Why the former DC schools chancellor says we’re underestimating kids | Kaya Henderson

So, one of my youngs said to me, Kaia, the solutions that we’re seeking sit at the intersection of wisdom and imagination. And I thought, well, that’s profound. And then I was like, wait a minute.

Am I wisdom and your imagination? And she said, yes. And I said, okay.

I just want to know. She’s like, but the thing is wisdom can’t do it alone and imagination can’t do it alone. Yeah, I mean so this is still a relatively early taping of our our burgeoning YouTube show podcast AI ED Studios.

I mean basically the the concept is I’ve I’ve been attending a lot of a lot of events, a lot of summits, a lot of conferences about artificial intelligence and I feel like all of the real meat of what I learn is happening not at the panels. Really side conversations in hallways or you know coffee chats or walks that I have with with really smart folks. And really what the goal of this is to try to bring, you know, that level of, you know, slightly informal, a little bit less guarded and, structured with a goal of, with an aim to actually, you know, bring some really new insights that people might not be hearing if they’re just consuming, you know, sort of like the talking points level of depth that like currently exists.

And I think right now everybody’s been talking about AI was adnauseium for the last two years. And so the goal is, you know, the the our hope is that we we can sort of go a layer deeper than than what a lot of folks maybe have kind of like capped out at. Now that said, you’re you know, I I’m really coming to this conversation with you, you know, interested in a little bit more about the big picture.

You know, I think there’s we’ve had a lot of guests on that are like deep AI experts. I am curious, you know, now that you’re at the Aspen Institute and you’re sort of have this like I think unique vantage point to really have a sense of the trajectory of technology and sort of like what’s of cooking on the frontiers of of technology. You know, you also bring an incredible depth of expertise as an educator and as someone who led one of the largest school districts and certainly the most complicated one of the most complicated school districts in the country.

And and I think what’s also been missing in these conversations is you know even when you have the deep technology experts in the room they don’t really understand the the I mean I’m going to say meat and potatoes and not sausage making but the meat and potatoes of like what happens behind the doors of a school district. And so when these lofty ideas about the way that AI is going to change education, you know, sometimes, you know, I look around the room, I’m like, I don’t know if they if any of these folks have ever even stepped foot in a school. Seriously, you know, since they left, high school.

So that’s that’s the rough trajectory of the conversation. I want to give I I want to spend you know the first part just kind of hearing more about your own path because you know very few educators find themselves you know in one of the most storied think tanks in the world the Aspen Institute and you know my mom is actually this is the Alex’s childhood bedroom edition of the AIED as you guys see embarrassingly my band trophies and speech and debate trophies I’m I’m here I’m in Akan Ohio your true being. You hear somebody in the background.

It’s my mom sort of buzzing around. She got home early from school today. So yeah, give us a sense of your journey.

I mean, I’d love to hear about sort of like how you got started in education and you know, you don’t have to go through the entire resume, but but certainly just like maybe like the spark notes what led you to what you’re doing obviously today at at the Aspen Institute. So I I am an unlikely educator. This is not what I set out to do.

I went to school for international relations. At Georgetown, but decided that while my friends were all going off to far away places to help people and do things, that I needed to probably put in some time here in the United States of America before I went abroad somewhere to help somebody. And when I thought about kind of domestic policy issues, the only one that I was really deeply interested in was education.

I thought about doing some education policy work, but figured nobody would have anything to nobody would take me seriously if I didn’t have some classroom experience. And so, I joined Teach for America back in the early days. I was in the third cohort of Teach for America.

And I knew I didn’t want to teach forever. I didn’t want to be in education forever, but I felt like this was a good 2-year kickstart to my career. Not only was it a kickstart, it changed my whole trajectory.

So, I taught middle school Spanish in the South Bronx through TFA. Became totally obsessed with teaching and sort of the opportunity gap and all kinds of things. And so, I was a recruiter for Teach for America.

I became the national director of admissions for Teach for America. I ran the DC office of Teach for America. And then after spending almost 10 years in Teach for America land, decided that I needed to understand why school districts weren’t concentrating on the quality of their people.

And so I joined the new teacher project and worked with superintendent and districts all over the country around issues of human capital. At the end of that stint, I was seven or eight years at TNTP. Michelle Ree, who was my boss at TNTP, was selected to be the chancellor of DC public schools.

I was living in DC and had been leading a lot of our work in DC public schools when I was at TNTP. And so she asked me to come as her deputy chancellor, which I did for the first three and a half years before she left and I became chancellor and did that role for six years, which is like dog years, right? I was all together at DCPS for 10 years in leadership and then just was like I’m tired.

I need to slow down for a minute. So I stepped down from the chancellorship. I consulted for a while and then went to work at Teach for All which is the international version of Teach for America.

