Kelly Smith, an entrepreneur and founder of one of the hottest microschool networks, Prenda, joined me to talk about his new book, “A Fire to Be Kindled: How a Generation of Empowered Learners Can Lead Meaningful Lives and Move Humanity Forward.” In our conversation, Kelly shares everything from an update on how Prenda is doing to some of the big themes around his book, which is designed not for educators, but for individuals—to help them become lifelong learners and maximize their potential.

The book follows the philosophy behind Prenda Learning and takes readers through what it means to be an empowered learner—followed by the key components in a learning process: to dare greatly, figure it out, learning over comfort, start with heart, and a foundation of trust. I pushed Kelly on how to overcome the barriers in our DNA that cause us to try to save energy and avoid doing hard things like learning. We then ended on a question of the importance of making this real so people can put it into action and connect it to their everyday lives.

As always, subscribers can listen to the audio, watch the video, or read the transcript below.

Michael Horn:   The messages in this book are ones that resonate for any individual regardless of your life stage. You're a kid, you're an educator, you're an adult living life, this has messages for you. So first, Kelly, it's great to see you. I always love when we get to spend time together. Thanks for joining us.

Kelly Smith:      Thanks for having me, Michael. It's good to be here.

Morning Warmup

Horn:                So we're going to start off with our morning warmup. We got four parts of the show, morning warmup, work cycle, our specials, and then our closing time. Morning warmup is just a little bit about Kelly and the Prenda Learning that you've started. Just tell us a little bit about what it is for those that don't know.

Smith:              Thanks for that, and excited to be part of morning warmup. So I think you just said a second ago that my life's work is helping empower learners, helping people see themselves differently, and I hope we get a chance to talk about that, but it wasn't always that way. I studied physics and nuclear science. I was trying to make fusion work, which if you're following this, it doesn't work. I did a whole bunch of careers in technology and software and got to this point as a father of four kids, myself and somebody who was, at the time, volunteering at the library to teach kids computer programming of all things. I had this moment where I just started thinking about the questions, what is it learning and what is formal institutions? And I think very much an outsider perspective on this, although I, of course, attended school like everyone else, but it got to this point where I became obsessed and that led me to do something crazy, which in 2018, was to pull my kid out of school and invite my friends to do the same.

                        And I started a micro school around my kitchen table. So it was me and seven kids. Really, I was reading your book, I think the word, micro school, you had uttered and a couple other people had talked about, but it wasn't huge yet. And we just put this thing together, personalized learning for mastery is using blended learning. We were doing a lot of projects and inquiry and all the fun things. At first, it was just designed around what made sense to me intuitively as an adult who likes to learn. Eventually, I found that there's lots of great research and people who have thought a lot more deeply about these things than I have. I'd say one of the interesting differentiators between something like homeschool and a micro school is this inherent connection, this human piece. We were together in-person every day.

                        My role as the learning guide in this class, as the adult, was to know and care about and understand the motivation of each of these kids and then be able to provide an environment in-person where they could take the risks and do the repeated failure and all the things that learners do. And that became just a fascinating semester that led to more semesters and more people doing it. The COVID pandemic came and exploded the whole concept. And since that, we've continued to grow. So we're serving something like 2,000 students today, really, all across the United States, but strongest here in Arizona, which is where I started out.

Horn:                Wow. And if the model is the same as it was a few years ago, you're partnering, a lot of times, with existing districts or charter schools or whomever, and then serving students, as I recall, it's seven kids around a table often, learning at their own path and pace, with, in your case, you were the guide there, but obviously, you're setting it up around these communities across the country. Is that still what the model looks like or how has it evolved?

Smith:              So picture a small group, we tend to cap them at 10. You'll have an adult and 10 kids, typically, close in age, but not necessarily the same age, so the mixed age group. Research would all apply here. Older kids teaching younger kids, kids with different skill levels and proficiency in mastery, trying to personalize as much as possible, trying to provide as many choices as we can. We're pretty high on agency around here. That's the academic model that stayed consistent. One of the areas where you'll see some change, for those who have heard me talk about this in the past, is the goal has always been to invite as many people in and make this as accessible as we possibly can.

                        So in contrast to folks that maybe start a private school and charge $20,000 for tuition, we're saying, let's see if we can make this free to families. In the past, that has involved partnering with districts and charter schools, and we still do those things. There's a new opportunity now with a wave of school choice programs across the country to do that in a way that's more direct or simpler. And we've really leaned in and participated in those programs. So you'll see us in a lot of these states that have large ESA programs in universal school choice, not because we have any sort of political slant. We really don't. Our goal is to make this model available and accessible to as many people as we can reach.

Work Cycle

Horn:                That's great to hear. So let's shift into our work cycle and get into the guts of this conversation, which is not about Prenda, but it's based off of a lot of the insights you had in Prenda and as well as... And you detailed this in the book around those early days, coaching people on coding in the libraries and so forth, but a fire to be kindled how a generation of empowered learners can lead meaningful lives and move humanity forward. It's a big title. I'm just curious, why write a book? What are your hopes for the book? What do you hope it accomplishes?

Smith:              Even after all this time doing it and thinking about this stuff, there's this voice in my head that's like, who do you think you are? This is audacious to make the claim I'm making, which is, basically, that we, as a civilization, don't yet appreciate and understand what real learning is, what learning can be, the level and degree of power. And I try to give lots of examples throughout the book of people who have discovered power and purpose and accomplishment and achievement and contribution all through this idea of really becoming a learner. And the first chapter goes right into it and says, you might think you know what that means because you have got this degree and you can point to these courses or these certifications. And I'm saying, those things are fine, but real learning transcends all of that. It's down to questions and answers and skills that are applied and applicable in whatever you are trying to do with your life.

                        And so that's, I think, a pretty big claim. It's inviting people to rethink their relationship with learning, think about themselves as a learner in a new and different way. And hopefully, it's exciting and people see that and think, yeah, I've tasted that. I know what that feels like. I don't think it's going to be totally new to a lot of the people, for example, listening to your podcast. But I think the hope is that we can double down on that and say, all these reasons, maybe to hedge that or hedge against it or do something different, let's be just explicit about it. Those aren't really what I'm about. As a learner, I'm about understanding myself, setting a big goal, and then going about learning in a way that really leads me to what I put in the subtitle, of a life of meaning and the contribution that will help move the species forward. So I really believe that, I believe, in a maybe irrational degree, in humans, and that's what I'm inviting people to do through this book.

Horn:                Well, and your optimism in the book comes out loud and clear because you talk a lot about what education can enable in a future state and things of that nature. And if you close your eyes, what do you imagine society to be, and things of that nature. It strikes me, you also do a lot of work to decouple this notion of learning from schooling, which you just talked about there, really grounded in what's the progress you're trying to make as an individual. And to that end though, I'm curious, as I was reading it, there's a lot of, yes, yes, yes, as I'm reading it, and I was thinking, but he's writing it to me as an individual, not to other educators or people who are thinking of founding schools or people who were thinking of enrolling in schools, like the ones you've created. So I'm just curious about that decision as well, why write it to the individuals as opposed to maybe the education audience?

Smith:              It's a great question. There's actually two books, Michael. So this is a funny story, is I said there's a theoretical framework here of what an empowered learner is and how that works. And then once you have that, once you agree with me about that, here's what that means for the classroom, for a learning environment, for setting things up, and it gets into a lot more. There's a lot more PJ references in the second half of the book. Well, my editor said, you're writing two different books to two different groups, and it's not really one book. So as painful as writing, and you've written books, there's this moment where it's like, you're right, I need to decide what's my main message. One of the things we've seen with Prenda is, people who buy into it all the way, who are empowered learners themselves, it's almost... I would say, number one is being able to start with heart to see human beings.

                        Number two is be an empowered learner yourself. And everything else, I will give you, you can use those things and create amazing learning environments. But if I had to pick, if I had to get really focused and prioritized about the change I want to make in the world, let's get more empowered learners thinking about this, in these ways, and then we can work with them, I think there's probably a lot more still to say, but I felt like there's folks like you and many others that are out there communicating to those people. I felt like what might be missing is just a deep, almost spiritual connection of, what is this? What are we really trying to do with this anyway because once you have that, and you take an example like, you used the words a second ago, learning versus schooling, there's this agency question of somebody who's decided to learn something, they're unstoppable.

                        You literally can't get in their way. And we've all seen this working with kids. And then there's somebody who has decided not to learn something, and it's just feels completely ineffective. Every attempt of carrots and sticks and all the programs I want to put together around them, it's really, if they're not with me on this, it's not going to happen. And so what I really believe is we as adults need to lead the way on this. Let's be learners ourselves. And that means this is hard for educators sometimes, it means being wrong, it means not knowing, not having the answer. It means changing our mind. It means asking a kid for help with something. I mean, there's all these things that really model the curiosity and persistence of a learner, and I'm inviting everybody to do that.

Horn:                Well, and it does it great. Although, I will also say there are some great tips for educators too, the three questions that you have that you ought to ask instead of leading with the answer and things of that nature throughout the book. Part of the book is talking about this empowered learner, which is, obviously, in the subhead, we've talked about this, is there's a whole chapter on it. And one of the things you talk about is something that a lot of cognitive scientists, like Daniel Willingham and others talk about, which is, people choose not to learn a lot of times because we're biologically wired to conserve energy and not learn.

                        And you go through all the reasons in the book, you give the science. And then you're asking the reader or the learner to make this leap. You can actually overcome this and rewire in some sense. What I would love to know is, what gives you the confidence that we as individuals can overcome that? Where do you draw on that strength to say, we can overcome millennium of DNA and inheritance of evolution that have asked us to find the lazy way out, if you will?

Smith:              I mean, it's massive, what we're up against, as human beings, and so I want to acknowledge that. And let's give ourselves some grace and be patient with ourselves as we try to do that. But the reason I'm confident is because I've seen it, I've seen it firsthand over and over again. And I'm thinking of one of the girls from one of my early semesters, friends with my daughter, incredible, bright, just fun young woman. I think she was a third-grader at the time I got her, and she had struggled with math. She was operating grade levels behind. We were using, at the time, Khan Academy for the day in and day out, what we call conquer mode. So here's your lesson, here's the formative assessment, you're answering questions, and she's getting them wrong, and I could see her resorting to all the tactics, like making jokes, distraction, just clicking through, rage clicking through Khan Academy, all the things that you do to get out of the incredibly painful feeling of not knowing something.

                        Our brains don't like it, and they're working so hard against us. Anyway, over a time, and it took months, she gets to this point where she's engaging with each problem. She misses it and she'll read the hint or the explanation of why she missed it. And I see her building that muscle of being a learner and taking risks and being okay being wrong, which was a lot of what it came down to. And I watched this transformation happen in this little girl, and then the next week, and this is where it got crazy for me, is we go to softball and I'm sitting by her parents and our daughters are on the same team, and her dad's like, she just never swings. She just sat there last season and every pitch just watched it go by, and she gets up to bat and she just takes a huge cut at the very first pitch that came. I don't even think she hit it.

                        She might've struck out, but to see her posture literally change in a totally different domain, to me, it was not coincidental. It's part of her growth as a person and as an empowered learner, is to be okay taking those risks and accepting the fact that you're going to have failures along the way. I've seen it happen. I've seen it for her, and I've seen it for lots of other people, where... In a way, that's part of why Prenda is K-8, is I actually think it's easier, the younger you are. Writing this book is like, hopefully, people that are maybe a little more set in their ways will believe me on this and take some risks. But I feel highly confident. This is not only possible but it's necessary, it's what's needed. I mean, the limitations are all on ourselves. We're limiting ourselves every single day, so unlock that and be you. This starts to sound like self-help, at some point. And I'm not really a self-help guy, but I believe, strongly, in what humans are capable of.

Horn:                Well, there is that element of it, and what you're just describing is far transfer, taking something that I've learned in one domain and then applying it somewhere else. And essentially, you're giving a process to do that over and over again. You have, Dare Greatly, Figure It Out, Learning Over Comfort, Start With Heart, Foundation of Trust and Making It Real. Let's maybe drill into the first one of those, which is the Daring Greatly, which is, basically, your assertion, and you have the analogy of climbing a mountain or things of that nature, in the book, but essentially, this notion that, hey, set a goal and say, I'm going to go... It starts with a big goal, and then yes, you're going to plot out the little steps, but this is how you do that to make that first big commitment, if you will, to learning about something that you care about. The curiosity that I had, as I was reading this chapter, was, is this concept equivalent in some sense to what cognitive psychologists would call agency, teaching people that they have agency? Or is it something else in your mind?

Smith:              The thing about agency alone, agency in a vacuum is just, yes, you need to make the choices, and I believe very, very strongly in agency. I think what's interesting, you need to connect it to something, and I think the psychologists talk a lot about motivation. I mean, it's something you can read. Daniel Pink writes about this stuff and others. But to have this idea of why, and the classic example from an Algebra 2 classroom, where you're frustrated with solving for the vertices of a parabola and hyperbola or something, and you're like, why, teacher? Why are we doing this? And there's two paths, really, the teacher can give, is like, well, you're going to use this in your life, which is a lie for most of those things and for most of those kid, or you can say you won't use it in your life.

                        I think there's a third answer here, which is because you could be this concept of empowered learner, and that's going to look different, literally, different for every person, and it doesn't always include every technical skill. I care less about the specifics of that, but it's more about, and you'll see this in that chapter, I talk about Socrates a little bit, and just this idea of a real understanding of yourself, your strengths, your interests, what's the inspirational Mark Twain quote of, there's these two days that matter, there's the day you're born and the day you find out why. And it's this purpose, this idea of big purpose. It should feel scary and audacious, and I know these things about myself, and therefore, I can set a big goal. And then it's about taking that goal seriously and backing into a plan.

                        Well, then what does that actually look like? What do I do today if my goal, when I'm 35, is to be a brain surgeon? There's an answer to that question. It's almost math, and whether you end up being a brain surgeon or not doesn't matter to me. It's in the process of doing those steps today. You are building the muscle that will then transfer to the new mountain that you choose if you end up deciding to do a different thing. And so I think there's some value to always having a mountain that you're climbing and being explicit about that for yourself and your friends and everybody around you to hold yourself accountable.

Specials

Horn:                Yeah, no, that makes sense. At the risk of having you summarize your book, I don't want you to do that, but I'll ask one more question on the process. Just, it's been interesting to me since reading your book, some of the language has crept into my own way of talking about what I'm doing or even saying to my daughters, hey, what you just did there was figure it out. You didn't know. You went into the deep end. We didn't know how to navigate this, and you figured it out. And so that's been interesting to me as well, is how concrete these ideas are. And the language is something that you can just easily adopt to make it almost do that inner voice as you're trying to pursue something and say, oh, what's happening right now, this is uncomfortable, this is really difficult.

                        I'm going to choose to embrace the suck and get into the learning. And so you have all these phrases throughout. Are these things you're using in the micro schools that you've tested? Are these things that are like, Kelly, this is how you think? Where does the inspiration for all that come from?

Smith:              No, a lot of it's institutional. We had a moment early in Prenda, actually, where we sat down and said, what are we all about? What are we trying to do? I mean, that was really where this empowered learner concept came from. And in fact, I said, I don't want one of those mission statements with semicolons in it, so we need a mission statement that's just a few words. And we came up with one that has two words, and this is still true, Prenda, as an organization, exists to empower learners.

                        That's literally the goal of the company. So that meant something to us. We couldn't have articulated, at the time, what that was, but it's a phrase that continues to exist, a concept across all of Prenda. And you'll even hear kids talking about it. The first five chapters after that are the core values of Prenda. I mean, Dare Greatly is one of our core values. Figure It Out is one of our core values. So as we put that together, those are meaningful. They have shared meaning across a community that includes five to 80 year old people and working together on these things. I mean, everybody adds their own flair to it, which I really appreciate.

Closing Time

Horn:                No, that makes sense. So as we go into closing time, and last question here, you go through this process in the book, and then you end with this chapter on Making It Real. And it's interesting, when I read the table of contents, I was expecting this to be, okay, rooted in real world projects or something like that. And instead, it's about how to make the process really real to your life. But I'd actually love you to abstract that other piece of it, because what strikes me about your learning model more generally is it's like this perfect blend of direct instruction and organic intrinsic progress based on what you're purposeful or excited about or whatever else at that given point.

                        You have this really cool blend between the two that seems to me anyway, to hit this practical sweet spot. And I'm just curious how you've come to that model because it seems to buck a lot of traditional schools, but also frankly, the far extreme of unstructured journey around. So you seem to have hit this really interesting sweet spot between the two. And I'd love you just to reflect on that as we close out.

Smith:              I'd love to say that was on purpose. I mean, I really entered this as an outsider and a novice. So a lot of it was just what was intuitive to me. I mean, over time, as these concepts gained words, I guess, in my... I was able to talk about them and notice them. There was this contrast that just continued to appear between what I had received. And so if you look at something like Dare Greatly and have a purpose, I had set this goal in high school to get all As without ever getting above a 91%. So I used my time and energy to do that. As I look back, it's like, what a stupid waste of my time. What could I have accomplished? What could I have done? If anyone in my life had said, here, you're capable of more than that, some invitation to set some bigger goal.

                        It literally just never occurred to me, and I never did it. And so I think what I'm really trying to do is align an environment with these principles that I believe to be true. Growth mindset's real, Learning Over Comfort's real. I mean, these are real concepts, and how can you just, structurally, allow those things to happen, which you just can't, if it's all about, I've got this list of standards and I've got to get it into their heads. I mean, this goes back to the very title of the book. This is a reference to Plutarch, which I'm sure all of your listeners are well familiar with. But the system itself, what your district curriculum is telling you to do, what your legislative, the code, the laws that are passed, it's all telling you to fill vessels, even down to like, you should or should not talk about this particular social science theory.

                        We're going to teach kids to think this. And that's all filling vessels, filling vessels. It's so wired in to the system. And so what I'm saying is, what if instead we start with kindling fires? What if it's about helping an individual make a decision to care about learning, to own it, and then do that work, which as we point out in the book over and over again, this is not easy. This is very messy. It's hard. It takes an enormous amounts of just time and frustration and the emotional work of it, but it's worth it because that's the type of humans that we need as a species to continue moving forward. So that's my hope, is people will shake things up a little bit and choose to be empowered learners themselves and hopefully, do that for others as well.

Horn:                Well, it's a heck of a dream and a heck of a way to get people started on it, is to read this book. It's extremely accessible, quick read, that I think is helpful. As I said, the language has seeped into my own dialogue now, both inner monologue, I should say, as well as dialogue with my kids. So Kelly, thank you for writing it, but also, thank you for spreading the work through Prenda Learning, which I'm glad to hear, it's expanded to 2,000 students and continuing to grow and make an impact in the lives of the individuals that we need for them and society. So thank you so much for being here on the Future of Education.

Smith:              Yeah, you bet. Thanks, Michael. Appreciate it.

As students, parents, and policymakers question the purpose of high schools, educators worldwide are building novel secondary school designs. What makes them "innovative," however? In this conversation, Shadman Uddin, a master’s Student in Education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, offered that what makes a school innovative is less its adherence to a list of “novel” ideas, but more its outcomes against the things that matter most in society today, which includes knowledge acquisition, but also things like real-world applicability and social and emotional development.

Against that backdrop, Ken Montgomery, co-founder of Design Tech High, known as D-Tech, and Keeanna Warren, who just became the CEO of the Purdue Polytechnic High School network, joined me to talk about their school designs, in particular the importance of:

* helping students connect to something bigger than the school itself;

* offering competency-based learning pathways with a transformed assessment system;

* allowing students to find their creative purpose aligned to the common good;

* and building a more permeable school that is connected to the community and offers a deep sense of belonging.

They also talked about the role of AI (artificial intelligence) and the anxiety that their students feel around its emergence, as well as the barriers that arise to building school models that break the traditional molds—from policy to human capital. Ken and Keeanna also talked about how they’re seeing a lot of energy from parents for new types of schooling—and not the small “C” conservative force for the status quo that parents often fall into.

As always, subscribers can listen to the podcast, watch the conversation, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:   Welcome to the Future of Education where we are passionate about building a world in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And to help us think about what that looks like and means today we've got three terrific guests in a format that we haven't typically done in the Future of Education. Where we're going to get to have a little bit of a conversation, a roundtable. We have Ken Montgomery, who I've known for many years. He's the co-founder and executive director at Design Tech High known as d.tech to those of us in the world. We have Keeanna Warren, the assistant executive director of Purdue Polytechnic High School Network, which has gotten a lot of plaudits over the years and we'll talk more about what they do there. And then the person bringing us all together, so to speak, is Shadman Uddin, who's a master's student in education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

                        And Shadman, I'm going to start with you as we launch into... We get four cycles, if you will, on this show. The first one is the morning warmup. And Shadman, you are bringing us all together because for one of your classes, you wrote this paper around next-gen school models, innovative schools, and we got talking as you were doing that. And one of your first questions was, what is an innovative school? If I remember this correctly.

                        I had COVID I think at the time, so I had brain fog. And I said, there's a lot of places out there, the Canopy Project, whatever else, that have done this in a variety of ways. But it seems to me innovation... As my friend Rick Hess often says, no one goes into an Apple store and says, “Give me your most innovative iPhone.” They want an iPhone that accomplishes something for them. And innovation is a means not an ends. And so what if we looked at the outcomes and asked, okay. Well, what are the processes that are getting them? So I'm curious how that suggestion landed and what did you learn in the paper?

Morning Warmup

Shadman Uddin: Yeah, totally, Michael. And first of all, I just want to thank you for having us here today. It's really exciting to be in conversation with both you, Ken and Keeanna. This has been a conversation that we've been having now for a few months through this research. It's really great to just have this forum and discuss a lot of the findings that we had in the paper. So before we get really right to your question about how did we define next-gen, I just want to form around a little bit of the team that was behind this and how we came to do this research in and of itself. So it was myself, another couple of students at the Graduate School of Business here at Stanford named Rahul Adhikari and Nikita Sushilkumar. And we were all together in Gloria Lee's class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

                        And all of us were united by this sense of excitement that we had, seeing all of the students and families asking for more innovation in high school across the US and even globally as well with Rahul and Nikita coming from India. And we had this big question of, how are these new innovations that are happening, or at least the ideas that hearing from new school leaders, how are they taking shape and are they successfully scaling? And so we posed that question to Gloria and she was like, "Why don’t we go ahead and do a whole research project around this? Let's find out this answer together.”

                        And that really launched this amazing series of conversations. We spoke to over 26 different school leaders and ecosystem builders in what we defined or called the next-gen school space. And ultimately we learned a lot about what are some of the major barriers and what are also some of the key strategies that the highest performing next-gen schools are doing to kind of circumvent and keep growing amidst a lot of the barriers that they face.

                        But back to your first question of how did we even decide what was a next-gen or innovative school, and this was where we got caught up for a couple of months honestly. We saw the Transcend Canopy Project that tried to define next-gen by a various set of inputs that they quoted to be different tiers of innovation in next-gen. And what we realized is, one, we were most interested in the scaling strategies and how were the schools surviving and thriving. And we didn't want to get so caught up in more of the intellectual and theoretical debate about what constitutes a next-gen innovation in a school. And so what we did is actually after speaking to you and then Kim Smith at Cambiar Education is we opted to do a different taxonomy or classification for how we thought about next-gen. And what we ended up deciding to do was an outcomes oriented framework.

                        So we thought about, okay, what are the outcomes that next-gen or innovative schools are trying to create within the high school landscape today? And then can we look and see what schools across the nation are performing well across those various indicators of outcomes? And so we leaned on Sir Ken Robinson's five educational outcomes that he outlines in his book, Imagine If. Imagining a new way of school, a new way of education. And those five categories are academic, economic, so that's job readiness, social, cultural, and personal. And we saw a number of schools doing different things across those different domains. Some schools focusing on primarily one outcome. But that then allowed us to compile a list of schools that we saw to be high performing in each of these categories. And then we went ahead and started reaching out to school leaders like Ken and Keeanna to learn more about how they were growing and how they were building out their visions.

Horn:                Ken, let's go to you on your school model. D.tech is one that I was out at the Bay Area actually still when you launched it. So I got to see some of it up close. But love for you to give the same sort of overview.

Ken Montgomery: Yes, thank you. Just like everybody else, I appreciate the time and opportunity to share our story with you all. I think a lot of what was kind of said is same with us. I think that's why we're all here. Definitely, one thing that is really resonating is a lot of people have said that we have all these programs, which I'll get to in a second. But what really separates us is our view of students. Like our view of what students are capable of. The fact that we feel high school is not just preparing you for something, you should do something real while you're actually in high school. And so we say that we exist to provide people the opportunity to do meaningful work, contribute to the common good, and develop their creative purpose. So everything that we do is just aligned towards that.

                        We say people, staff and students. And the creative purpose part is becoming even more prevalent because… even more important, as I'm sure we'll talk more about AI, there are a lot of changes. And that's what we say too, is that we don't know how the world is going to change. We just know it's going to change quickly and unpredictably. So we prepare our students to enter that kind of world. So we have five pillars. What makes a design tech school a design tech school? The first one is design thinking. All our students have a four year design lab, design thinking graduation requirement. And they can earn their regular high school diploma from us. Then also an innovation diploma. Which certifies that we worked with Stanford Center for Assessment Learning and Equity about developing rubrics for how you assess creativity, initiative and things like that.

                        So if the students take on this additional project, they earn their innovation diploma. And that's tied to design thinking. We're competency based. All of our students, we have an advisory period, all of our students have flexible time during the day and then we also have intercession. And so we are located on Oracle's corporate campus in Redwood City. And that really started... The first connection was our intersession program.

                        So three times a year for two weeks, the students take a break from their core classes and basically the Bay Area becomes their classroom. And so one example of that, Oracle employees teach kids computer coding or wearable technology or the internet of things. Or our students might go out to learn how to perform in a rock band or things like that. So it's really just trying to get kids out in the world and have them, like I said, find their creative purpose while contributing to the common good. We try to align everything towards that.

                        And we also really are focusing on belonging in terms of, especially with... I think that's something with the next-gen model is like, we've seen the previous system, it has left certain people behind based on their identities and in some cases it was designed to do that. So something I think is essential and if you're thinking about what does the next generation of schools need to do, it needs to have that equity component in it as well.

Horn:                Super interesting. And I'm hearing some common themes across the schools obviously, but there's that belief in students that they can do something real while in high school in both your models and you also have connection to something bigger than just the school. Keeanna, obviously the direct linkage with Purdue University. Ken, with Oracle. And this finding of purpose. And, “What is my superpower?” I think was your words, Keeanna, right? For each individual. I'm curious because both of you sort of build in outcomes as you're talking about this. What students are capable of and doing it while they're in school.

                        But by the same token, you're also bringing in these project-based learning, design thinking, these elements that people often say are innovative and yet John Dewey or Maria Montessori might have said, “Ah, we thought of that before.” So I'm sort of curious when you think of this frame where Shadman landed around innovative school more focused on the outcomes than what you're doing, if you will, how does that land for you as defining what next-gen really is? Keeanna, why don't you go first and Ken you can follow.

