The Future of Education

Michael B. Horn
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Interviews with the top innovators & changemakers so that you can stay on top of the trends transforming transform learning, education, and the development of talent worldwide so that all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose michaelbhorn.substack.com

  1. 12월 1일

    How Digital Curriculum Can Scale Career-Connected Learning in K12

    Amanda Kocon, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer at Edmentum, joined me and Danny to explore how digital curriculum can help scale career-connected learning for all students. Amanda discussed the driving forces behind the shift toward career readiness in K–12 education and emphasized the need to close exposure gaps and lower switching costs for students exploring different career paths. She detailed Edmentum’s recent acquisition of MajorClarity and their partnership with Interplay, which is enabling districts to integrate CTE courses, simulation-based trades training, and comprehensive college and career planning tools. I was excited to dig into how exactly we can scale opportunities for all students to have broad, student-driven career explorations in every district to ensure every student graduates with valuable skills and real career options. Michael Horn Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re 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 illuminate that today, I’m thrilled that my co-conspirator Danny Curtis is here because we’ve got a very good conversation teed up today. Danny, good to see you. Danny Curtis It’s great to be here, Michael. Always nice to chat with you and especially today because we get to talk about one of our favorite topics. Michael Horn Exactly. And you and I wrote this piece, I don’t know, about a year and a half ago at this point, I think, for Education Next, where we said, look, career-connected learning really should not be a “for some,” it’s really a “for all,” increasingly. And I think we’ve also though, been puzzling how do we help schools actually execute on that vision? And we’ve found someone that I think can start to shed some light on that. So I’m excited about this conversation, Danny. Danny Curtis Yeah, me, too. We wanted to bring on a guest today that is going to help us think through one approach to scaling up more career connected learning and helping districts overcome some of those challenges that they encounter when they do make the decision to move towards career connected learning. And so we are really delighted to have Amanda Kocon, the chief strategy and operations officer at Edmentum, a K12 online learning provider, join us here today. Amanda, welcome. Amanda Kocon Thank you. It is tremendous to be with you, Danny and Michael. Elevating CTE for Workforce Readiness Danny Curtis Amanda, as we mentioned up-front, we along with many others nationwide have been pushing for more career-connected learning in K–12. And as we’ll discuss you all at Edmentum, have a big announcement and have been doing a lot of work there. But before we dive into the work you’ve been doing, I want to start with the big picture “why.” In your view, what is driving this shift towards career readiness in K–12? Amanda Kocon It’s the question right now. Right. So if we think back to when Edmentum started this journey of really leaning into career connected learning for all, which is an important part of the story, we started paying attention to what was being provided to kids. So we are at our core a digital first curriculum company. We are a 60 year old plus ed tech company. We’re one of the oldest. We actually started our journey in workforce redevelopment and then focused many years later on the K12 space. But it’s always been sort of part of our DNA. We have always provided CTE courses and curriculum as part of our sort of comprehensive catalogs of offerings. And one of the things about almost four years ago now that we started talking about was what’s the sort of quality of offering that we have and how do we make sure that the same level of intention and rigor and learning design that is going into our core courses, so think your core four, your electives even, is also going into CTE. And so we started this build out in part to say what kids that are thinking about a path direct to direct to the workforce, whether they stop at college or not. Very few people exit high school and retire. It really is career for all. And so how do we get kids better ready with better materials, if you will? And so that’s where we started the journey. I think a huge part of the why for us was paying attention to the nearly 50% plus of that, like really won’t go to college and how do we make sure that they exit high school with something of value? So that’s when we started really building out our own CTE course catalog that we’ve built out over the last three years. And a huge part of that for us was then beginning to realize that as you think about what’s available, how do we combat, two things in particular, so we had started with like, what’s the curriculum that we need to deploy? And then we said, there’s two issues. One is a massive exposure gap. Kids actually don’t have a sense of what’s possible. The second thing we really focused in on is what’s the switching cost? So if we move kids, any kid, through a program of study, if you will, where they don’t learn academic, technical, durable skills and they don’t have a sense of what’s possible post secondary, we probably are going to continue to fail these kids. We will exit them from high school, but they won’t actually be future ready or job ready. Danny Curtis Yeah, you lay out a really compelling rationale for this movement towards career and connected learning. And now I want to really zoom in on the offerings that Edmentum is providing in this area. You all just made a big acquisition, the MajorClarity College and Career Readiness platform. And there’s a lot to unpack here. But I want to start with the vision behind the acquisition and the opportunity that it represents. Wondering what challenges have you seen districts face as they implement and scale these programs? And what is the role that digital tools and curriculum play in helping them to address those challenges? Scaling Work-Based Learning Solutions Amanda Kocon So I think one of the big challenges you laid out, actually, in the intro, which is how do you at scale, bring sort of the level of awareness, exploration, planfulness, curricular apps and programmatic options and then begin to manage what is the holy grail, which is work based learning for kids, in the middle school and high school arena. We, as I said before, started with what is true to us, which is we could become really good high quality digital curriculum providers. So we’ve built up as a starting place over the last three years, well over 200 semesters of CTE courses that is inclusive of 57 pathways and building. And that was an important starting place for us. But we also knew that in order to land a solution that allowed teachers, educators, counselors, superintendents to think about the programs that they offer and how to do that, not just in one building, but across all of their buildings. And we can get into a little bit why that matters in a second. We needed to actually bring the tooling and the solutioning that surrounds our curriculum that sort of integrates better with what is available in a brick and mortar, plus what we can bring that can be digitally or virtually available. And so for me, the whole vision has been let’s bring these two things together. How do we bring the workflow, the tooling, the planning, the career exploration starting in middle school and integrate that with the curricular options that are additive, not reductive in a place so that you have truly an interconnected solution of content, curriculum and tooling. And so the putting these two things together, it has been the vision. And so we’re very excited about the acquisition of MajorClarity and putting these two companies together. Michael Horn So I want to make sure I’m understanding the different pieces, right? Because 57 pathways, 200 semesters of content is already a lot. And so that’s like, I think if I’m hearing you right, that’s like the additive we can’t give exposure to learn about X. Here’s a way to do it. And so then now you have the MajorClarity piece of it that it sounds like makes this more integrated. But I want to make sure you’re putting a pin in it, like, how does this actually work for schools? And sort of what differentiates the Edmentum approach from, you know, because this is a hot space, as you know, a lot of folks are doing different stabs on what college and career readiness mean to them. What differentiates this approach with this integration? Amanda Kocon It’s a great question. So for us, our ability to use MajorClarity really as the entry point. So I’m going to just take you through the student’s journey. So starting in, starting in middle school. And that is where we have decided to start for now. It doesn’t mean we won’t move down into elementary, but you all know that in middle school is really the first opportunity the kids have to change classes. There is actually truly time for things like college and career exploration. And career exploration in particular, whether that’s advisory or in electives. We have interesting inventories that allow students to really think about what they are interested in that generates over time, both in that moment and later, sort of a fit score. Here are some things that you might want to investigate. Edmentum has built out elective courses which help students. Actually we’ve done these with America Succeeds. So they embed durable skills. We’re the first ones to bring it down to middle school. We think middle school is particularly important for students as they start to understand what are those work based skills, terms, terminology. How do you think about and understand what it means to develop communication skills and collaborative skills and even metacognition? How do you understand how you learn start

