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Tyler Thigpen wears a lot of hats. He’s the co-founder and head of The Forest School: An Acton Academy in south metro Atlanta; co-founder and head of the Institute for Self-Directed Learning; an instructor and academic director at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education; and the coauthor of a new book, The Playbook for Self Directed Learning, which provides strategies for transforming traditional schools into learner-centered environments. Tyler joined me to talk about innovative educational models that emphasize self-directed learning. We discussed everything from what is self-directed learning to the nature of his school and from the general philosophy underpinning Acton Academy more generally and his insights into how traditional, existing schools can take his advice to create more self-directed learners. We also talked about why high schoolers might be interested in microschools in this day and age—including why his kids have been. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on our conversation. Leave us a comment.
Michael Horn
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through how we get there today, I'm delighted that we have a very special guest. His name is Tyler Thigpen. He is known as the head of schools at the Forest School and Acton Academy in Fayetteville, Georgia. We'll hear more about that shortly.
He's also the co founder, executive director at the Self Directed or excuse me, Institute for Self Directed Learning. Going to hear more about that as well. He guest lectures occasionally at Harvard University. I see him in my neighborhood every once in a while. He's also the academic director at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. So you wear a lot of hats, Tyler, welcome.
Good to see you. Thanks for being here.
Tyler Thigpen
Thank you, Michael. Delighted to be here. Happy to have the conversation and yeah. Wearing hats as you. As you do. As well, as we do.
Michael Horn
Yeah. Well, as it is. Right. But you also are the author of, a coauthor I should say, of a brand new book, the Playbook for Self Directed Learning. A Leader's Guide to School Transformation and Student Agency. It's out from Routledge. It's on Amazon.
Check it out. We'll drop a link into the show notes and we're going to talk about that as well. I have one caveat. I've bought the book. I own it on my Kindle. I have not yet read it. I'm behind. So you're going to teach me a little bit as we go.
But where I want to start with you, actually Tyler, is with the Forest School and, and Acton Academy because I'll just say, like when I first heard about the Forest School and Acton Academy, I was like, this is the coolest mashup I have ever heard of in my entire life.
It's like outdoors, which I'm a strong believer in getting out into nature and then the personalization and aspects of owning your own learning that Acton Academy is known for. And for those that don't know, Acton Academy is a network loosely held, I guess, of microschools. Several hundred around the world at this point, use technology to help learners sort of follow the hero's journey as they progress through each year. But I want to hear it from you, like, what is this school all about? I have been dying to get down there. I have not seen it in person. I want to know how you blend technology and personalization of an Acton school and forest school, like that sounds magical and maybe mythical.
Tyler Thigpen
I love that. My answer may surprise you, actually. So what I really love about the forest schools around the world, and there are a subset of folks, families, caregivers, educators, you know, who've built and create these schools. You know, the love and engagement with the outdoors. A lot of, you know, very hands on, project based, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary stuff that, you know, kids are just engaged. I mean, a lot of forest schools, kids are outside, the vast majority, you know, of the time.
Michael Horn
Yeah, it's amazing to watch.
Tyler Thigpen
Incredible. The reason we, and we have, we share a lot of commonality with those schools. So, you know, being outside, in fact, our learners designed our school and they did an architecture quest like four or five years ago and it got built, we moved. We've been in a year and a month. It's incredible. And it includes massively large windows, which were very expensive. It includes a courtyard around which the school sits. This was all choices of the kids.
And they're spending a massive chunk of their time outside every day and learning in nature. And then we exist in a really interesting town where we have connectivity to walking trails and a forest. We're right next to the forest, but we're actually not a forest school. We founded in a town that was called Pinewood Forest and it was right next to the largest movie studios in the United States, Pinewood Studios. It's now called Trilith, the largest movie studio in the world. And by that point we had already had the name for school. So we didn't change our name to be Trilith, but we are in this really interesting place that is kind of a hub for creators, makers and storytellers. So the mythical component, the mysterious component, is definitely there because of being in the ecosystem of innovation and storytelling.
Interestingly, US Soccer just moved its headquarters five minutes down the road from us. So that's providing a really fascinating sports and competition component as well. But yeah, if you were to mesh up the storytelling, the love of outdoors, definitely the transdisciplinary projects and interdisciplinary, the choice, the hands on learning, that is very much our vibe and very much in line with the Acton Academy model where kids, the goal is that each person who enters our doors will find a calling that will change the world. And similar to forest schools, we have guides, you know, rather than teachers, and there's no homework. And we have studios instead of classrooms. And you can go at your own pace. And it's mixed ages. And so in that way it really is kind of mythical and magical.
Learner-Driven Environment
Tyler Thigpen
And honestly when folks visit us, Michael and I do hope you come. When folks visit, one of the most frequent comments we hear and I feel it on a day to day basis is they feel like I can breathe here. You know, it's not a sort of super rigid high environment. There's a lot of learning to live together, going on a lot of exploratory play, a lot of passion projects. And because it's self paced and mastery based, you know, it's very learner driven. So it's not top down where you, where the kids feel like they're on edge, just waiting on the, you know, the adults to tell them what to do. So it's a cool vibe. You know, nothing's perfect but it, but it's, it's really, it's really beautiful and it's a labor of love for me because my kids have been there.
I've got four kids, my oldest daughters aged out. My three boys are still there, one of them is a senior. So you know I get to hug their necks when I go on campus.
Michael Horn
So it goes all the way through high school. Give us the sort of the tale of the tape, you mentioned U.S. soccer is nearby so give us the stats if you will for the school. When, when was it founded, how many students, how many guides? You know, sort of the picture of what, of what we're talking about.
Tyler Thigpen
Yep. So the Forest School and Acton Academy founded in 2018 with 31 learners, today and that was grades roughly 2 through 8 and today we are 162 learners. We are at capacity that's pre K3 through grade 12. And so we've graduated a number of alumni know out into now the marketplace as well as colleges and universities. And it's diverse by design so we're trying to maximize economic, racial, age, gender, religion, school background and learning differences, diversity. We want to show that self directed learning works for all kids and staff. We have about 16 full time staff there and then we during COVID launched the Foreste school online which has kids from three out of four US time zones.
Kenya, Uganda, Costa Rica, China, Mexico. My head of schools in Thailand, that's about 50 learners and it's middle and high school and it's the most geographically diverse school I've ever been a part of. It is super cool to have the learners empathize with one another and the cultures and the different value systems and challenges and opportunities that they're all navigating so those are our two schools. And then like you said, we have the institute and that's sort of our version of scale, to be honest. You know, a lot of leaders in our space, when they think about scale, they think about more schools and more kids. But for us, we think about research, we think about leadership training, educator training, we think about sector change initiatives and consulting, you know, to really push against the ocean and help move the sector more towards, you know, learner student agency.
Michael Horn
Very cool. Okay, let me ask this question then. How did you choose to be an Acton school when you all started up? How was that choice made?
Tyler Thigpen
Yeah, we. It's interesting. My background is actually a traditional district. I taught at Georgia's largest public high school for a number of years and was a leader there. I co-founded a charter school that is nature focused. It was built off the idea of. Do you ever read Richard Lou's Last Child in the Woods?
Michael Horn
Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah.
Tyler Thigpen
Founded off that idea, you know, so, I mean, that really should have been called a forest school as well. But it's Chattahoochee Hill Charter school, a great K8 environment in South Atlanta that's still thriving today. And then I worked at a few independent schools, Mount Vernon in north Atlanta, and then the Forest School. But when we were collaborating, really, Michael the, with the leaders of a new development, you know, down here in the great state of Georgia, we still got a lot of space and some, you know, developments that are happening. And so we really build a trust building relationship with some leaders here. And they really wanted a school that would fit the neighborhood. And so I started just pro bono consulting with them to help them think through options, you know, district options, charter charter options, independent school options.
Choosing Educational Models for Kids
Tyler Thigpen
I just so happen to have children that I was looking for a high school for. And so the stars kind of aligned and we, you know, I was working at Transcend, a national nonprofit at the time and was familiar with a lot of different options and models, you know, public and private, to consider. And so I just brought all the models to the table with this group and, you know, they're not steeped in education. So they asked me what's my opinion. You know, the district option was great. We have a great relationship with the district here, but it's just going to take a long time. And they weren't really open to, you know, a new version of that in the ecosystem. Charter, you know, the charter constraints I'm very familiar with, we just didn't feel that we'd be able to be as innovative as we wanted to be.
And so we went with independent because of nimbleness and because we were going to have a public purpose and be a nonprofit. We thought that was a good speed and could be appropriately innovative for the kind of people we wanted to attract to the neighborhood. And we went with Acton. When I heard Jeff and Laura Sandifer, the founders, say on their video, we believe that every child is a genius and can change the world. I was like, I think that too. I wonder what their school model is like. And so I did a deep dive. And they're just lovely, people in the network are awesome people and a lot of parent entrepreneurs who have skin in the game with kids in their schools.
And, you know, early on, Jeff and Laura said, they said, you know, we feel like we figured out about 15% of this learning model and we feel like the founders and the network are going to figure out the other 85%. And I really took them seriously. And I was like, this is a place to, you know, join as well as play. And so I pitched that to the town developers and showed them some of the videos and talked about my vision for it and, and they, they cut a check, you know, for our founding funders.
Michael Horn
Amazing.
Tyler Thigpen
That first morning.
High School Microschool Challenges
Michael Horn
Amazing, amazing. A few different directions I want to go. But let me start with this: high school. Because when a lot of folks talk about the micro school movement, broadly speaking, high schools, where a lot of people sort of, I don't know if squeamish is the right word, but like, they get, they're not sure it's going to grow into that. Here you have a high school, you know, you're sending your kids through it, right? And, and I think the criticism, you know, it probably as well as I do, right. That bundle of other things, right, that creates the high school experience, is that something kids really want to forego for a smaller environment that's more bespoke, perhaps in, in all definitions of that word. How have you thought about that? What have you learned? What have you seen in terms of high school and micro school?
Tyler Thigpen
It's a great point, Michael. And obviously a ton of your work is connected to that handshake right between the high schools and the life's next steps. And high school is my bag of donuts. That's been the vast majority of my career. I worked, I'm actually an ordained minister. I worked with high schoolers as a full time minister for years before I moved into education. And then I taught at Georgia's largest public high school, served as high school principal. And so most of the bulk of my experience was with the high school model in general.
And so it was less fearful to me. A lot of the microschool founders that I'm familiar with, they just have less connectivity to it and there's so much to learn. It feels a little bit overwhelming. Not so for me. It felt very empowering for me. And I could see in the even very innovative high schools I had led that were teacher centric before, I saw some of the gaps and flaws and ways in which to kind of really change it out. So I felt bullish about that. In terms of what's being offered.
You're right. I mean, it's a trade off. And for some families, you know, it's not worth it to move into a smaller environment. You know, for some learners, it's not worth it. They want the friends, you know, they want Friday Night Lights. I mean, American football is a social institution in our nation, especially the south in Georgia, but we're actually part of a sports league where our learners can actually participate in American football with neighboring schools.
Michael Horn
That's cool.
Tyler Thigpen
We have a team. And because we're learner led, we say to kids when they have an idea, we're like, all right, if you want to start something, you got to get a critical mass of people to help do it with you. And then you've got to have a parent volunteer who can help. And that's how we got our boys basketball program started. Last night, we literally had our parent player end of season scrimmage. I'm happy to say that we won, the parents by three.
Michael Horn
You're hanging on. Yeah.
Tyler Thigpen
My son did block me like two or three times during the night, though, so I was humbled. And then, you know, our girls volleyball team got started that way. An environmental club gets started that way. Dungeons and Dragons club gets started that way. And frankly, I'm okay with those programs even dying over time because it is learner led. I mean, if the learners lose a will for it, you know, we'll.= move on. And then the other thing I've noticed in, you know, in independent schools and working with them, and not just independent, but, but also public schools, millennial parents these days, you know, tend to, instead of, you know, paying for a larger chunk of tuition so that the school has and offers all the services they want to be able to do with their funds, what they want to be able to do.
Michael Horn
More à la carte.
Tyler Thigpen
Yeah, à la carte. Right. So the fact that we have a core tuition that covers our operations and then they can, you know, bespoke choose what they want to do. They seem to like that model, you know, at least for now. So that's kind of how we're overcoming it, you know, but that's where we're at.
Michael Horn
Very cool. What, what is the tuition, out of curiosity, because that's always been a hallmark of Acton, is affordable also.
Tyler Thigpen
It is. Right now it's 12.9, $12,900 for the year, which if you look at, I mean, Atlanta has a very competitive independent school market that is very reasonable. And, and what's more than that is that more than covers the cost of our operations. Most independent schools, you know, in the United States, year after year, have increased the rates of tuition over and above the rate of inflation. And so it's priced a lot of families out. Yeah, we have sliding scale because we're economically diverse. We make use of our state's funding program, it's a tax credit program to be able to raise funds for lower income families to provide financial aid, financial, financial based, you know, scholarships for them. And that, that really works well for us.
And we don't have, Michael, an annual fund, which, you know, it was a learning moment for me when I moved into the independent school sector at one point. You know, it's just a common thing for a lot of private schools to have an annual fund and raise money over and above tuition. We don't have one and God willing, we never will. You know, that's my commitment. So.
Michael Horn
Yeah. Well, it's interesting because an annual fund can be quite exclusionary to some of those families that cannot afford right above and beyond. So it makes sense. Let me ask this question then. You lead the Institute for Self Directed Learning, your new book, the Playbook for Self Directed Learning. Self directed learning is a big part of the Acton model as well, building learners who are self directed over time.
How do you like, tell us about how that journey is? Do you know of, of helping learners take ownership over what they, you know, what and how they learn and so forth. And where's the autonomy and where are the guardrails and scaffolds perhaps?
Tyler Thigpen
Yeah, great question. So the way we define it is self directed learning is happening when learners are. It's not alone. It's not learners sort of off in a cave.
Michael Horn
Doing this is not autodidact by yourself. Okay.
Tyler Thigpen
Totally, totally. Which would be a Legit critique, know, self directed learning. But it's, it's when they're in the context of a community of peers, you know, trained educators and caring adults. But they have a ton of choice. They get to choose the process, the content, the skills, the learning pathways, you know, the outcomes of learning. And, and they're doing it in service of finding a calling, you know, that will change the world. And, and what we've been trying to do is study that pathway.
Phases of Self-Directed Learning
Tyler Thigpen
So we do have a, through our institute, we have a peer reviewed study that our head of research, Dr. Caleb Collier, he's got a PhD in self directed learning he put out that describes four phases of the pathway of a self directed learner. The first phase, you know, very familiar to all of us, just building the desire for learning, you know, making sure that kids feel like they belong, they are safe, they're having their core needs met and then they see relevance in their learning, you know, which is not to be taken, you know, for granted by any stretch. But that's just phase one. You know, phase two is when learners start to go into advanced player mode by instead of choosing to do something easy and, you know, just amusing, they will choose to do something challenging. So instead of, you know, watching Netflix on the phone or talking with their friends, they're going to choose to do a challenging task where they have to learn and they experience the learning pit, you know, know, and, you know, hitting that brick wall and feeling that frustration. That's phase two. We call it resourcefulness. The third phase we call initiative, which is where learners are now not just starting to, you know, solve problems, they're actually finding problems, you know, and they're seeking them out and they're making their plans, they're setting goals.
They've got a structured process for, you know, setting their goals. At our school, we use smart goals and whoop goals, you know, wish outcome, obstacle path, a great, a great protocol for goal setting. And that's, so that's initiative. But then that's not it either. Phase four, and this is, you know, ninja mode, this is, it's persist, right? It's where regardless of whatever struggle comes their way, they're going to be resilient, they're going to overcome it and nothing's going to stop them from learning, you know, and so we, we care a lot about that pathway. We talk about that pathway a lot. We invite learners to consider where they are on that pathway.
We invite parents and caregivers to consider where they believe they are on that pathway, and their children. And then we think through like what are the different guide moves, educator moves, mentor moves at each one of those phases, you know, but that's the end goal. And typically Michael, I mean, as you would imagine, like when we share that pathway with education leaders across the U.S. I mean, they very much resonate. Oh yeah, that's what we're trying to do. You know, regardless of the subject, they all want to get there.
Michael Horn
Yeah, no, that makes sense. I'm curious. My observation of a lot of the Acton’s that I've been in is it's a really neat blend of self direction on the knowledge or foundational knowledge, maybe put it through the technology and then in pursuit of these bigger goals and the projects and sort of the larger arc of the year. And it does a really good job of balancing like for each kid, some of the things that maybe people would worry about. Right. Of Michael's only going to study underwater basket weaving, which doesn't have a lot of, you know, outside applicability.
What have you learned about some of those questions in the institute? And then let's start there and then maybe we can transition in the book.
Tyler Thigpen
Well, we've learned about how to systematize that for sure. I think, you know, which for us and other Acton’s and I think other competency based schools who hold similar approaches, you know, it is making a very transparent process even at the beginning of each year to say, okay, what are the skills, knowledge and competencies that the learner is going to encounter and strive to master over the course of the year? You know, the way we do it is we present that to the parents, caregivers and learners at the beginning of the year and ask for their feedback. Say, is this right? You know, and then what do we want to add, subtract or change and then what are your goals in terms of pacing for finishing that? Right. And then, and then let them, let them go. And then as guides, we hold them, hold them to that. So we keep the onus on the learner. So it's not our time frame, it's not even our goals.
We're just the coaches. Yeah, yeah, facilitators. And then, you know, you'll have some parents who care a ton about not just the foundational skills, but even bulking that up even more and making sure that the foundational skills are super strong. And then you have the opposite end. You have some parents and caregivers and learners who are like, yeah, we don't really value that. As much. And. And then we want more exploratory components or we want more electives, you know, and the cool thing about having a guide instead of a teacher is you can facilitate that instead of, you know, direct instruction, it's.
It's managing the quality of learning through multiple channels. You know, I think in the young ages, they're still heavier on direct instruction. You know, we happen to have, for ages 3, 4, 5 and 6, they're in, It's a Montessori environment.
Michael Horn
Yep.
Tyler Thigpen
Which definitely includes, you know, some direct instruction, but some letting go over time. Our second, third grade is still pretty heavy direct instruction. I think we found that to be crucial. And then when it starts to get into grades four and above, we've learned that's when you can really wean learners off of that direct instruction. But what's so important is making sure our guides and staff know different facilitation protocols to help learners, you know, reflect and self assess, and then making sure the learners grow in their own ability to assess and self assess, you know, their own learning and then their peers learning as well without that's kind of a missing.
A missing piece for all this. And they can be just sort of adrift and not, you know, not know what they're learning, what they have learned, what they need to learn,
Michael Horn
Where they're doing it, et cetera. Yeah, exactly. Makes a ton of sense. And sort of the gradual release, if you will, through the ages so that they can have more agency and choice because they know more of what's out there, also makes us, you know, makes sense, I suppose. I'm curious. Last question before we transition the book, I promise. But I'm super curious to ask you this. When I hear people talk about direct instruction, I think a lot of the mental model they have is one teacher, 30 students.
I'm telling you the information. My observation to your point is, in a Montessori classroom, direct instruction is absolutely happening. But it's like one on one, one on three, one on four. Occasionally, you know, we do certain lessons right that involve everyone, but it's. It's like a much more varied direct instruction. Let me show you.
Now you try with me here. Now you do. Right. Sort of release. And that when your students get older, as you just described, they're still sort of getting direct instruction in the sense of, like, from computers or, you know, like. Right. Like, it's not like they're not learning content or engaging with a demonstration of how to do this thing that I think is important and I'm trying to learn.
And so it sort of gives lie, I think, to one of the weird dichotomies we've constructed in education. You can tell me I'm crazy and I'm wrong, but I'm just sort of curious your take on that framing.
Tyler Thigpen
I totally agree, Michael. I think it's a great observation to me when I think about where direct instruction can go wrong is when the teacher structures it such that the teacher really is the sage on the stage, you know, and that the answer, the content, the expertise, the assessment, whatever has to come from that individual, you know,
Michael Horn
and so it's all dependent on that person now.
Tyler Thigpen
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Rather than, you know, the teacher is facilitating, you know, facilitating the learning. And I was actually with a group of superintendents, principals in Ohio last week. We were talking about this and I just sort of off the cuff mentioned the fact that, like, what I've observed and what I have done myself. So I'm confessing here as a teacher, I mean, like, we can get addicted to, you know, the dopamine rush of explaining something to a kid and them getting it and us being.
Feeling good about ourselves, you know, and be like, yes, like, thank God my.
Michael Horn
Yeah, the magic moment is cool. I help facilitate that.
Empowering Learners Through Self-Differentiation
Tyler Thigpen
Yeah. My existence is worthwhile because I explained it to them, you know, rather than letting them, you know, productively struggle and wrestle with it and. And different. Helpfully differentiate ourselves. And I am using a term there from family systems theory, self differentiation, which I think can be really helpful here, where the teacher appreciates the fact that, like, the job of the learner is to learn and that cannot be forced, you know, and to help support and create the conditions, the inspiration, the incentives, you know, the structures, the milestones, the celebrations, all that. But ultimately it's a win not because the learner got it, because we explained it, but the learner got it because they came to it on their own, because you cannot take that away from them, you know. And, you know my parents.
I love my parents. I grew up with a lot of. A lot of. A lot of commands, you know, a lot of. A lot of direct instruction. And it came from an unbelievably great place. But it wasn't until I was outside of that environment, you know, as an adult, as a professional, where I started to appreciate the benefits and the power of coming to things on your own, discovering them on your own.
You know, people are so, in my opinion, I mean there's so we all have thoughts, you know, we all have feelings, we all have a will and plans that come from a beautiful, beautiful place. And so structuring the learning such that it really appreciates those things and creates space for them to be explored and developed. It's just the way direct instruction. If it's only that, you know, it doesn't provide for a lot of the plan making that a young person be doing. It doesn't plan, it doesn't allow for a lot of the like sense making and feelings working through the feelings, you know that, that I think learner centered schools are really latching onto.
Michael Horn
Very cool. Okay, let's turn to you the book now, the Playbook for Self Directed Learning: Leaders Guide to School Transformation and Student Agency. Why did you write the book? What are you hoping comes out of it? Yeah, and I should, I should mention it's not just you. Caleb is a co author who we mentioned. Amber Bryant, Brittney Toles. It's the four of you who have come together to do this work.
Tyler Thigpen
Yeah, and that's an important point, Michael. Those are dear friends, also parents of learners at the school. Two white men, two black women who we've been working together for the last seven years and we all bring our different backgrounds to this work and you know, love our community and together have sort of tried to with our team, broadly, you know, figure out what works, what doesn't work. And we have, we have pivoted so many times, you know, and so this is our attempt at sort of capturing, you know, some of that learning here. And, and so yeah, in terms of the book itself, you know, what would be, what would be helpful to riff on?
Implementing Educational Principles in Schools
Michael Horn
Well, so I know that each chapter sort of lays out strategies, right for how to put these principles in place in a school. I guess I would love to hear, you know, is this something that can really be done in an existing school or do they need to have Tabula Rasa to create something blank slate? Like how, how do you think about that? Because that strikes me as one of the biggest questions facing the country right now is do we actually believe this will come from the emergence of a vast diverse array of new schooling types or do we think we can actually move districts and existing schools to embrace the principles you're talking about?
Tyler Thigpen
Yep, I'd love to, I'll address that last point last I think the, are you familiar with the book Teach Like a Champion from Doug?
Michael Horn
Of course. Yeah. Doug Lemov.
Tyler Thigpen
Yeah, massive you know, for the listeners, a massive, you know, power, powerful book at a moment in history in education that, that a lot of really empowered and inspired a lot of educators and, and you, you know, I've read it and had used some of the techniques and really I use the word techniques because it was, that it was a book of techniques. It was like a playbook that you could tick it off. I'm going to do this. And it was to really manage a classroom to get learners focused on a discrete standard. And I do think the techniques did an effective job of that. I think we see our book as a companion to that for a different purpose. It's techniques for learner centeredness. It's what are the techniques adults can do to create responsibly, the space for the feelings, the plans and the thoughts for learners to take hold of their own learning.
So that's why we did it. And you're asking what we hope to do with the book now. Maybe all of us will have rose colored glasses. We do think it's possible. And so we speak in the book to both public and private school leaders and educators, you know, public school leaders who are, and educators who are dealing with the constraints of a standards based environment and private school leaders who are dealing with the expectations of parents and caregivers, you know, for you know, life's next steps. Some, you know, college prep environments. And then of course there's that both of those things exist sometimes in the other sphere as well. But you know, the process that we've explored and have discovered and continue to work with districts on is we have identified sort of principles that are true about learner led classrooms and learner led schools versus teacher led classrooms and teacher led schools.
Shifting to Learner-Led Education
Tyler Thigpen
And that, that's actually the different outline of our book. And we kind of, and their examples are like in a learner led school the learners are typically doing the choosing, whereas in a teacher led school the teachers typically are choosing things and there's a whole host of things they're choosing. Another example is in a learner led school, learners are doing the assessing for the most part or they're being assessed by experts or by peers. Whereas in a teacher led school the teachers really are the ones who are doing the assessing. And so it's, it, it's a different set of spectra on, on those, along those lines. But what we've done with districts, which is more of a, it's not a let's blow up the model and start something new. It's like, let's slowly work towards this is you've gotten with teachers in public school settings, in teacher centric settings, and we've taught the principals and we've inspired them to take a lesson that they're going to do next week, you know, and say, okay, now that you know these principles and here's the lesson that you have in front of you. What's one thing you can do to make it more learner led, you know, or what's two things you can do along these spectra? And which one did you choose and why? And then share that out and they share it.
And now go try it. And they'll go try it. And you know, usually it goes really well because learners are amazing. And you know, when they're given the choice and voice and agency, they will take it. And even when they make poor choices, if the natural consequences are in place, they'll learn from that. And so teachers come back and they'll share about that experience. And of course, if they're sharing about this experience in the context of other educators, then, you know, they're sort of stealing ideas shamelessly from one another, which is great. And then, you know, teachers.
And then it's rinse and repeat, do it again. And so teachers will take another lesson and just make that a little bit more learner led. And then as they do that over the course of a year or so, really we've done partnerships for multiple years at districts. They get better and they sort of as a default, they're building their muscles at making their classrooms or their departments even more learner led, even more learner centered, where kids have even more agency. And then at some point we'll stop them and we'll ask them, okay, what are the barriers? You know, like what. What are you encountering perceived or real that is stopping you from doing more? And of course, they're incredible at naming barriers. The teachers are. And when you have leadership that's on board, leaders will listen very, very carefully to those barriers.
And then they'll get together and they'll say, all right, what can we, you know, what barriers can we completely remove? Which ones can we tweak to make it easier? And then which ones can we just. We got to keep. But we can help them navigate around. And then the leaders and teachers have that conversation. And in our experience, when, when a district does that, the ball really can move, move forward, but it's playing a long game. You know, it's having a lot of courage. You know, it's having some skills in change management, for sure. And so a real deep belief in the trajectory.
So it's not, it's not for everybody because not everybody's there yet. But our book aims to be that thing that one can take off the shelf, open up and be like, okay, this week I'm gonna do this.
Michael Horn
And so super practical, super down to earth. Maybe as we wrap up, are there places, district schools, independent schools, but existing schools that you're like, excited about, that you'd say, you know, check out this place because they're doing this one thing that's really cool and you wouldn't believe it if I didn't tell you it existed.
Tyler Thigpen
Yeah, absolutely. So we worked for years with Pike County Public schools in Georgia, Rural district. Former superintendent Mike Duncan, who's state superintendent of the year, he was there for, you know, over a decade, which that's a part of it.
Michael Horn
You know, that's right. You need continuity. So we're all swimming toward this goal. Yeah, right.
Tyler Thigpen
You know, they, they took a stance around, you know, moving their educators towards the role of a guide in a public setting, you know, unapologetically, enthusiastically. I'm thinking about there's another school, I'm touting Georgia schools while I have the opportunity.
Michael Horn
No, go for it.
Tyler Thigpen
North of Atlanta, North Hall High School has this math department led by this guy called Jason, who has got a real switched on team there. And you know, one example of how they've made it learner lead is this one teacher at high school level math decided to, at the beginning of a unit, give all the kids in that classroom all the standards for that unit and give them all the resources that they would need, both human and material and online and say, all right, you've got six weeks. I'll be here if you need me. Go. And let them prove mastery in their own way. And sure enough, they did, you know, and now he's doing it over and over. But those are the kind of, I think, examples I'd highlight. But again, what's true about those is you've got leadership that's on board and, and stay and hanging around. You know, you've got courage because there's pushback always, you know, when change happens and, and you've just got folks who have rolled up their sleeves and are committed, you know, for the long haul.
Celebrating Self-Directed Learning Guide
Michael Horn
Well, and that is a worthwhile goal. We will leave it there. But Tyler, thanks so much for coming on. Congrats on the book, the Playbook for Self Directed Learning: A leader's guide to School Transformation and Student Agency. Something worth aspiring to. Appreciate the work you're doing on the ground online at the Institute and now with this book. Thanks so much.
Tyler Thigpen
Thank you, Michael. Great chatting with you. And all the best.
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Patricia Levesque, CEO of ExcelinEd, and Ben DeGrow, Senior Policy Director of Education Choice at ExcelinEd, join me to delve into the evolving landscape of educational choice. Our discussion centered on the uptick in states implementing educational savings accounts (ESAs) and the various questions surrounding their implementation, specifically academic accountability, financial safeguards, and effective program management. Levesque and DeGrow discussed the need for a balance between broad policy frameworks and practical regulations. I keep learning a lot from these conversations around this fast-growing space of choice and personalization—and hope you all do as well.
Michael Horn
You are joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through this pressing set of issues today, I'm incredibly excited. We have people I've worked with for many years, looked up to for many years, who are going to lend a lot of insight on the topic of educational choice in particular, but they could talk about so much more. So first, Patricia Levesque, the CEO of ExcelinEd..
Patricia, great to see you. Thanks for joining.
Patricia Levesque
Thanks for having us.
Michael Horn
And then Ben DeGrow, the senior policy director of Education Choice at ExcelinEd., Ben, good to see you as well.
Ben DeGrow
Thanks. Great to be with you.
Michael Horn
I've been looking forward to this conversation since y'all reached out on the topic of educational choice and the contours of that conversation and the really interesting debates that are going on right now around implementation as so many states dive into this world in a much more meaningful way over the last several years. And before we get into those conversations, maybe let's just like zoom out, high level. Patricia, let's start with you. And then, Ben, jump in. Look, a lot of states are moving, you know, not just into school choice, educational choice. We see education savings accounts getting a lot of attention, a lot of movements toward universal choice at that.
There have been movements, I think, in Tennessee and Texas in recent weeks. There were setbacks at the polls in November. What's your current assessment if you just look high level of where we are in the world of education choice and this movement, broadly speaking, and perhaps maybe a little bit of forecasting, where you think we will be by the end of the year?
Patricia Levesque
Sure. I'll start by saying I think we are in a great position in educational choice and opportunity for families. The best that we've been in my 28 years working on this policy. Right. And Michael, me just start by saying the way you introduce this podcast, the mission of this podcast is like the mission of private school choice or educational choice. It's giving families the ability to find the best education fit for their child. So their child, because we believe kids are individuals, they're very unique, and not one system or one school is the right, best fit for every child. So empowering families with that opportunity is what we.
What we like to do with policy. And we're in the best position on that, in the country that we've been in as long as I can remember.
Michael Horn
Ben, what would you add in terms of where we are at this moment and maybe give us a sense of how many states have moved into different, you know, really embracing real choice at this point?
Ben DeGrow
Yeah, I think we're at a real major inflection point. I feel like every year we've been saying this is the year of school choice for several years and every year it just seems to be more true Than the year before.
And I mean at ExcelinEd we cover a whole gamut of choice in the public and private space. But we're just going to hone in on private education choice. We're not talking more than 30 states that are offering at least some students either a voucher scholarship or tax credit scholarship from USA and we're coming up on just over a dozen states that are offering all students, regardless of income, regardless of background, access to funds. Personally, we dive into the nuances of that. It can be, you know, how much funding is available, for how many students and so forth. But with states like Tennessee passing, in Texas, we're on the verge of having the majority of students, the United States eligible for private school choice, which is something we hardly could have imagined five years ago.
Michael Horn
All right, so with that as backdrop, lot of momentum in this direction each year sort of surpassing the previous one as you said,Ben, let's flip to implementation from the outside. I will say there are a surprising number of debates around how to put these various policies into place in the states. Let's maybe start with accountability. Patricia, you wrote what I think remains the most nuanced and thoughtful take about accountability. I use it all the time on the stump with this continuum between sort of district run public schools to public charters to full on educational choice options and how we think about accountability and transparency mechanisms in each. Just take us through your logic on that and how you think about the accountability conversation right now.
Academic Accountability vs. School Autonomy
Patricia Levesque
Sure. And let me put a finer point and say we're really talking about the academic accountability, right? Not fiscal or health, safety, general welfare, things like that. And so we get asked often, how can Excelined have a position where students in the public school system should have to take a state test and there should be accountability or grading of public schools. Yet in private school choice or education choice, we advocate a more flexible norm referenced assessment model. And the answer to that is that there is a continuum of accountability versus autonomy. And so if you think about the ends of the spectrum, you have at one end a home education parent using their own funds to teach their own child. Right. And we would say there should be a very, very light touch of the state in that interaction between that parent and that child.
From an academic accountability standpoint, the other end of the continuum you have the traditional public school system, which is the default system. It's the compulsory system. It's the system that is federal, state and local taxpayer funded. It is a system that has taxing authority and, and sovereign immunity protections. Right. It is the big muscular system that the state needs to ensure learning is going on. Right. That kids are learning how to read and do math because the state or another government entity is compelling you to place your child in that system and telling you which school to go to.
Florida Scholarship Program's Academic Balance
Patricia Levesque
Right. And so there's a vested interest in the state ensuring there's some academic accountability in the system. If you move along the spectrum to publicly funded private school choice, and I'd put that right about in the middle of the system, what is the right balance between academic accountability, transparency and autonomy of the school? And so I would point your listeners to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program. It is the program that has been in place the longest of all the statewide school, private school choice programs has served more than a million students and for 23 years only served low income students. So you have the largest, longest running program targeted for at risk kids that has had 13 years of solid academic outcomes. So by looking at norm referenced assessments, we can see that the students in that program are learning just as well or better than in many years their low income public school peers. We saw the Urban Institute do one of the longest, largest studies of 85,000 matched kids and saw incredible outcomes.
Post high school college going rates, college completion rates. So if the largest, longest running program has good outcomes, what does that program doing? How do we know if that program has the right balance? And I would say you look at parental participation, private school participation and outcomes which we just talked about. And if you look at the Tax Credit Scholarship program, it was always oversubscribed. There were always more parents every year that wanted to get into the program. And there was a very good balance of private school participation. So 80 plus percent of private schools in the state of Florida chose to participate in the program. That's very different than in very heavily regulated programs like the Louisiana Scholarship program where barely 30% of the private schools chose to participate. Right.
So you have strong parental participation, strong private school participation and good outcomes. Those to me give you three green check marks that that what that program is doing has a good balance. And that program is norm referenced assessment on the students you're participating with, the results reported back to the parent so they can see how their own child is doing and data reported back so the state can see how is the program doing as a whole. So we know that the taxpayer funds are being used well, and that's a really good balance.
Michael Horn
Ben, if you want to add anything there, I guess the one question I have is the reason norm reference instead of, say, criterion reference or something else? Because we really want to understand the counterfactual. Is that the reason for that? Because we want the comparison.
Testing Flexibility and Accountability Guardrails
Ben DeGrow
It definitely helps because while a lot of lawmakers want to see that direct comparison between their scholarship students and their state public school students, what a norm referenced test offers is the ability to compare with a national sample of students so we can have some credible measure. But it also allows schools to choose tests that more closely align with their curriculum. So they are actually offering, you know, genuine options and alternatives for students and inviting participation for these schools into these programs. So it is less of a deterrent than mandating the state test as the sole instrument. I would also add, when we think about accountability, the evolution from the traditional volunteer scholarship into the ESA has put an added emphasis also on the need for fiscal accountability. As we think about what kind of guardrails do you need to put in place as families have more flexibility to spend money on things beyond just private school tuition, but also an array of goods and services. And every state, as I set up an ESA program, has to think through these things. And part of the work we do in implementation and our ESA administrator network and areas like that is to help states which are already, the administrators are already very focused on making sure those guardrails are high is to help them balance that consideration with the need of families who are driving the creation of these programs, and that's probably an area we can delve into more.
Michael Horn
Well, I think that's a perfect launching point, right, because that's one of the big conversations. Maybe let's start like where these ESA programs even live and how you manage them and how you help families access the dollars and their set of choices. We see, you know, Step up for Students in Florida. We see Odyssey in other states some places the Department of Ed is trying to do this work directly. How do you all think about where these programs live and who manages them?
Ben DeGrow
It's one of the first and most important decisions to be made when crafting An ESA policy and one that gets easily overlooked, especially in the early days. State lawmakers, policymakers would think, well, we just obviously put this in the Department of Education, right, because it's an education program within our ESA administrator network, which encompasses about 20 states. And we bring these program managers in to share best practices, to share technical resources with one another, hear the same common issues and concerns that they're dealing with. We have representatives from Departments of Education, we have Departments of Treasury, we have agencies that oversee that some states do, the higher ed financing authorities. And we also have nonprofit organizations like you referenced, Step up for Students, Children's Scholarship Fund and most recently ACE Scholarships. We have over time come to see that these nonprofit agencies are probably the preferable option to run them because they're not only mission driven, they get involved in this because they believe in the power of opportunity and choice for kids and families. We also have the flexibility to adapt to the needs as these programs scale up. That includes personnel decisions about contracting out to review expenses or other things along those lines.
So flexibility, mission driven. We like to see nonprofits, but we'll work with all agencies and help them work on focusing on that student centered, customer driven approach.
Michael Horn
One of the other things that this then raises the window is right, what can you spend on how far afield, right, how wide you make the sets of choices? You talked about balancing the desires of parents with the state's concern. I imagine some of what Patricia was talking about in terms of what's the participation of various providers is also an interesting data point. And thinking about getting that balance right, what's your own take around how flexible and how much freedom you give families to spend on whatever they want, that connects to education? And then my assumption, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, is the further afield you get out from the topics that a norm reference test would measure, the less relevant those sort of external markers become. And it's more about the parent understanding. Did my child make the progress I had hoped for?
Ben DeGrow
I will say we again, we would always want to focus on making sure that we're trying as a lot of our ESA administrators that we work with, their goal is to try to get to yes and help serve parents needs and make sure that they are getting the services, the goods they need. Whether it's curriculum, whether it's tutoring, whether it's a therapy for a child with dyslexia or autism, transportation to an education program. Every state has a lot of the same allowable expenses, but every state's a little different in the nuance and what's allowable and what's not. And that starts in the statute and it comes down to the level, how it's interpreted at the agency that's administering. So lots of challenges. We would say do the best you can to get to yes, but I recognize that you need clarity for families. So if you're going to set up guardrails, and you should set up guardrails.
For example, if a child needs a laptop for educational purposes, how often should they be able to purchase a laptop? Do they really need one every year? And an agency could say, well, we'll allow one every three years, for example, to make sure that families are balancing that the vast majority of families are legitimately working to help get goods and services to their child that they need. And so really the agency has to police the boundaries of those, that small percentage of people who might want to misuse the system. But we want to make sure that all those guardrails are in place that focuses on helping families get to the yes.
Patricia Levesque
And Michael, I would add to that. I think Ben was focusing on, you know, those kind of discrete expenditures that are maybe some of them are on the periphery. I would like to point out too that what private schools are eligible is also, you know, an actual difference of opinion in some states, there are some recent states that decided, well, the way that we're going to ensure that it's a real, for real private school is the schools have to be accredited. And what that essentially does in many states is cut out half of the supply that exists in the state or even the opportunity for some of the newer types of models like micro schools to be able to participate. Whereas what you see in a state like Florida is that there is more of a checklist of. Here are the 10 things that we want to see to ensure that you are private school to participate.
Ensuring Accountability in Education Policies
Patricia Levesque
We want to see background checks on the instructional personnel and we want to see that you've gotten your fire inspection or your health inspection or your radon inspection. There's more of a list of health, safety, general welfare, financial, you know, accountability type of provisions. And we do a site inspection and then, yes, you're eligible to participate. When we work with states on policy design, before it even gets to the bill passed and you're implementing, we would encourage states to be broader in the types of entities or institutions that can participate. It'll bring a healthier marketplace into existence in your state and actually give families more opportunities and options and there's still again a balance. Right? I think you're going to hear us say that word often. How much do you open up the market? How much do you have to do you narrow the market? So there's quote accountability. I think there's a good healthy balance in all of these things.
Michael Horn
So let's actually stay with that, Patricia, because what you just raised in thinking about that balance, it suggests that maybe there's another principle as states are starting to look at this, which is, and I want to check myself here, but in the policy itself, start broad, don't over prescribe, but know that when you get into the regulation there's a good deal more work to be done. And that's where you know, figuring out where you're assigning the, you know, what, what entity is going to manage this, the guardrails you're going to put up, striking the balance. Is that how you would think about it? Is like start broad and then sort of hone in on, on the finer details as you get into the specifics of operationalizing. Or is there a better approach as states are looking at these various policies right now in your, in, in both of your view?
Patricia Levesque
I agree. Broad is better for the, especially the places and the institutions and the tutors and the therapists that you start broader so that you have a lot of opportunity out there for families. I think what we would also say is ESAs are not brand new creations anymore. Right. They've been around for a while. You have a program like the state of Florida where there's 500,000 students that have been awarded for next school year either a full ESA or what some people call micro grants. Right. It's just for transportation or just for reading tutoring or, or math tutoring.
But that's a lot of information and data over multiple years on what you know, different policy prescriptions make it easier for families to access as well as give whomever is the, you know, administering agency enough guidelines so that they know how to administer the program well and that goes to not only just what kind of schools, but what's the window for parents to apply? What is the order like it, I think states that prescribed specific time frames of this student gets eligible on this date before this next group. All of those add administrative challenges to getting a program off the ground or making it parent friendly. Right, family friendly each year as parents have to enroll or re-enroll their child.
Ben DeGrow
I would concur. I mean there's definitely always a temptation to write legislation that can become too prescriptive. But at the same time using that word balance, you do have to include some level of detail to identify the categories of things families can spend money on to demonstrate legislative intent. And once you get down to that next level, that's as Patricia was suggesting, the administrative challenges pop into place. For those of us who've worked in the field of policy for length of time, we always talk about how there's a gap between what's written on paper and what gets put into practice from the implementation. Now I don't see anywhere where that's more true than ESAs. We created programs that originally were designed to serve students with special needs or learning challenges. In Arizona and Florida, the earliest programs, really around the principle of giving families the ability to customize, recognizing that each child is unique and has individual needs.
And so trying to define exactly what families can spend money on in statute is impossible. And you do the best you can to kind of identify and categorize those things. But as you get down from statute into the program rules and then to the policy handbooks and then the actual day to day decisions as they review expenses and things, it has to be a way to find that individual child's means within clear, consistent, transparent guardrails. And that's. It's an ongoing challenge. But we're seeing states grow in this area and get, and get better at it over time.
Michael Horn
Yeah. And so I guess the principles don't sort of cut off the ability to tick and tack and get it right from the get go. Start with some models that are already out there that are pretty proven at this point. One of the pieces that's getting a lot of conversation right now is around the funding piece at the moment. There's, you know, it moves beyond special needs students to universal choice. There's been a lot of conversation about, well, it says universal choice, but a lot of these programs are not funded such that they could serve every single student in the state. Or there's a lot of double funding. Right.
Where we continue the funding flow to districts. We have a separate line item in effect around the ESAs that are getting created. How do you think, you know, a state getting into this should do it? Is there a right way to maybe baby step and then grow into this? Is that an evolution or is it get it right from the get go? How do you both think about the funding piece of this and how it should be set up?
Phased Approach to Education Funding
Ben DeGrow
There's no one perfect script or roadmap for states, but there are some good principles for states to consider as they're going down this path and, and lots of factors are going to help determine it. Even for those who want to make the opportunity available to as many students as possible as soon as possible, we recommend states, you know, step back and think about the fiscal impacts and the administrative challenges. So phasing in a program over multiple years is something several states have tried, and that usually just means phasing in the eligibility. So in year one, you are only including students up to a certain income level or students who previously attended a public school or otherwise limiting, you know, maybe the, the amount or the number of slots available. We don't want that to deter the ultimate goal, which is to create a system that's open to everyone and a system that creates a fair, equitable funding for students regardless of which path their families choose for them, even if it takes three or four years to get there. The other thing we're looking at more and more seriously is helping states think about. And some states are doing this to some degree, but most states have a lot of work to do is serving the students who bring like, low income challenges, learning challenges, and helping to fund them at a rate that's right,
Reflects that to make them more, you know, palatable, to have more options to, to access private schools. But also they may need more services along the lines of tutoring or just support navigating the system. So building that phase and plan, building an equitable system are two of the things we help states think about.