Keeanna Warren: Yeah, I think that's a really incredible question because I think one of the things is, honestly if you look at research based practices in teaching and learning, it is you learn by doing and it's not something that we've reinvented. But I think it comes down to really applying best practices but putting students at the center. And it really sounds simple, but I think there is this historic assumption that students aren't capable or want to learn. And I think that is a really big piece about just really centering the learner and it's not innovative in the traditional sense, but using...

                        So for example, using technology systems so that you're able to undo and not have to use a master schedule. Those are one of the ways that we apply next-gen learning to the teaching practices that we know that work. Using the science of reading. I mean, none of that is new, but just the implementation of it is really new.

                        But I think that these next practices are an answer to making sure that teachers are getting what they need. So I love how Ken brought that up. It's not just about... The students aren't the only learners in the building and that's what we call it... I focus not on students, but on... Not just on the students, but also just being learner-centered overall in the ecosystem. And I think just integrating technology in a way that's purposeful and actually innovative. And I think really just the application of it and ensuring that really the practices that we know work really well, integrating real life learning into it and really doing things with technology that are going to lead to future success.

                        And then just keeping up with the times. There's so much technology out there that's incredible that's not being utilized. And I think some of it is fear and not understanding, but I think what sets us apart is we already know what we've been doing for years doesn't work. And to disrupt that, you have to apply new practices and new technology, which requires an awareness of technology and teaching and learning and all those things. So I do think it’s just applying what we already know and marrying that with the technology that exists is what makes us next-gen.

Horn:                Ken.

Montgomery:   I feel that... I don't know, this is where I always have these moments recently. I feel really old because I feel like I'm on the next-gen of next-gen. So when we were opening, we were a next-gen school, but we were… it was more towards... Because we were trying to personalize learning. That was kind of like what was considered next-gen 10 years ago. And now I feel like the next-gen is going to be more about helping people find their creative purpose. And so I love what you were saying at the start about you don't go into the Apple store and say, “Give me an innovative product.” You go in there and say, “I want something that works. Something that does this.” So I think it is a really nice shift to think more of innovation in terms of the outcomes instead of the process. In terms of like, are you personalizing learning, are you using these tools and things? It's more like, what are you after?

                        Because I think innovation, I think you could say, what we're doing is innovative. We're an innovative school because what we're trying to do is create a model that helps people navigate the world around them. And so whatever you're doing at that time, that seems really innovative if you can do that. And so you can think like, what did the iPhone do? It did help us navigate the world around us and it decreased the friction of a lot of things.

                        And then in doing that it actually started to change the way we navigate the world around us. And so I feel like if you can build a school model that is flexible enough, that is really helping people navigate and then shape the world around them, that they're considered innovative. And that's why I think it is really important to have more of the conversation focused on the outcomes instead of the tools and the technologies and the process. The process starts to take more of a backseat to the outcomes.

Horn:                Yeah, I love that. And obviously when you start blowing up master schedules and so forth, you create more dynamism into the day and week and year of what you can accomplish and how you can change. As we move into the work cycle, Shadman, I want to go to you on this because I'm curious in your research, what were you seeing as those practices that were popping up as sort of common themes across those next-gen models?

Work Cycle

Uddin:              Yeah, absolutely. And just even a quick note on the discussion that Ken and Keeanna brought up here as well. I mean, what we saw on a broad level across schools across the country were so many different innovations. From changing class sizes, from experimenting with hybrid, from bringing in more industry partners into the school. I think why we really preferred to abstract it to the outcome level was to really be able to think of this whole landscape as an ecosystem. Where various different next-gen schools were innovating in the ways that were most responsive to the needs of their community. Those were some of the grounding principles that we saw to be most effective. And we found whenever we tried... Especially early on when we tried to litigate against, oh, are you trying project-based learning? Have you seen the research there?

                        It was almost like trying to just force a square peg into a round hole, just trying to pigeonhole a school into saying, "You're only next-gen if you do this." And I think that wasn't really fair to a lot of the edupreneurs that we were speaking to. Because they're coming back to us and saying, "Hey, we are listening to our families. We're listening to the students. And we're delivering based off of that. And these are the outcomes that we as a school value. Sure. We'll incorporate some traditional model stuff too and then we'll innovate here." And getting into that debate almost, it just didn't seem fair to the spirit of what we wanted to encourage within this broader ecosystem. But to your question of what were some themes that we were seeing across the country, and it is really difficult to try to find these threads between schools in Indiana versus schools in Tennessee and New Orleans and the Bay Area. There's such different family needs.

                        But we did see high level, there was broader openness to hybrid learning. More interest around having smaller schools. This is primarily driven by a concern around safety that we saw across the nation, both as a result of the pandemic and unfortunately because of the rise of school violence from both gun violence as well as within schools. And so there were more families looking to say, "Hey, I actually just want to have a more socially community oriented experience for my child." We saw that in number of places. I think number one, we just saw a strong desire from families across the country looking for more career and technical education for their students. Be it, "Is this going to get my child into college better?" Or even, "Is this actually going to open up new alternatives outside of college?" As well. And so we saw both of that. Funny little story I think that was unique about our approach is we actually tried to do this whole thing and just see what ideas were resonating across the country.

                        And so myself alongside a couple of other students at the business school, we actually put up a bunch of different landing pages of 30 different next-gen school ideas. They ranged from learning technical and computer skills to learning how to build social change or entrepreneurship, fully self-directed learning, et cetera. And we generated over 1500 clicks on Google Ads over two weeks. Which is pretty bonkers. Like 23 out of the 30 ideas beat the average consumer product conversion rate of 2%. And five ideas generated from between 9% to 16% clickthrough rates on the ads.

                        And that was such a big signal to us of, it's not just that there's one or two ideas that families and students are looking for, it's that there's a lot of yearning for change in high school. I mean, we pitched each of these as high school for entrepreneurship, high school for computer science, high school for AI. Just to see what we could get from students. And then out of all those clicks we spoke to over 40 parents and students just to get an understanding of what exactly they were looking for. And at the base of it all, it was just this yearning for something new and traditional schools just not meeting the needs of their students. And so I think from the demand side we were like, okay, this ecosystem development around next-gen needs to happen. There's there's so much interest for it.

Horn:                Well, so that's so interesting because I think a lot of people say, "Gee, parents are a small C conservative force in education. They don't want change, they don't want this, they don't want that." You're suggesting something very different. So Keeanna, take us on the ground now in your community. I would say something common that Shadman just outlined that connects to what you and Ken said, which is connected to community. Communities are different. So those needs might manifest themselves differently. But what are you seeing? Are parents leaning into these new practices? You mentioned AI, using tech to undo the master schedule. Those could be I imagine daunting in some circles, but are you seeing that or are you seeing something else

Warren:            That aligns exactly. We are seeing so much community voice and choice and even in the foundation of our schools, we reached out to parents and we asked, "What are you looking for?" And they were telling us the same things, "We want to make sure that our kids feel safe." And that's not just physically safe, but there's a psychological safety that goes along with what Ken does with his schools as well, is just making sure there's that sense of belonging. Parents are looking for smaller schools, we're even launching a micro school model to support that need, which is a conversation for a whole another day. But very interesting and intriguing and something we're very excited about. I think another really important piece is, we believe in the power of community. We believe that we should be a school without walls. Not literally because we live in the Midwest where the weather is changing often.

                        And so we want walls, but in the sense of the term of we want community partners to come in. But we also want our students to go out. And we want our students to care about their communities and solve the problems that are most important to them. And ideally we want our kids to feel empowered and proud of their community. So we really center community in all that we do. I also believe in parent as the first teacher and unapologetically believe in school choice that is inclusive to all. So I believe that kids should have a school that fits their unique needs. Again, I think that we are past the industrial age where we are preparing kids to be factory workers. That's not what we're doing. That's not what we are going to do in at PPHS because that won't properly prepare the kids.

                        But that's what's happening in a lot of spaces. And then as far as the evidence, you vote with your feet. And so I will tell you, we're in a public school system, so we are open to all kids and that's really valuable to us. But I'll tell you, our seats fill up quickly. We live in a city where there's a common enrollment for our township or school, the boundary lines for our school and we consistently fill up. And I think that is evidence of itself that that's what parents are looking for. But even in our feedback we hear the same thing. The sense of belonging, the feeling that our kids will actually be prepared for the future of work. And that parents are feeling that their kids are actually prepared for college and post-secondary success.

Horn:                Ken, what about you? Are you having a similar experience or are you seeing some parents be like, "No, thanks."

Montgomery:   Yes, it's similar and I do think... Your school sounds amazing by the way. I mean, I love that emphasis on community because I feel like that gets overlooked way too much in terms when we talk about next-gen and things like that, that human connection is at the heart of it. And because we are centered on anchored and design thinking, empathy is one of our guiding principles. And so we just for a very basic level, the reason that we've been successful attracting students and such is parents... We're in the heart of Silicon Valley. Parents look at how they are working now compared to how they were 10 or 15 years ago. Look at their kids' school and if it's traditional, they're like, "Well, this just doesn't match up. There's no way this experience,... My kid is having basically the same experience I had. There's no way that could be preparing them for what work is going to be like in their future."

                        But what we've even noticed even more so with students in the last the six months with AI and ChatGPT, we've seen an increase in... I don't want to... Anxiety is a strong word, but it's a lot of nervousness around students where all of us have moments in school we're like, "When are we ever going to use this?" And so now with ChatGPT, students are asking themselves about that with everything. Like, "You're teaching me to write an essay, when am I ever going to use this? You're teaching me to make a presentation, we're never going to use this?" And then they take it to the next level, "What am I going to do? What is going to be left for me to do?" And so our counselors are, we talked about AI, our counselors are pointing out that there's student anxiety around this.

                        And that's why we are feeling even more so that we have to lean into our, developing people's creative purpose. Because even though ChatGPT will be able to do a lot of things, we are still human. We still need to know that we matter, that we make a difference, that we can create. We still have to have this sense of purpose in our lives. And so we're seeing that even more so just in the last six months. Even more so at the student level. The demand from the student level, even more so than the parent level, as the students, it's really starting to hit them. Because students are doing their work differently. Their schoolwork, they're able to do it very, very differently than they were just six months ago. So I think that's increasing even more of the drive for like, "Whoa, we need something different from the student." The students are saying, "We need to be repaired differently." And the parents are like, "Yeah, we agree."

Horn:                It's so interesting. Keeanna, you've teased this now a couple times, so I'm going to you. AI, how are you all using it? Because this is actually the first time I've heard Ken, what you said about student anxiety and nervousness. I've heard more of the teacher side of this and that students are using it. Keeanna, it sounds like you're doing something with that energy though to lean in on it. So tell us more.

Warren:            So I think that is something we're seeing too, that students are nervous about it from different perspectives. So we get the student who's nervous because they've watched too many Will Smith movies and they don't understand the fact that AI does what we tell it to. So it will do that. And so we're teaching kids to be the programmers there. But we're also teaching kids to be the consumers of the programming. And I think there's also the fear that, "I won't have a job or my parents won't have a job because these chat bots in different forms are going to take those certain skill level jobs." And that's true. And so we're coaching the students around how to become the folks who program it and the folks who innovate. So I'm like, if you're thinking about creating a chat bot now, you're two steps behind and we need to make sure that our students understand how to stay ahead.

                        I always use the quote, I'm like, in a world of Netflix, don't be a Blockbuster. I even forgot the name of it because it's irrelevant to us. And the kids are like, "What's that? You're so old." I'm like, "Yeah, I'm proud of it." So there's a piece there. I think there's another piece because we're a school that's diverse by design so we believe firmly in the power of all the types of diversity. But I also know, and transparently I will share, my dissertation was on AI use in education. So yeah. I was like, the last thing you want to do is talk to someone who wrote a whole dissertation about this. So yeah, that's always a disclaimer of stop talking about it. I have to remind myself. But not a lot of people who look like me, so a woman, a Black woman, not a lot of us are writing the machine learning models.

                        And so AI can feel dangerous to a lot of educational leaders that I spoke to because there's a lot of bias that could be in there. So one of the lessons that I love to do is... And you have to build a strong culture before you try this, but have the students play around with AI and specifically around the idea of bias. Have them explain to you why racism is a good thing. Some chat bots will give you a really compelling argument. And we have an agreement that racism historically, not been good. Sexism, not good. But you can get those chat bots to give you compelling research... I shouldn't say... I hate to use the word research,

Horn:                But some sort of manufactured... That's insane. Wow.

Warren:            Yes. And so I'm like, "Kids, you have to be the ones that are moving us forward with this because it's just one sided in many ways." So that's just one piece of it there. And just really emphasizing the importance for students on how to use it. So I use it myself. I tell the kids that I use it and I tell them how I use it. I have learned how to write really good prompts to get really good outcomes.

                        And so there's a good lesson there too. And then I think another piece about using it, I always tell the kids I'm a good writer. I would even say... I'll say I'm a good writer. We'll start there. But if I am a poor writer and I try to use the platforms, it's not going to help me. So you still need to learn. And also there's some AI that make grammatical mistakes. Now I know that grammar actually changes over time just like language does. And that's a human art form behind it. And I can tell if a computer wrote it versus a human with creativity. And so that's the art that we always bring to it. So I'll stop there because I literally could talk about this for days and I don't want to do that. But yeah, so I think there's so many great lessons in there on teaching kids how to be the creators and how to use AI properly.

Horn:                Well you answered one of the questions I had also, which is how do you get the adults in the building that know about AI and what to do with it and what questions to ask? So that was great on multiple levels. Let's move into our special section, which is I'm curious sort of the biggest factors that are driving or hindering growth of next-gen high schools like yours. Shadman, you just came off this research project, so let's start with you and then Ken and Keeanna, I'd love to hear on the ground what you've experienced around things that are driving the growth. We've sort of hit on some of that with the parent demand, but also the hindering. So Shadman, why don't you step in first?

Specials

Uddin:              Totally. And this was really the crux of our paper. Really trying to understand what were the barriers and drivers that were affecting growth. I mean, you've even heard just a snippet from two school leaders how exciting the innovation is in next-gen schools. And we had the same experience with every single one of our school leaders that we spoke to. We were just like, "How do we get this? How do we get more of this?" And so what we ended up doing was actually trying to frame our analysis in a broader framework. So we broke down every single factor in terms of either demand side, supply side, cultural or regulatory. Which encompassed like the political environment and the policies therein. And what we saw was demand side is really strong. Schools have existing strategies for how to either generate more enthusiasm or find families and build that way.

                        There's certainly challenges on the demand side that we saw. But we saw, at least in the learnings that we compiled from the schools we spoke to, we saw some really excellent strategies for being able to capitalize on the demand that's existing for new innovations within schools. And I think Ken and Keeanna can probably talk more about what their schools are doing. They've done really great jobs there. But in terms of the barriers, where we saw the most friction and this almost was across the board entirely, was on the regulatory side. And then on the supply side constraints. And so within supply side, we had three main categories that we saw really serious challenges facing next-gen schools. That's human capital, that's in infrastructure. And then finally financial capital. Human capital, it's already... There's a teacher shortage broadly. To get next-gen school teacher talent, not only do you have to be able to attract and retain those teachers, you're also looking for a unique skillset of teachers.

                        For example, at Design Tech Ken talks about how you're looking for that special nexus of skills in a teacher who knows how to teach well, but also knows design thinking and knows how to be able to teach it and deploy it at that level. And then one story that we heard from East Bay Innovation Academy was you get new teachers, you develop them and you put them on your website and all of a sudden you've got headhunters taking those teachers from you after they've been upskilled. And so there's this really competitive environment around human capital that we just were hearing from everyone. And obviously then you go to infrastructure. This I think is one of the biggest constraints facing next-gen schools is, if we have models that require us to be physically in place, many times it's the buildings themselves and the cost of either building a new one or updating existing buildings that really just require so much financial capital from the get go. That you have to go ahead and already have X number of students set up.

                        It doesn't allow an innovator to be able to test new models or test new marketing and get those students. You already need some significant financial capital raised in order to go ahead and start your new school. And I think what we heard was this was a mega constraint because for founders who don't have extensive networks around access to capital, which is really rampant across the country, then it becomes very difficult to have an idea. Especially for a lot of school founders who don't have entrepreneurial backgrounds to be able to go ahead and make that step.

                        So those were three really big constraints and we pose a series of recommendations around how to deal with that. I think both schools do an excellent job dealing with some of the regulatory constraints that they face, either partnering with district leaders or building coalitions with existing stakeholders in a school market and community.

                        We saw that to be a really effective strategy of being able to anticipate some friction that may be coming up from a political standpoint. I think that was a really excellent strategy. And then of course, working really carefully with community design. And I think where future entrepreneurs have an opportunity is, how can you help schools really think about bringing their infrastructure costs down and helping schools access more financial capital and think about ways that we can... And this is one of those wicked problems of tackling the teacher shortage, but those are where the ecosystem needs to be thinking about in order to really help lift that dynamic back up and see more of this innovation that we're hearing on this call scale to so many more communities and demographies across the country.

Horn:                Ken, let's go to you. I'm curious your answer on this, but I also, I'll just say, the infrastructure piece, partnering with Oracle, you have a really interesting answer for that part of the puzzle that actually contributes to the model as well. I don't know if you want to comment there or go elsewhere because California obviously also has had its share of challenges over the last few years. But your call where to go.

Montgomery:   Yeah, I definitely think... Well, that's one of the infrastructure... We were not... Oracle built this, a building on their campus and they lease it. We have a 50 year lease, a dollar a year. And that's solved the biggest infrastructure problem that most new schools have. That we have a facility.

Horn:                But actually let me interrupt you for one second because I'm curious. Some people watching this are going to be like, "Okay, but you had an amazing partnership with Oracle. What are the odds I can replicate that?" So what's the lesson to maybe take away from that, that transcends that one partnership?

Montgomery:   I think there are a couple of things. One, it works really well because both sides, Oracle and us, we have humility about what we can do and our limitations in that we feel that there are some things that a person working on the job can explain to our kids and teach our kids in a way that maybe a teacher may not even be able to. Oracle on their site also, they're not trying to run our school. We have autonomy in what we're doing. So it's really a partnership that starts with humility. And I do think that that's the other piece of it. Or I think a lot of the next-gen models have more promise in this is the flexibility. Is that if you want to make partnerships like that work tie it to the humility on our side, we have to make things flexible to access those partnerships. We have to be willing to say, "Well, maybe we don't have to do it exactly this way." So that we can work.

                        So especially freeing up the time. Most companies don't run on a bell schedule. I think actually all companies. Very few companies run on a bell schedule. So we have to be able to flex things like that to take advantage of the resources that they provide that way. But I do think, in California especially, where we are in Silicon Valley, the facilities is a major challenge. And so that was where we were very fortunate that Oracle saw that. They believed in our model, they saw that as a need and that's why we're on their campus. But the two challenges that are still challenges that I didn't think they would be after when all the schools had to close because of the pandemic, I thought that, well, schools are building up this, at least the foundation of an infrastructure to offer flexible learning situations. Even though it's not perfect across the board, everything, but every school had to do something to make it more flexible.

                        And we also thought, like the economy basically came screeching to a halt when kids couldn't go to school. It caused a lot of disruption. So I thought, wow, the political power and will of educators is going to be stronger than it has ever been before. But what we've seen is everything, it was just a race to get back to normal. So things where we thought like, okay, we have this foundation, flexible, so some of the policies might enable us to be more flexible, things like that. Like, no. It is just right back. Get your kids seat time, instructional minutes, all that. It's like the flexible learning that we did didn't even happen. And then the same thing, just the teacher sustainability, that if you're teaching teachers a new model to be innovative, but they can't sustain it professionally, then it does feel like you're really... It's a difficult journey.

                        Because especially like you said, the design thinking. We don't lose people, but we can't recruit people. Because we can't match the salaries. And it's even around here, a lot of people work in tech are like, they are coming back to the office, but they have very flexible work schedules. Whereas teachers, you're still here from, the school day starts here and it ends here. So in terms of the compensation and the flexibility in your work life balance, the value proposition for teaching is getting... It's challenging now. And I think that hopefully we'll start to loosen up some of the policies and rules allow around that or increase the funding for compensation. But things can be done and I thought those things would be done based on what we learned, but they haven't happened yet.

Horn:                It is similar to my observation. Lightning round around this and then we'll move into closing time. But I'm just curious about this specific issue around seat time. And obviously I've been pushing for competency mastery based learning since I've gotten into this field. Everyone has different barriers that they poke at when they look at the regulatory landscape, at what's holding that up. So sort of the lightning round of what are the two biggest things in your judgment that are holding that out? Ken, you want to go first then whip around Keeanna and Shadman, you can close with a couple more.

Montgomery:   Yeah, I think it's just the lack of consensus around how to assess those competencies. If we had that then we could focus more on that than the seat time. So I think that's the biggest... That along with really... Especially like I said, this is really pronounced where we are [inaudible 00:39:56] investing in teachers in a way that they can afford live a middle class lifestyle in the communities where they work.

Horn:                Keeanna.

Warren:            I would agree with the fact that teachers just need more training and support, and we all do on how to really... I'll use the word fairly, measure competency so it's unbiased. But there's still some art form to it. I think that's really big. And I just think marrying the idea of, we know that learning is not time-bound. There's nothing in research that confirms that. And just making sure we're applying what we know and that teachers feel really prepared to understand what competency-based education is and how to really help students move towards and giving coaching and good feedback. I'm super into ungrading and other things that we could discuss, but I think those are two really important things.

Horn:                Well, that's two round resounding votes for redoing the assessment system. Shadman, what did you find?

Uddin:              Yeah. I mean, it's actually funny that you say that because I think it even goes back to the earlier conversation we had about inputs versus outcomes. Even when thinking about next-gen. I think this is a similar situation of where a lot of folks in traditional school systems, policymakers are thinking, "Oh, these are the inputs that make a school a school." As opposed to thinking, "These are the outcomes that we want to be seeing within our students."

                        And when you're coming in with that input lens, you're just tethering a lot of schools to have to do X, Y, or Z. Sure, maybe having seat time regulated within some schools works for some communities, but for other communities that have really played around with hybrid and have really figured out distance learning, is that really what you want to be holding that school too and stifling that growth?

                        Yeah, I mean, I think here at the Graduate School of Education, we often talk about how there's a whole body of learning signs that we're discovering around how we should be thinking about each learner and their context and delivering based off of what cognitive information they already have and designing KCIs, all of these frameworks. But then when you go to the school level, the conversation is nothing like that at all. And that was just this big disconnect that we saw in terms of outcomes versus inputs.

Closing Time

Horn:                Fascinating. So closing time, Shadman, you get the last word and I was going to ask you around limitations of the research, but that's a very deficit minded way of asking it. So instead I want to ask, what's the further research that you want to do or you'd like to see in the field that isn't there yet?

Uddin:              Yeah. I mean, I think this conversation is really step one. One of the cool things that we saw once we sent out this paper to all of the schools that we interviewed and the other ecosystem builders was everybody was just so excited to hear what other schools were doing when grappling with similar problems that they were facing. And I think being able to discuss this at a level of, okay, school founder to school leaders, to ecosystem builder. Like, have these conversations about your specific pain points and thinking about, okay, what are the strategies that have been deployed? Where are the pain points? We just kept hearing from school leaders that they're so busy just trying to get through and keep their organization and school running that the opportunity to really connect across the country with people who are trying different models or not even trying different models and just doing things entirely different, that was something that we thought to be missing.

                        And so one thing for us as next steps is how do we continue to use this research to generate more community, more conversation. And really think through how do we better support school leaders and school founders like Ken and Keeanna who are on the ground innovating. So my ears are open and definitely eager to hear more from folks who do listen to this conversation and even from folks here today of just like, yeah, how do we make this better? How do we continue to push the ecosystem to allow for more innovation?

Horn:                Well, we know that by the time this conversation released, we're recording it before you graduate, but you will have graduated by the time this comes out. So congratulations. We look forward to watching what you do to further that. And Keeanna and Ken, just a great appreciation with the work that you continue to do to unlock the futures for these students that are going to make great contributions in the world. So thank you all and we'll be back next time on the Future of Education.

A serial entrepreneur, Devin Schain joined me to talk about his latest venture, Student Playbook, which helps place college alums in good jobs. In our conversation, Schain described the key opportunity for employers, colleges and universities, and alumni—and the unique solution his team is bringing to market. We also got to talk about one of my favorite non-profit projects of Schain’s, Shalom Learning. As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:   Welcome to The Future of Education where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And today, to help us think about aspects of that is a longtime friend, Devin Schain. He's the CEO and Founder of Student Playbook, and he's going to tell us all about that, but also about his journey in education and entrepreneurship, creating opportunities every step of the way for people to succeed in different parts of the student life cycle. Devin, first, great to see you. Thanks for being on The Future of Education.

Devin Schain:    My pleasure, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Morning Warmup

Horn:                You bet. So we're going to launch into our morning warmup, if you will. A little bit of a lightning round of questions. I'd love you to start talking about your background. I said you're a longtime entrepreneur in the lead-up here. You literally got your start of entrepreneurship in and around the world of higher ed, one might say the dirty underbelly of higher ed, but I'll let you tell why I chose that word, dirty, in a moment. But tell us your own story into entrepreneurship and education.

Schain:             Sure. So I went to the University of Pennsylvania, and I played soccer there and I brought up a remnant for my cold linoleum floor dorm room and my teammates comment, "Where'd you get it from?" My dad was a builder, and I brought up a couple remnants and gave it to my teammates. But the following year, because a lot of people commented, during the year, I put 112 remnants in a 14-foot U-Haul. And in six hours, Michael, I set up in front of the freshman dorm, the quad, during move-in, and I sold out. I grossed $6,000. I netted $3,000. This is in 1986. So I'm dating myself, but to put things in perspective, I held two jobs that summer.

                        I was a waiter and a counselor and I made $1000. So you don't have to be a mathlete. 10 weeks, two jobs, 1,000. 6 hours, $3,000, and that was my start. My senior year, I was doing this on 21 campuses east of the Mississippi. I went down to the carpet mills in Dalton, Georgia, and I lived with nine guys who sold on college campuses for me. And they said, "Schain, you got a great carpet business, but really? You're going to go into being a carpet salesman?" And I said, "Nope, I'm going into the college market." And 38 years later, I'm still here.

Horn:                Yeah. So I think it's just a great story because you never know where these journeys start and how you move into it. And we'll talk about some of this later, but you've incubated and built for-profits, you’ve built non-profits. You’ve built, as you like to joke, for-profits that don't make a profit. I think you use more elegant language when you say it, but your latest is you've created this company called Student Playbook, really focused on what you call this career shift focus. But give us the elevator pitch of what is Student Playbook, and we'll get into some of the details as we go down the journey.

Schain:             And as I do say, when people ask my background, I said, "I've started multiple for-profits, I've started a couple not-for-profits, and I have a few no profits. That's euphemism. It didn't work out so well." Hopefully, this one falls into the first bucket. But Student Playbook really was created, we call it playbook advances, lifelong engagement and career success. Helping students and alumni do three things, navigate new career paths, connect with other alum and advance their careers.

Horn:                Perfect. So that's the elevator pitch, if you will. Let's break that down a little bit. What does it look like and what's the big problem that you're solving for?

