The Future of Education Michael B. Horn

I’ll admit it. This was a pinch-me moment. Getting to interview Guy Raz—host of the top podcasts “How I Built This” and “Wow in the World” and one of the pioneers of podcasting? Count me in.
This conversation went in a bunch of unexpected directions. And that’s what’s so fun about it. After all, podcasting is all about bringing audio back and turning learning into leisure. And the question Guy and his partner Mindy Thomas asked a while back was: Why not bring kids in on the fun? Guy shared how his studio, Tinkercast, is leveraging the medium to inspire and educate the next generation of problem solvers. 
We discussed the power of audio to capture curiosities and foster imagination, how Tinkercast is doing that in and out of the classroom, and how it can help re-engage students in building needed skills at a critical time. Enjoy!
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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 human potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think about those topics today, I'm really thrilled we have Guy Raz, who is widely considered one of the pioneers of podcasting. Many of you are, I'm sure, familiar with his podcasts, whether it's, How I Built This, the kids science podcast, Wow in the World, TED Radio Hour, many more, we're going to get into all of that. Guy's also a bestselling author, and he's the co-founder of two media companies, including Built It Productions and the kids and family studio, Tinkercast, which we're going to talk about today on the show. Guy, just thank you so much for being here. I confess I'm fanboy-ing a little bit at the moment, but I'm just thrilled that you're here.
Guy Raz:
Michael, thank you for having me on and for being a fan. That's why I do what I do because, and we can talk about this a bit later, but every show, whether it's How I Built This, or Wow in the World, or The Great Creators, is I make it in the hopes that people get joy from it and value from it. So, when I meet somebody who says they're a fan, by all means, please. I mean, it means a lot to me, and I really love it and appreciate it, because most of the time, most of the week I am in this studio behind this microphone isolated from the world. I don't actually physically interact with people who are fans very often. So, thank you for saying that. 
Guy’s Journey to Podcasting 
Michael Horn:
You generally get to ask the questions, so this is a little bit of a role reversal. But I want to start there on the personal side, where you just gave us that quick entry into... Because as I said, you host a lot of podcasts. I don't think I can keep count, I don't know if you can. But I'd love you just to tell your story, because I actually don't think a lot of people hear that around how you got your start in podcasting, the shows that you're hosting now, and selfishly how you stay on top of all the work it takes to do these podcasts so well with this level of excellence.
Guy Raz:
Yeah. I started in podcasting when it was a backwater, back in 2011. At the time, I was at NPR, I had been at NPR since the beginning of my career as a reporter at NPR. I was a reporter at CNN. Most of my early career I was a war correspondent. I covered the Iraq War, I covered Israel, Palestine. I was in Gaza, I was in the West Bank, I was in Tel Aviv, I was all over the Middle East. I covered the Iraq War and Macedonia and Pakistan. I mean, that was my life. I was in and out of war zones for most of my career. I covered the military and the Pentagon, which is for many people who know How I Built This and don't know my background would be strange to imagine, but that really was my life. I was living in hotels wearing bulletproof vests, I still have them, dodging bullets and explosions, and that

There are new solutions for work and learning, but are we, as a society, open to shifting from the familiar to seize these opportunities? 
I sat down with Ryan Stowers, Executive Director of the Charles Koch Foundation, to discuss openness in the sector. We lay down a definition for openness, look at shining examples of learning innovation, and consider the risk of holding to the status quo.
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Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining us at the place 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. There are very few people that I know who exemplify that more than the Executive Director of the Charles Koch Foundation, Ryan Stowers. He's a man who's a friend and has offered a lot of wise advice over this journey for individuals of many organizations over the years. So, Ryan, great to see you. Thanks for being here on the Future of Education.
Ryan Stowers:
Thanks for having me, Michael, and thanks for all that you do.