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  2. 11월 24일

    Building a Public Education MarketPlace

    Jamie Rosenberg, founder and executive chairman of ClassWallet, joins me to explore the evolving landscape of education savings accounts (ESAs) and the broader push toward education choice. Jamie shares the origin story of ClassWallet and discusses how the company is innovating digital wallet solutions that streamline the flow of public funds to families, educators, and nontraditional providers. The conversation sheds light on the challenges families and entrepreneurs face in navigating new ESA programs, the delicate balance between agency and accountability, and how states can design effective policies that empower both families and innovative education providers. Michael Horn I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re 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 that today, delighted to bring Jamie Rosenberg to the show. Jamie is the founder and executive chairman of ClassWallet, which we’re going to hear a lot more about the show. And Jamie and I were in a conversation a few months back with a bunch of others around this growing education savings account space with a bunch of insights that really struck me around the market and how to create a really robust one between demand and supply. So delighted to get into all of that today. Jamie, welcome to the Future of Education. Thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate you being here. Jamie Rosenberg It’s great being here, Michael. I appreciate the invite. Michael Horn Yeah, no, I’m delighted to learn from you. And before we get into some of the ways that the market is emerging, I, I want to start out with ClassWallet origin story, if you will. You all were founded in 2014, well before education savings accounts was sort of the movement I think that it’s becoming national at the moment. And so I’m just curious, like, what did the company start out as? What was the opportunity that you saw that you felt like ClassWallet can really fill this need in the country’s ecosystem? Jamie Rosenberg Sure. This is my second company. So to understand the formation of ClassWallet, let me just share with you how I. Michael Horn Yeah, origin story. Good. Jamie Rosenberg Yeah, of course. So my personal and professional mission has always been to try to get the dollars as close to children as possible. I started my career as a lawyer, at one point in time was mentoring a student at a nearby school in Miami for mentally and physically delayed pre kindergarten aged children. And during that experience, I really just had a life changing experience and really wanted to understand how I could help children in an educational environment as much as possible. So I started my first company in 1998, which was Adopt a Classroom, which was a crowdfunding platform for teachers as a way of trying to get philanthropic dollars as close to that child and in that learning environment as effectively as possible. So I grew that to be one of the larger education philanthropies in the country. By the time I left, I had raised and distributed about $25 million to teachers in 30% of U.S. public schools. Education Funding for Children’s Success Jamie Rosenberg The origin of ClassWallet germinates from there because in that journey I had developed a way of getting money in a compliant, impactful way as close to that child, and realized that I could help more children, more students by taking that technology and delivering it to the system, the school systems and state systems. And that was the impetus and catalyst to start ClassWallet in 2014. Michael Horn And so what were those initial customer relationships like what was the dollar flows funding from to and so forth? Jamie Rosenberg Yes. So the initial focus and hence the brand name was really helping LEAs and school districts get their funding down to the classroom more effectively. K12 is a trillion dollar budget, yet teachers spend $1,000 out of their own pocket every year. I mean, it’s just a huge disconnect. So we started out selling to school districts and today about 6% of public school teachers in America actually have a ClassWallet account, almost like a teacher savings account, where they get access to a wallet and can purchase the learning goods and resources they need to meet the learning needs of their students. And then in 2017, we evolved to sell ClassWallet into the state agency space, really solving similar problems for education savings accounts. And since then we have become a market leader in school choice, but have also been used in other agencies like early child care, workforce development, and health and human services. Michael Horn Yeah, I noticed that. And before we get to the ESAs, just, just say a word about those other three areas because I think it’s interesting that you get to serve those as well as sort of this core K12 ESA market. Jamie Rosenberg The underlying theme is that it’s all the same problem. The challenge in trying to get public money to the right people and ensure those people not only use it for the right purpose, but ultimately have the biggest impact for that program lies in a point of intersection where policy intersects with rubber hits the road implementation and compliance. And our innovation has been able to unlock that friction point and maximize that impact of that dollar. And that applies to a dollar reaching a family for ESA equally as it implies reaching a family who might be getting early child care subsidy or an adult learner who has a grant from an agency to further their career journey. So it’s all the same problem. And our innovation has been able to maximize outcomes of programs across various types of programs. Michael Horn Say more about that because I think then as we get into the ESA space, sort of the counterfactual right. If ClassWallet hadn’t existed, I imagine would be we have dollars theoretically flowing from state coffers, to families in a private wallet to spend on education providers, both schools, as well as other options, tutoring and so forth. I can imagine that would have been a very bureaucratic application, paper and pencil, sort of heavy set of things like that. Friction would have been really real. How do you all come in there and facilitate and streamline those dollars reaching the families themselves? What’s the innovation there itself look like? Jamie Rosenberg So to talk about our innovation, I’ll give you just a touch upon briefly what existed before our innovation. Michael Horn Perfect. Jamie Rosenberg So you can understand the impact. So prior to our introduction of digital wallet technology, states really only had two choices, a debit card or reimbursement. Michael Horn Yep. ESA Funding Solution Jamie Rosenberg So how does the state get $100 million to, you know, 30,000 families on a debit card? Not only that ensures using it according to the rules, but can get the data it needs. You can imagine how challenging that might be. And reimbursement of course is equally challenging, forcing families to spend their own money and submit receipts. So that was the ESA market prior to ClassWallet. What our innovation does is a digital wallet that gives families immediate access to the funds and allows them to spend those funds within vendors and for goods that the rules of the program are already embedded in the system. So they have agency to get what they need, but also the ease of knowing that what they’re doing and what they’re buying is compliant to program rules. Michael Horn So you’re effectively solving the compliance thing proactively. So it’s hard coded, if you will, into the digital wallet and the set of market options that they’re seeing has already been vetted. And you have solved that sort of question in their mind of if I’m allowed to do this, is that a fair way of saying it? Jamie Rosenberg I’m saying that we solve an outcome problem, not a compliance problem. The compliance is the root cause as to why programs don’t get the outcomes they want. But what we’ve been able to do is by solving the compliance problem, we create a two sided marketplace and give families access to the breadth of innovation and all the providers that can support that child’s unique personalized learning needs with an incredible powerful market. If that makes sense. Michael Horn Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. So then talk about how many states are you supporting today in their ESA policies out there? Just give us a sense of the market that you all are serving at the moment. Jamie Rosenberg We currently serve nine ESA programs and in addition we serve other programs that give money to families but may not necessarily be used for tuition. So they’re not school choice under the classical definition, but they are what I would call education freedom, where families are getting funding from, from state agencies and can self direct how those funds can ultimately improve their children’s outcomes. Michael Horn Gotcha. And then so you have this fascinating bird’s eye view effectively into these markets that are getting created, the supply side, new school models, tutoring, right, entrepreneurs coming in and so forth. The demand side, families getting comfortable with this option, with using the dollars to get whatever set of services they need for their students. I’d love maybe let’s start on the supply side and thinking about lessons of regulation and policy. And you can go either way, positive or negative. I guess I’m curious what you’ve learned that really facilitates a robust supply side. And then the flip side, what stymies it, what holds it back or gums it up? And as we think about what, what are the right set of policies and regs to really make these marketplaces flourish. Education Market: Innovative ESAs Jamie Rosenberg So first, I would appreciate that what the education market is doin