Schain:             Sure. So first of all, I talk about you need three things, and you can already see I'm a big fan of list of threes when you start a business. One, is there a market? Will the dogs eat the dog food? And, clearly, there is. Two, do you have the skill sets to support the problem that you're trying to solve for? And then, three, do you have a competitive advantage or a moat associated with?

                         And I'll start there. Our competitive advantage, Michael, is working with the alumni office, which provides us their endorsement and access to their young alum, from 25 to 45. There's no cost to the alumni association or the young alum, the job seeker. And we have three attributes that differentiate us from job boards or LinkedIn, but ultimately, the value proposition is we help these students and young alum get jobs because every 2.8 years now, students and alum are changing jobs.

                        But the first part is we provide access to a live recruiter. We work with five national recruiting firms, so there's a high touch. The second is, shockingly, most people don't know this. I didn't a year ago when we got into this. Only 30% of jobs are socialized, which means 70% are not readily available. We have a platform called CareerShift, which we import jobs and internships into our database and our platform. In addition, alumni at the school will provide us unique job opportunities as well. So that's the second benefit.

                        And then the third, we provide services at no cost, such as assessments, webinars, access to resume review and LinkedIn evaluation. So the business model is the employer pays us to help place students that are looking for their second, third, or fourth job with experience. The employers are happy to pay for $75,000 to $150,000 call it second, third, fourth jobs. And what I really love about this opportunity and this business is I like to do good and do well as a company.

Work Cycle

Horn:                So as I look in this and we shift into our second segment of the show, the work cycle, we dig a little deeper on this. It strikes me, if I understand it, that you're basically saying alumni after they leave college, they're in that first, second job, there's a challenge. They figured out their footing, how that professional world works, they're trying to find that next job. The alumni offices, it seems to me, of the colleges you're working with want to add a lot more value to their former students. And they're not just asking for gifts and they're giving a lot more through the work you're doing, making it much more tangible what this alumni network and connections really means. And then, third, the employers, you're obviously finding great talent for them with all this value added services that appears free for the students and the alumni associations or offices themselves of the colleges.

                        What I hadn't heard you say before, and I think it's really interesting as you think about it, is you connect that, and I think this comes from Julia Freeland Fisher's work around all these jobs are not being listed. And yet, so it really matters who you know, and a lot of these opportunities are through the alums themselves at other companies and so forth, or the companies themselves making it known to the alumni you're working with.

                        Tell us a little bit more about that because that seems actually pretty important. LinkedIn, you see a job opening. You're basically saying, "That job opening may never appear on the web. We're going to get you it before you even know about it." That seems like a unique value proposition, if I'm understanding it.

Schain:             Yeah. Michael, can I take you on the road with me because you clearly get it? I've thought about copywriting the saying, "It's what you know and who you know." I'm a big fan of the genius of and, and the combination of the two. The term social capital is so important. And I'm going to elaborate on your last question and I'll roll into the other because I want to touch on the big problem.

                        And it really is stunning that over 50% of students that graduate from four-year colleges are underemployed, which means they make less than their market rate. In addition, the largest demographic graduating today is now first gen, and they don't have the prior experiences that we take for granted. Having a parent that has gone through the process and understands the importance of networking and the value of a college degree. Also, many graduates are under-resourced and underserved.

                        I think there's a misunderstanding that just because you graduate from college that you are not under-resourced, and that's not the case. So, lastly, everyone else normally doesn't know what they want to do in their first job. And again, as I mentioned earlier, they're changing almost every three years. We are helping young alumni with lifelong career support and professional development.

                        We're helping alumni associations build alum engagement with our services, which are so important. And our brand promise, which I'm really proud of, is to make every alum better off even if they don't get placed by our programs, but we have other services that they will benefit from. Let me stop there. There's obviously a lot to unpack, but I'll pause and get some of your questions and comment.

Horn:                Yeah, no, and there's a lot of interesting things there, as you said, Devin, and one of them that strikes me is this point you made of the underemployment and then the demographics of these students and how they don't have this reservoir of social capital at their disposal. Talk to us a little bit more about who else is in this space, how are you different perhaps from what else is out there? Because on the one hand, I hear you saying these things and I'm like, "Well, every alumni office ought to be tapping their alums. It's an incredibly valuable resource in the employer market." And yet we know by and large them in the career offices are not doing these things. So why is what you're doing novel and who else is in the space?

Schain:             So, obviously, an important consideration. So, first, we are leveraging the trusted relationship that schools have with their constituents to help students and alumni navigate the career journey and provide them with value-added career services while meeting the talent demand of employers, workforce development organizations, and staffing agencies.

                        I want to reference that my carpet business, it started as Campus Carpets, we've got you covered. I haven't used that line in a long time. And then I got into On Campus Marketing, which I'm proud to say is 35 years old. I sold it 20 years ago. And there are multiple programs, but I use the same model today that I did 35 years ago.

                        We get the endorsement, the affinity, the imprimatur of the university. We provide a frictionless, really, a work-free, no cost to the organization. In this case, it's the alumni association. And there's no cost to the young alum or the alumni themselves. So it's really a model that is somewhat unique because they don't have to pay on both sides, the university side and the job seeker side.

                        And we are increasing the level of engagement for the alumni association by, in essence, white labeling their service, and we're really creating opportunities for alumni that they're not getting, candidly, from either their alumni association or their career services. There's only one counselor per 1800 students. It's really difficult to place. So, again, let me stop there for a second. There's a lot more that I can talk about related, but I will turn it back to you, Michael.

Horn:                Yeah, no, it's super interesting. And obviously the cost value prop is a big piece of this for the alumni offices. They don't have to pay anything. Alums don't have to pay anything. They get access to these services. How's it going so far? What have you learned along this journey of starting up the company?

Schain:             Yeah, so you see my gray hair? Before I started, it wasn't nearly as salt and peppered and I've got a lot of scar tissues as well. But let me first, before I touch on what I've learned, let me elaborate a little more on the problem and the solution. We're in a very dynamic, as you know better than most, economic and education environment. And we want our graduates to be successful in the world of work.

                        More broadly, the country needs an educated workforce that gets a positive ROI from the investment in higher education. We believe we can make a positive impact by serving institutions and individuals in new ways by reducing friction in the connection between education and employment. In addition, there is tremendous concern that colleges and universities don't provide the level of resources to help students get good jobs. There are two places that generate revenue on college campuses, as you know. Enrollment on the front end and alumni on the back end.

                        Unfortunately, the career center, which reports into student affairs, doesn't generate any revenue, which is part of the problem, unfortunately. Alumni associations normally ask for two things from alum. Come to the reunion, which last week was my 35th. You can do the math. And, two, donate. Alum want career support and professional development and strong networking.

                        So our evidence is that the alumni associations are valuing this program, which is in a pilot stage right now, but also we're getting hundreds of job seekers from each school looking for recruiter support. We call this proof of concept and working on the different revenue streams such as getting paid by the employer to place students. So it's actually working really well. The alum association really values this turnkey, frictionless program. And the alum, or the job seekers, are raising their hand and saying, "We want to talk to a live recruiter. We want some unique job opportunities and we want some of these services at no cost."

                        And it's actually the proverbial win-win. So let me elaborate a little more on the lessons that we've learned on the journey. And a lot of people say when they have success, “We had a grand slam.” That's what a lot of people use. “It was a home run.” When things don't work out so well, it's either called a learning experience, which is euphemism for, “We learned a lot.” So with that, we started Student Playbook in February of 2020, Michael, two weeks before I realized Corona was not just a Mexican beer. We could not test and pilot for over a year because we could not get to schools. When we eventually got to schools, my original premise, which I haven't talked about yet, but I'm going to admit now, was Gen Z lack life skills for three reasons.

                        One, they spend 10 to 12 hours a day on screen time. Two, you have helicopter parents, which I resemble that comment sometimes, not always. And accreditations not based on soft skills, life skills, what I like to call success skills, they're based on the hard skills. So I thought I could use the same model, have the university allow me to offer this to parents this time for students transitioning from incoming freshmen to graduating seniors.

                        I missed two things, and that's why you test and pilot and you try not to fall in love with your own ideas. It doesn't matter what I think, Michael, it's what the market thinks. And two things did not support my original premise. One, schools do not want to outsource student development, which I should have realized that. So that was one. And the second, parents really don't value as much life skills as they value their child getting a job.

                        One is a nice to have. The other one is a need to have. So,, fortunately we did two things that really helped. One, we bought a company called CareerShift, which has over 200 relationships with career centers. It has a great technology platform, which I talked about. And the third thing, it has a terrific founder that's still with the organization. The second thing that we did last year was we started focusing on the alumni association and helping young alum get jobs, which again, is more of the need to have versus a nice to have of the life skills.

                        And finding a model where the employer who is willing to pay anyways, not for a first year grad because they don't have the experience, but they are willing to pay for second, third, and fourth jobs. So trying to change consumer behavior or trying to change a model is very difficult. If you can take something such as an employer who's willing to pay for placement and incorporate it a little differently, that's what we've done successfully. So we’ve learned a lot, we've had to pivot, and we continue to learn by listening to the different constituents. The alumni associations, their job seekers, the recruiters, and the employers. Again, I'll stop there.

Specials

Horn:                No, super interesting, Devin, and something to follow. I want to shift to our third segment, Specials. And up front, you mentioned that you've founded a bunch of things. You've alluded to the for-profits, the non-profits, and the no profits. But I want to go into one of my favorites, which is I've had the privilege of being on the Advisory Board of which is a nonprofit, ShalomLearning. So as we start to wrap up here, maybe give us the problem that ShalomLearning was designed to tackle and how that's gone so far.

Schain:             Yeah, thanks, Michael. And you were incredibly helpful in getting that started with a great book that I think is probably over 10 years old now, Blended, which was my original executive director's Bible, which is about as high a compliment as you can get. So I started the organization in 2011, wow, 12 years ago, because I hated Hebrew school and my children hated it as well. It's a really bad model.

                        And I’m generalizing, but the majority of people don’t like driving 15, 30 minutes for an hour and a half after school of six hours. And you have curriculum that's not well packaged, that's not compelling. And you have teachers, candidly, that only teach three hours a week. How good can you be? And most of them do it because they make $5 more than their day job. So being a ed tech entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur, I thought there was a better way.

                        And I ended up creating ShalomLearning focused on three areas. One, creating an LMS, learning management system, because Gen Z, their community, although a lot of the synagogues didn't like this initially when I said, these students, they want to be online. And in-person is a value, but there're also many rural areas that don't even have the option. So, one, creating an LMS because that was a more compelling community for seven to 13-year olds. Two, we took curriculum and we curated best in class out there and we repackaged it.

                        And that was really valuable. And the third, quite frankly, I should have valued this more initially, but I do now 10 years later, it's teacher training, and really teach them how to be effective both online, in person, blended, in the classroom, as well as out of the classroom. And what I like to say is I took 19th century teaching as a modality with 20th century teachers and 21st century learners and closed the gap.

                        And I'm proud to say we started with seven students the first year. In 2019, we had 7,000 students and we were the beneficiary of COVID because the market came to us. When all the synagogues were closed, we had this successful platform and now we have over 22,000 students. We're in 11 countries, predominantly supporting military families whose children have nowhere to learn. It's basically an online Hebrew school, and we educate over 3000 teachers. So I'm really proud of the success and, most importantly, the efficacy for the student, for the teachers, and for the synagogues is better than the old model.

Closing Time

Horn:                Phenomenal stuff. I will say, if my kid's temple tunes in, you all do a great job. You're the exception that proves, frankly, the rule that Devin started out with, which is that most of us, Hebrew school experience is not all that great. But tremendous thing that you've built. Last segment, as we wrap up here, it's Closing Time. And as a serial entrepreneur, I know you take seriously not only the ventures you start and the impact you make and the success you have and, as you say, doing well by doing good, but you also take seriously helping others start on their own entrepreneurial journey and solving meaty problems. And so I suspect there's a few ways you could take this, but for those tuning in who fit that profile, they want to start something, they want to solve a problem, give us some parting advice and words of wisdom.

Schain:             Sure, thanks. So I'm going to give one anecdote and one best practice. But let me start at a high level. I love to learn, I love to teach, and I really value model the masters and best practices. And I actually like to solve problems, but candidly, I'd rather be a fast follower than a pioneer because pioneers get arrows in their back. But let me start first with a anecdote... Or I'm actually going to end with the anecdote. Let me start with a best practice.

                        So there is a great TED Talk on YouTube. It's by... I'm having a senior moment. Bill Gross, there we go. He talks about the five keys to a successful startup. And he uses empirical data to measure 100 of his startups with 100 of some of the best startups, from Airbnb and Uber and Yahoo. Well, Yahoo probably doesn't fit that category, but he really goes through and ranks, and I'm going to give the five most important in order, but I encourage you to... He does it more eloquently than I do.

                        But for the benefit of a quick lesson, in order of importance, one is timing. Two is team. Three is the actual idea. Four is the model. And five is cash. And a lot of people ask, "Why is cash last?" And the simple answer is, "If you have the first four, cash will follow." So that, I believe, is a best practice in terms of evaluating the importance of a startup. And you've heard about one of my for-profits, Campus Carpets, which turned into OCM. You've heard about one of my not-for-profits. I like the term for-profit. I don't like the term not-for-profit. I like to call it for purpose. There's only one difference between a for-profit and a for purpose, and that's tax status. They should be run very similarly. But one example of a no profit that I think you'll appreciate, Michael and your listeners, it's called Campus MD.

                        It was telemedicine for the college market, both behavioral health and if you had a physical injury that seven out of 10 can be addressed with telemedicine. I was 10 years and one pandemic too early. So I was not the beneficiary there unfortunately, but ShalomLearning was. So with that, my last anecdote or my last comment, when I speak about entrepreneurship, I tell the class or the group, "If you get one lesson from me, one takeaway, this is the most important." So there's a group of maybe 25, 100 students or employees in chairs. And I'll say to somebody in the front row, I'll say, "Michael, I'd like you to stand up and look under your chair."

                        And you'll stand up, look under your chair, and you'll pull out, I taped a dollar bill underneath. I probably should have for visual benefit, let's say, I have a dollar bill. So, Michael, you would be going like this. And I'd say, "Michael, do you know what that dollar bill represents as it relates to entrepreneurship?" And you'll say, “A bonus?” I'll say, “No.” You'll say, "Lunch money?" I'll say, "Maybe," which is a nice way of saying no. I say, "This is the most important lesson regarding entrepreneurship. That dollar represents you got to get off your behind to make a buck in this world. And ultimately that's the key to entrepreneurship."

Horn:                Love it. Love it. I love that story. I've used it since you first told me. Credit you, of course. But Devin Schain, thank you so much for joining us on The Future of Education and the work that you are doing around helping people navigate this increasingly complex world of careers and, frankly, adding a lot more value to every step of that process. Thanks, Devin.

Schain:             Michael, thank you.

Horn:                And we’ll be back next time on The Future of Education.

Which colleges best set up its graduates for careers in finance? Or data science? Or law? It turns out that different schools really help students pursue careers in different fields. And other schools, not so much. Our guest, Matt Sigelman, from the Burning Glass Institute, helps breakdown the latest research that they published with the Wall Street Journal on the topic and helps you know what it all means—plus other insights on the connections between education and careers.

For those who have been in the worlds of education and workforce, you probably know Matt and the great analytical work he has led to help build the field of labor market analytics. This conversation is the first in a semi-regular set that Matt and I plan on having each year to help share insights from the latest in research that the Burning Glass Institute does and help share why it matters.

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

Horn:                Welcome to the show 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, our guest is Matt Sigelman. He's the president of the Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit that mines for data-driven insights around the future of work and pathways into the job market, and then works with educators and employers and policy makers to help build those better pathways to advance opportunity for more people. That's my language. I'll let Matt give a crack at it in a moment in his. But before the Burning Glass Institute, he was the CEO of Emsi Burning Glass for nearly two decades, which is now known a Lightcast, where he's still the chair of that board. And he really helped pioneer this notion of data-driven labor market insights. So Matt, welcome to The Future of Education. It's great to see you. We've been threatening to do this for a while. I'm glad we're finally getting to do it.

Sigelman:         Well, very much likewise, Michael. Thanks so much for having me.

Morning Warmup

Horn:                Yeah, you bet. So four parts to the show. We're going to start with our morning warmup, go into a work time of specials and closing time. And in our morning warmup, sort of our lightning round, if you will, I want folks to get to know you and your work better because you and I anticipate doing this on a more regular basis. So first, just give us a little bit more about the fundamental work that the Burning Glass Institute does and your raison d'etre. Why do you exist?

Sigelman:         So the Burning Glass Institute is a fully independent nonprofit that advances data driven research and experimentation at the intersection of the future of work and the future of learning. As you mentioned a few minutes again, I spent most of my career building what's today Lightcast, terribly proud of its breakthrough innovation of bringing really robust and granular and timely data to understanding the supply and demand of skills in the market today. The Burning Glass Institute builds on novel data sources like Lightcast and a number of others to be able to answer the question of: How do we take these kinds of data sets and drive fundamental transformation? We know that the world of work that we live in is one that still is rife with inefficiencies, with inequities, and the question is: How do we bridge those gaps?

                        So we've been doing a ton of work recently, for example, looking at worker mobility this past fall together with the support of the Schultz Family Foundation and in partnership with Joe Fuller at Harvard Business School, we released what we called our American Opportunity Index, which is our first foray into saying, "Hey, look. How we do evaluate worker outcomes in a truly quantitative way?" And specifically, what the was doing was measuring the Fortune 250 based upon the level of opportunity that they create for workers. At a broader level though, what we were doing was creating a methodology for evaluating mobility. And it's something that we've more recently been applying to understanding the trajectories of learners after the complete programs of study.

                        As you know, there's a lot of work that's out there. They're trying to figure out: How do we make sure everyone complete a degree? But how do we make sure that degree actually bears out over time? And so some of those same metrics that we used in the opportunity index to study worker mobility are proving to be terribly relevant in measuring learner mobility as well.

Horn:                Yeah. I mean, it's just fascinating the amount of work that you're doing in these areas. And focusing on the real question, which is the ultimate value, not just: Did we print a card that says, "You graduated," which is the easy part, I like to think? You did a bunch of reports recently that I think ranked schools in an incredibly novel way, at least as far as I can tell. You basically looked at the careers themselves and asked, "Which undergrad institutions were the best at not just placing students in those careers, but helping them earn high salaries in those careers?" I think the areas were data science, consulting, law, finance. I'd love to know more about the research and the methodology behind that.

Sigelman:         Yeah, for sure. This is something that we undertook together with The Wall Street Journal. I'd first just point out, I don't believe that the world necessarily needs more college rankings. But I do believe that learners deserve transparency into how, again, the kind of outcomes they can expect. Not every student going into school knows what she wants to do on the other side. I certainly didn't. But for those who do have an ambition, and I think that's increasingly important, given the very high cost of college and the debt that students find themselves saddled with. How do you know which schools are going to place you furthest toward that ambition?

                        So here's what we did and why this looks pretty different from things like the College Scorecard or the like. College Scorecard says, "Okay, in a given major," for those not familiar with it, this is the US Department of Education's effort to, and I think a very important effort, to say, "Okay, what are the earnings of graduates in the first few years after graduation?" It's limited to a few years. And it's really about looking at majors and just saying, "Okay. Where do people wind up?" And so you wind up with a lot of this sort of calculus of: Okay, well, if somebody goes on to become a social worker, not earning terribly much, but very well fulfilled, is that a poor outcome? Right?

                        Instead, we looked at this from the other direction. We said, "Okay, if you want to become ultimately a software engineer, if you want to become a data scientist, you want to become a management consultant, if you want to go into marketing, what are the schools that have been most successful at placing people into top paying roles within that career?" And so we're looking both at the share of graduates from a given institution who go into that field. And then specific to the ranking itself, of those at the school who go into the field, what percentage of them are in top paying roles? And some of the kind of results are pretty surprising.

                        So if you looked at the software engineering rankings, and again, you see this in The Wall Street Journal, I think they've got ... They're putting it all together. They launched it list by list, but-

Horn:                It's quite clever, the PR rollout.

Sigelman:         Next week, I think they're then going to kind of take the second bite of the apple and launch a print feature, I think. But so stay tuned, I'll do my job and do a little bit of advertising here. But one of the things you will find if you look at the software engineering ranking, look, there's a bunch of schools in there that ... Look, there's no surprise that MIT and Cal Tech and Stanford are top at sending, or some of the top schools, I don't remember the exact order, at sending kids on to software careers that pay well over a span of 10 years. But we found a number of small liberal arts schools, even ones that don't have engineering programs, I'm pretty sure don't have computer science departments, Schools like Mount Holyoke, which do very well.

                        And I think it speaks both to the nature of software development and how it's changing and probably will change even more in an era of generative AI. But it also speaks to: What's the broader set of tools that somebody needs in order to be successful in a career?

Work Cycle

Horn:                Super interesting because I think what you're starting to show is, I know you've done a lot of research on the importance of major and where it helps and so forth. We'll get to that actually maybe toward the end a little bit. But I will note that major's not always predictive of what you want to do. And so I think you're starting to point to the nature of this set of skills that go beyond the narrow technical skill, but also, the social capital that accrues in a lot of these places and giving guidance. I suspect as we move into the work time, everyone's going to want to know a few of the top performers with these rankings. So can you just tease a little bit in different disciplines? Because what's interesting again, just to say this, you did law, for example. But this isn't the top law schools, it's the top colleges.

Sigelman:         It's the top undergrads that send students on.

Horn:                It's so interesting.

Sigelman:         So first of all, by the way, one thing I should point out is how much it matters. And again, I don't have the rankings in front of me right now, but if I'm remembering correctly, the top earning ... Of the schools that had the most students graduate and ultimately go on to top paying law careers, their students were making about $50,000 a year more than graduates of median performing schools who went into law. So put that across a 30-year career, that's a one and a half million dollar difference in pay. One of the things that was really interesting in law as an example is that there was ...

                        So again, no surprise that going to Harvard is a great choice. I think we found was that first of all, there's very often a geographic effect in fields like the law, certainly in marketing. Some of the best paying jobs today are in tech or at least were until recent layoffs. And tech is sort of this black hole that's swallowing a lot of talent, lot of graduates. And so being in California, for example, a big leg up if you're going into finance, being around New York has a lot of the same kind of ecosystem effect. Baruch, for example, one of the CUNY schools, which is part of the City University system of New York. It's not one of the most selective schools out there, and yet, was far better performing in terms of what we call the school effect, the wage effect of associated with going to school, than many other schools that are considered far more elite. And I think it reflects the fact that, okay, well, if you're at Baruch, you're going to wind up doing an internship in the finance industry in New York on Wall Street, and you're going to be very well positioned.

                        One other thing which I found striking is this, and this was disappointing. We found that for the most part when we looked at sort of the best, the 20 performers overall in each field, very few of them were public, so much so that when we turned the list over to The Wall Street Journal, we said, "Hey, look, we're giving you both as sort of a ... We're actually going to split this into a private list and a public list because otherwise, you actually don't wind up seeing more than Berkeley or one or two others in most lists." And I think that speaks to both some of the continued equity challenges that we have in our higher education system. It also speaks to the problems of getting lost in scale.

                        If you're at a ... And you were talking about the methodology, I'm hoping I'm not getting too far into the weeds here, but if you're in a really big school, they may be delivering lots of people into great careers, but there's only so many jobs at Goldman-Sachs if you go into finance. There's only so many jobs at Cravath if you're going into law. And so there's just a lot of graduates from the University of Michigan or wherever it may be, so part of what we saw there was also kind of where you have the best change of getting seen.

Horn:                That's super interesting because in essence, you're saying if Mount Holyoke, small class, sends X number into computer science, software engineering jobs, whatever it might be, they're all doing pretty ... Well, maybe. Right? 100% of them are hitting it out of the park. Michigan may send a bunch of kids to those jobs that do even better, but they're also sending a bunch who are maybe going into that career pathway and not doing as well, so the law of averages sort of hurts them in these sorts of rankings.

Sigelman:         I think there's also a social capital question here as well. So again, if you're in just that great big melting pot, harder to get the signals, harder to get the help, and to get the concentrated attention. I think there's also what accountants would call positive selection effect. So most Mount Holyoke grads don't go into software engineering. The ones who do want us to imagine really are special people and who are really determined to be successful in that field. And so that may also explain some of the difference.

Horn:                That's really interesting. So The Wall Street Journal obviously when it came out, they publicized who got on top of the rankings. Those were the headlines for the private and public institutions. But I'm sort of curious about the flip side of it, the institutions that maybe failed to make the grade, if you will. And maybe the way to ask this is more like: What insights could I harvest from this if I'm a prospective student to avoid making a mistake if I'm set on a particular career path?

Sigelman:         So look, in terms of this body of research, we didn't do tons to mine the bottom of the list, I think, and that's partly practical because there's a lot of schools that-

Horn:                Right. You could go down forever, yeah.

Sigelman:         I think this is a ... And this is something which Jeff Selingo and I recently looked at, you'd mentioned that paper and I think probably worth bringing to bear here. The success of graduates is defined at a three-way intersection between the program of study, your major, the school you go to, and the skills you acquire. So there is a big difference in any program of study between whether you're at a highly selective institution or a non-selective institution. There's also a big difference between what program of study you're in. Look, let's call out what I think we all intuitively know, but which was I think a really remarkable finding just to see nonetheless, when we looked at that sort of intersection of programs of study and institutional selectivity, you would rather be a tech or engineering major at a totally non-selective institution at a regional public, or four year community college, or what have you, than be pretty much any other major at the most selective institutions.

                        And so I think that sort of speaks to some of the decision landscape that people have to make. We tend to focus on rankings at the institutional level. And we focus not enough at the program of study level. And again, some of that's natural because people don't necessarily know what they want to do. And there's this idle that we have of college is this kind of wonderful sorting hat, if you will, where we kind of come out knowing what we want to do. It's a very expensive sorting hat, and the stakes are very high. And so if you don't know where you want to go, what you want to do, you can wind up making some serious mistakes. Now it's interesting because this often gets cast as a debate between the STEM fields and the humanities. And indeed, there's been a significant flight out of humanities over the years.

Horn:                The numbers have declined dramatically.

Sigelman:         It's been a huge decline. But actually, where we see the biggest levels of under-performance are for the most part, less the humanities, though certainly most STEM fields outperform most liberal arts fields, not always, by the way. If you're going to be a life science major and not go on to graduate school, that's a mistake. But what kind of job do you get as a bio major who doesn't go get a nursing degree, or medical degree, or a PhD, or something like that? But most of the worst offenders are the kinds of programs that sound nominally practical, but which actually have either low demand or very little of the demand is for jobs that demand a degree. And it seems intuitively obvious to most of the people who are listening to us I'm sure, that mamas, don't let your babies go become parks and rec majors, or become transportation material moving majors, or law enforcement majors, or the like. If you're a first gen college goer-

Horn:                You do not know.

Sigelman:         There's nobody to tell you that.

Horn:                Yeah.

Sigelman:         And so we've actually seen a huge growth in those majors. If you look at enrollments and rather conferrals over the last 50 years, where are people getting degrees? STEM's been relatively constant. There's been a huge flight out of liberal arts. What's grown in the gap is those nominally practical majors that very often underperform.

