J.C. Brizard: Making a more humane education system

He kept asking what does it mean to be a student today? I said no. What does it mean to be human today? What differentiates us from the machines?

Right? I think is what is the value ad we bring? What is the human ingenuity to this work?

That’s what we have to make sure that we keep leaning on. Because the machines are going to keep iterating, getting better, behaving more humanike, taking more jobs. I’m thinking about even my own personal like I just finished last week doing all of my my nine leadership team members evaluation.

Last year took me I don’t know 10 days to go through writing them summarizing everything they done for the year etc. This year took me a day. JC, thanks so much for coming to my humble dining room which has been turned into a studio. Bit makeshift but you know we’re kind of you watched me get everything set up.

I I still feel like totally out of my element, but it’s been fun sort of learning about all the tools. So, thank you for joining. We’ve crossed paths, I feel like almost every other month.

We’re at an event together. But we usually don’t have time to sit down and really catch up usually between keynote sessions and closed door meetings with decision makers. Yeah, hope I’m hoping to use this time to to nerd out with you a little bit, pick your brain on some of the stuff that I’ve been mulling over.

Why don’t you just help us get started by telling us about who you are and how you got to help the helm of digital promise, one of the leading education nonprofits in the country? I I agree. We have to make time for these kinds of conversations because we tend to be always running from one place one thing to another and the work really requires a kind of u sort of retrospective conversation reflection I think for us to actually move move forward.

So again, impressive sort of setup you have you have here. You know, having a photography in my past. So I’m quite impressed with with the setup you have here.

So it’s been it’s been a while in this business in this work. Not one I ever intended to to be a part of. My parents were teachers.

My mom was a secondary school teacher. My dad was a school principal in Haiti. And I fell into teaching and my mom convinced me when New York City was desperate for teachers.

One August they were short like 2500 teachers for the beginning of school. Imagine that mid August and she goes give it a shot. You know stay for a year too while you get you find your way.

That was more than 35 years ago that I went to teach in New York City public schools and the first place I was assigned was a high school in Queens and I got displaced, you know, last in first out. And then they reassign me to Riker’s Island to teach. I I take some time to talk about this because it is has been the foundation frankly for my thinking.

So I got to Riker’s and I met a young man who looked just like me. I was barely 22. And he was 19 years of age my physical size etc. But couldn’t do read, couldn’t do basic math, basic computation.

And I was hired as a chemistry teacher and you know so we ended up doing math and basic science. And and make a long story short, and when I write my book, that book is going to called be called the sandwich because there’s a story there which I’m not going to give away. But this young man in many ways changed my life.

And you know, brought a lot of joy for me in a place that terrified me cuz I looked just like them. I grew a mustache and a beard, wore tie so I wouldn’t be mistaken for an inmate. I said I had to make a difference in the lives of a lot of young people because in one semester these young men went from doing basic computation to algebra.

Really really smart smart kid and we lost a mathematician I think. So I’ve been I went to a middle school in Bushwick Brooklyn. Taught for four years there.

I went to a high school became principal at that high school and it just kept moving up the system. And I tell people that I applied for two jobs initially. One of being teacher, one of being superintendent of schools in Rochester, New York.

So, 22 years in New York City, never applied for anything and just kept getting offers to do things differently. I was very lucky. I had amazing mentors in New York who taught me, who God railed me into making good decisions for myself.

So, principal, head of high schools, regional superintendent where I learned elementary schools. I knew nothing about those in in those days. Then went to Rochester as a superintendent.

Did Chicago as a superintendent? There’s a book called The Prize. Chicago public schools.

Yes. There’s a book called The Prize by Del Rosikov that talks about the Zuckerberg 100 million in Newark. I’m on page 99 to 101.

I don’t know if you know this, Alex. I was supposed to go to Newark as superintendent, but Chicago I guess manual convinced me to come to Chicago instead. So I I did make friends with Cy Booker when that happened.

I I I like I love him dearly. I think he’s an amazing leader. But I was meeting with Corey on a regular basis about just entry into into Chicago.

So in fast forward leave Chicago College Board for a while as an adviser, then joined joined the Gates Foundation. Forgot you were at Gates. Yes.

Loved my time there nearly four years. In fact, the only reason I left the Gates Foundation was because I got tired of traveling back and forth to Seattle. I I still tell people I was was traveling to work and for work which is not the ideal thing to do in life but I I I love my time there and from there I came into digital promise and it’s been an amazing transition and I love this organization and what it does.

Were you were you traveling from New York or from No, so I moved to California because my wife took a job at the Chen Zuckerberg initiative. And then I was init I was consulting at the time and I was on the red eye every Sunday night go to the east coast. I had portfolio work in Nashville in in Illinois and in Connecticut just took me on the east coast.

And I quickly found out to be not not conducive frankly to family life. And then yeah I left that. Yeah.

And you’re in the the valley, right? Like Menlo Park or Palo Alto. I live in Los Altos.

Loss. I used to live in Menllo. So we moved to the peninsula because again CI in those days was in Palo Alto then moved to Edward City.

So California here we came. And I love living in this state. And my wife was like do you mind moving to California?

And I said no it’s a bucket list thing man. Said like I’d love to live in California. So I’ve been here for eight years here in beautiful state of California.

I’m pretty close actually. I think I’m like almost coming on 10 maybe nine and a half. But also I grew up east coast and just and yes it was definitely a bucket list for me but I just was going back and forth to the east coast this past week.

It’s it’s hard enough. I do it like once every two months or something like that. I can’t imagine multiple times a month.

Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Absolutely not. Yes. That was helpful.

I don’t always ask people put people on the spot to kind of walk through their resume. I think it’s it’s important grounding because what I’m really interested in discussing with you is sort of this experience that you’ve had as all these issues that in your various roles and it’s worth for our audience Chicago public schools is what third biggest district in the country. It was I think Miami just passed it.

Miami date. It it was the third biggest about 420,000 when I was there. Okay.

Okay. I think that’s the total number of K-12 students in Arkansas or something. One of the maybe North Dakota.

Yeah. I used to I used to say that we had more dropouts in New York City than most systems had kids, right? Well, because New York is a million.

Yes. Yes. You’ve been in the education space, you know, as long as anybody and and all of a sudden now people who have never really thought about education are talking about the future of work and the skills and what should education look like and I’m curious how much of it and obviously AI is driving a lot of that and I’m curious how much of that is are you like yeah like this is what we’ve been talking about and how much of it is truly like novel yeah just from your vantage point like how have you reacted to sort of the this side moment and you know the excite excitement, but also sort of just like the the noise.