Patricia Levesque
And I would say over the long run, you need to contemplate where do you want to be 10 years from now? Right? Do you want to. I think Florida is one of the few states where the funding is built into the funding formula. So when the legislature meets, they're basically funding the public school and educational opportunities in one funding formula. And it's based on estimates of, you know, how many students are going to be in, in each of the different systems. And it's more of an automatic process where in many states it's a line item that has to be adjusted every single year that you're in a legislative session. And I think those, it's not that those are bad. I mean, I think it's wonderful that that's the way programs have been able to get off the ground. But if you really want to have a system where it's going to grow based on where parents decide and how the systems evolve, it probably needs to be more of an automatic type of formula that's Set up what Ben talked about in either system, in the public system and in your choice system, students that have higher needs, low income students or special needs students should generate more funding, whether they're going to a public school, a public charter, or taking a scholarship with them to a, to a private opportunity.
Those types of things are going to be really important to have built into your, your funding streams and how you think about having the program work.
Michael Horn
Yeah, it strikes me that it allows for scale, Right, organically as demand grows in either sector, I guess in either direction, but particularly in the choice one. It also occurs to me and Patricia, I'd love your take on this, that Florida, because of just the number of years of choice that you all have had. Like if I think back to how Florida Virtual School got started back in the 90s or early 2000s, if memory serves, it got written, I think into the state funding formula in like 03 or something like that. But it was still like a hold harmless double funding for like some number of years, I want to say. And so maybe that's like a baby step in Florida just because of the experience in years that has been able to really move to that full fledged model that you'd want to see ultimately. Thoughts on that?
Patricia Levesque
I do think started small and slow, you know, very, very small. Right. The first private school choice in the state of Florida, that was called the Opportunity Scholarship Program, only for students in failing schools. I think the first year had 42 students in it. Right. The first in Florida, special needs voucher. The first year only had two students in it because it was, you know, assigned to one county. But then the programs grew, the eligibility grew, or the region grew, or allowing a student to stay in the program if they met initial eligibility requirements.
All of those things allowed the program to grow slowly. And so what you see in Florida is a really mature ecosystem. I think for other states that are going from zero to universal in one or two years, they might have more hiccups like normal things like how do you make sure the private schools feel comfortable participating and receiving public funding? How do you communicate? How do parents find out about these programs? A lot of those things. There, there, there's going to be a lot of really heavy lifting quickly for implementation. And that's what makes, I think, the work that Ben does, having a network of mature ESA administrators and the very young new ones learning and sharing with each other. What are those best practices? What do you have in your handbook? How do you define what we sometimes refer to as gray area expenses. How do you treat them Arizona versus how do you treat them Florida? And it can really educate a new administrator as they're having to make some of these decisions quite quickly in order to get a new program off the ground.
Michael Horn
Ben, maybe just talk a little bit about that work and what it looks like on the ground. Right. And for those unfamiliar with what you're doing with those states and how they're supporting each other, just to give a view of, as Patricia just said, to rapidly, right, gGet these programs off the ground. When you know it passes in legislature and a couple months later you expect to have something up and going for families.
Ben DeGrow
Yeah, it's a venture that takes a lot of humility and cooperation because no state has really mastered this and completely figured this out. But as Patricia is suggesting, some states are more mature in the things they've learned and are able to share those lessons with others. So we work through something called the ESA Administrator Network, which ExcelinEd created back in 2020. And we're now up to 20 states participating in any, any state that's kind of overseeing a complex parent directed spending program. Whether it's a full fledged ESA where families can use their funds for private school tuition and or these other education expenses, or we have a handful of states that operate micro grants or supplemental ESAs that are smaller allotments where families can just spend on certain services. There's a lot to learn so we come together multiple times a year with the group and share our learnings and have them share formal learnings in these settings. And just a lot of conversation.
Resource Sharing for Program Implementation
Ben DeGrow
The feedback we get is all the conversations that they have with each other during the off program time is where they get a lot of value out of it. But we also try to keep in touch with them in multiple ways. And then we collect the technical resources and documents and things that it takes to get these programs off the ground. Whether it's contracts with vendors, RFPs to help secure the vendors, whether it's handbooks for parents and providers and marketing materials and half a dozen other things. We collect and share those resources with new states, especially as they're coming on board, and we try to give it to them in small doses to help them think about the next step. We also came up with an ESA implementation guide drawing on the wisdom of our some of our veteran states and leaders. And we use that as well kind of highlight the steps, all the steps you have to think about to get from we pass the legislation to now we can start a program and there's a lot to think about and a lot of lessons that we are continuously learning alongside them.
Patricia Levesque
I'll give you one specific example. I won't name the state. There's a state that had a brand new ESA and the administrator was really concerned and said we're going to need to delay the launch of the ESA because we did an open call for providers, vendors to get signed up and we, and we only had a handful of vendors signed up. We can't launch the program if we don't have vendors signed up pre approved in the system. And it was really helpful to have another state that had one year of implementation already under their belt to be able to say don't worry about getting vendors or providers pre approved. The parents will bring you the providers. Right? The parents, once they choose a school or a tutor or wherever they want, they'll make sure their provider gets into your system. So it was really reassuring to have that lived experience of that, you know, one year more mature administrator giving the new one kind of that reassurance. Don't worry about that. When you're, you're fine, you're fine.
Michael Horn
It's a great story and I love it also because it shows that, you know, we don't have to have all the answers from the top, the bottom. Right. The parents, the actual demand can, can bring us the supply if you will, over time as well. Last question, maybe as we wrap up here, there are several other areas I know we could geek out on and work through. The other one that I've heard come up in a few different ways recently is around financial safeguards and specifically like curtailing providers from unreasonably inflating their tuition. And on one side you have folks saying like, hey, and I literally just heard this anecdote about a provider in Florida actually being like, I'm raising my tuition by 7K or whatever, you know, the amount of the ESA because now I can, there's, there's public money. I'd be foolish to just leave that on the table.
And then some states that have said look, if we see a price hike like that, we're going to take action. You know, that's not okay. And others being like it should work out in the end because if you're talking about an esa, it's effectively a wallet. And so parents, you know, supply, demand can sort of take over over time. And maybe they do that in short term, but over time. Right, it should rebalance. How do you guys think about that conversation and where states ought to land, because it pertains directly to the ultimate thing around how do we get supply and really participating supply right in, in these marketplaces?
Inflation, Tuition, and Scholarships
Ben DeGrow
I'll take, I'll take the first crack at it. I think one of the lessons we take away is, well, first of all, there might always be isolated operators who will try to do that. If you look at the larger data trends, what we see in Florida, for example, is more correlation between rates of inflation and tuition than we do the advent of scholarship program or no scholarship program or universal access to scholarship programs. There's basically two effects that work and this is why we push states toward a more open, competitive model. There's, of course, the subsidy affect you talk about. As you give families more access to funds and they have more funds to put in the marketplace, it can encourage providers to raise the price. But there's also competitive effects that can offset that. So if we, if we set up a program like Florida or Arizona or Utah, New Hampshire, a lot, much of these states where families can use the funds not just on a narrow set of private schools, but a broad marketplace that includes private schools of different varieties, as well as micro schools and hybrid options and homeschooling and customized services.
The more competition you put into the market, the more it deters individual providers from trying to game the system. So there's never going to be a perfect solution. But an open approach like some of these states are doing is one way we see to really to address that problem.
Patricia Levesque
Yeah, I would agree with Ben and just say that we hear those anecdotal stories, right? There's one school here that's going to immediately raise tuition to eat up the full amount of the ESA. But the only state where we have a lot of data over many years is Florida. And so looked at 11 years worth of almost 2000 private schools and looked at their, their actual tuition increases based on the data, and we looked at the average increase each year and then looked at the prior 12 months of inflation data, and it's exactly what Ben said, is that private schools really, you can see their tuition increases are very much in line with inflation. The other thing that when we talked with private school operators in the state of Florida and asked about what's going on with tuition, this is what we're hearing from lawmakers. And they pointed out something else really interesting, which is in the state of Florida, at the same time lawmakers have been increasing educational opportunities through universal ESAs, they've also been purposefully putting billions of dollars into the public school system to create higher minimum teacher pay in the public school system. And so the private schools have been saying the only way we are, we're losing teachers to the public system because their salaries can be so much more, because taxpayers are funding, right, greater teacher salaries in the public system.
The only way we can be competitive and keep or recruit teachers is to increase tuition, because that's probably primarily how we fund teacher pay. So it's really interesting. A lot of the states that are doing ESAs for parents on one hand, are also doing increases in minimum or starting teacher pay, which distorts the market a little bit as well.
Michael Horn
It's interesting and it makes me think sort of in the higher ed world also, right. In terms of title4 federal financial aid, but those can only be spent on colleges and universities. It strikes me that the other thing that's unique about the space is it's not just a private school option, but I could be going to a micro school for two days, tutoring for two days, some menu of services, and sort of the fragmentation of that can actually really be, I would think, a downward price. And then as you said, Patricia, at the same time, sort of competing with, with the public marketplace choices for teachers in terms of where they're teaching. It's a very complicated landscape to almost overthink as a policymaker.
Right. And when you look at, even in that Florida data, even though you're looking at averages and average private school tuition increases each year, you can see also by what percent of private schools didn't raise tuition at all in a given year. Right. And so, and what is the base that their tuition is starting out from? So, a Catholic school that was only charging $3,500 a year. Right. It looks like a huge tuition increase for them to just do $1,000 increase, but it's still half of what the scholarship amount is or what the average is. I think it becomes really risky if policymakers want to put in artificial caps that could have such a different impact based on all the different range of providers and really can't take into account historical increases or what was the base that you even started from. All of those types of things will only depress the vibrancy or the ability to have a really vibrant market.
And we have to recognize that there is still a governor on all of this, and that's the parent. The parent knows how much their scholarship was awarded for. They know what the private school tuition was before the scholarships came into effect, and they're going to be pretty upset at the private school where they thought that they were only going to have, you know, the delta of what they were going to have to cover was only going to be $1,000. And now it's not. You know, there's parents actually are quite vocal on this stuff with policymakers and with their private schools because now they have the power, right, to be vocal on behalf of their child.
Michael Horn
A lot of checks and balances built in there. I think that's a good place to leave this conversation. It's been a whirlwind through a lot of issues that get a lot more complex that you all are working on on a daily basis. I know, but just really appreciate it. I think one thing I will also take away from this is not only is there not a one size fits all kid, if you will, there's not one size fits all suppliers. And so to have a one size fits all rule to treat them has some pretty big downsides. And same place on the academic accountability conversation, really understanding the context is very important as we think about putting policies in place. So, Patricia, Ben, really appreciate your time and the work you continue to do.
And for all you tuning in, we'll be back. Next time on the Future of Education.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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James Rhyu, CEO of Stride Inc., joined me for a thought-provoking conversation in their 25th-year of operations. Rhyu shared his journey from accountant to CEO of Stride, Inc. He emphasized the importance of viewing students as customers. We then delved into the potential of online learning to overcome stigmas and serve diverse student needs, including safety and flexibility for those struggling with their mental health. We also explored Stride's investments in technology and career skills, as well as personalization.
Michael Horn
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn. And you're joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through how we get there, I'm really delighted that we have James Rhyu, the CEO of Stride Inc. For those of you that don't know, you may remember Stride's former name, K12 Inc. Back in the day, when I got in this world and co-authored Disrupting Class, K12 was the big player on the block, if you will, helping to think about how digital learning could really open up opportunities for individuals that had not had it in the conventional school system. The company's continued to evolve quite a bit, rebranded as Stride, has a number of offerings. We're going to get into all of that and more because this is Stride's 25th birthday, if you will. 25th anniversary. So, James, thanks so much for joining me and having this conversation.
James Rhyu
Thanks for having me, Michael. Appreciate it.
Michael Horn
Yeah, you bet. So let's just start high level because I suspect people tuning in will know some of the history, but maybe not your history. And so tell us about your own path into becoming the CEO of Stride.
James Rhyu
Yeah, sure. At first, I would say this is the first time I've ever been CEO of a company. So I'm still sort of a rookie at the job, you know, learning as I go. You know, I mean, I started as an accountant, you know, tell people the only real profession I guess I'm really qualified for is accounting. I was, and I was probably average at best at that maybe. But, you know, so I sort of obviously said, then I came up through the finance, you know, end of the company. And I always like to tell people I was not a very good student. I was sort of a C student and, you know, so running an education company, I don't even know if it's a bad thing, but I take us maybe a slightly different lens to running the company.
Having been sort of not such a great student, I've never been an educator, which again, I don't say necessarily think is a bad thing, but it certainly puts a different lens on how to run the company. I think, you know, the education system in this country hasn't produced, I think, the outcomes societally that we want, probably. And so I think coming from a different angle or a different perspective, you know, has some benefits, I think, you know, so anyway, So I came to the company 13, 14 years ago and I came on the financial side. I was the CFO. I had come from previously that to that I was with a company called match.com. I think a lot of people have heard of Match and I was very fortunate to be there when we started this little app called Tinder and sort of helped sort of explode online dating. And I always say that it's somewhat relevant that experience because people maybe of my generation remember, but a lot of people don't remember it, online dating used to have a huge stigma to it.
Like it's now very commonplace and you know, you don't really have a lot of stigma associated with anymore, but it used to have a lot of stigma associated with it. And I think online learning or different modalities of learning, certainly different angles to take at education, they have some stigma associated with it. And I think the ability to overcome that stigma is one of the things that I think is important for Stride, certainly, in K12. And I think that you know, just like in online dating, it can produce amazing results for people if we can overcome some of that stigma. And so I was a CFO here for a number of years and there was some CEO transition. And you know, most, most companies go through like sort of succession planning. And about a year before, more than a year, almost, probably almost two years before I became CEO, the then CEO at the time, who's a mentor of mine, Nate, continues to be a mentor and friend of mine, he approached me on behalf of the board and said, would you consider being the CEO? And I actually said no for a fairly long time.
You know, like I said, I was an accountant. I was very grateful to have been the CFO. You know, a lot of accountants don't even get to reach that professional summit, I guess, and, and I just never thought of myself as a CEO. I really thought of myself as a finance professional. And it took some number of months before I sort of convinced myself to throw my hat in the ring for the job. And obviously I ended up getting the job. I think what the board saw at least, and you know, I'm now four years into the job, hopefully they continue to see is one is I have a real passion for the job. Meaning, you know, and I really consider this job a job where irrespective of the company, we have a set of current and potential future customers.
And our job, my job is to try to meet the needs of those current and future customers. And I think that will in enure great benefit for our shareholders and stakeholders. And so really that's sort of how I view my lens to the job is really sort of a customer focus. And I say that very specifically. And in this company, when I became CEO, I really, I'll say it sounds weird, but I introduced really the word, the term customer into this company. And I think, I think largely it should be introduced into the education vernacular more broadly because, and specifically In K through 12 education, you know, we think of them as students. That's fine. And by the way, you know, they are students, but they're also customers.
Rethinking Education as Customer Service
James Rhyu
And I think if we thought of them in that way, you know, the establishment of K through education has long thought, I think of their customers largely as an entitlement. And structurally there's a reason for that because you've got one school in a geographic area and that school really has dominion over the students in that area. And so you didn't really have to work for your customers in a way, right? They were an entitlement to you because you live in that area and historically you live in that area, you go to that school and that's still sort of pervades today for 90 plus percent of the population in the country. And so you can see why that framework established this entitlement sensibility, if you will. But in most other aspects of our lives, we want to be treated as customers. And the reason we want to be treated as customers is because when you're treated as a customer, there's this, there's a sort of two way dialogue, if you will, it's not always explicit, but you know, there's this push-pull of what's best for the customer. What does the customer want? What does the customer need? What outcomes does the customer want? Right. Like if you're running a restaurant and you're a dietitian running a restaurant, you may be like, okay, well I know what's best for the customer. You know, low calorie, high protein, you know, low fat, right.
Michael Horn
We're cutting out those sugars, we're going to get the right oils, et cetera, et cetera.
James Rhyu
Yeah, but if you listen to your customers, your customers might say, you know, actually the reason I eat out is because on a special occasion or whatever, I want to indulge maybe a little bit, or I want to try something that I can't make at home or that's different for me or whatever. And maybe health isn't the most important thing in that circumstance. And as the customer, you know, restaurants listen to that and obviously you have this wide variety of offerings and choice that enables what customers want and the outcomes that are important to them. And I think that's really important. If, you know, if you sort of put that lens on, on education, then you have some different perspectives, I think maybe than historically we've had. And even when you think about, you know, and I know you're probably going to maybe get into this further along, but you know, if you think about the outcomes that people want and you think about my restaurant example, I don't know, like a lot of the educators and people are going to say, oh, you know, but you know, eating is different than education. Of course it is. They're all different.
Every customer experience is different. But I would argue health is pretty important and education is pretty important. So, you know, we're talking about, I think, comparable outcomes, you know, healthy people and educated people, you know, and I think that if you think about that sort of analogy, sometimes what the customer wants isn't actually a healthy diet. And in our country, if we listen to our customers, unfortunately a lot of families aren't in the position where the most important thing to them is getting an A and going to Harvard. Sometimes the more important thing to them is survival, is actually the high school diploma which allows them entree into a job or a field that requires a high school diploma that helps them put food on the table for their family. So the outcome often that we think about is, oh, well, you know, you have to get good grades maybe. And of course that's important. And of course learning is important.
I say more importantly, learning is important and learning skills is important. And hopefully real world skills that you can apply later in life are important. But in some families' cases, I think we have to remember that the grade, and particularly high achieving grades, A's are not always the most important. And I think again, just taking that lens of like, what does the customer really want, what's important to the customer, how can we deliver for that customer is really important. And so go, sorry, I know I drifted a little bit, but going, yeah, this is helpful. Yeah, yeah, about how I got into the job. So, you know, like, whatever, I, you know, I almost begrudgingly accepted the job because I thought I could take a little bit of a different lens to what we're trying to do and expand how we think about our customers. And I think that sort of was important to me.
Michael Horn
Yeah, well, I want to lean into that angle because I think there's a few things there that you said that, that I just want to key off on one sort of, you labeled yourself. And I don't know if it's true or not, but as a C student. But it certainly gives you a window into the people that are not being well served by the traditional system, maybe being taken for granted. Maybe they are motivated by other things. Right. Engaged by other things.
From our research on what customers want and motivation and so forth, I don't think there's anyone who's unmotivated. They're just not motivated to buy what the system is offering.
James Rhyu
What family doesn't want their child to succeed, I mean, in whatever. However they define that.
Michael Horn
Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah.
James Rhyu
However they define it, they want their child to succeed.
Michael Horn
Yeah. And I think that's a big thing. And I guess let's follow that energy because as you know, like one of the big criticisms, I don't think you're hearing it as much at the moment, but certainly five, seven, eight years ago in the field of the virtual schooling in particular, that you all helped define that landscape was that large numbers of students weren't being served well. You could look at student outcomes on test scores and things of that nature and make certain assertions. And then people had different explanations for what's going on. Right. They ranged from, oh, you know, virtual schooling isn't good for folks to, oh, some of these companies maybe are not investing enough in teacher professional development or you know, the teaching experience to, uh, what else was there? You know, something, you know, things around the curriculum and stuff like that. Right.
And so I'm just sort of curious. You've made the point that individuals, when, you know, and families, when they come to a virtual school specifically, you know, their top priority might be help my kid get out of a bullying situation. Right. This is no good right now. And yes, we want them to learn, but we just need to get them back on course right now. How do you think about those as competing with, say, the learning outcomes that critics like to point to? And how do you think we ought to be measuring it?
Politics in Education: A Concern
James Rhyu
Unfortunately, I think sometimes we let politics creep too much into our education system, and I think it's really unfortunate political agendas, you know, when I hear people talk about the, the education system and the students in, in terms as if they're like the afterthought, you know, because there's this other agenda here that's more important. I think it's troublesome to me, I would say. And, and by the way, all those critiques that you mentioned, I'll also say I think many of them are fair. Like, I think also, like as a society and as a company, I don't think we should be. I don't want to lean into that sort of political dialogue where, okay, well, now I've got to figure out, I've got to frame the way to like say it in a way that make, you know, sort of like subverts what they've said or end runs what they've said. Like, the reality is we're certainly not perfect.
I think that there's a lot of things we can do better. A lot. I mean, the list of things we can do better is actually longer than the list of things I think we do well. Frankly, I think that again, the customers that choose our types of programs. You mentioned an element of a category. I think that's a much broader category, which is safety. Right. Bullying is an aspect of child safety that parents are worried about.
Gun violence is an aspect of it. There's a lot of aspects of child safety that, where virtual learning is for that family, that customer, that's the most appropriate choice. And I don't think that we should be dictating to those families what's the best choice for them in their particular circumstance. Now I also think that while the criticisms of this company have often been fair, I think that some of them are not completely accurate. And I also think that they're often being levied by the same system that I could easily say .
Michael Horn
Throw the aspersions at it as well.
Investing in Teacher Development
James Rhyu
You know, they have some of the same issues, I think, you know what I mean? So, you know, so I think sometimes it's a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black and, and that to me feels more political than it does so like figuring out what we can do for, for families. We've invested more in the past. I've been the CEO for four years. We invested more in the past four years and in any other four year period in the history of the company across whether it's, you know, our teacher professional development or, you know, new curriculum or new technologies or new platforms. And I think that a lot of what we try to do is also invest in things like the professional developments. Maybe teach professional development is one example where, you know, the, the in person model of, you know, the district professional development days where, you know, the kids get off and the teachers come in, you know, they have people come in and when I talk to teachers a Lot of them say that the subjects aren't often hitting the mark, the day isn't well utilized often. So what we've tried to do is actually invest in an online teaching platform that gives teachers some empowerment to maybe choose the types of professional development they want. You know, not everybody maybe has to do the same thing.
Michael Horn
So their own choice to break out of the one size fits all sort of way.
James Rhyu
They may know better where their areas of improvement are and what they need to sort of lean into and what they're struggling with in their classrooms or you know, whatever the situation may be. And so some of our investments are more towards those types of things than maybe, you know, trying to do it the traditional way. So again, some of the criticism may be fair, like, yeah, oh, they don't do it a certain way. That actually true. Maybe we're taking a different angle to it. And by the way, maybe that angle isn't even perfect yet. Maybe that angle, it has a lot of room for improvements still. But, I do think taking maybe a different lens to them, some of these things is important and I think those are a lot of things that we're trying to invest in.
Michael Horn
Gotcha. Let me ask you this because that's obviously the virtual school conversation, but over the last decade plus really you all have become a much larger company with larger suite of offerings from digital courses for students to career options or career connected learning options and things of that nature. Just like how do you all think of, you know, when you think of what Stride Inc. is today? We've obviously been geeking out in the virtual school portion, but how do you think about it and the portfolio or suite of things that you all offer?
James Rhyu
Yeah. So I think about it just in terms of what's the market we're really trying to address here. Right. And to me the market is the 55 million K12 school age kids in the country that may or may not want something different, by the way, I think many families are actually very satisfied with their situation. But I think that the way that the established system works has probably evolved less than most other sort of large scale categories, if you will, in the country. You know, whether, whether it's, you know, retail or entertainment or you know, whatever it is, it's evolved less. And so I think Stride is a company that really is what we're trying to do is see how can we improve the overall customer experience and outcomes that they want, those customers want across the landscape of 55 million students.
And that is everything from, you know, we're investing now in a, not just a curriculum, and we've been investing in curriculum for a long time, but the platform to deliver the curriculum that allows for just, you know, a little more easier, more intuitive experience. You know, if you can think about like a Netflix type of experience, you know, where, you know, it gives you recommendations based on what you know, what you like in, in an educational sense. More of like recommendations maybe on what you need, what your sort of next step is in, in there maybe a little bit working away from the traditional like chapter 1, 2, 3 of a textbook and more, you know, towards an engaging type of, of experience. I think it's a little more in line with what the customers experience in other parts of their lives as well. Where, I mean, of course, just like I guess everybody else in the world where, you know, we're, we're really thinking about how to invest in AI. I mean, you can't sort of, I think, say anything these days without at least mentioning it. I think our approach to it's a little bit different in the sense that AI, I don't think is actually the answer.
I think including elements of AI in an overall user experience solution is more the answer. You know, you've been in the industry probably around the industry a lot longer than I have actually. So you know, how long have we been talking about like personalized learning and, and how like really today after we can talk and by the way, you know, there's been, you know, tens of billions of dollars of investment in VC money that have gone into education company. How personalized is the actual learning today in schools?
Michael Horn
Not super personalized at all.
James Rhyu
I mean, if you, if you really walk into a classroom, right? I mean just walk into any random classroom and you hopefully you can't just walk into any random classroom.
Michael Horn
Yeah, but when I get to visit and so forth. Yeah, for sure.
James Rhyu
But if you just walk into a random classroom, I mean, I happen to, I live near a school and I have a dog and so I walk my dog actually around school and I, you know, I'm interested, I peer in, you know, there's windows, I peer in, I look. The personalized level of learning that is happening is not, I think, what we thought would happen 15 years ago. Right. And so. Well, how can you personalize learning? I mean, you can't put 30 teachers in a classroom. There's a teacher shortage. I mean, you were barely putting one teacher in every 30 person classroom, let alone, you know, putting 30 teachers in I mean, that would be the real way to personalize it. Right. If you, if you sort of think.
Michael Horn
About the tutor for every child. Yep.
James Rhyu
Right. You can't do that, though. So as much as I know some people really don't like the technology in the classroom and technology taking over education. If we're really going to personalize learning, I think, I do think we have to do it through technology. But I don't think it's just, oh, AI. You know, then everybody says AI. I don't think it's just AI. It's, you know, if, imagine if the student goes into the classroom and the first thing that they, you know, they turn on the computer and the first thing they see is some prompt, though, that says, oh, good morning, Michael.
James Rhyu
How are you feeling today? I mean, that, that little level of personalization, by the way. I mean, if you go, if you're, you know, if you live in a rich place and you know, you're really wealthy and you send your kids to private schools, the private schools, the first thing they do is the headmaster stands out. The school greets every kid, good morning, how are you doing today? Right. That's the first greeting those kids get. Right. And if we can make that part of the opening of every day of every student through technology. And by the way, Michael may say, you know what, I was up late studying for an exam or I was up late watching the super bowl or whatever they were doing. I'm a little tired.
Engagement Through Personalized Learning
James Rhyu
And if the interaction could be, oh, well, in that case, why don't we just take three minutes, watch this video and get up and stretch a little bit before we get into the lesson. That's personalized learning and it has nothing to do with education yet, by the way. Right. But I think that personalizes, and again, that's a more customer centric view of learning, I think, than what maybe the educational norm would suggest is about personalized learning. Right. Because we do know that a kid who's more engaged learns better. And by the way, a kid who can pay attention better is going to be more engaged. By the way, a kid who's tired needs to get, you know, some blood circulating to be able to do that.
So I don't see. There's nothing wrong with having that engagement through the computer. Get up, stretch your arms a little bit, get, you know, get your blood flowing a little bit. Now let's dive into the lesson. And when I say technology and thinking about your customers, it's more those kinds of experiences I think we can bring into the classrooms. And those are the kinds of things that I think Stride would like to invest in and help that experience for those customers improve.
Michael Horn
No, it makes a ton of sense. I mean you're preaching to the choir on a number of fronts as you, as you may know. But among them, as my wife likes to say, when she visited our kids current school and she saw a kid in the middle of a lesson pop up, go outside, run around, take three laps and then get back in. And she was like, what was that? And they were like guess he chose he needed a brain break. And she was like, we're going here. So, I totally dig that example. I'm curious because you all are servicing a lot of curriculum.
There's teacher professional development. You're helping in some cases change the structure of classrooms in traditional schools. You have the virtual school. You've also invested, I think in some career training platforms. You purchased Galvanize right before the pandemic if memory serves correctly, there's a whole bunch of chatter about how coding boot camps are no more or they, they crested and they fallen. I'd love to hear a little bit about the career connection of what you all are doing. And the reason I ask also is just to put my prior out there.
I think we have, in an effort to not lower expectations for kids, we have sucked out the connections to careers and the building of social capital for basically everyone to the detriment of helping people find reason to engage in many cases with the learning and explore and be prepared for the world. So I'm sort of curious how that has filtered in and where things are.
James Rhyu
Yeah. So years ago, before I was a CEO, we strategically saw an opportunity in the career space and specifically in the K through 12 more high school, obviously high school, middle school type for careers. Because you know, and if you think and just put sort of, I'll say career learning, the name we use aside or whatever. But like skills, you know, I think that's really the, really the thing that we're after here. Right. Is providing students the ability to acquire skills at younger ages that are useful in real practical ways post high school graduation. Right. That's, that's the real objective.
If you think about like what we're really trying to do right now in some, in some instances I think that can be a direct correlation of acquire a skill or set of skills leads to maybe a certificate, that certificate leads to a job. And therefore after high School either you don't want to, you're not well qualified for your financially can't afford college, you can go out and earn, you know, a standard of living that can support your family. Right. And I think that's really important, at least strategically for us is to, is to really lean into those skill development side of it. And I think on the flip side of it, I think some people are maybe critical that it's trying to maybe de-emphasize, you know, going to college or the college experience and things like that. And I don't think it has anything to do with that. I think it really has to do with whether a child decides to go to college or not.
Here's one thing we categorically know. Most kids who go to college don't use their college major in the job that they're in. Right. So either way they're going to have to obtain skills for some career that they're going to pursue. And I think the earlier they can acquire those skills, it's going to be better for their lifelong professional journey. And so whether they go to college or not, whether, you know, whether they go to a four year college or a two year college, whether they go right into the workforce and later go to college, there's so many permutations of this. But I think the base level, and by the way you're seeing now led by I think tech companies, but sort of more broadly across industries, companies that are really doing away with the four year college degree requirement and you know, really prioritizing skills and, and I think that that's a trend that's already started. I think it accelerated a little bit during the pandemic.
Enhancing Student Skill Acquisition
James Rhyu
I think it's going to continue to persist. And so our view is that we want to be able to offer those skill acquisition opportunities for students starting at younger grades. Virtually all of our programs now have that opportunity. What I'll go back to where we started with some of the critiques of us, which is I think what we haven't done, so those are available, I think what we haven't done a good enough job of is really ensuring that the holistic view or the holistic support necessary to really enable those students to embrace that we haven't done yet a good enough job of. And I think that's sort of where we'll make some future investments is, you know, they need better guidance and you know, traditional guidance counselors, they usually are focused on, okay, so what credits do you need? What college do you want to go to? And what credits do you need to go to that college? And you know, I think, and if that's what they want, we should provide that to them. But also, I think we should supplement that with, hey, also along the way, you know, if you're interested in cars or, you know, maybe you should take some things in mechanical engineering or whatever.
We know, whatever the thing is, you know, the boot camp specific stuff. We did buy a couple of companies in that space and they were bad acquisitions, unfortunately. I think the, like when we were looking at that space, there was virtually nobody in the entire industry that was making money, by the way. It was entire industry that was losing money. But they had a lot of sort of fanfare and popularity. And we happen to own and operate one or two of the only profitable companies in an industry tech elevator. And there's been some, I think, broader market shifts moving away from those programs. I think the other CEOs that I've spoken to that are participants in that space have all said, you know, volumes are down dramatically.
I think, you know, what they publicly say, maybe what they privately say are a little bit different. But I will tell you that our volumes are down dramatically. I don't necessarily see a recovery, I think because the, I mean, say AI again, but I mean, AI, I think, has at least in the psyche of a lot of people, suggested that maybe those types of jobs, and particularly at the lower levels are not going to be needed as much. And I think that's probably directionally right at some point. So, you know, so I think there's a shift in the marketplace and I think that we got that sort of bet wrong in where that was headed. So shame on us, I think.
But I think that broadly speaking, there's still tremendous opportunity in skilling kids, whether it's through the boot camps or not, or particularly in computer science or not. I think that's sort of the secondary importance. I think the primary importance is kids need to get skills. They need to get skills to give them job opportunities. And we, and I think our country needs to do a better job of focusing in on that. And I think we're going to continue to invest in that. I think it's really important. And I think parents, and if we get it going from a customer perspective, customers want that for their kids.
Educational Choice and Parental Priorities
Michael Horn
Yep. That's where I was going to wrap up is like, as you think about, you know, 25th anniversary Stride Inc, you all have a number of, you know, irons in the fire, if you will, different priorities you've named here. What are you hearing from parents? Right. As we, I think it's fair to say in many states we're shifting to more and more, not just school choice, but educational choice. I think the next few years we'll see a continuation of that for sure. Many of the parents I talk to, I agree, they're fine where they are. And many of them are saying, I'm not relinquishing this choice at this point, but what are their priorities that you're hearing at this point as we wrap up this conversation and how that may impact what Stride Inc. focuses on over the next however many years?
James Rhyu
Yeah, okay, so I, I'm hearing a lot of the same things you are, by the way. I think the research supports it. I think, I saw research recently said something like upwards of 70% of families have considered at least some alternative. But I also hear safety continues to be a big concern for parents. Again, that sort of broad category, whether it's bullying or gun violence, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Mental health is a big concern that I keep hearing from parents. I mean, our customers.
Michael Horn
Stay on that, stay on that for one second because, like, the mental health thing is being so pinned on technology right now. How does that interface for you guys? You're obviously not a smartphone app company, but I'm just sort of curious. Yeah. How do you think about that?
James Rhyu
I don't want to comment on the root cause of our mental health issues in this country because I'm, I actually just don't have the expertise to, and I don't have enough data to really, frankly, to synthesize, to really understand it well enough. But I do know that an increasing number of families that are in programs that we help manage state mental health as an issue with their child. An increasing number of the children themselves are stating mental health you know, and I say set up as a broad category.
Michael Horn
Sure, there can be any number of things underneath.
James Rhyu
Exactly.
Michael Horn
But the point is they're coming to you.
James Rhyu
It is an issue. And I think part of the reason that virtual learning is very attractive for families that have some of these issues is sort of some of the flexibility. Right. So if you have some mental health issues, maybe you can't deal with some of the structure, or maybe you can't deal with some of the social interaction, or maybe you can't deal with the rigidity. And so the flexibility that's offered through virtual learning, sometimes it just, it helps families deal with some of those issues. And, you know, whether they're because of technology or not. Again, I don't really want to delve into that. I think that the reality is unless the government steps in, which, you know, I'm not saying they should or shouldn't, but unless the government steps in and regulates the use of technology for children, which by the way, some countries are doing, the use of technology is only going to continue to increase unless the government steps in and regulates it. So while we may have differing opinions on whether it's a good or a bad thing and kids should be using technology or shouldn't be using technology, the reality of our customers is they are using technology and in increasing ways. And whether the result of that is some of these issues or not.
Michael Horn
You take them as they are,
James Rhyu
They're also using it to help with some of the solutions.
Michael Horn
Got it. Super interesting, James. Just a fascinating conversation. You guys are touching your hands in so many of the cutting edge things. But I think I'll take away from this the voice and intent and motivation of the customer and personalizing around that being two major thrusts as we as, as you all continue to go into this next chapter of growth for Stride Inc. Fair to say,
James Rhyu
Absolutely see you in 25 years. We'll do it again.
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Andrew Clark, president of yes. every kid., joined me to discuss the current landscape of educational choice in the United States. The conversation delved into the rise of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), specifically their widespread adoption and impact on public schooling and education spending. Clark shared insights from his experiences as a lobbyist and argued for the popularity of universal ESAs and the importance of ensuring their successful implementation. The discussion also touched upon accountability within the schooling system, potential pitfalls, and the importance of empowering families to make educational choices.
Michael Horn
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn. And you're joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live a life of purpose as they define it. And to help us think through what that looks like and how we get there, I'm delighted that we have Andrew Clark. He's the president of yes. every kid. We'll learn more about that and their vision for how we advanced truly this learner-centered future in this conversation ahead. But first, Andrew, great to see you. Thanks for being here.
Andrew Clark
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Michael Horn
Yeah, no, you bet. So, like, before we dive in, right. And talk about the work you do, just like think it'll help folks to understand the journey you've taken into this conversation around educational choice, specifically working in education along with the work of what, yes. every kid. does, which of course, it's a 501c4 organization. You don't see those quite as often in education. We see a lot of C3s, so we'll dive into that in a moment. But your purpose really is unleashing the extraordinary potential of every kid by treating them with dignity, empowering them to make decisions for themselves and give voice to every parent, student and teacher who shares that goal. So love to hear your journey into that work and what that work itself looks like.
Andrew Clark
Yeah, of course. So, yeah, 501c4 is a lobbying organization and I am a lobbyist by nature. I'm not an education guy at all. And I like to say education came looking for me. I didn't go looking for it. But the way that that happened is I was working in Arizona, working on state budget issues, and at the time, ESAs were being hotly debated. So there was a small ESA program in the state, one of the very first that have ever passed, in fact, the first. And the debate over the expansion of that program had people thinking it was going to go to the ballot and be a big fight.
Andrew Clark
And so people were asking if we'd be willing to fund that initiative. And I just didn't know a lot about education. And so we started doing a lot of research to see if that was worth getting engaged on because the implications of education spending are significant on state budgets, as you know. And in doing that, what shocked me is when you put together what I'd consider, the more classically Democratic arguments about education and the more classical Republican arguments, the public essentially rejected both arguments pretty soundly.
Michael Horn
Say more.
Andrew Clark
Yeah. So, you know, the traditional argument from Democrats has essentially been public schools are grounded in the community. They just need more money. Right. And if I can just have more money, they'll be fine. And you know, public's great with investing in public education, but they don't think that's the end all be all and they don't think that things can go unchanged. Whereas the Republican argument was essentially like, hey, public schools are terrible and they just need a whole lot of competition. That competition is going to force excellence and test scores and that's what we want.
And the public is dubious on test scores and they don't like the kind of competitive nature of it. Like none of that really resonates either. And so put those two arguments up against each other, there really wasn't any constituency being like, yes, that's what I want.
Michael Horn
Super interesting.
Innovative Policy Strategies Needed
Andrew Clark
To me, that was eye opening going, how do you have a space in which the two competing ideas are both unpopular? As a lobbyist, that's a really weird phenomenon. It just made me say, hey, I think what's going on in this space actually doesn't make any sense. And there's an opening to do something much more innovative and novel that people will actually enjoy. And so that's kind of what led to ultimately starting to run some experiments on different types of policies that we could talk about. But I can give you two examples. One of the things I saw early on is if a program in education was universal versus being low income, it was way more popular with the public, like 35% more popular. And essentially no advocacy group was working on that to the degree that I would have expected. And so I was like, hey, why don't we start working on bills that are universal and just saying, if it's a low income bill, we're just going to reject it.
We're just going to be opposed to it, even though we support more freedom generally. And as you can imagine, for a lot of school choice advocates, that irritated the crap out of people. But I'm like, I'm going to reject your bills. That was novel at the time. And there's a couple other policy areas like that where I just over index to saying like, why don't we just do things that people like and that make good economic sense and good educational sense? And let's just bank on the fact that if people see benefit in it, they're going to vote for it, they're going to re-elect people that do that and that's going to have a more transformational effect than advocating for something people don't want. Which sounds intuitive, but it was relatively novel at the time. And that ultimately led to me working with some other people and together we all created yes. every kid. And that's what we do. We just lobby for laws like that and try to get them in place.
Michael Horn
Super interesting. And you do the work beyond Arizona now it's nationwide, right?
Andrew Clark
Absolutely. Yep. We work in about 36 states right now.
Michael Horn
Yeah. And I guess the reason it's counterintuitive, as I would think about it, is a lot of folks might say like, yeah, we agree, you know, universal may be the goal or yes, that's going to make it more popular, but we have a win right now. We can impact this population, let's go for it. And they accuse you, I guess, of being against incrementalism toward that goal or something like that.
Andrew Clark
That's certainly my reputation in the space. I would argue everything we're doing is incremental. It's just a question of where you're going to draw those lines and what you're going after. And I think education is particularly influenced by this rise of Taylorism, which is this philosophical backdrop to the industrial revolution that basically said people, people don't matter, processes are what matter and we can optimize processes and everything just becomes a top down exercise. I think the people that go into education carry that mentality or that culture into the space. And that's true whether you're on the programmatic side, you know, you're trying to actually put schools together, or if you're on the advocacy side, you think I'm going to do this thing because academics think it's wise or think tanks thinks it's wise. And I'm going to impose that. Whereas in most spaces that are bottom up, you go the other way.
You're like, what do people see benefits in? What are customers going to gravitate to? And you design around that bottom up feature that just there's just not a lot of people that have that ethos in education.
Michael Horn
Space, from a job speed on landscape through my work that I hear the logic there for sure. So one of the big things that you all have been working on and pushing, you mentioned it briefly, these ESAs, education savings accounts, this notion not just of school choice, but educational choice more broadly. It's something that my audience is certainly familiar with. We've talked a lot about it in the show, so. But I think, you know, 2025, we're having this interview, beginning of the year. Where are we nationally on ESAs? What's the state of choice? I think there's like 11 states maybe with universal choice. But is that right? Who are they? What does that even mean?
Andrew Clark
Yeah, I would say the world is transformed in my view anyways. So the original thesis for a lot of this is hey, we've got a very again Taylor top down education center today where the government says in law you as a family will put your kid in the public school or we will send you to jail. And then inside of that school we're going to dictate how the day goes for you. And it's all very carefully orchestrated. And what we said at the time when we started back in 2018, 2019 was we just need a way out, just an exit, a right of exit to go try something else. So if that system doesn't work for you, no problem, let's get out. And that was the, a lot of the premise for these original universal ESA accounts, which is now up to a dozen states.
Michael Horn
A dozen states. Okay.
School Choice Programs Surge Nationwide
Andrew Clark
Yeah. And I would say, you know, you've got about 40% of kids in America that have access to some kind of private school choice program. This is booming. It's not just happening in legislative, it's also having huge political impacts. Like the idea is very popular, it's 75, 80% popular. And so when opposition has come out and tried to take people out in Texas or Arizona or Iowa or Arkansas, what has happened is the people have advocated for school choice, have won and won by pretty wide margins and then that just encourages the next group to go after it. And so now it's kind of sweeping. I think it's not crazy to think you're going to have 18 or 20 states that have school choice programs by the end of this session and you could have 60, 65% of kids in the country having access to private schools through these programs.
Michael Horn
And so it's public dollars. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Clark
With subsidized dollars. Yeah, it's a pretty massive change in the country.
Michael Horn
And so if we hit 18 or more by the end of the year, I assume you're thinking like Texas, Tennessee, like states like that are the ones that tip next. I'd love to hear your crystal ball on that. But are we talking about educational savings accounts specifically in all these states universal, or are we talking about different forms of tax scholarships or vouchers? Like where are they landing in this choice landscape as we're seeing this sweep of legislation?
Andrew Clark
Yeah, so certainly Texas is going to be the point of contention for everybody just because they've got north of 5 million kids and the entire country has 55 million kids. So you're talking about a significant portion of the total student body population in the United States is grounded in Texas and it's one of the few states that's still growing. Almost everybody else is on the decline. So the fight for Texas will be significant. I think the macro trends you're talking about is most states are still going for ESAs, which in policy terms just means I'm going to take a subsidy, I'm going to put it in a government controlled account, I'm going to create a bunch of rules around that account and then a family can come in and dictate where the money gets spent out of that. So most states are still needing to do that. But you're starting to see this, what I would consider the next wave coming out, which is these personal tax credits, which is just basically saying if you don't take your kid and put them in a public school, if you decide to do something else, we're just going to give you your money back.
And so Oklahoma already has this in law. I think you'll see this in several other states emerging this cycle, maybe three or four of them, where they're just literally like any other, tax credit, child care tax credit, child tax credit, et cetera. They're just going to give you your money back and you'll have the freedom to spend that however you will. So I don't think it'll be nearly as much money as you see in an ESA. It might be 3 or $5,000 as opposed to 7 to $10,000 in an ESA, but it will have significantly more regulatory freedom.
Michael Horn
Interesting. So essentially we're saying you do not avail yourself of the public school. Sure, people without kids don't either, but this is a way of giving you some of that money back so you can make a different choice with your child. Is that essentially the theory?
Andrew Clark
That's exactly the logic, yep.
Michael Horn
Okay, so I want to come back to some of these strands in a little bit, but I want to know in particular, there were three states where at the ballot box it seemed like there were some pretty big defeats of choice in terms of referendums, namely Kentucky, Nebraska and Colorado. What happened in those three states, because my impression, I'll lay out my priors, was what yours is that like, yes, this is a red state phenomenon for the most part, but, but it seems incredibly bipartisan support for it within those States, people of all stripes seem to really like the Education Savings Accounts in particular. So like what happened in those three states, because of that referendum. A lot of the stuff you've talked about has been policy at the state house level.