Specials

Horn:                It's interesting because you anticipated where I wanted to go, which as we move into the special section, is enlarging this with that research you did with Jeff. And you've just sort of alluded to it, that there's these bachelor's degree pathways that don't actually pay off in the same way that the bachelor's degree does on average. And I guess what was interesting to me was first, the first part of what you just said, is that these technical sounding, very vocation clear pathways that don't pay off, should avoid those if you're paying a lot I guess on the sticker price is the lesson.

                        But then you also found that there's certain pathways that are non degreed in nature that actually pay off better than some of those bachelor degree pathways you just mentioned. So what were some of those non-degree pathways that maybe people ought to be thinking about or considering?

Sigelman:         So I will break this down into two parts. One is the non-degree pathways, but part of it is also: How do we create a more hybridized version of that? I mentioned there's a sort of three-way intersection here between programs of study and institutions. But the third leg of that stool is skills you acquire. And what we found was that in any given program of study, there are sets of skills that you can learn that significantly differentiate students that significantly change your prospects of success.

                        A public administration major who is able to learn public investment skills is making almost a quarter more than the public administration majors. Remember I was telling you about how there's a lot of life science majors who underperform, certainly other STEM majors, and in many cases, many humanities or social science majors. Well, a life science major who develops clinical research experience is making 60% more than other life science majors. So it's really about not necessarily the baby with the bath water, it's also for learners, it's not about oops, I made this terrible mistake and now I'm doomed. But it's: How do we make sure that learners have the information they need to know what they can do to make sure that they are maxing out their chances of success?

Horn:                So that goes where I want to go, which is sort of the implications for this body of work, and I'm going to call it that because it's obviously lots of little strands that are significant each unto their own, but then together start to paint a very interesting picture about the landscape of pathways into the work and so forth. And so I'm just sort of curious at a macro level. What are things that we ought to be doing in your judgment to help empower learners to make investments and choices, and I'm going to phrase it this way, in line with the progress that they're seeking? And what are we learning about how to help them discern what is and isn't a good investment along that path that they've chosen?

Sigelman:         So there's a couple of things that we've been working on here. First, I think it's just providing the insight about how different skills work. And different skills work in different ways. Right? So some skills are important because they're core to a discipline. Some skills are foundational. They aren't actually the skills of that job, but you kind of need to know them. And we often forget those. For example, if you want to be a graphic designer, graphic designers are doing project based work, and so they often need project management skills. They often need budget skills. But no one teaches you that as a graphic designer and graphic design school. But at the same time, there are sets of skills that are foundation, that are transformational to a role, that are fast-growing within it that drive significant premiums. And how do we identify those as well? So that's the first thing I'd say there.

                        We recently worked with Coursera to develop a framework to help both companies and learners make better optimized decisions about what skills to learn. Optimize is a funny, kind of wonky sounding word. You would just think how to make better decisions. But I think the optimization thing implies a set of choices around different priorities is really important to it because we looked at three dimensions, which sound really easy, and by the way, like huge loss of blood and whatever associated with producing them. One is: How much of an earnings boost does a skill give you? How much value does it give you in the market? A second is: How long does it take to learn? And the third is: How long does it last? How durable is that skill?

                        And I remember first sharing it with some folks and they're saying, "Okay, great. What are those skills?" What do you mean, what skills? The skills that are really quick to learn, that last a long time, and give you this huge lift in your career. Guys, there's no free lunch. There's precisely zero skills that match all of those criteria. But how do you decide which ones are worth the slog, which ones give you the quick hit? Those are decision spaces that you want to help people sort of make. And so part of it is this, how do we then, and I think this is where you're getting to, it's a question of: How do we create the structures and the transparency, structures of how people can acquire these skills on the fly? Because the ones from… as I know you agree, no longer works.

                        We did some work last year together with the Boston Consulting Group. We found that the average US job has seen 37% of its skills replaced in the last five years, which is an astounding pace of change. Right?

Horn:                Wow, yeah.

Sigelman:         Think of it as: Has the average curriculum changed 37% in the last five years? Well, of course not. Accreditors won't allow it. Right? So in that kind of context, everyone needs to acquire new skills. How do we construct a mechanism for people to be able to do that? Similarly, how do we enable people to stair-step their way toward economic mobility? Most people don't leap tall buildings in a single bound and go. There's wonderful programs out there.

Horn:                Yeah. Do one thing and then build.

Sigelman:         Exactly. Right? So I think we need to rethink our community college system because it is the natural infrastructure for people to be able to learn new skills on the fly. But right now, it's very oriented toward degree transfer, which so often doesn't work. Something like 80% of enrollments in community colleges are around people expecting to get a four-year degree. And according to the National Student Clearinghouse, only about 13% ever do. But this is also about: How do we give people transparency? And Michael, this is why I'm so proud of the work that we're just kicking off together around short-term credential transparency. You want to have a skill driven ecosystem, one where people, that life science major couldn't acquire that additional skill and clinical research experience and earn 60% more.

                        We have to have a way of representing skills that has real currency as a marketplace. And so you hear a lot of voices talking about hey, we need more short-term credentials. Actually, that's exactly not the problem. It's exactly the opposite problem from what we have. The US Chamber of Commerce's credential engine project tracks something like 1.2 million credentials. I always point out that there are 114,000 words in the Oxford Dictionary, so it's literally 10 times more credentials than there are words in English.

Horn:                Than there are words to describe them.

Sigelman:         Yeah. So we don't need more of them, we need more clarity about which ones actually deliver outcomes. And so we're [inaudible 00:28:38] to recently announced partnership together with Jobs of the Future to build on the work of the EQOS, the Education Quality Outcome Standards framework. People say, "How can we do this at scale?" How could we provide an evaluation of which credentials are actually bearing out for learners so that learners know which ones to invest in, so that employers know which ones to value and which ones represent the skills that they need?

Horn:                Yeah. I think that's a perfect place to leave this conversation. I'll just add my appreciation, not just for the work that we're about to do with EQOS and JFF and Burning Glass Institute coming together in that, but more importantly, also the nuance that you just used to describe even those skills. Because what they stack on top of the experience, the program, the degree that you have makes a pretty big difference to answer: How valuable is it in the labor market?

                        And that level of nuance I think is important, just learning Python is going to have vastly different impacts on your career depending on what background you bring into it at that point. And so your answer to the person that says, "Well, where's the short-term durable magical skill?" It depends on context and that level of nuance I think that you all continue to craft, and this is incredibly important. So we're going to come back to you as you keep releasing these reports and breaking these insights because my hope is that it'll give people a clearer and clearer picture over time of this future of work and the different pathways, the winding pathways if you will, into it.

Sigelman:         Well, always welcome these conversations, and I think we need to do so much better than we're doing right now. And there's a moment of opportunity when we see the kind of transformations that are taking place in the market, 37% of skills replaced in five years, we see the advent of generative AI, I think it's going to create an impetus for change at a policy level. It's going to create a demand from change both from learners and from employers at the other end, and that makes this an exciting moment.

Horn:    No doubt. So we'll keep tracking it with you. Thanks for joining us on The Future of Education, all of you tuning in. Keep track of Matt, Burning Glass Institute, and all the insights that they're publishing. And we'll be back next time.

When the Khan World School launched last year as a partnership between the Khan Academy and Arizona State University Prep Digital, it promised a new way forward for virtual schooling. One year later, Sal Khan and Amy McGrath rejoin me to share how the first year went—including some stunning first-year results, lessons learned, and what the next year ahead will look like as they enroll students for the next school year. As always, subscribers can listen to our conversation as a podcast, watch it below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:                Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are devoted to helping create a world in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And to help us further that idea, today we have two guests who are returning guests to the conversation: None other than Amy McGrath, the COO of ASU Prep Digital, and Sal Khan, of course, of Khan Academy fame, and the two have partnered together, as many may recall, on creating the Khan World School. And first, Amy, Sal, great to see both of you. You're almost a year in, I think, to a full school year, if you will, of the Khan World School. How's it gone? How's that first year been? Congratulations.

Sal Khan:               Well, and first of all, Michael, you had a hand in this, for those listening. I don't know if it was a year and a half ago, two years ago, we were looking to... Obviously I've been thinking about how do you put all the pieces together to really reimagine learning for a long time. We had started Khan Lab School out here in California many years ago, but we said, hey, after the pandemic, there's an opportunity to do online schooling, but do it right, do it so it's not just students by themselves in isolation, nothing but screen time, but actually get the best of both worlds. And I was talking to a bunch of folks of just who's done interesting things, and Michael, you said, you should talk to Amy McGrath. And Amy and I had a conversation, and by, I don't know, minute 45, there was a little bit of like, hey, you wouldn't happen to want to do this together? And Amy, I'm paraphrasing, was like, I was hoping you would ask.

Amy McGrath:          Yes, indeed.

Sal Khan:               And we ended up... So Michael, you are definitely the matchmaker here. But I've got to say that it has, I don't want to jinx it, but it has gone surprisingly well. I give a lot of credit to Amy and Betsy and their team at ASU Prep and ASU generally, where I and the Khan Lab School team came to them with a three to five page vision document, which really talked about personalization mastery, things that I've been talking about for many, many years. You could leverage tools like Khan Academy for students to learn at their own time and pace. We leverage another sister nonprofit that we started called Schoolhouse.world, where students can not only get free tutoring, but even better, prove their knowledge, which actually a large number of universities are now taking very, very seriously.

                        But we want to anchor it not just an asynchronous activity, but seminars where you're actually connecting with people. But when you're on Zoom together, you're talking to each other, you're digging into the issues of the day. Borrow a little bit of the Oxford model where students are having small group tutorial sessions, they have check-ins with their advisors. And things like the humanities, where Khan Academy has some content, but not all the content, having reading lists, and borrow a little bit from some of the great books type programs in curricula, but also giving students choice on how they do that. And Amy and Betsy and their team have executed.

                        I think, incredibly, we had 50 9th graders in this first year, and I tend to run pretty optimistic and these are students from all over the world as we talked about. I mean, Amy can give the exact numbers, but it's a good chunk from Arizona where it's free, where it's leveraging the charter of ASU Prep, but there're students from India, there're students from all over the country, there're students from all over the world. And the data in terms of their growth has been almost hard to believe, so I've been very careful on how... But we're looking at two to three times growth in math, we're looking at three plus times expected growth in reading. Language, arts, don't even want to say it because it's so large, five times expected growth. So these are all... Even if you discount those numbers... I mean these are the real numbers, I'm not making these up. Even if you discount them by 50%, they would still be hard to believe numbers.

                        But I think the other side of the coin is equally interesting, is not only are these students performing at a very high level of growth regardless of where they started, but also they seem happy. They seem part of a community. It really is defying a lot of the stereotypes folks have about online schooling. They really feel like they're part of a rich community. I've been doing a monthly seminar with them, and I got to say, every time I talk to these students, I have hope for the future and I definitely have a lot of conviction on this model.

Horn:                Amy, what are your reflections on one year in talking about those... Those results are incredible. I had not heard those before, by the way. Sometimes I'm suspicious of the growth rates relative to expected value, but that's also because you never hear anything anywhere close to what you just said. Amy, what are your reflections a year in as you close out the school year?

McGrath:          There's so much that we've learned, but certainly both qualitatively, and obviously as Sal just mentioned, quantitatively. It's all about the outcomes for the students, and they came in voracious and high aptitude learners and still demonstrated that much growth, so we are so proud of the students. But they are enjoying themselves. We've had a lot of student focus groups and parent focus groups and seminar is where it's at. These kids so enjoy even the access to Sal on a monthly basis, to talk just about big world problems and healthy discourse. It's one thing for us as adults to try to myth-bust around the perception of online learning as being detached, and then to have kids who are sending us videos about why they feel so close to their community, to their houses, and how they can't wait for more students to join. There's eight countries represented. There's really genuine and authentic relationships that have formed in this initial year, and so it truly has been... I don't think we could have even written the narrative better than the students are reporting back, so we're very proud.

Horn:                I want to come back to the word, surprisingly well, Sal, that you just used, but I'll let you say why you chose that word in a moment. But you just mentioned something, Amy, about the houses, and I actually think this is one of the, that and the seminar, are some of the coolest pieces of what you all have put together. This notion that... I think there's four houses or something like that that you've constructed? So what is that experience like? What is this community that these people across eight countries get to build?

McGrath:          We really believe in this idea of interdependence on each other, so in order to really engage you need your peers to engage. You can't be doing it on your own. And so even though 50, really, is a small community of learners, we then shrink that even more and have smaller houses where they get to know each other on a more personal basis, do projects, teach each other what mastery is like, work on peer mastery, and then they also have the opportunity to get together in the Socratic seminar sessions that have all 50 of the students. We want there to be multiple opportunities to engage in smaller and more intimate settings as well as in the larger, but the students are... It's been fun in the focus groups to hear them say, "well, I still get to stay with my house next year even though new students are joining, right?"

                        They have this sense of pride and they've really enjoyed getting to know each other. And it's also fun to watch them play off of each other as the year has progressed because, it's certainly a progressive autonomy type of situation, but in the beginning they're sort of watching each other's vibe and, is this okay to speak back and how do I say this question in the right way? And now there's just more of a general comfort, but a resounding theme is respect for one another and for different opinions and the desire to grow and expand their thinking. That has been a real powerful piece in terms of a learning of Socratic seminar.

Horn:                Sal, you get to teach them once a month you just said. Maybe not just in that experience, but more broadly, what has been the student experience from your perspective? How do they describe it? What have they gotten to do that maybe they're also surprised about? Not just you saying, wow, it's gone surprisingly well.

Khan:               Yeah, I think the things that... The student experience, this was all an idea on paper, and what we've really tried to do is go on this journey where there's Khan Academy that's being used by thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of classrooms around the world, and there we have all of these efficacy studies that if students are able to put in even 30 to 60 minutes a week it leads to really big gains. Then in 2014, we started Khan Lab School, which at the time was a very small lab school out here in Northern California, that's where my kids go to school. And we started saying, well, what if you really leaned in on personalization and mastery and having one-to-one connections with advisors and community? Everything Amy just mentioned. And we saw even more dramatic results. Khan Lab School pretty consistently sees one and a half to two and a half grade levels per year, especially in math. We need to, frankly, at the Khan Lab School side, get better at measuring what's happening in other places.

                        But when we wrote the vision document for Khan World School, we decided to go even closer to vision, which is, we kind of took out the traditional schedule. We did anchor it with these synchronous seminars, my seminars are not the only one, they don't happen just once a month, that's just when I show up. They're happening regularly several times a week. But if we anchor with that, have other synchronous moments where you can connect with your advisors, your tutorial groups, but the rest of it is very much up to the student. This was a bit of an experiment to see if it threads the needle in the right way. And what we're seeing over the past years, I think we've hit the sweet spot, where the average student is spending about two hours of synchronous time with their community, but that two hours, I would argue, is more connected than the five or six hours that a lot of students might spend in a traditional classroom. Because in a traditional classroom, oftentimes you're somewhat passive, sometimes you're lost, sometimes you're bored, you're not necessarily engaged, and you'd be lucky if you have even 30 minutes to an hour of where you actually are engaged in a live classroom.

                        Here, they're having two hours of pretty small group, very engaging, it could be with their tutorial, which is very small group, meeting with their advisor, it could be the seminar, which is also reasonably a small group, where they are engaged, where they're talking, they're discussing, they are exchanging ideas, working on things together. So I think having that anchor, but then having the rest of your day where you can engage asynchronously, you can message each other, you can do ad hoc meetings similar to the way we would do in a workplace if you want to meet with someone, you want to discuss something, and it really feels like that's the right amount of flexibility. And we are now... It's feeling right, and as I mentioned the numbers in terms of performance are, even for me, almost hard to believe. But because of that, we're actually actively trying to take a lot of what Khan World School is doing and bringing it back to KLS. KLS was, to some degree, the inspiration of Khan World School, but Khan World School has gone further and now we're trying to bring that back into the physical setting as well.

Horn:                That's pretty cool actually, to hear about how they inform each other. Iterations over there then can feed back and then vice versa. It's almost like siblings competing with each other or twins, Amy, maybe in your case. But the question I'm curious about is, what have you learned about why students chose to enroll in Khan World School, and what's the message for those who are thinking about what they want to do for their schooling next year that are thinking, is Khan World School right for me?

McGrath:          I can answer, at least start us. We imagined a school of students that wanted to go really fast, that had a ceiling in traditional settings, that if we eliminated some of the walls and the ceilings then they could put together their own learning experience that's all anchored to mastery. And that is the case, but not every student wanted to go as fast, and some of the students really needed a lot of training around what does it look like to leverage mastery and have few rules in how you demonstrate mastery. Students are coming from really structured environments and realized, I don't know what pace I'm on. I need more. I need more. And so this year, we are going to be working in the first couple weeks with our newest students on what it looks like to be involved in this model. That was a key learning for sure.

                        The students wanted to sprint, but also were afraid to unleash because they might not get an A, they're going to get a high mark of high proficiency, et cetera. And so some of the things that they were used to being incentivizing to them moving forward were different, so that was an interesting piece.

                        I think we're also seeing that some students really want to focus heavy on one subject a week at a time and then do the next at another week. And so some of their styles that have come out have been key, and not just us assuming this is what sprinting looks like, but asking the students, how do you pace your week? Where do you want to learn? And truly, our learning guides have been key architects into this experience and they're really helping to inform, I think, some of the Khan Lab School. Very excited that the collaboration is so much that we're going to have a pod in Mountain View, California, with Sal's son as a part of this, as a Khan World School pod at Khan Lab School. And so you can imagine that environment and that cycle of being able to make one another better and draw from each other's assets is going to be pretty fantastic.

Khan:               Yeah, I'll just add... I mean, you could tell I'm voting my beliefs by convincing my kids. And look, my son, who's going to be a freshman next year, you asked me what type of student I think... The number one reason we yell at him in the house, my wife's like, Imran, stop coding. He's that kid. Maybe it's not too much of a surprise for folks. He likes to solve puzzles, he likes to code, he likes... But he's curious about things. His favorite thing to do with me is we'll go on a walk, he's like, "hey, is it okay if I have some questions, some science questions?" I'm like, yeah, it's okay. Let's talk about science while we're walking around the park.

                        But I would say that a student who is feeling under stimulated, who wants more flexibility, who wants to dig into their passions, who, as Amy said, who doesn't want a ceiling, who wants to be around adults who don't discourage asking questions but encourage asking questions, even hard questions, even questions that adults might not know but the adults are saying, "well, let's figure that out together. Let's see if there is a way to do that." But at the same time, who wants to become part of a community and wants to be around other similar students.

                        I won't say this is an outright school for high performers. I think all kids who come to this school could end up, in fact we're seeing that in the results, they can end up being high performers, but we really want to... But there are some high performing students who really want to be told every moment of the day what they should do, and it's probably not good for them, but for students who feel like they can do a lot more, who want to have more of a sense of purpose, who want to have a sense of being able to engage with the world and not be limited in any way, I think this is a good fit.

Horn:                It's interesting hearing you say that, Sal, because I think that was part of my wonderings as well, is this for the Montessori students, say, who wants to continue that freedom? But it's actually also, maybe yes, but also for the student that's feeling boxed in by the experiences that they've had and sort of looking for that escape valve. Amy, you just said something really interesting though, which is that there's going to be a pod in Mountain View on the site of the Khan Lab School for Khan World School. So this gets us to where I want to go, which is what's next year going to look like? It sounds like those 50 9th graders are going to become 10th graders, there's going to be a whole new entering class and there's going to be some variation in the experience. Tell us more about the pod. What else is coming down the pipeline for next year?

McGrath:          A lot to be excited about. We are expanding. We really wanted to start small and be obsessive about the quality and the opportunity for our students, and it went so well that we are going to expand our offering to 6th through 12th grade. We expect about 50 students per grade, so 350 total. The idea to pilot a Khan World School with a physical presence in Mountain View is just that, to pilot. What does this look like from a scheduling perspective and a hybrid learning environment? When are students going to come to school? When are they going to stay back? So I think that's part of our future, is honing it and mastering it in this next year in a safe and collaborative environment, such as Khan Lab School, and then offering this more broadly, nationally, to progressive school leaders that have the right space and have the right structures to allow us to collaborate.

                        One thing that we're really careful about is not diluting the experience and handing it over to someone else. We're somewhat desiring to be controlling of the model so that it is a purist mastery model and so that... One of the things that we keep talking about is these students, they're not necessarily coming in as crazy high aptitude learners, they're just willing. They know how to self-regulate, they are curious and they desire to be there. And so there are so many of those students that are untapped that may need a physical place to report. And so as we desire to scale this to thousands and tens of thousands, we're trying to create models in various modalities that are going to be able to cater to those various needs.

Khan:               I'll just add to that. I'll keep a heaping praise on Amy and Betsy and the learning guides and the whole team there because I... and Michael, you know this, we've both written a lot about mastery learning, which is really just the idea that students have the opportunity incentive, whatever their assessment level is, to improve it, to get to a level of proficiency or mastery. It usually goes hand in hand with things like competency based learning, which is really, hey, it doesn't matter that you took algebra, what matters is do you know algebra. And obviously you could have multiple shots at goal on this. It doesn't matter if it took you a year to learn it, two years to learn it, or two weeks to learn it. But it's one thing to talk about personalization and mastery and all of these things and making things student-centered, it's a whole other thing to implement it.

                        And what we've seen even at KLS, Kahn Lab School, is that there's a lot of gravity towards going back to the traditional that tends to be a little bit more, the adults direct what a student does on a day-to-day basis. The assessment, maybe it doesn't feel as mastery as we would like, it's not as personalized as like... So to be able to get such a, I would call it a pure but well-thought-out implementation, with such great results is pretty darn amazing. And so that is one of the reasons why I'm so excited about scaling it behind, bringing some of that back to KLS, where we can create that program and see how you can do a hybrid between a physical layer to supplement the Khan World School experience, which I actually think is going to make it a lot easier for a lot of folks.

                        A lot of folks around the world are looking to do innovative schools, but it's hard to come up with the curricula and the grading and the college admissions and all this stuff. Now they can just take that from KWS, we imagine, and then focus on the physical setting and the environment that they want to create.

                        Another dimension that I think is going to be really exciting, as you know, Khan Academy has jumped in with both feet on artificial intelligence, both Khan Lab School and Khan World School were the first places where we were able to try things out. It's had a huge impact on what we're actually creating. And I think as we go into next year, you should never use technology for technology's sake. You should think about what is the problem you're trying to solve. But there's some very clear problems that we've been trying to solve at Khan Academy, KLS, and now KWS, that we think artificial intelligence could play a very, very, really interesting role.

                        One, it obviously can act as a tutor for every student that has even more of value and a personalized mastery framework. It has powerful capability to act as a teaching assistant, help create lessons on the fly, make them dynamic, help prepare students in ways that would've seemed science fiction. I just gave a TED Talk and I shared a story of a young girl from India who goes to Khan World School, her name's Sanvi and she's reading The Great Gatsby, and she was trying to figure out why he keeps staring at the green light. And she says, "oh, I realize I could actually talk to Jay Gatsby via Khanmigo." Via our AI that we have on Khan Academy, and then she has this conversation with Jay Gatsby where he is like, oh, old sport. Yes, what do you want to talk about? And she's like, "well, why do you look at the green light?" He's said, that's at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock, and it represents the distance between where I am and where I want... Anyway. And then she apologized for taking up the simulation, Mr. Gatsby's, time.

                        But that's the type of thing that... We're rolling it out to schools around the world, especially around the country. But I think Khan World School is going to be the epicenter of not just throwing in technology in there just to look modern, but to do it in ways that are really thoughtful where we can start to do even more mastery based learning and things like writing. And on Khan Academy, it's pretty straightforward to do personalized mastery learning because it grades it for you and there's a very deep item bank so that you don't see the same thing repeats. But with essays, Khan World School has already been doing it, but if you had an essay and you're not quite mastered yet, in theory, you should be able to edit it and then someone should review it again and keep assessing it. But how do you make sure those assessments are consistent and transparent and you get as many shots at goal as needed? That's very resource intensive, and we have been doing it at Khan World School, but maybe artificial intelligence has a role here.

                        Artificial intelligence can do higher order tasks, even in math, that we couldn't traditionally do, where a student has to explain their reasoning, a student has to give a proof, a student has to design an experiment. And once again, the artificial intelligence can both work with the student, but also assess the student and also communicate with the adults on what the adults can do to better support the students.

Horn:                It's cool to hear you say all that, and I'll tell this story on air: One of my daughters was home sick from school a week or so ago, maybe two weeks ago at this point, and she was asking me questions, and not quite pestering, but about various things. And I said, you know there's this talk of my friend Sal that I need to watch of him giving this TED Talk, which I knew I should watch, not just the explanations you had forwarded me originally around Khanmigo. And so we watched it together and then she said, "okay, my turn." And so she hopped on, we had the invite to Khanmigo, and by the end she was full on programming by the end of the day. It was an incredibly productive day and she said, "see, dad, I can be productive and learn outside of school too." And I said, "of course you can. That's awesome." It was incredible to watch the interaction between the two.

                        And I think the other thing that you just pointed to is, you've almost built this dual engine, seems to me, Sal, of Schoolhouse.world on the one hand of peer-to-peer almost assessment, but peers who are denoted as masters of the things that they're assessing, coupled with perhaps the artificial intelligence. The amount of information we're going to be able to get about people's learning and true mastery thresholds in a much more seamless sort of authentic way seems like it could really dramatically change the learning models and sort of our mindsets around what teaching and learning even looks like. I'm sort of curious, how far has this played out in your head about what's possible?

Khan:               Yeah, and I know for folks listening, it could get confusing because we have an alphabet soup of organizations that we have, with Khan Academy at the core, and now we have the schools, Khan Lab School, and what we've been talking about, Khan World School, and Schoolhouse.world. During the pandemic, it's always been my dream... And we've always seen it in classrooms, that the best classrooms don't just have students on Khan Academy, but the students are able to engage with each other and provide that extra support towards each other so that you don't just have one teacher in the room, you have 30 teachers in the room. You can get to a one-to-one that way. And we said, well, what if we could scale that broadly, especially during the pandemic where folks were at home and they needed to feel more connected.

                        So we started a sister nonprofit, Schoolhouse.world, its mission is connect the world through learning. And the whole idea is peer-to-peer tutoring. And we said, well, how do we certify whether someone can tutor, whether they know their material and they can tutor? Well we said, what if they took Khan Academy assessments that come from a very deep item bank, so you could take it as many times as you want and not see repeats, and record their face and their screen while they explain the reasoning out loud. And then that video artifact, if they get to 90%, if they don't, they can try again tomorrow with a different test, but if they get to 90%, it gets peer reviewed, to your point, Michael. And if it all looks good, and obviously Khan Academy is doing the grading, the peers are making sure that the person didn't cheat, they followed the protocol, then we say, okay, you know unit one of calculus, you can start your journey to tutoring. Then there's training and all of that.

                        But at the same time, during the pandemic, universities like University of Chicago, MIT, reached out and said, hey, could we use this as a way for college admissions? Because one, we love this way that you're assessing folks. You're not just making them fill out a Scantron, you're making them explain their reasoning, and they also have to review other people's work. That by itself is awesome. But then these days, especially at some of these elite schools, kids with maxed out grades and standardized scores are almost a dime a dozen. We want to see the kids who can teach this material, who can go off to other people and explain it and invest the time. And to your point, that has created this really powerful... It's not the same scale as Khan Academy, Khan Academy is tens of millions of folks, this is tens of thousands of folks, but it is scaling quite fast.