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  3. 11월 10일

    Launching Vocation, the AI Coach to Help Individuals Make Career Progress

    Cliff Maxwell joined me to announce the launch of Vocation, an AI-powered career coach. Built on decades of research, Cliff and I cofounded Vocation with Bob Moesta, my coauthor of the bestselling book Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. Cliff and I discussed how Vocation now brings the process from Job Moves to you with the help of AI—so that you can identify what truly drives and energizes you at work and move beyond traditional resume-based or job title-focused career tools. Cliff shared some early stories of how Vocation has helped individuals. I’m excited that this resource can now be in all of your hands—and we look forward to your feedback. Links: https://www.joinvocation.com/ Michael Horn Excited to be with you, Cliff, as we talk about this new company we have created together, with Bob Moesta as well, called Vocation. It is based off the book Job Moves that we did. We had, you know, over a decade of research with a thousand-plus individuals who had made job changes and started coaching them and so forth. Ethan Bernstein’s class at the Harvard Business School, one of our coauthors pivotal in doing this, and then you sort of looked at this [book] and you’re like, hey, we could create a product out of this. And you were actually one of the early victims, if you will, of our research and tried out some of the work on you and I think it, I think it helped [you]. But before we start to introduce what Vocation is, maybe let’s tell your own personal story into this work and how you got to be here. We’ve been collaborators and friends for I think over a decade at this point. But why don’t you tell it through your own, your own words, your personal story into this. From Semiconductors to Education Innovation Cliff Maxwell Yeah, no, it’s so great to, to be connected again here and, and it’s so fun to be building something that, that has really, when I look back, has been a passion project all along but, but now is manifested in some really, you know, powerful tools and research that we can use. But yeah, my career is pretty winding. I started out in semiconductors actually. When you’re 18-years old and have to pick a major, you just go with what sounds interesting and, and I love math and science, studied electrical engineering, but really quickly started to find a lot of passion and energy in other things that, that frankly just didn’t offer. One of which was startups and, and innovation was doing some, some venture capital work in, in undergraduate and, and working with some entrepreneurs in that capacity and was dabbling with start of my own and then also education and teaching. I had never been obviously a K12 teacher, but had taught in various different capacities and really loved just being in classrooms and thinking about how to help people learn. And so when I was struggling with unfulfillment and trying to figure out what’s next, the first time, which was my first job out of undergrad, I stumbled upon your research with Clay Christensen and really just fell in love with the idea of, of how to innovate and make change in education and where that space was going, which is obviously much earlier on over a decade ago and so left engineering entirely, came to work with you as a researcher and product manager, building tools for educators and thinking about that space. And then it was during that time when Clay Christensen asked me to be his chief of staff and help manage everything that he was involved with, obviously with the Institute, but also his teaching efforts at Harvard Business School and his consulting work and was such a remarkable opportunity to meet so many wonderful people, so many, you know, insightful leaders from all over the world, and just exposed me to, frankly, what’s possible when you, when you think, you know, think big and try to help, help people at scale. And so that turned into business school and then I use that really to think about how to get back into some of the things that I enjoyed, which is startups and innovation. And so I have been at venture capital for the past several years working with early stage tech startups, usually in the AI and robotics and more deep tech space. You know, even that process, you know, you mentioned that I, I connected and was one of your early victims. I was navigating the transition of my own between firms, thinking about what I wanted to do. And you know, Bob Moesta, one of our co-founders, said, hey, we’re, we’re doing some research. We’re working on a process to help you think through this. And that was so impactful for me, I think, just to realize that I could focus on progress and what I needed rather than what was expected or what I should be doing or what my resume says I should do. And so when the research came out last year and I got to see the book and see the implementation of that thinking and that process, it was just a light bulb to me that there’s a huge opportunity to scale those insights to job seekers everywhere who, like me, have struggled and, and tried to get through this question of what do you really want? What are you really trying to accomplish? And so it just started tinkering and prototyping and here we are now, right, building together and it’s been a lot of fun. Michael Horn Yeah, no, it’s been a ton of fun. And so we’ve launched officially the new company Vocation. I’ll put the link up there for those who are tuning into the live stream as well—joinvocation.com—but Cliff, you sort of alluded to it, how it’s helped you and so forth, and you’ve been a part of it and you read the book and you’re like, this should be a bigger product to help people. talk about what the product is like, what just at its fundamental core, what is Vocation? If folks go to joinvocation.com, what’s their experience going to be like right now? Navigating Career Changes Effectively Cliff Maxwell So we take as a starting off point really the underpinnings of the research, which, you know, many of your followers might be familiar with, which is how can we help a professional who’s in the middle of a potential job change? Something’s off at work, they feel like they want something new. Maybe they’re starting to apply to a few roles, maybe they’re networking, or maybe they’re even seeking out coaches or other tools. And what we try to do is basically give you a process to work through that uncertainty, to work through that fuzziness of trying to navigate what should my next thing be, what do I really want? And so we take you through effectively the research in Job Moves, but in a more consolidated and focused fashion of a multi step process. Each step builds upon itself, gives you a bit more clarity and guidance and direction. Starting with what is your career quest, what is ultimately driving your desire for change? A deep dive into what gives you energy at work and what drains it. So we can really pinpoint the types of work you want to be doing fundamentally. We look at the themes of your career. So we try to help you understand what are the common trade offs that you’ve made, what, what are the common choices that you’ve made that have guided your decisions. And so that we can kind of stay on brand, stay on purpose. And then we take a user through a prototyping exercise where we look at a whole host of opportunities, some of which maybe you’ve never considered, some of which maybe you think I couldn’t do that, but it gives us a chance to really have a job seeker wrestle with trade offs and wrestle with opportunities and put themselves in the shoes of different places to see where do I really fit. And then the last step of the process is narrowing down and guiding that process to drill down on a role that actually based on all of that discovery process makes sense for you and is going to give you the progress that you’re seeking. And then once you’ve gone through that process, we then have a whole host of tools and resources to help you then put the plan into action. Right? So now let’s go get that job and help you get the progress that we’ve helped you identify. Michael Horn Gotcha. Okay, so that’s the basic process, that’s the what we’ve talked about, the why, because you’re sort of the why like, and maybe we should make it a little bit more crisply, right? Like we see Literally millions of folks right now frozen in jobs where they’re disengaged, if Gallup is to be believed, like 2/3 or 3/4, right, of the workforce is disengaged, 50% looking to quit. And so there’s a huge amount of dissatisfaction, fear, anxiety in this place. But there’s like a long, you know, standing industry Cliff, right. Like career coaches and, you know, other places you can turn. There’s lots of job searching tools that are out there right now. There’s tons of AI companies popping up that will take your resume and they’ll adjust it for you and blitz it out to like a thousand different online postings and the like. Right. So, like, why is this different from the typical career tool or the coaches that are out there and so forth? Traditional Career Tools’ Limitations Cliff Maxwell Yeah, I mean, I think that if you’ve used these tools. Right. And I’ve used some of these and, and played with a whole bunch of, not just in building this, but also just throughout your life and even in high school, you kind of, you come across career assessments and, you know, things of that nature. I would say that the vast, vast majority of career tools are focused and still stuck, I would say, in a very traditional and narrow mindset of what a career needs to look like. And so they take as a starting point one of two things. Either, number one, what job are you looking for? So it assumes you know exactly what you want and then let’s put in the tactical how to go get that job. And that could be useful, right? Particularly if you know exactly where you’re going