Yeah, it’s it’s a great question, Alex. You know, I I did a talk this morning and describe dinner I had with a bunch of my students two weeks ago in Brooklyn. About 40 of my kids join me in Brooklyn.

We all had dinner. And these were my kids in my class, my physics class, and we talked about really where they are today. And what we talked about and what I realized in their desri description of my work as a teacher as a as a principal was that I laid the foundation for them for their future.

One told me that every decision he makes now he thinks about what would Brisad say. What would they have said if I did this? So you never realize the kind of impact you have.

And when you’re looking at everything we talk about today about the future of work, talking about redefining success, it goes back to what many of us have done, and I’m not putting myself on the pedestal here, but many of us have done for for eons, right? Because we know that education wasn’t just about academic proficiency. It really was about lifelong outcomes for young people.

And and I think even the AI revolution is a latest iteration of pushing us there. So let me qualify that. When I became a principal and that story by the way is still on the web.

If you Google chief information officer magazine Brisard you’ll find an article called the school grows in Brooklyn was published in 2001. It is still on the web. It talks about the reform and redesign of George Westinghouse High School.

A school that used to be called Hip Hop High because Jay-Z Buster Rhymes look Kim Biggie all went to that school before my time. We qualify that because Jay-Z is about my age. But when you when you I was I was a teacher became principal of that school but the redesign of the school is is chronicled in this article by Sher Benson about a school moving from oldfashioned vocational education to career tech or frankly technology based work.

Again, AI was not part of our verbiage, but certainly we talked about technology enabled education and the discussions we have about the future of work, what technology is doing to the future of work. That was part of our conversation. And I remember my first PTA meeting in the redesign of the school.

I was warned they’re coming for you. Be careful because I was closing down certain programs in school like jewelry making for example, right? And I walked in there with the Daily News, the New York Post, the New York Times, all the newspapers in New York City again before online ads all been at the same time.

And I asked the the the all the parents and some teachers were in the audience, can you help me find a job here for jewelry makers? There were none, but there was job for CCNA, for CCNP, for all the networking technologies, etc. And we’re looking to create these kinds of programs in the school to really give kids a future. One that scaffolded to postsecary and a postsecary to work.

I didn’t fully appreciate and understand the non-academic importance. When you look at the portrait for of for of graduate right now, you see these things showing up. Didn’t fully appreciate that.

But at the same time, we knew we had to put kids on a path toward a meaningful life and a meaningful career in a dead and esoteric job. One that was being taken over by technology, right? Most costume jewelry is made by tech.

I mean very few handmade things these days right we saw it coming so we prepared we’re prepared for that so for me this is the same discussion slightly iterated or the latest technology right that we keep having about really redefining success and future to go beyond proficiency to think about what is it that we want kids to be able to do and and thrive in 20 years and 10 years that was always part of our discussion and conversation when I was a te teacher when I was a principal Yeah, this this grounding is important because I think there is one you tell me but my my sense is that there’s something different between 2001 or let’s say 2007 with like mobile 2013 with like sort of cloud and big data and ML like 2014 2015 education leaders were long talking about you know what is the portrait of a graduate you know what does school transformation look like we heard a lot about 21st century skills. I think it was it’s interesting, right? Like maybe we we didn’t know what we were really talking about.

It turns out we were talking about AI, right? This 21st century skills. My sense is most people were not at the dinner table having conversations about school transformation.

And today I’ I’d wager that most dinner tables, parents, teachers, superintendent, everybody’s having a conversation about this because they’re touching it. They’re feeling it. And I I have mixed feelings about what that means.

It’s exciting that this is now getting people’s attention. But it’s also there is a lot of hype and whether we’re in a bubble, I don’t know. That’s that’s a separate discussion.

But there’s a lot of hype to sift through. And I’m curious if you think like is it is it helpful to have more attention? Or does it actually make it more complicated, confusing to get to the sort of like the clear so what?

What are we supposed to do about it? No, it’s always to have in my opinion it’s always good to have more attention but cutting through the noise I think becomes more of the challenge right there’s a reason I think you’re seeing or hearing this discussion at every dinner table is in the past I’m thinking back to 2001 the kids I was serving in Brooklyn mostly black brown poor kids were the ones many of us were worried about the middle class or upper income kids they were in a river to postsecary in careers that were pretty solid and that was going be around for a while. But now when you look so the the thing about AI and I agree it is a similar conversation but an accelerated one.

It’s really is an exponential growth in technology. So we argue AI has been around in education since 1975. But when you look at the the speed at which it is moving now it is accelerate is exponential.

And now we see it’s going to impact my kids, right? And and my kids go to a Silicon Valley school, right? That’s attended by many Google employees in their in their children.

So these are the kids what my kids are surrounded by, right? But now I think a lot of parents, even the middle and upper income parents are seeing the possibility that the jobs that they have going to disappear or will change fundamentally change, you know. I mean there’s a guy named Andrew McAfee from he was to be at MIT.

He talks about this idea they coming for our jobs. He showed an an article written for the Wall Street Journal that was written by an algorithm and he said and I quote wait till this algorithm wins a puliter. So we seeing that even the white collar positions jobs have the potential to disappear.

So many parents are worried about the future. So when you look at the kinds of portrait, the kinds of things many of us are talking about now, we didn’t fully understand them, but now we much more understand now because again the school of psychology is always known about this. But now the school of education is catching up with the school of psycho.

They’re talking to each other. We know we have to develop in young people the kind of skills and mindset and competencies that allows them to change jobs, allows them to grow with their job, that allows them to see a future perhaps we don’t see today. And and they will not be an esoteric den job if we build those skills.

The the hard skills are important but we understand now those kinds of companies and please don’t call them soft skills because they’re the ones who beget success. Those are the skills we have to teach for successful people. Well, to give you a quick example, when I got first got the digital promise, I put a a Google sheet on the screen and I told my leadership team and I have high-end sort of I mean R1 institution, MIT, Stanford graduates on my leadership, PhDs, etc. And I asked them each to write down three things that were instrumental to their success.

And I gave him 15 minutes and I came back. No one listed their academic credential. Oh.

And I said, why is that? Right. They talked about, can you give examples of some of the things I listed?

They talked about curiosity, tenacity. They talked about being able to extrapolate from content, be able to to navigate a room, right? All the stuff we used to call soft skills, right?