                        But both Khan World School and KLS have anchored deeply on this for our math, because one, it's a way to show that you really know it, but then we also want our students to go on that journey to eventually tutor other students, which by the way, there's now 16 universities including MIT, UChicago, Yale, Cornell, who have become part of this consortium who are taking these types of signals seriously. But to your point with artificial intelligence, we're just starting to explore how the artificial intelligence can run a simulation with a student, how it can ask them questions. You can imagine pairing that maybe with what we're doing at Schoolhouse, where you record yourself engaging with artificial intelligence, maybe in the humanities, it can run essentially like a thesis defense with you, and then maybe that gets peer reviewed by humans. And so we do see something interesting developing, to your point.

                        Traditional Khan Academy with the exercises and the practice, we think that's going to be relevant for a while because it is the most curated and clear indication, but then you have a layer of artificial intelligence, both on the support side and on the potentially of the assessment side eventually, and then you have the human support and assessment at the highest level with Schoolhouse.

McGrath:          I'd love to just comment on that as well. As a learning designer, watching students have access to every one of the tools in real time that Sal just described, it's been phenomenal to watch 13, 14, and 15 year olds with Khanmigo, and the respect that platform has for the student on their learning journey is pretty phenomenal. I mean, there's so much controversy around this right now, and it's challenging me as an educator. I mean, the whole theory that the brain who does the work, does the learning. I truly do still believe that, but I think we're seeing it in a different way now.

                        I think some of the future of all these tools that Sal is just talking about, this universe of assets, so you've got AI sitting between the student and the teacher, and it accelerates exponentially their ability to not just be waiting on them and on the adult, on the human. It's making connections and pushing the student further and we're really seeing that actually happen. And so the students are still doing the work, but they're actually doing a better work product and going back to it, asking the bot how to deepen and expand their knowledge base, which is, I think, improving the ability to master as well. So very, very impressed as an educator in architecting new models that this is a good thing for students.

Horn:                It strikes me that that's where the focus is as we start to wrap up here, Amy, which is it's not just taking the tool and just putting it blindly in an existing system, it's building new models around it. And that's what fundamentally you all are demonstrating here, is that Khan World School and Khan Lab School are these Petri dishes in which to reimagine what schooling looks like. And then with this technology, the scale that you can start to do this at, to allow communities all over the world to form around this, it gets pretty exciting pretty fast. Take us through where you're thinking... You're enrolling 6th through 12th grade coming up, you just said, where does this go from here in both of your minds as we wrap up?

Khan:               Well, I view Khan World School as a Formula One car analogy where automotive companies, they have the Formula One cars to show what's possible. If you take the best of all the technology, the best engineering, the best drivers, what you can do, that's what Khan World School is. What's interesting is it could also potentially scale. It's not going to scale to millions likely, but definitely tens of thousands over time. But I think... And it also creates a very powerful outlet for students today who want to be challenged. And I think these are going to be the kids who start the Googles of the future, who cure diseases, write the great novels of the future, and even if we can reach thousands of them, I think that's going to have huge impact on society. But I think even more importantly, it sets an example of what's possible in the broader world.

                        The timing of Khan World School existing hasn't been better because of all of the artificial intelligence work that's happening. We need to show the world how this can be used for good, how it can accelerate outcomes and be very clear-eyed that we're not just alluding ourselves, that we're measuring it and we're seeing that it's actually working. There's a very interesting moment in EdTech that's happening where classic EdTech has always been, hey, you've been running a school a certain way, here's a tool that might improve things and here's our efficacy studies, et cetera. What's happened with AI, it's been like a big bomb in the education system where it kind of broke education or it is breaking it where people are like, what do we do with term papers? What do we do in a world where kids can cheat and ask ChatGPT things? And we think we have a solution here where not only could we mitigate any of those risks and make it safe, but we can dramatically accelerate and do things that would've seemed utopian, honestly, even a year ago.

McGrath:          Yeah, so increasing opportunity is what Arizona State University is all about. And so this K-12 concept of ASU prep, creating new models, and now being able to partner with someone as prolific as Sal to design a model that is giving students hybrid flexible choice and allowing them to sprint is so exciting. We also are doubling down on early college. Truly eliminating that line and bringing college to 13, 14, and 15 year olds to master and to continue to just... No longer is it all breath. There's a lot of depth. And when a student knows what they want and can just go after it and tutor themselves using AI, show mastery with their peers on Schoolhouse.world, have access to state-of-the-art university content anytime, anywhere, it's pretty phenomenal. So I think it's the best of what we know as education experts all in one menu.

                        The desire and the goal is certainly to expand that and to get more students on board. So 350 next year, I don't know Sal, what do we say? A thousand the following year? That's the pace that we would love to go because we think this is so great, and as the outcomes are speaking for themselves, this is something that we now... We hypothesized it was going to go really well and that we knew how to design a powerful model, now we are seeing in real time that it's good for kids, so we're excited to get it into more hands.

Horn:                Khan World School one year later. People should keep checking it out and you all keep expanding so that you bring these pods to Massachusetts so my girls have some good options for high school. I'm excited about where this is going. Sal, Amy, keep up the great work and thanks joining me.

Senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Rick Hess recently joined me on the Future of Education to talk about his new book, The Great School Rethink. It's a terrific book that reaches a similar set of conclusions as my own recent book, From Reopen to Reinvent. Rick argues that change in education won't come from on high, but instead from education and entrepreneurs on the ground. He then talks about what those changes could look like—and how they'll look different in different communities. In this conversation, we delved into some of Rick's pet peeves—which viewers may be surprised to learn are also some of my pet peeves. Phrases like innovation and disruption and best practices. We also talk about rethinking the job of teachers, what a charter teacher might look like, and the use of time in schools and mastery-based learning. As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:   Welcome, welcome, welcome to the show 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 today's guest is a longtime friend of mine. He's the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of a great new book called The Great School Rethink. He's none other than Rick Hess. Rick, it is good to see you. Thanks for being here.

Rick Hess:         Hey, good to be with you, pal.

Horn:                Yeah, no, I appreciate it. And I'm going to try not to fawn too much over the book because I know you hate that sort of stuff in these conversations, but I enjoyed every word in it, so I'll just say that upfront. I loved how you started it off in particular, I used to tell my team when I had a team at the Christensen Institute that our job in policy circles is not to so much tell people exactly what to put in place or do this policy, it's often, frankly, to tell them not to do these well-meaning things. Like don't do this sort of thou shall use technology in this way sort of policies that you know people love to put in place. You have a lot of humility around that in the book, I would say. But also your message is that the best ideas are going to come from educators and entrepreneurs on the ground. I'd actually love to hear how you came to that conclusion, the evidence you sort of have and hold for it and why maybe we don't see enough of that, if that's the case.

Hess:                Yeah. These are great questions, man. And it's very kind of you to say the nice stuff about the book, but anybody who's going to read it is going to be like, "Wait a minute, didn't Horn actually make a lot of these points in Reopen to Reinvent?" And I think part of it is you're out there doing a lot of this work, so it means a lot that you say that.

                        Look, for people who are thinking about this book, part of it, yeah, it's a continuation of stuff that I've been thinking about since I was teaching high school in the last century. Folks who've read my stuff will probably know this story. I was teaching high school, I got frustrated. I was like, how can so many well-meaning people drive each other so nuts? And for me I went back to do my PhD to try to understand how come school reform seems like it's a frustrating enterprise.

                        One of the key insights to this point that why I'm a skeptic about grand fixes and great resets and all this kind of stuff is that I did this book back in the... My dissertation at Harvard in the '90s wound up being called Spinning Wheels. I studied 50 odd urban school districts. And at the time, the conventional wisdom was that we needed to shake them up, they needed to be brought to life. And the big counterintuitive finding was that I found that the average district appeared to have launched more than a dozen major reforming initiatives in the prior three years. That's one every three months.

                        And the big takeaway from the book was like, look, guys, when you teach people that nothing is actually going to stick very long, they don't take it very seriously. And what teachers do is they close their doors and they tell each other this too shall pass, and none of this reform becomes anything more than raindrops pounding off a tin roof. And several years ago in Letters to a Young Ed Reformer, I said, look, this actually explains, I think a lot of our frustrations, whether it's these big R reforms, no Child Left Behind, and school improvement grants and Common Core are all premised on the notion that if we write some laws and give some marching orders from state capitals or Washington, that will translate into changes in schools and cultures.

                        I think 25 years of empirical observation has taught me that it just doesn't. And in fact, what happens is it creates more rules, more routines, more fear, and it actually leaves us more stuck than where we began. So kind of the great school rethink, I said, look, we've just been through this brutal kind of disruption in the way Americans think about schools and how teachers experience schools and how families relate to schools, and it's created a moment of punctuated equilibrium. And rather than use this as a money moment for somebody's grand scheme to try to jam it in place, it's actually a great opportunity for us to ask the kinds of questions that in the hurley burley, we usually don't get around to asking.

Horn:                Love it, love it. And you know, you have this quote then that really resonated with me and seems so common sensical frankly, which I'm going to quote it at length, so apologies. But you say, “How do I want schools to change? I want kids to play more games, master more rigorous math, read more fiction, engage in more debates, play more music, and learn more history. I want schools to be both more rigorous and more joyous. I want more assurance that seven year olds are mastering the building blocks of literacy and more freedom for 17 year olds to be out in the world learning a trip. I want schools to find ways to do vastly better with struggling students and with high achievers. I want teachers to have more control over their profession and more freedom to focus on the things that matter for kids.”

                        And like me, you don't particularly care where that occurs if it's a private school, a homeschool, a charter school, district school, just want this to happen for kids. I guess I'm curious, your reflections, you've written the book, you do see a fair amount of the innovations, you get to interview a lot of people doing interesting stuff. They come through the AEI forums as well. Do you feel like this is happening that we're starting to build these communities, and where is that occurring, if so?

Hess:                Yeah, I mean, one of the funny things is people say, "Well, Rick, how can you be both for rigor and joy?" And I'm like, where did we lose the thread of the plot? Every parent wants more rigor and more joy. Pedro Noguera and I kept talking about this when we were doing this in search of common ground book a couple years ago, how fundamentally stupid our debates have gotten that we pick sides on things that no normal human being picks sides on. In making this happen, yeah, I mean I think that's the weird thing. I mean, I think you and I both kind of observe this a lot when we get to talk to people out there and are out in the mix, is that lots of cool stuff is happening, lots of cool insights about how do we start to leverage staff, the opportunity culture stuff that Brian Hassell does or the ASU stuff that Brent and Carol at ASU are doing.

                        There's an enormous amount of interesting stuff around technology and how to leverage it where we think about choices and new models, whether it's micro schools or learning pods or there's any number of interesting things. The problem, it goes back to what we talked about a moment ago, is I feel like so much of this just runs into the brick wall of that's not how we do it. Districts wind up trying to threaten and bully parents who are looking for a learning pod. Instead of saying, hey, we talk all that stuff about equity, why don't we help people who need help build learning pods? That seems like it advances equity. Instead, they wind up denouncing learning pods as some kind of nefarious scheme.

                        When we think about funding mechanisms, course choice, in order to be able to do it, you've got to be able to use your federal funds in ways that are consistent with what ESSA allowed. But we also know that there's time and reporting requirements. And so for me, so much of my career in education last quarter century has been watching people keep trying to build a new scaffolding that they just lay over the ruins they've inherited... not ruins. Over a system that wasn't designed to do what they wanted to do. And instead of saying, well, all right, we need to create some green field here, they say, well, if we just put one more story on top, if we just weld on one more plate, we'll finally get there.

                        And I think they've made it harder and harder for the kinds of communities of practice that you're talking about, the problem solvers out there. it becomes much harder for them to grow and extend and create than it needs to be. And so for me, the great rethink is largely how do we get people in positions of authority, district leaders, school leaders, school board members, state education chiefs, asking questions about how do we facilitate this work rather than imagine that it's their job to come up with one new grand solution?

Horn:                And to do that, you have some really cool exercises throughout the book. And one of them actually asks educators to define what a school is. I'll just confess, I read that, I was like, actually that's really hard. I struggled with it as I read it. So I'd actually love to turn it back to you. What's your own answer for what is a school?

Hess:                It's a great question. For me, I mean, I think to cut to the chase, I don't know that there's a clear answer. When I think about Aristotle doing his thing, that was a school. When I think about these self-impressed, fancy New England prep schools, their schools, when I think about these scrappy, non-traditional kind of CET shops in their schools, I mean, I think a school is a place where we get together learners and educators in order to try to master skills, Dick Elmore's old kind of triangle, the student and the teacher in the presence of content. But for me, the more important thing is these exercises are so much fun. You and I get to do a lot of work shopping and teaching kind of stuff. And what what's fun about them is you realize how little opportunity really smart educators and leaders are given to just think creatively.

                        They get drilled. Here's what you're supposed to say. You're supposed to talk about teacher quality and effective schools, and you're supposed to memorize the slogans. You are supposed to learn the five pillars of this reform strategy and the opportunity to just say, well, how much time actually gets lost to disruption? Or what do teachers actually do in 390 contract minutes during the day? And I learned this years ago. I remember I was doing this book The Same Thing Over and Over. And one of the fascinating things, it's a history how schools got to where they are. And one of the funny things that struck me that I hadn't expected, but when you go out and you talk to people about this stuff, if they understand where things came from, somehow it makes talking about changing it less personal. So this is particularly the case, say, with I always found it with step and lane pay.

                        When you explain that step and lane pay was actually an attempt to bring some degree of rationality and fairness to pay because we were paying men twice what we paid women and white teachers twice what we paid black teachers, and the step and lane pay was created to address that, but it's now a solution to a different set of problems, you could just get a different conversation going than you could before you got into the history. And so for me, so many of these exercises are trying to create that space to reflect in a way that lets people have conversations and think about stuff that we often don't.

Horn:                Well, they're incredibly effective. I'm going to be honest. I'm going to steal a couple of them. I'll credit you on the road, but they're really effective. And on that note, you talk about educators don't have the space to do this stuff, but they also sort of revert to these truisms or the things that they're supposed to say. And you have some great pet peeves in the book. I suspect some folks who tune in will be surprised that I share your pet peeves actually. And so I'm going to toss a few of them out, and you can do your lightning round around why you dislike the phrase or the emphasis. And the first one is you have innovation as an end.

Hess:                Yeah. It's funny, you and I have had this conversation, and you're a great innovator. But anybody who's ever walked into an Apple store and said, "Sell me your most innovative iPhone," looks like an idiot, because innovation is a process. You get a better Apple phone with more memory or it takes better pictures because folks working somewhere have solved problems. And a good overall description for that problem solving is innovation. But when you hear educators talk about innovation zones or innovative programs, and that becomes the goal, I'm like, y'all just lost a thread of the plot.

Horn:                Yeah, I love it. I always say to folks in the innovation community also, they're like, we just got to try stuff and we have to have space and it'll fail and blah, blah. I'm like, fair, but the idea is to get good outcomes. Apple, it's not an innovation if it doesn't help people make progress in their lives. And so progress in their lives is what you ought to care about, not how you got there. You have another one that I suspect given that I'm the disruption guy for better or worse, but you say disruption or transformation is bad. I totally agree with you. So tell us why though.

Hess:                Yeah, well it's funny too because one of the things that I've always loved about your work is when you talk about disruption. You and Clay talked about it in a very precise way. By disruption we mean replacing one way of doing things. You get these other people, it particularly comes up in the school choice conversation. You get these over caffeinated kind of social media types who love to talk about blowing up the school districts. And I'm like, look, guys, lots of people like school choice. Seventy percent of people want the right to pick the school their kid goes to. Over half of families say, especially after COVID, they'd like to have a school model where there kids are at home one day a week. They want options. They want programs, they want choices. That doesn't mean they don't like their local schools. Their local schools are where they go on Friday night to watch football. It's where they get to know the other families in their community. So it is possible both to like robust school choice, education, savings, accounts, vouchers, as well as charter schools and other options and also to like your schools.

                        And if we talk about it that way, that school choice is about giving families options, about empowering them, I think it's both true to what we're trying to do and really sensible and well liked. But what happens is you get the same kinds of kids who if they were on the other side, would be saying, let's defund the police, running around chanting these crazy slogans that the goal is to disrupt America. And all of these parents are like, dude, I got plenty of disruption in my life. What I'm actually looking for is somebody to help me educate my kid in a safe, caring environment. And I just feel like disruption picks up absolutely none of that.

Horn:                Yeah. I love it. The next one you had was best practices.

Hess:                Partly it's what the heck is a best practice? Look, if we're talking, I'm going to my dentist and the dentist is like, "Hey, I'm an innovator. I don't believe in giving you anesthesia first." I'm like, no, no, no. Go best practice. Don't innovate. Give me the anesthesia first and then drill. That's the best practice I can get behind. The problem is in education, a lot of times best practice is somebody did a pilot somewhere with lots of foundation money in an opt-in school where all the teachers were excited about it, where they had an MOU, memorandum of understanding, that gave them flexibility to do it well, or they did it in some charter that was built around doing this thoughtfully and well. I think a lot of the blended stuff fits this. And then you look at it, and it works fantastic in that site, and they go, "Ah, ha, it's the best practice." And you're like, "No, dude, dude, dude. It's not a best practice."

                        It's something that works well under very particular circumstances. You want to replicate none of the circumstances. You just want to do a dog and pony show where you fly in for a day, look at it, come back and do a half-hearted version of it, and then two years later you're going to ring your hands and say it was an implementation problem, what could we know?

Horn:                It's so funny on that, and I'm glad you brought up the blended example because so many people when we came out of that taxonomy of different types of blended models, you remember people would say, well, which one's the best? I was like, I don't know. It depends. It depends on so many things that we're not even capturing. Circumstance matters in this sort of average, this is the best practice thinking is the death of progress, I think.

Hess:                Part of this is a problem with the ED research that they're like, well, we find that on average you find some kind of effect if you do this, but it's like saying, on average we find a minuscule effect if you give kids carrots sometimes. Well, how many carrots? How often? And most of our ED research doesn't have any of the particulars that educators can then use to say, "Well, I know exactly what I'm supposed to do."

Horn:                Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it's interesting that best practice problem pervades frankly all of social sciences and business as well. Jim Collins stuff. Everyone should not have a charismatic leader. Well, Steve Jobs did pretty fine. So it can't just be that. So conditions matter, I think. You didn't have this one, but I want to name it because it's one of my pet peeves, and I suspect it might be one of yours, but I'm curious, which is personalized learning.

Hess:                Oh, I can't believe I didn't hit that one. Thank you, man. Well, the hell's that even mean?

Horn:                One, yeah.

Hess:                It's like, look, I mean... Right? And, again, it's all these things. People are like, well, what we mean is that there's a problem that kids are sitting in classrooms organized by grade level, and it doesn't actually in any way reflect where they're at. It doesn't reflect what they're curious about, what they need to master, what they've already mastered. Okay, totally on board with that. But what do we do about it? And they're like, oh, we need personal... I'm like, well, fine. It's a game.

Horn:                Moms and apple pie.

Hess:                Part of it, it's weird. It's almost like education has learned to talk about improvement by watching The Office. If you think about Steve Carell just doing one of those things where he was just throwing out words he clearly didn't understand, and it's like we've trained superintendents and school leaders and they go to these foundation led conferences where it's almost as if you say the right half dozen words in the right sequence, schools will magically improve. And so we wind up with effective quality based, equitable, personalized learning environments. And it's like, well, there you go. And what gets lost along the way is how all of it is the actual doing, and none of it's the talking.

Horn:                Love it, love it. And I also push a lot of times back on folks, and I'm like, personalization's a verb, right? It's how we help get to the outcomes. And I suspect there's some times where having the whole class doing the same thing, that's a great idea, but let's be open to what's the outcome, how are we trying to get there? And just be open to it. So three more concepts I want to hit from your book out of the lightning round, if you will. You talk about the impossible job of teachers, and you referenced this earlier, the ASU worker, the Public Impact, Brian Hassell work, and like me, you spend some time on asking folks to rethink what that staffing model is, maybe getting rid of one to many, whatever it might be. I'm curious because when I talk about this right now on the stump, people are like, okay, outside of ASU and Public Impact, how do I do this?

                        And I'm curious, how do you suggest helping more school communities sort of think through this foundational question of what are the adults in our buildings doing?

Hess:                It's almost like your personalization point that you just made so effectively. Starting with ASU or opportunity cultures, starting at the wrong place. It's like, hey, here's something on the shelf called improved staffing, so let's plug it in. And that's the exact wrong way to go about it. The right way is to say, "Look, most important thing schools are doing is spending money on adults." That's a bulk of what they do. What are they getting for this? I do this exercise when I work with teachers, get out chart paper, and I'm like, let's list all the things you did in the last week. Teachers will routinely put five dozen things up.

                        And so then I say, all right, circle the five that are most useful for kids and star the five that you spent the most time on. And there's usually a limited overlap. And they've never actually done this. Even in districts that claim they're data driven, nobody's ever actually sat down and systematically thought about what are teachers doing all day in their work? And nobody's actually trying to say, how do we optimize for the stuff that matters for kids? Much less start talking about how do we match teachers with complimentary technology? So where to start, I would start with what the heck are teachers doing? Understanding that, talking about what matters, how much time is being used in ways that are inefficient or ineffectual, and then work forward from there.

                        Because one of the things that any of the ASU or opportunity culture stuff is doing is it's saying, look, let's layer teacher roles. You don't need them to help you think about this. If you go to an architecture firm, prizewinning architects don't spend a lot of time filling out paperwork for clients. That's handled by somebody else, but that's partly because they have figured out what work is high leverage and what maps on the skills. If you've got a phenomenally effective K3 literacy instructor, I don't know that you want to compartmentalize. I think departmentalized schools work in some cases, not others. That's fine. Whichever you want to do is fine by me, but you sure as hell shouldn't have them spending a lot of time loading kids onto the buses, getting off buses and having them watch kids eat Jello at lunch. That's not a great use of highly skilled labor.

Horn:                Makes a lot of sense. Let me move to this next one, which is, you have a fascinating chapter about the use of time in schools, and you made a lot of really important observations, one of which, why aren't there more studies around the day in the life of a kid and just the minutes literally of what they're doing and how much time is wasted in the name of efficiency is the way I'll put it because I don't want people to think I want kids slaving away all the time, but it's wasted in the name of actually those sorts of things in many cases. But I'm curious, you also talk about the Carnegie Unit and obviously that's a big push for me, mastery based learning, and I genuinely don't know how you think about this. Is mastery based learning one of those things that requires conditions do you think from government or rethink of the assessment paradigm for it to thrive? Or is it one of those things that should be more community by community driven and not universal in your view?

Hess:                I think to move off the Carnegie Unit, I think you need a baseline level of comfort among the policy, the folks who are funding schools in the state, that they have some assurance, whether kids are learning what you want to learn. Completing course units is a clunky and terrible way to measure these things, but at least it's some way to measure them, and it gives people some way to cover their ass. The problem of going to mastery learning is you no longer have any way as a policymaker to cover your ass. And so I think just as a pragmatic question, yeah, you need some degree of buy-in. You need at least an opt-in agreement at the state level that districts are allowed to use these set of mastery kind of badges or what have you as a stand-in because that gives school boards or local school leaders the room to operate. You can't do the whole thing from scratch.

                        So I think that's right. Again, this is a place where part of what's necessary for, and I think you've made the case for mastery learning as opposed to Carnegie compelling. I don't know how anybody could sit there and be like, oh, yeah, I don't get it. But there's this question of how do you practically do it instead where you're worried about which kids are going to fall off the radar. But the other thing, it's just such a crucial point that people routinely talk about, oh, we've got to extend the school year. We've got to extend the school day. I'm always amazed how many people don't understand that if you look at the OECD data, American kids spend about a hundred hours more in school each year than their peers around the globe.

                        That's compared to kids in Finland, in Japan and Germany. I mean, we got kids locked up a lot, and lots of it were just boring the living crap out of them. So like you said, being more thoughtful and purposeful about times, not about strapping kids to a desk instead of we're locking kids up for over a thousand hours a year, how do we make sure that we can in good faith, tell the kids that this actually is about them and not about bureaucratic routine?

Horn:                Okay, last question. I have so many thoughts on this. So we could go down the OECD rabbit hole, but I'm going to avoid that one for another day. But the last question is, you have this great idea, which was new to me toward the end of the book about a charter teacher rather than a charter school. So share more about what this looks like, and is anywhere actually doing it? I'm not even sure.

Hess:                Yeah. This was Julie Squire's idea. Julie was my program manager like 15 years ago.

Horn:                Back in the day.

Hess:                She's way back in the day. She's at Bellwether now doing that interesting Assembly work they're doing. This was her idea. If folks want to find the writeup, it's in the Conservative Ed Reform Network, Sketching the New Agenda Series. Julie and I had chatted about it. It's been introduced in Louisiana. It has not been adopted anywhere. The idea is real simple. It's a version of a thing that a bunch of us I think have written out over the last 10-15 years, which is if you are a teacher who in whatever fashion demonstrates your medal, national board certification or student achievement or any other mechanism, what's the equivalent of being able to hang out your own shingle as a psychiatrist?

                        And the charter teacher idea is that Julie says, well, states should create a mechanism where teachers can apply and win charter status. They then are negotiating essentially as standalone operators with their school or district. They negotiate a rate for the salary split. So say it's 50/50 or what have you, 50% goes to the district for overhead. Teacher pays their own expenses, any teacher aides, their own benefits. And the teacher can then choose how many students to take. They have to take, say, at least the district minimum, whatever that is per class. But if they say, look, I can handle 35 kids and I want to hire an aide or two, bless them. More kids in a strong teacher's classroom creates less drag, makes it easier on her grade level or departmental compatriots in that school or system. And it creates ways for teachers to grow in their role without having to step out of the classroom and enter administration.

Horn:                Love it. And it strikes me, it's also one of these ways, Clay and my work is a lot about autonomy, how you create autonomy in the organizational or business model so you can do these rethinking exercises. And it strikes me that this is a great way within schools to get that freedom away from the conventional model and allow some educators to do the rethinking like the exercises in your book.

Hess:                Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the things that has, again, gotten lost with all of the sloganeering in the choice conversation, that this really ought to be about creating options and empowering families and educators, letting folks create learning environments that make sense for them, whether they are the learner or the teacher. And I think what Julie's come up with here is just a terrific version of one piece of it.

Horn:                Love it. Love it. Rick, thanks for joining us on the Future of Education. For all of you tuning in, check out his new book, The Great School Rethink. It's just out, I believe, by the time this conversation airs. And just really appreciate you being the voice that you are out there.

Hess:                Oh, man. No, appreciate it. And thanks so much for having me on.

In the latest episode of the Future of Education, I interviewed Kenisha Scaggs, founder of the Soar Academy. We talked about everything from the history of the Soar Academy to how she defines student success and why more public school funding won't get us to where we need to go. Scaggs originally started her microschool-turned-private-school in her attic to help kids who were desperately behind in their education.