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  4. 11월 3일

    Khan Lab School's Growing Partnerships

    Kim Dow, executive director of the Khan Lab School and Khan Schools Network, and Elizabeth Dean, head of learning design at the Village School, joined me for this conversation. Together we explored the evolution of the Khan Lab School, as well as the Village School. We talked about how these schools are designing forward-thinking, mastery-based, and self-directed learning environments, the impact of AI on education, and why collaboration and knowledge-sharing across the network are vital for supporting new educational models. I was interested to hear about the Village School’s goals for expanding into high school and Elizabeth’s view on the importance of fostering authentic experiences and character development for students in the age of AI. Michael Horn Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re 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 that today, I’m really excited for our two guests. We have Kim Dow. She’s the executive director of the Khan Lab School and the Khan Schools Network. So first, Kim, great to see you. Kim Dow Thanks for having us on your podcast. Michael Horn You bet. And then we’ve got Elizabeth Dean. She’s the head of learning design at the Village School and the first Kahn School Network partner on the east coast, which we’re going to hear more about today. But first, Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining as well. Elizabeth Dean Thanks for having us. Khan Lab School’s Growth Journey Michael Horn Yeah, you bet. So, Kim, let me start with you. Just Khan Lab School, I’ve been there probably a handful of times over the years, but if I’m being honest, it’s probably been like seven or eight years since I was last there. I was trying to do the math this morning as I was preparing for you to come on. And of course, Sal’s been on the show a few times, but still, I think the audience would love an update. Sort of like just Khan Lab School. We’ll get to the network in a moment. But just like, you know, the current state of it, how many locations do you have? How has it evolved over time? What’s the student body look like? Day in the life students, just give us a little bit of the color. Kim Dow Khan lab School is actually going into its 12th year this year, and I’ve been here for about eight years and it’s been quite a journey. And the school, as you know, is a Mastery based school. One of the earlier Mastery based schools, we’re located in Mountain View and we’ve also just expanded to Palo Alto. And so the school has grown over the past decade or so. And so now we have a campus for our lower school folks, and then we have a campus for our middle and our upper school students, which is based in Mountain View. In fact, our middle school this summer we just did some rehab and just moved into the old Khan Academy space. So we have moved from about, which the students love, and so the program has grown from the early days of about, you know, 20 students. I like to say it’s achieved escape velocity and we now have just tipped over 300 students, which is super exciting. So we often say that we have evolved from being scrappy to established, but not too established. And so we’ve really tried to retain those kind of startup, innovative roots and everything that, everything that we do. But it’s been, it’s been amazing to grow to, you know, a larger school. Michael Horn I love it. One more question, Kim, before I bring Elizabeth in. Just—300 students. I’ve always thought of Khan Lab School as a microschool. Do you, do you all still consider yourself as such at that size or like, how do you think? I mean, some of these classifications are sort of silly in some sense, right? It’s more about the educational experience. But I’m just sort of curious how you think about that. Kim Dow I think that we have evolved away from being a traditional microschool just partly because of the number of years that we have been around. And I think that moving into kind of being more of a grown up school based on, you know, the number of years that we’ve been around. Some of the things that, you know, are part of our operational elements, I would say are part of being, you know, a larger school. It’s interesting, you know, most recently about three years ago, we also decided to expand the program and we can get into this in a little bit later, but we expanded the model to open a school in Wichita. So we are now three campuses. One in Mountain View, one in Palo Alto, where Lower School is, and a new campus in Wichita, Kansas. Michael Horn All right, we’re gonna have to get more into all of this in a moment. But Elizabeth, I want to bring you in because before the partnership, the Village School was alive and well, and has a good history. So tell us a little bit about the Village School, its roots, who it serves, you know, what a student experience is like and so forth. Elizabeth Dean Yes, thank you. So similar to Kimberly, we started eight years ago. So this is theVillage School’s eighth year with 12 learners, preschool through elementary school age. And now we have close to 80 learners and we’re pre K through 8th grade. And we’re hoping to launch a high school in the future, which is where our partnership with Khan comes in, hopefully helping us with that, with all of their wisdom and launching a school and growing it to 300 learners. Our school is really built, we have our roots in a self directed learning model and we have a really entrepreneurial founding community. Some of those founding families are still here, really active and have just kind of pushed us to continue to expand and explore. We’re really focused on self directed learning, of course, as that’s, you know, really where our roots are. But focused on project based and mastery based learning and really wanting to make a school model and a learning experience that is really the future of education. Focusing on those, you know, human skills that are going to be really important as we continue down this road of AI and all things that come with that. Michael Horn And tell us a little bit about, like, that founding story with those founding families. You’re all in Northern Virginia, right? So just a little bit about, like, what was the why the rallying cry, if you will, that said, hey, we gotta. We have to put something different together. Elizabeth Dean Yes. So I can speak to that as I was one of those founding families before I worked here. So I was a member before I was an employee or I think there’s a famous line about that. But I might be dating myself with that. But you all get it. I see you laughing. Michael Horn Yes. Elizabeth Dean Families come from really, you know, I wouldn’t. It’s hard to describe. It’s not like they come from one particular background, really, just families that were looking at their current young, you know, their children’s school experience and just wanting it to be more than just fine. And I think something that all families, especially that founding group, really has in common and something we hear every time we take our new families out to a coffee is that, you know, they played the game of school and they either played it really well or they didn’t play it well at all. They figured it out either way, but they wanted something different for their kids. And so it’s really that just knowing that they’re just really wanting something else, which is like what I like to call them, entrepreneurial. Right. They’re really seeing that disconnect or seeing something that could be better and wanting to figure that out. So that’s really what I feel like brought us together. And we are, we’re located in Arlington, Virginia, right outside Washington, D.C. and we really take advantage of our close location to all things in the District of Columbia that are, you know, take the kids on really great field trips and have access to a lot of really wonderful professionals who are willing to come in and share what they do with our learners. So we’re really. We try to take advantage of our location for sure. Michael Horn Very cool. Very cool. All right, Kim, let me go back to the Khan Lab school because that’s also part of your title, Khan Schools Network. Right. You guys started to expand, I think, a few years back, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s global, in fact, at this point. So sort of tell us about that evolution of Khan Lab School into thinking about it as more of a network, if you will. How many partners at the moment? Where are they? What do they look like? And why partner as opposed to, like, just build lots of Khan Lab schools yourself? Kim Dow Very early on, I would say. And it’s actually a separate entity from Khan Lab school. And so. But I would say, you know, one of the things that, like, innovative schools in the Bay area and all over the country, everybody gets requests to come and visit their school, especially like Elizabeth, if you’re in a large metropolitan area. And what we were finding is, in fact, we’ve got a visit this morning. I’ve got another visit later in the week. You know, one of the schools is from India, and one of them is from France. This happens to everybody who is in this space. Building Collaborative School Partnerships Kim Dow And one of the things that I found was these conversations were so rich and that we, you know, folks would come, they would spend an entire day at the school, but then, you know, we would sort of drift away. We would stay in touch. You know, we would email each other every now and then, but we really weren’t continuing that relationship and those opportunities to learn from one another. And I would say probably about two years ago, we started thinking that we had gotten some things together about our model. And we have