Defining Openness as a Key Principle 
Michael Horn:
No, you bet. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while for many reasons. You all at the foundation have been working with so many entrepreneurs, educators, and employers, helping rethink, how we develop talent in this country so that all individuals can live into those ideals that I espoused up front. You know like purpose, and that businesses will also benefit in the process. So as a result, you get this bird's eye seat on all these cool journeys about how people are doing things differently from the way they've always done it. This will be the first of a series of conversations we'll get to have. I'll set the table because, over the past couple of months, I've gotten to explore a few of these principles with your grantees. The concept of mutual benefit with Scott Pulsifer of Western Governors University. And what I think you would call the broader dimensions of talents with Kathleen St. Louis Caliento of Cara Collective. I'm looking at your book that the Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Industries put out Principle Based Management. You have this other one in there called Openness - key principle. I'd love you to define what openness means to you and why it matters because it's one of those that I think on the surface, the word could mean lots of different things to lots of different people. And so it requires a little explanation.
Ryan Stowers:
Yeah, thanks, Michael. When I think about openness, I think the best way to define it is the free movement of ideas, resources, and people, and that generates knowledge, innovation, and opportunity. We think that's been critical to fueling progress in society, and we think it's going to continue to be important moving forward. So I think that's the best way to define it.
Michael Horn:
No, that's a good definition, and you couch it in that larger narrative of progress. In the context of learning and education and the workforce, what does openness sort of look like?
Ryan Stowers:
Yeah. And you and I have spent a lot of time on this. If you think of a system that right now, from my perspective, needs thoughtful consideration of openness, it's the work and learning ecosystem as we think of it. For so long, the focus has been on things like credit hours, seat time, and degrees, and it's not working. It's helping a select few get to the point where they can reach their potential, find purpose and meaning, and produce value for themselves and others in society. But for the most part, it's leaving millions behind, and it's setting a lot of people up for failure. So in this context, openness means, and you said this, you use the term rethink. Openness would lead us to consider that we haven't figured this out and that

So many teens are addicted to phones and social media. How can parents and educators help kids thrive in a digital world with unwritten rules, uncertain effects, and endless changes?
Devorah Heitner wrote her latest book, Growing Up in Public, to help adults better play that role. I sat down with her to discuss strategies for maximizing the benefits and mitigating the risks. We also talked about whether legislation around social media is a good idea and how all this technology should or shouldn’t be used in schools. As many of you know, this is a hot topic—an an important one. People have strong hot takes on both sides. Devorah takes a realistic and practical path into the conversation that I appreciated and enjoyed learning from.
Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are passionate about building a world in which all individuals can develop their full human potential and live a life of purpose. To help us do that today, we have the noted author Devorah Heitner, who is the author of the new book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. Not her first book, but this is a really important one and an important moment in time where we are starting to see both the negative and positive impacts of social media. Devorah, welcome to the Future of Education. I think no one does it better than you at helping articulate, really both sides of this complicated world into which our young people are entering. So first, thank you for writing the book and welcome.
Devorah Heitner:
Thank you. Yeah, I'm living in this world and talking to young people every day. And if anything, I think I started over a decade ago with slightly more technology, rose-colored glasses, and now I'm more like in bifocals, but that sort of befits my age, I guess.
Michael Horn:
No, I like it. I like it. I mean, as you mentioned, it's not your first book. You had Screenwise as well. Talk to me about your journey into this topic, and how you've progressed. I like that analogy from rose-tinted glasses to bifocals. But just tell the audience about your own journey into this.
Devorah’s Journey to the Work
Devorah Heitner:
I was a college professor and very connected still to higher ed. But when I was teaching college, I had my students, I had written my master's paper on Sesame Street, and I taught classes on kids media culture, and I had my 18 to 22-year-old undergrads doing research about kids and media in the community. And they would interview third graders. In our case, I was teaching in an affluent suburb of Chicago, and I had kids interview my students, interview third graders in a working-class suburb and in their own, where the school was, which was Lake Forest in Illinois. So it was very different. What they got was that third graders are using tech in really interesting ways that were very different from their own use. And that was less than a generation. These kids could have been their siblings. A nine-year-old could be a sibling to an 18-year-old.They're certainly not a full generation apart. So that was eye-opening to me. Then I became a parent in 2009 and really witnessed a moral panic around smartphones, touch screens, tablets, and schools using tech more in k twelve and how's that going? Colleges deciding if they're going to ban cell phones in the classroom. All these conversations about, is tech killing our kids. Is it helping our kids? Is it doing both and trying to really understand what is the experience of being a young person and then an emerging adult with all of this and with growing up in public, I'm really curious about especially the pressures on young people's identities, like, how do you figure out who you are when so many people are looking at you?