Helping neurodivergent kids reach new heights, Scaggs noted that the classroom environment she created is different for her students. “Our class is a one-room schoolhouse, so it’s not about what grade you’re in. You’re not necessarily sitting with fourth graders if you’re in fourth grade, you’re sitting with whoever meets your learning [need],” Scaggs explained.

The SOAR Academy puts a big emphasis on helping students learn to read—with a focus on phonics and background knowledge—and learning math. In the conversation around helping students learn in different ways, although Scaggs used the phrase “learning styles”—which generally refers to the debunked notion of people being a visual learner or an auditor learner and the like—you’ll see that she means something different by it in actual implementation. I also really enjoyed learning about how the SOAR Academy treats Mondays and Fridays as dramatically different from Tuesday through Thursdays to help students get in the flow of their learning and feel a real sense of belonging in and excitement about the school.

I continue to be inspired by the wave of education entrepreneurs solving problems for students whose needs aren’t being met. As always, you can listen to the conversation, above, watch it below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:                Welcome to the show 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, our guest is Kenisha Skaggs. She's the founder of the SOAR Academy. A school that has what it says are not your typical classrooms inside. Flexibility is the name of the game, but with some clear principles at work. Which we'll get into, and I'm excited to learn about. Also, SOAR Academy was one of the finalists recently for the Yass Prize, which rewards permissionless education. Which for my reading certainly describes what they have built at the SOAR Academy, which is based in Georgia. So Kenisha, welcome to The Future of Education. It's really good to see you.

Kenisha Scaggs:             Thank you. I'm super excited to be here as a part of the Future of Education. So, awesome.

Morning Warm-Up

Horn:                Well, I think you've represent it in many ways. So let's start with our segment, the morning warmup. We're trying out a new set of segments for this show. And it's a set of lightning rounds, if you will. And just simply what is SOAR Academy in your words.

Scaggs:             Sure. So, SOAR Academy is a neurodivergent micro-school. And it is for students with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and students facing remediation. Our approach is project-based learning, real world application, and just getting to the heart of what's important. Which is mental health support and literacy and math, is what we think are the really important points in education. So that's kind of how our education standards are formed around math, literacy and mental health support for our students.

Horn:                Wow, that's fantastic. And what grades do you serve? Is this K through 12? Or what is this?

Scaggs:             Pretty much. We're first grade through 12th grade.

Horn:                Gotcha. And then tell me the founding story. This is 2011, I think when you founded it if I have my year right. What was the sort of barrier or thing that said, "You know, we got to create something for neurodivergent students? Whatever is out there is not serving them."

Scaggs:             Right. So in 2011, I was working with No Child Left Behind. I was working with a provider. Actually, I was just a tutor there, and we were working with a lot of inner city kids from low performing schools, just trying to increase their literacy and their math rates. And the students were not engaged with the program. It was a lot of worksheets, or back then they weren't online as much. But the time they were online, it was just kind of more of a babysitter. It wasn't really something that engaged the students in their interests. And so I mentioned to her, "We should have some games we can bring in. We can go outside. We can turn this reading into a multisensory project, versus just the worksheets." And she said to me, "We're making a lot of money. Let's not do that. Let's just push the paperwork through the state. And you're going to get paid well. I'm going to get paid well."

                        And that was what was important. And I just could not leave that space thinking that was a good idea for those kids. I really felt like, if we could give them a real chance to read well and to critically think, that might change their trajectory after graduation. And so I decided I had $700 in the bank actually, it's funny. And I said, "Okay, I'm going to start a school in my attic. Or am I going to work through some things that needed repair in my home?" And I said, "Nope, I'm going to start a school." So I quit my job. I was actually working in accounting right after college. And I started a school in my attic. And it was about 10 kids who were not reading on a grade level. Two and three grade levels behind high schoolers. They were not doing basic math. And from there, it spiraled quickly. Parents found out that I was homeschooling and the line within a year, it was over 20 students. And that's when I had to lease a retail space. So it's just always been in demand.

Horn:                Wow. Wow, that's fascinating. And so, would you describe yourself in the lingo of today as a micro-school, a private school? How do you think about that?

Scaggs:             Yes. Well, the Yass Prize actually coined us as a micro-school. But thanks to them, we've actually turned into a private school. Because we are looking at serving hundreds of students this fall. So we're not really a micro-school as much, and we're looking at more than one location. So I say we're leaning more toward the private school realm at this point.

Work Time

Horn:                Wow. That's exciting. That's really exciting. So let's move into our next segment, work time. Where we dig into the work of the day of what students do. And let's start there. Give us a sense of, if I come into SOAR Academy, what do the classrooms look like?

Scaggs:             Sure.

Horn:                And how does the teaching really work?

Scaggs:             Sure. So our school is super flexible, as you've mentioned before. So Mondays and Fridays are very non-traditional. Our students go to mental health therapy if they need it. ABA therapy, speech, OT. We do character development. And we do field trips, STEM and art. So on Mondays and Fridays, you're not even in a classroom setting. We have autism chairs, ADHD stools, some kids lay on pillows on the floor. It's just sort of getting kids back into the flow of the week. And I don't think you can really just ask kids to sit at a desk at 8:00 AM after all of the deprogramming you have to do from the weekend. So our kids look forward to coming in Monday because they know they're not going to be sitting at a desk doing busy seat work. They're going to learn how to work with other kids that aren't like them. They're going to learn something that connects to the real world. And they're also going to be able to critically think outside of the box.

                        So it's really fun. Tuesday through Thursday is a little more traditional. You'll do math, language, science and social studies, but still it's project-based learning. It's multisensory. Our class is a one room schoolhouse. So it's not about what grade you're in. You're not necessarily sitting with fourth graders if you're in fourth grade. You're sitting with whoever meets your learning style. So if your learning style is that you need audio to hear the lesson and you need a video, then you're sitting with those kids. And if you need to move and be kinesthetic, then you're sitting with those students. And that's kind of how we've broken the room apart. And that seems to work for our students. They're still meeting the standard. So yeah, Tuesday through Thursday are more traditional. But still, what is your kids' learning style? How can SOAR teach your kid the way that works for them? And that's what we do. We build the curriculum around the kid.

Horn:                Wow. And do you find that students will gravitate toward their math? They maybe want... I'm making this up, but maybe they really want that audio, video, headphones in. But then they're doing reading and they're like, "Nah, I need to be more kinesthetic, moving around." Or similar. Do you find that it varies based on whatever they're working on, or their mood, or things like that? And how much do the kids get to dictate that?

Scaggs:             Yeah, so I would say that the kids 100% dictate that. Because at SOAR, we're dealing with a lot of learning challenges. We've got, pretty much everyone's dyslexic. Over 50% autism. ADHD, pretty much 100%. We have a huge foster care/adoption community. So those kids need us to be flexible to them. So of course we require a certain level of respect and character development, but we let the kids guide which way they learn best. So for example, if we're learning social studies and I say, "Guys, we're going to read a story together and we're going to create a civil war box. And we're going to talk about a major battle in our civil war box. And then we're going to incorporate some math."

                        And I might have one of my gifted students whose ADHD say, "Miss Kenisha, that doesn't sound appealing. I'd much rather go on Khan Academy. I found this great article on there. Can I do that instead with a quiz?" Sure. You're still learning what we're learning. And then I might have another student say, "Miss Kenisha, I found this Civil War book." And I'll go, "Okay, you can do a paragraph for me on that while we do the project boxes." But we're all learning the same topic a different way. And it works. It works.

Horn:                That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm so excited about this. I'm curious, digging into this, right? So where do you say this is a non-negotiable for a student? Where do they have that choice? Right? Because I find that's always... You often hear the phrase like, "learner voice and choice". But then you dig in and, not all schools, but a lot of educators are like, "No, no, no. They've got to learn their reading." And it sounds like you have certain things around that. So how do you navigate that?

Scaggs:             Very good question. So here's my motto. I believe that if every student has excellent literacy skills, they can do anything post-graduation. That's my motto. Because I was homeschooled in high school only. And my mom's not a formal teacher, but she knew exactly what I needed. And I was able to learn anything because I had strong literacy skills. So we draw the line with phonetics. You must do the phonics lessons, and that's K through 12 at SOAR. It doesn't stop with sixth grade or eighth grade. Because when you talk about dyslexia, and processing issues, and memory issues, it's something that affects them all the way up. So they need it K through 12th grade. So we require each student to do phonics. And we require each student to do math intervention. There are certain basic math skills you have to have just to survive. Outside of that, we're very flexible with how much you complete with the science and social studies. Very flexible with those. Because we know if we can get our kids reading really well, they can do anything they want when they graduate.

Horn:                Gotcha. And then in terms of maybe civics or things like that, how do you think about where those come into the curriculum?

Scaggs:             Sure, great question. So a lot of our civics is real-world application. We went to the capital quite a bit this semester. And we really dissected our state government website. We spent a month dissecting that. So we do think civics is super important. We met our senator, our legislative members. So we kind of take a real world approach to that. There's awesome videos online for that. And so for Georgia history and for Georgia learning, our kids were engaged, because they actually saw the building where the legislation takes place. And again, you can so easily incorporate science and social studies into literacy. So that's something that we find is easy to transfer into our phonics lessons when we learn about spelling some of those words, or verbs and nouns with... It's just so easy to cross pollinate the subject. So.

Horn:                That makes a ton of sense. And I think a lot of folks are finding we've sort of broken them out arbitrarily actually. And maybe that's hurt us in many ways, because learning something about social studies and reading are sort of intertwined once you know how to read.

Scaggs:             Exactly. Exactly. This morning we actually walked to Lowe's because our school's so close to Lowe's. And we were dealing with conversions. And we were also dealing with our phonics lesson for the week. They were looking for words. We were also working on area and perimeter. And so the kids were like, "Miss Kenisha we're doing three subjects just by walking the Lowe's." I was like, "Exactly. And this is real world application. These are things you've got to know how to do inches to feet." And it was something that our sixth through 12th grade did all together. And it related for all of their lessons. So it was beautiful.

Horn:                I love that they're getting real interdisciplinary learning. I will also say I love the Monday sort of ease back into school. At the risk of oversharing as a father of a kid who doesn't always love getting back into the Mondays, if you will...

Scaggs:             Right.

Horn:                I can see the benefits of that approach.

Scaggs:             Yes.

Specials

Horn:                Let's switch to our third segment here, specials. Where we're going to lift up a little bit and get to geek out on some of the things that are on your mind beyond just SOAR Academy. And you certainly have some provocative views that I want to dig into. I won't hit everything, I suspect that's on your mind. But one I think is becoming maybe less controversial, but really important. And you referenced it earlier, the importance of phonics...

Scaggs:             Yes.

Horn:                For every kid. And I know you believe it should be essential for every single student in all grades K through 12. You say low performing schools, but I suspect you have in mind everyone. So...

Scaggs:             Yes.

Horn:                Tell us why that's so important in your view.

Scaggs:             Phonics is so important to me because if you can read for yourself, then... If a student can read for themselves, then they can teach themselves. And you're not stuck in a system telling you where to live, and dictating where you can work, and how you can live your life. So what I've seen with kids that come into our tutoring program is that their IEPs say, "You have to read aloud to this student." It's a sixth grader, and the IEP says, "Read aloud. They're not reading on a grade level." So if we're reading aloud to that student, when do they actually bridge the gap? When do we actually ensure that they're going to read on their own? It never happens. The read aloud is listed in the IEP from sixth grade through 12th grade. And so they never have gotten past the third grade reading level.

                        So what is that student going to do post-graduation if they can't read for themselves? And again, another reason why I think literacy is so important is because, again, I was homeschooled in high school. So once I hit high school, my mom just went to this whole real world field trip learning. Just this really different approach to learning. And so I recall not following the state standards for high school. But I graduated early. I did dual enrollment. I went to college. It was no problem. And what we found was that was because of the strong literacy skills that I received K through eighth grade. And the critical thinking and the comprehension, all of that is so important.

                        And so when we don't have that, we rob our kids of the opportunity to be independent in adulthood. And they're stuck in the system. So reading opens up the gateway to freedom. And I just wholeheartedly believe that. And when kids come to SOAR and they go, "Do you want the test scores for science and social studies?" Nope. I need to see how fluently they can read. I need to check their vocabulary. And that's all that matters to me initially, because that is the gateway to freedom.

Horn:                Super interesting. So I want to actually dig in on that. Because I think a nut that educators have struggled to crack is we know phonics is important, but we don't know how to do adolescent literacy. Because a lot of the materials out there are not, maybe age appropriate, if you will. They're built for a first or second-grader, but maybe they don't hold the engagement. So you must have cracked this nut. How do you get around that with your sixth, seventh grader that doesn't want to read "Spot did X" sort of thing over and over again?

Scaggs:             Yep. Yep. Such a good point. And I love that you say that. Because when I think of phonics program, I think of ABC Mouse, Hooked on Phonic. And these are for early readers. So if you have a sixth grader not reading on grade level, their self-confidence is already low. So you have to connect to them first. So what we typically do is, we find out what that child interest is. And if it's art, if it's sports, science, whatever it is, we focus on introducing them to a book that they like first. But we're reading it to them. And then our approach is that we have the standards for what is important in phonics, but you're not going to be working in Hooked on Phonics. So for example, if you need to learn "sh" and "th", we're going to use that book that you're interested in, and we're going to find "sh" and "th". And then when we need to get to tion, T-I-O-N, we're going to find that in a book that you like.

                        And then we've come up with these lists of 30 projects we have. And it's pure project-based reading intervention with our kids. You don't have to do, like I said, the Hooked on Phonics approach. We can use things that you are interested in. And then once we have you hooked and you see that you can read a little bit, we're usually able to sneak back in into a Wilson Reading program, or Orton-Gillingham. But again, we don't use that kind of first grade approach. It's more of projects built around your age level, that we custom create for every single child, honestly.

Horn:                Wow. Wow. I'm just struck by how much, I suspect people who love phonics typically think of it as a drill and kill sort of methodology. You've really said, "No, we can take these two philosophies, sort of the direct instruction merits of that with the project-based learning. And kind of unify them. So we're really grabbing the interest and motivation and doing something that feels real and authentic." It sounds like.

Scaggs:             Exactly.

Horn:                With the science of like, "We're going to make sure you get your phonics and so forth."

Scaggs:             That's correct. And when I think about what I just mentioned to you, I'm thinking about my middle school boys. Because it is very hard to capture their attention. And most of the time it's sports for them. It really is. And so we have maybe like 50 to 75 sports books. And we've got the list of phonic standards. And we will play basketball for a week. We'll play air hockey. We'll play soccer. We'll play whatever gets them excited. So it builds that relationship and that trust first. Because again, they're already so nervous and downtrodden with their self-esteem. And they know they cannot read. So let's build the relationship first couple of weeks. Let's not delve straight into a worksheet or anything. Let's just talk about what you like to do. And then once we have the relationship there, again, you start with something they love. And I tell you, three months in, they're reading things that you never would've thought, that interest them. So again, just go with the student led interest first, even with literacy. And then bring the rules into that information, is what we do.

Horn:                Love it. And use the interest as a segue to build and broaden them.

Scaggs:             Yes. Yes.

Horn:                So I love it. So let's do this next one that you mentioned to me before, which is why IEPs are not effective for most students. I'd love you to double-click on this one. Because when I hear your approach, every single kid in your program clearly has their own individualized learning plan.

Scaggs:             Exactly.

Horn:                So we're with an IEP then, an individualized education plan. That's that formal designation for a special ed student.

Scaggs:             Yeah. So I'll tell you what, we started out with IEPs. This is probably our first year kind of pulling back from it. Because you spend hours and hours drafting an IEP. I mean, the school system meets so many days and hours and they rewrite it. But the implementation is what's difficult. Because if you actually implement every single kid's IEP, that's actually one teacher per child, which is not possible in the public school system. But again, if we get back to the basics of what every child needs, which is literacy and basic math skills, an IEP is not needed. Because we're going to cover that for every student anyway. So again, in our class, what it looks like is sixth grade and seventh and eighth sitting together. We have autism there, dyslexia, ADHD. But every single student is covering the phonetic instruction for dyslexic students, even if they don't have dyslexia. Every single student is doing the real world map application.

                        So you're hitting everything, for every child, no matter what. We have the sensory accommodations. We have the autism chairs, the ADHD chairs. Every student at SOAR can use any of these accommodations. Every student's allowed headphones. You can leave the room when you need to use the restroom. You can lie down when you need to. So there's no need to specialize it for anyone. It's specialized for everybody. You know?

Horn:                Yeah. So you build from there is basically the idea. As opposed to sort of designating, it sounds like the students...

Scaggs:             Exactly.

Horn:                Are building something formal. Is that the real difference? Very cool.

Scaggs:             Exactly. Every kid gets it.

Horn:                So I think this one maybe follows then. Because you mentioned that continuing to increase funding into public school system, it's not going to fix the challenges we're having. Which strikes me as maybe related to IEPs because we spend, in this country, so much on IEPs for each kid. And are not getting the results that they deserve. So I'd love you to reflect on what you mean when you think about that just continuing to pour more dollars, or maybe your point is that it's a money problem, is not the right framing.

Scaggs:             It's not. And I did a lot of studying of Marva Collins and her approach. And she was really big, again, on reading intervention and the Socratic method with teaching. And she taught all of her kids all together. It wasn't like a split thing. And so again, with IEPs, there's no way to implement them for every single individual child. But if we reframed how we taught the entire class. And we focused on phonetic instruction, real world application, project-based learning, we're going to hit every single issue in that room. We are. And so I think that when I look at No Child Left Behind, it wasn't super successful and there was a lot of money leaked into that program. And I was working with that program and I thought, "These kids are still not learning. They're not engaged. They're not excited." So I get what they were trying to do, but it still wasn't working.

                        So one issue I see is that the public school classroom is just too big. So there's no way you can... And you can do 30 kids in a class, or 20 kids in a class if we get rid of the standards. And we focus on literacy intervention and math intervention only, in a real world sense though. So the classrooms are super huge. That doesn't really work for the kids. And then the teachers are bound by these standards that essentially won't matter if our kids can't read. If you're in the seventh grade and you're not passing science. And so you're in science tutoring, but you're reading on a third grade level, what does science matter? It doesn't. What matters is the literacy intervention. And so when we keep putting more programs into the public school and more funding and more... All that just needs to stop, honestly.

                        And I think that if they were able to say, "We're getting rid of the standards, we're going to focus on the meat and potatoes." Which is literacy, strong literacy skills and strong communication skills and math skills, our kids would soar. In my opinion. I don't think that there's anything we can really do to fix the program on such... We're trying to keep every single... We want a national standard for what it looks like to educate kids. And there's no way to do that. And I think that teachers don't have enough flexibility to say, "I'm throwing the standards out the window. I'm going to teach you guys to read today. You're not reading well." They don't have that flexibility.

                        And so I think that as we continue to keep saying, "More money, more money." What really needs to happen is schools partner with micro-schools, they partner with private schools. Let's pull the kids out, even if it's for just two or three years to get the literacy skills up. Most of the kids will go back to the system, because they want to be around their peers and be around the larger groups. But we can't keep saying, "Us versus them." They've got to be willing to partner to change what's going on in the school system. The money thing is just not going to ever fix anything, in my opinion.

Closing Time

Horn:                Fascinating. So let's move to our last segment, which is closing time. Because I think it's a perfect segue for where you just went to. Which is, I want to start with this question, which is, it sounds like this one world schoolhouse model that you've built, should really be able to serve everyone. But as you just said, people might want to transition in and out of it.

Scaggs:             Right.

Horn:                There's times where you're going to want that comprehensive, maybe rah, rah, school, sports, whatever...

Scaggs:             That's right?

Horn:                Prom. Whatever it is that drives you.

Scaggs:             Right.

Horn:                How do you think about that one room schoolhouse? Who's that designed to serve? Is it for all students? And what's this blend in the future that you envision?

Scaggs:             Yes. The one room schoolhouse is for all students. I've been doing this for over a decade. And our students, about 60% of them go back to public school. And when they go back, they are thriving. They are passing the reading test, they are completing math with their peers. They're no longer having IEP or pullout services, because they can read well. And so, the one room schoolhouse is not not age specific. It really isn't. We have 10th graders reading at a fourth grade level. So if they stay in that one room schoolhouse and they hear what the fourth and fifth and sixth graders are doing, and the high schoolers, they're actually picking up extra information. And sweeping up more than they would've in a grade level classroom. So I think that for SOAR, we are going to keep with the one room schoolhouse approach. And we are just going to magnify that multiple locations.

                        So again, I don't think that there necessarily has to be specific standards for high school to meet, or even middle school. I think, in my mind, just literacy all the way. Math all the way. And then let the kids kind of direct what they want to learn with science, and social studies, and history, and all that. And then they are prepared for the real world in that sense. So I just think that, from my experience in high school, and just seeing what literacy could do. That if we just focused on that component, everything else would fall into place, is kind of my ideal with it.

Horn:                Amazing. So last question as we wrap up here, which is you were a finalist for the Yass Prize. It prizes itself on permissionless education. But I'd love to hear from you, what does that actually mean? Why is it so important? And assuming it is important, how do we get more of it?

Scaggs:             Sure. So permissionless means that, I know for SOAR, we don't wait for any government agency or any funding to complete our program. We've kind of worked around the system. We are accredited as a private school. But we've decided what's important for our students and what they need. And we partner with parents to decide what they want their kids to learn and not learn. So we don't really believe that, if we don't have more money, our program won't succeed. We've run our program with a couple of thousand dollars every year. So we're able to be permissionless in how we deliver the education, by not following the traditional standard of, again, students being in a separate class for each teacher, having certain grades. We put them all together, that saves us overhead. So we're super permissionless in that way, but our students are still getting what they need.

                        Another way that we are permissionless through the Yass Prize is that our kids aren't working just on the core subjects. They're out in the real world. Field trips every week. Daily, trying to see how they can apply what they've learned that week. And so that's not something that you see happening in a traditional school setting. And the Yass Prize, what I like about them is I actually met with other public schools, charter schools, homeschool groups. It wasn't just about private schools. It's about us all working together with public schools, with charters to just innovate for kids. To change these statistics in America for kids. So that's what I really like about the Yass Prize. It's just that it's not biased. It's super open to every type of organization. And most of the people that I worked with, were public school teachers and public school superintendents who said, "Kenisha, what are you doing? We want to innovate. What are you doing with the kids? Show me what's going on there." And I asked them, "What are you guys doing?" And we just worked together in that initiative.

Horn:                Love it. I love your passion. I've learned a lot in this conversation. A lot of really important ideas. And just keep soaring. You're doing amazing things for the kids clearly. And thank you for joining us Kenisha.

Scaggs:             Thank you for having me.

Horn:                Yeah, you bet. It's been an absolute treat. And for all of you joining us, rate us, review us. Keep tuning in to folks like Kenisha that are changing kids' lives. We'll see you next time on The Future of Education.

The Modern Classrooms Project is a nonprofit dedicated to helping teachers enact personalized learning, student-centered instruction, and mastery-based assessment. They take a grassroots approach by supporting teachers with making the transition to a specific new learning model. Their theory of change is that this approach can help create a tidal wave of change through the resulting ripples and tensions. In this conversation with the co-founder and CEO Kareem Farah, we dig into just how they operate and what he sees as the most critical points of leverage in changing the system. We also dug into the results of their work--both in terms of student learning outcomes and attitudes from the teachers themselves.

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

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:                Delighted to be with you all today to talk about what I'm passionate about, which is helping build a world in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And today, we have someone in Kareem Farah, who is the co-founder and CEO of Modern Classrooms, who is seeking to do that in our nation's classrooms and with our nation's teachers. And so, Kareem, welcome to the Future of Education. Great to see you.

Farah:               Nice to see you as well. Thanks for having me.

Horn:                Yeah, you bet. So, Modern Classrooms is one of these organizations that I've long heard of and seen in the ecosystem, but we haven't gotten to connect before. For our audience that perhaps doesn't know you, just tell us what is Modern Classrooms and what's the theory of change behind what you're doing?

Farah:               Yeah, absolutely. Modern Classrooms project's a nonprofit, we were founded out of DC. And our entire vision as an organization is to support educators in actually accomplishing a lot of the buzzwords we often hear, right? Things like personalized learning, student-centered instruction, mastery-based and competency-based grading. I think for a lot of educators across the country in the world, they aspire to create classrooms that look like that, including myself, when I was teaching in DC public schools. But when you wake up in the morning and you go, I support either 30 students a day or 150 in my... If I'm at the secondary level and I need to figure out how to pull this off with all the challenges and constraints that I face within a traditional school system, what do I actually do? We built an instructional model that provides a blueprint for how educators actually do that.

                        It's a blended, self-paced mastery-based approach where essentially educators eliminate live lectures with digital resources and instructional videos that they create or leverage from external resources, letting students work at their own pace within a unit of study or a short burst. And then finally getting to mastery-based grading where students don't move forward based on day of the week, but actual understanding of content. So, we created the instructional model, we saw a ton of success with it. And now, the organization's vision is to very simply empower as many educators as possible across the country and the world with our instructional approach.

Horn:                So, it sounds awesome. Before we go with the plan of questions that I wanted to ask, I thought actually maybe it makes sense for you to quickly define those buzzwords in a bit of a lightning round, if you will. Let's start with... You said, personalizing learning. What does that mean from your perspective?

Farah:               Yeah. I think personalized learning is really the idea that you use data to drive instruction to support students with their unique needs, and that's the academic side of personalized instruction. And then there's the social emotional side, which is that you as a human being and as an educator are available to understand how students are feeling, and then support their unique needs and\or leverage external resources outside of your classroom to support their needs. I think in very simple ways... When you teach traditionally, it's very hard to look at each student who walks into your classroom and feel like you understand them both academically and socially emotionally, because that doesn't fit with traditional approaches of instruction that sort of use the classroom as the primary venue. And personalizing instruction means digging in really quickly in a detailed way to each student's unique needs and then leveraging that to actually define their supports.

Horn:                Perfect. Now, let's do the mastery-based one. That was the next buzz phrase I think that you said. So, what does that mean?

Farah:               Mastery-based grading is one of those where the buzzword is actually quite clear in what it is intended to say, I think, what's much less clear is how you do it. To me, mastery-based grading just simply means students are assessed based on what they actually understand, and they move forward based on what they actually understand and not day of the week or after.

Horn:                Perfect. One other question on that. Why do you call it mastery-based grading instead of say, mastery-based learning or competency-based learning or some of these other phrases for it?

Farah:               Yeah, that's a fascinating... In fact, I probably misspoke a little bit. We call it mastery-based assessment at this point, and we've iterated on that a number of times. For us, what really matters is this idea of, hey, the grading practices in your classroom are centered around this idea that you are assessing whether a student has demonstrated full understanding or mastery of a particular skill. I think we've floated around a lot of different ideas around this and even played around with changing it. To us, we see mastery-based assessment and competency-based assessment as equivalent. And I think we switched to assessment because the word grading is so loaded and so complicated. And I actually think it can be a lot simpler in some ways or at least moving teacher practice can be a lot simpler. And we've really overcomplicated it for most folks, which makes people freeze. As soon as you were say the word grading, you get panic in rooms. So, I think it's more about the assessment than the grading practices in some ways.