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  5. 10월 13일

    A Playbook for Public School Districts to Start Microschools

    Deborah Gist of Transcend and the XQ Institute and Victoria Andrews of Getting Smart joined me to talk about their report, “The Public Microschool Playbook: A New Actionable Guide for System Leaders,” a guide for public school districts interested in starting their own microschools. Our conversation explored the barriers districts face and highlighted solutions and real-world examples where microschools are already making a difference. My guests emphasized the importance of community engagement, starting small, and designing schools around the specific needs of students. For those who have read my book From Reopen to Reinvent and followed my work, it’s no secret that I think many more districts ought to be operating a range of microschools rather than continuing to have a one-size-fits-all mentality around serving students. It seems like a big opportunity to increase student engagement—and by having a bunch of purpose-built and differentiated microschools serving different groups of students yet offering them through the district, you can also imagine still having the best of a big community with other offerings like sports teams and the like that might be a draw. How to do this, however, has been a challenge for many districts, so I was glad when this guide came out. I hope our conversation helps more districts move forward accordingly. Michael Horn Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. Something we’re not accomplishing today. But two folks that we get to welcome to our show today, being dedicated to this work for a very long time and doing incredible stuff. So thrilled to have two friends here, Deborah Gist and Victoria Andrews. Deborah, obviously now superintendent in residence at Transcend and XQ Institute, but of course, you were the superintendent of Oklahoma’s largest public school district in Tulsa, your hometown, for many years and of course, commissioner of Education in Rhode island and many other things. So first, good to see you Deb. Deborah Gist You too. Michael Horn And Victoria, you’re obviously a partner now focused on professional learning at Getting Smart, but you were the assistant director for an IB school, I think most recently before Getting Smart. So thank you so much for joining as well. Victoria Andrews Super happy to be here. Yeah. Can’t wait for the conversation. Michael Horn Well, we’re going to dive in because you all were part of Getting Smart Collective, Learner Centered Collaborative, and Transcend coming together to write, I think, a really important report, the “Public Microschool Playbook: A New Actionable Guide for System Leaders.” We’ll link to it, obviously in the show notes and up front, but it’s a really important playbook that encourages districts to get in the game, start creating microschools. And Deb, you’ve, I feel like actually I was in front of you a couple times from when From Reopen to Reinvent came out being like, districts should do microschools. And you’d be like, there’s not a playbook yet to get them to do it. So you guys have written that. Let’s, let’s dive in because I think it’s obviously incredibly critical. There’s a lot of interest in them. Overcoming Educational Innovation Barriers Michael Horn Let’s start with the barriers, though, because you all note in the report that we’re not seeing a lot of district run microschools. You list several of them actually helpfully, but there’s not a, there’s not as many as there should be. So maybe let me start with you, Deb. And then Victoria, you jump in, like, what do you see as the big impediments or barriers that’s holding this back? Deborah Gist Well, I mean, I think honestly one of the very first barriers is just awareness and just a recognition of the why and what’s possible and how they could go about doing it. And then once a system leader, whether it’s a school district superintendent or a charter school leader or a leader of tribal schools or whatever the entity is, once they get the bug and they think, oh, I get it, like, I see how this could be such a game changer for my students, my teachers in our community, then you start encountering, you know, some practical kinds of things. And it’s everything from funding, which always comes up. It’s like, how do you set aside the seed funding in the long term, it really should be, but there are some things that people have to work through you. You might run into, depending on the state, on, on most of these actually certification challenges, like, you know, teachers of record and, and how that is done within the state, depending, depending on the design of the school, you might run into needing to figure out, you know, how you count courses, how you count attendance, you know, seat time issues and things like that. Then you have facilities. And again, you know, there are, there are typically in, in many districts. There’s space available, but it’s figuring that out. And if you want it to be intentionally, which we actually recommend in the playbook, outside of the system, at least initially, you know, figuring that out and make. And then you have to work through, you know, safety concerns and all of the things. So we lay this out in the playbook. So I don’t want anyone to feel daunted by the that we’re talking about barriers right away. It’s. It’s very doable. And all those mechanisms that we touch on that I talked about. And then you also have enrollment and the procedures and different things like that. All of that is very technical things that can be addressed, I think, helping to lead the adaptive change of helping people to think how. How do we do school differently and what do we have to let go of and what do we need to embrace? Because we all want to serve students for their whole unique selves. But the barriers sometimes can feel daunting, but we can help people address them. Michael Horn Victoria, what would you add, yeah? Victoria Andrews I would just liken it to, you know, everybody has a dream of owning a home. And you’re like, oh, I’m going to get a house that’s going to be three bedrooms, two baths. It’s like, there are so many different types of houses. There’s condos, there’s townhouses, there’s modular houses. So sometimes it’s just truly, you don’t know what’s possible. And so for a lot of leaders that are leading, they’ve got the blinders on. Deb can attest to this just like I can, where it’s like the day to day, you’re just like, I gotta make it through. And we need to do what we need to do to make sure that the kids are safe and the staff is supported. And sometimes, unfortunately, innovation is the last thing on our minds. And so not even knowing what are the possibilities to attract different parents to engage students in a different way, just even knowing that this is an option and this is an avenue to do that. Michael Horn Yeah, no, that makes sense. So I want to double click on a couple of them because you talked about seed funding. That’s one I hear a lot from folks on the ground like, we are stretched as it is running flat out. And to your point, Victoria, like the urgent and immediate, maybe trumps the important in the long term that maybe we should be planning for. How do you go about getting seed funding? And then the other one I’d love you all to address, I’ll just name it. I hear a lot about union contracts or policies or procedures. Like how do you think about batting those down so you can create space for this? Funding Small-Scale Education Initiatives Deborah Gist Well, I’ll start and then this is probably mostly a Victoria question, but I mean, there are resources available. Getting Smart is one. VELA has given out grids and they don’t need to be big. So the seed funding, you know, having led large systems, even though I led large systems that were constantly needing to, you know, cut budgets and figure out how to adjust and so forth, the amount of money that we’re talking about is doable. So it’s about will, it’s about saying like we are, it is worth it to set aside an amount of money or co fundraise for it or whatever it’s going to take to get this going. I think sometimes people think it’s just a tiny, tiny number of students. And, you know, how do we focus on that when we have this much bigger population that we’re serving? But it’s not just about those students. Even though it is. It’s really about how we are adjusting the system overall. Quickly, on the union question, you know, obviously it varies from state to state and district to district in very dramatic ways. I know from personal experience, but I would say that microschools are about teachers. I mean, this is about helping the union leadership and the teachers that are part of that union leadership understand that this is about respecting the professionalism of educators and giving them an opportunity to work with communities to build the kind of schools that they really dream about. So I think it’s a doable thing. But Victoria knows more about doing that on a day to day. Michael Horn You’ve been in the trenches, Victoria. So because you all are getting smarter, funding support, supporting a lot of these. So, talk about that. Victoria Andrews We have and what is inspiring is that you see once people wrap their minds around that this is a possibility then you see that like innovation light bulb go off and it’s how can I be creative with the space and the staffing that I have? I think about Canyon City out of Colorado. So they have a microschool and it’s experiential learning and they take the young people on various trips across the country and even globally. And their staffing model is so that they’re on the block schedule. But if there’s