And that is where I got back to my international itch. And I worked with, we were in 60 different countries and I helped communities understand the role that they played in educational transformation. And then the pandemic hit and I thought this is a great time to do something which I had dreamed about which was think about what a African-American curriculum might look like to teach young people African-American history and culture.

And so I ended up doing what I thought was a curricular project, but ended up being a company called Reconstruction. And we used technology to teach African-American history and culture to young people. And then later, incorporated AI to help teachers create more culturally responsive lessons.

And then I was minding my business, running my little company, having a good time when my friends at the Aspen Institute asked me to help them with a youth strategy, designing a youth strategy. I’d been on the board of the Aspen Institute for the last nine years or so, and I’d constantly been like, what about young people? We always had youth programming, but we didn’t really have a strategy around young people.

And so they said they had a strategic planning process and youth arose as one of the priority areas and they said can you just come help us think this through? And I said sure I’d be happy to help you think this through. This is what I’ve been worried about for a long time.

And in designing that youth strategy, I sort of fell in love a little bit with the ideas that we were generating and made a big transformative ask for funds to support this from the Bezos family foundation who said, "We’d be happy to make a big investment, but only if you lead this work." And so here I am at the Aspen Institute leading the Center for Rising Generations, which is thinking about how to make leadership development a predictable part of growing up for young people ages 14 to 24. Well, it’s interesting because I my experience with the Aspen Institute was their Socrates seminars and it’s you know the design is so it’s really it’s really beautiful. I mean, it’s this moment where you have all these different folks, you professionals in case coming together and it was like it’s like three days of like almost like going back to school and you’re studying topics that you don’t you’re not generally super familiar with, you know, reading like hundreds of pages, you know, many people are cramming the night before.

You know sitting down and just like having these you know Socratic conversations and discussions and debates and it’s very cool to think about Aspen also investing you know that expertise and that sort of that special sauce and sort of cultivating youth experiences as well and actually putting you know rubber to the road in terms actually bring that experience like what what is the first year I mean you’ve been in this role now for almost August will make a year Okay. What has been the what has the first year been like? I mean you did you have like a clear set of priorities that you wanted to immediately get done or were you also doing some sort of longer learning and planning?

A little bit of both. So I came thinking three things. One, we needed to bring some cohesion and alignment to the Aspen youth programming that already existed.

Aspen has 72 different programs and most of them operate in silos. And so thinking about how we could bring the youth programs together and extend their reach. Some of them serve 25 or 50 young people, some of them serve 200 young people, but if we’re talking about a predictable part of growing up, that means we’ve got to reach kids everywhere.

And so how do we extend the sort of reach and impact of our existing programs was question number one. Question number two is how do we push the rest of the institute. So of these 72 programs only about 15 of them work with young people and we want to be a model for what it looks like to engage intergenerationally.

And so I have some work with my other colleagues getting them to think about and build their capacity to work with young people. And then thirdly, kind of getting out into the world to figure out who we should partner with to amplify amazing youth leadership leadership work that’s going on or to create and innovate around new ways to engage young people. And so this first year has really been kind of establishing ourselves as a brand, building connections.

We did a research symposium in April where we brought together researchers and practitioners and young people to talk about changing the narrative on adolescence. We called it the promise and possibility of adolescence but to move away from this deficit-based anxious generation disengaged teen mental health crisis to something more positive and more proactive. And it was amazing.

We had close to 200 people engaged in deep work around what this kind of narrative change might look like. We did it in conjunction with Georgetown University. It was amazing.

We are also hosting the Rising Generations Summit where we’ve invited young people from almost every single state. I think we’re short three states to come together for a weekend of leadership development activities and then to go back to their communities with a community impact project that they will be implementing over the summer. We have Pinterest as our co-sponsor because the Youngs use Pinterest to dream and envision.

And so, they’ll be with us in June, 125 young people from around the country and they’ll go back to their communities and do these impact projects and we’ll feature them and highlight them and show what young people are doing all around the country. We are working on an Aspen youth ideas festival because everybody loves the ideas festival and that is sort of the way Aspen came to be and the young people said we want you know a a youth ideas festival for young people by young people about young people and so we’re taking a group of young people to the ideas festival this summer so that they can then plan the the youth Ideas festival next summer. So, we get to do a lot of cool things.

And you know, we’re building relationships with people all across the ecosystem, different youth serving organizations to figure out cool ways that we could partner. And so, it’s really been just kind of getting out there a little bit. But I think longer term the real play is how do we impact systems where young people are to ensure that they are getting civil discourse and civil dialogue training and hardcore leadership development skills and opportunities for civic engagement as just part of what they do.

One of the things that I was just talking to a colleague about is, you know, we have a huge disengagement problem, right? Kids are kids hate school cuz school sucks. School is not relevant.

It’s not concentrating on the things that are important to young people. Young people are distracted by their telephones. And every single day I get to hang out with young people who are doing amazing things because they’re leading.

They’re leading in their schools or in their communities. And like they want to solve the world’s problems. And so why can’t we engage young people in the things that are important to them and use that to help drive learning?