They didn’t even notice they were doing that, but they’re articulating the kinds of stuff you now see in a portrait. Yes, the portrait does include academic and cognitive development. But now we’re beginning to fully appreciate and understand, but has always begotten success are the kinds of skills that require you to invent the job, grow the job, right?

The kind of leadership, tenacity, stuff that we know is critical for for success, now we know needs to be part of the curriculum, needs to be part of the pedagogical practice and and development. A lot of middle- class parents find ways of giving their children that kind of experience. My three boys just came back from three and a half weeks of sleepa away camp in upstate New York.

My middle guy who’s I know yeah he’s interesting but he’s a brilliant kid. Sunglasses, jacket and tie speaking in front of 400 people. He’s 13 years old.

That’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about, right? A lot I know he’ll be successful because he can navigate that kind of environment. So that’s why I think you’re seeing this discussion at dinner table and folks are worried.

Some have dystopian views of AI because of that. Some are trying to stop it. You’re not going to stop it.

It’s here. It’s going to move. So elevate the pedigogy, elevate the work that we do in schools to really prepare young people future.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean I will say that I’ve had conversations with you know folks at some of the companies that we you know talk to and you know senior executives who can pick up a phone and like basically guaranteed that their kid is at the top of the list you know the top of the stack of resumes like yeah my son looking for a job for 6 months computer science degree from Berkeley his friends are all struggling to find jobs and this is this is what like Derek Thompson’s been covering right like the the record high unemployment rate among new college grads paradoxically in especially in like computer science and physics anthropology is always number one those poor anthropologists but computer science is that is surprising to people because we you know my my parents are both immigrants you know Lebanese immigrants so it’s like doctor lawyer maybe engineer and god help you man I was getting my political science degree my mom was like Oh, pre-law. Pre-law.

And then after I she she knew that I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. She’s like, "Well, you can still get your PhD." I was like, "What are we going to do with the PhD?" She’s like, "It’s just important to have. You know, you have this degree." And and that’s because for what, like 100 years, there was this period where, you know, having credentials and like specific domain expertise was that differentiating skill that companies were looking for.

And so now AI comes into the language models specifically sort of the sort of like general purpose, not AGI, but sort of general purpose tools. And so a lot of the expertise that we thought would sort of differentiate our kids and put them on a path to be able to command value in the labor market and people sometimes push back and say education the purpose of education isn’t just getting a job which I completely agree with. But that is really top of mind.

I mean if you’re a parent you do care. There’s all these secondary things that you really should be and and are concerned with. But the first thing that you will say is like I want to make sure my kid as you said is able to have a a job and have dignity and have the and and you mentioned the ability to change jobs which is really interesting because like this idea of agency is important right if you’re just really good at pushing the button or using the tool but you don’t have that transferability like that’s I think that’s part of this whole like idea of like dignity and thriving that goes beyond just getting a job.

So so so AI can is is increasingly going to be able to do maybe not the jobs but the tasks. It is really good at writing code. It is really good at writing you know grant proposals and pitch emails and doing like backend database integrations.

My husband actually just did this 20 hours and he used lovable. He never written a line of code in his life and he just like vibe coded this like Tinder app for for venture capital. So now he just like swipes through his his companies and he finds a company he likes.

He clicks on it, it autopopulates. I think these Apollo and like Affinity so it autoop populates their their CRM. It pulls a scrapes does a Google search scrapes all the relevant information.

I qualifies it, you know, and he’s like you can buy this tool for like $12,000 a year. I think there’s lots of stories. You’re probably seeing stories in climbing.

There’s lots of stories in classrooms. You know, those stories are starting to people are starting to come across that more and more. And if you’re astute, your mind immediately goes to like this is just the beginning.

How how old is your oldest? 24. And the youngest is nine.

Nine. Okay. So I mean even your 24 year old, you know, you know, six, seven years from now, they’re still in the early part of their career.

We’ve had AI for what, like three three years now, like LLM sort of in the general public. How do you, so how do you think about that trajectory? I mean, like we’ve seen a lot of change, but there’s a lot more to come.

Like, how do you how do we sort of have a conversation that’s coherent given the uncertainty? It’s funny. I spent some time with a Boston College professor in upstate New York gosh two weeks ago week and a half ago and we’re talking about this and he kept asking what does it mean to be a student today?

I said no what does it mean to be human today? How do we define what differentiates us from the machines? Right?

I think is the thing we have to keep thinking about. What is what is the value add we bring? What is the human ingenuity to this work?

That’s what we have to make sure that we keep leaning on. Because the machines are going to keep iterating, iterating, getting better, behaving more humanlike, taking more jobs and changing jobs. I’m thinking about even my own personal like I just finished last week doing all of my my nine leadership team members evaluation.

Last year took last year took me I don’t know 10 days to go through writing them, summarizing everything they done for the year, etc. this year took me a day because I was using a tool an AI tool to help me with a summary with a collecting of data from my from my archives right because I keep we we meet once a month twice a month and I keep notes I didn’t have to do mine all of them yes I I had to be in the middle make sure that it was accurate but my work was made hugely easy or easier compared to that so you think about everything else that’s happening look I’m a commercial pilot I can tell you Machine learning has been part of my world for a very long time. I fly a plane that can land itself, right? I mean, not a 740, 757 or 737, a Cirrus, right?

A small four-seater. It’s pretty fast for a four-seater, but that’s been part of my world now for years. And I remember when I moved from analog to digital and two giant iPads and I’m flying a plane at, I don’t know, 200 250 mph.

It’s amazing. So it’s going to keep doing make keep making our world safer as we do that. The question of what it means for that kind of lifelong understanding how we keep making sure not just reinventing ourselves but making sure we understand what it is to be human that differentiates us from the work.

Do we not become afraid of the technology that we embrace it as a tool to support us? That is the challenge. I used to show educators Andrew McAfee’s videos they come in for our jobs and I would say this is like 12 13 years ago say are you scared or are you excited and of course medium will say we can’t we struggle with basic math proficiency that is scary but at the same time I think what’s been happening which is why I think folks are even more afraid of the the acceleration of the tech is there the acceleration of the education pedigogy is not keeping up and That’s terrifying.

The car I drive, I mean, I I own a I own a self-driving car. Not a Whimo, but a self-driving car. This thing took me home.

I wasn’t feeling well. 270 Mi from central California back home. I remember this story.

You were like, it you’re at like a conference and you were like atund like four degree fever or something crazy. Yes. It was was a League of Innovative Schools.