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  6. 10월 6일

    The Effectiveness of Purdue's Income Share Agreement Program

    Ethan Pollack from Jobs for the Future and Kevin Mumford, an economics professor at Purdue University, joined me to dive into Purdue’s innovative “Back a Boiler” Income Share Agreement (ISA) program. They defined what ISAs are, talked about how Purdue’s model aimed to make higher education more affordable and accessible, and discussed the findings from new research analyzing the program’s outcomes. Our conversation covered the program’s origins, regulatory challenges, its eventual pause, and what the data reveal about student outcomes, particularly regarding fairness, completion rates, and financial impacts for students from different backgrounds. One of my takeaways? Based on the outcomes, it’s a shame that the initial momentum behind ISAs in the mid-2010s has stalled. But maybe there’s some hope now on the horizon with better guardrails in place for a resurgence behind ISAs. Research Referenced: * Distribution of Returns to a College Income Share Agreement: Evidence from Administrative Data * Promising New Insights from Purdue University’s ISA Program Michael Horn Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. And you’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. And part of that equation is thinking about how we pay for and afford what’s become a more and more costly higher education over time. So to help us learn about and think through some new research about what was a very interesting program to make higher education not just more affordable and accessible, but also focused on real value, in my view, our two individuals that we get to welcome today. First we have Ethan Pollack. He’s the senior director in the policy and advocacy practice at Jobs for the Future, or JFF as it’s commonly known, where he leads the Financing the Future initiative, which explores these new approaches to financing post secondary education. So, Ethan, great to see you. Ethan Pollack Great to be here. Michael Horn Yeah, you bet. And Kevin, we have Kevin Mumford, who’s an economics professor at Purdue University, also the director of the Research Center in Economics at Purdue. Kevin, great to see you and thanks for being here. Kevin Mumford Yeah, thank you. Happy to be here. Michael Horn Yeah. So we’re going to get into a bunch of things in a moment, but I wanted to sort of level set us start with the basics because we’re going to talk a lot about income share agreements today, ISAs, as they’re known, and we’re going to talk specifically about a program that was in effect at Purdue, the Back a Boiler ISA program, and a working paper that you published, Kevin, recently. But before we get into all that, I just want to make sure our audience is level set. We’re all on the same page. We know what we’re talking about. I know how I describe an ISA, and I see it as a pretty compelling alternative to a loan, at least on paper for a given individual. But Ethan, you’ve thought about this much more than I have. You probably have a much more concise answer. So in brief, tell us, what is an ISA? The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Income-Based Student Loan Alternative Ethan Pollack Sure. So an ISA is, I think, best defined in contrast to, to what is more the standard, in particular, the standard in the private loan space, where in that latter space you really have fixed payment loans. Right. You have, you know, much more kind of like a mortgage. You’re paying a fixed dollar amount over a period of time. You have to pay back at the end of the, the, the loan you need to pay back the principal and then the interest. And ISA is different in a number of respects, but the main respect is that it is income based. You are paying on the basis of how much you earn. So students are only making monthly payments if they earn at least a certain income threshold. They’re also making payments that are a percentage of their earnings. So if they earn above that threshold, they may pay a certain percentage. It can be anywhere from a couple percentage points. Some of the short term boot camps were charging pretty high income shares up to 17 percentage points. Purdue’s are much lower. And then the last feature of an income share agreement that’s unique is that it expires after a period of time. So it’s really de emphasizing this idea that you’ve borrowed a certain amount of money and you need to repay it with principal and interest and actually operates almost a little more like an equity investment where you’re paying on the basis of how well you do. And the person that, you know there, the, the entity that gave you that kind of, you know, financing that ISA is going to be, you know, receive a lot more revenue if you do well after graduation, and they’re going to then receive a lot less and they may receive nothing at all if you never earn above that earnings threshold. Michael Horn So a couple key things that stand out about that, right? It changes it from paying based on the cost or the expense to paying on the value, if you will, of it. And then there’s some more risk, obviously on the part of the institution as a part of that, it seems. Kevin, then, you know, ISA programs, they look different in different places. Ethan just alluded to that. They have different incentives and so forth. Tell us a little bit about the origins of Purdue’s spin on this through the backup boiler program and its specific mechanics as well. Purdue’s Income Share Agreement Origins Kevin Mumford Sure. It, you know, it came about because of the president we had at Purdue at the time, Mitch Daniels. He had been asked in the spring of 2015 to testify before a House subcommittee. And in that testimony he had kind of a throwaway line about, you know, wouldn’t it be great if the university was doing something with income share agreements? And he got so much sort of press inquiry after that that he started thinking to himself a few weeks later, maybe, maybe we should really do this. There’s so much interest in it. So there was this funny episode where he calls in the head of the foundation and the chief legal officer for the chief lawyer for the university and says, let’s start an income share agreement. And they both were like, yeah, let’s do that. And they left the office, then turned to each other and said, what is an income share agreement? And they Googled it on their phone and the university just kind of, you know, he started the apparatus. Twelve months later they started accepting applications and they launched the thing. You know, the idea was they’re going to allow it to be available to all majors. And in some majors people earn a lot more and in some majors they earn a lot less. So they tried to price it according to what they thought the earnings would be in that major. They put all the majors into seven different bins and said if you’re in this kind of high earning bin, then we’re going to charge a lower income share rate. And if you’re in a lower income bin, we’re going to charge a higher rate. And the idea is to try to make it so that it would compete well with a Parent PLUS loan. They weren’t going to try to compete with the subsidized federal loan or the unsubsidized federal, the direct federal loans, but they were going to try to compete with the Parent PLUS because it has a higher interest rate. And the difference here would be, is that a Parent PLUS loan, the parents are the borrowers. Here it’s the student who is taking on this repayment obligation. And you know, there are some protections, like Ethan said, there’s a lower threshold, there’s an upper bound. Nobody could pay more than originally it was 2.5 times the funding amount. Then it went to 2.3 times the funding amount. So that’s kind of the basic idea though, price it so that people would be paying back about what they would under a Parent PLUS. Michael Horn I didn’t realize. I actually did not know that. Yeah, that’s hysterical. I did not know that piece of it even. And then put it in context of like, you know, when this launched. Right. Why was it such a big deal at the time? How did it fit in? Right. With the larger movement? ISAs were gaining a lot of currency as an idea that might be this alternative to loans. Give us a sense of why this was such an important program. Ethan Pollack Yeah, it was a really interesting time. So I was at the Aspen Institute at the time and I remember hearing about income share agreements and both thinking like, wow, these are like, this could be really exciting. This could totally kind of rewire how we do higher ed finance and workforce as well outside of the Title IV system. And also is like, this could also be kind of dangerous too. Right. We don’t have guardrails that are uniquely designed for income share agreements too. And there’s A lot of uncertainty as to which laws actually applied to ISAs. And so I was kind of in this middle camp of being really excited about the potential but also then having a bit of concern. But there was at this time, you know, when it was launched in 2016, there was this real interest in ISAs, you know, not just in higher education, but in particular, you know, this was also the rise of, kind of the time of the, of coding boot camps. And you know, with coding boot camps there, there, you know, a lot of the tech companies were feeling, look, you don’t need a college degree, we can, we can just teach you to code. And we know that you don’t believe us. So instead we’re going to take on the risk and attend my coding bootcamp. And if you don’t make above a certain, you know, amount, then you just don’t pay anything back. Excitement and Backlash Ethan Pollack So I think that there was, that was happening in