And so whether that looks like a curriculum for team captains, right? Because when you become the captain of the lacrosse team or first chair in the band, nobody tells you what that means from a leadership perspective, right? Like how do you motivate your teammates?

How do you set a goal? How do you do any of these things? And so we want to get into a place where we are impacting the systems where young people are showing up every day and getting them the leadership development that they need and leadership opportunities that they deserve.

Yeah, it’s funny because the narrative really is, you know, how are we going to help these poor young people who are going to be left behind by technology? And I I I think it’s almost quaint for adults to feel like we are going to have to go and help the kids figure out AI because in every context I’ve seen it’s completely the opposite. It’s like absolutely they’re going to be they’re going to be running circles around us and that’s right.

I was just talking to to Jessica Ann at Stanford. They said something called the the the tinkery and it’s basically a maker space for for faculty and the idea is like help faculty figure out how to use AI in their classrooms. The mentors and they have these mentors that sort of like sort of roam and sort of like help faculty with their projects.

They’re the students. Yeah. And I do think it’s interesting, right, that like we we we feel this but tell me more about this because it’s it’s not just about AI literacy.

It’s you’re talking about civic engagement. You’re talking about almost this narrative of you mentioned the anxious generation which I’m for those who aren’t familiar I I assume you’re referencing Jonathan Haye’s book. Yes.

And also sort of the broader discourse that has sort of unfolded in part because of Jonathan Hay who basically has been sort of sounding the alarm for the extent to which technology has created dislocation and dissatisfaction and feelings of isolation and depression among young people. And but interestingly, even Jonathan hate will will admit that when you when you ask young people about, you know, how do you feel about things like, you know, Tik Tok or or Instagram, they’ll they’ll actually admit that like I if I could get rid of all of this, I would, you know, they’re not it’s not that we need to pry it from their their fingers. It’s they they sort of feel inexraably linked to it, though, because it’s like their social lives, their their community is there.

And so it’s if you’re if you ask them about Tik Tok, you’re really asking them about their entire community. So I I I love that mention. I mean, what you’re tackling a very big challenge.

Can you just paint a picture of what this actually looks like? I mean, even maybe just going down to a single program, you know, for someone who’s wondering like leadership development is sort of an amorphous thing. Lots of folks talk about leadership development, but like the Aspen Institute has really dialed this in.

Yes. So maybe even just like the most recent example that kind of like can, you know, help our audience get a sense of what you’re what you’re building and what you’re what you’re envision. Yeah.

I mean, so at Aspen, we sort of do three things, right? We dialogue, we convene and dialogue, and we develop leaders and we provide opportunities for civic action. Right?

And so that’s the sort of thinking that we want for all young people, the the kinds of experiences that we want all young people to have if they are going to lead. And I believe leadership is like driving, right? Like you don’t learn it by reading it in a book or by taking a test.

You actually learn it by doing it, right? And so how do we create opportunities for young people to dialogue across difference and to learn how to disagree? You know, have a program called better arguments, which is literally about equipping people to disagree and to disagree, you know, productively.

Or, for example, we have the Aspen Young Leaders Fellowship, which takes young people through the same kind of a Socratic seminar over the course of a year monthly with a huge community impact project. So, they’re learning discourse and dialogue. They are digging deeply into content that builds their ability to to lead and they are choosing a problem in their community that they have to solve together.

And so this is the kind of stuff I think that you know the Aspen Institute is super good at. We are very we have a wealth of resources around you know skill building and leadership development. Even at the summit that we’re hosting for young people next month, we’ll do workshops like you know digital storytelling and how to engage community around problem solving.

These are the kinds of things that when young people start doing that work they get better at it and then they can lead. We think when I say leadership we think about problem solving young people problem solving for themselves for their communities and for the world. And so if they as young people, as high schoolers are solving problems for themselves in their community, it just grows.

It’s like an avalanche. And so we feel like we need to get as many young at bats for young people doing leadership work so that they can take on bigger and broader problems. And not like 20 years from now, right now.

Cuz as you say, I mean every single day I just came from an AI conference last week and there were a number of young people there who were literally teaching us just how different their world is because of AI and how they’re engaging with AI. And I learned more from the young people of course than I did from, you know, the rest of the conference. And so I feel like there’s an important intergenerational piece that also has to happen that we’re trying to support here at the Center for Rising Generations.

Like one of my young people, we’ve we’ve hired a ton of young people to come work for us because I can’t be doing programming for 14 to 24 year olds cuz I haven’t been 14 or 24 in a very long time. And so we hired a bunch of youngs to come work with us. I also just deeply believe in giving young people real experiences to do hard work.

And so one of my youngs said to me, Kaia, the solutions that we’re seeking sit at the intersection of wisdom and imagination. And I thought, well, that’s profound. And then I was like, wait a minute.