I had a high fever. Wasn’t 100 before. I’d go to a hospital for sure.

And I had to get home and I pressed summons. The car came to me and I got in the car and I pressed. Yes, I had to stay awake and make sure that I was an integral part of the of the journey, but it took me home 270 miles.

So I mean it’s here. The world is here. What is what it means frankly for what we do and how we think about the future of work or the present of work, how we think about P12 and P16 work.

All that becomes part of the way we have to really not just reinvent but accelerate the changes in education to catch up to what is happening in technology or as injury says we’re going to leave a whole population of people behind. And that’s what I I worry about worry about most. You haven’t really what what I haven’t heard from you is this idea that like well what we really need to do is make sure the kids are all using AI.

And I’m not not to say that you don’t believe that because you’ve also said you can’t ignore the technology, but you’re talking about critical thinking. You’re talking about I like this idea of like hard durable skills as opposed to soft skills. You know the communicator just like sort of problem solve.

I think about like Thomas’s example this this vibe coding app that he built. It’s there’s a lot of troubleshooting and problem solving and you know agency built into that. And I would guess that he would say this idea of like agency comes up if he were to if he were to be asked like sort of like what’s been most important in my role in my career.

Folks outside of education might say well yeah it duh I mean like these things all are all important. Our school teaching and centering critical thinking in curriculum like what what does it look like today if you could just paint a picture? Yeah.

I mean that’s that’s the child I think NCLB no child left behind in many ways we know now the curriculum and so many of us are fixated on reading and math proficiency while we need to really quickly evolve to both the definition of success right that’s a big part of the challenge we’re still trying to catch up to 1975 and and we need to be you know 2035 frankly that’s part part of the work that we need we need to do in education when when you look at the work first of Well, and and that and I and I professors on a regular basis, education is human development. You can’t remove the human in the loop to be part of the interaction. I’m watching these schools trying to replace folks with AI, etc. That’s going to be a a dangerous and I’m hoping a failed experiment, right?

Because you can’t outsource the education work. So I argue that every system or every school needs to have a coherent instructional system. How are you thinking about curriculum pedagogical practice or instruction assessment being embedded in pedigogy and that loop remains and how do you thinking about ubiquitous learning what’s happening at home and outside the school and within school I think the four walls of a school are really designed to be the socializing aspect of education.

And I said this nearly a decade ago in Aspen at the Aspen Institute and people were like smiling and laughing at me. I’m like now it’s coming. I mean the physical building becomes a place for socialization.

Education is everywhere. One we have to capture that learning. I think AI can help us actually do that.

We need to understand how technology captured the learning in the sense of be able to measure well or recognize the learning right. Because the kids who are learning outside the school that is not recognized. We think sitting for a three-hour test is the way to do that, which is nonsense, right?

We also understand that there is no such thing as neurotypical people. We’re all neurodeiverse. Todd Rose taught us that, right?

With his book, The End of Average. Yet everything is built around the average person. The three-hour test, a 40-minute period, that needs to completely be abolished.

The Carnegie Foundation for the advisual teaching is abolishing the Carnegie unit which since 1906 has conflated time in learning right so I think it’s an amazing thing so when you look at the portrait of a graduate right now there states who are pushing this across the state and look at the portrait look what it says yes it’s academic cognitive but you see a lot of other stuff in there that is sometimes referred to as a doable skills also the doable skills framework I love but there’s too many of them right there It’s like says a wheel and it’s like there’s way too many. But what I’m talking about, they they need to be scientifically based into the definition. We have a definition of powerful learning at digital promise that lists some of the key things like curiosity, agency, etc. But every word you find in that definition is scientifically linked to the learning sciences.

It is not something someone invented. It is part of what we know about about neuroscience. So in so when you think about coherent instructional system one baking this idea of the portrait one that looks at the non-academic and the academic right then you can begin to understand the role of AI and technology in enabling that to actually happen but the coherent system needs to be first and foremost the I mean just name two school systems who do an amazing job of of maybe there’s three I can name who are doing an amazing job of integrating the portrait into the every single day Tadega County Alabama is one, right?

Fyet County in Pennsylvania is is another. There’s a few Pennsylvania districts who are doing this. One has this thing called the portrait of a Talibet.

It’s a dog, right? But when you walk into that school or the school system or the schools, every child knows what that is and what it means. If you ask them, Alex, show me how tenacity they show up in this art class.

They will tell you. In Tallaladega, they they get so granular. I can tell you what this looks like Monday morning 9:00 a.m.

Fourth grade math class. It is embedded in the pedigogy in the curriculum in the units of study. Teachers own it.

Kids own it. Right? It is not the superintendent.

She did her job. So my point very simple is that when you look at what we need to do, it needs to show up in a granular way in the fabric of schools to prepare kids for a future that we don’t really understand yet what’s going to happen. I did walk into a school into a school a year ago I won’t name where where one of the pathways was truck driving.

I walked out with with like a like pain in my stomach. I’m like that job will disappear in about four years. So these are high school kids.

What are you preparing them for? So the idea of making sure that we’re preparing young people to be malleable to to to really move and change and grow and navigate that is the work for us in education. And this idea of being granular I think is just alludes to it’s easier said than done you know actually and you were at Chicago public schools I like so at New York City is 100,000 teachers so CPS is probably what 40,000 about 28,000 teachers 28,000 is a big human machine to to move.

And so I think part of why we cling to assessments and specific standards and you know learning outcomes you know subject by subject is this that it feels like the one thing that we can measure and you know we also have just gone through this period of session with data. I think for good reason it’s important to have data but it’s hard to think about data collection for something like critical thinking. Not impossible, but it’s not something that’s just intuitively going to happen without either a carrot or a stick.

And so with with Tallaladega, like what what was the driver that went from, you know, zero to, you know, fourth period, you know, 7, you know, 8 8:30 a.m. The student could tell you where tenacity is showing up. So, so the driver was not the summitative state assessment, whether it be smarter, balance, or park.

That was not a driver to making this happen. It was when you look at the design of the portrait. And it’s done typically with community with teachers with students at the table design what they want the portrait to be.

Just in the design process, you create agency and ownership of the work. So when you look at tadab there was a deliberate three-year process of integration that really involved the teachers and the students in really the design of the units of study. So that kind so it’s not you go slow to go fast basically right it can’t be a mandate to say you must do this but you involve people so they understand why this is so critical and important what what is frustrating many educators is that we have not had the same investment in assessment.