The benefits and drawbacks of social media 
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Michael Horn:
Yeah, it's such an interesting question because

On our latest episode of Class Disrupted, I interviewed Diane Tavenner about why America’s approach to math class isn’t adding up. We analyzed the outcomes produced under the status quo, considered the current system’s alignment with workforce needs, and proposed a personalized approach to teaching each student the math that is meaningful for their path—and doesn’t privilege Calculus over things like data science and statistics, but also doesn’t strip opportunities away from those who are accelerating in their studies. As always, subscribers can listen to the episode, watch it, or read the transcript below.
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Michael Horn:
Hey, Diane, how are you?
Diane Tavenner:
Well, I'm well, and I'm going to start with urgent priorities today. Do you have any recipes that use a lot of lemons?
Michael Horn:
Lemons, okay.
Diane Tavenner:
And it's not because we're going to make lemonade out of lemons today. It's literally after years of drought, with all the rain we've had, my lemon tree has gone insane, and I have now made curd and cakes and ice cream and ice cubes of juice. And I have run out of recipes and I still have hundreds of lemons.
Michael Horn:
Well, it sounds like you're in California. It sounds like you've had rain. It sounds like I remember why I miss California. And I will tell you, the only other two I will add to your list is preserved lemons for salads. And then, of course, there's an alcohol that you could make as well. But we won't go there today. Instead, we could think about all the ratios and all that stuff that goes into making it just right, because I know you've been wanting to talk about math and some of the things that you've been learning about how our school system thinks or perhaps doesn't think about math in relation to work. So I'd love you to start to unpack that.
Status quo K-12 math pathways 
Diane Tavenner:
Well, great, because it's much better that I talk about this with you than turn to the drink because math can make me feel like I want to do that sometimes. So I appreciate your willingness to have this conversation. And what is prompting it for me is, you know, I have thought about math for many years from sort of a K-12 educator perspective, but now I'm coming at it from this new direction where we're really thinking about careers and post secondary and what's getting me going on this topic is my observation of how important math is in careers and how that is really at odds with how people in K-12, I think, think about it. And so let me just lay something out and see if it makes sense to you, which is my experience in K -12 is there's a mindset there and it's a mindset among students and parents and teachers and counselors and kind of everyone who is in the system. We really focus on math almost exclusively in how it relates to college and specifically, like, how do I do what I need to do in math because it's a key to college admissions, essentially? And so the big thinking that ends up happening, especially in high schools, is if I can get all the way to calculus, it gives me a better chance of getting accepted to college. And an elite college at that, maybe into the major that I want. Taking the most challenging…if I can't get to college, taking the most challenging courses that I can in high school relative to what's offered, helps me get into college. Getting good enough grades in math helps in my GPA to get into college. Previously and maybe a little bit again now emerging, taking the SAT and the ACT and getting the best score I can helps me get into college. The point being, as you hear, it's all about getting into college. And as I think about my time in K-12, we almost were never talking about the value of the learning of the math. It was always this entry into college.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, it certainly matches up with my experience

Tutoring has been a favorite intervention among school systems looking to get their students back on track after the pandemic. But not all programs are created equal. Results have been uneven at best.
I sat down with the Alan Safran and AJ Gutierrez of Saga Education, a nonprofit that has been supporting schools to get tutoring right since long before the pandemic. We discussed the evolution of their model, what it will take to weave tutoring into the fabric of schools, sustaining programs after federal COVID funds are depleted, and the role of AI in the future of tutoring. As always, subscribers can listen to the podcast, watch the video, or read the transcript below.
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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 here to help us think about that are two co-founders of Saga Education. We have Alan Safran and AJ Gutierrez. Alan serves as the CEO and AJ is the Chief Policy and Public Affairs officer. But as we'll hear, Saga has been at this work of tutoring long before the pandemic made it a trendy topic. I remember meeting with both of them outside of Porter Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had a great conversation about all the things that they were learning about how you do tutoring well, how you start to think about scale and a lot of the questions that were on their minds.
So, Alan, AJ, great to see you. Thanks for coming back and educating me once more.
Alan Safran: 
Yeah, great to see you again.
AJ Gutierrez: 
Yeah, it's great to be here, too. And usually after meeting us for the first time, people don't want anything to do with us. So I'm actually surprised and excited to be here.