Am I wisdom and your imagination? And she said, yes. I said, okay.

I just want to know. She’s like, "But the thing is wisdom can’t do it alone and imagination can’t do it alone." And that thing rings so true for me. Like I feel like there are adults who have abdicated responsibility and have said like, "Fix it, young people." and then I feel like I talk to young people who want to engage intergenerationally.

They want to know how can how how can we do this together? And so that I think is one of the better parts of my work that I get to do with young people. Yes.

I mean the the the narrative so often is that you know young people are the victims and that technology is like the protagonist that’s going to like how how do we unlock you know help students with problem solving and and I think there’s a lot of trouble with that definition and also just the idea it’s disempowering to you know be so focused on the risks and the concerns and and there will be disperate impacts. The question is the question is does it serve young people to just be so focused on the challenges and and not sort of reciprocate with some sort of agency that they can take. A listener might be hearing this and saying well yeah but like that’s what school is for and surely you know you you say things like problem solving and leadership development like that’s what we do in school isn’t it?

No, it is not what we do in school. And what is I mean you mentioned absentism. I mean just you know you don’t have to to single out you know Washington DC public schools.

I mean it’s this is something that’s you know a national issue but just like can you just paint a picture of what is the school like right now? Like what are the challenges that we’re trying to to tackle? Yeah I mean I think one we have reduced school to its most basic elements right you need to read by the fourth grade.

You need to do algebra by the eighth grade. You need a 75% graduation rate. And you need to prepare kids for college and career.

We have depprioritized creativity and extracurricular activities and the things that make us alive as humans because we’ve been driving really hard towards these outcomes. And I think what I learned at DC public schools and how we turned it around. I mean, when I got to DCPS, we were the lowest performing urban school district in the country according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

And when I left 10 years later, we were the fastest improving. And still today, I’ve been gone for eight years, almost nine years, DCPS is still the fastest improving. And part of the way we did that was to stop thinking about like the reductionism in in education and to really speak to I mean none of this is rocket science like it is speak to things that engage young people make learning fun make people have agency like we turned our whole curriculum around to teach kids how to solve problems.

It’s different to teach volume with you know a bunch of examples in a math book. It is much more effective to get kids to think about how they’re going to move water from this watering hole to this village that is 2 miles away and they need to actually have different size containers depending on how big or tall you are or whatever whatever to carry this water right and so when kids are solving problems when kids are you know are stimulated not just from I we don’t like just do math or just do reading like all of it is in the context of life and larger questions. And so that’s how we built our curriculum.

And kids were super excited and super engaged. And that’s how we turned around our academics by adding, you know, art and music and PE and foreign language and technology and field trips and extracurricular activities and study abroad at a time when most urban school districts were stripping all of that away so that they could drill and kill. That’s not how people learn.

Come on. Well, it’s it’s interesting because, you know, Washington like like DC I mean the the the student population that that DCPS serves is incredibly underserved and there’s like a huge there’s a there’s an extremely like acute like set of just sort of like fundamental challenges that those kids are are navigating on a daily basis when they go home from school. And I think that often the the rebuke of these like this like visionary this this vision of the future of education is like look it’s great to say all that stuff but at the end of the day you know kids are going home and they’re they’re dealing with really difficult living situations.

They may lack you know parents or guardians who are in the mix. And you know, it’s it’s just it’s just not reasonable to talk about all this, you know, pie in the sky ideas about the future of education until you’ve solved for those you know, basic needs. And yet, you kind of are describing this this sort of very optimistic and empowering view of like you don’t have to you don’t have to sort of like let all that stuff to the wayside because well, these kids are just again, it’s sort of that victim positioning.

But here’s here’s what I always think, Alex, right? Like, don’t you know wealthy white kids who struggle with reading or wealthy white kids whose parents are disengaged? Yep.

And guess what? We still let them go on the family trip to France. We still let them play lacrosse.

We still let them take piano lessons and we get them a tutor. So, why can’t we treat poor black and brown kids the same way we treat wealthy white kids who have problems, which is yes and right. And so my thing is this is how I was raised.

This is how this is what I want for my kids and this is what I if that’s what I want for my kids then that’s what I want for all kids. And I have not se and you know the proof is in the pudding like we met outcomes better than most people from the largest increases in the history of the NAPE exam. Nobody had ever moved up as much as DC public schools had to reversing a 40-year enrollment decline against a robust competition field with tons of charter schools to, you know, the highest teacher retention in the nation, retaining 92% of our highest performing teachers to 90% student satisfaction rate.

Like, you can’t argue with my receipts, right? And so all I’m saying is none of this is is like brand new thinking. We know what it means to be engaged, right?

You know what kind of work environment you want to be in, one where you’re challenged, one where your work feels meaningful, one where you get to hang out with other cool people. Why can’t school be that way? And so that’s what we set out to do.

And as a result, we got great results, great outcomes. But I think and I think the same is true in the way we are characterizing this technology stuff, right? Like kids are not stupid.