So this is where when you look at the conditions for powerful learning, it can’t be put on the heads of teachers or principles or for that matter even the superintendent. Right? So there is a as as Michael Fulen described the outside inside the inside outside story of the three stories of school reform.

Where is the state house? Yes, the feds have a role. This is where perhaps I disagree with our our secretary of education.

The feds have a role in this. The states have a bigger role in this in terms of setting the conditions for success. You think about the investment in assessment.

We have we’ve made some investment in curriculum like HQIM high quality instructional materials. We’ve made investments in standards and we did with the common core state standards. We have not had the same requisite investment in assessment.

We we so we have a myopic measuring tool against something we know is critical and important. But at the same time when you look at ETSS and their work with Carnegie and and others they are looking to this right now. Kindly just launched this high school redesign process, right?

And when you look at the work they’re trying to do is to go back to the pivot, the fulcrum of education reform, which I think is the high school, and come back to what we have failed to scale and begin to remove the constraints, right? Let me give you a quick story, Alex. When I was at high schools in New York City, I I kept staring at the regulation and to get a a Carnegie credit in New York, Carnegie unit in New York City, New York State, you have to meet two criteria, mastery of content and seat time.

So I call the commissioner’s office and I say, "What if you earn a failure?" Meaning you come to school every single day or you have minimum attendance and you fail the class. Do you have to sit for the class again or could you just demonstrate mastery? Is of course you can just demonstrate mastery.

So I ran up to to Joel Klein’s office in in like look what I just discovered and everybody around him Joel of course I love Joel he was bullish like yes let’s go do this but everybody was like slow down do you know what this means if you do this like tell me I said summer school jobs etc are going to be lost so the bureaucracy clamp down on innovation thereby not creating the conditions of that kind of powerful learning again maybe I’m stretching this a bit but when you think about the role of the system in in creating those conditions investment that we have to make in assessment the feds can do this with NSF and I let’s get next generation assessments right now assessment is a thing it’s a place it’s an event it does not really measure really learning sorry one last quick quick story my 13-year-old two years ago blew up math you know did really well in mathematics last year it tanked like what the hell happened you know he goes oh you mean that test I don’t care about that thing you know he never took the assessment seriously because he saw no value in it right so if we change that then we have a chance and AI can actually help us get there your your anecdote about you know all the disruption that would have to happen in that school system to make even just like just one change not all the change but even just like one change so this is the challenge of school transformation is it’s like there’s 14,000 school districts in the US there’s some states that can be quite impactful top down many states like you know in Ohio and Michigan and I won’t throw anymore on the bus but I can say in Ohio Michigan for sure it’s it is not top down Colorado same thing right like there’s there are mechanisms the state can use and standards all these things but even with standards right like Ohio created you know computer science standards who I would say like mixed effective forous going district by district and each district has its own context this is really really And this is why I was talking to somebody at one of the big you know elite philanthropy consultancies and I didn’t realize this but actually like K-12 philanthropy has decreased over the last 10 years and I was like well like what’s behind that? I mean the the need is more important than ever and they’re like yeah but these funders they’ve been funding school transformation and they’re like 10 years later they’re seeing you know maybe at best you could call it stagnant. I think actually the NAPE score suggested it’s even starting to trend in the wrong direction and there’s this sense of like well we just can’t this is this is an impossible task.

Let’s focus on something where we can actually move the needle which brings us around back to this whole conversation with the dinner table because I’m curious about how we can I think our orgs do this really well. This is why we sort of are are such kindred spirits both you and I but also AID and digital promise. You know our our readiness framework just sort of like you know give you some accolades like we really started with digital promise portrait of a graduate and your AI literacy framework but you had the you had the portrait of a graduate that underpinned it wasn’t just about okay what do we do with this AI thing it was holistic I mean I’m rather than poses a question I don’t want to make it a loaded question I have a perspective so maybe you can just refine it for me or maybe give me some feedback.

So my my theory is people are having conversations about AI at the dinner table. They have a lot of concern about work and the future of careers. There’s other stuff that they should be concerned about.

AI companions and deep fakes might start to get up there. Not it’s not quite there yet, but it will. But jobs and careers, that is really what parents are asking about.

How do we use this moment to, you know, while jobs are not the only point of school? You can actually justify doubling down on all of the the durable skills, the human advantage that you’re talking about. We can now directly connect that to success postsecary and success in your career because these are now one and the same.

Companies are are not going to pay you if you have some if you have a skill that AI can do. They’re going to be looking for what do you add? What is the value that you add as a human?

How can we sort of like basically harness that excitement, that energy towards moving the needle on systems change and like bringing in some of the people that maybe weren’t showing up to the schoolboard meetings, but now actually, you know what, they might come and and the question is like what how do we enlist them? Like how do we enlist parents and maybe even policy makers that are wondering whether this is a sort of a legacy building moment for them? Yeah.

So what you’re describing is a level of frustration amongst parents and amongst funders etc. But let me start with the first thing you push around funders and as a former funer we need to take some responsibility for what we what funders are frustrated with meaning funders taking some responsibility. One thing I heard very clearly at Gates as I travel my communities and my portfolio was called the P16 community investment team. So we’re much more systems, design systems change and we had a group tell us you guys fund programs then you expect systems change.

That is so many of us in the funding world look for these u u magic elixir, these silver bullets or these one thing that will change these technocratic solutions to very complex problems and challenges right we have to take a step back and say really what are we what what were we funding to support the kind of transformation so there is some level of responsibility on the part of funders as well for the frustration but the frustration is real and I completely agree and this is where perhaps Linda Mcben and I align that trillions have been spent on education in the past x number of years without the results for it Michael Finan’s about to publish a book 50 years of education reform and we’ve not moved the needle and the question is first of all what needle are we talking about that’s a part of problem too how do we define success we don’t have a good definition of success and there are lots of reasons but I I met with the Lego team in in Denmark and they asked me to talk about US education and the bulcanization that we see in this country in Chicago is a perfect example of bulcanization, right? Where and that was our push. We can show this in Philadelphia in Chicago.

I can show you two kids to different parts of the city. Vastly different outcomes based on traditional measures. And we know that has to do very often with the resource allocation.

I don’t mean money, but quality of teachers, quality of curriculum, quality quality of of dollars coming into a system. I can show you in Chicago when I got there, chemistry one in one part of the city was not chemistry one the other part of the city. Yes, standards changed that.