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  7. 9월 29일

    Repurposing Spaces and Reimagining Competencies in the Empire State

    In this episode, Danny Curtis interviewed Jonah Schenker, superintendent of Ulster BOCES in New York, to explore the launch of a groundbreaking new center for career and technical education at iPark87. The conversation dove into the innovative programming and community partnerships at the new center, the challenges of moving beyond traditional, industrial models of schooling, and the vital role of collaboration between educators, industry, and local organizations. Schenker also shed light on broader statewide reforms in New York around redefining student competencies, the importance of starting transformation with empathy and stakeholder input, and how these changes create new opportunities to equip students as designers of a better future. Danny Curtis Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Danny Curtis 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 today to help us think through that, we welcome Dr. Jonah Schenker, superintendent of Ulster BOCES, which is a regional education services district in New York. And I’m really excited to have Jonah on today because he’s going to tell us about the innovative work that he is doing with his partner districts in New York, including the opening of a very new and very big center for career and technical education that’s playing an important role in a larger shift happening in New York towards rethinking student competencies. And so Jonah, thank you so much for joining us today. Dr. Jonah Schenker Awesome. I’m super glad to be here and actually recording from the new site as we were just chatting about. So I’m happy to be in space with you. Danny Curtis So cool. And we especially appreciate you carving out the time right now at time of recording. We are just leading into a new school year. So I’m sure this is a busy time for you. Dr. Jonah Schenker It’s always a busy time for schools as we think about opening but, but especially busy when you know, a new 140,000 square foot facility is, you know, just on, on the agenda as something to get opened as well. Danny Curtis So yeah, the big agenda item right there. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, I want to dig into that center in a second, but just to start, I’d love to hear about your journey to this work. What brought you to Ulster BOCES? Dr. Jonah Schenker Yeah, so you know, kind of the one minute overview, you know, I started my journey in school and I describe it as I was good at school, I knew how to do school. I don’t really recall, you know, what I was really getting at or, or absorbing. I recognize amazing teachers throughout that, but the learning style, the approach that that was always didn’t, didn’t feel right. And so I found myself gravitating towards shop class. I found myself gravitating towards clubs and extracurricular. But again I knew how to play the game. And so I got good grades, went off to college and did about two years and, and then left and spent my second two years of undergrad traveling around the world in an independent study. Finished my undergrad that way and that was really where kind of the aperture opened up that there are more than, there’s more than one way to kind of get at this thing we call learning in school. Fast forwarding. Started my career at a new school startup in Brooklyn. Spent about five years there teaching. Taught for another three or four years after I left the city in Dutchess County, New York and then began my journey at Ulster BOCES 16 years ago as an administrator, assistant principal, teacher, coach and have worked through the progression of leadership all here at Ulster BOCES. So building principal and director and interim directors of portions of our entity that handle tech and professional learning. Had the opportunity to become the deputy superintendent here and then our superintendent at the time retired and that was the moment at which I had the opportunity to become the district superintendent. And the district superintendent is an interesting role in a BOCES. One portion of the role is the CEO of the BOCES. So really handling like all the programming that we’re doing and then the other portion is a direct report for the commissioner through the New York State Education Department. And that’s the kind of two way conduit that offers or where we support districts in initiative that is coming out of the state education department and equally as important bringing up voice from the ground floor to help inform the Education department around decision making, policy and things like that. So it’s a different role. I’m very, very fortunate, wonderful board who supports innovation and about 10 years ago in one of my principalships I got the opportunity to start a school, a P Tech school, Pathways and Technology Early College High School. It’s a six-year program and, and that was really where I really began to become passionate around economic and workforce development, around the interconnectedness or the lack of interconnectedness of the entities that need to pull in the same direction on behalf of students if we’re going to really do this work. And that was done in kind of this micro school where we built out that model. But tremendous amount of gains and I’m sitting here today in a center that represents the scalability of that same vision. And so I know we’re going to get to talk a little bit more about that, but I’ll pause there for you. Danny Curtis Yeah, yeah. That connects a lot of dots in the lead up to the present day. That day being just less than a week out from the opening of the new career and technical patterns at iPark87 as it’s called. Could you tell me more about the center and its services and give us a view into the story behind its development? Dr. Jonah Schenker Sure. So we run a ton of different types of programming that are student facing. We have a whole other, many other divisions that are non-student facing, workbook but focusing on the student facing career and technical education. So for the most part, students come to us in their junior and senior year as part of their journey through nine through 12 in our district, so in our county, our BOCES works with eight component districts. Those are the districts in our BOCES region. And so many of those students are progressing through the 22 credits and five Regents exams as part of the graduation requirements, which I know we’re going to get to later because that’s shifting as well. And they come up to us for either AM or PM and they’re engaged in career and technical education, automotive, culinary. Revamping Vocational-Technical Education Dr. Jonah Schenker You know, we have, you know, all of the health occupations, a technology class, electrical, HVAC and go down the list, welding and, and they’re getting the technical skills. But also students are progressing through integrated academics as well. So they may be getting some math credits and science credits and English credits, et cetera and career in tech or as some, you’ll hear some people talk about VoTech or vocational tech is in the same kind of dilemma as our traditional education system where we are still very much for the most part operating in this kind of industrial model of schooling. And so we’ve been pushing on that for a decade across all of our programs. What should schools really be? What can schools be? And how do we move out of this industrial model of teaching and learning into something that’s more relevant for the students in order to prepare them for whatever next is. And so kind of going to the site here. The iPARK site is the former IBM site in Kingston, New York. So the story of that IBM, you know, headquarters, last I heard in, in this area of the facility, 6700 employees like you don’t go anywhere in Ulster county and have a conversation with somebody who didn’t move here, have an uncle or a cousin who were like worked here at the facility. Revitalizing New York’s Industrial Communities Dr. Jonah Schenker And again my, you know, like many communities in New York, especially those with those kind of single massive industries that out-migrated, they left and it bottoms out a community, an economy, hope and really has been this for decades this legacy of failure where there had been several attempts to kind of think about how to revitalize this campus. The campus was turned over and purchased to National Resources who really did an amazing job at the cleanup from an ecological standpoint and making the site safe and working through that in partnership with many entities, county government and Environmental Protection Agency, etc and about eight years ago some conversations about like let’s take a look at this and, and some early conversations and some dialogues and again the ground is not always ripe for things to grow. And so that kind of fell short and then we took a break through that little period of time known as Covid and and I had the opportunity to step into this position and rekindle those conversations and kind of went at it with a little bit of a different strategy than prior and began to get steam on this concept. Right. And a lot of that I think is about preparation, meeting, opportunity, but also really the amount of groundwork to engage with our eight districts to see the why and the what and the how through transparent conversations rooted in what’s right for students, what’s right for kids. And so you know that, that took hold and we have become what will be the anchor, you know, for this campus. The career and technical school that will be here is amazing. I was saying for a while like it’s going to be amazing but I keep reminding myself actually that today about an hour before this conversation our, we had gotten our co from the town some time back but, but our sign off from the New York Educati