Kids actually understand deeply both the pitfalls and the possibilities of of technology. You know, these young people who I was engaging with last week, a couple of them have started a nonprofit to educate their peers about about technology because they feel like informed informed young people make smart choices, right? And and so you know there were other ones who are using AI to build you know new tools and like they are one this one young woman who I was talking to who goes to Harvard and has built five or six different AI tools I said well what’s your major she’s like computer science and art and I was like say what she’s like oh yeah yeah she’s like there’s a lot of and and I that’s the thing right I think it is not that technology is sucking these kids in.

I think these kids are learning to navigate you know what the technological future looks like. And and I think we I mean I generally just think we give kids short shrift, right? We underestimate them.

We don’t trust them. And I think that that’s why we have this like victimhood mentality for, you know, the robots coming to suck our kids’ brains out, right? Like that.

Come on. Yeah. I mean, one thing that’s really sort of on my mind is very much something that I’ve really included mostly conversations with kids who are reporting this, which is I’m actually writing a substack about this, so we’ll see if it’s out before this this episode gets published.

But essentially just like the the rates of students interacting with AI or just people in general, but it’s like mostly I think young people interacting with the AI companions like blowing up. I mean, it’s like unbelievable. Way more people are talking to AI companions every day than are watching the NBA or the NFL or playing some popular video games.

And it’s interesting because it’s something that I I worry that adults don’t even really have the the capability to like truly get into the mind of of a young person because they it’s like a lot of adults think this is some future problem that we’re going to, oh yeah, one day people are going to have AI girlfriends and like I I watched the movie Her. I’m like the movie her which is about this this guy who you know interacts with this very lifelike AI girlfriend it it is it’s here it’s happening lived experience of millions of people and and I was really clued into the severity of this in conversations with young people who are saying you know stuff like I have friends now that they don’t you know text and ask to hang out and I know they’re just sitting at home and they’re sort of like texting or sexing their their AI girlfriend or their AI boyfriend. And it strikes me as the type of example where if we don’t empower young people to help us understand how the world is changing, you know, it’s going to be a long time before adults, I think, figure out that Yeah.

Why of an issue this is. And by that point, you know, we’ll have missed an opportunity, which is, you know, and and and I also wonder, and I’m curious for taking this, like, you know, let’s say you really believe, and maybe it’s the jury is out, I don’t know, but I I let’s say you’re like me and you deeply believe that it’s probably not a good thing for a kid to be sitting at home by themselves, you know, having these like extended conversations and relationships with AI that perhaps get in the way of human relationships. But let’s say you agree with me on that.

I mean, are adults really going to be successful in preventing it by just saying to kids, "You can’t do that?" No, not at all. When has that ever worked? Not at all.

And so, I’m kind of curious like how much can can adults really do and and and in what way do we really need to figure out how to harness young people as almost like the champions and messengers? Yeah, it’s a really good question. I don’t think I had as much of a handle on how much young people are engaging with these AI companions until very recently.

But I was having a conversation with a young woman who was telling me that pretty soon like her AI com she’s going to introduce her AI companion to her friends AI companions. And I was like what? And she’s like, "Well, you know, it is a little bit like to really deeply understand me, like you you need to understand kind of all of the things that are happening that my AI companion has captured." And I like it blew my mind.

I also heard a young person say last week that it was just easier to engage with the AI companion than it is to engage with people in real life. And I know for sure that most adults have no idea that I mean even most of the newest AI stuff coming out is around companionship, right? And I young most adults are not paying attention to this.

We are not going to solve this problem by I do agree with you that kids should not just be sitting at home talking to their AI chatbot or companion or whatever. But I think this is for me like my big worry is how we make the case for staying sort of humanly connected, right? Like it is it is making sure that our kids are engaged in sports and other activities so that their life is not just on screens like kids don’t go to the mall anymore and hang out or whatever.

And I think the thing that adults have to do is be intentional about creating environments for interaction, right? And that way there’s not a like it’s it’s like when you say don’t do something kids run to that thing, right? So like let’s not trip about it.

You can have an AI companion. I just don’t want that to be your whole world. So what else are we doing in addition to the thing?

I think giving kids some agency around that like let’s craft a life together. What do you want? Like what do you want this life to look like?

What are we going to do? How are we going to learn, grow, blah blah blah? Everything is not here.

So let’s let’s dream of something together. And I think that I think that’s how we start to deal with this. I also am just like it is I I think there’s a little like pandemic hangover, right?

Where for a while we were all so inside and just so insular and just talking on screens. And so I think that there are I think for a lot of people especially young people, right, who and a huge swath of young people, right? Kindergarteners during the pandemic who weren’t playing with each other and who weren’t, you know, whose initial socializing sort of learnings were kind of to middle schoolers who like I think the pandemic sort of messed up our socialization across a lot of different age ranges and dynamics.