Andrew Clark
Yeah. So I'd say strategically there's two big inflections in policy design choices that have huge impacts on the the way that the public perceives them. So one is this question of who is eligible, Is it going to be eligible for every kid in the state or is it just going to be eligible for some kids? If it's eligible for every kid, it is about 30 percentage points higher than if it's just some kids. And some kids could be low income kids, special needs kids, it could just be an overall cap, whatever. But the difference in political popularity is massive on that one line alone. And the second part of it is if it's just a private school choice option, people are way less inclined to be supportive of it as opposed to if it is agnostic to whatever works for the kid. So an ESA is designed to say, look, if you want to put your kid in public school part time and private school part time and tutoring a little bit, and we don't care, you pick whatever you want. That's a very popular idea.
People want all the options. They don't want to be pigeonholed into just private schools. That's not a very popular option. And so the mistake that I think a lot of these very well intentioned advocates have made is they think, man, if I just go put a $10 million program on the ballot, which is the Nebraska proposal, that's going to be fine because it's not going to scare anybody. And who would oppose $10 million? It's so small. But what happens is teachers unions aren't idiots, right? They're going to go after a small threat just as hard as they're going to go after a big threat. And if they go after a small threat that's not very popular, that small threat's going to die. And so if we could rewind the clock, I'd love to sit down with the advocates doing that and saying, hey folks, there's no reason to walk in with an idea that's 30% popular just because you think it's good.
Talk to the customer, the customer wants everybody to be eligible. $10 million isn't going to get that job done. Go bigger, actually be more ambitious. And what you'll find is when the public's with you, then you'll actually win at the ballot. So I think in all three states we go through it, but they all three made that mistake essentially in crafting policy that wasn't politically savvy.
Michael Horn
And so the big, just to reiterate what you just said, the big issues universal, not for some. And two, it sounds like a voucher that is like essentially a ticket to a private school and that is your only choice. That is not popular either. People want a more expansive set of I get to direct my kids' education and including public options that you know, ideally, and we heard this in Florida, they start innovating, right? The public options as they start to see different ways to structure education as well through these different funding mechanisms over time.
Andrew Clark
What the parents are upset about is they want control. It's not that they want a different tax status for the school. That is not right.
Michael Horn
If it's the private first, public is not what's driving this. I want control. Okay, all right, let's flip to implementation. That's a good gateway into this because you are not just advocating, as I understand it, for policy, you're also advocating around implementation as well and thinking about this. And there's a lot of debates about how ESAs are put into place specifically. The first one is maybe where it lives and how we manage it. Are we using, you know, a third party technology like Odyssey or something like that to help distribute funds step up for students? Is the Department of Education trying to stand up something? How do you think about the where it lives and how we manage it, how we disperse funds, et cetera questions?
Andrew Clark
Yeah, I think on the first step you're right that most advocacy groups come into legislation, they're like, I have a big idea. And they give the big idea to politicians. The politician puts the big idea into a law and the law just says here, here's the big idea. Give people money essentially, right? And then they give it to a department who's like what the hell are you talking about? What am I supposed to do with this? And at that point most of the advocacy groups are gone. What we try to do that is different is we want to stick around and say, hey, here's what the intent was, here's the thinking behind it and here's how you could actually apply that. And I think that's really important to carry that through line all the way down because the passing the bill is just the very baby steps. All the real work happens after that. And there's a moment for choosing in the aftermath there on what are these going to look like in practice? And I'll just give you maybe two mental models to think about what this could look like.
One way that this could play out is going to be like health insurance. So if you think about the way that health insurance works in health care, those companies, those third party companies are basically tasked to ration your healthcare. They're there to think through like what's the appropriate use of the healthcare system and how do I make it as cost efficient as I can and safe. So that's one option. I'll give you another design option which would be like Social Security where we're trying to eradicate senior poverty and we just send people a check and we say this is for you to take care of yourself, I wish you the best. Right? These are two very different approaches. They're both welfare programs, but very different policy designs and ESAs are going to run into that. Those kinds of choices.
ESA Decision: Customer or Third Party?
Andrew Clark
Are we going to make it more like a health insurance model or we're going to make it more like Social Security? So when we say we're trying to empower parents, both could empower parents. But one model, there's going to be a decision maker that's a third party. And then the other model, the decision maker is going to be the customer, the end user, which one are ESA's going to decide? And for us we have a very clear point of view which is the customer ought to make the decision. That doesn't mean there's no regulations. It's pretty reasonable that any public funds given are going to have some regulations. But there is a very binary choice between who the actual decision maker is. Is it going to be the government or a third party or is it going to be the customer? We think it ought to be the customer. Most people in the space think it ought to be the third party.
And I think that's a very bad idea. You just look at how popular health insurance companies are, right? I mean you just watch the poor CEO got shot and half the country cheered. I think that tells you just how unpopular that idea is. But I think that is a very real possibility of where education's headed to if we don't head this off.
Michael Horn
So let's play that out on a few things. I had never thought about that mental model with ESAs because I think of it as fundamentally a consumer powered choice, more akin to say a health savings account than a health insurance plan. But it's interesting when you frame it that way. So some of the downstream decisions of that, I guess in the health insurance model would be restrictions around what you can spend on, restrictions on pricing perhaps of the schools and things of that nature. Just sort of play that out. What are the implications where you see that taking hold based on what some people are advocating for and how you would do it instead?
Andrew Clark
Yeah, I think health savings accounts are probably like if I give you the two extreme wings there between Social Security and health insurance. Yeah, Health savings accounts are probably somewhere in the middle ground and maybe probably more tilted towards the customers. So I think they're a fine model. Right. If I go see a chiropractor, I can pay with my HSA and I don't have to get that pre approved. I might have to submit it afterwards and maybe the HSA company would reject it. There's some rules around it, but for the most part I can pay for pretty wide latitude of whatever I want to. That is different than like if I go see a doctor with my insurance company, they're going to call Blue Cross, Blue Shield or United or whoever and say, can this person get this treatment? And if the answer is no, they're going to say no.
Right. Like, doesn't matter what you and your doctor negotiate out, that insurance company is going to make the decision. And that's the way most of these ESA programs are working right now is I say, okay, I want to buy, you know, Bob's textbook. If the department hasn't pre approved that purchase and or Class Wallet or Step up hasn't pre approved that purchase, you're not going to be able to buy that book. I think that's the bad model and the one that we're running the risk of slipping into. We want to be much more in the HSA mold where it's like, hey, I can buy textbooks, that's what's approved. And then as a consumer, it doesn't really matter what textbook I buy, as long as it's a textbook, we're all okay with the fact that that's on the net, that's going to be a positive for society.
Michael Horn
So it's interesting you say that because I've seen accreditation pop up as a requirement in some of these programs, which I have to be super honest, has like shocked me on a number of levels. And maybe that's speaking toward that is like, okay, if it's accredited, we say that's pre approved and therefore you're good no matter what. If not accredited, we're going to have to have another conversation. Is that.
Andrew Clark
Absolutely. And this is where, you know, most people who advocate for ESAs and other kinds of freedom are really, really offended when they get attacked by critics who say, like, oh, this is going to raise prices and send in grifters and cronyism, I actually welcome the criticism, like, bring it on, because it keeps us clear on where the risks are and they're not wrong about the risks. So the risk is you get somebody who comes grifting along. Let's say you have a textbook company, they're going to say, man, only my textbook should be approved. Those guys, textbooks that's full of crazy garbly gook and kids will learn God knows what. So you got to make sure you only approve my books and not their books. Right? And that's. This is just classic government. You can only buy my therapies, not theirs.
You can only buy my tutoring service. You got to make sure that my employees are approved, not their employees. That's just what happens when you get a regulatory environment is you get regulatory capture. People want to make their business not providing customers some benefit. They want to make their money by getting the government to get rid of their competition. And so one of the reasons that you want to try to make sure you don't have that is think of the higher ed space that you've talked a lot about. Higher ed space does that exact problem. They say, like, you can't create an alternative.
You know, the folks at the University of Austin, people are all excited about that. That's unaccredited right now. You can't use your 529 or your Pell or any of that public subsidy money to go to that school. And why isn't it accredited? It's got some of the best professors in the country, maybe in the world, working there. Why isn't it? Because they've made it a 5 to 10 year process to get accredited. Well, what happens? That means no competition can come into the space. That means higher education goes sky high all the time and it never stops. There's no incentive to bring it down. The same thing will happen in K12 if we allow the same kind of regulatory barriers to exist.
If it's hard to come in and sell a textbook, well, then the existing textbook guys are just going to jack the prices up. It's going to be really hard to get in. So this is kind of why these debates matter so much, is if we want to get to a world that is low price, high quality, happy customers, you have to give people freedom to come in and enter the market and freedom to buy in the market really easily. And most of the advocates and lobbyists in the space they're being paid to try to capture the market for some regulatory space. And so both politicians and just normal people have to be outspoken, loud advocates for the ideas of freedom and markets or education is going to stifle and do what it's always done historically in this country, which is it's going to get captured by the special interest.
Michael Horn
Just to play that out. The counterargument I suppose would be, well, if we don't have lists, we're going to get, you know, hacks and frauds coming in and taking dollars. And I think I'm going to anticipate your argument back would be like, well, we have some of that anyway and it's going to be discovered a lot faster if individuals can make these choices than we're hoping that government somehow discovers it. Right. Because in some ways that's a feature, not a bug actually of more choice. Am I anticipating the debate correctly?
Andrew Clark
Yep, you got it. I mean, this is, you could think of it in Milton Friedman's vernacular. Right. When it's, when it's me spending someone else's money, I'm much more prone to spend it maliciously than if it's me spending my money. Right. And so depending on how you think about it, if it's you spending the government's money, your incentive is to spend as much of it as fast as you can. And, you could be relatively reckless. If you're spending your own money, you're going to guard it very carefully.
Most people, most families want what's best for their kids and they're going to make hard trade off decisions. I think that's one of my favorite things about your job to be done research. It's showing, it's illustrating the trade offs. Right. That's what we want people to do. Yeah. And that's again why you want the market dynamics to flow.
So yeah, public schools spend money on all sorts of crazy things. Margarita Rosa at Georgetown has essentially made a career out of the crazy things people have bought inside of public schools. You're not going to get rid of waste fodder abuse, but you can put in reasonable mechanisms without corrupting the market.
Flexible Spending with Educational Savings Accounts
Michael Horn
And so that's, I mean, in my mind that's been the, one of the biggest arguments for ESAs is it really is putting money in a wallet that is yours and you don't have to spend it all in one year. You can save it over time. And so that doesn't introduce, it doesn't just introduce the notion of choice. It also introduces the notion of value and trade offs as opposed to a voucher, which is like a ticket for one thing, regardless of economic value and, and doesn't have those trade offs and choices and fractionalization and value assessments that an individual might make. Let's go on, just to stay on this though, on what you can spend on. Do you think there should be categories of things or like how do you, you know, where do you draw the line or, or no line. Right. Because you know, I obviously we've seen the headlines, equine therapy and you're like, actually it's a really important thing for some families and kids, so probably a really good thing.
And by the way, you know, schools send their kids to field trips to Disney World and stuff like that. So like where is the line and where isn't the line in your view?
Andrew Clark
Yeah, and I, my personal view is the best case is like the child tax credit that we saw issued during COVID There were a list of uses for that. They were pretty broad and you know, the IRS reserved the right to come in and audit and make sure you spent the money on your child. Makes sense. Pretty reasonable. Didn't prohibit anybody from doing what they wanted to do for the most part. But it also made sure that if there was fraud that the government had a mechanism to come in and enforce it.
Michael Horn
Come back in and unfold it. Okay.
Andrew Clark
That's the best case scenario.
Michael Horn
Got it. Okay, so let me ask this question which is a lot of these ESAs, even the ones that are universal, meaning access to it is open, they're not fully funded, as in that there's a line item, as I understand it, that could cover every single person in the state and it is double funded in many cases in the sense that there's an account for the public schools and then there is also an ESA. That introduces an interesting sort of case of rationing or choices around who do you market this to first perhaps you can't foreclose people, but maybe you can if there's waiting lists, like how do you navigate that focus, access, set of questions in these environments? And maybe I just named the corollary up front, which is like at what point do we say, okay, the dual sort of funding structure was really important so we don't, you know, get their ire up front. But at some point like there it has to be replicative of, you know, what was there. How do you, how do you think about that?
Andrew Clark
No, I think, I think the original strategy we had of let's just give people an exit was a good one for its time. I think the problem is if you leave that old system in place, exactly what you're saying is happening. One, you would hope that the money, you know, that was 15 or $20,000 in the public school system would now be the 7,000 in the ESA. And we would say, great, the government has now saved $13,000 and it's a win win and everyone's happy. But what happens in reality, we've created a lot of dependency in the current system. They don't let go of a dime and then it becomes additive. So that's a problem for the government in terms of its overall spending, but it's also a problem for the market because what happens is you get New York City spending $40,000 a kid, what do they do? They just start spending money on every crazy thing you've ever imagined in human history, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. And people begin to expect that level of service even if it doesn't make sense.
So it's like, why does this school have a climbing wall? And why does it have a restaurant? Why does it have crazy things? I have the money and if I don't use it, I lose it, so I've got to keep spending it. Well then what happens is when an alternative comes up and says, hey, I'm gonna now give your kid a better education at a significantly lower cost, they're like, yeah, but where's the cool climbing wall? Right, right. And so now the expectation level for service gets higher. So the promise of like bringing the cost down, which then increase access for everybody, it starts to diminish because the service expectations are higher, which is a little, a little bit wonky. But it's to say that if we don't get the, the existing public school system transformed as well into a place where it has to care about what families want and be responsive to what families want, the promise of this idea to transform education, it's not going to deliver. And so I think the next big wave is we have to go back to public schools and say, hey, it's time for you to also come back to a system like esas where parents are going to decide, do I give you all $15,000 or do I peel a thousand of that off and go use it for a tutorial when you don't meet my needs? I think we need to, we must get the definition of public schools redefined from the public system owns and operates the dollars and the families comply to a system where the families own the dollars and the school meets their needs. And if we can do that, all sorts of good cascading effects will happen. And if we don't do that, I think we'll stall out again.
Michael Horn
Also interesting off that right. Is this notion of overserved and that is critical to disruptive innovation. And one of my arguments around why we can't disrupt schools at the present, you know, traditional system in the United States is there's no non consumption and there's very little sense of overserved. But it's my argument about why have ESAs have emerged, I actually think some of the most well off families that are like, you know, I don't need the 10, you know, English as second language instructors and the football team and the this and that. Like I just want this, this, this, this, this boom. Thank you very much. I'm great. And that's sort of where the disruption will really start I think if we're going to really see a revolution of how education, learning, schooling occurs in this country.
Andrew Clark
Yeah. And maybe if I just double click on that because you and I do the same research methodology which is this jobs to be done. And we asked the people who have left the public school system, why did you leave? And almost universally what they say is I just wanted basic life skills. Like I just want to be able to do math and read and just, you know, some fundamentals: wash their clothes, pay bills, like the easy stuff. And so what they go and search for in the market usually costs about $5,000 a year. So they're leaving a free service that costs $15,000 a year to go to a paid service for 5,000. But they're doing it because they want less, which is really remarkable to watch. So I'm with you.
I actually think we probably in a space where 65, 70% of the current offering in a public school, people don't actually want to buy. And if they were given the choice, they wouldn't buy. Which is a pretty fascinating intellectual thing to get to doodle through.
Michael Horn
No, I think that's exactly right. I mean look, it's the classic case why iPhone, new iPhone sales are slowing down and spreading out. People are like, I don't need the extra whatever gimmick. I'll hang on for another year to my phone. Right, exactly. So, let me go to this, which is accountability. I think it's implicit in a lot of what you said. But it seems to be another place where there's a lot of opinions on both sides of this.
And on the one hand you sort of say, actually the quote unquote accountability of no child left behind, etc. Etc. was more transparency, perhaps less accountability because not clear always what happened out of that. There were some punishments attached to it, but for the most part there were ways to ward them off. This is perhaps true accountability, goes the argument, because families say, you're not serving me, I can leave, I'm going to move to another option. And I have control over that. Whether it's mid year, mid month, end of the year, right? So much faster cycle times. The flip side of it says, sure, but these are public dollars and we want some sort of layer of are kids actually learning how to read? Are they actually learning how to do math? Things of that nature.
And so we want some minimum set of baseline assessments, maybe, perhaps they could be more growth based, but we want some sort of public mechanism still in place. How do you think about this question? What do you see happening?
Andrew Clark
So I think the way you framed it up I would vigorously agree with, which is we don't have accountability today in public schools, we have transparency at best. And we could go through a litany of examples. But Chicago, Baltimore, New York, you know what you see is enrollments dropping wildly, right? Like people are just straight up walking away from public schools and on these standardized test scores, you've got tons and tons of schools, just Google it. Chicago proficiency rates. You'll be like, wow, there's 30 schools where not one kid is proficient in English or reading or English and math. And then you'll be like, great, so what happened, you know, the next year nothing changes, right? Year after year the behavior stays the same, but as they lose kids, their pure pupil dollar amount goes up. So if anything, they're almost getting more money for, for not changing at all, for being resistant.
That is not accountability. That is again, at best, that's transparency. But it's not actually changing anything. So I'm with you. The idea that somebody could actually then say, like, if you're not helping me, I'm going to go somewhere where I can be helped and my money's going with me. That's actual accountability. That has teeth to it. So I think that if you value accountability, and I certainly do, that's the accountability you want.
The standardized test score isn't going to get you there. Now that said, I do think, look, reading is good, math is good, right? And if you're investing in this as a taxpayer, you want to have visibility into it. I think when you mandate testing on every single kid, it's not useful for parents, they don't want it, they're not asking for it, they wouldn't buy it. That's not a great way to do it. I think the way that we do it with NAEP, which is just this randomized group of voluntary participants, makes way more sense because then you get visibility into what's going on without anybody being forced and without teachers trying to optimize to the test. So I think that's the kind of thing we should do. And you could do it across a broad range of things, micro schools, private schools, whatever. It's voluntary.
You can get much more transparency, much more visibility into where kids are actually learning and where they're performing without anybody being forced into anything. So if I were the state, I would invest money into a NAEP style system, if not NAEP entirely itself, to try to get that visibility without coercing people.
Michael Horn
It'd be interesting. I hadn't thought about this before, but one of the challenges is, I understand it that NAEP faces is frankly budgetary, it's all from the federal government. But if the state were to say, hey, we're going to contribute X amount in because we want, you know, to leverage the sampling mechanism and this well regarded assessment that's already structured, but do it every single year, say, or you know, maybe that's a way to get the funding up to be able to do something like that. And then I imagine this is a question though, but I imagine your second statement would be like, and some parents probably do want assessments to know, hey, how's my kid doing against on this or that or whatever else. And so they could pay for, or they could choose schools that administer. And then I guess the question is what becomes public or not in those choices. I'm curious your take.
Andrew Clark
Yeah, as you know, the philanthropy community gets really obsessed on this idea of navigation where they're like, we're going to tell people what they want and we're going to tell them what good and bad is. And when you ask people like would you pay for any of the services that government or philanthropy suggests? And the answer is always no. So it's like, would you pay for this testing service the way that we do it today? The answer is almost, yeah, uniformly no. So what I would do is say, hey, in your ESA or voucher, tax credit, whatever you're designing, testing is one of the things you can pay for in whatever you want. And then you, as a family, you decide what's actually creating value. And that way, you know, if it's a Google review Or a Yelp review or it's a standardized test or it's whatever, I don't care. Right. You as an entrepreneur, come up with whatever feedback mechanism you think families will be like, yes, that's going to help me decide where to put my kid and why and whether they're succeeding.
Great, go out and sell that. Is that worth $20? Is that worth 200? Is that worth 2,000? Right. Let's find out what the value of that is. And that way we actually start getting real products and services that families value and use as opposed to the ones philanthropy or government's value that nobody finds value in and nobody uses and we just hemorrhage crazy amounts of money on for no particular reason other than making people irritated except for academics who love it.
Michael Horn
Well, it occurs to me as if certain places write in provisions and policy around navigation requiring a coach or something like that to help advise. Frankly, like the AI tools that are coming out right now that are going to know your situation are going to make that so cheap and easy and to say nothing of social trust and so forth, that if they're, if those policies are not written at an extremely sort of like outcome level as opposed to process level, they're going to be outdated within days, right.
Andrew Clark
Yeah. I think this is the overarching argument I'd make is Taylorism. I'll give it a lot of crap, but I actually think it was great. The industrial revolution was awesome. It made things super cheap. But it's made for machines and people are not machines. And so when you're dealing with the people business, let the machines do the machine thing. But if you're trying to say, what's the right coach for my kid? There's no process to tell you what the right coach is.
It's you sitting across the table from the coach having a conversation saying, is this person going to love my kid? Are they going to resonate with each other? Are they going to understand each other? Is this relationship of trust? There's nothing that you can do to replace that kind of just authentic relationship that goes back and forth. And s I think you're not going to design a law that says, hey, let's optimize for that. The only thing you're going to do is empower people and let them make their own decisions. And that's why, you know, freedom almost always beats some kind of top down control.
Michael Horn
And presumably someone could pay for that navigation or counseling or whatever else.
Andrew Clark
100%.
Michael Horn
Okay, last question as we wrap up here. This has been a pretty wide ranging question, or conversation rather on how these things should look in practice. I'm curious, are there other implementation questions on the ground that you think are not getting enough attention or are really sort of bubbling up right now that we haven't talked about that we ought to focus on as we wrap up this conversation?
Andrew Clark
Yeah, I would bucket the implementation thing kind of three waves. There's the how do you sign up for it? Which sounds really stupid, but there's a million debates on like, how do you sign up for these programs? And kind of who gets qualified and then which time period. We could nerd out on all of those. But this is one of the reasons why we advocate for universal, not just for because it's good policy and good politics, but because it's good implementation. So if it's a low income program, you have to go ask people, how much money do you make? Please submit all your form forms. And then somebody has to process. It takes forever. Whereas if it's universal, it's just, are you a person who lives in the state? Great, you're approved.
Streamlining Government Program Enrollment
Andrew Clark
Off we go. But there's a ton of fights on the how do you sign up for? So I think it should just be easy to sign up for. It should take seconds, right? Verifying your taxpayer should be stupid simple. The second one is easy to use, which is where I think we spent most of our time talking here, is like, how do you use these darn things once you're approved? And then the third part that is there is in an ideal world, people should love these programs. It's free money. Who doesn't love free money? Right? Like, I think there's all sorts of good arguments against free money, but if you're gonna do it, it should at least be enjoyable. The fact that we torture people is kind of crazy, but there's almost no feedback mechanism to see if anyone cares, because nobody cares about the family in government, which blows my mind. So one of the big arguments is, hey, you actually need to circle back with the family and say, was this experience enjoyable? Did it meet your needs? Right.
Jobs to be done? Was your job hired for? If yes, cool, we're probably doing something right. If no, where did we break it? Let's go back and fix it. And until we can get that kind of feedback loop going and get incentives aligned, it's going to be hard for these programs to work in practice.
Michael Horn
All right, I lied. I want to stay on that last one for a moment because one of my arguments to folks like Joe Connor and other entrepreneurs in the space, building systems to help with the disbursement of dollars is that as they move up market. Right. Part of the feature set that they probably will have to have is some of those feedback mechanisms, as well as, frankly, navigation supports, because they'll sort of become. I hate the Yelp analogy, but I'm going to use it for a moment, like sort of the Yelp, like, marketplace, if you will, for me, helping to figure out or find things that I might not even know about otherwise. That's my own opinion of how they might evolve naturally. I don't think there needs to be policy to do it. I just think it's part of the feature set.
But I'm curious, is that how you're thinking about this, or do you have other ideas in mind?
Andrew Clark
No, I think if a marketplace is allowed to thrive and it's out. What you see in these early days anyways, of school choice is people start by saying, I don't even know what my options are. I've always been told what to do. So they just default to essentially a private school, or what you'd think of as a bundled solution. It has all your products and services in one place. And then as they get more comfortable, they're like, I really want to do math over here and I'd like to do athletics over there. And they start to unbundle. They start to pull off services and go to different places and different vendors for them.
And so somebody who's been in a program for two, three, four years looks very different than somebody who's there the first time. But my expectation is just like, you know, when we transitioned from cable companies to Apple tv, it got annoying really fast. You're like, my God, I'm tired of having 32 subscriptions. I just have one again. Yeah. So what happens is you start to rebundle. And my guess is you're going to, you know, any.
Any good market has this process of bundling and unbundling, and that's what drives innovation at its core. But I expect you to see we've had 100 years of a tightly bundled system. Now we're just starting to have the first two or three years of unbundling. But the natural evolution of economics would tell you it's going to rebundle. So somebody's going to say, hey, you just tell me what your kid is like and I'm going to come back to you with suggestions. And you just, you pay me and I'll take care of transportation, I'll take care of everything. And you know, you might end up paying a premium for that service, but it might be really worthwhile.
And then somebody will get irritated and break that model and we'll just turn and turn and turn until, you know, the experience and education is the greatest thing that none of us have ever imagined, which is the way that that all again, all human experience goes.
Future of Customized Service Bundles
Michael Horn
We should wrap up there. But I will say I think it's a really good point and that rebundling will be around different spools, if you will, from the current one, which will be the real magic. And to your point, figuring out the right mix and sort of services and so forth and trade offs that individuals will make saying like, well, it's still not 100% but nothing in life is. It just reduced the friction of me having to make every single choice. It's a lot of work picking all the summer camps as parents we have to do. So if there's a couple bundles from which I can choose and the more it can be customized around, you know, this is my circumstances, my kid, all the better, right?
Andrew Clark
Absolutely. That's what we all want. We all want an EZ Bake Oven. That is also exactly the way we want it. Right?
Michael Horn
Well, with that is the final word. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a fun conversation. I've learned a lot and just appreciate the work you're doing.
Andrew Clark
Of course I appreciate the work you're doing. It's excellent.
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Ron Matus, the Director of Research and Special Projects at Step Up For Students, joined me to discuss the evolution of education choice in Florida. We talked specifically about the significant growth and impact of education savings accounts (ESAs) on the landscape. And Ron shared insights into the trend of unbundled, à la carte learning by highlighting its rapid adoption and the factors driving it. We also touched on the accountability debate surrounding ESAs and the innovative roles districts and programs like Florida Virtual School are playing.
Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. Delighted you are all joining us at 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 how we get there, I am delighted that Ron Matus, the Director of Research and Special Projects at Step up for Students, which was founded as a nonprofit org to administer scholarships for Florida school children to the school that most made sense for them. I'm delighted that Ron is joining us today. Ron, first, good to see you. You've been a longtime friend and follower on both sides of the equation in this space. So how are you?
Ron Matus:
Good to see you. I'm great. I am amazed and grateful and honored to be on your show. I feel like I'm in a dream. So thank you so much for inviting me on.
Michael Horn:
As always, you guys will learn as you listen that Ron is nothing but flattering and over with the praise of others. But why don't you start before we get into some of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you, which is getting a view of the landscape in Florida, specifically. But first, give us sort of an overview briefly of your own background, how you came to the world of education and, and perhaps how, you know, Step up for Students, how it intersects with that story and how Step up for Students has actually evolved over time into its current set of operations.
Ron Matus:
Sure, sure. Well, I guess the most boring part would be my story, but I am a longtime former newspaper reporter. That's what I did really my entire adult life until I joined Step up back in 2012. I was at the Tampa Bay Times, which is the biggest and most influential newspaper in Florida. And back when newspapers had a little more juice, I mean, they were pound for pound, one of the best newspapers in America. I was there for 10 years, and for eight years I was the state education reporter. And so there's a direct connection between what I learned as a reporter and what inspired me to move over to Step Up. You know, over that time, writing a lot about issues with public education, seeing how choice was making a difference, and I started covering education, during Governor Bush's second term, of course, he did a ton to accelerate choice in Florida. So I was there in the early days as choice was ramping up, and I came to see how absolutely vital it was to an education system that I thought made sense. And at some point back around 2012, I got a chance to move over to Step Up. One of my former colleagues, a really remarkable guy named John East, who was a longtime editorial page writer at the Times, had moved over to Step Up. And a few years down the road, he reached out and said, hey, if you want to actually make a difference, instead of writing about problems, you want to help solve them, you might want to consider Step up and best decision I ever made.
I'm not one of those reporters who left the profession because things were crumbling around me, and I had to go, you know, reinvent myself as a PR flack or something. I left because I realized that choice was going to be the new normal, and I had a chance to shape that a little bit, and I had a chance to watch it unfold from just an incredible perch, which is Step Up. So the second thing that you were asking about how Step Up has changed, I think Step Up has changed remarkably over the time that I've been here. And in some ways, that change is representative of the change as a whole in the public education system in Florida. So when I got to Step Up, there were, like, 20 or 25 employees. We have 20 times that now. We have more than.
Michael Horn:
For real.
Ron Matus:
For real. We have more than 400 employees now.
Michael Horn:
Wow.
Ron Matus:
When I got to Step Up, we were serving about 50,000 students on scholarship. Today you probably heard this big announcement from Governor DeSantis last week. We've now reached the 500,000 threshold in terms of scholarship students. So the number of students we're serving has increased tenfold. And then, as you know, because you pay such close attention to this stuff, we're not just serving students on school choice scholarships anymore, which was the way it was when I got here, which is relatively simple. And I want, you know, my colleagues do a lot of incredible work. So I don't want to say it was simple, but
Michael Horn:
Emphasis on relatively. Yeah
Ron Matus:
Yeah, compared to what it is now. You know, these scholarships are technically now all ESAs. And so the volume of transactions that we have to process, it's gone through the roof. And so we have been right there the whole time, as Florida has moved from a system of district schools to school choice, and now from a system of school choice to education choice. And, and that's where we are now. And that next phase of going from school choice to education choice is exciting and we're right in the middle of it.
Expanding Education Choice Discourse
Michael Horn:
Yeah, I think that phrase from school choice to education choice is a really good way to frame it, of course, because ESAs are not just, and one of my biggest pet peeves is when people call them vouchers, and I'm like, it's not just, it's, it's very different in a lot of, in a lot of respects. And I love how you introduced yourself the same way you introduced yourself to me over, you know, probably, I think it was right before you maybe you formally joined Step Up for Students is the first time we connected and you said, I'm just a journalist trying to figure this out. So here you are, having learned quite a bit and for, and figured out quite a bit. And I guess the intersection section where I want to go in is about a year ago, maybe a little over, I wrote a piece suggesting that as education choice grows, meaning not just school choice, but we should start to expect more unbundling of what we think of as schools. Right. Students aren't just going to go to one school.
They'll have tutors, they'll have a variety of options. But I didn't expect to see a great unbundling en masse. And, and I base that frankly on two things. One, our theories at the Christensen Institute around how innovations tend to start as very bundled over time before they modularize and unbundled. But I also based it, frankly, on data from Florida that you all had published about how individuals were in fact using ESAs. But then fast forward, and you all came out with this report, a taste of à la carte learning. And it seems that things on the ground are changing quite a bit. So in that report, what did you learn? What is the data showing in terms of how people are using education savings accounts and how perhaps the nature of choice and schooling and learning is evolving?
Ron Matus:
I think it's changing pretty rapidly. So when you say, you know, you expected there to be an unbundling, but not a great unbundling, I guess it depends on, you know, what your definition of great is.
Michael Horn:
Sure, I got some latitude in the headline writing. Right.
Ron Matus:
So, I mean, I think there's a lot going on and things have changed very quickly. Your analysis was absolutely correct in that the vast majority of money at this point is still being used for private school tuition, even though technically these are ESAs. The vast majority of families are still using the ESAs like the old school. And I say old school even though most of the country hasn't even gotten these yet.
Michael Horn:
But I was going to say you're well ahead of the curve there.
Ron Matus:
We are ahead of the curve. And so, but, but most families are using it like a voucher in that they're using it to access the private schools that they want. And for what it's worth, those private schools are also changing pretty dramatically. I mean, I think there are a lot of dynamic things going on in the private school choice space too, and I don't want to diminish that. At the same time though, even though most of the money is still being used for private school tuition, we do have growing numbers of families who are doing completely customized, personalized, à la carte unbundled learning. And it's not, it's happening pretty quickly, but it's happening maybe a little less quickly than people realize because the first ESA is 10 years old. I mean, we got our first ESA program 10 years ago that was for students with special needs. But very quickly, thousands of parents were using that ESA to pick and choose from multiple providers and programs.
Rise of Personalized Education Programs
Ron Matus:
They were the pioneers, the early adopters, you know, whatever you want to call it. And they really started showing the rest of us what was possible. So, there were pioneers and there have been for 10 years. And then you fast forward to 2023 when we got this new scholarship program called the Personalized Education Program Scholarship, which is an ESA for a broader group of families who are not enrolled in public school. They're essentially homeschool families, although there are some legal distinctions there. But Michael, we went from thousands of families doing à la carte learning to tens of thousands in a snap between those two programs, between, you know, the ESA for students with special needs and those in that program who are unbundling doing à la carte, and this new program at this point, we have probably about 80,000 families doing à la carte learning this fall. I would bet a decent amount of money that we would be in excess of 100,000 because the cap on the PEP program alone is 100,000 plus we are seeing more and more of those, the scholarships called the Family Empowerment Scholarship for families with unique abilities, students with unique abilities.
But that program has a bunch of à la carte families too. So between those two programs, we'll be beyond a hundred thousand this fall. So when you say great unbundling, I mean that's a pretty big number that's materialized in a short amount of time.
Michael Horn:
That's a huge number. I just put it in context in two ways. One, overall K12 student population in Florida. And then two, just so we have a percentage sense. And then when you say like they're à la carte, like, you know, what are their days or, or sort of spend look like what, you know, what's the range of categories you see that they're cobbling together?
Ron Matus:
So overall in Florida we have about 3.3 to 3.4 million kids. So, you know, 80,000 or a hundred thousand do an à la carte, that's still a relatively small number in that bigger mix. And I don't know what the ceiling is. You know, if I ever had a crystal ball, it was shattered into a gazillion pieces five years ago. Things have changed so rapidly. I never would have foreseen what we're experiencing now. So it's still a small percentage, but it's growing rapidly. And then in terms of what those families are doing, it's remarkable. I mean, they so quickly have figured out how to maximize the use of the ESAs to cobble together these programs from multiple providers. So to give you just, I mean, just one example, this one mom who I wrote about in conjunction with the à la carte paper, she's probably picking and choosing from a dozen different providers. So she's going to outschool for a writing tutor, she's going to two different micro schools to get à la carte classes. In one case for science and engineering classes, in the other case for art and drama classes. She's using the ESA to do lacrosse for her kids at a recreational league. She's using it for a chess club, Lego robotics competitive team. Oh my gosh. What else is she using it for? Oh, her kids are dyslexic, so she's got a dyslexia tutor which she accesses online because the tutor is in Iowa where they were originally. So she can continue to use the same tutor and then on and on. And then, then she supplements all of that with a variety of homeschool materials. So she's got like 20 different things that she's juggling to put together for her two boys. And that is not unusual in the least. There are families all over the place doing that.
ESAs and Special Ed
Michael Horn:
It occurs to me one, the lack of parochialism is admirable in the state that you would allow dollars to be spent for a tutor in Iowa. Right. I can imagine other states putting in education savings accounts and being like. But it has to be spent within, you know, so that strikes me. But a second thing strikes me about the special ed origins, which I, for some reason, had not put that together. The opportunity, I think, for ESAs, like, of course special ed families should be on the front lines of à la carte unbundled, because their needs are probably the clearest to those parents and the need to source it from lots of different places rather than assume a one size fits all, like they've been crushed under the weight of that for a long time.
But B, it also could bring some real exciting, like from a, you know, not just from a service delivery of getting the right services, but also from a cost perspective I would think, the current incentives in special education across the country are to like, ramp up dollars as evidence of serving. Here's actually a way to make it more efficient, I would think, because the parents are thinking about what's the right mix and value across. Across a budget, in effect, which I think is pretty exciting. The other thing that your report did, and again, the name of it, A Taste of à la Carte Learning, came out in June. You all talked about how this was also really happening in certain regions within Florida. I think South Florida was one of them that you fingered, if memory serves. What's the context? So, like, if part of this story is special ed, what's the context of South Florida? Why is it, why do you think it's perhaps happening there more?
Ron Matus:
Well, it's definitely like happening in a huge way down there. I mean, there are folks down there who have just created an alternative universe for education in a short amount of time. It's really remarkable to behold. Shiren Rattigan, who you just had on your show recently, who I just find to be completely inspiring, she's right in the middle of that. But there's like a hundred of hers down there doing these amazing things. I think there are several things happening that make sense as to why South Florida is a particular hotspot. So number one, you know, there's the density down there. There's a lot of people. I mean, there's 6 or 7 million people between three counties, you know, Miami Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. And, you know, when you have that many people, even a small percentage who want to do something different can be a lot. And I think that's what we're seeing down there. There's a small percentage who want to do something different than traditional education.
But they've got numbers because there's so many people down there. The second thing I think is it's incredibly diverse down there. I mean, Florida would be one of the most diverse states in the country, right and South Florida is even more diverse than the rest of Florida. So you just have this incredibly dynamic mix of people. Many folks down there would be first generation immigrants. So you have that, like, immigrant drive. I think you have very much a ton of people with an entrepreneurial mindset down there who want to do something different, who want to, you know, shape their own destinies.
And if they got the opportunity, they're going to do it. And then last but not least, and I hope I'm not, like, gonna sound disparaging here, I do think that these folks, particularly in Broward county, which is the heart of this, are particularly driven because of the situation with the school districts down there. It's kind of interesting that you have, side by side, one of the most dynamic school districts, a district that has made a name for itself embracing change and embracing choice. And then right next door, which is Miami Dade.
Michael Horn:
I was gonna say that must be Miami Dade.
Ron Matus:
Yeah, Miami Dade. Certainly under Alberto Carvalho, who's now the superintendent in Los Angeles, they did remarkable things, and that has continued under the new superintendent. But then right next door is Broward, which is, you know, kind of more like your traditional big city school district, fairly or not, it has, you know, a disproportionate share of negative headlines about board politics and, you know, financial issues with projects and cost overruns. And that's been kind of the Broward story for a long, long time. So there were many frustrated families down there. Not to say that it's still not serving a lot of families well, because I don't want to take that away from them, because they are. But I think there was more frustration down there because it's kind of a stereotypical big city district.
And then the last thing I'll say, and then I'll quit rambling. Parkland also happened down there in 2018, and I don't want to, I don't think we should diminish, like, the psychological impact that had on a ton of families. So between the frustration with, like, a typical big city district and then the horror of Parkland, people wanted something different. And it's not a surprise to me that the biggest growth, both in raw numbers and percentage in homeschooling in any big district in Florida was in Broward. And so it's also no surprise to me that parents there and educators there took the opportunities they got with ESAs and ran with it. And that's what you see happening.
Michael Horn:
Is your sense that the folks who have taken ESAs and gone into homeschooling are most of them in micro schools at this point. Like how micro schools are in the state of Florida?
Ron Matus:
You know, nobody has a good number, but it's easily hundreds.
Michael Horn:
Okay.
Ron Matus:
There is a group called, you know, the Florida Micro Schools, which has a couple hundred members and I don't think they've captured them all. I mean, Michael, they crop up all the time. I mean, it's amazing. But nobody has a good number on them. Some of them you can track because they are technically officially state registered private schools.
As you know, the definition is kind of fuzzy. So there's a bunch of schools that aren't registered private schools, but are still like these little micro environments, essentially micro schools, either hybrid home schools or kind of their own little homeschool setup. So nobody has a good number, but I would say easily hundreds.
Michael Horn:
Super interesting. Okay, so let me ask you this question, because you brought up the districts and where they are more effective, perhaps you see less folks looking outside the district and where they are perhaps less effective, you see some more pent up demand for other options. You know, you talked about the special education history in Florida also. The other history, of course, is the Florida Virtual School, which goes back almost, you know, 30 years ago, I think, at this point. And Florida Virtual School is interesting because it's literally à la carte online courses for the most part. And it was also sort of like in this interesting way, like a tool of districts to provide bespoke options. So I'm just sort of curious, like in your view, has that made school districts perhaps more able than maybe we'll see in other states to be able to respond and offer, you know, unbundled education options themselves or sort of be the quarterbacks, if you will, for these, for families, you know, taken a little bit here, taking a little bit there, you got the Tim Tebow law. Like you have sort of, it seems, ingredients that would make districts more nimble.
But I don't know if that's true.
Ron Matus:
I think it very much is true. And I'm so glad you brought up Florida Virtual School, because as amazing as they have been for 30 years, I don't think they've ever gotten fully the credit they deserve for being just the pioneers, of course choice. Right. Like you're right, they were, they're like the original à la carte provider.
Virtual Learning Expands in Districts
Ron Matus:
And they've been here in our backyard, and I think what they did was show people a model and they also kind of prime the pump because, you know, for, I don't know, at least a decade now, maybe 15 years now, it has been a graduation requirement that kids take at least one virtual school class. And so hundreds of thousands of families have had a little taste of à la carte learning because they've had to, like, take a single class from a different provider. So everybody's experienced that. I think what we're seeing now is families can still go to Florida Virtual School to access à la carte classes. But we're also seeing, and this is a super amazing development to keep track of going forward. We're also seeing districts now offering unbundling of their own, apart from virtual classes, and so there are six districts. I think that's correct,
There may be even more now. There are six districts that I know of who are now official providers in the system who can get paid with ESA funds. And they're doing that so families can access one or two or three classes, whatever they want to supplement the rest of the programming they're putting together for their kids. There are at least a half dozen other districts who are in the pipeline. So there are districts who are seeing the times have changed. Some families don't want our whole package deal. They just want some of the pieces,
Why don't we offer that to them? And so Florida Virtual School primed the pump for that. But we're seeing districts on their own offer in person, à la carte classes too. And that's a trend I expect to continue.
Michael Horn:
That's fascinating. I mean, I think it's really cool also, because it also gives lie to this sort of storyline that I think is lazy from people that say, oh, ESAs are just a way to undercut districts. No, like districts, come on in, innovate, compete, you know, do better things for students. You got evidence that maybe they're doing it?
Ron Matus:
Well, they're doing it. And it's also not unexpected to me anyways. And I want to give everybody credit who deserves credit. And I don't think this is an either or thing. It's not us versus them. And even though people don't recognize this enough, the fact is districts in Florida, most of them, not all of them, but most of them did respond to the first wave of choice. They did respond to school choice.
All those charters and all those private schools that, you know, parents were accessing with their vouchers or tax credit scholarships that did inspire districts to rev up their own choice options in a huge way. I don't know what the exact latest numbers are, but I would say they are either the biggest engines for school choice now in Florida or among them, because all those magnet schools and career academies and IB programs and everything else they created, made them leaders in choice, too. And so I am not entirely surprised that now that we're moving from school choice to education choice, and they see families wanting that, that they will find some way to adapt. And I think we should give them credit for the extent to which they are adapting to the new environment.
Florida Education: Innovation and Challenges
Michael Horn:
Super interesting. And of course, it's not just choice, right? With the innovation and choice and range of things you're seeing, you know, test scores, everything else have risen in Florida. It's one of the real bright spots in the nation. I want to end our conversation on maybe the downer, but maybe you'll give us the silver lining, which is you have this section in the report around remaining challenges. And so I'll quote it, you say, to ensure the sustained growth of à la carte providers, policymakers must continue working with parents, providers and other stakeholders to raise awareness about the possibilities, better define success and accountability, and thoughtfully strengthen processes for everything from determining eligibility to facilitating payments. Now, I don't have to tell you this touches a big nerve around accountability and it's a flashpoint. As you know, in this space there are some who say public funding, therefore we need, you know, publicly determined accountability for every choice a student or family might make, whether that's school or piano lesson or equine therapy, I suppose. And the other side says, well, families choosing is in fact the accountability, because if it's not working for them, they can go elsewhere.
So they're really empowered in this world of ESAs and education choice. Help me understand why you all highlighted this as a challenge in your own perspective or observations around this tension or looming question.
Ron Matus:
You know, I think we had to put it in there because it is an important question. It is a totally fair question, and, you know, nobody should dodge that. And I, and I don't think it's a downer. I think it's an opportunity for us to better explain one, that it's not either or, but two, that, you know, accountability isn't just regulations. Accountability is on a continuum that also includes, you know, consumer choice or parent choice and that end of the accountability spectrum, and this is something I've learned a lot about over the past 10 or 15 years, is pretty exacting. You know, parents make good decisions, they do drive quality.
And I think we need to help people understand that accountability isn't just regs. I think we have an opportunity to help people understand that there is evidence, including from our other scholarship programs, that when you have a light touch with the regulations and you put the bulk of the accountability on the parents to drive quality, you get good results. I mean, what we see with the other scholarship programs essentially are better outcomes at far less cost, with much higher customer satisfaction, even though those systems are far less regulated than the traditional systems. I suspect that will hold true with à la carte learning as well. One other thing to mention is that, you know, going back to the not being either or so there is a regulatory accountability piece on the PEP program as well, which is, you know, the à la carte program that's blowing up. Those students do have to take a norm reference test just like their counterparts who are using the old school school choice scholarships. So at some point, not too far in the future, we will have data from those students and that will tell us something. And you know, maybe it'll tell us that just like with the school choice scholarship kids, that light touch on the regs is working pretty well.