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  8. 9월 22일

    The Latest on Learning: Taking Stock of the Education Headlines

    Danny Curtis joined me as we dove into some of the recent education headlines that caught our eyes to explore shifts in K–12 and higher ed. We started by discussing efforts by the Future of High School Network and the Carnegie Foundation to move away from seat-time requirements toward competency-based and work-based learning. Then we shifted to diving into one of my favorite topics—Texas’s multi-classroom teaching model from Public Impact and Opportunity Culture, which enables teachers to earn six-figure salaries without leaving the classroom, and its positive impact on both retaining veteran teachers and supporting newcomers. We then talked about the value of play-based learning, especially in early literacy, and questioned some of the labels and dichotomies that people often draw between different instructional philosophies. Sometimes there are similarities that people don’t see when you crawl underneath the proverbial hood. Rounding out the episode, we analyzed ChatGPT’s new “study mode” as a potential tool for student learning and discussed the complexities and opportunities AI brings to education. Publications Mentioned: “The Race to Redefine the High School Learning Experience Is On”, The 74 “How Some Texas Teachers are Earning Six Figures Without Leaving the Classroom”, The 74 “The Science of Reading and Play Go Hand-in-Hand. Schools Must Make It Happen.”, The 74 “Understanding Value of Learning Fuels ChatGPT’s Study Mode”, Inside Higher Ed Michael Horn Welcome to the Future of Education. Those tuning in live, we're trying something new today. We'll see how it goes. It's sort of a throwback to the past, but I'm Michael Horn. You're joining the show where we're 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 that today, thrilled to welcome back Danny Curtis who is head of all things digital for the work that I do and wears a number of other hats as well. Danny, good to see you. Danny Curtis It's great to see you too, Michael. Excited to talk some shop today. Michael Horn I'm looking forward to it as well. We'll keep an eye on viewer comments if we're able to. But I know that there's been basically, we text a fair bit. We're always in touch on different things. A few articles that have bubbled up that caught both of our eyes. I think it's fair to say that we thought let's do one of these, riff on it, catch up on some of the headlines that may be driving the school year ahead. No matter where you are at this point, schools either started or lurking for K12 students and colleges, those with traditional calendars are back to school. So this is like a hot topic right now. What's on your mind? Where should we, where should we go? I'm going to let you sort of run the show. Embracing Competency-Based Learning Danny Curtis Yeah. So the first headline to cover today is an article out of the 74: The race to Redefine Define the High School Learning Experience is On is the title. And this is one that covers the efforts of the Future of High School Network, which is a network of schools led by the Carnegie foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that are transforming how we do high school in America. And it's part of sort of a larger effort by the organization to move away from our education system based on seat time requirements towards more competency based approach. And so it gives a close up look at how this type of shift is allowing students in one Houston area district to engage in much richer work based learning through a partnership with a local hospital there. And so obviously some of your favorite themes in there. Michael, what did you take away from this story? Michael Horn Yeah, well, a few things. One, obviously we've had Tim Knowles on Class Disrupted right before the head of the Carnegie foundation and Diane's obviously on the board. So this is a group that we pay a lot of attention to. In many ways they're making up for what at the time was a big innovation and now they're cardinal sin, right, of creating seat time as the measure of learning against which students progress and so forth. What I think is interesting about this is that we've seen a lot of, I think reinvention efforts around K8 learning, right? But now high school redesign, that was sort of a theme 15 years ago with the Gates Foundation. But this seems, Danny, to me at least like really interesting for how connected it is to work based learning experiences. And you and I have both been hypothesizing a lot that sort of a career connected learning for all, we've written about this, right, is a critical thrust. And so the way that they're actually creating real partnerships seems to me really interesting. And then obviously there's a competency based element of this where they're actually looking at progress. I've curious your take on this, but I thought it was interesting that they started with the health system as that employer partner, which I think makes sense because healthcare is one of those places where there's like clear board exams, Gates, right, that like if you can pass those and have clinical hours and practicums, you can go practice. And so competencies that perhaps tie to an industry standard are maybe more likely to get liftoff, maybe more likely to get traction than say competency based or skills based hiring in a space where we don't even really know what the skills are. There's not like an agreed upon set of competencies or definitions or even how to measure them. And I guess that last thought, Danny, and then I'm curious, yours is like really exciting to see this work go through and to see work based learning pulled into the high school experience. Sort of flip that high school day. I think that's a really cool trend that I would like to see, every district in America I think. What did you take away from it? Danny Curtis Yeah, a lot of similar thoughts. I'm excited about competency based learning for a number of reasons in a number of applications, including more traditional academic pathways and what it opens up for personalized learning. But I was really excited about the use case that they chose here, the work based learning use case, because a lot more districts and states are taking the career part of college and career readiness more seriously these days and are making moves to make that happen. But the seat time requirements that are still the status quo in most places are a serious barrier to that, because in this day and age, in this technology landscape, with technology moving faster than most schools can keep up with, work based learning is sort of a requirement for true career readiness in order to have the skills that you need to be job ready, in my opinion. Shifting to that competency based approach not only creates the latitude for students to be off campus and on the job site and working, but so much of the assessment of ability that happens on the job sort of defies these traditional modes of assessment and requires more of a competency based assessment mechanism. And I agree with you. I think that the healthcare, selection of a healthcare example in particular is especially valuable because within that field there are already some of those more competency based signals baked in that you mentioned. Michael Horn So you brought up an interesting point, I think on the assessment piece, which is to say in some ways we don't have to assess like granular knowledge and skills that sit below an experience. Like to your point, if someone's working on a, in a hospital, you know, behind a desk, doing whatever it might be, allied health work of some nature, we can assess like, did you do that particular job well right. Like literally more macro, if you will, competencies which could be more widely agreed upon rather than trying to break them down into lots of granular skills and trying to figure out what transfers and whatnot. Like that gets very technocratic quickly. This seems very interesting. Like could you check someone into a health system? Could you help, you know, take their vitals in the beginning, whatever it might be? That seems like something you can measure in a much more authentic way. And it's like authentically valued as well, I would think. Danny Curtis Yeah. And one thought I have coming out of that is like when you are preparing people for these workplace competencies, the need to put everything on that 4.0 GPA scales is also reduced. And so yeah, these different types of signals and different ways of measuring that that unlocks, I think creates a lot of opportunity in these types of partnerships. Michael Horn Perfect. All right, well, let's leave that one there. What else is on your mind as we go through the carousel? And we'll link to all these in the show notes. So folks getting this as a Substack email, they can check out the original source articles as well. But go ahead, what's next on your mind? Empowering Teachers Through Mentorship Danny Curtis So the next headline we have here is how some Texas teachers are earning six figures without leaving the classroom. This is another one from The74. These salaries are kind of comprised of two pay bumps. There's a new multi-classroom teaching model where teams of classroom teachers are led by one lead teacher who has demonstrated excellent outcomes typically. And they offer coaching, planning and curriculum development support. And for that, for taking on those increased responsibilities, they receive a pretty big pay bump, $13.5K on average. And then the other source of the increased pay is a Texas state fund that awards additional state funding to districts for each of their high performing teachers. And so this one comes to mind or you know, stood out as important one to be talking about because in an education system where teacher recruitment and retention is a persistent problem year over year, it

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Interviews with the top innovators & changemakers so that you can stay on top of the trends transforming transform learning, education, and the development of talent worldwide so that all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose michaelbhorn.substack.com

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    Michael B. Horn
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    2022년 - 2025년
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    The Future of Education

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