And so there’s a part of me that wonders like is it just easier to engage across screens because we had this like pandemic moment or like will now that like people are engaging more and you know everything that I hear about is third spaces and places where people want to like I do think it’s crazy. I was talking to one of my young persons who is telling me about third spaces and I was like, well, third spaces used to be church and your bowling league and your civic association and your knitting circle. And I have young people who are telling me like they want to create knitting circles as third spaces.

And I’m like maybe this is maybe we’re not in such trouble, right? Because I actually think that young people are still craving, you know, places to come together and put down their phones. That’s all we’ve been talking about.

Put down your phone and engage with people. And so I feel like we have to be as diligent about, you know, scaling that technology as we are about scaling artificial intelligence. Yeah, I I was actually going to say precisely that it’s really impressive to hear you know a founder like yourself, you know, talking about this grand vision for the world and and what is at the center of it is not technology but but creating you know community and like physical experiences and sure and you mentioned ways that technology can be like a really powerful tool that gets harnessed right to to like youion like sort of community projects and if I can I can think of a hundred ways that technology could help us do a really badass community project but the hard thing is not figuring out the technology.

The hard thing is how do you get those kids together in that space and it’s it’s just like less sexy. It’s like you can’t growth hack something like bringing kids together and like empowering them to you know like even just the process you described of like bring kids to Aspen Ideas like that invaluable sort of like qualitative research that those kids are doing. You can’t sort of like skip over that.

It’s inspiring to hear you that just like yeah let’s put the time in. Let’s do the hard work. But you you were going to react.

I mean do do you see a world where this could be scaled? I mean like there’s a lot of kids from it. I just I think about technology.

So like, you know, whatever. But we didn’t have the internet when I was growing up. We didn’t have like all of these.

We didn’t clearly didn’t have the technology that we have now, right? And do I spend too much time on my phone? Probably.

But my phone enables my life, right? Whether it is you know whatever tracking my steps or my weight or my whatever to you know scheduling things like everything that I do is technologically supported but like the tech is not my life and I think that I think we we like we we have these pendulum swings right it’s either all technology or no technology that’s not life right is somewhere in the middle and so can we imagine a life for young people like my whole entire career has been about enabling young people to like reach their fullest potential to be whoever they want to be in the world. And I feel like technology, let’s techn let’s use technology to do that.

That’s what technology is supposed to be doing, right? Like you we just talked about Tik Tok is where people find community, right? It is how people are making change.

It’s how people are advocating for issues that are important to them. So cool, let’s use it for that. But let’s not make the thing the thing, right?

It is AI. What is AI? I mean, what like the real question is what problem are you trying to solve and how can technology help you do that?

What advice do you have for you know because we we we work with a lot of systems and there is just a lot to tackle right now. Yeah. You mentioned sort of like the co hanger and it really does feel like that like we’re we’re just starting to even just get a sense of the scent of the learning loss and you know how not everybody is necessarily back have teacher shortages that are more and more acute.

Really interesting that your career includes like this big focus on the teacher capital and the human capital component of schools because I really everything that you’re talking about there is a teacher on the other side of that vision that bringing it to life. So whether or not that’s actually part of your answer to this I’d be curious but the your advice to to a superintendent of a district who now they’re hearing this and they’re like okay I thought I just had to solve AI literacy. Now I’m hearing that I need to figure out how to make learning more engaging and create more physical spaces like their heads probably swirling so much there’s so much on their plate and there’s so many burning priorities like what are any of these things interconnected like is there sort of a set of you came into a district superintendent back in like leadership role like what would your sort of like top of your agenda be in service of some of the things that you’re you’re describing this sort of vision of like empowering youth and giving them agency.

Yeah. I mean it’s interesting because this is what I like my superintendent friends are fatigued and burnt out and uninspired by even what they are doing right now. And so I’ve said to them, well, what if your job wasn’t whatever you think it is?

And what if your job was to build a cadre of leaders to turn out leaders from your school district every year who could, you know, solve problems, change the world, whatever, whatever. And they’re like, well, if I was doing that, I would do lots of things differently, right? And so I think again like we’ve reduced education to this set of metrics instead of thinking holistically like a a a a school is very well positioned to create physical experiences for kids because that’s where they are is it’s easy to build community at a school.

It is like all of the things that we’re talking about are actually the things that schools are good at, right? But we’ve got them doing 250 different things instead of the five good things that they are really good at or should be good at, right? And we’ve got 25 different people holding them accountable from the school board to the city council to parents to whatever whatever because we don’t have a shared view of what their job is.

And so if I were if I had advice to a superintendent, I would say stop doing so much. Concentrate on a couple of things that you know you can really do well and don’t ignore your expertise. We have policy people who never set foot in a school building telling us what we need to do for young people.

Trash. These are people who have spent their lives as experts on children. And so let’s rely on our expertise.