Maybe it'll tell us something different and we'll have to, you know, adjust. But somebody in their wisdom, I think, you know, and I know testing can be controversial, and I know plenty of families don't want to take any test, but I think that somebody in their wisdom decided we should at least have that piece so that we can check going forward whether this is getting, you know, the results and the outcomes that we want and taxpayers want and the state wants. So I'm rambling now, but we had to put that question in there. Accountability is a huge question. It's a fair question. And I think we have an opportunity to better explain it to people so that they see the setup that we've created so far makes sense.
Michael Horn:
So sorry, lightning last question on this one then, because I'm curious. You all Step up for Students is almost a portal that's processing ESA dollars and helping people get to the schools of choice or education programs of choice, whatever it might be. What role do you all play in sort of showcasing the data, whatever that means, whether it's test scores or consumer opinion or whatever else, to help, you know, people have more information. Are you all thinking about, almost Yelp like providing more of that information?
Ron Matus:
I think that is the hope that eventually our systems will be able to have that consumer posted information so that families can get some kind of. Now, I don't know where that's at and sure, I want to be careful here. I don't know exactly where that's at or what it's going to look like. But that has been something that's been talked about for a long time. You know, essentially having the parents themselves, the consumers, like we do with so many things nowadays, put their two cents in as to whether this provider or that school was a good deal. So I suspect that that is where we're headed.
Michael Horn:
Well, these are things that we'll have to stay abreast of and you'll have to come back at some point and tell us how it's evolved over time. But just really appreciate you all, you coming in and your team and I didn't realize 400 plus amazing growth, you know, the work that you all are doing on behalf of Florida students. Appreciate it, Ron.
Ron Matus:
Well, thank you so much. And a big shout out to, you know, all of my colleagues, all 400 of them, most of whom I have not met. I haven't met them, but they're incredible. And they're making this all happen. I mean, they're making it so families all over Florida can have exactly what they want for their kids. And it's a cool thing to be part of. So thank you so much for giving me a little bit of a spotlight and asking these great questions. I really appreciate it.
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In this latest episode, I got to join forces with my colleague Ann Somers Hogg, who leads health-care research at the Christensen Institute and hosts the podcast, Life-Centered Health Care. Our guest was Craig Sprinkle, CEO of MedCerts. We discuss how MedCerts trains health-care professionals, from how it delivers hands-on learning through remote instruction to the savings students have incurred and future innovations on the horizon.
Michael Horn:
Welcome, everyone. Michael Horn here. And I'm thrilled for today's episode of our podcast, which will be different from what we've done in the past. And that's because we're doing a joint podcast, if you will, so that this episode will actually air in two different places. There's, of course, my podcast, the Future of Education, where we're dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And then we're partnering today with Life-Centered Health Care, a podcast that my colleague at the Christensen Institute, Ann Somers Hogg, produces. And Life-Centered Health Care delves into what disrupting health care really means. Not the buzz phrase, but what does it really look like and how do we do it? And how do the innovation theories that we use at the Clayton Christensen Institute shed light on the evolution of the broader health-care ecosystem to inspire others seeking to transform health care? So first, a welcome to my co-host for today. She's a senior research fellow at the Christensen Institute, Ann Somers. So good to see you. Happy New Year.
Ann Somers Hogg:
Great to see you. Happy New Year. Thank you for having me today. I'm excited about this.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad we're teaming up together on this. And for those wondering why we're doing a joint podcast, I will say the reason is because those who fill the jobs in health care, of course, do so through forms of medical education. And that's a place in sore need of innovation itself as we think about that broader ecosystem. So with that, I'll introduce our guest for today who's going to shed light on all this. Craig Sprinkle, CEO of MedCerts since 2022, you're an InStride company. And of course, Craig joined MedCerts in 2018 in a combined role as the CFO and COO and has served as the CFO since 2020 before stepping into the CEO role. So, Craig, great to see you. Thank you for joining us.
Craig Sprinkle:
Yes, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. So thank you. Great to see both of you.
The MedCerts Origin Story
Michael Horn:
Yeah, you bet. So I want to start actually, you know, predating you at MedCerts, but what led to the launch of MedCerts, You know, what's the market need you all were fulfilling and the credentials that you're really helping fill in the health-care system. I will say, like, I had the chance to watch some of the formation of it, but I've never actually heard from someone at MedCerts how they view the opportunity and market need
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, absolutely, so as you said, it kind of predates me a little bit, but I'm happy to share that. First of all, we just celebrated our 15-year anniversary a year ago. MedCerts originally was founded and frankly still operates very similarly today, in a way that we saw a lack of quality online health-care training that existed 15 years ago that would quickly elevate students to be able to gain new skills, be job ready, and be ready to step into a job or a career. So we saw that gap, we saw an opportunity to ultimately fulfill that. At the same time. And what still carries forward today is that we're addressing a skills gap in the health care and IT industry. Employer needs are continuing to grow. They're looking for more out of job candidates and people that they want to fill vacancies that they have. And there's just a lack of available talent. So we saw a need not only in terms of delivery of that curriculum and delivery of that education, but also fulfilling a need on the employer side to really train towards skills that employers are looking for and making sure that those students are ultimately job ready when they come out of that training.
Ann Somers Hogg:
Yeah, you mentioned that there was a lack of quality online medical training. Could you tell us a little bit about how do you compare with other market offerings in terms of thinking about your business model? So what are the resources and processes that you have in place to educate your learners?
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know that we'll probably talk a little bit more about delivery models and things like that as we continue the conversation, but if you kind of rewind 15 years ago, you know, a lot of things that the experience that a student would have is mostly like in classroom instruction, there wasn't a lot of hands on experience being taught. There wasn't a lot of applicable skills being taught inside that classroom experience. And that was ultimately leading to a gap whenever a person would walk out of that training to ultimately be ready to step into a job. We saw that, and I don't think that it was perfect at the time 15 years ago, whenever we first started delivering this, but bringing more of those applicable skills into an application environment where the student is not only listening to instruction on screen, but they're also learning on how to apply those skills as they're learning and going through that training. So that's a little bit of the difference, if you will, between the delivery of something that we were doing at the time online versus more traditional in classroom instruction. Not as much hands-on experience and not as much interactivity, if you will, within the classroom itself.
Providing Hands-On Learning in an Online Environment
Ann Somers Hogg:
Got it, got it. Thanks for explaining that. And this is probably going to sound like a silly question, but I want to dive into it because if it's an online based education program. You mentioned the importance of the hands-on training and a lot of medical training involves that hands-on experience. So how do you provide these hands-on learning opportunities for students in that online environment?
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of our programs first and foremost involve a clinical requirement. So there is hands-on training required in order to even obtain the credential to begin with, in many of the programs that we train towards. The way that we accomplish that is a couple of different ways. One, we have a lot of partnerships with employers whereby they have agreed to allow our students to come on site, in their environment, work alongside someone else and ultimately obtain those skills. So they're not only taking what they've learned in classroom, if you will, through our didactic portion of our training, but also taking that into a live environment and applying it alongside someone that's already working in the job or the role that they're ultimately seeking to be a part of. So some of that is through those relationships that we have. We also work with a lot of local training facilities that ultimately host students to allow them to come into a simulated classroom environment, or, sorry, a work environment to where they can do the same thing, it's just not on site with a particular employer. So we do that in both ways. We do it through partnerships that we have with employers. Then we also do that through training sites that we have relationships with, whether that's regionally or locally based, to where our students can go into those facilities and ultimately complete those clinical requirements and hands-on requirements that they have. The third element of that is that we also have skill assessments built into our training itself online. So as the student goes out on site, they get some of that hands-on experience, they come back, if you will, into the virtual classroom. We have assessments that we will walk a student through to ultimately test their proficiency on how well they understood some of those things that they learned. And they're going through assessments on a regular basis and getting feedback on areas where they can and need to improve.
The Student Experience
Michael Horn:
It's super interesting to hear you sort of break that down, Craig, because what is coming across actually is that you weren't just innovating in the area of online education, but you were also innovating against the traditional model, as you described, to create a much more interactive experience, a more active learning experience it sounds like. Just talk us through what a typical student experience looks like over the course of their certification program. But also maybe Ann Somers, we can ask the question about business model in terms of program costs relative to other options in a moment but Craig, just focus on like the interactive learning experience itself and how that differs and how you facilitated that over the course of their certification.
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, sure, absolutely. And I guess I'll preface this by saying that obviously every student experience is a little bit different. But by and large, when a student first enrolls in their program, first and foremost they're looking for that alternative route in order to get a fast track into a career. That's sort of fundamental to what we do, is that we offer that affordable training. It's something that we can offer in a fast and rapid way for them, it's much more affordable at little to no debt to that individual at the end of the day. And it provides that faster path into a career that they're ultimately looking for. Remember, the end goal is not the training itself, it's the job or it's the career that they're trying to build towards that we're really trying to help them with. Generally speaking, our students, once they enroll in one of our programs, they're typically going through a three to six month process, depending on the program, whereby they're completing initially a didactic portion of the training. That's the virtual online piece of it, typically that's built around quizzes, virtual assessments, interactivity, there's gamification if you will in a lot of the training that we do, there's real time feedback that they're getting through avatars and things on screen that they are interacting with and then that's followed up in some cases depending, on the program of course, with a clinical component that we were just talking about where that student will then go out on site, complete a lot of the hands on training that's required associated with their program and learn a lot of that in person either through an employer or training facility that we were talking about. They're taking regular assessments along the way, so they're getting continuous feedback around areas that they're doing well in, areas that they need to improve upon. And there's one to one support that we're ultimately offering them as well. They have an advisor that's assigned to them from day one. That advisor follows them all the way through, providing support, providing encouragement. As you can imagine, in an online environment it's very self led, self paced, it's sometimes very individualized and there can be an element of loneliness that comes along with that. So having someone that they can connect with on a regular basis, we feel is critically important to that success of that student. Along the way as well, they get connected with a career coach. That career coach is also helping them begin to develop a resume, begin to go through skill development as it relates to having a successful interview, getting connected with employers. While we certainly don't guarantee employment at the end of a program, we help students as much as we can get connected with job opportunities and openings that may exist in the geographical area that they're a part of. So that gives you a little bit of a window into, I guess, more of the specifics of how we deliver the training, but also the support and the service that we give along the way as well.
Access and Affordability
Ann Somers Hogg:
Yes, that's really interesting, especially how you pointed to the connection to the advisor and how they're really helping them through the process, so that there is that feeling that people would probably be getting in the one on one or sorry, in the in person environment where they have that one on one connection with a teacher or an advisor. So one of the things you mentioned towards the beginning of the explanation about the typical student experience is it's an affordable training and it's a fast and rapid way to get a certification with little to no debt. So could you talk a little bit about how your program costs and maybe the options for student payment differ from traditional models? What sets you apart and makes it more affordable or makes people able to get through with little to no debt?
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think I mentioned a minute ago that typically our programs are structured to cover training that goes around either between three weeks up to about six months. From a pricing perspective, those programs range as low as $2,000 for a full certification program, all the way up to $6,000, but generally the average is around $4,000 at the end of the day. And whenever you kind of stack that up against, you know, a traditional undergrad program or even course hour costs at the four year college level, it's much more affordable and less expensive whenever you start to compare it on that level. At the same time, the speed at which someone can move through that training, first and foremost is self paced, which is a huge advantage to an adult learner who has a lot of distractions in their life at the end of the day, they do want to dedicate the time to getting the additional training, but they may not be able to sit and dedicate 8, 9, 10 hours a day to doing it. So we allow that flexibility in their scheduling to do that at their own pace. The funding and the ability of someone to be able to pay for their programs actually comes from a number of different places. Number one is that a lot of our students come through relationships that we have with employers. So there's typically a tuition reimbursement policy behind a student or other funding that's available through their employer, that from a student's perspective or that employee's perspective, it's basically no out of pocket cost for them at all. They're simply utilizing those benefits that they have through their employer. Some of the students that we ultimately interact with are also eligible for either state or federal level grant funding, depending on the program, depending on where they're taking advantage of that training, and they're able to tap into some of that funding as well. And then lastly, we also provide very affordable tuition assistance programs, payment plans, that allow a student to effectively take out a loan for their program. But it's a relatively low payment in the grand scheme of when you think about traditional student loans and the cost of tuition and things like that, it's a much more affordable monthly cost for them that they're paying for as they go through their training. And by the time they frankly complete their training, they have none of that debt left at that point in time. So they're walking out not only with a credential, but no further debt or payment obligation as it relates to the program that they just took advantage of.
Michael Horn:
Super interesting on a few fronts, Craig, I have a set of questions around outcomes and success. But before going there, just to double back on something that you just said as you were describing the loan, you know, when the few circumstances where people are taking out loans, it sounds like it's not federal student loans. So do you all not participate in the Title Four, you know, federal government, right, funding of higher ed?
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, that's correct. So we don't actually take advantage of any of the Title Four funding that's out there today. The loan programs that I'm referring to, those are programs that we've structured internally ourselves. So if you think about it for a second, we are ultimately underwriting, you know, the default risk, if you will, associated with a lot of those payment plans. But quite frankly, we find that the performance is very, very positive. Because at the end of the day, you do have students that enroll in these programs that are very motivated. They are looking for an opportunity to take the training and very quickly move into a job and a career in a very short time period. So we see the performance of those payment plans, frankly, being much better in a lot of cases than what you would see through some of the other funding sources that you mentioned. And that allows us to continue to just do more of that, you know, over time.
Evaluating Outcomes
Michael Horn:
Super interesting, because it strikes me that that does a few things, right? One, by not participating in Title Four, you all save cost in compliance, but you also get permission to do a lot more innovation in terms of program delivery, distribution, cost of acquisition of students, so forth. But secondly, I would imagine because you're doing the loan programming, your incentives are actually well aligned with your students because you are bearing the risk just as they are which is a central problem right now of the higher ed financing, right, is that the institution doesn't have any skin in the game on that. Let's talk about metrics of success and value and so forth. I know this a little bit because I was at Guild, I think when MedCerts became one of the providers for helping employees be able to move into health-care roles, depending on where they were with their employers. And a big thing for the Guild was we want to choose online programs that serve adults well. We want to choose programs that have good outcomes. How all do you measure outcomes? What are they, and how do they compare to traditional models?
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, first and foremost, I mentioned a minute ago that the end goal and the ultimate outcome that we're looking for is the student's placement into a job. And again, that can take different forms when you're talking about relationships that we have with employers, because some of those students and those learners are already existing employees of that particular employer, but they are looking for upskilling or reskilling opportunities so that they can move into that next role or move into the next step in their career ladder. So ultimately, that is the end goal that we're looking for. Beyond that, it's more the traditional outcomes that you would see, regardless of it being MedCerts or any other training provider or education institution, you know, number one is whether you call it a graduation rate or a completion rate, that is something that we look very closely at in terms of how the rate at which our students are completing successfully their training and their programs. I would say the next largest or equally most important one is ultimately the employment rate. And we look at that very regularly. We are surveying our students on a regular basis. We stay in contact with them post graduation after they've completed their certification training, to stay in contact with them to make sure that either A, they did get the job that they were looking for or B they are looking for something different and if we can be of assistance to them to help connect them with other employers and other opportunities, we definitely want to do that for them. I will tell you that comparatively, and I'm certainly biased whenever I say this is that I believe that our outcomes are ratably better than what you would see in more of the higher ed space. Our completion rates or graduation rates are well in excess of 70% across all of our programs. That's blended by the way, some are a little bit lower and certainly some are much higher. But that's the overall average. And the way that we ultimately look at it's not traditional placement at the end of the day, but we look at employment and our employment rates of all of our graduates again are upwards of 70% or higher. And again that to be fair, that's a blend at times of both in field and out of field. But the vast majority of the employment that we're typically reporting on and looking at is infield associated with that. So there's other outcomes certainly, but those are the biggest ones that we definitely look at.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, go ahead Ann Somers.
Ann Somers Hogg:
Oh, I was just gonna say when you're looking at employment rate, is that employment rate at completion of the program or is that at one year, six months? Is it at a certain time period?
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, it's actually over a time horizon. So it's at the point that they have completed their program and then 12 months following that time period. Because you have to remember again, depending on the program, there are clinical requirements that still have to be completed. That student still needs to sit for their certification exam. So it's really getting them in that employment opportunity in that time period immediately following graduation.
Ann Somers Hogg:
Great, thanks for explaining that.
What’s Next?
Michael Horn:
Yeah, it's super interesting. Just one more question before I turn it to Anne Somers for sort of a final question, if you will. But when you talk about those metrics, those are actually stunning metrics for on ground programs, for an online program, those are astronomical. As you know, when you're talking about excess of 70% graduation rate in particular. And obviously the ROI to the student is very clear because these certifications have very clear labor market value. So the return is very clear. I'm curious, I guess a two part question as we think about where MedCerts maybe goes from here. Apprenticeships are becoming a very hot topic in the education career space, particularly in health care, is one of those places being identified for them. I'm curious if you're doing anything there and then the second question is what are you doing with AI in terms of program delivery as well? Because that's obviously another hot area. So AI, apprenticeships, things that we ought to keep an eye on there.
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, absolutely. So let me address the first one first. So I would say in terms of a traditional apprenticeship, we are doing a little bit of that, but not significantly. What we do a lot of frankly, is more of like externship placement. So again, in terms of an employer and ultimately what they're looking for from our graduates, sometimes depending on the program of study, the vacancies that they have, they may not look to fill that vacancy right away, but they want that person to come out on site and almost do further on the job training with the employer in an externship type setting, and then that leads to a job for them at that point in time. Apprenticeships can get a little bit complicated, to be quite honest, about what it takes to manage that at the employer level. It's not that we shy away from that. It's just a little bit more difficult to execute. At the end of the day, we find that again, to change the word a little bit, you know, a traditional externship provides that faster and easier path to where it's a little bit of like test driving from the employer's perspective and test driving from the employee's perspective. And we find that that works out pretty well.
Michael Horn:
What about in terms of AI before I turn it over?
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, yeah. So I would say probably 12, 18 months ago, we really started in earnest to start to embed elements of AI into a lot of our training. The best examples that I can give you today is that we have a mental health support specialist program that we train towards today. And part of that training, a good core of the training, quite frankly, is on the screen interaction with a persona that an individual learner is interacting with. A patient that is already pre wired, if you will, with a certain personality and based on the nature of the conversation, obviously intelligent large language models, and we start to build up that intelligence in the interaction that starts to build that relationship and that conversation as the person navigates through, through that interview process with the patient. So that's just one example of that. I will also tell you that we're actually leveraging AI quite a bit from a product development perspective to just help expedite how quickly we can move through new product development and bring new offerings to market as well. So I don't want to diminish that fact, but we're, I mean, we're finding every way possible that we can leverage AI in the most positive way.
MedCerts’ Work With High Schoolers
Ann Somers Hogg:
Great. And as Michael mentioned, I'll try and close it out with an all encompassing question here. So is there anything about what makes MedCerts unique that we didn't ask you but you wish we had? And if so, what's the question and what's the answer?
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, I mean, I think we had some really good conversation by the way, so thank you for that and I really appreciate all the questions. I think the main thing that we maybe didn't talk about, that I'm particularly excited about, is that what are the additional things that we're really doing to have a material impact on the vacancy crisis in health care? And I would say one of the bigger things among many, quite frankly, that we're doing is really focusing on early talent development and early skill development. And what I mean by that is that we're accomplishing that by really reaching down into the high school population and working with K12 providers to really bring our training into like juniors and seniors in high school, so it becomes part of their path towards graduation. And we kind of look at it as like a triple benefit at the end of the day. And what I mean by that is in many cases a student will have the opportunity to walk out of high school with a high school diploma. They will have a nationally recognized certification, and in some cases they will also have credit for prior learning associated with that certification at the college level if they choose to go down that path. And if you think about that, that is a massive cost saver for that learner at the end of the day where they may get credit for upwards of a semester's worth of education at the college level, which saves them a tremendous amount of tuition costs downstream, not to mention the skills that they've already built before they ever came out of high school. So that's just one path, if you will. But for those that are maybe not going down the four year college path or the two year college path, they are ready through that certification to step into a job that ultimately an employer is looking at that skill set and saying they're ready to be hired at the end of the day. So that's an area that obviously I'm really excited about, you can tell by the tone of my voice at the end of the day. But it's really something that we've seen a really large movement towards in the last 12 to 15 months.
Ann Somers Hogg:
Absolutely. I'm so glad that you brought that up. A few of the interesting models that I think I've sent on to Michael and another one of our education researchers at the institute have really piqued my interest when I see that a large health system is partnering with local high schools in order to do what you were talking about, in order to help those juniors and seniors really have a career path as soon as they leave high school.
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, that's a great point. I think to your point, employers are also seeing that opportunity where they can ultimately tap into talent earlier as well and not necessarily be solely relying on a training provider, you know, to bring all of that talent to them. They can find that through that partnership with that local high school district. And then we simply become an element of allowing or enabling that training to get that student job ready.
Michael Horn:
Yeah. It seems to me also I like it for all the reasons you guys have said, but it's dual enrollment with a lot more teeth in it because it's a meaningful credential that's backed up by a certification. So it's not just sort of the high school said you learned it. You can actually show that they've learned it and it has value whether they go labor market or college. I think that's going to be much more meaningful as a set of credentials.
Craig Sprinkle:
Yeah, absolutely.
Michael Horn:
Perfect. Well, look, thank you, Craig, so much, obviously, for the work that you're doing, for joining us on both Life Centered Health Care and the Future of Education today. You get two for one out of this conversation with us. And for all you tuning in, thank you for joining us. Ann Somers, great to see you. We'll look forward to more conversations on both of our shows. Thank you so much.
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We wouldn’t ask a piano student to attempt an advanced concerto before they had Mary Had a Little Lamb down pat.
So why do we do the equivalent in schools?
In this video I use a comparison to music instruction to illustrate why tying school curriculum to students’ ages rather than their skill level doesn’t work for anyone.
(music playing)
Oh, hey there. I was just brushing up on a piece that I have not played in a long while. It's Schubert's Fourth Impromptu, and it's a piece that I'd actually mastered a long time ago on the piano.
But now I'm trying to get it up to speed on a keyboard—and it's a very different experience. But you can imagine that if I was just starting piano—I'd never played before or maybe just a couple lessons and my piano teacher said—well, Michael, you're 44 years old and it's August. So that means our lesson plan says it's time for you to be learning Schubert's Fourth Impromptu. So let's get started.
That would be insane. Why?
Because I wouldn't have mastered any of the foundational building blocks to be able to play such a piece. More appropriate for me would be trying to learn something like this. Right?
So it would be literally crazy for someone to say, sorry, it's time to skip on to what the pacing guide or the lesson plan says you should be doing based on your age.
Now, to be fair, that maybe wouldn't be a classical piece of music.
Maybe they've taken some of my level into account.
But still, maybe it'd be something like this. (music playing)
Or maybe even this. (music playing)
But the point is that it's pretty obvious that I should be moving on to something more advanced only once I've really shown that I've actually mastered or at least become proficient in the current piece and the set of skills that I'm working on.
No piano teacher worth their salt would do otherwise.
Thanks for reading The Future of Education! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Yet here's the rub.
Our traditional schools, they do this all the time and every single day. And we—the public, parents, even educators—most of us don't even bat an eye. We accept that that's just how school works.
Even though we know that's not how learning works.
Even though, of course a kid who has not mastered double-digit addition is going to struggle if they move on to double-digit multiplication before they're ready. It's crazy.
And it's time that we had people—students, kids, all of us—learning at the right level for them, just above where they've achieved mastery, so they aren't bored and there's some struggle and effort required to really engage them, but also so that they aren't discouraged, as there's too much struggle and too much effort required.
So let's wake up and move to mastery based learning and embed success for each and every child—not what we currently have, which is failure for most.
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There has been a national discourse around the wave of anti-semitism that has swept across higher education since the start of the Hamas-Israel war in 2023. But what has it looked like at the K–12 level—and what can that teach us about combating hate more generally? To tackle those questions, I sat down with Tyler Gregory, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the largest collective voice of Jews in the Bay Area of California. We discussed how anti-semitism has manifested in schools over the last two academic years, the challenge of balancing free speech with protection from discrimination, and how to better equip students and educators to combat hate.
Michael Horn
Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. Since October 7th, 2023, in this country, we've seen an outpouring of hate and specifically anti-Semitism across schools. The story has been well-known and well-told in higher education and our colleges and universities. It's also occurred in our K-12 schools and districts, and we haven't covered that nearly as much on this particular podcast, and so I'm glad we’ll get to delve into that today.
But before we do so, I just want to address what some folks have asked: why are we covering this as a topic for the Future of Education? And I think the reason fundamentally is that hate, anti-Semitism, so forth, raises big questions about the discourse and behaviors in our schools in the future. It raises big questions around free speech in our schools. And to the point of the work here, it raises big questions around how we support each and every single individual in realizing their full human potential, regardless of their race, creed, beliefs, on and on. And so I'll also admit, as this has begun over the past, now, year and a half, this is personal as well for me as a Jew, but I think it raises larger questions.
And to help us think through them, I'm delighted that Tyler Gregory is joining us because Tyler, you actually know something about this much deeper than i do. You've been on the front lines of this as the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the largest collective voice of Bay Area Jews in California. Under your leadership, JCRC pushes for a just world where Jewish identity is embraced and all people can thrive. And I think it's important to note before you jump in, you all have mobilized multi-ethnic, multi-faith coalitions to fight back, not just against anti-semitism, but to show up for lots of groups who have felt marginalized or experienced discrimination—from Black communities, the Asian Pacific, Asian-American Pacific groups, obviously, anti-LGBTQ, sorry, I cannot talk today, anti-LGBTQ+ groups, and so on and on. And so this is an incredibly important set of topics, not just in the narrow prism of anti-semitism, but much more broadly, of course. So Tyler, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.
Tyler Gregory
It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Michael.
Anti-Semitism Prior to October 7th
Michael Horn
Yeah, you bet. And I'll do my best to talk a little bit better as we get going on, but you get to do most of the talking, fortunately. So I just want to have you give us the ground state of things. If we go back to October 6th, 2023, what was the state of anti-Semitism in California K through 12 schools specifically? There was a lot of conversation, I will say, around a proposed ethnic studies piece of the curriculum that some people felt had anti-Semitic efforts. So I'd love you to sort of give us what was the state of play prior to Hamas's attacks, and maybe how that's been similar or different from other states in the US that you've observed.
Tyler Gregory
So thanks so much, Michael. I would say that the October 7th attacks accelerated a trend that we had previously been seeing, which is an increasing amount of anti-semitism in K–12 schools, both environmental as well as in curriculum. You mentioned the ethnic studies course that is now going to be mandated in California schools and other states are following suit. We had a wake-up call almost five years ago when the proposed state model curriculum included anti-semitic rap lyrics that were references to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was our community's wake-up call. And this discipline historically has not included Jewish Americans, Jewish studies departments and higher ed have been separate from ethnic studies departments, Asian Pacific Islander, Latino, African-American, indigenous communities in ethnic studies. But they started writing about us in derogatory ways, and they decided that the Middle East would be a disciplinary area that should be included in ethnic studies. And so that experience was a wake-up call for us that we needed to play catch up and also figure out how we wanted to fit into the story of ethnic studies. And so that's been a hotspot for us, but so too has been casual anti-Semitism on the playground, in the classroom, and often more of dog whistles and overt forms of anti-semitism that maybe your or my parents, Michael, might have experienced as kids. And so we have a lot of work to do to help teachers and administrators recognize those dog whistles and how that leads to exclusion for Jewish students today. So then, I mean, that's obviously a disturbing state of affairs that had been escalating.
Responses to the Attacks
Michael Horn
I assume it goes into overdrive, sadly, starting October 7th, but just talk to us about what the last school year looked like before we get into this school year. Just, you know, in the schools themselves, I suspect you have stories of parents and students who've reached out to you and told you things. Give us a sense of the state of play, whether that's through stats or the stories, to really help us understand what was going on.
Tyler Gregory
Yeah, the challenges have evolved. So in the days after the horrific attacks, the main issues that we saw were from parents that felt the response from school districts to their communities were either inadequate, non-existent, had implicit biases, or there were other problems with the way they were communicating. And you talk about belonging on your show. This is really a moment for Jewish students, parents, families, teachers to feel like they belong as part of that district. And I think a lot of folks listening might not understand how these terrorist attacks impact Jews in America. This was the single deadliest day for the Jewish community since the end of World War II, since the end of the Holocaust. And that collective trauma, that generational trauma was felt across the Jewish world, whether we had direct connections to Israel or not. And so for a kid to show up on October 8th after that, whether they had a direct or indirect relationship to what happened, that was a traumatic event for all of us. And that was a time for them to be seen, felt, heard in the same way the response from school districts that we saw after the murder of George Floyd with Black Lives Matter, after a wave of Asian hate, particularly here in San Francisco where one out of three residents are Asian Pacific Islander, we saw the response from school districts to those acute moments for those communities. And we had the same expectation that school districts would hold our community in the same way. And sometimes there were insensitivities. Sometimes Muslim and Jewish students felt pitted against each other in these communications. And so that led to a lot of concern, if not disturbance, depending on the communication in terms of how administrators were communicating to their constituents about the issue.
Michael Horn
Did you see like in the classrooms themselves, teachers lash out in different ways and districts, how did they respond if that happened? Because I mean, right on higher ed campuses, I think a lot of people saw the protests, right? They saw the sit-ins and basically encampments in many cases. And then the administration saying, yeah, it violates a policy, but we're going to sort of look the other way. What was going on in K-12 school districts themselves, in the classrooms, on the playgrounds around this outside of the district initial response?
Tyler Gregory
So as you can imagine, things got more complicated as Israel responded to the attacks and went after Hamas and Gaza, which is an incredibly challenging condition to conduct a war. You go after terrorists that are hiding under civilian populations. Gaza is one of the most dense places in the world. And a debate, and I don't think this is the place to give my personal opinion on what's happening, but there is a robust debate and differences of opinion. And no matter what school district setting you're entering, you're going to have a multitude of opinions about what's taking place for the war. So once Israel's response started, it got much, much harder for administrators to figure out how to hold everybody, including places where you had Israeli and Palestinian families, both in that district. And you saw activism, much like on higher ed campuses, we saw Gaza walkouts in Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts. And most administrators were woefully unprepared on how to handle that, because you'd have a set of activists, students, and in some cases, teachers, which in our mind crosses the line, call for their fellow students to walk out. So what happens if you're a Jewish student that's sitting there and you're not participating? You feel vulnerable. You see that you are being judged by your peers. There is not a good way for the teacher to address the situation in the moment. I would say there are some bad actors and we can talk about that. But for the most part, what we're seeing is a lack of competency on how to hold Jewish and Muslim students through this traumatic time.
Holding Divergent Viewpoints
Michael Horn
So maybe actually, let's jump into that, because I'm super curious. It sounds like it's more of a story of we just don't know what to do to handle these challenges. Obviously, JCRC has been providing resources, I imagine, to help educate district leaders, school principals, et cetera, about what the proper response is. How have you all thought about how to hold these two divergent, two is actually probably the wrong word, right? Two Jews, three opinions. So it's probably multiple, multiple opinions and divergences in a community. How have you recommended people start to respond or lead their schools and districts given those conditions you just described?
Tyler Gregory
Well, one thing we quickly discovered is that in diversity, equity, inclusion programs or in diversity trainings, the Jewish American experience is lacking. And you could say the same thing about Muslim Americans. And so the first thing that we worked on was retooling our anti-Semitism and Jewish identity training to support administrators and teachers to make sure that they had the core competency to understand what a Jew is. And Michael, you know this as well as I do, Judaism is our religion. Jews are a people. We have peoplehood. But in many places, and this is not something to criticize if you're not fully versed in this. People conflate our religion with the rest of our identities, our culture, our nationhood, our relationship to Israel, or our secular nature. You can be an atheist Jew, right? And I think that our identities have been flattened in this Christian country such that teachers and administrators don't quite know how to put us in a box. And that's a very complicated thing to work through. So if you don't know who we are, how are you going to hear the dog whistles that weaponize various parts of our identity? And that's the way that we try to educate K-12 leaders, to make sure that they understand and can better listen for the ways in which our religious, cultural, political connection to Israel is weaponized in ways that echo forms of anti-Semitism that have existed long before the modern state of Israel, for example.
Including Jews in Ethnic Studies
Michael Horn
Yeah, it's super interesting as you get into that because Rabbi Wolpe, he's long made the point, right, that Jewish as a construct predates the Western constructs around race, religion, and so forth. It was sort of an amalgamation of a lot of these things, and you just described them. Even if you go to Israel now, you'll see secular atheist Jews, deeply religious Orthodox Jews, and everything in between, traditionalist and so forth, that doesn't even get into the divisions we think about popularly in this country around reform, conservative, and so forth. It's much, much deeper and multifaceted. So the trainings, it sounds like, is actually fundamental ground level education of just even understanding what is going on and what you're seeing in your context. I'm curious. That sounds like it would not provoke maybe the backlashes that some of the DEI trainings we know historically have done, but I'm sort of curious about the effectiveness maybe more to the point because we also know DEI trainings, but also frankly, Holocaust trainings have not been super effective often in protecting the populations that they're intended to. How do you all think about measuring that or protecting against it?
Tyler Gregory
What I would say is too often when we think about longitudinal students' experience with Jewish identity and anti-semitism, when they have an ancient world history course, they learn maybe there's a couple lines about ancient Israel and the Israeli kingdoms when we're talking about the Roman Empire, and then maybe we talk about the Jewish American experience the Holocaust, and there's certainly a Holocaust education component that is from 1933 to 1945. But Jewish history spans 3,000 years. And so that's why we think that Jewish identity should be a part of ethnic studies and that we do need to educate people about the multiple elements of our identities and talk about not only the bad things that happened to us, but to celebrate what we have contributed to this country. Jewish sports heroes, Jewish elected officials, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, people should understand how we celebrate being Americans as the Jewish community and the ways in which we've contributed to this country. And without ethnic studies, really, we're only talking about bad things that have happened throughout their history. And Michael, you know that most of our Jewish holidays are about overcoming the bad things that happen to us. And at the end of our holiday, whether it's our Passover Seder, we usually say, and let's eat, let's celebrate, l'chaim, right? But we can't just be in this victimhood mentality. We have to talk about who we are, what we believe in, talk about Jewish joy and what we mean to this country. And that's why I think whether we're newcomers or not to ethnic studies, there is a
meaningful place for us in this story about what it means to to be Jews in this country. And that's something that I don't think takes away. For those that don't want Jewish Americans to be a part of ethnic studies, we're not trying to take away any other experience from being a part of this. We just think that the Jewish kid in the classroom that's going through an ethnic studies course could equally benefit by being seen through this discipline in the same way that we touch on Holocaust studies or helping kids understand what anti-semitism is.
Michael Horn
Super interesting. It's a very similar answer to the one Dara Horn gave me when I asked a similar question. I'm just curious, and I'd love to dig one level deeper, as I did with her, actually, on this, which is how do you make sure, frankly, for ethnic studies in general, but also, you know, the Jewish component of it, it's not just one more thing on a long list of items that schools should do because there's limited time. Right. There's lots of competing interests trying to get their segment in. Why does this rise to the top in your view or in inclusion? Right. Or are there other ways to go about this maybe that get the principles across but create more freedom for, OK, what's the precise knowledge or specific standards we're going to study as we learn about principles of, frankly, not dipping into anti-semitism, but hate more broadly?
Tyler Gregory
I think you've got to tackle both layers, Michael. We, as a community, are often the canary in the coal mine of a health, of a democracy, of society, as the Jewish community. And so to help students understand that a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, when one community is targeted, it often leads to other communities being targeted. And if you look historically to Jewish communities around the world, 1920s Germany was a golden era for Jews in Germany in that democracy. I'm a gay Jew. There were gay clubs in Germany. And we saw how the Jewish community was a canary in the coal mine for what was happening in the steady march to fascism in that country. And so we don't think anti-Semitism is only a Jewish problem. But if you if you zoom out and you look globally, oftentimes we're a scapegoat that is a harbinger of things to come and a measurement of the health of the society that we're living in. And so we think that we can talk about this in a much broader lens where we're helping people understand historically what some of the consequences can be when the Jewish community is targeted. I also think there's not a one shot to this. I don't see a silver bullet. The more ways we can integrate our very small minority in the context of America, two to two point five percent, depending on the day, the better chance we have of reinforcing what our community means.
The Free Speech Question
Michael Horn
Super, super helpful and interesting. Let me ask you this, because one of the contours of debate that has come up in the higher ed context. Right. So we lay the education piece. People still have different viewpoints. How do we think about the line between free speech? You know, students expressing viewpoints about Israel or say, you know, maybe less savory ones around support for Hamas, even Tinker V. Des Moines, you know, stuff right. Supreme Court case of the ability to express your views freely. You don't lose those when you enter the school doors. But how do you think about that tenant, if you will, of the American experience? And when this crosses the line into blatant discrimination, bullying and stuff that is not OK, how do you think about that, I guess, in general?
Tyler Gregory
So for better or worse, anti-Semitic speech is free speech. I think when universities uphold free speech as their gold standard, we ask them, OK, if you're going to allow this kind of hate speech where Israel is the the scourge of the earth and responsible for all these ills that extend beyond what a tiny economy in the scope of global affairs could possibly achieve, we ask, where are you exercising free speech? If this is such an important value to you, why are you staying silent when Jews are not allowed to go to the library because they're being blocked? When are you staying silent when terrorism is being glorified by certain campus groups? We can respect their their value, but where we lose faith in their abilities is when they don't practice what they preach. And too many universities and since we're talking about K-12, unfortunately, too many districts are staying silent in the face of these discriminatory acts. And so that's where we would like to see education leaders step up right now.
Michael Horn
Do you think there's a different line from K-12 to higher ed in terms of how teachers, you know, you mentioned the ethnic studies curriculum, obviously, and getting Jews included in that curriculum and an understanding, frankly, of Judaism more broadly built into it. You know, in higher ed, there's this sort of sense of academic freedom, right? Professors, they create their own courses. I get to lecture as I as I view. Do you see that extending into curriculum in K-12 as well? Or is there a different way we ought to think about academic freedom, slightly different from free speech, but still, you know, related and these noxious viewpoints that you just talked about that perhaps we're not calling out as clearly as we might?
Tyler Gregory
It's a it's a tough question. And I think teachers have a right to bring their own lived experiences into the classroom so long as it does not target the experiences of other students. And unfortunately, we're seeing too much of that. We're seeing and this is a tough issue to talk through, but we're seeing Palestinian flags. If a teacher is a Palestinian American into the classroom and there's a Jewish student sitting there not knowing how to feel, are they going to be graded poorly? Are they are they safe being in that environment? And that gets really tricky because we don't want to deny a Palestinian their identity. But these symbols that for some people are personal are otherwise political. So I think we have a lot of work to do to figure out how to massage those issues. But we also don't want to deny the lived experience of teachers, which can be so rich for students to learn about. So I think it's a balancing act. And I wish I had a clearer answer for you.
The Road Ahead
Michael Horn
No, no, this is good. I mean, frankly, I think delving into the shades of gray is what's going to make us stronger over time. And as you said, you know, your mission has really been these trainings around the education to get awareness into the schools. I'm curious what you're starting to see the fruits of that. What does the school year look like? You said some of the anti-Semitism has morphed maybe over time. Where are we now? How are we doing? What else do we need to do as we think about charting a path forward for all students?
Tyler Gregory
Yeah, so we did a poll a few months ago of Bay Area Jews, a random sample public poll, and we found that only 28 percent of Bay Area Jews are satisfied with how K-12 schools are tackling anti-Semitism. We also found that one out of three Bay Area Jewish residents have personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism. And then we asked those folks, where did that happen? And about 30 percent of them said that that happened in a school setting. Second, only to social media. So we think that it's a prominent source of the challenge that our communities face. And we have a lot of work to do still. What we're seeing this year is more of the incidents that we're getting calls with are classic anti-Semitism rather than weaponization of the war. So classic anti-Semitic tropes about Jews having too much power or privilege. And I don't think that we're quite to the bottom as to why that is. But the level at which we're getting those calls is clearly inspired by what happened last year. And so in the same way, I don't want to get too political on here, but after the initial election of Donald Trump, we saw a Pandora's box open on the far right with anti-Semitism. October 7th seems to have led to a Pandora's box opening with far left anti-Semitism. They look and feel differently. There are different types of threats. But that permission seems to continue to exist. And our job is to make sure that those forms of hate stay on both extremes and not creep into the mainstream of our society. And unfortunately, it seems like public and private education is one of the most important battlefronts in which we're dealing with this problem.
Michael Horn
No, super helpful. Tyler, as we wrap up here, just any other thoughts that we should be thinking about work that you're doing that you want to spotlight or conversations that we ought to be keeping an eye on as we progress through the rest of the school year? One thing that we think is really important to lift up, but I will not give any illusion it's easy. It's important for students to see Muslim and Jewish leaders talking to one another. And I think districts see, OK, we've got to have our anti-Semitism module, we've got to have our Islamophobia module, we need to have an assembly dedicated to Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans or Palestinian Americans. That's great. But if there are divisions in a classroom or in a school or even among parents, what better way to get them to change the tone of the conversation and lower the temperature and tensions than to see Muslim and Jewish or Israeli and Palestinian leaders talking to one another with civil discourse? And that's a broader conversation just in the context of this civil discourse. But if they can see role models talking through differences about how despite the fact that the war is six thousand miles away, both of our communities are in pain and trauma and that actually we have a lot more in common culturally and as immigrant communities than we do our divides over what's happening there. Maybe we can start to build bridges and change the way that we're having this conversation. And so we work with a Muslim organization both to provide joint trainings and to model civil discourse. But there are a lot of amazing organizations both in Israel, Palestine and here that ard trying to bring Jews, Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians together. And to model that in front of students goes a very long way. And so that's something that I think we need much, much more of as this issue plays out. That's a very hopeful note to end on.
Michael Horn
Let me ask you a final question. How can people find out more about JCRC and follow your work?
Tyler Gregory
You can follow us JCRC.org and learn much more about our education trainings. We'd be delighted to work with you.
Michael Horn
Perfect. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us. And for all of you, we'll see you next time on the Future of Education.
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Is it better for education solutions to have an interdependent, self-contained design or a modular one? Well, it depends. That contradicts the advice of a lot of CEOs and investors who adhere to one or the other view.
In this video, I use music as a metaphor to help explain the tradeoffs and best uses of each architecture.
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One of the big questions that I often get is this: Is it better to be vertically integrated That is, you control everything you do. You make all the parts, you have a proprietary architecture.
Or is it better to be modular, that is horizontally integrated? You're just one step or part that fits neatly into a whole that others also contribute to in clearly defined, predictable ways.
And basically what we've learned is that, contrary to what Apple or anyone else might tell you, the answer is… it depends.
The theory of interdependence and modularity says that when you're trying to improve the raw performance or functionality of a product, a system, a service, composition, you need an interdependent architecture. The reason is you can't specify in advance how one part works and functions and the way another part works and functions because they're interdependent with each other. If you make changes in one, it changes the other and vice versa. And so when you're trying to wring out every last ounce of performance from something, you need to wrap your hands around everything and really embrace this interdependent architecture.
IBM mainframes are a classic example, highly interdependent product. IBM did everything. They built the logic circuitry, the operating system, the memory, they manufactured it, they did the sales, everything.
But frankly, most Apple products are very interdependent as well.
And we can make this idea of interdependence come alive in music as well, because it's a confusing concept. And I thought if we did something very outside of the bounds of how we normally think about it, it might come alive a little bit more for folks.
And I'm going to do it by demonstrating something by Bach. It's his Fugue No. 2 in C Minor, and it's a great example of an interdependent architecture. And by having [that architecture] he really optimizes the overall raw functionality of the composition I'm going to illustrate it here on this keyboard—and I'll apologize in advance it's not a weighted keyboard, it's not going to be a beautiful grand piano sound, it's clunky here and there—but i think you'll get the idea.
Essentially what Bach has done in this Fugue is that he's going to have three subjects come in you can almost think of them like melodies and then there's going to be counter subjects that respond to it with movement and opposition and he specifies in essence by writing down music everything in advance to create this incredibly rich composition together.
It starts with this first subject, which is the alto part, which you'll hear here. And I'll just play it—it's very elegant and simple. We'll use a Steinway grand piano sound so you can get the idea.
[Piano playing]
Elegant. Simple.
And then the soprano in the right hand is going to play that subject as well—the second subject—in the very next set of measures. And it goes like this.
[Piano playing]
And while it's doing that, we're going to have the left hand introduce the counter subject that's going to move in opposition.
And at this point, it's still in that alto range, but I'll let you hear what it sounds like, and then we'll put them together.
[Piano playing]
Okay, let's put it together with the right hand so you can start to get a sense for how they're interweaving and responding and moving in opposition to each other to understand that interdependence.
[Piano playing]
So you can see how the counter subject—it's literally moving in opposition in many ways to that subject and it's starting to create this real richness.