So you can move a large system. It requires real strategy, not firefighting. We’re taking a look at even if a state Yeah, I’m a big fan of Ohio.

Love that state chief. And my my good friend in in Utah just retired, Sydney Dixon, he’s another powerhouse. When you look at these kinds of states who have a clear sort of in they understand what we call strategic agility.

How do you actually move up and down the system and pull the right levers to get to get things done without forcing just a top down initiative. So it’s possible. Joel Klein demonstrated in New York City.

You may not like what he did but he moved that battleship with a paddle. He made it happen. It can happen.

It can work. But it requires deliberate action and deliberate strategy. To to the other parts I think and I’m losing my my my train here but the second part of your of your push around the table parents etc. connecting connecting the the this like new wave of interest in the future of work.

Yes. To creating more of the conditions for the good exemplars that you’ve shared because there’s lots of different people behind it. Like is there like a a big sort of public awareness campaign or like like and who matters to this because you know most people would say well I don’t know a superintendent that I could talk to like who’s impactful and sort of like pushing schools in the direction that you’re describing.

It’s that’s a great point. You know, I think that’s missing right now, frankly, in America, right? So, like, who’s the voice?

Who are the voices of this conversation, especially given the fact that the feds are looking to to the to the evolution saying that we no longer own this, the states need to own this. It is a is we’re at a critical inflection point in education in this country where things are moving faster than we we are keeping up with without that coherent and cogent voice. Again may not like on Duncan or what happened to the top etc. But there was clear clear voice coming out of Washington, right?

We don’t have that right now and we need that desperately. When when when people tell me they are frustrated with public education and looking for alternatives, right? I mean the vast majority of parents in this country go to public education, right?

They can’t afford to go elsewhere. So it is still the place to make the changes. That can be that can be happening.

And I know groups like ASA, the Association for American School Superintendent are trying to figure out we I was part of a group that helped divine design their new sort of framework around education. So all that requires leadership in terms really articulating the next framework that we need to worry about and that framework needs to take a look at the granular work of curriculum of instruction of pedigogy leaning on the portrait of a graduate that really builds a human ingenuity in the work that embraces technology. It helps us understand the role of AI in education, right?

Without outsourcing our work to the machines, right? But it requires that kind of deliberate understanding of the major levers we have not pulled, investment and assessment, redefining success, the redefining and accountability framework, which right now is very myopic, right? When I was in Rochester, New York as a superintendent, my blue rib, my only blue ribbon school, my best school in the city, World of Inquiry School number 58, right, was an EL school, expeditionary learning school.

They focus a lot on what we call now the portrait. Their reading and math scores were above 90 percentile proficients for the entire school, 78% poverty. They didn’t focus on the test.

They focused on on on developing the capacity of young people. I watched the fourth grader lead morning meeting for the entire school. You walk out there, you’re crying because you see kid that old, you know, 10-year-old leading 4 500 people in conversation, right?

That does not come from focusing on just reading a math proficiency is building the kind of human ingenuity I’m talking about. So we know how to do this. The question is how can we execute on that at scale?

That is the challenge for us. Organization is very focused on the grassroots and sort of like building that like the field game as it were. And what I keep hearing I’m hearing you center leadership and I and I have to say like that there is it’s not that it’s missing.

There’s there are a lot of amazing leaders out there. I think what’s missing is AI is so novel and it’s been gatekept. I mean when I started AI when I when I founded AID six years ago, six and a half years ago, there are some funders who quized me.

They were like ask me like technical questions which I actually I got one wrong it was really embarrassing and that has been the vibe you know it’s like well this is really this is for the technologists like we’re gonna figure this out and even frankly the biggest AI company some of the biggest AI companies like this this laser focus on AGI it’s kind of like we don’t even have to worry about sort of like these interim challenges because we’re going to this other place it’s so you can’t even this is kind of the the rhetoric it’s like you can’t really even imagine what it’s going to be like you have to take our word for it and it’s very chilling if you’re a school leader and you you want to take action but you feel like you don’t have the depth. I don’t know that we’ve quite even crack the code on like how do you equip because a superintendent can’t sit is not going to be able to sit through 20 or 30 hours of PD. A small number might be able to but most will not.

How do we cultivate that next generation of leaders who who understand this is a legacy once in a generation moment. This is the thing you’re going to be telling your grandkids about. They have that desire but they feel frozen in terms of well I don’t feel like I am equipped to dictate what to do and then so you lean on these you know tool providers who have lots of ideas about what you should be doing but there’s not necessarily it’s very very different from what you’re describing where yeah where do we start so so I don’t want to rely on the next generation of leaders we don’t have the the the luxury because the world is changing too quickly we have a cad of leaders yes we have many good ones but we have folks not picking up the ball And and I said this to the secretary that even the state strategy there’s some amazing state chiefs and we name some right Ohio, Utah, etc. But the vast majority the well the majority of states are compliance machines they’re not innovation machines and how do we change that?

We have a casual leaders now. We’ve got to push to understand and or we need to provide the kind of support to the systems to catch up and move quickly otherwise the folks who are frustrated with public education are going to find ways to bypass teachers to bypass schools right and that I think is going to be a disaster for many of our kids especially the kids who don’t have access to these places or to be left behind which is going to create the kinds of issues this the sort of moral fabric of of our country will continue to to decline, right? That is part of my worry that what you’re seeing in many parts of the world right now around this leaning toward fascism is because many of these folks do not have access to economic mobility.

So they’re angry. Andrew McAfee predicted this back 13 years ago where he compared two white guys. One is a blueco collar truck driver, one is a white collar Silicon Valley tech person, right?

One is thriving and one is tanking. We’ve got to worry about with the future of work. We have to worry about making sure the access is not just around race lines.

It’s around economic lines, right? Rural Ohio, rural Pennsylvania, rural Alabama is as important as what’s happening in Manhattan, New York, right? So we’ve got to make sure that our systems are prepared for this and the leaders we have right now.

We’ve got to push them and make it happen. Sometimes it requires the kind of work you do on even convenings or working with regions which I think frankly might be the solution. How do you take a regional cluster of leaders and build a capacity to really understand one the work of education right a coherent instructional system and the work of technology in accelerating in supporting we have to help create coherence in the ways in which we approach reform and that might be be being done frankly with the kind of work you do in regions the work we do the digital part in regions around around the country.

One last thing very quickly. I was in Uruguay maybe six, seven weeks ago. I saw a nation that is moving and they the first thing they did was to close the digital gap.