I had people telling me I should do all kinds of things at DC public schools and I was like, "Yeah, that’s not that does not jive with what I think." And so I’m going to do the things that feel true to me in, you know, making things move for kids. And as long as there were enough of us who kind of had a center of gravity around those things, those are the things that we did. Sometimes you got to block out all the noise and do the things that you know are good and right.

Yeah. Yeah. And I I I mean I think that so much of work that we do is you know it’s like like the demystification of artificial intelligence but in service of really empowering education leaders to and and teachers to like bring their expertise to the table because it’s like we again there’s the same sort of like protagonist antagonist or like victim framing that we have in for teachers.

It’s like, oh well the teachers they’re they can’t figure out what’s going on with Pat GBT and they think it’s cheating but it’s actually not cheating and they’re just buttites because they’re, you know, too afraid of the technology. They need to embrace it. And it’s like this idea that teachers are afraid of technology and they’re they’re they’re letites really it is such a disservice and it doesn’t honor like their deep intuition.

And I like to replace cheating with with shortcuts because maybe it may or may not be cheating. This is a semantic argument. It is definitely a shortcut.

Teachers totally get it. They totally get it. It’s like these kids are and and and I think what what sometimes and I’m actually doing a a PD on this at my mom’s school tomorrow.

My message to teachers, look, you’re on to something. You you are a little bit behind the curve on like the thing that the thing that you’re intuiting about cheating. Your kids are just way more advanced.

And so part of like what you need to figure out is like try to keep try to get maybe not maybe not completely keep up but try to at least understand like how they’re using technology and then you have the tools yourself to kind of design these like you know project based learning is not some new innovation. That’s ultimately the the answer to to like chat GBT and cheating is like more project based learning. Technologists don’t really have any place to lecture teachers about how to do PL.

But I think right now teachers don’t necessarily understand that like it’s almost that simple. Yeah. And and their their assumption is that this is some sort of like and often it’s like there and I I’ll react to that just a second.

There’s one thing else is on my mind which is they a a lot of times we are now throwing more technology that’s like oh well the way to get a get ahead of the kids is to catch them cheating instead they’re using the detectors as this enforcement which is just such a it’s just so interesting to see us going through the same like revs that we went through in the past. Well, I think one, we have this like I went through it and so you have to go through it too, right? Which like I didn’t have to if I didn’t have to learn my times tables like through wte memorization because there was always going to be a a calculator in my hand, right?

I would have preferred not to. I could have been doing some other things. If teachers knew that they could, you know, use technology to grade their papers or to write their lesson plans or whatever, of course they would ask any professor at Harvard who is now using chat GBT for their whole syllabus, right?

Like, and so why wouldn’t we give kids the tools that they need to be successful and then use that shortcut to take it up a level, right? To do the things that technology can’t do. And I’ve seen lots of teachers who are into it, who are using generative AI, who are crafting their lessons.

I mean, it’s so interesting to me the hypocrisy of the K to2 world, which is still embroiled in this whole cheating thing versus higher education, where I feel like I’m watching professors craft meaningful lessons using generative AI, right? Where young people have to use generative AI as part of the the work. And somehow or another in college, it’s acceptable for us to use technology and tools to solve problems and to be efficient and whatever, whatever.

But like in K to2, you got to slug it out and do it the oldfashioned way. Why is that? But it is it’s interesting.

There’s a a student is actually I don’t know if he’s suing the school, but he’s he’s I think he’s demanding his a refund on his tuition because he discovered that a bunch of his professors are using AI to create assignments and to sort of like create lesson plans and they have a ban I think on the use of AI and it was this like so they have a ban on the use of AI for students. It is quite hypocritical for kids to be able to use it but that’s why there shouldn’t be a ban on these things like I don’t know yeah it’s certainly the case in the workplace right like companies are righting over themselves trying to figure out how how do we get our employees to I think going back to what what the conversation the earlier conversation we were having about it’s like human relationships and you talked about just to sort of like paraphrase you talked about sort of like the importance of friction in sort of building of like the the skills to be a human. Yes.

And I do think that there’s a legitimate question about and I’m going to talk about human relationships but I think there’s a correlary to like you know things like arithmetic or like writing essays like just the hard stuff that you don’t necessarily want to do but maybe you have to do some of it and the question which pieces are critical. But you know, I think like I think it’s a really formative part of being a kid to like tell a joke and have your friends not laugh at it, ask somebody out on a date and say no and to sort of like sit with that rejection. Yeah.

And I know it’s like easy to say that as an adult looking back and I know as a kid when adults would tell me stuff like that, I would kind of roll my eyes, but I I really believe it’s true. And so I worry about the like the tendency of AI to be really powerful for folks like you and me who have already gone through that. You know, we’ve we’ve gone through those.