And just a bit later then we're going to get a third subject that's going to be in the base part in in the left hand again—it's that repeat of the melody if you will. And then the right hand of course will be doing its own counter subject at that time and you're going to start to get a really cool exposition as these three parts start to play with each other in intricate interdependent ways that optimize the overall composition.
Rather than play each of the parts, I'm just going to play the whole together just a little bit of it so you can start to see the beauty of that interdependence.
[Piano playing]
You get the idea.
Now, on the other hand, sometimes we're not worried about the raw performance or functionality of something. What we really in those instances want is speed and customization, personalization, and really the ability to improvise within all the different components.
And there you need a modular architecture—where the ways that these different parts come together—the interfaces—are specified in advance in very tight ways. In other words, how they fit together, very predictable ahead of time. No surprises. But a lot of freedom within the different parts themselves on the other side of the interfaces to really freelance and customize and make sure that you can meet different demands and so forth.
There’s no right or wrong way to be on these different spectrums—interdependence versus modularity.
When we're talking about modularity, instead of an IBM mainframe, we're thinking about a Dell personal computer. Instead of an Apple iPhone, we're thinking about an Android phone. Much more modular architectures that allow for customization.
Now, of course, we can illustrate this again through music.
And in this case, you probably know where I'm going, but jazz—the ultimate in customization through improv. And I'm going to use a specific type of jazz composition to really show modularity. I picked out a piece here called Little Sunflower. It's written by the great trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. And it's what we call a modal piece—almost sounds like modular—in the key of D minor Dorian.
And basically what that allows me to know is that in the bulk of the music, when we're in D minor, I can play any note in that D minor Dorian scale as I'm improvising. And the note, it's going to work. There's a clean interface, which gives me a lot of freedom to improvise with melodies in the scale itself and have some fun.
Now, when I go into the bridge, there's going to be a D major for four bars and an E flat Lydian first for four bars, and then those will repeat.
So I'll work through those.
But just to give you a sense for how Hubbard really creates these modular interfaces, I prerecorded a simple baseline on the D minor Dorian, just so you can get a sense of the texture of that, what we're going to lay down over which we can improvise and what it sounds like.
So let's go ahead and mute these drums and we'll play this baseline.
[Bass line playing]
You get the idea. Very straightforward, simple.
And then we're going to just add some drums on top of that. It would really be a Latin, medium Latin sort of groove if you were playing it. But just for the sake of this, I just chose a simple rock beat just so you can get the idea of how these two parts come together. I put this together ahead of time. This is what it sounds like.
[Music playing]
You get the idea.
And then the melody is going to go on top of that. And we'll choose a basic classic electric piano. And I'll do a little vamping in the left hand because the interface is clear. I know I can play different variations of D minor chords. And the right-hand melody is going to sound very simple.
It's just... I'll play it in fourths just to give it a little bit more texture. And again i can do that with a melody because it's a modular interface. I know as long as I stay within the D minor Dorian no problem it gives me a lot of room for improvisation. And what I'll do is I'll play the basic melody with the drums and bass behind it and then I'm just going to start improvising earlier than you normally would just to give you a sense of how this modular architecture allows you to really customize, improvise in the different parts themselves and create a very cool piece, very different from Bach and that interdependence, but awesome in its own way as well and far more customizable.
So let's lay those first eight bars down and then I'll start to improvise.
[Music playing and fade]
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Often, incumbent leaders recognize well in advance that they’re being disrupted by a new innovation but feel powerless to make the changes needed to survive.
In other words, they’re held captive by their pre-existing business model.
In this video, I use music as a vehicle for explaining why organizations respond to threats with such rigidity and how they can be more nimble when it matters most.
One of the biggest challenges that successful organizations have is surviving disruption.
When they see a disruptive innovation afoot, they know that if they don't do something, they're going to get overrun by it, potentially in the long run.
But responding to disruption is hard because it just doesn't feel natural.
Remember those newspapers we all used to read back at the turn of the century? They saw online news coming and they're like, we've got to do something.
But they just didn't know what.
And they were in essence held captive by their existing business model. We've seen what's happened to so many newspapers since then.
So how do you survive disruption and even thrive or pioneer the disruptive innovation yourself? How does an existing organization do the disruption?
Clark Gilbert did some really important research years ago, looking actually at the newspaper industry. And what he saw is that the first thing you have to do when you see a potentially disruptive innovation is that you have to frame it as a threat.
Why is that?
Because framing it as a threat will motivate you to throw resources at the problem and really take it seriously. So the first thing to do is to frame it as a threat.
And the way I like to think about that so I can get in that threat mode is you think of like that disruptive innovation, it's coming at you. It's like the Imperial March from Star Wars. Darth Vader's coming at you and you have to do something. (music playing)
You get the idea. But here's the problem.
If you leave it in that threat framing, then the organization gets super rigid. So you're motivated. You have the resources to tackle the problem. You're ready to go against Darth Vader. But now you're also kind of like Darth Vader. You're trying to move in that hard shell, awkward suit. You're super rigid. And you see a lot of command and control behavior in organizations when they leave it in a threat framing. A lot of top-down leadership, classic Darth Vader sort of stuff.
And Clark Gilbert called this threat rigidity.
And the problem with threat rigidity is this: You see the threat, you framed it as such, and you're dedicating resources to it. I mean, after all, Darth Vader's coming at you. But if you become rigid with those resources, it's the exact wrong response.
Because no one at this stage knows what the disruptive innovation should really look like yet. How should it work? How will it help consumers? How do we design it? How do we structure the business?
And so to figure all of that out, you need to be the opposite of rigid. You need to be nimble. That means lots of fast testing of key assumptions, learning from those tests, and then iterating.
So the question then obviously is like, how do you become nimble? And so it turns out that after playing the Imperial March and galvanizing the resources, you then need to do a reframe to see this disruptive innovation as an opportunity.
Think A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman.
Because the question should turn into this. Disruption is going to happen. So why don't we do it?
And to frame it as an opportunity, Clark Gilbert found that you need to build an independent, loosely connected organization and empower that small group of individuals to go and explore and pioneer the disruptive innovation.
Because why not close your eyes and see that the world will only wait for you if you go out and allow an independent group to seize the opportunity for innovation.
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A false dichotomy has formed in the education world: rote practice versus project-based learning.
As in music, it’s important to both drill the knowledge & skills AND pull it all together into a cumulative performance.
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I have a confession. When I was a kid, food fights, I kind of got the appeal. But as an adult, not so much.
Yet we have food fights all the time in education.
And we pit things against each other that I don't think are actually diametrically opposed to each other.
Here's a classic one. Have you ever heard an educator say, no more drill and kill? It’s not good for kids! And while what they might mean is they don't want someone doing just busy work for its own sake on something that they've already mastered, what they also often mean is that they don't think it's important for someone to work repeatedly at a foundational skill to really ingrain it in their long-term memory.
On the other side, you'll get the people who just say, no project-based learning. I don't want students learning projects, just direct instruction. None of this inquiry-based learning or anything like that. And what I think they mean is that there has to be something substantive in the learning. It can't just be a whiz-bang project masking as learning. They really also need to learn the knowledge underlying something and automate these things. But what they're also saying is that why you're learning something, its relevance, I'm not sure it matters, is what they're saying. That putting these things into larger context, not that important.
And to think about how absurd these two poles are, all you gotta do is think about music. Learning piano, for example. Like, do you think that it's not important to learn scales? (music playing)
Maybe it's not important to practice, say, your octaves? (music playing)
You get the idea, right? But what about practicing some different patterns for jazz or something like that? (music playing)
Is that not important? I mean, you know, yes, it's meat and potato stuff, but it's critical for foundations. And yeah, it's kind of drill and kill. And yet it turns out that it's pretty important to commit your times table to long-term memory for more advanced math and science and engineering.
But now here's the thing, if you told most people, hey, the only thing that you're gonna learn this year is scales, because trust me, scales, like those are really important, they're not gonna do that. They want a project, they want a performance, they wanted the scales to be a part of a whole. And like, I'm willing to do the work, but most kids, not all, but most, they want it to be for a reason. They want that relevance. And that's the performance. They want to work on those patterns and scales and octaves so that they can play something like this. (music playing)
Or so that they can play something like this. (music playing)
You get the idea, right?
And look, they don't want that performance or that project to be the dessert. No, they want it to be the main course. It's the purpose. The repetitive practice, the drill and kill—that's also so I can build the muscle memory and the muscles and automate my skill set so that I can then play those pieces and express myself.
But it isn't one thing or the other.
As with so much in education, rather than an “or,” we need to move to a both-and. And see that at some points, look for a novice, like one set of exercises to build a foundation, that's going to be critical. Like the performance for a novice isn't going to be one of those pieces I just played, but maybe something simpler like this.
And look, maybe if, you know, I'm not an expert, maybe I'm, you know, or if I am an expert, maybe I'm not doing sort of simple exercises like this. (music playing)
But maybe I am—even in the beginning just to warm up—because both the drill and kill and the projects are important.
And let's be real. Tell me that LeBron James is not spending time drilling his free throws and working on his mechanics, but he's also scrimmaging and playing games.
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Geordie Hyland, president and CEO of the American College of Education, joined me to talk about how ACE is helping more educators earn degrees with less student debt. We discussed the college’s laser focus on learning, implementation of credit for prior learning, and the role of employers.
Michael Horn:
I am delighted that you're all joining us on 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 about this today, I'm delighted because I've got a longtime friend whose career I have followed through his different stops along the way. His name is Geordie Hyland. He's currently the President and CEO of the American College of Education, which we're going to learn a lot about today. But, Geordie, so good to see you. Thanks for joining us.
Geordie Hyland:
Yeah, thanks for having me. And I've been a big fan of yours over the years. I'm a big fan of your podcast and your work, so it's really an honor to be speaking to you today.
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The Founding Story of American College of Education
Michael Horn:
So, you're the doer, so let's dive in. Tell folks about the American College of Education, ACE, what you do, you know, who you serve, how you do it. Because I suspect while it's a really neat story, I suspect it's not one that many people have heard.
Geordie Hyland:
Okay, well, appreciate the opportunity to do that. So American College of Education, we refer to it internally as ACE. I do think it's a unique institution in higher ed, and we're really trying to get the word out to students, but I think it also has a unique model that's relevant to other higher ed institutions. So it was founded in 2005 with the original premise of offering a Master's less than $5,000 to teachers. And there was a founding decision, not even though it's HLC accredited, Higher Learning Commission accredited, not to accept Title 4 loans. And so I think with. With the original premise and with that founding decision, we've really scaled over time with those guiding principles in mind. So we're at about 11,000 students right now, and we offer programming in education to teachers, but also in healthcare, nursing, and business. And we've really been focused on quality, flexibility, and affordability. And so that affordability combined with quality is key. And currently our Masters are less than $10,000. Our Ed.Ds are less than $24,000. We have a wide range of programming. For example, in education, we can take paraprofessional all the way to a superintendent and everything in between. And I think what is remarkable and something that I wanted to talk about today is the student outcomes. So we have about 85% graduation rate. We have, in States where our students are taking licensure exams, they meet or exceed the state averages. And one of the things that really differentiates us with our focus on working adults that are working full time while they're studying with us is the majority of our students pay as they go, and 85% of them come out with no debt. And in the larger context of higher ed, where there's $1.6 or $1.7 trillion, I can't keep track. There's a lot of federal student loans outstanding, and the average debt rates for a Master's degree student from studies I've seen is about $83,000 and PhD students is about $125,000. I think it's very differentiated and very remarkable that our students come out, 85% of them with no debt and in great standing to be able to proceed in their careers, receive salary adjustments, and really benefit from the experience.
Disrupting Educator Education
Michael Horn:
Wow. Okay, so there's a lot there that's, I think, super interesting that we can unpack together. But the under $10,000, right, for a Master's degree, the principled decision not to take federal financial aid, meaning students are by definition not going to go into certainly student loan debt from the federal government, maybe they have some private loans. But 85% of your grads graduate with no debt whatsoever, and you have an 85% grad rate. And you're an online program, which means you're much more convenient and accessible. It seems to me like you're sort of fitting into this definition of disruptive innovation that we think. Right? Lower cost, more accessible, more convenient.
But you've done it not just around that, but around a value proposition where you're actually delivering on these student outcomes together. I'd love to just hear you sort of riff on that for a little bit. And you know, I guess the corollary is like, it's nice to be a disruptive innovation, but why does it matter? Why? Assuming you think it is.
Geordie Hyland:
Yeah, why? When I think about disruptive innovation, I go to Dr. Clayton Christensen's book and your important work in the area. And so seeing as you actually wrote the book or a couple books on this, I feel kind of funny talking about it, but I'll give it my best shot in terms of. So when I think about it with disruptive innovation, that the new innovation needs to be convenient and it needs to be affordable. And over time, it moves up market and starts to disrupt an incumbent that is less nimble. And I think another characteristic that's really important is that it brings more consumers into the market that wouldn't previously be interested in that product or service. So at a high level, that's kind of what comes to mind for me. I know there's a lot more behind the theory and in your analysis around it, but that's ACE to me. I mean, when I think about ACE, we've really had the discipline to remain affordable. We haven't raised our prices since 2016 in the larger context of huge tuition inflation. And then we're really committed to credit for prior learning. So we often can, where it's appropriate, provide college credit for professional development for students as they come in or for previous learning to further bring down the costs. And so over time, our net tuition has actually decreased over the last few years. And obviously with the fully online modality that's very convenient for working adults. So our typical student is a working teacher, a working nurse that's working full time, has family commitments that's able to do this while they have lots of life issues going on and then they receive a tangible benefit at the end, typically with more career opportunities and a salary adjustment. So that's very differentiated than the traditional model where a student would have to take time out, they'd have to travel into a bricks and mortar location. And it's just a very, I think a less convenient model traditionally. But I think we're also changing the paradigm with not accepting Title 4 loans and creating a model that's based upon pay as you go, keeping the prices down so our learners are able to do that and for the majority come out with no debt. So to your second question about why it's important. I think that within higher ed right now, I mean I'm a huge believer in the benefit of higher ed. I think that higher ed has such an important place in society. Lots of studies have shown that there's huge benefits to the individual, to society, to all sorts of things. But I think there's elements of higher ed right now that should be disrupted. And one piece of that is the reliance on debt. As I mentioned before, $1.7 trillion of outstanding federal loans, the average debt rates of $83,000 for a Master's, $125,000 for a PhD. Those debt levels can be catastrophic in terms of the impact on individuals lives as they build their career following graduation. There's life decisions like buying a house, starting a family that can lead to mental health issues. There's all sorts of knock down effects with those sorts of debt levels. And I think it makes it challenging for higher ed. Institutions to show the value proposition when there's this addition of the student debt. So one of the things that we've really been able to do in a compelling way is show the ROI for our students. We've worked with Lightcast, which is a market research firm. They looked at the earnings and the data on our graduates, and they calculated that for every $1 a student invests in our tuition, they receive $19.20 in future career earnings. And that's huge. I mean, that's a very tangible metric in terms of what students can expect. And I think that in my opinion, there's huge swaths of higher ed that really are focused on institutional ROI rather than the student ROI. They're not adequately tracking the graduate earnings and career pathways, and they're not as aligned to the, to the business community as they could be in support of their students. There's been a number of studies. I could point your listeners to a couple that I think are really interesting onthis. One is from the Wall Street Journal recently.
It was called “Colleges Spend like There's No Tomorrow. These Places Are Just Devouring Money.” That's an interesting one. It studies the 50 major public institutions and it shows that with data looking at their financial statements that they're really not focused on - while the tuition has been going up - the focus in terms of their expenses hasn't been on teaching and learning. It's been on facilities, amenities, more administration, and sports coaches. And another recent study which is really interesting from Georgetown, it's called “Graduate Degrees:Risky and Unequal Paths to the Top.” And it shows that the graduate tuition has increased significantly over the last 20 years and challenges around that. So following that release, we actually called for higher ed institutions that are graduate granting to have a freeze on their tuition for the next five years. As I mentioned, we haven't raised our tuition since 2016. And I really believe there's a place for more higher ed institutions to focus on the teaching and learning, really bring more discipline to their expenses in the interest of the student to try to bring the cost down.
ACE’s Secret: A Focus on Learning
Michael Horn:
There's so much there that's, I think, differentiated, stands out, right? Is really focused on the student and making sure that they get ahead. I mean, that ROI, you listed every $1 of tuition, $19.20 in return, I've got to ask, like, what's the secret sauce? Like, how are you getting outcomes like this? Because, you know, in other online programs, you know, if they graduate 50% of students, we say that they're doing an amazing job for working adults, you are at 85% and getting these sorts of outcomes, like, what's the secret sauce?
Geordie Hyland:
Well, so I think there's a number of elements to it. I mean, first of all, we have fantastic students that are great students that see the value in coming to us and are really dedicated to the academic, the academic journey. But from an institutional perspective, we really do focus on the teaching and learning. We're focused, since founding, on the value proposition of students. We have a centralized curriculum model. We spend a lot of time on training our faculty, on investing in the process for building their curriculum with our SMEs and with our internal instructional designers, and then on supporting the students throughout their journey. We also are very committed to continuous improvement. We leverage a lot of data to continue to over time, constantly and relentlessly looking at how students are performing and how we can better support their success. And the budgeting process with us is very rigorous. I mean, we're with not increasing tuition since 2016, but with growing over time. You know, we're growing typically 20% a year. We have ratios in terms of our staff to students for some of the positions. And we also have invested heavily in our platforms and our technology. But we really have a lot of discipline in terms of what we invest in and in terms of innovating and trying new things. We pilot a lot of things and then we have a succeed or fail fast approach where if things aren't working, we're proactive in terms of, okay, let's shut this down and focus on another pilot. And that's our approach to innovation.
Striking the Balance with Credit for Prior Learning
Michael Horn:
Gotcha. No, it's just, it really does stand out. And I guess the other piece of that is you said credit for prior learning, your net tuition has decreased over time. Yes, I guess I have two questions on that. One, it strikes me that a lot of institutions, they'll give a lot of lip service to credit for prior learning, or frankly credit from credits earned at another institution, but it feels not really in their business model or their faculty's interest to do so. And so they sort of make it hard and complicated. But then the second question, I guess is the corollary, which is like, how do you make sure you're not just giving credit for prior learning and becoming a diploma mill. Right?
And just giving out degrees because it sort of gets people through quicker. Like, how do you balance those two things?
Geordie Hyland:
That's a great couple questions, and there's a lot to that, but I appreciate the question. So I think first of all, it's very consistent with our model of being focused on the student value proposition to have a well thought out approach to credit for prior learning. So as students come in, we're looking at their previouslearnings and assessing credit as appropriate. But we also have corporate partnership with professional development providers where we've looked across their professional development and then for the professional development as appropriate, we've provided pathways for credit into our programs. And I think there's a lot of benefit there to the student because it can shave off time, which is a huge value proposition to student and tuition cost in their journey with us. And so it's in the interest of the student. And I've often heard that there are barriers set up in a lot of higher ed to doing this effectively, but I don't think those barriers are in the best interest of the student when the credit is provided appropriately.
In terms of our approach to that, we've set up an internal team. We have individuals focused solely on credit for prior learning. They're following the industry best practices, they're working across our academic and other teams to make sure that there's comfort in how we're assessing and providing credit for the prior learning. And so we're very comfortable with the process and with the fact that it's solely in the best interest of the student. If they already know the materials in a given area and they've put in the time and invested in it, it makes sense to provide the credit for them.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, it makes sense. And obviously I guess you see it in the licensure exams. Your graduates are having no problem graduating. So you know, you're not like reducing academic standards or something like that?
Geordie Hyland:
No, for sure. And we also see it in the employer satisfaction, over 90% in terms of their satisfaction with us. And we see that in the career progression of our graduates. Our graduates self report their first year salary increases and the latest data on that is in the first year across our degree programs, the average is over $20,000 in terms of that salary increase. So we're seeing a lot of value for the student and we're seeing a lot of value for the ultimate employers. So the school districts or hospital systems in them supporting our students as they get their degrees and continue to go on their employment journey with the employers.
The Role of Employers in Higher Ed.
Michael Horn:
Well, so that's the next part I wanted to talk about, which is like the, the employers, you're graduating students into them, sometimes they're working and you're sort of elevating them within. How do you think about employers and their place in the higher education ecosystem? Maybe more generally or at a level of like philosophically. Right? What's the role of employers in higher ed?
Geordie Hyland:
Sure. So I think that given that there's a challenge with the value proposition of higher ed, it's important that higher ed works closely with employers to make sure that there's a close connection between the learnings and the career pathways of graduates so that the school experience can provide a pathway for, that's relevant for students into employers. So what that means for us is, I mean, we work incredibly closely with, with employers. Obviously we're working with working adults. So the stakes are high. We need to make sure, so we have advisory boards, we have lots of feedback loops. We need to make sure that our, our curriculum is, is as relevant as possible and as close as possible to job experience to enable our graduates to get ahead. We also have in many of our courses, job embedded learning opportunities where our students can work with their employers on actual assignments and projects. So that's one piece of it. We need to be very relevant for our adult learners. But then there's lots of other pieces to it that we're focused on. So we have partnerships with thousands of school districts and hospital systems where employees can come to us and receive an education as benefit, pay for our degrees, and then be reimbursed by their employer. Those are really important relationships. And again, very, you know, we spend a lot of time with those partners to make sure that we're supporting those relationships. So that's another piece. The professional development partnerships that we talked about with credit for prior learning, that's another really important piece where we work closely with corporate entities and then we are fortunate to serve the teachers and nurses.And in those industries there's a lot of shortages. So everyone that's listening, I'm sure, has read about teacher shortages, nursing shortages, and so we are very passionate about doing what we can to contribute to helping to solve or being a solution to that contributes positively to those shortages. So we, in the spirit of that, we work directly with the leadership of school districts and also hospital systems to provide bespoke solutions to help strengthen the human capital and to help those institutions better attract, retain and upskill their employees. So there's a number of levels on how we partner and support employers. And so it's very important to us, and I think it's hugely important to the value proposition overall for higher ed.
Leveraging Elements of the Apprenticeship Model
Michael Horn:
No, it makes a ton of sense. Okay, we could finish up in a couple different places here, but like, it's actually two more questions. So it seems to me, as you're describing this that you are not an apprenticeship model, but you actually have a lot of the features of an apprenticeship model. And what I mean by that is the students you're serving, they're often employed, not just in general, but like employed at the place that they might then continue to work as they upskill.
Geordie Hyland:
Right.
Michael Horn:
And so it strikes me that like, and you're giving credit for prior learning and like if they do something on the job, you can, you can give credit for that or work based learning. And so I, you know, teacher, excuse me. Apprenticeship degrees are getting a lot more attention right now.
Geordie Hyland:
Yeah, no, it's great to see.
Michael Horn:
But it seems like you are actually doing a lot of the features of an apprenticeship without the name. Am I, am I misreading it or do you.
Geordie Hyland:
No, I think that's fair. And we're certainly doing everything we can to support school districts and hospital systems. And if you think about how we work with a school system, for example, I mean we have programming from a Bachelor completer to a Master's, a principal certificate, teacher licensure, Ed.D, and a wide range of different programs. And so we can really support the career pathway of an individual as they progress in their career. And our programs actually stack together. And so for example, many credits come through from a Master's into our Ed.D. And so I think you're spot on in terms of we're looking to make our learning come alive and be as relevant as possible. There's opportunities for individuals to work directly with their employer as they're in our programs.
And we're also really trying to map what we do to the organizational help of the organizations that we're supporting. And I think, you know, one of the things that we're hopeful that we're, we will do over, that we contribute to over time and we'll be able to show over time as well is as we're working closely with the school district supporting the progression of the strengthening of the human capital that really helps with learning outcomes or likewise at a hospital system as we're supporting the progress of the human capital that can lead to better health outcomes. So we're very focused, I think on the strengthening of human capital and ultimately the communities that we work in.
The Employee Experience at ACE
Michael Horn:
So a lot of mutual benefit there and then the other place it seems like you have mutual benefit is the people that make it happen internally at ACE, which is the employees. I know you have incredibly low turnover rates. People stay, they build careers at the college. Talk a little bit about sort of, you know, the employee experience at ACE, Faculty, staff.
Geordie Hyland:
Yeah.
Michael Horn:
And why that matters for what you do.
Geordie Hyland:
Yeah, no, appreciate the question. I mean, we are a people business, so we live and die by our people. And I think one of the aspects of ACE that's really important to call out is there's a very strong connection between the mission of the organization and our day to day operations. And so I think there's a close connection there where our teams and our staff and our faculty can feel like they're contributing to helping strengthen the human capital of school districts every day or hospital systems. And it's very tangible and so I think that really helps. We have a very mission driven team that really wants to make a difference and I think a lot of them, it's fair to say, really feel like they are making a difference day to day. So I think that's very helpful and really helps us to hire the best people as well because there's people that come in and feel like they can make a difference with us. We've been fortunate to be recognized by Energage as a top employer over the last three years. 93% of our employees feel like there's a strong mission and sort of believe in the direction of the institution. So I think that's important. And then also we're a B Corp and so that that is a separate process that we go through with B Labs that validates that we're having a positive impact on the greater good. And our staff can volunteer in their local communities 14 hours a year. That's supported by us as PTO. We call it Civic hours. So there's a lot of aspects of ACE that I think are helping people feel like we're trying to do the right thing by our students and by our communities. It's interesting.I've seen a lot of articles lately about employers bringing staff back to the office. We're actually fully remote. Our students are obviously fully remote. Our staff is fully remote. And I think that also helps us to attract the best people for any given role because we're not constrained to one specific location within the United States.
Michael Horn:
Super interesting. Geordie, thank you so much for coming on and talking about the American College of Education. What you do, the students you serve, the employers, districts, hospital systems, etc. That you serve and then the people at the heart of it really appreciate what you are doing for students. Last thing before we leave, folks who want to learn more about ACE, where should they go besides listening to your voice? Come on commercials while they're maybe on a rower watching the NFL Channel.
Geordie Hyland:
Yeah, no, I would recommend just going to our website, www.ACE.edu. There's lots of information there and I'm always available to answer questions if anyone wants to reach out to me as well. But I really appreciate your time. And as I mentioned, I'm a great, great fan. Congrats on your new book and love watching what you do.
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Shiren Rattigan joined me to talk about her work as a founder of Colossal Academy and the Innovative Educators Network. We discussed the motivations, challenges, and opportunities of starting a microschool and connecting microschoolers in her area. We also dove into how Colossal is preparing students to be similarly enterprising through its entrepreneurship-focused curriculum.
Thanks for reading The Future of Education! Please feel free to share this conversation with those who would benefit from it!
Michael Horn:
You're joining 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 how we get there, I'm really excited because we have Shiren Rattigan. She's the founder of a school we're going to hear a lot about today, Colossal Academy, as well as the Innovative Educators Network, which we're going to discuss what that does and the ecosystem, really, that she has built around helping a lot of school founders build meaningful places for kids to learn. So first, Shiren, great to see you. Thanks so much for being here.
Shiren Rattigan:
Thank you so much for having me. You're one of the people. I have very little accolades, and you're one of the check marks. I'm like, I’m on Michael Horn’s podcast.
The Origin Story of Colossal Academy
Michael Horn:
That’s very kind of you to say, but you're the one doing the work. So let's dive into that. Introduce folks to your origin story of Colossal Academy. I'm excited to hear it.
Shiren Rattigan:
Yeah. So I am a fifth-generation teacher. My great grandmother, my great great grandmother was a one room schoolhouse teacher on a farm in Illinois. My great grandmother was a teacher. My grandfather was a superintendent of schools in rural Illinois. My mother, special education in an urban setting for 35 years. And then I came in, and I was like, no way I'm breaking the cycle, right? And all signs pointed always back to being a teacher. And so I finally submitted to the fact that that's my calling. And I went into public school because that's where you go when you're a teacher. You get trained. You become a public school teacher. And then I swiftly found out that it was physically dangerous for me to be there. I was breaking up fights. I was pregnant, and I was like, this is nothing… What I saw, I saw myself as Miss Frizzle. And we're going to go to the digestive tract, and we're going to learn all these things. And when we get there, it was like, mandates, here's your curriculum. How come they're behind the test? Here's the state. And it wasn't what I thought. So I said, okay, let me go to private school. It must be better there, right? Really elite, very expensive, top 2%, very elite. But there were bodyguards for different reasons, right? Cause these kids could be taken right? At the school that they had their personalized bodyguards.
And I was like, this isn't it either. I'm still checking in badges. There were still some expectations there that I just was like, this isn't it either. Something's wrong. We're not outside. We're not going on field trips. We're not in the real world.
Maybe Montessori is it. Let me go find Montessori. So I went to Montessori, and that was lovely, but I felt like something was missing for the future, that I felt like students really needed to have some future forward competencies in order to be successful. Computations, coding, programming. And I know that many Montessori schools do that, but I felt like it needed to be real and relevant and actual. The pandemic hit, and I decided I really love teaching. I didn't want to be a people manager and asking how long they're washing their hands for and mandating the mask and making sure it's up past their nose.
It's not what I wanted to do. I don't know if I got fired or if I quit, but short end, I no longer had a job at my school, which meant that some of the families that wanted to be a pod hired me to be their full time teacher. And I said, okay, well, if they're paying a little bit less than what they're paying as tuition, they could pay me to be... All I need is four kids to make my salary. And then I started with four kids. We moved to six and 10 and 12. And so that's kind of the genesis. But what I found out there is like, I get to do whatever I want, and when I mean whatever I want, it's whatever the kids want, whenever they want in real time. You want drones? Look at drones. It'll be here on Thursday. Let me Amazon. What do you want? You want to learn how to code? You want to go surfing? Whatever you want. I can be that, and I can give it, and I can create those opportunities for you. And I was like, this is it. This was the Miss Frizzle that I had imagined, and it took me so many stops along the way to get there, but I found it, and I found where I was able to be the teacher that I knew I needed to be for young people.
Colossal’s Education Model
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Michael Horn:
So cool. I'm just reflecting on what I heard, and my father's family is from Illinois, sort of a city, but not a main city anymore from there, so have some resonance there. And then I feel like I went to public schools. I was then in the independent school world, and the board of NAS for a little bit. Microschools have certainly spoken to me. My kids were in Montessori schools. The pandemic hit. We went into sort of this pod like thing very similarly, but they went back to Montessori because we couldn't find a different solution that would lean into some of the things you just talked about. To be clear, it's been beautiful, and I hear some of the excitement and passion you've introduced. So tell us a little bit more about the educational model itself from Colossal Academy. And as you do so, I'd love you to sort of reflect on, you know, kids desiring to learn about drones getting whatever they want versus, like, are there certain non-negotiables that you say, well, and this is really important that you learn through the experience? I'd love to hear you sort of walk us through that.
Shiren Rattigan:
Sure. So there are definitely absolutes. We really firmly believe in a deep knowledge in language, literacy, and numeracy. We deeply understand that. And we think that we're presupposing that we're going to need that in the future. Right? Even if we are replaced with robots, I still believe in, like, passing on knowledge. Right? As humans, that's what makes us different than any other animal, that we're passing on knowledge and we're teaching. We also firmly believe, and we're declaring that nature is a future competency. You have to be in touch with nature. You have to understand how nature works. You need to be able to identify plants and know how to grow some food. That is a part of our model as well. Entrepreneurship is really rich and deep. We understand that the traditional education system is outdated. And part of it, the reason it's outdated is it's not relevant for the future moving forward. We're not in an industrial era. We're in the future era. And so what is that? It's going to require people to be entrepreneurial, make their own jobs, problems, solve on a deep level, and consciously make money. And that's part of what we do. And what we found is we have amazing projects. And we took over this vacant lot next door and turned it into a food forest. We're in downtown Fort Lauderdale in the art district, and there was a vacant lot full of bricks and rebar and the kids themselves pulled it out. We got it. We had to talk about responsible dumping.Where do you put things like that? Where do you put a battery? Where does that go? Right? And so that was a beautiful project that we were able to do. And they love their garden, and they think it's amazing. And they eat from it. We have sugarcane and bananas and all kinds of local Florida native tomatoes and foods and roots. But what I find really unlocks them is when they have an enterprise. So when they are making money, that's where I find that it's like, oh, I got to understand how to work. Okay, what's the spreadsheet about? I'm like, I told you guys, like, you need to see your projections. What's your Q3 looking like, guys, how many more to get your $200 goal that you spend for yourself? Okay, once you make $200, what are you gonna do with it? Like, so those things, those skills, I feel, become super relevant when there's an actual dollar amount that they are earning. So all of our students own their own business. They learn to be CEO's of their companies. Right now we're working on a beautiful project.Across the Collosal Academy. We have an online school as well where they design T-shirts based on their identity. So they go into their identity, they build out t-shirts, and they all have their own drop shipping site, right? And so all of that goes into being relevant. They learn how to use Canva, they learn how to design. They learn how to ask questions. They learn how to, like, show their identity, find their core values, attribute those to colors, find the chroma hacks, all of those things. They have a brand kit, all of their brand kit, and that's theirs. And they have to justify why they're using Kelly green, right? Like kids, like, I'm Irish, I'm using Kelly green. I'm like, that's great. You have to be able to understand, why do those colors create that kind of reaction in you? And what is that doing for you? And how does that represent the brand and what kind of font do you want to use? Right? So asking questions like that, and then the skills that we're learning in it are transferable. They're able to have that. They can build portfolios. They have their own websites that they build. Every, every week they drop into their websites. They have their own LinkedIn accounts. They're meant to find and create connections with people because that's what elite private schools do. It's really your rolodex that you get from a private school. It's not that the education's any better or the quality of learning is any better. And in fact, I might argue the opposite. Don't come for me for it, but I think it's different. Some of it is the accountability piece. Right? When you have a lot of money, you can turn those Ds into an A, right? Those things happen at very elite schools. And so it's not that their models are any better. It's that they built a beautiful network of when you needed a job, who are you going to call? Right? And so we have to elevate who's within our network so that we can change our trajectory as far as who we're going to be out in the world. So that's kind of like the model itself. We center everything around relevancy. What is relevant for you? We have a very large waitlist. We have four locations, but at the downtown Fort Lauderdale location, extremely large. I could just get another building, but I'm not going to because once you go beyond 30, you become a people manager, and then you have to use those old systems of, like, bells and whistles and times and clocks. You have to manage people rather than, like, interact with people. And we just are refusing to be larger. And it might not be the best, you know, the old school, best business decision, but that's what we're doing.
The Scale of Colossal
Michael Horn:
But it sounds like you're spreading. I'm sorry. There's so much to love and dig into here. So let me go in this direction for a moment. It sounds like you are spreading, though. You have four locations, if I understood correctly. 30 kids in each. You have an online school as well. Tell us, like, tell us, like, who the students are, how many, and, like, how are you staffed? You know, these are not traditional teachers that are working with them, clearly. So, like, who are the adults that get to interact with them? Yeah, who of them, maybe the right way to ask is who of them are on your payroll versus, like, they get to interact in the community as they build the social capital you just described, which is beautiful, by the way.
Shiren Rattigan:
Thank you. Yeah, it's been. These are all questions I'm answering, and we're building it as we do it. But who we serve are really the students who are on the fringes of the Internet, like the traditional ed. The kids with the largest adverse reaction to the traditional ed is who we're serving. And they're really the first generation of whatever education system is coming next. They really are the trailblazers. They really are the students that are developing the new model. Right? But what's profound about these students is, although they have adverse reactions to the traditional model with all kinds of symptoms that can look across the board like many different things, what we're finding is they're extremely talented and totally capable of so many other powerful tools. That skillset that's going to drive innovation forward, right? So they might not be great at sitting still and taking notes and doing, but what they're really great is powerful solving and collaboration and communication and figuring out a new business that's going to. I have a student who has costumes for guinea pigs, so she made wings for guinea pigs. Not a traditional student by any means where her talents lie is there. So that's, you know, who we serve. A lot of times parents are just like, I cannot stick my child in a traditional classroom. I don't know what it is. They're magical, I believe in them, they're dying in a traditional system, you know, in other matrices for us is joy. You should just, you can get to the same result joyfully, right? So we try to unlock the joy in everything that we're doing. So our online school, as you know, most of what's happening in the future is going to be digital. How do you practice showing up online if you don't ever have to do that? What is your background? I'm not actually the prime example, but what does your background look like? How do you dress for online interviews, online communities that you're going to be in, that's the workforce of the future. So the online school really helps us. All that learning, digital citizenship, how to show up, how to collaborate across screens, and that's allowed us to be with our students in Jacksonville and Miami and have all kinds of cross pollination. So our online school also serves 6th through 12th grade. Okay, so the beautiful thing about that is I as a micro school could not hire one biology teacher to come in three days a week for 1 hour. We just couldn't do it. So what we're able to do now is be able to utilize the same pool of teachers to make sure that our students have in the areas that they need to. We have partnered with ASU Prep and license some of their classes and then we “Colossalize” our other classes. So we use AI tools that help to help with research. They learn how to manage their projects and find collaborators across them. So to your initial question, yes, we have four locations, Miami, Jacksonville, and we have a school in Mexico, Marydo, Mexico, and my school in Fort Lauderdale. Teachers own, their school belongs to them, it doesn't belong to me. And the point is you serve your community. My community looks different from somebody else's community and you need to serve your community and call on the community experts to pour in because they're dying to come into our classrooms and teach something. So my job is to teach her to be a teacher for a day, for 45 minutes. Don't talk for more than ten minutes, sir. Do not talk for more than ten minutes. How are you going to engage them? What are they going to eat? What are they going to touch and engage their senses? And so I give them like a rap sheet of how to do that and then they build partnerships within the community. So our staffing looks like we have two amazing veteran teachers whose goal, I think most teachers goal is to like unlock the child within really deep discovery, joyful learning, play based learning, nature, nature, awareness. And they're, they're both veteran teachers. Those are kind of like our staples. And then we have the other teachers that do some deep depth and then we have specialists in Florida. We're so blessed with so many people that decided to leave education but stay, leave the traditional classroom but stay in education. Thank God for them. So that might look like just chess or home economics. You're able to bring back into the classroom or someone to do permaculture. And so these are our specials. Podcasting, t-shirt design. Right? Like those are the, those are the specials that we're able to bring in from teachers who have left the non-traditional classroom and decided to start their own.
Michael Horn:
Very cool. Very cool. And so, and then the online, if I understand correctly, that's older students. The in-person, is that younger and older? Just younger? Like what's the age? You know?
Shiren Rattigan:
Yeah, six to twelve grade. We're six to 12th grade.
Michael Horn:
Okay. Insofar as there's grades. Yeah, yeah.
Shiren Rattigan:
That could be a 7th grader doing algebra. It could also be a 7th grader doing fifth grade.
Michael Horn:
Got it.
Shiren Rattigan:
Whatever that looks like. But their age wise, it's about 11 to 18.
The Policy Environment in Florida
Michael Horn:
Very cool. And so now, as I'm jealous in Massachusetts of what you're starting to build in Florida. My turn to ask the next question, which is like, you were frustrated as a public school teacher with a lot of the requirements, restrictions, things of that nature. Right? But how is the policy ecosystem helping you here? And maybe where is it still leaving something to be desired as you're starting these new micro schools and serving families in these really cool ways?
Shiren Rattigan:
Well, the policy in the Florida has actually created more need for microschools. Right? So people are deciding that they want something that serves their family because unfortunately the public schools have become like a battleground of culture wars. Right? And so we've been able to build community schools or microschools however you want to like title them, in order to serve the communities that are needing that. So if that means you want to read African American history and take an AP African American history class, then you can design a school like that. And that's great.
You want to be LGTBQI inclusive, build a school like that. And then the culture wars don't need to exist because you have a safe and inclusive space where students feel seen, loved, heard and can actualize. Right? And so the policy now, you know, we are open to having universal savings account, which really allows for accessibility so that students can make choices, families can actually make choices. The hardest part is really about the visibility, knowing that we're there because we're so tiny, which we can talk about with, but we're also just so tiny and we're all just in our own little orbit, right? So the ESA has really unlocked a lot of entrepreneurship. And in fact, Broward County spends $19,000 per pupil, our tuition is $15,000. And once I started to look at my budget, I'm like, where is all the money going? How are people? Every square inch of this place is accounted for. Every dollar is accounted for. If I had $19,000, Elon Musk and I would be putting kids in space. If I had that much money, where's all the money going? Right? So I think having access to funding that allows us to be sustainable has been amazing. Where policy and practical are kind of in dissonance right now. I have the same school zoning requirements as a 4,000 person high school. So the fire, which is costly. It's costly to outfit of school. The zoning requirements I have 4,026 sq. feet. That means I need a sprinkler system and a whole fire system. Some of the health department restrictions just aren't matching the micro environment. So where the opportunities for growth need to be. And I think we're working on it. Right? Like if you have 20 kids, do you really need to be zoned as a full fledged standalone commercially? It just doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
The Innovative Educators Network
Michael Horn:
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all. Okay. No, super helpful. So that's a perfect transition then, because the other thing you founded is this Innovative Educators Network.Tell us about what it is and its purpose and why you created that.
Shiren Rattigan:
Thank you for bringing that. So I'm going to just tell you, if you don't know, Surf Skate Science. Michael, the next podcast you need to do is. I'm going to email you after this. Tony from Surf Scate Science. Tony and Yuli already started this amazing program and our students utilize surfing and skateboarding on Fridays to learn physics, marine biology. We're out. They turn features and skate parks into classrooms. And it was during the pandemic. And Tony was like, would you want to get lunch or dinner? And I'm like, yeah, let's get together and just hang out. And we have the same issues, right? Like zoning requirements and where do we find this form and how do we, and so then we asked a couple more people, Tobin from Acton, Fort Lauderdale. Amazing. We have four kind of Fort Lauderdale locations here. And I was like, Tobin, Miss Suarez, Miss Ratchett, you guys want to have lunch with us? And so it just started to grow. And as we were growing, we're realizing we're all facing the same issues and so we just decided to do something about it. Tony is incredible about like super action oriented. I'm very grassroots. And so the two of us just have been such a beautiful partnership in making sure that microschools and providers, we have 120 in south Florida, which is West Palm Beach, Miami and Broward counties, serving over 8000 students. Tampa has opened up their own chapter and so is Jacksonville. And so our key, our key pieces, the key contributions that we do are visibility. So we have showcases to let parents know and bring everybody together into the same space. We do conferences and showcases, press, getting, helping, getting the word out nationally and locally. Local is always hard.
What else are we doing? Oh, just entrepreneurship. How do you keep your books? How do you do marketing? What's a funnel? Like, who's a bookkeeper? Where do we get insurance for twelve students? You know, like those kind of shared resources that we're able to help each other out with and Tony's gonna kill me. There's a fourth one. Oh, yeah. Okay. Just like what this changes in education, in the platforms, like, what are the best practices so that we can share those better practices with each other. So we have guest speakers come in and you can choose to come to the webinars or not come to the webinars. And really what we are is a community. We show up to each other's open houses. We cry when we have to close our doors together. We help you play like we had a school that just closed and we helped all of us buying a chair, buying some kind of something from the school, showing up, passing the word around so that when this person closed, not only did she place the students in a better environment or an environment that would serve them, but just like helping her dissolve that business with love and kindness around the work that she's done. Wow.
Thinking Macro on Microschools
Michael Horn:
Very cool. I want to connect that work to something you said earlier, because you said that your teachers own their own school sites. You don't own the one in Jacksonville or Miami and so forth, because I think you said something powerful, which we often forget in my experience in education, which is that these are really local of the community, of the context, institutions, maybe we call them, that exist in that environment. And, yeah, they're things that are, like, common, just like the laws of physics transcend San Francisco to Boston to Miami. But how you build the bridge in each of those three places is very different because of the local terrain. And so, too, I think, as you build these schools, and I guess I'm curious because as I hear you talking and you've built this Innovative Educators Network, the thing that I keep thinking is, like, scale, I don't think is one of these schools growing from 30 to 100,000, but I suspect scale is like a lot of families getting the right option for their kid to make progress and sort of as a movement growing up over time with these principles underlying it. And I just. Maybe I'm leading the witness, but I'd love to just have you reflect on how we get to that greater scale. It's something that we think a lot about on my end, and Tom Arnett, my colleague at the Christensen Institute, he sort of has this belief that as a sector, we're going to have to be able to solve more complicated and different kinds of problems. Or like the kid that stays in traditional high school because they love football, even though the rest of the experience sucks, we have to sort of figure out how to bring those people in over time. I just sort of love you to wrestle with that question or tension or opportunity.
Shiren Rattigan:
Yeah, I see Innovative Educators Network and I see the moms, family members, aunties, caregivers, teachers. If you mess with our kids, which traditional ed has, we are endless, relentless. We will stay up till 4:00 we will drive 8 hours for our children. Right? And this is true for both teachers and caregivers. And so it's like, almost tirelessly, we're taking on this mission. Right? But the other piece I will say is, I feel like the independent microschool owners, and that's who ed focuses on. We're like the mycelium of this movement, and we're a network that's just kind of underground, and we move really swiftly, and we're supportive and super collaborative. Right? And I think that that root system is really going to keep us grounded. I can imagine, as we see schools closing, we can still have a sports program. We can. We can have micro schools within a larger school. We can have 20 micro schools in a large high school. Like, they're okay.