Then they closed the digital learning gap. Now they’re moving computational thinking across the country. I saw CT specifically, not CT specifically.

Yes. I they took our framework of digital promise and they build a scoping sequence around it. We we saw the policy.

We saw the the the the national conversation then we visited classrooms and we saw the through line right this is happening across an entire country tiny country in South America they have closed and they’re closing the gap they’re about to build an AI lab for the nation and so they they think with large and what they did by the way was create this organization called Sabal I call it a cousin organization to a digital promise because we do very similar things this organization is not the ministry of education It has three board members. The president of SBA, the minister of education and the minister of finance. The president of the country appoints the president of SA.

So three individuals manage and their job is to agitate and to demonstrate and to make happen with support from the ministry but their job is to push on the ministry. The finance minister provides the support and funding. They make it happen.

They’re becoming quickly the envy of the world because they have done it. We can. We’re the most powerful country in the world.

If you can do it, we can do it here. Yeah. I I just wrote this very long.

All my pieces are long. It’s how I think. I just If I don’t write it down.

It’s hard for me to which is a whole separate segue about I’ve learned a lot about the future of work as I’ve failed to use AI to write. It can actually it can write quite well, but it doesn’t I don’t get and I don’t get I don’t benefit from the process. And one of the things that that I sort of like just sort of fell into as I was kind of looking I was writing about the American AI action plan and I was around for like the very like when I got into the AI space was right after the US China pivot.

This is like 2017 National Security Council, you know, like like formerly now China is a competitive risk. Huawei was added to the special entities, what’s it called? There’s there’s a list of like companies companies you’re not forgot to and and that year China put out this big push on on AI and education.

The next year 2018 they they put out a an action plan for artificial intelligence and education in higher education. And you know as I was sort of going through this process and sort of like the going through the the translation and they do control F to see like how many times you know education a workforce and like reskilling are mentioned and it’s like all throughout the document. And I had this realization that like you know we’ve you know and then Biden comes in the Biden administration is very this is still lying they kept the the export controls on like semiconductors essentially maintain course but there wasn’t as much of this I think that there was a reticence to really lean into like the USChina conflict as a driver and certainly we did not you we thought we we thought about this a lot like oh is this something we pitched to funders is like we are in a race against China and and at At the time, me and my team were of the opinion that this is this is bad vibes, right?

Like we’re trying we’re talking to educators to school leaders coming in and trying to like paint this in this like broad geopolitical, you know, like zero sum frame just wasn’t didn’t didn’t that wasn’t our brand. But I feel like now the US government has made it very clear with the American AI action plan that this is I mean like the preamble is explicit. It’s like we are in a race.

I suppose there’s a question of like oh should we push back and I don’t think our organizations that’s not what we do right we’re not we’re not so there’s the whole political strategy but absent that this is the status quo but hearing you talk I feel like there’s maybe there is some power in this because like if we’re trying to really motivate leaders a little bit of competition maybe even a lot of competition like that might be something that is sort of gets them out of their seat and I wouldn’t But what you’re describing isn’t necessarily US, China, geopolitics. You’re even describing like, you know, Ohio and Michigan, you know, maybe it actually is okay for them to feel a little bit of pressure, like do we really want to be behind? And that actually is what happened in Michigan.

They they we have this like statewide strategy in Ohio and Michigan’s like we we could totally do that. Like what what’s what’s required? The answer is we just need a line.

Do we just need literally leaders to step up? Initially, philanthropy and civil society and then Yeah. And then in Michigan specifically, it’s like Detroit public schools and then the long tale of rural districts.

But I like the parts of this country where the work is easier, right? So like New York like New York for example has what over 7 or 800 school districts. A little harder.

Illinois too many school districts. I mean can be done but much difficult more difficult. You go to Rhode Island, you know, you can fit the entire state in the conference room.

And in Helica, I will tell you that. And at one point I was a finalist for the state job in in Rhode Island. In my research, I discovered I think like 70% of teachers came from one university, from one college in the state, University of Rhode Island.

I forgot which one it was. It was not Brown. But I but I can tell you that once you discover that my god if I change if I work with the school of education and pre-ervice I can impact the lives of 70% of my teachers.

Right? So there are places like that in America where we can demonstrate quick and movement around reform and what they’ve been describing in in a much much more cogent place. So it can be done.

This thing with with China by the way. So we’ve had I think in my opinion many Sputnik moments after Sputnik. We’ve not captured them or it’s not been as what are some examples I mean look this this the movie has been soft let’s use China as the example right where they’re quickly becoming the the world leader in technology right so it’s not like a moment but several small moments what someone used to describe as the boil boil frog syndrome which frogs by the way don’t sit in the water they’ll jump right out but but when you think about it hasn’t been as mo as as as pronounced I was part of a discussion last week in Aspen with the Aspen Institute and the China Fellowship.

Was there with all talking about China? Are they there a threat or there frankly an something you learn from? I mean China at one point in history was top of the world in in GDP, right?

Then he went through a few hundred years of extreme quite far back but yes poverty, right? In 30 years they have moved 800 million people out of poverty. Yeah.

The average GDP in China this was like around like I think Dang Xiaoping early on in his tenure it was like $200 per capita you look now I mean yes it means flattening out a little bit but my point is that love or hate China whatever you want to do right there’s a lesson there that we need to learn as a nation as the most powerful country in the world we can make it happen for poor people and we have to understand that we’re never going to be really successful until the poorest part of our country actually move forward. But the bottom line is when you look at the work of again states and regions it can be done in a way that is can demonstrate success. I don’t know what’s going to happen with more green in North Carolina but the last state chief I know more from his work in Guilford but the last state chief was somebody we were talking to quite progressive as well too and enough Carolina is one to watch if they keep moving that direction.

I’m heading to a rally in about a month to talk to leaders in rally on the research triangle. So there are parts of the country who are pushing. Let me come back to Pittsburgh.

Our last League of innovative schools meeting was in Pittsburgh. 13 School systems supported by the Greyel Foundation are banded together to create a regional innovation hub. I mean so it we have these catalysts in America but we have not really learned how to leverage them in the way that pushes the kind of scale we’re talking about.

And this is where I’m begging our secretary. This is the kind of leadership that we need from Washington. Yes.

Do whatever you want with the money, etc., you know, but support these kinds of regional hub. The state of Alabama is doing amazing work on cyber security with the Walton Foundation and our team. You’ve got these things happening in the US.