Horn:                Super helpful. Let's do the last one you mentioned, which was student-centered. There's all sorts of notions of what that does or doesn't look like. What does it mean to you?

Farah:               Yeah. When I think about student-centered, I think about this fundamental idea that when you walk into the classroom, students are doing most of the learning. And I think what that looks like and feels like can be on a very broad range. So, I think it's actually one of the toughest ones to define. But I think ultimately, what it fundamentally means is that students have greater agency over the learning experience. Doesn't mean they're determining what they're learning, I think that's another one of those very hotly debated topics that we tend to stay away from, but it means they're in the driver's seat of the learning experience. And the educator's job is to support them as they're driving that experience and then intervening when they're struggling with particular skills or with the 21st century skills of leveraging time effectively.

Horn:                Super helpful to delineate what we're talking about here and perhaps what we're not talking about. So, thank you for going there. Let's talk about your founding story behind the Modern Classrooms Project and the moment you said this needs to exist and your personal passion for this, coupled with how the organization came together.

Farah:               Yeah, absolutely. So, first thing I'll say to anyone listening, I never intended to find an organization. I tell folks all the time, my co-founder and I were sitting at a Qdoba just hanging out in probably 2015, and he asked me what I was going to do for the rest of my life and I said, I was going to be a teacher. I asked him, he said, teacher, and then a few years later we were Modern Classrooms' co-founders. So, this was never the intention. We were classroom teachers. We founded this organization literally in the classroom. I was teaching in DC public schools. I was in my year four in the classroom, and it was that pivotal burnout year for me. I'm leveraging a traditional one size fits all lecture approach to high school math instruction. I have a huge diversity learning levels in my room as well as social emotional needs, massive chronic absenteeism and huge amounts of trauma.

                        I'm teaching every day. If you have watched the movie The Truman Show, I often describe teaching traditionally as being in the Truman Show, which is this bizarre world where you're delivering a product that so fundamentally misses the mark, but everyone's doing it. And then when you go to everyone who's doing it, you go, hey, is this missing the mark? Everyone's like, definitely. But then when you say, hey, do you have another plan or pathway? And they're like, absolutely not. This is what teaching and learning looks like. And that was just too uncomfortable for me. I know we're currently in a teacher burnout crisis, and one of the things I often say is teacher burnout to me is driven by the fact that most educators don't feel like they are accomplishing what they intended to do in the classroom. They don't feel successful every day, so then they ask themselves why they're staying in their profession.

                        And that was certainly how I was feeling in year four. Waking every morning, and I'm more concerned about compliance, and I'm more concerned about control than I am about my student's needs. When a student walks into my classroom and is dysregulated and struggling, I'm more concerned about what that student's going to do to disrupt the larger learning environment than I am about their actual pain and struggle and needs. And it was at that stage that I said, look, either I quit, or I redesign what I'm doing in my classroom. And I went the redesign route. And again, no intention of creating a model, right? Phase one was lectures are a really poor use of my time. Students who are absent, aren't seeing them. Students who are late, are missing them. And the students that are there, for the vast majority, it's not working because I'm teaching in the middle and I have a huge diversity learning level. So, how do I get rid of them?

                        I tried things like external videos and realized, my students want to hear my voice. I have a particular curriculum to teach, and I can actually build really bite-size instructional videos that align to the research that work. So, I built instructional videos. From there, I was like, wait a minute, why are kids all on lesson three today if they can access the content any time? So I said, cool, why don't I start self-pacing? But within each unit of study, because I have a curriculum and I have an end of course assessment and I want to hold students to high standards and also want to teach the content that's grade level. And then I launched this self-pacing and bursts, one or two weeks at a time, gave them little game boards and checklists. And then finally I said, well, now that they're self-paced, now mastery-based grading is super easy, or mastery-based assessment is super easy because all I need to do is figure out what assessment allows me to measure whether the student understands the skill and allows the student to demonstrate that skill.

                        And then when they get it right, they go to the next lesson. And when they get it wrong, then I do a reteach and give them a reassessment. And then it was a model. At that point, it worked really well in DC public schools, we got some awards for the model. And then we said, let's found an organization and start training teachers on it. And we found the non-profit back in 2018. And then today, we have a lot of different ways folks can learn the model, but have trained over 50,000 teachers in our free course and 7,000 teachers through our mentorship program. So, it's starting to reach a lot of educators.

Horn:                That's awesome. So, it sounds like you have a very clear instructional model to do this. How does the work itself come about? What does it look like?

Farah:               Yeah. There's a couple sides to it. So, there's a training experience and there's the actual experience of implementation. So, I'll start with the training experience because I think that's the kind of the first and most important part of digesting how this works. The first thing to know about our work is we're [inaudible 00:09:51] only, which is actually really interesting, and I think one of the more disruptive ways to think about change. I always say the diversity of learning levels in the classroom is honestly not that different than the diversity of learning levels of teachers, right? So, if you're going to throw something pretty innovative and different at a group of teachers and you're going to go, all you are doing this starting September. Well, good luck. I don't want to be in that room and I don't want to be a part of the change management journey that happens as a result.

                        So what we say is, look, anybody who wants to do this should be able to do this. So, we go to local communities with philanthropy, we go to schools and districts who partner with us directly and we offer our virtual mentorship program to these educators at scale. They raise their hand and say, I want to be a part of it. We say, great. At that point, they get paired with people we call mentors. They're teacher leaders, they're the people we've credentialed who are in classrooms today doing our model beautifully. And they travel through a virtual mentorship program, which means repairing the educators who want to do this program with educators who do it beautifully already. And in the virtual space, they design their Modern Classroom, they build real resources to leverage in their classroom, and it's reviewed by their mentors in a competency-based framework.

                        Once you've built the skills to execute a Modern Classroom, now it's the implementation time. And that's a journey. Right? Some educators right after they learn this, launch their unit and go. Some educators do bits and pieces of it. And it really is part of a movement and a community of educators who are trying to explore the different ways to run the classroom. I think the biggest push that folks experience and the biggest challenge comes down to how do you use your time effectively when suddenly you've unleashed time. Right? I think teachers are so used to having almost no time in the classroom that when you give it to them, they're like, wait a minute, what do I do with this and how do I leverage it effectively? And what is controlled chaos versus complete chaos? So, that's how we do the work and then we provide really structured supports to districts who are really trying to go deep with our work. But did that answer your question, Michael?

Horn:                Yeah, super helpful. I'm curious, is every teacher then, to your insight, that your students actually wanted to hear from you, not some disembodied voice or program? Is every teacher creating sets of videos then to do this work? Do you host it? Or is it maybe a little bit more à la carte, they might create some videos and pick others from what the wealth of things that's out there? How does that work?

Farah:               So, the first thing is we don't host anything. We don't even have a product. So, it's actually quite interesting that we're one of the only organizations I know that are just like, we have a different model of teaching that is curriculum, grade level, content area and tech tool agnostic, which was one of our goals as an organization. We were like, there's plenty of tech out there. The tools are doing all the things they need to do. There's plenty of curriculum, it's the approach to instruction, it's the instructional delivery model that's missing at the moment. So we need to dig deep into that. So at its core, most educators will build instructional videos for most lessons. But one of the things we make clear is A: that shouldn't be an impediment to implementing the model. So, plenty of educators take a little bit of that à la carte approach. They'll build some instructional videos, some lessons don't even require instructional videos, and then they'll outsource some.

                        I think what we've found is critical, is that if the teacher is not part of the content creation experience, the students start to feel like their educator isn't the expert in the room, and it actually has a deeply negative impact on relationship building. In addition to that, I think you start to see that teachers feel disconnected from the learning experience when they're outsourcing themselves continuously. So, we think it's important for students to hear their teacher's voice and see their teacher's face on the screen, but it doesn't need to be every single lesson and it doesn't need to be the only way that students access direct instruction or new information.

Horn:                That is super helpful. And I imagine there's times where the teacher super comfortable with their content, but certain student maybe is struggling with a misunderstanding from a grade level years before, and it'd be better for them to pull someone else rather than them try to do the research and figure out how do I do adolescent literacy building or whatever it might be. So, that makes sense. Love some examples of real schools and classrooms where you've transformed them in this way. Just to give us a sense, you talked about DC public schools, obviously.

                        And talk to the student outcomes that you've seen. Do you try to measure these and understand the lift in how students are doing?

Farah:               Totally. So, what's really fascinating about our work, and this was my favorite stat that came out the other day, there are over 1,400 schools across the world that have a Modern Classroom trained teacher in it, that speaks to the virality that we have. So, I could speak to teachers in Zambia, in Australia, in Mexico, in the Middle East, all across the country. So in that way, it is truly a model that lives beyond the organization and there is a viral nature to it. So, when I go to our free course every single day, about 40 to 50 new teachers join our free course completely organically every single day. So in that way, we've touched a lot of classrooms and we touched a lot of communities. Our biggest partners include the state of Indiana, where we've trained nearly 1,500 teachers, districts like Jefferson County Public Schools and Wichita Public Schools and Tulsa public schools as well as individual schools that partner with us as well and do some really deep transformational work.

                        We have a school down in Texas, the Gaming Design Development school, that has a full implementation of our model. So, even though we're an opt-in approach, in that case, they got buy-in from every single educator to implement our approach. When we think about student outcomes, there's two parts of it. The first is because we're opt-in only, it's pretty hard to run randomized control trials on student outcomes. So, we measure the impact on the student experience in two ways. One, survey data on what they're experiencing versus control educators. What we found consistently is Modern Classroom students, and this was done in a Johns Hopkins study, Modern Classroom students, generally speaking, feel more connected to their educator, feel like their educator understands their strengths and weaknesses more clearly and they feel like they have stronger relationships with their teachers. So, it speaks this idea that in a Modern Classroom, students actually feel like they belong better and they feel supported better.

                        In addition to that, we have some really interesting case studies, like that school in Texas as well as a district up in Michigan that have both seen sizable gains in test scores. And the Texas school, we saw sizable gains in the end of year star assessment in Texas. And then up in Michigan, we saw sizable gains in their benchmark math assessments. So, in those cases, you see big academic gains. And then individual teachers present about this all the time, right? Their previous test scores grew drastically. And just one small point on this is I would actually say we have even more data on changes for teachers. So, you have massive shifts in teachers' competencies, like their capacity to do the things we want them to do in classrooms. But I think the most interesting is that the average educator who opts into our program has 14 years of experience in the classroom, and 86% say they enjoy teaching more. Right? So, it's those kinds of data points that I think are most compelling about our model is experienced educators finding a pathway to success. I know I went a little-

Horn:                No, that's super helpful because I suspect it blows up a lot of stereotypes people have that these sorts of approaches are for younger teachers or something like that. But you're saying 14 years of experience, that's a good deal of time in the classroom, even outweighs what I remember from years ago where the typical, I want to say, online learning teacher was eight years of experience before they get in there. These are even more senior teachers with a lot of years under their experience.

                        I want to stay on one of the elements that you talked about at the beginning, which was mastery-based assessment, and why do you see that as such an important lever in all of this work. I know from reading your writing and some of the things that you've talked about, not just in this conversation, but that you see that as a really important piece of the puzzle to moving this along. Why is that such an important lever in your mind? And maybe not just in math education because I think sometimes people are like, oh, I get it why it's in math, but these other subjects, I don't know. Is it the same?

Farah:               Yeah. I think there's almost a fundamental academic component to mastery-based assessment that is almost obvious why it's important. And then there's a larger question about the damage we do to this idea of learning in general with students when you don't hold them to that bar. So, I think from an obvious standpoint, it's like, how do I actually support students in a data-driven way and accomplish my goals and educator of having them learn a set of skills over a year when I'm not assessing for mastery. Right? When I'm just providing completion grades and effort grades and partial credit, it's completely meaningless, it's just a world of chaos. A four out of 10 on an assignment or an assessment tells me and the student and the families absolutely nothing about performance, and it also encourages a culture in which we don't actually generate high quality student learning and then don't know what to do about it.

                        So, it's no surprise that when I'm teaching algebra two as a high school teacher in DC public schools at the time, my students had a 1% proficiency rate in Algebra one that year, and you asked the question, how did we get there? But then we have big graduation rates. So, we've created a world where we're not actually teaching students skills and then hoping that they understand them, we're just presenting a bunch of information, whatever sticks, sticks, and then we keep it moving. And that is not healthy and it's not good, and it makes it impossible to be an effective educator.

                        I think there's an even bigger point to that though, which is what happens societally when you start to send the message that actually understanding something doesn't matter. And that was to me, the most alarming part about being a high school educator because I was graduating these kids, many of these kids were going to walk across the stage, and then we were going to let them go to college or into the workforce with an operating assumption that as long as I try, I'll succeed, and it doesn't actually matter if I can do any of these things effectively. And what I think we all know as adults is that's not how the real world treats you.

                        And this idea that you create an environment for students where they don't actually believe mastery matters, competency matters, and then we send them free is a really great way to blindside entire communities. And I think that's why you see really, really tough graduation rates in college, right? Because we're sending students to colleges and then you see 40-50% graduation rates at universities, and you go, why did that happen? That happened because we coddled students into thinking effort was plenty.

                        So, I think that's probably the biggest passion of mine is really instilling this understanding that competency in math stream matter. And if we're not holding students to that, we're holding them to low expectations. And I think the variable to play around with there is not whether not a student can master a skill, the variable we play with is are we requiring too many skills. Right? What matters more is that a student looks at themselves in the mirror and says, I can learn new things and I can achieve maximum understanding, not, hey, I did a bunch of work, I feel all right about it and I got a C+ in my class. Right? That doesn't mean anything.

Horn:                Yeah. No. There's a lot of points there that I think are incredibly important. The other thing that strikes me from your statement is that frankly, they also might get the message that effort doesn't all matter that much as long as they show up and get by, they can succeed. And then to your point, that doesn't cut it once they get into college and the workforce. I want to stay on this point of mastery just for a moment because as we start to wrap up our conversation, I'm curious how you... You're working at the unit level of teachers in classrooms, some people obviously approach this work from schools, others approach it from the system on down, and I'm curious how you think about innovating within a structure that bounds, if you will, some of what's possible. And so, say, you're a fifth grade teacher, you move to mastery-based assessment, but then there's all these competing elements. You mentioned, right? At the end of the fifth grade year, they take the fifth grade test that has fifth grade elements.

                        So yes, maybe we've aligned to what's now thought of as accelerated learning, where they're doing on-grade level stuff and we're patching the holes the best we can, but at the end of the day, they may be taking something system-wide that's not mastery-based. And then the other piece of it is they in next to say sixth grade math, they haven't mastered all of the standards or things that you thought were important in fifth grade math because that happens if time is now the variable and learning is fixed, and yet, they go maybe into a classroom where they haven't adopted that philosophy. And so, all of a sudden, they're in the sit and get bunch of things that are not where they are and not focused on mastery. It feels like, and the other thing I would say is almost like the grading piece feels like easier to deal with in some ways than those system level issues. So, I'm just curious how you think about that friction. Or maybe you think that's not as much of a barrier is as it sounds like?

Farah:               I think there's a few parts to it. I think the first thing is we underestimate how much freedom educators ultimately have within the four walls of their classroom. And I think that's really hard to say to a group of educators without contextualizing what I just said. Because in some ways, being an educator, you're filled with constraints and requirements, and oftentimes, it's way beyond your capacity. So, when I say that, I don't mean they're not overstimulated and have too many things to do, they absolutely have way too many things to do and they're underpaid and there's like a lot of constraints that are challenging. But what is true is they walk into this room usually with four walls, they are teaching for 180 days or 181 days a year, they're given a curriculum, they're observed every now and then, they're given a great book that is honestly just a glorified spreadsheet, and they're told to go.

                        Now, I will tell anyone that that feels a little bit like an unconquerable task in the first place because you have these incredibly diverse minds with all these unique needs and you have this textbook that you have to teach and a test is super hard to pull off, but there are a lot of flexible constraints within that framework. Now, are they so flexible that it's extremely easy to launch a beautiful system that I would imagine to be perfect? Absolutely not. I think in many ways, there are clear constraints that are designed at their system's level that don't support mastery-based grading and don't support the type of learning environments that we cultivate. But what I often say is our model is evolutionary, not revolutionary. And I think a mistake we've made in K-12 education is thinking, hey, let's get a bunch of leaders to buy into a type of change.

                        And then once they change it, everything will follow suit. And it's this trickle down model of change that doesn't work because the most important advocates in our K-12 education system are the teachers when we think about creating a scale change. So, to me, what we need to do first is equip educators to change what goes on in the four walls of their classroom. And then that actually creates the test case, the example, what is needed to observe to then inform some of the bigger systematic changes that need to happen. What I'll also say is I think a lot of leaders are trying to create changes in a systematic way that they would've never been able to do in their own classrooms. Because when they were teachers 20 years ago, they didn't have the technology, they didn't have the buzzwords, they didn't have the resources.

                        So they're going, I want to create student-centered learning. I want to create personalized learning, but they didn't do it when they were educators and they don't know what it looks like. So, you actually need to give the freedom to the educators first to play around within the constraints. Let them innovate, let them execute, and then use what they create as a test case to then create bigger innovations that are systematic. Like, hey, why do we stop grade books after a quarter? Hey, why do we use number grading systems and percentage grade systems anyways? Right? But that's not a limitation to changing a lot about what's going on in classrooms right now. So, I think that's critical. You asked the second question, or part of your question was about this idea of I'm a student, I'm a fifth grade student, and then I go into my sixth grade class.

                        What I tell folks about that is I love how disruptive that is. To me, that is true disruptive innovation because first of all, what happens is that student goes into their next class and frequently will go to the teacher and say, how come you don't teach in this different way? Which, no better way to convince a teacher who's not bought in to change than to hear their student go, hey, in my fifth grade class, this thing works. Can you go figure out what was going on in there because this isn't working for me?

                        And then on the student side, students need to become adaptable. You need to be ready for this because what's true is that the least innovative learning models, in my opinion, are at the university level. Right? So, you're going to sit through two hour lectures when you go to college, you may only do that for 15 hours a week, and then you have a bunch of free time to learn and leverage the skills you learn in a Modern Classroom. But you are going to be sitting through lectures, so be ready to handle those environments and be able to adapt. So, I actually see it as quite a powerful way to think about how change can happen and the purpose of bottom up disruptive innovation.

Horn:                Love it. Love it. So, let's wrap with this last question. I've just invited you to say why... It's okay that they're running into the frictions of the system, and that's actually how to change it over time. But let's just pretend you get to be the wizard of education for a day, you get to change one barrier in the system-wide thing and everyone will magically get along your point not withstanding that the best way to get them to be you excited is grassroots, what's the one thing you would decide to change?

Farah:               I really wish that educators had greater autonomy over their professional development. I wish they had dollars behind it and I wish there was a culture in education where every summer educators had both the financing and the drive and time, because I think that's a key constraint, to engage in professional development that works for them. Because I think, right now, while we're a bottom-up movement, we're a movement where we're sharing teacher to teacher a lot of resources ultimately to get our full paid experience, it costs money, and teachers are underpaid. And if there was a world where educators had a really sizable amount of dollars to spend on their own professional learning and were also equipped with the capacity to choose that and the time to invest in it, I think you'd see a lot more innovative models that we could all be drawing on.

                        And it wouldn't just be the Modern Classrooms' approach as one instructional delivery model, teachers would be creating them everywhere because it was creating in our classrooms just because we were trying something different. Well, that said, the most incredible innovation in K-12 education happens in the classroom level, and it usually happens when educators are given the time and the freedom to innovate and the professional development they deserve.

Horn:                Awesome.

                        Kareem, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for the work that you are helping spur in classrooms, not just across America as I've learned, but across the world.

Farah:               Awesome. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Teach for America is known for taking college graduates and placing them in schools as educators to serve the nation's most vulnerable children. Those corps members in turn often become leaders in helping transform education in the United States. But Teach for America is increasingly paying attention to the education system itself—and acknowledging that it was never built to optimize learning for most students and that therefore it needs to reinvent itself. As a result, it launched its Reinvention Lab with the goal of reinventing learning systems—and perhaps reinventing Teach for America itself in the process. Michelle Culver, who leads the Reinvention Lab, joins me in this conversation to detail more what the work looks like and why it matters. Some of the highlights for me were when Michelle spoke about:

* The Reinvention Lab’s incubation of Ignite, a tutoring organization that is getting some terrific learning outcomes with students;

* Her analogy of how the Bay Bridge was built—the new was built while the old was rebuilt and then maintained until all the traffic moved over to the new segment by segment—as a way to think about how we have to attend to the old system even as we foster the new. That’s such a powerful metaphor for me that really helps summarize what Dual Transformation is all about;

* And her discussion of AI and education.

Subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch the video below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:                Welcome, welcome, welcome to The Future of Education, where we are obsessed with helping all individuals build their passions and fulfill their human potential. And today we have a guest, Michelle Culver, who I suspect is dedicated to something similar. Michelle, it is good to see you. Welcome to the show.

Michelle Culver:              Thrilled to be here, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Horn:                Yeah, you bet. So let's start with biographical information and where your own personal conviction comes for the important work of education, but also Reinvention Lab sounds like it's up to something maybe bigger than we've historically thought of. Schools as they are right now, reinventing them in some way. So just talk about your personal journey into this work first and then we can talk about what the work is itself.

Culver:              Okay. Well, I began my career teaching in Compton in the late '90s. And for me at the time, and even actually still today, I still think of the act of teaching as an act of activism. So for me as a college student, as a young person, I remember being in New Orleans and I was so struck by, I could not come to groups with the difference between my public education that I had received growing up in Montgomery, Maryland, which was really quite good, and what the students who I'd gotten to know while I was volunteering at the housing projects in New Orleans were getting. And that just growing outrage inside of me was very present when I found out about Teach For America. So I joined the corp at the time in '99, and it was a way for me to get into action on becoming a part of a community and stepping into this radical injustice that we see in our country.

                        But I'll say this, you asked about Reinvention specifically, that's more recent. So that was a while ago. Actually, I should say this too. There's something that happens when you're a corps member, and this is not unique to me as an alum, but you start to fall in love with your students. And when you become so in love with your kids, you become unwilling to accept what the system has charted for them. And so what was started as a two-year commitment is now well over two decades. And so it's almost because I've stayed in it that this desire to understand how to reinvent systems has been a emerging conclusion, or at least question, I should really say it's a question. And it was in my last role, before starting the Reinvention Lab, that I started to grow really convicted around this.

                        And it was because I had this unique opportunity as a part of Teach For America's senior team on a national stage to get the rare privilege to just be immersed in some of our fastest improving school systems in the country. And the reason that's important is twofold. One is when you're young, you naively expect that the world is going to change, but over time, it was a rare opportunity to actually witness that when communities come together around a bold vision, that change is actually possible. And that's important because these days we are disillusioned. It is hard to find hope and inspiration. And so I do not take it for granted ever that I can wake up with evidence-based hope, evidence-based optimism. And yet, because I saw what many consider the best of the best, I had this unease, this growing dissonance that I thought, well gosh, if you take these models, put them on steroids, fast-forward through to its most logical conclusion, this cannot be it.

                        And so that growing dissonance got me to a place where I kept thinking, not that I'm not proud of some of these hard fought wins in the last several decades, but I'm not doing another two decades like this. And so that was growing inside of me, that real dissonance. And I became a mom at that time, I had kids later in life. And I enrolled my kindergartner, at the time, in a school here in Denver that's designed to optimize for curiosity. So the tagline is where learners are co-architects of their education. So she shows up, Elsa, my oldest daughter shows up, first week of school and they say, "Elsa, what do you want to study?" And we had just recently seen some community theater, and so she said, "I want to study plays."

                        And so the first thing that the school did is they took her out of the school building, put her next to a female director while she was casting so she could ask questions about are you making those choices in the context of the real world? And then she came back and they matched her with an older buddy, and this older buddy of the school helped her then write a play, cast her peers, direct, and then star in this play in front of the whole school. So at the time I sat in the audience and, Michael, I lost it. And the tears...

Horn:                I bet. Crying, yeah.

Culver:              The tears and the tears were coming for two reasons. One is I'm a proud mama, that's my girl. I'm so proud. But it was actually just a moment of deep humility. I had helped to craft at Teach For America curriculum around high expectations for all kids and scale this with thousands of leaders across our country, and yet it had never occurred to me that a five-year-old could do this. And so I just had this thought where it wasn't the case that I believe this model is the right model for all students or for all families, but I did have that opportunity to make that choice for my own daughter.

                        And what it prompted was a set of much deeper questions coming from that place of real humility. First, what is the purpose of education that we're optimizing for? What are kids learning? What are those outcomes that we're designing for? And why does that matter today? So the what and the why. The question about how, or the pedagogical underpinnings, or the methodologies, or the use of tech, or what are the methods in which we're bringing this up into life for kids? What, why, how? I was asking questions about where, so does it just have to happen in the four walls of a classroom or can it be out in the real world? With whom? So in this case, it's not just a single educator, but of course all of these people in the community who are engaging, older peers who are engaging in the learning.

                        And so it's from this place of asking what are these answers to these questions, and who gets to decide? That I realized we at Teach For America, we the field of education need to be asking a very different set of questions at this moment in time and broadening not only the suite of answers, but who gets to answer them. And so that was a big part of this genesis of the journey into reinvention and specifically the Reinvention Lab.

Horn:                Super interesting. And by the way, I knew obviously some of the story about your daughter before, but I didn't know that you were Montgomery County as well. That's where I grew up too. So we're two proud of Montgomery County-

Culver:              Were you in public school?

Horn:                I was. Walt Whitman High School, and so-

Culver:              I was right down the street, Quince Orchard High School.

Horn:                Okay, there you go. So going out in the world and realizing it looks quite different from what we had. But I'd love to talk then your founding journey to the Reinvention Lab itself, before we talk about the work. So you come out of this experience, you start asking these big questions about why, what, how, where, and then what do you do next? Because you're working at TFA, you're in a structure that's been there for a few decades at this point. What do you create?

Culver:              Well, so my journey coincided so beautifully with Teach For America's next strategic direction. So this was coming up on about our 30 years as an organization. And our CEO, Elisa Villanueva Beard, who is extraordinary, was herself asking big questions about where does the world need to evolve? How is the world evolving? What is that going to require of us as we ourselves, 30 years later, need to change as an institution? And so we basically launched this massive process of just engaging multiple stakeholders from our community members, our students, to industry, to school partners, to community leaders, and asking them, what do you hope for our young people? Students, what do you most want out of your own learning journey? And from that, we birthed a 10-year goal. So we were thinking on a different horizon about what our contribution could be. The goal is that by the year 2030, we would see twice as many children in the communities that we serve reaching key academic milestones, educational milestones, and that are indicating that they're on a path to economic mobility and co-creating a future filled with possibility.

                        And those keywords, through conversation with so many different stakeholders, opened up and unlocked several things for us. First, it really helped us hone in that there is still, there has been in the past, there is now, at least that I see in the short-term future, a real need for us to understand what it takes to realize those sort of key academic milestones at third grade, third grade literacy, eighth grade math, those do in fact matter. And we now have a body of research, both about brain science and also methods about how to bring this to life in a way that's much more intentional. So it actually gave us, in some ways, focus. At the same time, it also gave us an opening to ask a much broader set of questions. And so now all of a sudden we're talking about economic mobility and a future filled with possibility where young people are co-creating that.