There are schools now opening up in malls. I think we have to really reflect and think, what is school? What is schooling? Who has to go to school? Should you have to go? All these, like, underlying questions of, like, what is education? How should we be delivering education? What's compulsory? What's not compulsory as a society? Do we want educated population? I'm gonna say yes. That's my own standpoint, and I think we'll solve those problems as we come. And we see now we have, in our network, we have a coach, an Olympic coach, and he does PE for students and runs sports. And we have, because there was a need for homeschoolers to also still be able to do the sports. They have a competing team. They have competing teams. And so they're still able to compete and be in the. And go for a professional athleticism. We also find that professional athletes are using microschools and homeschooling as a real option because they get their school done, and then they do what they need to be doing. So they're training after school, they have private trainers, or they're joining in in a different way. So, yeah, I think that. I think where our challenges are right now are some of the, like, landmarks of graduation. And so I think we're just gonna create those. I think there's a problem. We're entrepreneurs. We'll just solve the problem. One of our micro schools is doing a prom this year, so.
Michael Horn:
Oh, wow. Okay. And you're modeling it, I guess, right? You're modeling it for the students. What it looks like to be entrepreneurial, to build something meaningful and lasting that contributes value to the community and those who participate in it. So let's leave it there, Shiren. This has just been really educational for me, and just beautiful, just beautiful stuff you are building out there, both within the schools that you directly support in this broader network. Thank you so much.
Shiren Rattigan:
Thank you. Thank you so much.
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Bill Kerr, Professor at the Harvard Business School and Co-Chair of the Managing the Future of Work project, joined me to talk about his perspective on the present and future of business education. We discussed the hastening rate of skill obsolescence, how HBS keeps their pedagogy up-to-date, and the role of AI in the future of business education.
Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose and to help us think through that and frankly, the shifting landscapes in how we prepare managers and leaders to lead organizations in this world. I'm delighted to have Bill Kerr. He is the D'Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, Senior Associate Dean for faculty development and research. Long list of accolades, but the one that I also want to hit is he's co-director of Harvard's managing the Future of Work initiative, which is so critical in thinking about how we develop human talent and how organizations, leaders, managers evolve in this world. And he's Faculty Chair of the Launching New Ventures program. I could go on and on, but I'll also just add Bill's neighbor, friend, and used to be a CrossFit buddy. I think you still work out occasionally with my wife. But Bill, it is great to see you. Thanks so much for being here.
Bill Kerr:
Michael, thank you for having me for your work and for those listeners that don't know it. Michael is amazing at CrossFit. He smokes me every time.
The Evolution of Business Education
Michael Horn:
Not true when we get on a rower, but this will be fun. So look, so much is happening in the world of work right now. Big technology changes, automation, rapid changes in skills, demographic shifts, could go on and on. Haven't even mentioned AI, obviously, but I want to focus on the areas in which you teach as well as research and think about the future of business education itself, particularly at places like the Harvard Business School where you're training the next generation of managers, leaders, frankly, through the exec ed programs, people already in leadership roles. How do you see business education itself evolving, Bill?
Bill Kerr:
Well, I think there's a very robust future for business education, Michael. I would suspect that the future is going to have many more types of programs. They're going to be more granular. They're going to be fit for many different purposes. But all the features that you began describing, the world's kind of constant evolution and very rapid pace of change is going to require business leaders and business students to stay at that cutting edge. So I think our MBA program is going to have a robust future as people look to prepare themselves for careers that will be ones where they're going to change jobs a number of times. And they're going to be thinking about the impact that they could have on the world. If you go later in career, many companies and many individuals are going to need to retool, reskill themselves for that future. That's going to give us a lot of exec ed opportunities and gaps to kind of help there. And then you can go even back upstream. Harvard Business School doesn't teach undergraduates, but many schools do. And in that business context, if you're an engineering student, you're going to want to have some business school courses to go alongside that. We don't separate those two functions anymore in the corporation. And so likewise, education is going to mix across them.
The Velocity of Change in Business Leadership
Michael Horn:
Yeah. So I want to then focus, Bill. I'm just sort of curious because we talked about all these technical skills changing. You talked about more granular ways of educating leaders more on the job, in many cases adapting curriculum. But sort of at a base level, as you think about the future of work, and frankly, where we've been like, have the essential skills for business leaders changed all that much in recent decades? Do we see the same velocity of change in those skills that we do in the technical fields?
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Bill Kerr:
Well, let me start the end part there. There has been some important work that describes the rate of change for technical skills, for digital skills and similar compared to more traditional, non-digital skills. David Deming, who is a faculty member in the Kennedy school, did a remarkable study where he looked at the same job ten years, so 2009 to 2019, same company, same position, everything was exactly the same and did this at scale with many, many job postings and quantified that digitally focused activity, had a faster turnover in the skills that were required, what the job ads were asking for compared to non-digital activities. So if you looked at what traits people or qualifications employers were requesting, if it was something that was closer to the digitally based world, it moved faster than, than otherwise. But that, you know, kind of how that plays out for the broader landscape of business success, like what helps a leader kind of move faster up in the career. I think we're still learning a little bit. My favorite study on this regard goes from Joe Fuller, who's my co director of the Management Future of Work project, as is Rafael Sedun, his co-author here, where they looked at CEOs and job descriptions and also what mattered most for CEO success over a 20-30 year period. And there was a lot more emphasis on social skills today compared to two decades ago or three decades ago. A lot more emphasis on technology and kind of products and sort of those relationships to consumers, less on things like finance and some of the more traditional strategy functions. Likewise, if we look at some of the, the profiles of people that have been most likely to kind of ascend up through the ranks and ultimately end up in the CEO role, they've been coming out of a different, a different set of line responsibilities than before. So we'll anticipate that continuing forward. And the question I think many of us are going to have to work with is in a world where it moves so fast, let's face it, sometimes the academic programs don't move as fast as we need them to be. And you're going to see some differences emerging both across fields, across schools and so forth, as to what's the gap of the recency of what's required in the workplace versus the syllabi and so forth that are being taught. Now there's some very interesting work that's being undertaken at Yale right now that's measuring that for the first time. Like actually measuring syllabi and what are they teaching there versus what are employers kind of saying is the crisp latest frontier skills that they're hiring for?
Do Employers Know What Skills They’re Looking For?
Michael Horn:
So I want to come back to that in a moment, but I want to stay on what you just were talking about. Also about if you look at job postings and what employers at least seem to be requesting from technical skills, the rapid turnover that we've seen in the past decade now, plus there, compared to maybe other managerial skills, what some people call the softer skills, I don't always love that phrase of turn, but I know it is one. But I'm just curious, like as you analyze this space, how much stock do you put in the job descriptions and what people say they want? Leave aside the technical skills for a moment, but the softer skills, the social skills, the managerial ones, how much stock do you think we can really read into what's in a job description versus actually spending time shadowing managers and CEO's to see what they actually do? Because, and I'll betray my hand a little bit, it often seems to me, of course I'm going to write critical thinking and problem solving in the job description, but what that actually means on the job is not always as clear, if that makes sense.
Bill Kerr:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's, first off, we will label soft kind of a social skills because I think that at least captures a bit more of the essence there. Michael, you raise a great question that I'm going to broaden slightly, which is a lot of the ways we have been talking to employers at the Managing Future of Work project is to appreciate what is their expectations of new hires and what is it they are kind of most hoping to grasp with the new talent that they're bringing in. And there's one version of the world which is I am going to wait until I have a specific need. I'm going to write out a very exacting job description, and I'm going to expect a fully loaded, fully prepared candidate like Michael to show up and then, you know, offer his services to me at a very, very low rate, you know, and that really doesn't work for a variety of reasons, including the, you know, the overall challenges in finding the talent these days. But it also doesn't work in an environment where six months, 18 months after Michael joins the job, I'm actually probably gonna need to have him shift into different types of activities, like the pace of change is going to move where he is. And so what we would hope that the employers would begin to appreciate more is the willingness to go learn, the openness to new experiences, the capacity to learn on the job through that shadowing process, through the ability to kind of see both what others around me at the organization are doing, and then also what's the emerging opportunities that I should be learning as quickly as I can in ways to be useful for those tasks. So it's going to be both in the job ad, but it's also in the expectations of how we're hiring somebody for the next. If you're going to keep somebody for five years, ten years, which should always be your ambition or goal, then you're going to have to anticipate they're going to have multiple waves of the things that they're doing on the job. And so let's not overly, overly make ourselves rigid around what we're expecting on that very first assignment and task.
Keeping Academia Up to Date
Michael Horn:
That makes a lot of sense. So let's go to then, the other part that you ended the previous answer with. That seems to me to link to something, which is you talked about given rapid velocity of change in job roles, curriculum, needing to keep pace historically, that's been a challenge from my perspective, that points to one of the big things that, you know, goes on at a place like the Harvard Business School, which is you're not just teaching and delivering, you know, obviously case study method in the case of Harvard, but you're also doing a lot of research, presumably so that you stay on top of the big changes and are able to adapt curriculum accordingly. Just talk about the interdependence and link between those two areas. Not every school, frankly. Actually, let me, before you answer, let me just say to the audience, there is no school that I've ever come across that cares about teaching as much as the Harvard Business School does, for a research institution. It is truly different from anything I've seen up close, but talk about the link between those and how that enables you, presumably, to keep curriculum up-to-date.
Bill Kerr:
Mike, this goes back to my sort of overall point of view as to where the world is, what matters for business success, and then what's the role that business education and business research plays into that environment? And you began the podcast by describing this rapid pace of change and the many, many things that are coming at us one after another, and that have material impacts on how our businesses operate, what our employees need to be tasked with, and how we can best guide and lead them. I think you have to be increasingly focused on where new information is coming from, new insights, new technologies, new opportunities, and then how you as a person, and also you as a business can be connected and learn from that. So it's a strong mindset shift from maybe where we were 15-20 years ago, where oftentimes you had this idea of, wow, we have a wonderful R&D division. We are accumulating a body of firm specific knowledge, and we're going to think about that as the asset that we take out into the world. And there's still certainly places and opportunities for research that happens inside companies to really push it into a proprietary advantage. But increasingly, you also have to be able to be close to these places where new stuff is springing forth, coming out. And I think business schools are going to play an important role in facilitating those types of connections. Being a conduit for an individual manager, or maybe even a broader company as a whole to have access to those pieces of knowledge. And where that then ultimately brings the faculty member into is what a concept we often call absorptive capacity, absorptive advantage. That if you're engaged in the research process, if you are out working in these new ideas and their applications, you're going to have, first off, some stuff that comes from you specifically. Maybe Bilker has a lab that is producing some of these insights, but it also puts you on the ground and gives you the tacit understanding of how to interpret many of the other things that are going on in a place like the Boston area, where you have MIT and HBS and Harvard and all these kind of different places. It gives you a way of kind of harnessing some of those and providing them into the classroom and into the lives of these business leaders for them to then work on and grapple. So I think this research teaching kind of combination is actually going to probably strengthen going forward due to this way that it puts you close to the frontier so that you can both appreciate it and then you can also help transmit it or help others understand how it could be useful for them to grapple with.
Michael Horn:
It strikes me that it also could increase the connection for experiential learning and sort of embedded, certainly the case study, but also simulation, anything that has the individual learning more closely connected to the case or set of experiences that they're actually going to be working on. It strikes at me that that'll be strengthened as well in this fast moving environment. Is that your view?
Bill Kerr:
Absolutely, absolutely. And it's something that many of us are going to need to be much more hands on in the future in our work lives as well as also in the classroom to support that. You hear phrases like hands on the keyboard, where it's not that management is just up there kind of architecting direction, but without direct hands on the keyboard type applications, you're not going to understand the technologies, you're not going to understand, you know, what they could do to the organization and build it, build it from there. It also has direct implications for how we think about, you know, the, the life of a person and what points we can connect into them. We're not in a world where there's going to always just be early education, be an undergraduate or an MBA, and then, you know, you're done, you're good. You can go work on this for 20-30 years and send us an alumni check every so often. We're going to have a lot more interaction with people on the way because, you know, the part of the value proposition was to be close to where these insights are coming, but they're going to keep coming. And so how can we be somebody's signal? How can we help them discern what could lie around the corner?
The Lifelong MBA Program
Michael Horn:
I'm curious, in your view, does that like, maybe we start seeing business models and business education around lifelong learning models? Where to your point, do the MBA, come back a couple years later, get a two week course, get an online module here? Just a lot. Like does it open up to creativity around that?
Bill Kerr:
I think it's going to open up the necessity around that and then creativity will probably follow as we and other schools work. To that end, I don't have the one to one translation of this metaphor down, but what has struck me recently is the idea of hardware being built for software based applications. And so one of the cases that we've taught at HBS is around Toyota and has some sort of linkages here. But like the example of hardware for a hardware based application, you tend to be very exacting. So if you need 10gb of memory in that hardware, you don't put in 15. Like, you know, you put in exactly ten, you cut the cost right down. You're ultra efficient. If you're building hardware for a software based application where you're going to anticipate continual upgrades being needed into the future, you often overbuild the hardware. So 10gb would do right now, but you want to put in 30gb because the next software upgrade and the one that's going to follow after that, and the one that's going to follow after, they're going to be ever more memory intensive. And so you're trying to build the hardware in a way that can allow the product to stay more relevant, to stay more up-to-date into the future. So if I then kind of bring that into the business school world, and we agree that the lifelong learning concept and the rate of change is going to require us to have continual check-ins, maybe that means that we should be thinking about things differently, at the very first MBA level, early career investments. Are we overbuilding the hardware at that point with the notion that you're going to be coming back to campus every three or four years, you know, for one of these kind of software updates, and then you're going to come back again and that maybe the package that we provide to the people that are part of our community will engage in this kind of longer term. You're part of it. You're a citizen here. You know you are. Once you kind of enter into this world, we're going to be a way for you to stay at the edge of the new ideas and concepts that are emerging and that preferential access is what we're, what we're building for.
Michael Horn:
It's interesting because it's often said education is wasted on the young. And I know graduates of the MBA program often say, wow, that case study on X, 20 years later, that's when it all of a sudden I realized what it really meant and it was so valuable to me. It just occurs to me that as you describe this, really helping people see this is something that they can keep coming back to. It's a change in relationship. It makes probably, the ask from an alumni, you know, this is for schools more generally who are saying, how do we get donations? It's not a donation. I actually feel like I'm getting a service on a real-time basis. Does this also point to a lot more virtual education in your view, Bill? And what does that look like in the future?
Bill Kerr:
Yeah. Let me begin with the first part of your statement there, which is, you know, when you're an MBA here, Michael, I'm guessing you had approximately 600 cases or some crazy number over the course, and some of those are ones that have immediate applicability. Whatever you're going to do right after, you need to be able to interact with the team member and so is developing some of those skills. And then there's probably a case or two that had you as the CEO of a large organization, which nobody was going to go immediately into that task, but it was both a way of learning how the role operates and then also kind of preparing the almost like a future capacity to be in that spot. Like we want to open up these conversations earlier and awareness of the types of career dynamics that will later occur, knowing that by the time that a student actually becomes the CEO of one of these large organizations, the world will have shifted and they're going to need to have kept up to pace there. So sometimes, again, you want to kind of open the student's perspective to the bigger set of issues that are going to go into the future. And it's actually the, almost like the value proposition of business school. You may have been for three or four years really crunching numbers away at Goldman Sachs on the latest deal or doing something, you know, for Deloitte Consulting on its packages, but you didn't have the chance to kind of see the bigger picture of the world of business that you are going to be working in for some time. And we're trying to start that conversation just like in the entrepreneurship group where I've been, you know, for 20 years at the school, many of our students, in fact, the majority of our students who become entrepreneurs don't do it immediately upon graduation. Usually there's, you know, a few years maybe due to student loans or to other kind of desires of building a knowledge base before they launch business where they're, they're going to go do something and then it's five years later that they begin their enterprise. So we want to prepare them for what that journey might look like ahead, recognizing that when they get there, they're going to need to know the actual term deals that venture capitalists will provide. So we like to have that kind of capacity. This does think about, and again, it goes to this idea of the hardware and kind of continual software pieces. I used the phrase citizen a little earlier, and it's an interesting, I think, term of how we might think of our communities, because a citizen both has rights and responsibilities. You think of the package that somebody is participating in. We're in that relationship. And to your point, I think it does change how one thinks about being a citizen of a community over a longer horizon, and that this is not just, hey, as you think about your philanthropic giving, maybe you can spare some money for us as well as also for some other good causes, but instead kind of think about this is we want to be relevant to you. We want to be somebody that, you know, is on your short list of where you might go for insights on the following. And so how can we make that an attractive package for the future? I think the digital piece is going to be critical. That was the last part of your, of your question there, because, you know, even if I was to describe this idea that you're going to come to the campus every four or five years, you know, for one of these kind of upgrades, it's a lot of time that happens in there. If you were going to come to campus this year, the last upgrade until now would have been the introduction of ChatGPT. That would have happened within that window, and it probably would have been a little too long to wait until your next time on campus to pull that off. So I think we'll want some very high frequency digital outreach. Again, in part of the relationship to being at the cutting edge, that you have to be able to hear things faster, and that will be an important component to sit inside the broader suite of executive ed type activities.
The Lifetime of Skills
Michael Horn:
I want to get to AI in a moment, but something you just said triggered this, which was your colleague, my co-author, Ethan Bernstein, made the observation recently to me that no wonder Gen Z has this reputation of being so impatient to sort of rule the world and have these rights, because we constantly keep yelling at them, hey, your technical skills, your skills are eroding faster than ever before, and they're like, well, I want to put them to use. I guess when I hear you say all of what you've said, I wonder if it can put them at ease a little bit and make them a little bit more secure in, hey, you're going to have a progression and progress in your career, and there is some patience, and it's okay because we're going to be, you know, sort of rebuilding around your needs. It's not just sort of "come in for the MBA and you're out and gone."
Bill Kerr:
To, I guess my thought on that one is, it's a yes and it's a both. The atrophy of digital skills is rapid and to some degree, if you are trading off of your digital skills, you should be very impatient to get them to work. And I do the opposite. When I talk to large organizations, I basically say, you want to, you tell me you want to go hire all this digital talent? Well, let me tell you about the worst thing you can do is you hire, but then they can't put anything to use. They can't see progression. They are stuck at the bottom of, you know, a very, very long process that's in front of them. You have to have the escalators, the things that can allow them to put their skills to work faster and also stay up-to-date. Like the worst thing a company can, I think, do, well that’s not true, there are many even worse things a company can and have done. One of the worst things in this context that a company can do is have its employees feel like they're missing out on the next generation of skills. The company is stuck in what was maybe even very relevant in 2019. But the talent base doesn't feel like they are staying at the edge of the skills that are defining right now and will be relevant for the next two to three years. An organization that has that people look at it in that way is going to find it very, very hard to keep the talent that needs to be kind of always up-to-date and always refreshed with their skill base. So I want to recognize that dimension. But on the opposite side, to, I think the second part of your perspective there is to appreciate that the most durable skills, the most durable things that people are going to be able to build careers on probably go back to those social skills, probably go back to kind of their ability to coach young team members.Many of the things that are not the specific hard skills of this moment, but instead are the things that the organization most needs in order to activate the technologies that are available to it, to activate the talent that it has in place. The things that are, that are impossible at this stage and probably will be for some time to automate, but instead can be important for the employees to be able to realize the potential of the organization.
AI Applications in Business Education
Michael Horn:
Gotcha. Okay, so I've teased this AI thing, that we're going to ask you some questions about that for a while now. So let's get into it. I'm just curious how you all, as faculty, right, are making use of Gen AI by students and their work and the tools that you're developing for them to use or whatnot. But also, if you could reflect on the research side as well, how that might be changing the work or even the curriculum itself. It strikes me that building simulations, for example, that put someone in the shoes of a case protagonist, rather than just reading about it, those things might become more possible than a future imagined state. I imagine there's a bunch of things you can do with it if it's not feared. But I'm curious what reaction has been.
Bill Kerr:
Yeah, the reaction has been overall has been positive. I think maybe there's like a cautious optimism of us bringing into it. There's no, try to hold back the tide here. I think our stance from the beginning has been Gen AI is going to be here, it's going to be a tool in the workplace. You should use Gen AI. And if anything, I think more often than not, we have been kind of prompting students to actually use it more than they otherwise would. And even going so far as early in their MBA career, having them be introduced to Gen AI. And it can do this and it can do that because not everyone that comes to campus has been as immersed in ChatGPT as other people. And then the second is kind of making sure that in some classes the professors may be even very pushy, as I want you, for every class, to ask ChatGPT the following types of things about the case. Now, I was actually, as I was walking over to this podcast, I bumped into a colleague who was describing, however, in his class, how he's getting very disparate answers and the quality level's not right. And he himself is also using ChapGPT to see what he thinks that it would tell them as a potential answer, so that he can kind of think about like, what is their independent learning. So there's complications and things that we need to kind of work through in this level. But the overall stance has been that this is here to stay and we should make it work. We don't use it for, they're not that easy for exams, obviously. We have, even before the introduction of large language models, had a policy of no Internet use during the exams, and that continues to hold. So it's still, at the end of the day, Michael, and the case is going to be the final product, but it's important along the way. We're excited at HBS about the ways this can make faculty more effective towards the classroom. One of the things that we've always struggled with, and this isn't a live product yet, I'm just kind of putting it on the roadmap. One of the things we've always struggled with is if we're going to do case-based work, it's very, very time intensive for us to do a practice exam or to do anything. That's like taking Michael and his 93 section mates, have them write an eight page case that we're then going to, you know, provide detailed feedback about Michael and what he was getting right or less right on the exam. Large language models chat, that gives a lot of opportunity that if we can train the models, the models can help us provide this feedback to students early on, it's still going to be the case that faculty will grade the final exams, but nonetheless, we can provide a lot more kind of real time development along the journey. There you raise the idea of simulations and the like. I think our state of the art right now are bots that we have developed for specific classes, both in the first year as well as also in the elective curriculum that digest enormous amounts of material that is about the course. Like every case study that's going to be done through the course. Some background notes, some other things that within the walled garden that the instructor places in there, lets students then engage in Q and A. And sometimes they're doing some stuff that's about like, can you remind me what this acronym means? Or I want to, what was the concept that brought this and that can kind of bring all these sort of things, you know, to help make the student more prepared for the classroom environment. We're going to, I think, see going forward innovations on the material itself, using AI, as you're rightfully suggesting. I think the easiest kind of cases are going to be, let's customize our case library a little bit. So if Bill is going to Turkey for an exec ed program, maybe I can try to take a case and have it customized to the Turkish context, like, you know, kind of fill out a few of these extra pieces that make it more locally relevant than it would be if the case is set in Brazil. So we maybe some things we can bring across from there. Likewise, we'd already begun experimenting and building out some more traditional if then kind of bots that had been developed based upon data for things like venture capital, term sheet negotiations. I think there's going to be the next generation of those types of products that can take advantage of this power as well.
Globalization and Business Education
Michael Horn:
I mean, it's really cool, frankly, to hear where this could go and the tools that you can probably envision before it was sort of futuristic and science fiction feels like it's in the roadmap now. Last question as we wrap up here, I'd love to talk about the global picture and internationalization of business education. When I was at the business school, one of the most enriching things was not just that cases were worldwide and HBS had research centers all around the world, but also that my students. Right. My fellow, you know, my fellow peers were from all around the world. That's obviously been a big trend in higher education more generally in America over the last many, many years. It's also one that, as you know, not at Harvard per se, but elsewhere, has receded a little bit over the last, call it eight to ten years. And there's sort of winds blowing, right, Bill, in the political conversations about a retreat from globalization. I love your perspective. Like, international students continue to be a growth sector for us. Business education, is this something that retrenches a little bit? How do we think about this in the current context and what matters here?
Bill Kerr:
Goodness, Michael, you like to end with a big bang. A bang, yeah, a bang there. I actually related a little bit back to where we ended the last one with AI. And kind of, I'll start there because one version of hearing about all these new even phrases, kind of crazy simulation world that perhaps we could generate and live in and just the digital world would be, is that going to somehow weaken the need for a student or the desire of a student to come and be in Boston for a period of time with their studies? And I think exactly the opposite. There are probably going to be a large amount of synergies between what we can do in the digital world and what we can also do then in the physical world. And if we have the amazing content to help somebody work on their business problems in the time that they're away from the campus, what we can also then do is make it more valuable that they were a part of the campus and made some of those personal ties and connections at a period of time that we're kind of continuing to refresh and update from there. The analogy I've given, you know, and I think others certainly have given as well about this, is like when you think about phone calls and emails and Zoom, you know, those tend to be used mostly within organizations like, like my number one, you know, people that I zoom with or other HBS employees. The number one destination of emails is HBS, and yet it makes the campus even more important and vibrant despite the technologies being weightless. So if we kind of start with that premise, which is to say that there is a value to being on the, you know, on the campus, on the location, then yes, I think it's important and will be the case that international students will continue to want to be in the US for higher education. And recently, we've gone back up above 1 million total students. This is undergraduate, graduate, and so forth, which was, we're slightly less than where we were in 2019, but we're almost back to 2019 levels recovering from the pandemic in that way. So there's the demand there. There is pressure that is blowing in political winds. And it's not just the United States. A number of countries are kind of struggling with the questions about what's the role of immigration in our economy and in our society and similar. And I think, broadly speaking, I have a very long term enthusiasm and, again, support. I think we're going to recognize, especially for the most skill based work, countries are going to start competing like crazy for talent, like, as you think, as you look ahead to environments where there is an aging population, you have large fiscal imbalances, you have the need to stay towards the cutting edge of technologies and so forth, there's going to be a fight for talent rather than pushing it away. And that gives me the enthusiasm, the optimism for the horizon. Can we mess it up? Oh, we absolutely can mess it up. I think one of the scariest studies, and they didn't actually think they were writing a scary study, but it was scary for me, was a group of scholars that looked at H1B visa reforms that happened in 2002. And so, as a little bit of background, the US had its most expansive policy towards skilled immigration in the early two thousands. And in 2002, there was a sunset clause that basically brought the program significantly down in terms of, of its size and - perfect for researchers - there were, most countries were affected by that decline, but there are a handful of countries that weren't affected due to specific relationships they had with the United States or exemptions under the policy. So I gave a wonderful kind of treatment and control group to look at. And what this study looked at was the inbound students in 2002 to 2003, as this decline was happening. Now, let me again position this in time. They're not going to enter the labor market for another four or five years. These are inbound college students when the decline is happening. And they found that the treated countries had a 10% lower international student application and coming to the United States rate. And the ones that we were most likely to lose were the best students of the group. So the SAT scores also went down. And your listeners are education scholars, they're probably not interested in the minutiae of immigration policy, but this was not like an extraordinary change. And it was also something that if you had been a part of the policy environment at that time, you would have imagined we could easily correct or change. And yet it had that level of impact on forward looking students as they thought about I want to go to school at the place where I also want to have a career and work. And so when I come back to our current political environment, I always emphasize that choices around education are often an investment. And as an international student, I want to invest in being in the United States in many cases, because I also then want to anticipate working in the United States and whether or not we have direct policy change, whether or not we have a lot of animosity about the issue, it's still going to tarnish and then lead to weaker investments among the inbound students that we, that we could have competed for. So I hope that we can find a way to navigate through this and not have those tensions flare up the way that they have over the last decade. But it's an important, it's a very important topic for higher education.
Michael Horn:
No, it's super helpful, Bill, because I walk away thinking the war for talent is heating up, if anything. And so those countries that are the best at being attractors of talent, which starts in education are best positioned to come out on top. And I believe in positive sum worlds, but there is certain zero sum elements of where talent goes.
Bill Kerr:
Yeah, let me second that by saying, I think there are several what we call pathways that immigration operates. And in the United States context, arguably the most important pathway has been the education pathway. People that came here as a high school student, people that came here for college, people that came here for graduate school, their impact both while they were here. And, you know, there's various studies that have quantified the billions of dollars for the local economy, but even more importantly, like how they then connected to the United States, staying for work even when they went back home, the interactions that they facilitated with our economy were very important, and we absolutely must keep that alive for the future.
Michael Horn:
Beautifully said. He's Bill Kerr. You can see why he's terrific. And you should check out his Managing the Future of Work. What's the podcast name, Bill?
Bill Kerr:
Managing the Future of Work. We always stay on brand.
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Jonathan Hughes, Associate Director of College Planning and Content Creation at the Massachusetts Education Financing Authority, joined me to discuss the organization's work of helping students prepare for post-secondary education. We discussed how MEFA has evolved over its 40 years, including the addition of MEFA Pathways, an initiative focused on career navigation.
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Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education, the show where we are dedicated to a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose, and to help us think through how individuals navigate so that they can do all of those things. Delighted to have another neighbor to the show and our guest, Jonathan Hughes. He's the Associate Director of College Planning and Content Creation at MEFA, the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority. We're going to find out all about that and more in just a moment. But first, Jonathan, thanks so much for being here. It's great to see you.
Jonathan Hughes:
Yeah it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.
The History of MEFA
Michael Horn:
Yeah, you bet. So let's start with just that. Like, you know, the history of the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority, which in the state we call MEFA, but people outside of Massachusetts might not know the acronym. Tell us the history, how it's changed over the years. What does it do now?
Jonathan Hughes:
Yeah, absolutely. So MEFA, as you said, is the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority. And we were actually created, we're a state authority. We were created by the Massachusetts State Legislature back in 1982, so about 42 years ago. And what we were initially created to do was to offer a loan. We were actually created at the behest of colleges. At the time, there was a limit on the plus loan, which is the parent loan for undergraduate student, at $4,000. And there was not a lot of educational loan options for families to go for financing.And so MEFA was created to offer that loan. That's something that we still do. However, as I like to say when I'm doing presentations, you know, since 1982, as you may have noticed, the cost of college has continued to go up. So we have a public service mission to help families to plan, save, and pay for colleges. Just offering that loan wasn't going to be sufficient to do that. So we expanded in the nineties to offer two savings programs. In 1995, we added the U Plan, which is a prepaid tuition program. And in 1999, I believe it was 1999, we added the MiPA U Fund, which is the Massachusetts 529 plan. So that takes care of paying for college and saving for college. The third part of that being planning. That really started to bloom about maybe 20 years ago or so, where we really started to flush out our guidance initiative. And so we offer hundreds of free seminars and webinars every year, you know, in person and virtual, on all topics related to planning, saving, and paying for college. So that's savings, admissions, college financing, et cetera. And now even further sort of branching out from just being college focused, like a lot of things recently, you know, we're sort of branching out to include college and career training. So we have MEFA Pathway, which we'll talk about later on. And we also were selected to offer the state's 529A, or ABLE plan, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it is essentially, it works in a similar way to the 529 college investing plan. It's for individuals with disabilities, so you can save in a similar way, tax deferred, and use those funds to tax free for qualified educational, I'm sorry, not qualified educational, but qualified expenses, which include educational expenses, but also health, assistive technology, transportation, daily living expenses, things like that. So that is a real change for us as well, and a real expansion of what we do. So I know I'm talking a lot, but it's hard to encapsulate everything that we do, and it takes a lot. But also, I think the backbone of who we are is offering that free guidance to people. So we are here for people in Massachusetts, but anyone as well.
The Evolution of the Organization
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Michael Horn:
Okay, so that's interesting. So I'm curious then state authorizes you, that's how MEFA is created. It's evolved a lot, as you said, not just loans, abilities to save, like the 529 Able Plan you just talked about, the guidance and so forth, is that, and then obviously, you said the big thing also not just college but also career guidance, is, you know, how does an organization like this evolve? Is this an independent set of decisions? Is this a state sort of mandates that help you evolve? Like, what's the interplay with the state at this point around those decisions?
Jonathan Hughes:
Well, I think it's a bit of both of those things. So we have certain things like MEFA Pathway, which was, and then we're going to talk about that later on. That's our college and career portal. That was an initiative from the governor's office at the time, Governor Patrick, and we set to work creating at that time, it was called your plan for college. But also, you know, we, in order to do the work that we need to do and be a resource for everybody in Massachusetts, we have partnerships with high school counselors, college administrators, and try to be a resource for them and for their population. So we hear basically what's needed. I'll give you a good example of this. We heard from our college administrators that they were seeing a lot of students who were confused at the point of when they were receiving all their financial aid award letters from colleges, and they needed to make that decision of where they were going to go. A lot of them were having a difficulty deciphering the letters and then comparing the offers among different schools. So, as you know, they're really confusing.
Michael Horn:
Yeah.
Jonathan Hughes:
Yes. It's confusing when you're looking at one of them.
Michael Horn:
Let alone comparing them. Yep.
Jonathan Hughes:
Right. And, you know, there's not a lot of uniformity between award letters. So we created this campaign called our paying the college bill campaign, where we go and sort of break down what you might see in award letters and also how you figure out what your balance due is at each. And we encourage people to actually bring their award letters so we can help them compare and figure out what they have due at each college. So a little bit of both. Some things come from sort of top down, and some things, a lot of things, I would say, are in reaction to what we hear from partners and what folks need.
Building In-State Networks
Michael Horn:
No, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, one last question, and then I'm going to switch to the MEFA Pathway. But I'm just sort of curious. In general, you have all these products, services. I didn't realize people outside of Massachusetts could use them as well. But within Massachusetts, does the relationship as a state created entity, even though you're a separate nonprofit, does that allow you to get better distribution, to have these partnerships with high schools? Or, you know, how does what you offer get in the hands of not just students, but frankly, the students who maybe need the most support and guidance around these questions that, you know, maybe they're a first gen potential college student, they might not have that knowhow in their household they really need a service like yours. They, you know, plausible.
aren't getting the support given what the student to teacher, excuse me, student to guidance counselor ratios are something like what you offer would seem really important. How do you get that distribution and connection with schools, district students?
Jonathan Hughes:
Yeah, and I think you hit it there. I think it is the relationship with the counselors, and it is relationship not just with counselors, but with CBOs, community based organizations as well, other agencies like agencies. For example, there's one called Mass EdCo, which is headquartered in Worcester, but it's also a free resource for students to use to file financial aid forms and help figure they can help them do a lot of things, basically. And I think so. Trust is key and ease of use, I mean, we are a free resource for folks to use. We do try to encourage guidance counselors or high school counselors rather, to reach out to us with any questions. We are happy to take calls. We do have free appointments that people can set up with us and we do, as I said, take that feedback from counselors.
What are their students experiencing? We work with a sort of number of ambassadors that offer free financial aid nights. We will come up with materials, and a lot of this fits in with me for pathway as well, because high schools that use MEFA Pathway have access to us for free, and we're able to sort of hop on a call or run out to a high school to help them administer that. So it is just a lot of important partnerships that we cultivate, and that's why, as I said, trust and usability is so important for us.
Michael Horn:
Gotcha. And you're able to offer it free because the state helps fund that or how does that work?
Jonathan Hughes:
Yeah, so we are, financing is done through our loans. So that's how we keep doing what we're able to do. And that's why the loan piece of it is very important to us. That's how we keep the lights on. That's how we keep going out to colleges and to high schools and to K-12 schools and to offering everything that we need to offer to our citizens in Massachusetts and elsewhere.
MEFA Pathway
Michael Horn:
Gotcha. Okay, so let's get, we've teased it now multiple times coming up with another question, but MEFA Pathway, what is it? Where did it come from? What's the purpose and what does it do? And have you had to partner with folks to be able to stand it up? What does that look like?
Jonathan Hughes:
Yeah, so MEFA Pathway, I said, was created by, through an initiative through the Patrick administration at the time, it was 2011, and it was meant to be a free college and career portal for students in Massachusetts. So that was your plan for college, as I said, and went through some iterations. It became your plan for the future later on, I think about 2017 was when it became MEFA Pathway, and it's just continued to develop. I mean, we work with, to build out the platform, a company called Folderwave, and we sort of have partner schools that we try to get. We're sort of enlisting schools in the effort to use MEFA Pathway in their schools as their college and career portal. Now, you know that there are other college and career portals as well for use in high schools and for middle schools. And so it's been, you know, a process over many years of trying to get more and more schools. And the thing I can say about MEFA Pathway, how it has changed, it has just grown more and more expansive I mean, every time I look, they're sort of adding something to MEFA Pathway. Um, so it's for use beginning in grade six. And of course, in grade six, you're starting to. I just have a son, actually, who just started grade six, so I can't believe he's at the point now where he can set up a MEFA Pathway account and try to figure out what he might want to do for a career. But, yeah, I mean, when you're in grade six and you start to use this, it's going to focus primarily on fun things, you know, things that you may want to do for a career. What are your interests? What do you like to do? What are you good at doing? What's your learning style, et cetera. When you get to high school, of course, it's gonna be a little bit more in depth, a little bit more planning your courses, et cetera. And the functionality of it has just gotten more and more in depth and comprehensive. So you can use it as a sort of just, any student in the Commonwealth can open up an account or anywhere, really, but it's mainly targeted towards Massachusetts can open up an account and do these things, or a school, a high school or school district can opt to use MEFA Pathway and use it for free and have sort of their guidance department use it as their portal. Different schools can use it at different levels. So some might use some parts of it and some might use another college and career portal for something else. So it has just continued to evolve and to get more in depth and to encapsulate more, not just college. As you can see, it started off your plan for college, and now it's the college and career portal piece, which is continuing to be built out more.
Differentiating MEFA from Other Career Navigators
Michael Horn:
So it should be said in the interest of full disclosure FolderWave, who I've done some advising for, is the one that connected us together for this conversation. And obviously, then, as you just said, providing some of the technical infrastructure behind what you all offer. I love to stay with that journey that you just described where it's very, you know, what do you like doing? Fun,engaging. as you get into high school, more serious navigation questions around choices that have to be made based on those interests and understanding of where you tick and so forth. But help us understand how it's different from, you know, as you mentioned, there are a lot of tools out there. There's a couple of market leaders out there, right, that have big presence in more high schools than middle schools around this college. Navigation in particular, they’re starting to add careers as well. What really differentiates MEFA Pathway from the other things out in the market?
Jonathan Hughes:
Sure. Yeah. No, its a good question. And I think a couple of things make it different. The first I’ve mentioned a few times is that it’s free. So it’s a free resource for schools to use or for students to use. And so that is different also to be trained and support on this is also free. I know that that's not the case with other college and career portals.
They might charge to be trained or for troubleshooting, what have you. I was just sort of in preparation for this, talking with some of the pathway team that goes out to high schools. And we did, I think, 150 or 160 visits or conferences with high schools over the past year. So that's one thing. The other thing is we do have that interplay with counselors. So we do solicit feedback and we do act on that feedback as quickly as we can. There's a relationship there that's really, really close and that extends to something we hear a lot about lesson plans that we can offer. So we have created lesson plans for teachers, counselors to use in their school. So we heard from counselors that, you know, we have all this great information on MEFA Pathway, but, you know, on top of classes and on top of everything else that students have to do, they're not really getting this information. So it would be great if they could use it in classes. So we developed lesson plans for advisors or teachers to use in class so that they know students are getting that information. And it's all sort of lined up with MyCAP guidelines, which are through the State of Massachusetts. So it stands for my career and academic placement. And so that makes us different also because we have that Massachusetts focus to us. So we are aligned with the MyCAP program. We have specific tools on our site on MEFA Pathway where people can go and see what their savings might be. If they go through a Massachusetts community college and use the mass transfer program, see what their savings may be versus not doing that, they can search careers and save those that are Massachusetts focused as well. So those few things I think make us different. And also the other thing is that, you know, as I said, we are, everything is done with sort of a human face. We're a small shop and we are very responsive to questions or issues.
Shifting Mindsets towards Career
Michael Horn:
No, it makes sense. So I actually want to stay on something that you mentioned because you had the career academic placement standards, you talked multiple times about how MEFA Pathway and you all in general, are not just sort of a “college for all” shop anymore. Career is a much bigger piece of this. This is obviously, you know, in some ways a back to the future moment for high schools across the country, but with the different emphasis that we want people to really make informed choices as they're navigating this college career, not just one time decision, but frankly, like interdependent set of decisions throughout their lives. I just love your perspective on how the state, the standards, you all have evolved to help people really think about the tradeoffs or questions that they want to be asking is they're thinking, hey, I'm going to graduate high school. Have I set myself up to go right into career first trade school, community college, four year college, gap year. There's a lot of decisions there. How have you evolved that to help? You know, pretty like, these are very different initial pathways, big steps that have big implications. How do you help people think about that?
Jonathan Hughes:
Yeah, and I think, you know, that's a shift that you've seen across the industry and across the country in general. I mean, just hearing folks talk about college and career is different than it was 20 years ago. As I mentioned, and I'll mention it again, when we first started off, it was you were playing for college. And when I started working at MEFA a long time ago, we were completely college focused. And as that has changed, we have to grow to meet where people are and to adjust for other pathways as other people are doing. And it's hard. Everything in high school, counseling or counseling and postsecondary endeavors, it's all, like you said, interlocking sets of decisions.
You have to get in front of people at the right time to get them thinking about the right thing so that their next step is the right step and putting them on the right path. I think how we do that through pathway, well, how we do it through MEFA in general, just start talking about these things and mentioning that there are other ways other than college. And it's not that everybody has to go to college. College will be important for many people. It's a great investment in many ways, but not everybody needs to go or goes to college. It's just whatever happens after high school, we want our students to be in a good position to succeed.So I think how we do that through MEFA Pathway is getting in front of them at a young age, in the middle school years, to try to see, to try to get kids thinking about what they might want to be and what they might want to do.
This is also where the lesson plans for high schoolers come in, too. So a lot of these lesson plans are designed to get folks thinking about this. And this is what the MyCAP program is all about as well, to sort of let the student drive the process. And the first part of that is self discovery. The first part of that is knowing what the student wants to do for themselves, know what they want to do, and go that way. Now, that's not going to be the reality for everybody. And I know that I can only imagine myself at 17. You could have given everything, put in everything in front of me, and I still probably would have had a hard time. But to try to get that in front of people and give folks as many ideas as possible and to let them know that there are viable pathways wherever they may want to go, there is something out there for them. And then to the extent which they can use the tool and to try to carve these pathways out, there will be, as we were mentioning, a new focus on work-based learning. As there are more pathways for work-based learning in high schools, I always think of tech. That's the first thing I always think of when you talk about work-based learning is technical high schools. I've talked to a lot of technical high school students who go out to a job for, you know, one day a week or one week every month, whatever it may be. And I always thought that that's such a great thing to do. And I talked to a lot of them who love it. You know, I interviewed students on my pod, on our podcast at MEFA at a technical high school in Massachusetts.
And the reason we got in there was because they were a pathway school. So they use MEFA Pathway to do various things. But this work-based learning is getting more and more notice from a lot of people. It's something that a lot of high schools and colleges are looking at. For our work-based learning, we have a portal where, well, not a portal, but a feature where counselors can list all the work-based learning opportunities that are available to their students. Their students can go on, if they log on to MEFA Pathway, see the options that are available to them, apply for those internships, job shadowing programs, whatever it may be, externships, and apply that way. What's coming soon, hopefully, is a employer portal where they can manage that part of the process as well. So this is something, as I said, that just giving students exposure to that and letting them know that there are other pathways out there and that they're valuable and they can lead to good outcomes and good salaries.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's part of the name of the game. And obviously, to your point, I probably was similar to you in this way. I would have been very hard for me at age 17 to imagine. But the flip side is, if I'd had more exposure to lots of different work-based learning opportunities, maybe actually, I would have known far more about what made me tick and what didn't, at least to the point that I could have started to rule certain things out in a meaningful way, which I often think we expect people to be like, oh, that's the thing. I think we're much better as human beings saying, that's not the thing, nor is that. And it might be these five other things.
If you can help with that. I think it makes a lot of sense. What do you see in terms of utilization numbers and sort of, I don't know if you have quantitative ways of looking at impact, but at least qualitatively?
Jonathan Hughes:
Yeah, I mean, we do have some numbers in terms of accounts. I mean, there's about, I would say around 55, 56,000 accounts set up the MEFA Pathway. We have about 180 schools or so that are in Massachusetts that are signed up for MEFA Pathway, and they may be participating to varying degrees. Right. So some may use, you know, the lesson plans, but not use the common app parchment integration, for example, to send all of the transcripts and letters of recommendation to the colleges. That's a tool that we have on MEFA Pathway, but, you know, people can use it to their comfort level. And we are just, I think as high schools, you know, they have contracts with certain other college and career portal providers. They may sign up with me for pathway.
These things take a long time, but, yeah. So, and from what we hear from counselors and from students, we know that it's really working out for people, particularly lesson plans, scholarship searches, and app applying through school. But there's so many tools, and the comprehensive nature of it is so great and getting greater all the time. I feel like I was talking about MEFA Pathways of its own, little sort of separate thing, and now I feel like it's, it's the other head on the shoulder, so to speak, so well.