Saga’s founding story 
Michael Horn: 
When you reached out, I was like, yes, I need an update. I want to know what's going on, but fill our audience in first. And Alan, I'll start with you. What's the founding story behind Saga Education? Because it has an interesting origin story that is perhaps not what most people think of when they think of tutoring.
Alan Safran: 
We go back to Aristotle and Socrates thinking about individual tutorial, but a little more modern. I was Executive Director of the Match charter school in Boston. AJ was a 9th grader when I first met him at that school, and Mike Goldstein was the founder. And Mike had the idea, look, kids are coming to school like AJ and his classmates, many of them three years behind grade level. What do you do when you're a normal school with a normal schedule, with normal classrooms? You can't do it. A teacher, no matter how heroic, has a hard time differentiating in a class, say, at 9th grade, where there's an 8th grade differential between some kids coming in like six years beyond grade level and other kids coming in two years ahead. It's impossible. The burden we put on teachers.
What the expectation is for teachers to reach grade level skills is impossible. So how do you structurally address that? So Mike had the idea, let's build a dorm in our building. Bingo. Let's recruit tutors from around the country, like Teach for America recruits teachers. Let's recruit tutors. He said, what I think of the idea, I thought it was crazy. But then we worked together. We started it in 2004 and within a few years we had a reputation.
The US Department of Ed said we were in the top seven charter schools in the country. And the results for kids like AJ were remarkable. And my own story is I come from two public school teachers, so I long have had in my blood this desire to get justice for kids. It's a phrase not often used for teaching, but getting justice for kids whom the system has not provided enough for. For me, that's a big theme of my

Where did you turn for help in deciding what you wanted to do when you grew up?
For more and more students, CareerVillage.org, an online platform that connects high schoolers to advice from real-world professionals, is serving as a trusted guide in navigating their career paths. I sat down with the nonprofit’s founder, Jared Chung, to discuss how they are sourcing and delivering career advice; developing AI that enables the scale needed to address the massive need; and ensuring the reliability, transparency, and accessibility of their services through their growth and innovation. I was particularly struck by some of the intersections with the book I’m working on to help people find their next job, which you’ll be hearing more about in the coming weeks. As always, subscribers can listen or watch the conversation or read the transcript below.
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Time Topic
00:54. The story behind Career Village
03:48 Career Village’s scale and services 
09:31 How end users engage with the platform
11:25 The AI Career Coach 
16:44 User reactions of the new AI
18:59 Ensuring the quality and transparency of the AI, from source data to end product 
26:18. Building access through scale and ensuring equity
29:36. The promise of the AI Career Coach and where to learn more
Michael Horn: 
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are 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 part of that, of course, is really navigating the world and transitions from education into career and making sure that you're finding something that really helps you make progress, not just in the jobs that you hold, but in your life. And it's consistent with the purpose that you have. And to help us think about that, today we have Jared Chung. He is the founder and executive director of Careervillage.org, which we're about to hear a lot more about. So, Jared, welcome. It's great to see you.
Jared Chung:
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Michael Horn:
I'm excited to learn about what you all are doing. I know you have a number of initiatives in AI and elsewhere that are very cutting-edge. But before we get into that, just level set us all what is Careervillage.org, and what's your founding story behind it?
Jared Chung: 
Careervillage.org is a nonprofit organization based here in the United States that helps people prepare for careers. And we do that using technology. We do that using people, the power of people. And importantly, we do it at a very large scale. And the reason we focus on scale is that the scale of the need is massive. The number of people who need support, advice, guidance, and information to prepare for their first or next career move is nearly ubiquitous. So, we focus on scale. The origin story, I think that it's almost such a universal mission. Everybody finds in it something that speaks to a part of their lived experience or the communities that they're in. For me, I, as a young person, was very career-oriented because I cared about financial stability for myself, and for my family. When I was in education, I knew that I wanted to get a job after an education that was going to allow me to put food on the table. And that was pretty much my only calculus at that time. I got very lucky to have some people in my life who served as mentors for me to help me navigate my way into college, help me ask questions that I was able to get answered about careers and help me navigate my way in my first job. So, when I started my first job, I turned back and was mentoring and advising young people, volunteering with nonprofit organizations and youth development, and helping young people prepare for careers. So th