We’ve got to highlight them. We’ve got to leverage them for for scale reform in this country. Yeah.

Yeah. And I want to and the good interviews, what I’ve learned is the key to being a really good interviewer is to just have a good a good guest with a lot to say. So the time flew by.

I do want to close with a bit of a call to action. I’m going to be exp and I can be explicit because we’ve we’ve done this work together. I think we both have a clear view of like what needs to be done.

I’ve had a several meetings at the White House talking about the aiteracy executive order and you know I I I don’t know what the chances are of shifting their perspective. It seems quite clear like they see this as as something for states to lead on and public private partnerships and then you have you know like in Oregon NVIDIA partnering with the department of education and the headline was like you know it was it was like a this big flashy headline but then you look into it it’s like no this is Nvidia’s deep learning institute which is Nvidia’s thing it’s like this is training people to be in the Nvidia ecosystem that is not what you are describing that is a that is that is captured right by technology companies not saying Nvidia shouldn’t be working in in Oregon. That’s great.

It’s great, but it’s like they can’t be the only organiza, you know, only company. So you have these you have you have education, philanthropy. Sure, maybe there’s some learnings to be had from the last 20 or 30, 40 years.

But now it’s, you know, like it or not, they’re being handed, you know, this incredible responsibility. You know, our organizations, I think, work together quite well because we we’re just compliment, we’re just so complimentary. It’s like we don’t have the bandwidth to be in Pittsburgh.

And I think the way that you’ve designed your frameworks, Portrait of a Graduate, the way we’ve designed our our framework, the idea is to be able to go to a school if they’re working with Digital Promise that they’re in the League of Innovative Schools. It’s not choosing a framework. There’s lots of frameworks and I think some of this sense of like who’s going to win the framework battle.

It’s like we’re just now trying to figure like how do we make it as interoperable as possible because like what we want to be able to do is go to a school and say whatever you’ve done that is awesome. Let’s help. Let’s identify what else you need to do to keep moving forward.

And so setting up exemplars, we’re we’re aligned, right? Like we need more of them. How do we like like how do we convince philanthropy that yes, investing in tools and AI for blank?

It’s it’s important. We need just like we need philanthropy to balance, you know, corporate investment in education, we also need them to balance corporate investment in the tooling. But how do we get them to sort of like widen their aperture and really think about like the systems change, investing on the ground, bu investing in leaders, investing in, you know, direct programmer mentioned pre-ervice.

I mean, there’s like there’s a lot of like really ripe areas and I am not hearing as many funders as you’d expect like identifying those and it’s not because they don’t believe it. I think they still see themselves as in learning mode and it’s like how do we shift them out of this like you know sitting back and like waiting for the world to happen to like really seeing themselves as like I’m going to lead back to your sort of sort of the thesis of this whole conversation and and they are there are many funders I know who think broader and bigger they still have a layer of accountability that they have to have with the money they they’re giving away but they do think about the bigger broader picture when I was at Gates there was something that Warren Buff used to say to the all hands meeting once a year that I’ve never forgotten. He goes, "Swing for the fences, you guys can do this.

You can afford to do this." So, swing for the fences. I mean, I always took that to heart. And it’s something that I’ve always believed around taking bigger, taking broader.

And there’s a friend I’m dealing with right now. I love talking to her because she sees things even beyond where I see it. Like, oh my god, yes.

Let’s think five years down the road how we’re going to b fix this this this working solution. Also don’t expect a single funer to be able to do that. Let’s be clear about that too.

I think no one can do research or fund research like the US government. That’s what’s made us who we are as a country. And and I’m really hoping that you know as we move forward National Science Foundation IE yes we need to be retoled.

There’s no question about that. That we don’t forget frankly our place in research in in the world. Let me just maybe say one one more thing that I heard last week in Aspen with my friend Patrick Aua who’s a MacArthur genius created a session university gave up his leadership career at Microsoft and moved to back to Ghana to his home and build an amazing university.

He said we have to to scale to the size of the problem and no one institution can do that. It’s got to be a collective and this is where I think aid or digital partners and others working together can make a difference in the world. But we have to bend together and I’m going to push on funders maybe a call to action for funders too and I’ve always loved this idea of fun collaborative.

And when funders get together around a behag a big hairy problem right and you get the right nonprofits together to work together and doing this kind of work even for profits you can get somewhere. Yes, I love what Nvidia is doing. I like the fact that OpenAI is partnering with the AFT around teacher academy, but it can’t be bespoke.

It can’t be about a single product line, right? Because you got you got Google, you got others who are doing amazing work in this space. This has to be about education, not about Nvidia, not about OpenAI, right?

If that makes sense. So that’s an important piece. But this idea of funders coming together as a collaborative and supporting big hairy challenges in education and sometimes do so with the US government.

We’ve done projects with NSF, Gates, Walton, etc. We need we so desperately need more of that. Yeah. Yeah, this is I mean and you know folks can look at our organization’s funders for you know like the there’s a a very like there’s a there’s a good cohort of early movers who sort of have that bigger lens and there’s a lot of fun cloud you’ve actually I know you’ve spoken at probably many of them.

So it’s not it’s the the reality doesn’t to me seem like funders are not doing their job or they’re they’re they’re failing. It’s it’s that we’re still in sort of this moment. The question is still what’s going to happen?

I guess moving together derisks it. It also allows you to achieve the scale because funders are they’re they’re maybe they’re not that big, right? Like New York City public schools, what is the budget?

Like 40 billion. Is it that much now? It’s 28 with that left.

I think it’s 40 I think it’s 40 billion. So you see this like $23 million, you know, like that’s a big headline and that’s and it’s also for leasing space in New York City. So I don’t know what the what the lease is going to cost.

So yes this this idea of sort of like how do we bring everybody together I mean for folks who are listening if they’re if they’re in you know curious and I would say you know JC is the person to talk to if you really want to have a sense of like what is possible you’re organization is not new to AI and and yet you’re not a techie you’re tech you’re tech literate you’re tech forward you’re an innovative thinker but you’re an education I’m a teacher and you’re a teacher. And that’s why we need as, you know, I was so excited to have you on the show and this is why we need we going back to sort of this this idea of like building leaders like if you’re if you’re a school principal, you’re a teacher, if you’re a school board member, if you’re a superintendent, like this is your moment. Yeah.

It really is. It really is. I see.

And it requires collaboration amongst them as well too, right? Thank you. Excellent.

That was awesome. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.