How Guidance Counselors Are Managing the Shift
Michael Horn:
And it's gotten a lot of support from the governor's office, the current governor's office, obviously, with the public service announcement and so forth. And if I'm not mistaken, 180 high schools in Massachusetts is about 40, 45% probably, of high schools in the state is my guess.So that's, that's pretty good coverage there. Last question as we wrap up. It seems to me the other part of this equation as we move away from “college for al”l to a more robust understanding of what individuals can do to lead productive lives as they leave high school is that there's a fair amount of re education of counselors, like a lot of the guidance counselors, you know, for the last generation, it's sort of been college, college, college. That's a big switch on them. I'm just curious if you see, you know, how are they doing with that switch on the ground? You probably have a view of that. And I, I imagine a resource like the ones you provide is actually super useful to them, getting educated around other options beside the, you know, the ones that they've been focused on for the last 30 years.
Jonathan Hughes:
Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, it really is. To be honest, I'm asking them so much of what they're seeing from their students that they, they're the ones who told me, you know, because I asked them, are, are you seeing more students go directly into the workforce to college or you see them, you know, going the career vocational training pathway? And a lot of them say yes. And I think that there's a sense, too, among students and parents that, you know, this is, I think it's different from when you and I were going to college in a way, and, or when we were graduating high school that this is seen as more of a viable option for more folks than it was. So, yeah, I don't, you know, to be honest, I don't really know. I don't have an answer for you.
Michael Horn:
I was just curious because it seems like a stark shift. And so services that are maybe, you know, have bigger budgets, right, to do the work and resources that MEFA Pathway has and the lesson plans, it seems like that can be a real resource not just for the students but maybe for the counselors as well.
Jonathan Hughes:
Yeah. And I think that's where employers come in and other CBOs and other sort of industry partners and local partners come in to sort of shape that. But, yeah, I think that makes sense.
Michael Horn:
That makes sense. Jonathan, really appreciate you coming on to explain all about not just MEFA Pathways but MEFA itself as an organization. Where can folks who, you know, they, they finish this conversation? They want to learn more. How should they do so?
Jonathan Hughes:
Well, they can go to a couple of places. They go to mefa.org. they can go to mefapathway.org and they can follow us on our social media channels. They can follow, they can look for the MEFA podcast, but they can go to?
Michael Horn:
Where they get to hear your voice on if they lucky them, right
Jonathan Hughes:
They get to hear me. Yes.
Jonathan Hughes:
I would recommend folks to go to mefa.org or mefapathway.org for more information.
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Kevin Stoller, CEO of Kay-twelve, a school furniture provider, and Board Chair of the Second Class Foundation, joined me to discuss the importance of reimagining learning spaces in the broader effort to transform education. Kevin shared how his work in creating adaptable school furniture drove him to create a new docuseries on school spaces titled “What We Show Them.” You can watch episode 1 here.
Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to 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 how we can better do that, particularly in the K12 education system. Delighted that we have Kevin Stoller. He's the CEO of Kay-Twelve. That's spelled K-a-y twelve spelled out so not the normal sort of K12 that you often see. He's the author of the book Creating Better Learning Environments—after my heart—about how do we can think about space and architecture and the furniture inside of places to better facilitate learning. And he's also behind the Second Class Foundation's new docu-series called “What We Show Them,” which we will get into in a little bit in this episode. But first, Kevin, great to see you. We were on a podcast in the midst of the pandemic as I recall together talking about some of these things. It's good to see you here.
Kevin Stoller:
You too. Thanks for having me. You are one of those change makers in education that I always talk about. So I learn a lot from you. I love all the work you're doing. So I just really appreciate you having me on.
Reimagining School Spaces
Michael Horn:
Well, very, very kind of you to say, but I'm excited to learn from you today because you've got a lot of things going. But let's, let's start high level. Introduce yourself to the audience. Like, the premise behind your work more broadly has been what?
Kevin Stoller:
So it's really been around how do we improve education? And I got into this in total, total by accident. I always say that. I ended up. I never thought I was going to be anywhere near education. To me, school was just something you get through. And then I somehow landed in my career of owning a school furniture company. And I still remember the moment where my mindset shifted when I was just walking into really the most ordinary type of school anywhere in the country, happened to be in my backyard when I was living in Worthington, Ohio, and walked into the lobby. And this time something felt different. Something felt different. I went to go check in with the principal that I was going to meet with, and I just felt there's this, like, buzz coming from this one wing of the school. Like there was this, like, almost like electricity coming. And he comes out and he's one of those. One of those principals that just like everyone, like, looks up to and loves. He just makes everyone feel great. It's one of those where it's like people want to move into the boundaries of his school so your kids can go, yeah. And he just smiles. And he's like, follow me. And I'm like, what? I'm like, what is going on over there? And he shows me. Brings me into a classroom and shows me a teacher. And she goes, watch this. And she has all the students kind of in a U shape around her, and they're all paying attention, and she explains what they're going to do today. And then all of a sudden she does like a clap, like a break, like they're breaking from their huddle and they go. And they immediately go into groups of three or four working together. One kid you would see, like, break away from the side and start doing some solo work just trying to comprehend something, then come back in. She would just kind of dance around the classroom and all of this would happen. And by the end, there'd be presentations that would happen in there. And then she'd bring them all together and wrap it up. And it was the first time that I realized I'm like, oh, crap, I don't own a school furniture company. Like, my this actually matters. And it was like the moment where, like, we need to figure out how to do this, because these straight rows of classrooms facing the front of the room, like, that's all I knew school was. And that was really the turning point that shifted us from having a school furniture company to having a mission driven how do we improve education company.
Michael Horn:
Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, I've had that experience now a couple times where I've spoken to school furniture companies or design companies or whatever it is, and I got lucky enough to take Vince Scully's class in college. And you just realize so much of how we relate to each other is because of the space in which we inhabit together. And we don't even think about the impact on mood, collaboration, all these patterns. And you're right. Like, if you reframe it, you can all of a sudden be part of that change and create that dynamic, exciting environment that you got to see that day in Ohio. It sounds like.
Kevin Stoller:
Yeah, it really was eye opening to me because it was, you know, like the engagement level that you start seeing in there. And, you know, and that was only the first part of the story, because the other part is we did this in four classrooms. So we were trying out this new furniture in four classrooms, and we go to the other three, and the other three literally would have X's with painter tape of saying, this is where your chair has to go and you cannot move it.
Michael Horn:
Oh, okay.
Kevin Stoller:
So. So it was really like the entry of, like, oh, wow. I can see where it can go. But I also see that this is a much bigger, bigger initiative here, because this isn't just about changing out the furniture. This is about how do you really change the culture and how do you really drive things from the leadership level and, you know, and really changing the perception of what school could actually look like.
Michael Horn:
All right, I have to tell one more story because it's now fun, because my kids, they go to a Montessori school and they're now in fourth grade, but they call the type of school traditional schools that I went to and my wife went to, they call it schools with desks, because to them, that's what it looks like, right? So, like, you went to a school with desks. Let me get this. Like, why did it work that way? And I'm like, I can't really explain to you why, but anyway, there we are. So then you have the Second Class Foundation, where I think you're the board president, and they are launching this docuseries. Tell us about this organization and how it intersects with your work.
Extreme Makeover: School Edition
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Kevin Stoller:
Yeah, so what. What really happened was it was a lot of years in works here, and it really came from someone on our team. Kirsten, on our team was like, you know, I'm sitting here and I'm watching all these, like, home renovation shows and, like, these makeover shows, and I see the work we're doing and how it really changes the learning environment and, like, where's, like, an extreme home makeover but school edition of it? So this is really, you know, four or five years in the works of, like, hey, that's a good idea. Why can't someone to do it? And, you know, because we. Our mission is to improve. Improve learning environments. We said, well, this is really the missing piece. It's like, we can talk about these at educational conferences, but we really need the movement to come from outside of the walls of school. How do we get to the point where people, like, just general community members start saying, well, why doesn't my school look like that? Like that? And that was really what we identified early on of, like, that's really the tipping point that if we really want to drive this change, how do we get it to that point where it's not like saying, like, well, don't put this fancy school furniture in my school. It's more of like, why doesn't our school have those types of opportunities for our kids. So we went down this path of saying, hey, can we pitch this show to Netflix? How do we get this on the network? How do we do this? And we quickly learned that either we could sell this concept, we can do this, and we can sell the concept, and then, you know, they can, you know, whoever buys it can do whatever they want. But we said, that's really not the intent of why we want to do this. And we said, well, we really can't do this by getting, like, product placement. We don't want to look like a big commercial. So we were like, we really need to do this as a nonprofit. So we set up the foundation a few years ago, and it's really with a blank slate of how do we improve education through the use of media and storytelling? Because we really want to do a lot of projects like this docuseries that we're launching, but as well as we want to highlight other types of work that's going on and how do we meet people where they're at in a more entertaining format so that this isn't just for people who are seeking kind of education documentaries. How do we do really entertaining, good work that people would want to watch when they're sitting down trying to figure out what do we watch on Netflix tonight?
Showing the ‘Before Picture’ of School Infrastructure
Michael Horn:
Yeah, I, Well, I love that premise of Extreme Makeover School Edition and the demand side of the equation, because I think you're right. And obviously you're. You live in Arizona, so you're in the land of ultra school choice and parents making different decisions around their school at the moment. But I think the bigger premise is correct, which is parents saying, like, no, I'm not settling for the school with desks, because now I know that there's something else out there that can be done that's going to light a fire under my kid. And that's the opportunity that I want. And once community members start demanding these things en masse, you start to see bigger changes, and that's possible. So you're launching this docuseries. It's called “What We Show Them.” I've seen the first pilot episode about a school in Idaho, and I will say it's sobering. We don't see the rebuild in the eight minute segment that I saw or nine minute or whatever it is, but it's, it's a sobering first message. Talk to us about that first episode and sort of the larger arc of what you're hoping to accomplish.
Kevin Stoller:
Yeah, so it was one of those where we had our film crew and we were trying to figure out how do we hit home as fast as possible on this. Because to produce anything, like, at this level, which I would say is at, like, film quality level, like, I mean, it's outstanding.
Michael Horn:
Yeah.
Kevin Stoller:
Like, they did an unbelievable job with this, but they started looking at stories around the country. And what's amazing is they have a lot. There are so many good, like, characters and stories that are going on in education, but this one stood out as, like, we need to capture it right now. Like, we need to go out there right now and capture it. And you use the word sobering. I like that term. I'm probably gonna take that. It's. It's. I've been saying it's heavy. It's a lot heavier than the intention of the whole series. But if you look at any type of good storytelling and the arc is that you look at any movie or any character at the beginning of the book, it usually starts out with. With the situation. And you can almost always predict that the end of the movie or the end of the book is the exact opposite. And I just so look forward to us getting to that point. So we can show the exact opposite, but it is very heavy right now. It's a school in Idaho that honestly, like, at any moment, the school can crumble. They've actually had their gym fall, like, collapse in 1996, and they have not made any structural changes to the school. And Idaho is an interesting one. And when we get into this is, we really want to figure out who's the antagonist in here because we don't want the general public to be like, the enemy on this. But every time they've gone to bond to try to try to get the vote for a bond. Idaho is one of two states that requires a 66.7% approval before the bond can pass. And they've been getting, like, their last vote, they got 54%. 54% in a vote anywhere else in the country is like a landslide victory. But in Idaho, it's not passing. And. And because of that, they are going again, trying to do this and trying to really get ahead of this, and they're doing all the work that they should do. But what I give them credit for, and, you know, and I'd highly recommend that people watch it and we can. We can share the link. What I give this district credit for is that, yes, they want to solve the issue for their school, but they are also Taking on the bigger battle of. They're just one of the communities in Idaho. Everyone is running into the same thing. And these are old facilities that need updating. And they're trying to change that law so that it doesn't require the 66.7%, but just like a normal majority vote where, you know, where, you know, in 48 states, the rest of the country has it that way.
Michael Horn:
So this is a school then that it's still in that state. This is not the other side of nirvana yet. In this particular school.
Kevin Stoller:
No, they actually have, you know, in this November. And so not sure when this. This episode releases before that. But. But they are using.
Michael Horn:
It'll be before the election. Yeah.
Kevin Stoller:
Okay. So they are using it to help get their local support. And I hope they do get the 67%. But. But we wanted to make sure as a film crew, we are not dividing this community and trying to be like, well, the other 46%. What are you thinking? Like that's not the. I mean, that's really wasn't the intent. And the other piece of this too, is that the goal of the docuseries is that we have a whole bunch of different stories that we interweave because movement is slow in education and it is not exciting to watch. So being able to have other districts and not always dealing with facilities, of just having really good characters, which is what we've built up, is we have a list of really good characters that we want to highlight and that allow you to have an emotional connection with them that are just people that you want to see the work they're doing and transpose that. Where some are in amazingly new schools, some are like different stages, some are doing more like micro school. Like really just showing the different landscape of what education actually looks like in this country right now. And where I just keep coming back to in an entertaining format.
The Range of Topics Covered in the Docuseries
Michael Horn:
Yeah. So give real breadth to that vision of what school can and should be over time. But also against this sobering beginning. Just give us a little bit of tease. You said, you know, facilities is not the only entry point into the topics are some of the other entry points that this will tackle.
Kevin Stoller:
Yeah, I mean, one of the storylines that we look at is in the Virgin Islands. I don't know how much you follow what happened there, but literally almost all their schools got destroyed by.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, by storms yeah, okay.
Kevin Stoller:
Yep. So they are going through this and there's an amazing leader that they have that is like. That is rallying up the communities to re-envision. Be like, hey, this is our chance, like, you know, like we, we literally can start from scratch and do this. And it's super fascinating to see what is going on there. And then you have, you know, other ones where we actually have just a community member in Salt Lake City who just has taken a passion on and and is, is taking. Rallying people to just look at, again, look at education differently. And it's. And he is super like energizing and upbeat. So trying to really transpose some of these stories around the country and give a really good like, patchwork of like, hey, we're at a really interesting time in education and a lot of things are happening that maybe you and I see, but I don't think the general public really sees it.
What’s Next for the Docuseries
Michael Horn:
Yeah, no, I think that's right. And you're right. U.S. Virgin Islands, that's the ultimate in, you know, what I would call nonconsumption, where you can truly create something that has not existed before because there's not everyone going to the status quo, if you will, and sort of locked in with the mindset of what this looks like. So, so wind us forward. Let's, you know, this fully gets off the ground. We're having this conversation in September right now, back to school, but play it forward a few years. You know, the nonprofit exists to move change in education through storytelling, through media. What's the hope for this series and beyond of what you catalyze?
Kevin Stoller:
Yeah, our hope for this series is that we raise the money so that we can complete. We have a kind of a story arc of a 10 episode docuseries that once it's produced, being able to sell it and license it to the streaming platforms, it's a lot easier for them when you have a product that they can be like, yep, we can air it now. So that's the goal with this one and we hope it becomes an ongoing one. But obviously like anything like this, you got to take one step at a time and see what the response is. But the nonprofit is really to be meeting people where they're at. We hope we can fund additional projects like this. We hope that we can be affiliated with people that are already producing like this and even things that honestly are probably like some of the low hanging fruit we want to tackle. And I'll use the example out of like any news story that you see on education, the newspaper or the website is grabbing some stock footage of what a school looks like from like 20 years ago. And can we have like an industry like, can we do that? Yeah. Can we upgrade some of the stock footage of what schools are looking like and try to change that perception of like, hey, they don't look like the way they looked in Ferris Bueller. And you know, in the mid-1980s, some still do look that way, but most of them actually don't. But, you know, but if you're not like walking into schools pretty regularly and, and I would say that the majority of adults in America are not really actually going to see the insides of schools very often, how do we change that perception? Because I do think there, there is a big element in this where we're just stuck where people are just like, oh, that's the way school went. Because I went there 30 or 40 years ago. It's probably the same.
Michael Horn:
Yep. Of course, school with desks, as my kids say again. But let's, let's end on this. How can folks find more support? I think it's secondclassfoundation.org/projects if they actually want to see the, the first pilot itself. But, but tell us how, how they can stay in touch and support.
Kevin Stoller:
Yep, perfect. Yeah, that, that is a great place. I just, I think that's a great place to start. Watch that. You can see the story or you can read more about it on the website. But on the Contact Us is really what we're looking for the help for. And we're trying to connect with the organizations, the individuals that can help financially support us but also help in additional ways. We have some additional board seats that are open that we can fill. And then, you know, there's also kind of the volunteer level, you know, like just ones that can help spread the word and share, you know, like share this and other work that we're doing on social media and within their networks. But those are really the three, three things that we're asking for at this point. Trying to find the, you know, like those right donors or organizations or individuals that can do that, board members and the volunteers.
Michael Horn:
Perfect. Kevin, thanks for the work you're doing. Thanks for the storytelling you're doing. Thanks for the reframing you're doing. And for all those tuning in, check out secondclassfoundation.org learn more, see how you can support.
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Mike Flanagan, CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC), joined me to talk about the organization's recent “acquisition” by ETS, as well as its broader work in changing how we measure student learning and represent that to colleges and employers. Could the broader adoption of MTC change the game for how students choose college—and allow colleges to be more diverse, rather than “one-size-fits-all” as many are today? This was a fun conversation where I pushed Mike on a few ideas around skills—and then learned a lot from his nuanced answers. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments.
Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world where all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through that today. I'm. I'm really excited. It's my longtime friend, Mike Flanagan. He's from the town over from me here in Massachusetts. But we've known each other since I was on the board of the National Association of Independent Schools, and he was running one of the very cool business lines for NAIS, as well as, frankly, all things technology for the organization. But then he became the CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which was acquired recently by ETS, an organization focused on testing across the country and internationally as well. And we're gonna talk about all of that today. Mike, so good to see you. We're not in person, but it's great to be with you on camera.
Michael Flanagan:
I am so excited. Yeah neighbors first, but, like, this is, what a great opportunity. I really, really appreciate the invite.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, I should have added, you're a CrossFit certified coach, as well. So, you know, we've got, like, I'm not that, but, you know, we have certain other things in common, as well, so.
Michael Flanagan:
Yeah, I always have to put that in asterisk on that. I was former. Former coach. Unfortunately, my certification lapsed when my job changed, and I found wound up spending 90% of my time on planes. You know, Crossfit's a great way to be healthy and stay in shape, but if you want to get injured, a really good thing to do is do Crossfit once a month.
The History of Mastery Transcript Consortium
Michael Horn:
Fair enough. Fair enough. Don't do that. Get some regular rhythm, but hopefully not afflicting you. But it's good to see you. Let's dive in. You and I have had a long set of conversations around what the Mastery Transcript Consortium pre ETS acquisition is. We might call it MTC, so you know that's the acronym. But let's just talk about what Mastery Transcript Consortium was at the outset through its history, before the acquisition itself.
Michael Flanagan:
Yeah, I mean, I will say just a preview. It's what and still is, the changes as a result of our new home with ETS, which we'll talk about in a bit are much more about expansion and kind of continuation of what we're doing versus, like, a radical kind of rethinking of it. But to go back to the start, the way we talk about MTC, to educators out there is, to start with a pretty simple premise, which is that we think there are better ways of doing school, right. That the schooling models we have today, for a lot of kids, they don't feel very relevant, they don't feel very useful, they don't feel very engaging. And yet, at the same time, there's all these counterexamples of amazing schools. You talk to them all the time, right? School leaders who are innovators. They're doing project based learning, doing interdisciplinary work. They're getting kids out of classrooms, into the world of work. They're putting kids in teams and solving real world problems, and they're really focused on skill building. And the challenge we had, or the thing that kind of kept pushing us was like, these models are awesome. Why aren't they everywhere? Why doesn't every neighborhood have a school like this? And what we realized, talking to a lot of the same people you talk to, school leaders and innovators, is that what we kind of have is an infrastructure problem. We basically know how to produce this amazing, innovative learning. But all the systems we have to, frankly, keep score to credit and credential that learning are completely yoked, completely invested to old ways, credit hours, academic courses, and GPAs. And so the question is, like, what do you do if you're a school leader and the model you have, like, doesn't map to any of that? And the answer to the question for us was a grassroots effort, the consortium and MTC, the Mastery Transcript Consortium. And what we've built with our schools is, simply put, an alternative credential. It's one that's completely based on competencies and skills and also centers artifacts of student learning, like actual work product, and then combines the two. So you have the best attributes of what we think is a competency based transcript and a portfolio system. And that's it. That's MTC in a nutshell. We've built this system so that kids that are doing innovative learning don't have to translate or water down that learning to have it make sense to colleges and to workforce, but they can actually have a credential and exit ticket that is fully consistent, both in terms of philosophy and design, with all the hard work that the people that started their school are probably doing.
Michael Horn:
Very cool. I think what I've learned and appreciated over time, as I thought about it, Mike, is, is two things. One, by focusing on those folks that either have an innovative model or want to, to your point, you're creating the infrastructure for them to grow, for them to validate what they're doing to be accepted by colleges or trade schools or employers or whatever else, sort of giving them a consistent infrastructure across the school. So it's not just, oh, here's another one off here, here's another one off there. And then, number two, what I think I've come to learn is you're not necessarily in the weeds of my big thing of competency-based or mastery-based learning of we're throwing over seat time, and you get to move at your own pace. What you are more is on the, yes, that would be great. But you're more on the end of that saying, okay, whatever the system is, let us represent what you have mastered in some way that I can then click in and see the artifact of learning that proves you've in fact, mastered that domain, skill, knowledge, whatever it is. And so it's really, the way I kind of think of it is it's like an asset-based report card. At the end of the day, these are the sets of things I can do. And yeah, it may be jagged, but, like, that's a reflection of then who I am as an individual. I don't have to lie about it, right? I don't have to puff up these other areas. How do you think about that exactly?
Michael Flanagan:
I mean, jagged. Jagged and asset together, right? And I think if there's one thing that we spend, I mean, MTC is a nonprofit by design, because if we were a for profit, we wouldn't be able to invest so heavily in advocacy and outreach to higher education. And if there's one place where I think we've had to work very hard to move the needle and change the mindset is folder reading in universities and colleges today is largely done through a deficit mindset. It's how many APs did school X offer? Did applicant y take all the ten APs? And if not, why not? And it's a very weird way of thinking about the high school journey. It has this weird, pernicious effect where the most high achieving kids actually have the most narrowed options in terms of what they study and how they study, because they are basically engaged in a full time exercise of compliance. Like, how do I put the best portrait forward, no deviations allowed, whereas all the best real learning. I mean, 80% of the great stories you tell when you're talking to somebody who's innovated or built something new. All the Clayton Christensen work is like, oh, what comes from failure? What comes from looking at things through totally unexpected ways of bucking systems. And so if you build feedback loops and measurement loops for high schoolers that say, oh, no, we want you to be creative. We want you to take risks, but also we need you to be perfect at everything all the time. No variants allowed. They're smart kids. They know what the actual assignment is.
Michael Horn:
They know what the game is. Yeah.
Michael Flanagan:
Yeah.
Michael Horn:
No, and I mean, I think, look, this should be a huge thing for colleges as well as, you know, I famously earned, famously sitting there watching the closures and mergers of colleges. My argument is, lean into what makes you as a college, distinct. Look for the students who match that profile. And guess what? We don't all have to try to look the exact same, which is the current system.
Michael Flanagan:
One of the things that I, when you're starting new things, it can be very hard to find signal in all the noise. Right. And so I think one of the things that we've learned both in this role and in some of my previous jobs is generally, you know, you're onto something when you see that users on both ends of, like, a performance curve, like what you're doing, or see some value in what you're doing. Right. So for higher education, if I'm in charge, first of all, I want to stipulate that we as a society overly obsess about 20 colleges, and they're very, very low selectivity rates. And that's not where kids actually go to school. You know that better than anybody, written books about it. But since we do, if you are in one of those 20 colleges, you are still, you still have the mandate to yield a diverse, representative class. And the Supreme Court just tied your hands. So they now are saying, oh, you have new metrics. You have different ways of visualizing student capacity and capability in a systematic way. That's interesting to us. We want to have that conversation. So that's not anything MTC did. That's the kind of market shifting to kind of wind up where we already were. And then to your story earlier, the vast majority of enrollment managers at these institutions are actually just trying to find kids, right? So. And right now that the signals we give those same kids when they're wayfinding, trying to find the right, you know, destination, they're very blunt tools. It's like, okay, you have this set of SAT or ACT scores. That means if you theoretically stack rank all these schools, how high up are you allowed to aim? But there's no lateral dispersion. There's no way of saying, but what about fit? What am I actually going to do if I get into one of these schools. And that level of fit, real skill profile, that's where the jagged becomes a feature, not a bug.
Joining Forces with ETS
Michael Horn:
Yeah, that second one, I confess that's where I'd love to spend the energy that. Not so interested in the former, but the, but let's, let's jump in then to the ETS question, because they made the choice. We're now, this is September, so I guess it was June or something like that.
Michael Flanagan:
Yeah, we went, we announced it in the middle of May. Signed the paperwork in early May.
Michael Horn:
Okay, so May. We're now a few months in. They acquired MTC. Why was this interesting for them? How does this fit into ETS strategic plans? Folks who follow the industry know they have a relatively new CEO. There have been a lot of changes at ETS as well. Wrap it in. Tell us the story.
Michael Flanagan:
So, first, what I will say is just for, in case you have any professors of law out there, it's not technically an acquisition, because we are a nonprofit and they are a nonprofit. Legal junkies out there will know that what we did was called a sole member substitution. But let's just say in plain English, we are now a wholly owned subsidiary of ETS. We are one of the ETS family of companies, so we still operate independently. MTC is still its own 501(c)3 but we are absolutely now in this kind of family that has much vaster resources and I daresay, like, grander aspirations. So ETS has been very busy. The ETS that you and I grew up with, Educational Testing Service, has rebranded. It's just ETS now. And if you look at their tagline, they're talking more about education and talent solutions. Amit Savak, who you just kind of name checked earlier or referred to, is definitely leading the organization in a new direction. I have heard him get on stage and talk to an audience of ETS customers and thought leaders and say, hey, standardized testing isn't going to cut it anymore. I mean, that's a very bold statement for him in that role of that organization to make. I think the strategy is that skills are the future. Interdisciplinary skills. If we really want to give targeted supports and take advantage of emerging technologies to give actionable insights to young people when they're in school, to young adults as they traverse high school to college or work, the more and better information we can give them about their skill profiles, the better job they can do of self-advocacy and wayfinding. In what I think we all kind of stipulate is a very complex and fast changing world. The classic compact that you and I had together, which is study hard, sharpen your number two pencil, get to a good college, get a good job. Like, I mean, good luck with that. I mean, that is a, that whole, call it a treadmill, if you want to call it quality, value proposition, has been very deeply upended in some ways for better. I think there are equity stories to tell in finding talent through new and different lenses. But that's sort of the big picture direction of ETS. They're going in a new direction. They're focusing on skills and most specifically in the area of K-12 schooling. They have an initiative, a partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, which is led by Tim Knowles. And I know you've spoken with Tim yourself. Tim's vision for education is to upend K-12 educational architecture. He, like, we believe architecture and infrastructure drive practice. And so if you can move beyond seat time, as he has said many times more eloquently than me, the Carnegie Foundation created the Carnegie unit as we know it. And they're sorry, they're trying to kind of disrupt that. If we can move beyond seat time and we can widen the aperture of what counts as skill development and what we, you know, assess and credential inside of schools, we open up more pathways for young people to be successful. So I never thought I would say this, but we have been working at MTC now for seven plus years, kind of at a grassroots level, trying to be like, seat time, move beyond it, right? Like, hey, expand your aperture, think about skills. So to suddenly have those two organizations be like, no, this is right, this is where we should be going. That was a huge kind of, I guess, wind in our sails and also let us, you know, it was pretty short discussion when we realized just how aligned the senior leaders were of those organizations and our admittedly much smaller team and our senior leaders on board for what we were hoping, the change we wanted to see in the world.
Defining and Codifying Skills
Michael Horn:
So quick question, and then I have a longer one. But the quick one first is when you say the word skills, so many ways to think about what that word means, right? Some people, it's critical thinking, problem solving. Some people think, you know, it's, it's the ability to do a task in a certain domain, you know, and maybe think, you know, show critical things, like lots of different ways to show that. Sometimes it's just applied knowledge. How are you all like, what does that word mean in MTC land?
Michael Flanagan:
Yeah, we are borrowing very explicitly and with a lot of gratitude, the phrase durable skills from our friends at America Succeeds. And so for your listeners out there, please check out America Succeeds. Google durable skills. What you'll see is a wonderful research project where they did a meta analysis and like a data extraction of 80 million different job postings online. And what you see when you look at those is that there's a tremendous consensus about what employers are looking for. Technical jobs require certain technical skills, and I don't mean like STEM jobs, coding jobs, although those certainly do. Right. One job in a bakery, there are technical skills you need to have, like understanding how doughs proof and how to laminate doughs if you want to make croissants and things like that. But there's also soft skills, which they have rebranded as durable skills. You have to be able to communicate and partner well and make this problem solve on the fly. So whether you're in the bakery or whether you're working at Facebook, those durable skills are transferable across those in ways that the technical skills are not. And more importantly, employers are very comfortable, we think, skilling up entry level hires in technical skills that are specific to their tasks.
Michael Horn:
I see if they have the durable skills, they'll take the chance on them.
Michael Flanagan:
They have a much higher bar for their expectation for what we as education leaders give them as product. And so in terms of there being a mismatch between what K-12 is doing and what employers might want, we think it's the opportunity to add more value is in the explicit creation of durable skills. And I hit that word really hard, right? Cause I am a former English teacher. That was my first job out of college. I was a liberal arts major. I majored in English. I'm a huge believer in a liberal arts education. I know my communication and critical thinking. And I guess in some ways my negotiation skills were built around the seminar table. I had no doubt about that. The difference is those were implicit. The compact was go to a school of certain profile, major in certain subjects, and we can trust as an employer that you'll have that toolkit. It'll just kind of happen. Like the secret sauce will just out itself. We're actually saying, no, these are explicit skills. You can see clear progressions. The progressions are backed by learning science. Teams with the capacity of, say, ETS or Carnegie can surface those very explicitly. And when they do that, it's to the whole betterment of the sector for us to be able to use those as yardsticks as we coach and mentor young people through the skill development. So just as an aside, you know, as you know, I spent now the past seven years talking to a lot of very skeptical admissions offices. Right. I'm saying, hey, we want to give you something you've never seen before, but it's going to do a better job. Trust us. One of the best conversations I had was with the admissions team at West Point, because I showed up there and they're like, okay, look, we've read your website. We get it. But honestly, we're kind of into this ranking and sorting thing. Like, we think that's a feature. And what I said, yes. And we probably also agree that leadership can be taught, like, it's not this, like, thing some people have, some people don't. You can. It's a process. And they were kind of like, okay, we found common ground on that. So if they believe that leadership can be taught explicitly that there's ways to do it developmentally at scale, that's sort of the big idea that we're trying to lean into with durable skills and skills for the future at MTC.
Michael Horn:
Stay with me on this, because I think we'll lead into why the ETS partnership probably makes triple sense. But I guess the push I want to have is durable skills, like critical thinking or problem solving. Does it really transfer that much from domain to domain? Because in a bakery, it looks very different from a coding job. Looks very different from me behind my desk podcasting. Like, how do you think about. Or is it. No, we've codified it. And therefore, like, whatever domain you're working in, yes. You got to build up the knowledge base. But as you progress beyond novice, we expect to see this sort of set of behaviors.
Michael Flanagan:
So the easy thing, because it's the right thing, is to just agree with you and say it's more of a matrix than a ladder.
Michael Horn:
Okay.
Michael Flanagan:
There's not a unified model of critical thinking that is domain independent. Okay. But there are versions of that ladder that are optimized for critical thinking, say, in the humanities or critical thinking in the STEM fields. And I don't know how fine grained we can or even should be as we parse those. And I use the we there very loosely. Like, I am not a psychometrician who's going to be making that deliverable for the sector. I'm very lucky that ETS employs, I think, 75% of the psychometricians in America so that we've got the capacity to do that. Now. Smarter people than me will be figuring that out and also working across the sector, you know, bringing into domain experts. So we can have their voices as we build out the skill progressions.
Michael Horn:
No, that makes sense. I mean, I know at Minerva University, the way, and I'm on the board there, the way that they have thought about it is what you just said, which is we create a clear framework for these different, they have different names for them, but these different habits or skills. And then whatever you're learning, like, we expect to see the progression over time that you mastered. And so it becomes a habit that does transfer, to your point. As I move domain to domain, I guess the question there, or the, perhaps maybe I'm jumping to something, but it seems like ETS the partnership rather than just resources. The other thing now it does for you is we can actually create validated measures to say, like, yeah, what you just represented in the MTC transcript, that artifact of work like this, is how we assess it, validate it. And so that's sort of scalable, if you will, across the platform. Maybe there's even a third party way to do that that gets out of the, oh, my teacher liked me and therefore said this project was good.
Michael Flanagan:
That's exactly right. I mean, I think of the....Our moonshot is if you think about why AP's have gotten such traction, right, and why they. It's that there is value in having a national verified, psychometrically sort of stamped, you know, exam that certifies on a scale of one through five that, you know, student is at this level of capacity in Area X. Huge value in that as like, as a premise. The downsides are one time a year, very high stakes, you know, very significant upstream effects on what the curriculum is. And what if you didn't have to compromise? What if you could have a student doing an independent study, a portfolio defense capstone project completely of their own choosing, all the right adjectives. You would want self directed, personalized feedback, you know, from, you know, defending into experts in the community. But you could take the deliverables that came from that and run them through, we'll call it an engine, and get valid feedback about their communication skills or evidence of their critical thinking. And you could do it in theory, ad infinitum. You could run it through that engine as many times as you want. You could take a single high stakes exercise into a formative exercise, and you could take one of the biggest gating factors to the adoption of these exciting models, which is teacher workload. And you could turn some of these technologies into copilots. We're not taking humans out of the loop like, education is a relational, human centered exercise, but if you could have that kind of heads up display. Right. Those metrics on the side that assisted educators took a little bit of the burden off them, but also improved the validity and accuracy of the feedback they were giving to the students. I just think it could be transformational for the adoption of these practices in actual classrooms. And yes, they result in credential, whether it's a mastery transcript or a learning record. The biggest area of pushback we still get with justification is, well, these are really just collections of local assertions by the schools, which, by the way, is what grades are. So that's the current state that we're kind of solving against is grades. But yes, a competency based transcript currently generated by MTC school is ultimately what the school says. So. And we work very closely to make sure their competency models are as. As strong as they can be. We have to advocate implicitly and explicitly on behalf of those models. With higher eds, we have skin in the game and making sure they're high quality, but that's not the same thing as all as being able to say, oh, because we've run this portfolio of work through a process, we can now certify or stamp or put a badge on those things. I hesitate to use the word badge. Let's scratch that. But you can certify or stamp those. To say, no, you can take this to the bank. Means something third party.
The Role of AI in MTC’s Work
Michael Horn:
Very cool. I have to ask, is AI a central component of being able to build that scaled infrastructure in some way?
Michael Flanagan:
I mean, it's not even a yes or no question. It's sort of in what ways? Right. The areas I'm most excited about are thinking about certain kinds. Like, if you think about what a mastery transcript is today, you pull it apart. From a technology perspective, what it really is is an assemblage, a collection of varied artifacts, student work files, meta tagged with a lot of data about skill and skill development and scales and other things by humans. That is a really interesting kind of corpus of data and text to put into a large language model. I'm really excited to see what happens when we have a lot of these flowing into trained models and to see what we learn by doing. The other thing, too, is that there are problems that we face now as a consortium. So last count, we had about 400 schools and districts that were working within the MTC environment, right? That probably means we got about 400 bespoke competency models that are in play. Each of them is kind of built with good intentions and backwards design and community buy in, but that's a lot of different ways of defining communication. So there's two ways you solve for that problem. One is by fiat. Somebody comes in top down and says, no, this is how we do it, which is terrible for change management and terrible from a product and customer perspective. The other is you say, hey, we've looked at all of these in a very analytical, thoughtful way. We've run them through different large language assist models. And what we can tell you is that in all these different models, it looks like there's actually two meaningful variants. If you have communication, you're probably doing it either this way or that way. And we'd encourage you to maybe like choose one of those and try and move towards that. That kind of like AI assisted harmonization, I think is going to solve a lot of our problems in the coming years.
Michael Horn:
Very cool. Very cool. As you were saying that, I was laughing to myself at your earlier assertion again, which is like, hey, grades in English suffer from a lot of the same problems, but we sort of accept it because we've accepted the Carnegie unit and we think we have an understanding of what goes on in an English class. Even though I would argue the signal of grades has been increasingly breaking down over the last several years in particular, always flawed in my mind, but really breaking down in the last few years.
Michael Flanagan:
Covid pressure tested our kind of national and local assessment practices and not surprisingly, found them wanting in areas, as you've, as you've documented, probably better than, better than anybody. No, but I mean, you know, for those of, you know, listeners out there who are less familiar with mastery learning, I could see some of them saying, well, isn't this kind of just standards based grading? And it's that the answer to that is not a no, it's a yes end. Like standards based grading is awesome. It's criteria and referenced. It's very objective. You can look at, you have scales. The difference is you can still do standards based grading and not tinker all that much with the fundamental architecture of school, right? You can still have everything in, like seat time. You still have everything based in like, academic subjects. Not a lot of, not a lot of, you know, moving the needle on sort of what school feels like and is a lived experience for kids. Still better than status quo grading. And that's my point on that. But we think that's a good start. And what we want to do is take the same essential principles, really clear criterion reference scales, but expand them so we can use them to measure new and hopefully more relevant things and create.
MTC’s Plans for the Future
Michael Horn:
The room for that jagged asset base. Okay, so last question then for me is you all are a separate nonprofit still legally, that's how it works. But there's obviously a great deal of integration. What does this look like down the road as you play this story forward with ETS and MTC in the work together? And what's the hope for what this looks like in five years?
Michael Flanagan:
I think you can almost work backwards. And when we talk about this now as a team, we have two big goals. One is to use all the amazing support and the brand equity and the relationships with of our new parent to grow the footprint of what we're doing. Like we more or less, without spending any resources on sales and marketing, just kind of grassroots, have managed to build really good sustaining relationships with like these 400 schools and districts. There's no reason we can't double that in the coming year. And who knows? I would love us to be and say, be available to half of school districts, right, as MTC by 2030. I think, and we're now in an organization where like you talk about having a couple hundred thousand kids and they're like, yeah, it's a good start. So I think that's one thing. The other is anything. When we think about product and we think about innovation, it's just contributing as much as possible to the success and product development of the Skills for the Future initiative. I want to be very clear, Skills for the Future. It is owned by Carnegie and ETS. Those are the organizations. That's their jam. But anything we are bringing to the table that can be used or leveraged in terms of thinking about how you build skills based credentials, skills passport or skills transcripts as Amit sometimes likes to refer to them. And also the fact that we do have, you know, as we work with these five states, that first Skills for the Future that Carnegie and ETS have recruited as co design partners, we also can use the portfolio of MTC schools to get feedback and kind of testing new innovations and assessment and insights. So all of it I think fits together from a product perspective and a growth perspective.
Michael Horn:
Very cool. Mike, thanks so much for the work. Thanks so much for joining me and walking us through where you've been and where you are now and where you're going. Really appreciate it.
Michael Flanagan:
Thank you for, thanks again for the invite. Love the conversation.
Michael Horn:
No, I'm, I've been thrilled to watch from afar and sometimes close. And it's great to see. And for all you tuning in, we'll be back with more stories like this next time on the Future of Education.
Michael Flanagan:
And you can find us at mastery.org.
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Amar Kumar, Founder and CEO of KaiPod Learning, joins Danny Curtis in this conversation! They discuss the growing microschooling movement, unpack what teachers need to feel successful starting and operating their own schools, and envision a future in which districts leverage the power of microschools.
Danny Curtis:
Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can fulfill their potential, build their passions, and live a life of purpose. I'm Danny Curtis, producer of the podcast and collaborator with Michael Horn on all things learning innovation. And I am stepping in front of the camera here again this week for a conversation with Amar Kumar who is the founder of Kaipod Learning, which is a technology solution and service provider for microschools. Amar, thank you so much for joining us here today.
Amar Kumar:
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Danny.
Amar’s Journey to the Work
Danny Curtis:
Yeah. Well, Kaipod Learning has been such an important player within a microschooling movement that has been growing rapidly and earning a lot of attention. So I'm so excited to have the chance to learn from you about all of the great work that you're doing. And so to start us off, Amar, could you tell us about your journey to microschooling and the founding story of Kaipod learning?
Amar Kumar:
Yeah, happy to. I have been in education for almost 20 years now. I started off as a school teacher where I taught a high school math class in a very high needs school in India. And I discovered in front of the classroom what I think a lot of teachers discover, that you might be planning to teach the pythagorean theorem today, but there are kids who are not ready for that. They're maybe doing math at a fourth grade level, and there are some kids who were way past the pythagorean theorem and they're doing calculus and they're all sitting in front of you waiting for a lesson. That problem of I just couldn't appropriately target all kids with the same lesson plan was really, really difficult for me, and it caused me to want to try things differently, create small groups. I started experimenting in my classroom, which worked to some small effect. I became the principal of the school, saying, I'm going to do this across the whole school. And it all failed because I started to realize that the construct of a rectangular classroom with a teacher at the front and students sitting down all getting the same delivery at the same time, that construct itself is the problem. I wasn't the problem as a teacher. So I left traditional brick and mortar education to do a lot of things in education. Eventually, that journey led me to online schooling, where a curriculum and lesson plans and assessments are all pre-created on a predictable path, and the students move through that at an unpredictable pace. So students get to choose how fast they're consuming that knowledge, demonstrating understanding before moving on to the next thing. And I loved it. I fell in love with that model because I said, this is the future. Every teacher doesn't have to reinvent the lesson plan. The teachers just focus through an online network how to help each child. Loved it. I became the head of product for Pearson's online schools business. And of course, as much as I loved it, I started to also realize the flaws in that system. When students are completely home alone, it can be really difficult from a social and emotional perspective for them. It's difficult for parents when maybe just need some childcare, when the kids should be in a safe place outside of the home. And so I knew that that solution was also incomplete. And when the pandemic happened, like all education companies, I said, what do we do now? And we in Pearson were seeing massive growth of our online schools business.And the families who were in those schools were saying, wow, my child is thriving in an online learning environment. And never predicted it, but, oh, my goodness, like, I would never want this long term because socialization, childcare. And so for me, there was a really important insight there. While the conventional wisdom was, everyone's going to go back to traditional schools, for me, the counterintuitive insight was, but this form of learning really works. So what if we could create small groups of kids who come together socially in a safe place outside of the home, and they're learning at their own pace? So I thought I'd invented a brand new learning model. I was going around telling someone, I've invented something new, until someone said, this is called microschools. We know what this is. And so for me, it was a really interesting sort of bottoms up way to enter this space when I just found this problem that I thought I could solve.
The Evolution of Kaipod Learning
Danny Curtis:
Got it. So, you know, you saw the shortcomings of traditional education from inside the four walls of the classroom, as you said, and also some of the challenges of tech only from within ed tech, and then tapped into this microschooling movement that was trying to get the best of both worlds. And that was a movement that was in the midst of a lot of growth and change. When schools were closed during the pandemic and more parents were sort of entering their students into these small, personalized learning environments, learning pods, and some of which stuck with it even after school doors reopened. And I understand that Kaipod learning is also in a period of growth and change. Could you tell us a bit about how Kaipod looks differently now than when it started?
Amar Kumar:
Yeah. It's interesting because when we first started, we grabbed onto this concept of learning pods, or pandemic pods, as people were calling them, where parents would voluntarily come together, hire a teacher, meet in someone's basement, and the children would be learning in person. And same thing as what I mentioned earlier, parents who were in the system said, wow, my kid is happy. He's not being bullied. He's learning. This is wonderful. I love it. It's the best year of school he's had. But when schools reopen, it's like, why? Why would you do this? This has been great for you. Again, the insight there was, it was a huge pain to organize these learning. It was a huge pain to hire the teacher. So when we started off to your question, we said, we can organize this for you. We'll grab the space. We will hire the teacher. We'll set the schedule. We'll recruit the families. You just pay a membership fee to join. And that model scaled from our first site in Boston three years ago to 16 sites across the country. And so we saw families were craving this model. Families who'd been homeschooling or families who've been doing online schools. And what we discovered is every time we would want to open a new site, we would get hundreds of applications for our learning controls, and then we would get hundreds of families who said, I'm interested in learning about this. So we just knew we just couldn't do it faster. We knew we could never open enough. It's very capital intensive, as you would imagine, to open one of these learning pods. And so for me, I really wanted to bring this learning model to many, many more cities and states across the country. And I said, I don't have to hold the secret. I don't have to be the one that has my name on the building. It can be someone else who opens it. And so I went sort of down the path of franchising, but there's a lot of legal hurdles there. And then eventually we discovered, actually, if a teacher in a community has a lot of passion around creating her own school, she knows the families in that community, she knows the geography, so she knows kind of where the school could be. She has her own how she wants to run it. Why don't we support her to get her dream off the ground? And then once she launches, we can continue to provide that support, and that can be the start of a new business model. So that's what Kaipod is turning into, is we have sort of our core pods. Those are like our innovation sites where we continue to learn and iterate. We work with great kids, we help improve their life outcomes. And everything we learn there goes into supporting our partners. And there are now almost 100 partners across the country who are opening their own microschools. And so I'm sure we'll talk about that now. But that program is called Kaipod Catalyst.