                        And so it forces us to start to interrogate narratives about assuming all children successes, all children from our communities go to a four-year university. We start to understand now, as an organization, that that's just too simple, if you're really thinking about economic mobility. And if you're thinking about a life filled with possibility and you're talking to our kids, there's no way to think about mental health simply as a means to an academic end. And if you talk to our young people who are grappling with anxiety, trying to find their own aliveness in the world, that's an outcome worthy of, it's an outcome in its own right, not just a means to an academic end. And so these conversations start to get unlocked in the organization and you realize if you're going to take on something this big, it has to be with others. And it requires us to build new capabilities.

                        So we have the word co-creating in the goal. And one of the first things my team started to take on was this idea that that's going to require new practices to do youth, adult co-creation. And so getting into action, actually learning how to do that in earnest and codifying our lessons along the way. When do we get it right, and when do we go back to the patterns that we've all learned? And how do we discern the difference? How do we build some muscle about those things? So this goal really came at this sort of important moment of my own personal aha with an institutional transition. And that became then the catalyst for launching the Reinvention Lab.

Horn:                And so this is around 2020, 2021. Is that when we're talking?

Culver:              Four years ago now.

Horn:                Four years ago. Okay, so 2019. So then-

Culver:              Yeah.

Horn:                Yeah. So then you get to tell us the Reinvention Lab, what is it? What do you all do?

Culver:              Well, our chart, we wake up every day asking ourselves, where is the future of learning going? Or more precisely, where do we want it and need it to go? And then how do we put Teach For America's assets to work on behalf of that future? And so our motto, which is inspired by Grace Lee Boggs, is to transform ourselves to transform learning. So specifically what it looks like is two things right now. One is we just launched a Product Studio last year where we're trying to build and design new offerings that can be for our current school partners, for our alumni, for other innovators who are already working at that intersection of equity and innovation and we could be of service to what they're trying to get done. So we're trying to build new offerings. This idea that we might not just be a two-year core program, but perhaps we could be some other things too.

                        We've seen real success with Ignite, which was one of our first new offerings. It's a tutoring core that combines this focus with early literacy and Middle Ages math with a real intentional emphasis on belonging because we co-designed it with young people, and that's what they said was most on their minds. The adults cared about literacy and math. Young people were saying, but I'm feeling so anxious about being back at school and figuring out how I can be in relationship to people when I don't sometimes know that.

Horn:                It's awfully hard to learn if you don't have that connection in the first place and feel like you belong.

Culver:              That's right. So it's not a surprise that all of a sudden this program is taking off and we have thousands of college students right now who are resuming into classrooms who are in relationship to these small group learnings, and we can't keep up with the demand for that. So the question now is, could we take some bigger swings? Could we build something that pushes even more fundamentally on the construct of school as we know it? And that's where we're headed next. So the Product Studio is one part of the work. The second part of the work right now is what we call our Learning Studio. It's been focused on helping Teach For America staff members have a bolder vision about what's possible for the future of learning, because many of us have worked in schools that are deeply inequitable and look a lot like the schools that we went to and our parents went to and our grandparents went to.

                        So even just imagining what else is possible is been a big part of our work, because nothing transformative ever happens absent radical imagination and a bold sense of vision. And then also secondly, building some of those capabilities around the innovation methods that very few of us in the field of education get practice with. And so we're trying to build some of those new ways of doing and being. We may compost that second body of work in service of trying to share the learnings that are coming from our research more broadly. So that's a little bit about where we think we may be headed next.

Horn:                Super interesting, and I love that you guys are pushing and inquiring on this because, you know as I often say, the system we have gets exactly the results it was designed to do. And so we push at the margins, in effect, but unless we question the fundamental tenants, we're going to keep doing this. So I love this. You have this Product Studio and Ignite, I've seen some of the research, it looks astounding with the impact that they are having in the field. And then the Learning Studio around vision and methods. This though, I mean it should be said, right? For people who think of TFA as recruit 21, 22-year-old college grad, put them in a classroom with students who really need good instruction and haven't gotten that sort of support, that that's the job. This is very different from what that is. How does that get received within TFA? How does that get absorbed within TFA?

Culver:              Yeah, I appreciate you asking this. I'll start just by saying sort of a paradigm that informs a lot of this work, or maybe I'll use a metaphor, even better.

Horn:                Metaphors always win.

Culver:              I've been thinking a lot about the rebuilding of the Bay Bridge. Did you ever watch, it took place over a good decade?

Horn:                I was living there then, I forgot. Yeah, absolutely.

Culver:              Okay, so here's what I saw. You tell me if this matches your observation. But we all recognize that that bridge was, in the 1930s, considered a great engineering feat of the time. And then for decades afterwards, it was widely understood that it no longer was up to code, up to modern safety standards. And yet, it wasn't until the earthquake in '89, when a portion of the bridge completely collapsed in on itself, that the city was forced to reckon with that. So what they did, I think as instructive. They both propped up the first bridge in order to ensure that families, tourists, people who were relying in that bridge every day to see their loved ones or to get to their jobs, they still had a way to keep moving. And then at the same time, they hired another group of engineers whose job it is to build the second bridge, this more modern bridge. And once they had that second bridge, slowly and responsibly, they took section by section, part by part, and transferred traffic from one bridge to the second.

                        So I say this because at TFA, we believe both bridges matter. It is the case that our kids are still looking to this current outdated system to serve at least those most immediate needs that don't yet exist, at least not at scale, for all kids to be able to access an alternative yet. And so the real challenge, I think, we see is that it's taking up every bit of resources and energy and creative talent to prop up that first bridge. And we still do not have enough leaders thinking about working on the second bridge. And so that's really, I think, the charge of Teach For America, is to honor that both matter internally and in the field. And our job is to be a strong champion for both, and particularly the second one, which has just not been part of the discourse in the same way.

Horn:                Okay, so that analogy totally lands for me. That's exactly what I saw in terms of the process of the rebuilding, is that they were building literally a parallel bridge that is gorgeous and wide open and amazing, even as they were keeping the existing one up afloat, to your point, so you could get across the bay. And it really, I never thought about it before, it really mirrors the dual transformation process that I talk so much about in terms of you continue to support the here and now because that's where the students are, that's where the educators are.

                        And then yes, you also put some set of resources more, I think, you're right, than we've historically put in the education system, but it's not 50% toward building this brand new set of options. And you take some bets on this, not everything is going to work out because you are building the new, and so you have to take informed bets on that to develop that new. I love that. So culturally for TFA that's still a shift, I imagine. How much do the core members that are coming in get exposure to, if you will, this transformation be thinking of building the new structure and how much does it inform, perhaps, how they're teaching in the current system as well, even as they're limited by today's structures?

Culver:              Yeah, I appreciate you asking that. I'll talk a little bit about culturally in a couple of different ways. One is just, even first I'll start with staff. As an institution, culturally, how do we embrace this? One of the things that I have found that's so important is, because we design the Reinvention Lab and a lot of the strategy, what we call, based on the ambidextrous research of trying to keep it both separate and connected. Distinct so something new can emerge, but really integrate it at the top. And one of the things that I've seen with staff is when folks get an opportunity to be immersed in this, it's so inspiring, but because we sort of put our heads down and out of humility to figure out if we do in fact have something to offer before bringing attention to it, part of the work is helping people now see what we are learning and be a part of that co-creation process with us.

                        And I share that because when you think about how we will start to create more folks who are working on the second bridge, it is my belief that staff touch a number of folks every day, not just core members. So our core members are the obvious when you think of Teach For America, that's the immediate thing that comes to mind. But we have over 60,000 alumni who are doing extraordinary things on both bridges. And so figuring out how are we in different relationship to our alumni? How are we in different relationship to our school partners? Who, again, we're talking about every day. So we're trying to think a little bit more about how to get that right balance with the number of different stakeholders that we're working with. As it relates to core members, I'll just be honest in saying this is a tension point.

                        We've tried a few things where young people who are coming into the profession for the first time, we see that they are very motivated and inspired by this bolder sense of possibility, and yet, on a day-to-day they're held accountable to delivering for their kids in the current construct. So as you think about the journey of a new teacher, there's so much for them to learn and to master in order to be able to just show up and deliver for their kids. So we're trying to find what are the right pieces that are most useful for an incoming teacher, and then how do we start to, as they get to the place where they're more competent and capable, they're able to be broadened from there? So we're trying to scaffold that and figure out what are the right pieces.

                        One of the new ideas that came up last week, inspired by aiEDU and some of the work they're doing, is trying to figure out how do you pull even 10 minutes out of your instruction to help young people experience and practice working with some of the emergent AI in order to get, again, some of the exposure to the tools that they're going to need over the course of their career. So this is just going to become the norm. And we know if we're not intentional about bringing this to our kids now, the equity implications are just going to get even more pronounced. And so, okay, is there a 10-minute lesson that an incoming core member or a new teacher could get that allows them to practice some of these new things that we know are going to have an outsized impact on our young people's lives? So that's the kind of mapping that we're still doing, and I'm, frankly, still learning.

Horn:                No, it makes a lot of sense. And I imagine just from a cognitive science or learning science perspective, the working memory capacities of your core members are probably quite overloaded as they're just trying to get through the day-to-day and then you're like, and then there's this new thing coming. So I like where the little leverage points, is it a flipped lesson? Is it an AI exposure, rather than banning the AI, how do you productively use it? For example, which is a great example because, look, there are a lot of kids that are going to get access to that, regardless of whether it's in school or not. So let's be intentional about using it in a productive way and exposing it to individuals that otherwise wouldn't because they're going to need it, to your point.

                        So last question as we wrap up here, which is as you start to think about impact and how you measure what that looks like. On the one hand you have the Ignite program, you have clear measurable outcomes from something like that. On the other, you have this, I suspect but tell me if I'm wrong, sort of harder to measure reimagination, co-creation, informing, thought leadership, if you will, function that you're playing. How are you starting to think about impact? Are you already measuring it in some ways? How should we think about this narrative as we look, in my case, fondly upon this reinvention work?

Culver:              I love this question because we are obsessed with impact. And yet, you're right, the old tools, how I've historically measured success don't quite work in the same way here because we're not working from a clear end goal with a linear backwards plan that we just need to execute against. This work is truly emergent, especially the R&D efforts. And so a lot of what we're asking ourselves is the pace at which we're learning and our ability to quickly compost when work is not actually having the intended impact, so we can pivot those resources to something new. And I don't yet know exactly what the ratio is going to be, where you need to pursue X number of ideas to yield the one that's actually the breakthrough. We're still early on enough to be able to get that rhythm exactly right. But what that requires us to do is to engage differently around accountability or our responsibility to impact.

                        So for example, we've been working on this idea, this is one among many, this idea of creating the possibility of Teach For America creating new roles to help make it easier for schools to pull forward these reinvented learning. So the observation is kids show up every day with more learning needs and schools are designed to meet. Most all of the solutions require the teacher to learn it, but we cannot ask more of our teachers. And districts are faced with this unbelievable talent shortage. And so the hypothesis is, and again it's a hypothesis, is that perhaps we could create some of these new roles to make it very easy for schools to just hire in these folks to take on some of the other learning goals that they might have at their school. And so Teach For America could therefore, if we co-design this, we could then recruit, select, train, and support these folks as they step into something new, make it easier for teachers to do this work alongside another team.

                        And because we are in this exploratory research stage, we have some mixed data about whether this idea is going to be a go or whether this is not something that's actually going to be able to be effective. And so part of what we did is we just brought all of that research to a group of folks on our reinvention council that included young people, superintendents, educators, funders, and we asked them to interrogate this and at the end give us feedback. Is this the moment to compost or keep going? And if we keep going, what specifically would we need to look for in order to see that this is, in fact, going to have the impact that we hope it might?

                        And that kind of process of regularly just interrogating the work and opening it up for others to learn with us and to influence and shape it, I think is the way in which we'll, at least in the short term, start to know if we're on the right path of what we build. And then once you have something, measurement needs to look different at the next couple of stages. But that's where we are right now.

Horn:                I love it. It follows a lot of the thinking of discovery-driven planning to, that success is getting a clear outcome on the test and then figuring out, do we double down, pivot or, I like the phrase compost as opposed to ditch and stop doing this? So tremendous work. Michelle, I'm so glad that you are leading this charge at Teach For America to think about these fundamental tenets of what education looks like and this sense of what students can imagine and build themselves, not just learn in a narrow academic scale. So thank you for coming on and sharing this with us, first and foremost, but even broader, thanks for the work that you're doing.

Culver:              Thank you, Michael. And I'd be remiss to say, even though I may be the entrepreneur who started this venture, I will say there are just so many extraordinary people, both on the team and in the community, who've been shaping and co-shaping and revising this along the way, and so gratitude to the full set of people who've been a part of this journey with us. And Michael, you've been one of those bright spots that we've looked to for learning and inspiration along the way. Your books for some of the foundational underpinnings of some of this work. So thank you for your leadership.

When Diana Diaz-Harrison was looking for good secondary schooling options for her son who is autistic, she wasn't finding great options. She advocated and fought, but eventually decided to take matters into her own hands and started the Arizona Autism Charter School, which is now expanding. And it won this year's Yass Prize, which awards the country's education provider that best demonstrates the STOP principles—Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, Permissionless education. In this conversation I asked about the path to the prize and the journey to better serve students with autism. We delved into all sorts of topics, from how she is able to sustain such a small student-teacher ratio to the personalization and project-based learning she provides for students. As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation, watch it below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:               Diana, first, welcome. Congratulations on winning the Yass Prize. There were, I mean frankly, many inspirational and incredible educators competing this year. Many of them won awards. You won the top prize. I happened to be a judge actually in one of the rounds and got to read your application and I was just blown away and so excited by what you have created and the vision. And we'll get to the prize and more toward the end of our conversation, but I just want to start with grounding our audience at a high level with what are the Arizona Autism Charter Schools?

Diana Diaz-Harrison:     So we are an autism focused charter school. So we implement best practices for children with autism and we are the first and only autism focused charter network in the state and in the southwest. So we feel that what we do is very unique in kind of marrying best clinical practices for kids with autism, along with best instructional and educational practices. So the best of both worlds in a school setting for kids with autism.

Horn:                            Very neat. So tell us, we're going to get more into the instructional model and unpack all that, but go back a little bit, tell us the founding story. What was that problem that you experienced that led you to say, "We need to create something that does not exist."

Diaz-Harrison:               Yes. So I am an autism mom. I have my son Sammy, who is 20 years old and in our Transition Academy now. But when he was little and we found out that he had an autism diagnosis, we immersed ourselves in best clinical practices to get him up to speed on all of those foundational skills like communication, shaping behavior, and just more social interaction, tolerating sensory differences, and the like. And luckily here in Phoenix there are wonderful early intervention programs that are a model for other states. But sadly when he became school age, all of the work that we had done in early intervention wasn't available, or to be continued when… the next chapter came to be, kindergarten, and then K-12 school. All of the great work that I learned about in clinical practice was just not a part of his schooling. So it became very challenging to watch him regress and just go through school and go to school but not becoming his best self during school, which is what school is supposed to do.

                                    So I was one of those moms that advocated heavily for bringing the embedded supports that's needed. But I quickly realized that I just didn't want to be that mom that was fighting all the time and then have these forced situations and then feeling like people were doing me a favor when there were more and more kids with autism coming up in school, and we parents just had to settle, or pay 40 to 50,000 a year for private schools. So I knew there had to be a better way, and luckily I did learn about other autism charters in the country. Florida was a wonderful state to look at as a model, and I pitched the idea to people in Arizona, but special education comes with a lot of litigiousness around it and there were no takers. So after a while of knocking on doors, I realized that if I really wanted this to happen I would have to be the one to do it.

Horn:                            Wow. And so all of a sudden you're an education entrepreneur. I think, I mean it makes sense. We had a former school head for our kids who used to say, "We get the best and you get the rest." It sounds like that was the opposite of what you were having for your son, Sammy. I'm curious, you build this model and as I understand you've used applied behavioral analysis on the clinical side, and then you're really deeply personalizing the learning itself. What does that look like for students in your schools?

Diaz-Harrison:               What's really great about our school is that when people come and tour and see what we're doing with the kids, they'll tell me, "This looks more like a program for gifted kids." There's so much seeing, project-based learning. We've adopted the WozED curriculum, which is developed by Steve Wozniak, which is typically those kinds of innovative programs are reserved for the highly gifted kids, but at our school we really see all the kids as gifted in their own way. We really celebrate their neurodiversity. Obviously autism and other special needs come with challenges of course, but the neurodiversity is also very much celebrated here in that we allow kids to engage their foundational skills into projects that are of high interest to them.

                                    So we developed a model that really addresses the needs of the entire spectrum because it is a spectrum condition that manifests in many different ways. You could have kids that have intensive needs and need a functional form of communication because they're nonverbal, to very verbal kids who have peak skills, say in tech or math, but need more support with language. So the class sizes are very small. We have an average three to one student to staff ratio across the board, and that really helps make the program more personalized for each student that is a part of our community.

Horn:                            That's amazing. So the three to one student to staff ratio, how do you afford that? Because Arizona's not known for high per pupil funding, per se. What goes into supporting a model like that so you can provide that kind of personalization?

Diaz-Harrison:               Well, I think the main thing that happens is that the resources that do come from the state and federal funding go into the classroom versus top heavy special ed departments that hire a lot of extraneous legal staff or others. Our executive team is super small and all of the funding goes into the classroom. Then I think that that's a choice. Anybody can make that choice, but very few schools do. I think the other area is all of the private grants and fundraising that are a core part of my job, telling our story and convincing grant funders to invest in our kids, because they can do great things if given the opportunity in our model. So both of those things I think make a huge difference in putting the resources where the kids are.

Horn:                            No, that makes a ton of sense and I think that focus on the classroom spend as opposed to the administration is something other schools would do well to model. Sometimes when you see these big price tags on the east coast where I am, you sort of say, "Where's all the money going?" And it's sadly not into the classroom in many cases. I'm curious, you talk about on the website in the about what you do, that every student at every single grade level and ability level is going to make progress in your model. You're realizing the high state standards, you've talked about it here. It doesn't look like a program for special ed students, it looks like a program for gifted students. This is a school frankly that has high expectations for its students, it's clear. What are the outcomes, what do you see from the students every day?

Diaz-Harrison:               We really measure and celebrate engagement. And so with our students, oftentimes especially highly impacted students, if they're kind of there and not causing any trouble, they can really slide by with doing the minimal, and people that are in charge of the kids can also get by with doing the minimal. But we have high engagement expectations for our students and staff that are measurable. We've got a lot of data driven instruction. We check our data very frequently. We have the kids be the owners of their data as well, so that it's not an external force watching their growth, it's themselves. And then we have a very competitive spirit at our school that is healthy, I think, because our students, if given the opportunity, do love to compete.

                                    One example is our great Special Olympics program and tournaments and our kids are coming back with first place medals. Internally we like to post our data, celebrate our data, and also come together as a community for students who need help in any area. And part of the learning that takes place here is being okay with asking for help, learning how to advocate for yourself if you need support in different areas, and celebrating that as well. So it's all about what the kids can do and kind of reframing how they feel about themselves. Yes, they have learning differences, but that is not what's going to define them. It's their latest research, their latest group based project, or how they help somebody else in the community that really defines them. And so now kids will come and say to me, "Ms. Diana, autism is my superpower. Look at what I figured out." And that's exactly what we want them to feel here.

Horn:                            I love that asset-based framing. I suspect the parents also love that asset-based framing. Dig into the personalization a little bit more, because it sounds like you have a real model of empowerment where the students, as you said, are owning their data. It sounds like they're setting goals. How does technology play into that learning? How does the projects work? What does that look like in the mixing of those different elements?

Diaz-Harrison:               So I think it starts by having a menu of assessments that is developmentally appropriate for each student. So we don't just have one assessment and then everybody has to fit into that. That doesn't work for our kids. We have research based assessments that are proven to deliver best outcomes for autism, and we use those. For students who don't have intellectual disability, we use more standardized assessment. But having just one assessment that is the state safe assessment for all kids is really detrimental for kids who can't access that. And so then you end up measuring nothing because the test is not appropriate for them.

                                    So it starts by really doing a deep evaluation of each child and putting them in the right assessment, evaluating the efficiency of the strategies we use to help them grow, and then helping them own their data. Another exciting thing about our school is that we have student digital portfolios. So parents are seeing the students' data in real time and can see data, work samples, videos of projects, kind of a nice well-rounded portfolio base, which is light years ahead of most SPED programs because of kids that have special needs typically have an IEP that gets reviewed annually.

                                    And oftentimes parents will go to that meeting and find out after a year that their kid made minimal progress. So parents feel like they're in the dark really if there are acquisition issues they should know earlier so that they can help be part of the team that figures out a solution. So we really love the data transparency at our schools for our digital portfolios, and it really is game changing for parents who are often told over and over what their kids can't do. Their kids' disability is this, that and the other. Yes, we address that as well, but from there it's all about what the kids learn and do.

Horn:                            That's awesome. So then it sounded like you all have an online school as well, if I'm not mistaken. So this is not just a brick and mortar school experience. What does that look like?

Diaz-Harrison:               Yes. So we did dive into virtual programming when everybody had to during Covid, and the way we ran our online schools, which was not part of the original plan, but we didn't hesitate to pivot. We really took cues from telehealth, teletherapy, and developed a protocol called tele-lessons where it was still very much small group or even one-on-one, so that we could still run drills and get data on the kids. We still did our project based showcases even though they did work online and in person and there was a variety of modalities. But back to our project based learning, every quarter the kids collaborate to develop a project with peers, which is huge. And they present it either in-person, or virtually if they're in the online school. Our online program had so much success that we decided to keep it as part of the menu of options for families, and more than 100 families have selected that. Now we've spiraled into a hybrid model as well, as one of the menu options. And so it's all about just giving parents choice who typically don't have a lot of choice.

Horn:                            So I mean that's powerful. And so it sounds like, I mean students have a lot of choice at the classroom level. The parents are having choice of different models here. Just take us one more step into the learning experience. Student shows up, it sounds like we're not talking about block periods or a seven period day or something like that. It sounds like they're really deep with a fellow teacher, with fellow peers, figuring out which projects they're working on, which content they're going to learn, and it's much more self-driven. What's the rhythm, if you will, of the day? How do you use time?

Diaz-Harrison:               So in our K-5 program, the kiddos are in a group of about eight to 10 kids. They have a lead teacher and support staff and then they go through their regular daily schedule that is very much visually driven. There's visual schedules all over and then as they work through their day, students are kind of marking what they have completed and then moving on to a different station. It's a three station rotation model which helps keep the teaching and learning small, three kids to a staff member, and rotations throughout the day. And it really helps students not have to be seated in one spot for several hours a day. They're moving about and navigating an instructional program that in large part is self-driven, so that they can apply their skills into ideas and creativity that is of importance to them. And kids on the spectrum have very defined interests. So this really helps leverage learning foundational skills and then as a reward applying it to their preferred project.

Horn:                            Gotcha. Super interesting. Okay, so let's pivot now. You win the Yass Prize a few months ago, $1 million. What are you going to use the funds for? You already have several schools up and running. I think you're serving something like 700, 800 students at the moment. What's next on the horizon?

Diaz-Harrison:               So we're really excited to be adding a campus in Tucson, Arizona. We're using the Yass Prize funds to continue to have more and more project based learning through WozED. We're thrilled about this partnership because the co-founder of Apple developed these awesome schemes and project based tips that include everything from coding robotic drone flying with the culminating activity of getting an FAA license, for example. Very cool stuff. And so we are going to expand our theme programming across all our sites and including for our online students. And that's a very exciting expansion that we're having internally. And then the other portion of the prize is going to be used to develop a national accelerator of autism charter schools. I know first hand how hard it is not to have a viable school choice for my child with autism. And we know there are only a few autism focused charter school, tuition free, around the nation. So part of the appetite will be to accelerate their creation and the founding of nonprofit, tuition free, autism charters in other states.

Horn:                            That's powerful. And it goes to the next question I want to ask. And I'm curious frankly if you agree with the statement I'm about to make, which is, it feels like right now there's a movement of entrepreneurs in education that feels much bigger than it was when you got started, say, in 2016 I think it was. And I'm curious, quickly I guess, does that feel right to you that we're in this moment of time right now where there's a lot of education entrepreneurship going on?

Diaz-Harrison:               Absolutely. There are charter schools that are more niche specialty charter schools, which we're excited about. And then all of the micro schools that are emerging. And PSA scholarships that are available are great for education options, innovation, and choice. We've seen a little bit of a pendulum swing here in Arizona and we're watching [inaudible 00:19:26] because we think the more choice, the better. It's hard enough to navigate the school setting with a child with special needs. Having limited choices or just one choice is insufficient and outdated, and now that parents have experienced choice, they don't want to give that up. So we're very protective of the ability to start charters if that's what a [inaudible 00:20:00] wants to do, or to start private or micro schools that benefit from PSA funding, because we shouldn't be [inaudible 00:20:12] proscribed by a district program.

Horn:                            That makes sense. And obviously we're all watching Arizona right now to see what happens. But I guess as you turn and you're supporting these entrepreneurs in starting autism based programs specifically, but more generally as well, what are the lessons from your own experience that you would offer or teach these entrepreneurs as they jump into this world?

Diaz-Harrison:               I think it's very important to know that it's very consuming work. Starting a school is not for the faint of heart. So you really have to go into it knowing that you're starting a business, and many businesses don't make it in the first few years because of all of the barriers that come into play. But if you have a committed founding board that's willing to help navigate all kinds of obstacles and a leader with a purpose, first and foremost, and you're doing this because you're going to do it no matter what it takes, then that is the level of commitment that's required for something like this.

                                    But once you get all of those pivotal processes in place, the reward that you get from serving kids who otherwise wouldn't have a quality option is really priceless. And then to see those kids flourish into high school students that are starting entrepreneurial endeavors and making friends for the first time and presenting a project to their parent, who previously they thought they wouldn't be able to present anything, is really game changing. And I think it's really changing the narrative about what it is to be a person with autism and how that that doesn't need to have all the limitations that have been previously associated with it.

Horn:                            It's powerful stuff. So last question as we wrap up here, which is, what are the lessons that maybe your experience holds for us as a nation, not just for the education entrepreneurs, but for educators, parents, policymakers, and society more broadly?

Diaz-Harrison:               I would say we should not lower the bar. We should not just make due because of whatever, the talent pipeline, or resources shift up and down. I think keeping the bar high for our kids, we should be unapologetic about that, because the kids deserve everything that is the most fruitful and exceptional and exciting at school. So we fight hard to keep the bar high and to troubleshoot any barriers that get in the way of that. But I think what's going to bring America back is not lowering the bar for kids and fighting to keep it high no matter what.

Horn:                            Terrific stuff. Diana, congratulations again. More importantly, congrats for what you're doing for students, not just in Arizona, but increasingly across the country. Really appreciate the work you're doing.

Diaz-Harrison:               Thank you so much. Thank you for the support and helping us share our story.

Horn:                            Yeah, you bet. And we'll be back next time on The Future of Education.