Kaipod Catalyst
Danny Curtis:
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a great segue. I would love to focus in on that work that you are doing to bring new founders into the fold and support aspiring micro school founders in making the leap. And I know you all have been doing a lot of work around it, as you mentioned, and have some big goals around it, too. So could you tell us a bit more about that initiative?
Amar Kumar:
Yeah. The number one goal here is lower the friction to start your school. So if you're a teacher who's got this dream to say, I wish I could have my own school, or if you're a teacher who's sometimes in a staff meeting, like, I bet I could run this place a lot better than those people. If you have those types of attitudes, you should think about starting your school. And when you start thinking about starting your school, you get overwhelmed very quickly, because that's a really big task. And through our research, we've identified four really big barriers for teachers who want to do this. The first is sort of content and knowledge. They don't know what to do.
So how do you build a website? How do you figure out regulation? How do you build, set your price? How do you do marketing? How do you enroll families? There's so many things, probably hundreds of decisions you have to make. Teachers don't have a knowledge base to do that right now. That's the first big barrier. The second big barrier is confidence. Teachers don't have the confidence to say, I am going to be, I'm going to be a small business owner. That's a really difficult transition for teachers to make, but it's really important going to start school. You got to see yourself that way. The third is community. If you're doing this alone, it can be a really lonely journey and a lot of people give up. In fact, 90% of the people who want to do this give up—90%. So we know there's a huge problem where people feel alone in this journey. And then the fourth barrier is capital. You need a little bit of money to get started. It's not tens of thousands of dollars, but it is some money to get a lease, to pay for some marketing materials, to buy curriculum, etcetera. So there's a little bit of capital required.
So these four barriers prevent teachers from starting their schools. And if you prevent teachers from starting new schools, you're not creating new supply. Because the new supply starts, the more demand generates, more and more parents get interested. So this is the problem we're setting outwards. How do you break down each of these structural barriers? Teachers and the catalyst program is very specifically designed to break down each of those barriers. On the content side, you have our entire playbook. Everything you need to know to start a school is in our course. That includes lessons, videos, master sessions, tools that you're going to need, templates like, gosh, I spent like $15,000 on my first staff handbook and family handbook with lawyers. Don't spend that much money with a lawyer. Like just use my handbook. Customize my handbook for your school. It's just like that. There's lots of these templates that the school founder has to build. It takes a month to do it. So we think we can accelerate your journey about six to seven months to get your school off the ground.
On the confidence piece. We provide a lot of coaching, one-on-one coaching, group coaching to help these teachers make that mental transition that I am first, a business owner. I'm figuring out how to build a sustainable microschool for my community. So it serves kids forever and it gives me a sustainable wage. So we do a lot of coaching.
The third is the community itself. Like I said, we already have about 100 founders. We're tracking more than double that this year. So the idea is that you are not alone. There are people on this journey who are a few steps ahead of you. There are people who are a few steps behind you, but you're all moving together to create new education options in your community. And one of the most famous phrasing sayings in our community is don't make this mistake, we've made it for you. Because whenever someone asks, oh, I think, I'm going to buy this, like 15 people will say, don't do this. I bought it. It was garbage. It didn't work. And so it really helps people see how they can learn from each other. And these founders are all over the country, and they're really helping each other because there's no competition. They're all over the place. And so it's a really vibrant community. And our founders helped. They feel so supported. Every time there's a win, the first place they go is their husband. The second place they go is our community.
Every time there's a fall or a hurdle, they come to our community because they want the help. They know there's going to be 15 people who have ideas for them on how. And then finally, capital, which is the fourth. We're working with banks to provide loans. We're working with nonprofits to provide grants. We have access to our own grant that the catalyst founders are eligible for. So we're trying to build all these wonderful supports so that there's as little friction as possible if you want to start school.
Danny Curtis:
Yeah. It strikes me as a comprehensive set of offerings that you all have, no doubt informed by the 360-degree view you got into the challenges of microschool operators during your time or in your role as a direct service provider yourselves. And I love that you are not just leveraging your own expertise and experience in this field, but crowdsourcing, the wisdom of microschoolers everywhere, through the community piece that you're describing.
Amar Kumar:
Our network just gets stronger and stronger as more people join the network, that crowdsourcing gets better and better. And so we're really excited about the future.
Serving the Varied Needs of Microschools
Danny Curtis:
Yeah. And to stay with the alliterative c theme, I'm wondering about another term starting with c customization. One of the great parts about microschools is the wide variety of microschools around the country. Kaipod is plugging into schools with very different missions, different methods, different student populations. And so I'm wondering, how have you all designed your product, your services, to allow it to meet the needs across so many different contexts?
Amar Kumar:
This is great. I think the first thing you picked up on is that the strength of this movement is its diversity. This is the primary reason I decided that the franchise model was the wrong model, or just like the company owned center is hundreds of times the wrong model. Because the reason microschooling will be successful is that they can completely flex to serve their community. They're founded by people from the community for their community. And they're in the community. Right? So I'm sitting in Boston. I have no business telling a founder in Wichita, Kansas, how to launch your school. She knows her community, so then my job becomes to give her a wraparound support and give her the key principles and teach her what would make her successful in her community. So, essentially, we have 15 building blocks of success. Each microschool needs to think about these 15, but the way they adapt them within their school is going to differ. And so, for example, one of them is family relationships, right? Obviously, a great microschool has very strong family relationships. They're not just, we do a parent teacher conference twice a year, but, hey, family member, like, you're getting pulled into the school to support each other, support the other families, support the other kids. Now, for some schools, that dimension is very explicit. There's an expectation that families are volunteering. They're running enrichment activities or field trips for other schools where maybe they're serving a different segment of families that might be busier. There's not an expectation that they volunteer, but there are regular community events. So we don't prescribe how you should do these 15, but we give them guiding principles. We give them the way to think about how their school brings these 15 to life to get to excellence. And so we found through that framework, all of our software, all of our services, all of our coaching, everything can flex to support each founder in their journey. And the biggest proof of that is in our network today. We've got one school in the Bay Area who's charging $30 to $40,000 a year for a very high end gifted student education. That's what that market commands. In the same time, we have microschools in our network who are serving very low income families in Atlanta for less than $5,000 a year. And we, as the network, can and have been supporting both founders serving these extremely different sectors. And so that, for me, is the promise that microschooling diversity is great, and we, as a network, can flex to support that.
Danny Curtis:
Yeah, got it. Accomplishing two very important goals, providing the bones and the structure to stand these things up, maybe more quickly and more easily, and also providing and affording the flexibility to adapt these to different contexts and environments, both of which so important to doing this at scale and making room for the potential for innovation, the enormous potential for innovation of the microschooling movement.
Amar Kumar:
This is the great thing about having teachers start them, because teachers have a million ideas about how to do things better, how to do it differently, for their community. So to give them that flexibility, the bones, like you said, giving them the structure to innovate within is exactly what's right for them.
Founders’ Experiences
Danny Curtis:
So, Amar, I'd love to hear what you're hearing from the microschool founders that have gone through the program, both about the program itself and the experience of moving into the micro school founder and leader role.
Amar Kumar:
I would probably categorize their reactions in three buckets. And the first is we're hearing that the comprehensive nature of compliance support is really valuable to them. They love that they are never alone and that that support doesn't stop once they launch their school. So I haven't mentioned this, but the way the Catalyst program works is you actually don't pay anything to join the program. You don't pay anything for any of our coaching, any of our support, any of our content, because my vision, my passion is not to run an accelerator for schools. My passion is to run a network of really successful schools. So my incentive is to get you to that point that your school is so successful that I'm so happy to be in your network. You're in my network.
So essentially the way our model works is it's free to join the accelerator, and then when you launch your school, we essentially do a revenue share model, like a first student fee model for your school. And so what people love about Catalyst is that it's a full amount of support and we're with them forever. Like, we don't give up or we don't let go once they've launched. So they always feel like they're part of a bigger team. The second thing we hear is this, this phrase that comes up all the time, that this is literally a lifesaver. I think literally is being used a little extremely here, figuratively a lifesaver. We've had founders who've been two days from being evicted, that we've been able to step in. We've had founders who have accidentally signed a lease for a department that wasn't zoned. So we've been able to step in and help them out when they've made these types of unfortunate mistakes. And so I think knowing that there's a national network with connections, with resources, with the ability to help them get out of sticky situations has helped them get the confidence to keep going on this journey. You can imagine it's really stressful for a first time founder to have made a big mistake like that. And so we're there to help them in that. So that's, we feel great when we hear that. And third, which for me is just the most amazing, is when they say, this journey and this program has changed how they see themselves or it has changed how their family sees them. And they use phrases like, I used to be, quote, just a teacher, unquote, but now I built a school, now I'm a founder. And those phrases, you know, it's really hard to be a teacher. Saying just a teacher is not a great phrase. It's a really, really difficult job. But to make that leap and then see yourself differently and see your community, have your community see you differently is just so incredible to see that transition. And these, these people, they just sit up a little straighter. They carry themselves with more confidence, and they tell us that, hey, I was at the grocery store and someone recognized me as, you're the lady who started a school, right? And their daughter is beaming with pride at their mom being recognized. I love those stories. Like, these are people who are creating jobs in their communities. So this is as much of a story of education innovation as entrepreneurship in some of the most disadvantaged communities or with some of the people, these teachers who've been really forgotten, who aren't respected, and now they're taking matters into their own hands to do something about them.
Danny Curtis:
Yeah, I love to hear that. One of the biggest drivers of career dissatisfaction that we hear about from teachers is that lack of career pathway in a lot of traditional education settings, the lack of opportunity for experienced, excellent teachers to sort of grow their responsibilities and their role within the traditional school context. And so it's nothing surprising to hear that that is the opportunity to be a CEO and a leader and a decision maker within their own school and in their own classroom. That that is one of the most gratifying and rewarding parts about this switch. But for those teachers that might be skeptical of microschools or apprehensive to making this switch, what would you say to them?
Amar Kumar:
Yeah, there's plenty of them. I don't think starting a microschool is right for everyone. Like I’ll be upfront about that. But I think the first thing I would say is every teacher deserves more than they’re getting. And I don't think that's a controversial statement. I think everyone of any political stripe would agree with that. Teachers deserve more. That's the first.
The second is asking these skeptic teachers who may be skeptical or apprehensive, asking themselves why they got into teaching. And when I had this conversation in an interview for Catalysts, they often sort of give, like, the rehearsed answer, but then, like, I push, and then I let them sort of sit in some awkward silence. And then it really gets into the real reason, you know, the spark in a kid's eye. Or, like, my grandmother was a teacher, and she inspired me to do it, but now I've lost the passion, etcetera. And so we asked them, why did you get into this? And are those dreams still being fulfilled? And if not, which, unfortunately for the majority of teachers, it is not being fulfilled, then I would say, just start looking at some of the profiles of people who started schools. Believe it or not, they look like you. They have the same struggles as you. If you go to our website, Kaipodlearning.com, you'll see these profiles, you'll see these men and women of all ethnicities, in all geographies, all income levels, all backgrounds, all ages. Who said, I need to take charge of my life, of my careerAnd all of them were. All of them were skeptical. No one wakes up and says, that's it. I've decided I'm gonna start a school today. No, that's not how it works. Entrepreneurship isn't this magical spark that we might see on Twitter or on TV. It is a slow and fearful journey. It's a journey where eventually you say, oh, my goodness, I have to do this. Something or someone is calling me to do this. So if you're religious, that someone or something is God. If you're not religious, that someone or something is your own inside or the fire that's burning inside you saying, you've got to do this. So if you're finding yourself moved by some of this, just read profiles of people. Type in microschooling, type in how to start a school. Go to our website, whatever you want. Just start learning.
Because it might take you three years to get there. It might take you three days to get there. But everyone should. Every teacher should say, I deserve more, and I want to know what I can do about it.
The Future of Microschooling
Danny Curtis:
Yeah. To your first point, a big fan of using the five whys to get at that deeper meaning or those deeper reasons. And on the second point, I can imagine that as microschooling grows in popularity, and more and more teachers are seeing more and more teachers like them developing these schools. It becomes easier to imagine themselves in those roles and taking on that responsibility. And for this last question, as we wrap up, I want you to get your crystal ball out and look five years into the future, and I'm curious, where do you see this microschooling movement going? How is it growing or evolving over that period?
Amar Kumar:
Yeah, I think there's probably two scenarios on how this plays out. The first scenario is microschooling starts to get steam. More teachers are starting schools. More parents are then leaving traditional schools, public or private, to start there, to join these micro schools. And that plan just continues. More and more people leave the system, which creates more demand for these microschools, which then spurs more supply. More demand, more supply. Right? So you can imagine a world where, say, 70% of kids are in a microschool in the next ten years. It's not unrealistic. You might think I'm crazy, but it's not unrealistic. North Carolina today already has 25% of kids who don't go to public school. 25% are already opting out of traditional public schools. That's one state. But it's not inconceivable that across the country, 70% to 75% of kids will have opted out of public school. That's a really big existential crisis for the public school system. It is also an exciting opportunity for education innovation and transformation.
So that's one scenario. The second scenario is public schools see this trend, and they say, we're not gonna. We are going to start competing for these kids. Public schools say, I will not lose another kid to these new microschools, because why? I'm gonna empower my own teachers to create new pathways, new microschools within my district. So I have this really wonderful teacher. She's a middle school math teacher. Everyone loves her. She's got such amazing energy. I'm going to say to her, you now create your own pathway for robotics. A microschool focused on robotics within the Boston Public Schools system. You're still a tenured teacher. You're still in our union. Families still join public school. But now kids can opt into your pathway. And if they opt in and that pathway grows, she can grow, she can add more teachers, and if that pathway dies, then someone else can do that. What a great pluralistic system that would be to build within the public sector. That's the second scenario. Now, which scenario will it be? Anyone's guess. And I think it comes down to how the public sector responds. The way I see it is this innovation is going to happen regardless. Whether the innovation happens by teachers who have left the system or by teachers who are still in the system is the choice of the people who control system. Yeah, it's an exciting vision that you've laid out in that second scenario where students in more traditional settings are getting access to this personalized small learning environment. But obviously, as you have already alluded to, a lot will need to shift or change for that to become a reality. And so, I know I said the last question was my last question, but if you'll allow me one more, I'd love to hear what do you see as those necessary supports or changes that would facilitate or accelerate that future? And feel free to take this any direction you'd like, from culture to technology to policy. I mean, I'm a pretty simplistic person when it comes to this. I feel like there are, when something feels too hard to do, you think about what are the barriers? And there are barriers that sometimes exist in nature, and then there are barriers that are man made. And I think in this case, all of the barriers are man made. Right. All it requires is the political will of a strong school superintendent or school leader, the support of the bargaining units, the excitement of local parents and the passion of teachers. Those are all man made. Like, these things can happen in any school district in America, but those four ingredients don't exist yet. And so the question is, how long will it be until the school leadership, the staff, like sort of the membership organizations like unions, the parents and the teachers, how long will it be until they come together and say, we're tired of losing kids, we want to do something about this. Right? So I think those are the things that have to happen. Am I optimistic? No, but that's for the next five years. It's all really I can see. I don't think it's going to happen in the next five years, at least not at scale. But I do know there are school districts who are thinking about this today. This is not a pipe dream. Some of them are saying, I wish we could do this. What would we have to put in place to get it right? So it will happen in small pockets over the next five years, not at scale. And my hope is that in the five to ten year horizon, you do start to see the majority of districts say, we're going to build this within.
Danny Curtis:
Yeah, well, thank you, Mar, for sharing that vision and the ingredients it will take to realize that vision and more generally, your knowledge and expertise within this world of microschooling, and not only with us on the podcast here today, but with microschooling founders around the country. I look forward to watching as you continue to inspire innovation and facilitate learning across education and just really appreciate you joining us.
Amar Kumar:
Thank you. Appreciate you having me. And to the teachers who are listening, I'm serious, you deserve more. We need to look into what that means for you. We have a new program of Kaipod Catalyst that's going to start this fall. So if this is something you want to think about doing for next year, go check it out. This could be the right, this could be the thing you've been waiting for.
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John Woods, provost and chief academic officer at the University of Phoenix, joined me to discuss how the University is drawing a closer connection between college and career. We discuss steps the college has taken to build career pathways and equip students with the language and signals to communicate their skills. This episode is worth the read/watch/or listen, as all that they’re doing I suspect will surprise you.
Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and I'm excited about today's show because we're going to get to geek out on topics that have just become more and more of interest to me as we think about where the puck is going in education, learning, upskilling and so forth, which is a lot about careers and skills and things of that nature. And so to help us navigate that conversation, delighted, we have John Woods. He is the Chief Academic Officer and provost for the University of Phoenix. John, thanks so much for joining us.
John Woods:
Thanks, Michael. And thanks for the hockey reference. That resonates with me as a Canadian.
John’s Journey to the Work
Michael Horn:
There you go. And we’re trying to make you really feel at home, right? But let's start and make you feel even more at home. Before we get into some of these conversations around skills and careers generally, let's talk about your own career path to the University of Phoenix and perhaps reintroducing the University of Phoenix to folks. You and I got to spend some time together just a few months back and with a lot of the senior leadership team at the University of Phoenix. And it's clear to me anyway that it's a very different place from, say, 15 years ago, say a decade ago. So if it's easy to do, interweaving your own story with how the University of Phoenix has evolved and how you've landed as the provost there.
John Woods:
OK, so real kind of quick backdrop here. I've got a coal miners lamp on the shelf behind me, one of the many things on that shelf. Both my grandparents were coal miners and my parents, neither one of them went to college. I had two older sisters that didn't go to college, so I was a prototypical first generation college student. I was not a very successful student. I tell the story of my mother dropping me off and some upper class students grabbing my duffel bags and me waving goodbye. And that was it. And I was there for eight years. I don't think my parents visited the campus once. I did an undergrad and a master's and went on to do my PhD in higher ed, higher education administration. And I took a real interest in that because of my own experience in higher ed. And I did a couple areas of focus within my PhD work. One was adult learning theory and the other one was academic honesty. And I thought I would return to Canada from the US with my PhD in hand and go to work at a Canadian university. But I had a lot of opportunities in the US and stayed. I worked for about 25 years for adult focused institutions some eight years ago, I was contacted by the University of Phoenix when they were looking for a future provost and lucky enough to come on board there. Coming up on my 7th anniversary, I guess it would be soon and been part of this thing you just described, which is becoming a very different university. When I joined, new owners had recently purchased the university as well as a number of other companies within that same portfolio, and they sold the other companies off. Some of them were institutions in other countries and they really focused on the University of Phoenix, which had kind of a different model when it was publicly traded. There were not only these other companies within the portfolio, but there was sort of a central service providing really help to the different business units, including the University of Phoenix. And what they sought to do was really divest of all the other things and focus on Phoenix and push all the services back into the university to make it a standalone soup to nuts entity. And as well they decided that they were going to make a number of changes to improve the outcomes at the university. I've been part of that journey, which has been fantastic. I really consider kind of to be the capstone of my career, working with working adults.
The Career Optimism Index
Michael Horn:
Very cool. And obviously I think this is going to be a more natural segue than I had even planned with that backstory because obviously now you're making sure the education you all provide is not just academically rigorous, but it's also career relevant. And maybe career relevant is where you all start. And I don't think I have to tell you that it's unusual for a provost at a university to have that sort of focus and that be the portfolio sort of charge, if you will. But one of the things that you oversee each year is the Career Optimism Index. It surveys 5,000 American workers to understand their points of view and their sentiment on the labor market economy and so forth. And we'll be sure to link to the current version of it, the 2024. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, what jumped off the page. What were some of the highlights from this latest installment? Because I will say it was interesting to me that there seems to be a lot of tension in the market right now. That was one of the things that really came out loud and clear, but I'm curious if that stood out to you as much or what your big takeaways were.
John Woods:
Yeah. To connect some of the transformation at the University of Phoenix to the most recent findings in that survey, which I think there's just a wealth of good information in there and I'm glad you can provide maybe a link to it. We presented it to chambers of commerce across the country and a number of different organizations that are really interested in that data. So some good stuff in there. The transformation kind of, of the University of Phoenix included eliminating a lot of programs that we're not tracking to above average job growth projections. So that's where kind of this starts. And only adding new programs that met that criteria for a certain amount of growth that was projected in terms of jobs. And when I laugh a little bit sometimes when people kind of compare the size of the university to what we used to be and say the beleaguered University of Phoenix, which is much smaller than it used to be.
Michael Horn:
What is it right now? Like 100,000 or so?
John Woods:
We're over 80,000, but getting smaller was intentional. So moving away from campuses, because working adults had clearly chosen online as their modality of choice, moving away from programs that didn't track to really good job growth prospects, and then adding programs that only did that, those were big steps. And then probably the next biggest couple of things is we reduced the cost of attending the University of Phoenix in 2017 and haven't increased it since. I think I saw a statistic the other day that, on average, higher education has increased its price at a rate higher than the rate of inflation for something like 65 of the last 70 years. So we really bucked the trend there. And then we skills mapped every one of our programs so that when a student completes a course in their program at the University of Phoenix, they've earned a number of skills. But we clearly signal to them what the three top skills are that they've earned, and that skills mapping tracks from the learning content that they are exposed to, to the assessments they complete, to the data we collect, that tells us the level at which they achieved on those assessments. So how I connect this to what the Career Optimism Index survey tells us in its most recent iteration is that, as you said, not only do we survey a bunch of workers to get their sentiment on their career prospects, but we also, as part of that study, survey a number of companies, and we hear from them as well. And it's interesting to kind of see the points of differentiation between the two sets of populations and their perceptions. Companies are saying it's hard to find people, hard to find people that have the right skills, that they need. Workers are saying that companies don't seem to value professional development as much as they once used to, and companies don't do enough to develop their talent, to keep their talent, to grow their talent, and so that's an interesting, you know, kind of dichotomy, because the, the mapping of our programs for skills, we think, has given our students a language that they can communicate in with an employer or a boss or a future boss or prospective boss.
We've now issued 685,000 skills badges. The badges are collections of skills, and the students can post those instantly with a couple of clicks to their LinkedIn profile or zip recruiter profile. But more than anything, as I said, it's given them a language they can speak in that companies understand. And that skills mapping that took three years to do has enabled us not only to do that badge work, which I think is probably more badges than any other institution is issued so far, but we've also created a set of career tools with that same data. So one tool allows students in their portal to be sent actual jobs that match their skills profile with us. So the data is all connected that way that, Michael, I could send you three jobs and you'd see that you are an 85% match to those jobs, and you could apply or click on a link to get help to apply from us. And we think that's changing the game, because the notion of, I'm going to go back to school, and when I finish, I hope I get a better job, it shouldn't really be that way. The degrees and what people learn should be far more transparent, and people should be able to earn as they learn, maybe change their circumstances, not only at the end, but even as they go. But that can't happen with the opaque nature of a degree where people say, I'm done my second year, can you hire me? It can't even be done sometimes when they've got the degree in hand, because it's not clear what's in the degree. So we think this really can unlock some of that.
The ‘Grain Size’ of Skills
Michael Horn:
Very cool. So let's double click on the skills part of it and the badging and so forth. I'm just curious because sometimes employers have, like, really clear understanding of the skills that they want, and sometimes, as you know, they don't really have much clue, so. And you all have an unabashedly sort of both and approach to this, right, degree and skills, which I think stands out in a marketplace where, you know, a lot of places are all in on one or all in on the other. I'm just curious, can you give us a sense of, like, the grain size of the skills? And are you the one certifying them? Are they third party? And just so you know, the reason I ask, I was with a CLO of a large company the other day, and he was observing, “you know, I think we're sort of overthinking the skills conversation. We're trying to get so granular and specific that we sort of lost the plot,” was his argument. So I'm sort of curious your take and what grain size we're talking here.
John Woods:
Yeah. So I find it really fascinating. When any of these lists are published annually of the top skills employers are looking for, they usually come out from people like SHRM or the big consulting firms. Those lists always have what we'll call soft skills.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, the communication, critical thinking, which aggregates well across all skills and industries.
John Woods:
That's getting somebody who can really function and by their sheer nature being able to function while they're more teachable or trainable along the technical skill stuff. And so we mapped for that, too. And I think that's been really important, those types of things, executive functioning skills, some people call them. They exist in core classes and they exist in gen eds, and we've mapped for them too. So park that for a second, because I think those are really valuable and helpful, making people better workers and more promotable and all these other things. But the mapping we did of all the technical skills kind of took a bit of a Rosetta stone to build that, because the inputs were many and employers certainly wanted input. We have our industry advisory boards made up of companies that gave us those inputs, but we also have programmatic accreditors who say these things have to be in your programs for you to hold our accreditation. And then on top of that, we had all the kind of industry groups that weigh in on these things.
And then you actually had all of the jobs and their definitions from the Bureau of Labor. All the jobs have codes, and all the codes have a number of ingredients baked into them of what the skills should be. So we mapped all of that and saw that we taught all these things in our programs, but we needed to probably simplify to what you said and identify the top ones. So where, from all the source data, where are the things that people are asking for? What are those, the things they're asking for the most? So we rank them, and the top three are most clear, and those are the ones that we make more clear to the student, and it's collections of those that give students badges. Now, on the other side of the coin, to your question, we're doing an awful lot of work with employers, so we can tell employers this on behalf of our students and make them more interested in our grads but we also have some tools that leverage, and I know you wanted to talk a little bit about this today, but we have some tools that leverage AI, which will allow an employer to identify the skills being demonstrated by a group of people within their organization and map that up against. Maybe it's the next level position in that organization, that they've identified the skills for that job, and we can show them what the gaps are. And in that way, we could maybe do some just-in-time training for the people. They've got to be developed into these other roles, which is a lot less costly and risky than bringing on brand new people for those roles, plus more enfranchising for the people they already have to take an interest in their growth and development and show them a path to promotion. So we've actually got a couple of pilots going on with employers where we're doing that leveraging, like I said, some AI tools.
Michael Horn:
I mean, that gets cool, because I think what you're saying is the AI allows you to assess and skill in context, as opposed to pulling me out of my job. And as you also know, critical thinking, we use the same words in every field, but how it manifests in one field is very different from another. So now I can develop that critical thinking skills in the context of the industry I'm working for.
John Woods:
Yeah, and I think, you know, we hear an awful lot about employers and their frustration with higher ed. I think this can really solve for a lot of that. And, you know, I think kind of running parallel to their own skepticism of higher ed and some of the pronouncements some of the bigger companies have made, that they'll hire people without degrees, you know, no degree required, we'll train you. Running parallel to that, in the last year, we've seen 100 institutions either go away entirely or merge with somebody else. We know higher ed is costing more and more. We've seen dozens of institutions announce that they have big deficits, that they have to cut programs and even sacred ground, eliminate tenured faculty roles. So higher ed doesn't have a great brand right now of solving employer problems. And we think the combination of being more affordable and being much more granular, to your words, around what the student is learning and making that connection more clear, that people can speak to what they've got in terms of skills, employers can hear it and understand it and feel more confident. We feel this is kind of a recipe that is, it's time has come kind of thing, especially with what's going on in all of higher ed, as I described.
Reducing Anxiety, Increasing Transparency
Michael Horn:
Well, it's interesting. If you step back from that and you think about the anxiety that you described in the Career Optimism Index on both sides, the employees and the employers, one of the things it seems to me that you're doing is trying to strip out anxiety on all sides. right? We're not raising the price you've held at constant. You're trying to make the skills that you actually learn within the degree much more transparent. So you know where the matches are in the market, and then you're trying to do it within context so it's less of a step away, if you will. And I want to try this one out on you and see how you react. Someone observed recently, actually my co author on the upcoming book Job Moves observed to me that everyone sort of wants to rag on Gen Z for being impatient and looking for the next thing right away and so forth, and he's like, can you really blame them? All we do is sit there yelling at them that their skills are eroding faster than ever. Of course they're impatient to use them and put them to good use.
I'm curious, you know how that lands with the moves that you are all making and the folks that you're serving.
John Woods:
Yeah. And this one hits close to home, too, because I've got a grad, a college grad from, I remember that three months ago who's looking for a way to launch, and I need them off the payroll. And then I've got one in college who's trying to figure out what to major in. And right now she's, she's majoring in psychology and, well, I have to wonder where that's going to go. So we'll figure all that out. But the generation you're talking about, I think they need a better set of tools to navigate a really complex, rapidly changing work environment. And the frustration that they're facing when they talk to employers or prospective employers, I think, is that they're not speaking the same language. And I think the anxiety of folks on the employer side who could hire their way out of this thing can't anymore.
John Woods:
The labor market is pretty tight. Unemployment is pretty low. There's not as much churn as there was in previous years in the market. So just finding people to do the things they need to do is not easy. So I think they got to grow their own people, and they might have to bring more people in at lower levels and have great programs in place to engage and develop them. And the only way they can do that with any amount of specificity or accuracy is the skills kind of map the skills taxonomy, the skills pathway that I think we've sort of tried to unlock here. So we're really actually pretty excited. We can reduce anxiety in both those groups.
Michael Horn:
Yeah. And I forgot the other way you're reducing anxiety is by eliminating degree programs that don't have that positive ROI. And I'm going to get the number wrong, but I think it was Third Way that said, over a third of bachelor's degrees - right. - have a negative ROI after five years. I think Preston Cooper's research has shown, like, 25% or something, always have a negative ROI. Getting those off the table and being transparent about it, I think that probably helps a great deal as well.
John Woods:
And those numbers being well documented, if you put that up against the number, that seems to persist. And I wrote it down here for today, the New York Federal Reserve said that people with bachelor's degrees are earning, on average, $60k versus $35k for people without. If you think about that and the negative ROI and a bunch of degrees, it means there's a lot of degrees out there that are really helping people improve or change their lives.
Michael Horn:
That's a great point.
John Woods:
Yeah. And so what we try to, I think, make clear to folks is the degree over the long haul is still an amazing ROI. And if it comes with a couple of caveats, the school that's offering it should be able to tell you our degree because of the network you'll get at our liberal arts college. And another school will say our degree because there's a need for technicians who do HVAC or whatever it is. And we'll say it's our degree because it's practitioners who've done the jobs you want teaching it. And the skills that we've mapped into the programs, into the courses, give you what you need to, with confidence, share what you know, and employers will understand that. So everybody kind of, you know, across this vast landscape, diverse higher education institutions, they've got to have the, you know, the story that backs up what they are selling. And that's some kind of great thing about American Higher Education, is its diversity.
But the stories are being challenged, so you got to back them up.
Educating Employers
Michael Horn:
Yeah. And I love the way you just framed each of those narratives for three very different universities in very different parts of the stack, if you will. Last question for me as we start to wrap up, which is you've talked about growing your own and the reskilling or upskilling that employers have to do. I think that's right. Some people worry, well, will they go to another company. And as Richard Branson, I think, quoted once said, yeah, but what if they stay at yours and you didn't upskill them? So I think it makes a lot of sense. The curiosity I have is you're introducing the skills, taxonomy and language so that people, employers and employees, or prospective employees in some cases, can talk with each other better and make these matches. How much education are you having to do on the employer side? And the reason I ask is, my observation at least, is they do have a pretty good grasp of the core technical skills that are at hand in any given job.
And then the critical thinking, communication and stuff like that. They know it's important, but they don't really know how to measure or assess or like what it really means in their context. And so I'm curious how much education or to get them to buy in, if you will. You all have to do on that with sort of the leadership role you have to play?
John Woods:
Yeah. The interest we've had, when we share what you and I just talked about for a few minutes, the interest is really high. It comes in within an environment of a lot of people talking about skills-based hiring, maybe more than I've ever heard talked about. And like you said, the proof is in the demonstration of the skills, whether they're technical or executive functioning, soft skills, durable skills, whatever you want to call it. I think what we've been able to do is show them how we assess those things, how they can assess those things. I think that will be an evolution. I think we'll get better at that and they'll get more receptive to that. And I think the driver for that is the sheer economics of it. Many of them are already paying for their employees to go back to school as a retention tool because some other employer will offer it if they don't. They want that to make sense for them and for the learner. And making sense means they'll stay, they'll be increasingly more valuable to the organization. So those economics all work far better than we had. X number of positions we couldn't fill for a long time, and they were vacant, and as they were vacant we were hurting from it. Or we filled x number of positions, but a lot of them flamed out of or we hired a bunch of new people at a tremendous cost. We wish we didn't have as much churn and need to do that.
John Woods:
The economic drivers are at least those and many more for folks to be open and interested in this concept, in this conversation. So I think it's for those reasons we've had great conversations with companies and are helping, we think, kind of solve some of this challenge for them.
Michael Horn:
Yeah. So actually I lied. I want to ask one more question about that because it's so interesting. I guess my observation then out of that is like you're basically tagging these skills to a much clearer KPI's so they can understand the ROI with much more granularity perhaps than past education investments they've made. The flip side of that, I guess, is as you're starting to show them how you assess it, can they start building that into their own performance management systems to better show the growth of their employees and where they need to work?
John Woods:
Yeah, I think that's possible. I think in a couple of really far along conversations we've had with companies, we've talked about doing exactly that as kind of follow-on work. Step one would be we have people we can demonstrate, have the skills to the jobs you've got today. Just need to give them that opportunity. We're confident we've got the skills right for what you have. Second part of the conversation, we think we can assess the skills of the people you've got and get them to different positions within your organization, not even maybe with whole degrees, but with courses or certificates. And as you said, the third part of the conversation would be kind of following those people along and being able to measure the actual demonstration of skills that we all kind of bought in and thought would happen and seeing where they go over time. And I think we'll get there. I think AI is going to be instrumental in getting there. There's a lot of way to evaluate different kinds of work product and use inference and some of the large language models to inform what is versus what is not in terms of the work product. So we're excited because that's only evolving and at a rapid pace. We think these conversations can get even better. We're excited about where we are, but we think there's a lot more to come.
Michael Horn:
Very, very cool. I mean, I love the transparency, careers making skills a real currency and lingua franca, if you will, on both sides of. John, huge thanks for joining us and talking about the approach that the University of Phoenix is taking on this.
John Woods:
Thanks, Michael. Enjoyed talking to you and happy to do it again, maybe give you a ere's the rest of the story down the road.
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Danny Curtis, producer of the Future of Education podcast, joins me on the “mainstage” to discuss a new bill introduced recently in the Senate that would increase Research and Development in the Department of Education. We discussed the bill’s potential to spur learning innovation, the demand-side challenges to adoption, and systemwide reforms that can support in addressing those. Danny will be making more appearances in the weeks and months ahead, so I’m thrilled to introduce him to you all here by video.
Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education. I am Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to a world where all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And over the past year and a half, it's been really fun because I've had a partner in crime on this. He's been largely behind the scenes, although we have bylined some articles together. So you’ve seen his name pop up in different things, different forums, but he has literally been overseeing all of my digital products, all the digital work that I do. He's helped bring up the quality a ton, but he also happens to know a lot about education as we'll get into it in a moment. He's none other than Danny Curtis. Danny, thanks so much for actually coming on the live stage and showing your face to the audience today.
Danny Curtis:
Thanks, Michael. It's great to have the chance to step in front of the mic today.
Danny’s Journey to the Work
Michael Horn:
Well, why don't you tell folks about yourself? Because part of this idea is we want you to be in front of the mic a little bit more, either riffing with me, bylining with me, or maybe even interviewing some guests. I know you've done one interview that’s super interesting coming down the pipeline, but why don't you give people a taste of, you know, your background, your experience in education specifically, and workforce issues as well. Before you and I teamed up to start doing some of this work together.
Danny Curtis:
Well, outside the work that you and I have done, Michael, I have also worked in education workforce policy, as you mentioned, at the state and local level, and a nonprofit, all towards designing systems that do a better job of connecting learners to opportunity. And got my start in this work as a high school English teacher in California, where I met so many inspiring people, teachers, administrators, students, and saw incredible work being done and also noticed the ways that that work was constrained by outdated systems. And that's really what got me into policy to try and create that change. And it's also why the mission of the Future of Education, to unlock the potential of schools and students through innovation, why that resonated so strongly with me.
The New Essential Education Discoveries Act
Michael Horn:
Well, I appreciate everything, obviously, and let's dive in. There's a bill that has come up that you called my attention to has some bipartisan support. It's around research, I think. But why don't you give folks a flavor of what we are talking about and why it caught your eye and worth talking about here in the show?
Danny Curtis:
Yeah. So I wanted to talk about a bipartisan bill. I know, very rare these days, that has proposed increases to federal education research and development funding. That was introduced in the Senate at the start of August. It's called the New Essential Education Discoveries act, NEED for short. And it was introduced by Senators Michael Bennett, a Democrat from Colorado, and John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas. And it would develop a fifth center in the Institute for Education Sciences that they're calling the National Center for Advanced Development and Education. And it would be dedicated to developing, disseminating, investing in what they're calling high risk, high reward, cutting edge innovations in education. And that includes technologies, innovative learning models. And it also proposes some changes to the state longitudinal data system. But for today, we'll stick to the R&D and learning. Innovation specialists have long argued that one of the great challenges of implementing innovation in education has been the lack of research and development and supply stemming from that. The federal education budget allocates only about $2.5 billion to R&D in education, which sounds like a lot, but it's only 2% of spending on education in the federal government and like, two tenths of a percent of total education spending when you take state and local into account. It also stands in stark contrast to the R&D spending in other departments. Like one department that it's often compared to is the Department of Defense with their DARPA fund, which spends $79 billion a year. And so for those reasons, this bill has garnered a lot of interest from learning innovators and a lot of excitement, too.
Michael Horn:
Yeah. And I think it's great. Like, if we start putting more research on those big sort of home run questions, if you will, budget behind it, see what we can develop out of it, I think that makes a heck of a lot of sense. Not nearly enough R, as you said, in education. I mean, that's, you know, that's pennies on the dollar when you think about what you just said. And for a sector where so much is riding on it, look, we'd never do that in healthcare at this point, right? We invest a lot in R&D. It's incredibly important. Basic research is incredibly important. Solving the most intractable problems, incredibly important. I think all those statements apply to education as well. And frankly, I talk a lot about personalizing, customizing education. That's akin to precision medicine in the medicine field. But they went through this whole field or movement where they had empirical medicine, where on average, if you have these symptoms, you should do this treatment. And, yeah, it didn't work all the time. But it started to come out of RCTs before they've started to refine it more and more. It's funny. In education, we don't even have the empirical stage often even in place. We don't even know on average often what works. And we're sort of trying to leapfrog into the precision or personalized. We just need a lot more research on a whole host of things, not just science of reading, so that we can get much more precise. I love all of that.
The Education System’s Demand-side Differences
Michael Horn:
The one quibble I have is, and you didn't say it, but, you know, you hinted to it, which is that a lot of people compare this to DARPA, the defense advanced research projects arm that has given us the Internet, you know, GPS. Right. All those things. And I just, I don't love the analogy.
Because in DARPA, it's big, thorny problems you're trying to tackle with a relatively centralized buyer that is also federally funded. Right, as in the military service arms. And if DARPA comes up with something really interesting, you have a buyer that, yeah, I get procurement is broken in the military, but relatively speaking, it's nowhere near as insanely fragmented or idiosyncratic, frankly, as school districts are in America, where we don't only do a very bad job of understanding demand from the top down, frankly, what they’re going to demand, the problems that they think are most interesting are often different from place to place in unpredictable ways. And so thinking that we can crank out something and then theres going to be an at scale adoption, thats the only piece that I would say, like, lets go a little bit easier on that part of the D, if you will. But I still think the reps of basic research leading into something that actually produces a product. Its not just an academic report on a shelf that has a lot of value. I would agree.
Danny Curtis:
Yeah, yeah, you raised some really important points there. And I agree for the most part, not only is the education system far more diffuse, you mentioned the defense has a fairly centralized buyer. And schools, there are about 14,000 school districts around the country somewhere around that. And not only is it diffuse, but many of these school districts, most of these school districts are locked into an industrial paradigm of education that makes it hard for them to incorporate a lot of these innovations and therefore kind of suppresses demand. And there's historical precedent for these challenges that you're raising. In the 1990s, there was the new American Schools federal initiative that had a lot of the same R&D goals as the current one. In the Obama administration, there was the I3 initiative. Having said that, I do think that there are some factors at play here that point to maybe this time being a little different. Post Covid, I think there's a lot of. There's a renewed sense of urgency around supporting students to recover learning and maybe increase openness from that. I also think that the growth of new education AI tools and all of the buzz around AI has created a sense of excitement about learning, innovation. And then in the post secondary front, I think the wave of college closures that we've seen also increases a sense of urgency to try something new. And also included in the bill, there are measures designed to solve for this. There's a lot of discussion about these within the bill, about these innovations being community informed. And the plan for going about that is they would create these advisory panels and they'd be comprised of teachers, specialists, parents, students. And the idea there being that they want to ensure that what is being produced by this new center is solving for problems that exist in schools.And so they're kind of working to ensure that whatever is created there is a practical use for. But I think that stops short of necessarily solving all the demand problems that you're describing. But there is more that can be done at the state, federal, local level to stoke demand as well.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, and in some ways, let's have the breakthroughs and then we could figure out the demand side of the equation is, I think, part of the thinking that I think would be great anytime we can get researchers, frankly, they struggle often to get into districts to do really good research. If we can get researchers into districts with companies, those who can create product, I think that's all to the good, and I think would get me excited. I'll add one other thought, which is we also know that there's another bipartisan bill around research. It's much more around the model providers. Our friend Joel Rose and new classrooms has spoken about this in the past, and I think model providers are super interesting because they can also more readily rethink the industrial model itself. Which to your point, frankly, if you're trying to innovate within an industrial model context, the model can only prioritize those things which perpetuate it, not undermine or overthrow it. And so I think having model providers out there, deeply integrated, maybe frankly, what about an army of 200 lab schools, truly lab schools, not sort of John Dewey reprised, but like real lab schools paired with deep researchers at research universities, were not just the ed schools, but cognitive of neuroscientists, etcetera, could come in and really be playing in an integrated way with all the different inputs there. I think there's some very cool things when you get into really rethinking the model, integrating all the parts in very different ways.
Rethinking All the Parts Together
Michael Horn:
That's where the real breakthroughs, frankly, in any field come when you get to rethink all of the parts together. So, Danny, that Bill starts to get into some of the out of the box providers that have been written about that, Joel's written about New Classrooms, has written about, and a series of recommendations there for how we would start to get that really started as an engine of innovation in America's schools as well. Thoughts on that as we wrap up here?
Danny Curtis:
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the Out of the Box report, so much good stuff in there on how the system can sort of more comprehensively, in addition to this R&D initiative, increase that demand and ensure successful implementation of innovations. And so looking at the federal level, I think there's a real opportunity here to create a grant and introduce funds that will facilitate the adoption of innovations by unburdening districts that decide to take these on of the costs of implementation and so helping them cover some of those startup costs for creating new schools and new classrooms that are going to be implementing new forms of learning, both state and federal level. There's an opportunity to change regulation, open up flexibility around testing and procurement so that districts can implement these innovations to their best ability or to their fullest potential rather. The California Math Framework that was immplemented this time last year stands out as a really good example of that to me. And then at the local level and at the school level, Michael, you write a lot about how difficult it is for an organization or a school to build the classroom of tomorrow while also operating the classrooms of today. And so I think schools can start thinking about creating those separate arms that are dedicated to innovation and dedicated to thinking up new ways of teaching and learning.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, it's a great point. It's a great point. Danny. Sorry, keep going.
Danny Curtis:
Well, I was just going to bring it back to your earlier point around model providers. We've already talked about the diffuse nature of, of our education system. So many districts doing so many different things. It can be really difficult to have your finger on the pulse of learning innovation when you are operating a school day in and day out and doing that difficult work. And so partnering with model providers who do have that landscape and have worked on implementing these new forms of teaching and learning across the country can be a great way to really get the ball rolling and ensure the success of implementing innovations.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, all of that makes a lot of sense. And I think, to your point, and we'll wrap up with this thought, is that as you start to have different arms, different educators coming to the table with space, time, and their only job is to create these new models and then find places for them, that makes sense, right? Asking someone to operate your classroom and innovate in a radically different way doesn't make sense. You never ask pilots to come up with new ways to build airplanes. That's insane. And similarly, I think with schools, frankly, that's true in healthcare, too. We're not asking the doctors on the front line to come up with the vaccines. They're giving input into the vaccines, but they're not actually doing that sort of work itself. That's where the researchers, the developers, et cetera, come together. Same principle here in some ways, like, it's surprising that we think, oh, you know, why aren't schools innovating more? Well, of course they aren't, because they're trying to operate the schools and serve the kids and like, of course you need other people to do it. So great set of points all around. Really appreciate you bringing this bill to the fore so we could talk about it, and we'll look forward to seeing you much more on the Future of Education. And for all of you tuning in, it'll be a relief because you won't just see my mug made for radio on the screen. You'll also get to see Danny. So thanks so much for joining us.
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