I’m sure you’ve dealt with quite a lot of rejection and complicated if not outright hostile human relationships as a leader of a big district. But surely you would have struggled in that work and your work at DCPS you hadn’t like sort of just like put the time in sort of like built the calluses and the the thick skin that you need and also the ability to like know when you need to come in and empathize and so what you I’m just curious like I mean you you’re also building the answer I believe right because like the answer as I think we’ve discussed is sort of like well you just have to you can’t that’s not a curriculum that’s just an experience that you have like being around other people like 5 years from now is there a world where your work at Aspen will have kind of like catalyzed like impact beyond just what you’re able to convene or or reach directly like do you have any sense of like what it would look like for what you’re building to become almost like a model that other either and is it schools like like what would it yeah like what is the what is sort of like the grand vision of of of how like your work could Yeah. So I think push us closer to this.

I think I think that my like personal goal for this work is to have legions of young people who are so accustomed to leading whether it’s in school or in community or whatever that like they like that the adult world is just not ready for how assertive they are, how effective they are, how like that is just not ready for them. Because we don’t generally think about young people this way, but because they’ve had so much leadership experience, they can go out and do things that people might not expect. And I do think that this is way beyond just the young people who we can put our hands on, right?

I think this is about systems change as well. How do we ensure that in many of the places where young people are that they are getting this leadership opportunity stuff built in? Kids are learning everywhere.

And I think that’s a huge it’s a huge opportunity for us because I don’t just have to go to schools. I can actually affect young people in, you know, in community- based organizations. I can affect young people who are incarcerated.

That I can affect young people, you know, online, offline, like there are lots of places where young people are. I can convene them. We can push out curriculum to folks who are serving young people.

There are just so many ways to reach young people nowadays. And we love school because school is one place where they actually all show up. But we ask school to do too many things.

That’s why school is not as effective as it needs to be broadly. And so I think we should let other people do stuff with young people. I’m big on sort of the kind of credentiing and independent study and curating your own set of learning experiences and then going somewhere and get credit for that as opposed to putting the onus all on the school to do every single thing.

And so I feel like we can reach lots of kids well beyond the ones that we can just put our hands on. Even sort of with these 125 young people that we’re convening next month, like they’re going to go out into their communities and they have to figure out what their communities are passionate about and that’s what their work has to be about, right? They’re going to engage people in this project that they’re doing.

And you know for the 125 who who I’m touching you know think times 10 that they will be engaging with just to do this small project that we’re asking them to do. So I I do believe that it is possible. I believe that if I do my job right, young people and their parents are going to start to demand why doesn’t school look like this?

Why isn’t school giving us these kinds of meaningful experiences? And that’s when I think we crack the nut of what is school? Yep.

Damn right. And if anybody can do it, it’s you. And this is why and this is why we you know AIDU we’re so f we talk about AI readiness not just using AI but you know durable skills and engaging building agency with kids and and I think part of the goal is really push to like use this moment we have the zeitgeist like AI is is the shiny object and that’s powerful I think people roll their eyes at it but like I think a lot about presidential campaigns and success presidential campaigns almost invariably have this like zeitgeist of their Yeah.

The thing that people just just it just it draws people to it. It puts it at the top of conversation. AI is that thing and we the question is do we just use that as an excuse to sell more tools into schools or do we use it as a catalyst to actually help a superintendent see this as you know you may not think about you know student leadership development as part of AI readiness but that’s really what’s important like the ability to communicate and problem solve and you know use technology for specific you know outcomes for your community.

Like that is what companies are going to be looking for. That’s what I think colleges sooner or later are going to realize they need to be looking for. And so that’s why I think you know what expanding the horizons of what people think about when they think like being ready for AI.

I think what you’re doing is sort of almost needs to be not just at the peripheral but almost at the heart of it. And the tools, you know, you tell us what tools you need, right? Like that’s like we we can we will be able to build you people should be able to build you the tools that you need to but but in to what end and it’s not just better math scores.

I think that is like where a lot of folks are getting stuck like how do we use AI to increase our math reading and that’s important but it’s yes but that’s not that is that is a means to an end right the end is living a great life you know problem solving leading whatever and we have in education made the means the end right we can’t be afraid of this technology we have to jump in with both feet adults have to start playing around and start getting familiar and and whatnot. And like I I feel like the worst thing that we could possibly do is run away from it cuz I feel like we’re abandoning our young people and and who knows what the world is going to look like if we don’t stay in it with our young people. They want us to be in it with them.

Yeah. We have the responsibility to lean in. Yeah.

By Anderson, such a pleasure. Fine. I’m glad we were able to to make it.

I I will Are you You’re in Washington sort of most of the time these days. Are you? Yes.

And And then you’ll be at Aspen Ideas, I presume. Yes, I will. What?

In like three weeks or something? It’s pretty. It’s coming up.

Yeah. End of June. Last week in June.

All right. I won’t be there. Thank God.

I am I have like tapping out after June 12th. Good for you. But yeah, thank you so much again for for making the time and we’ll we’ll send you the the cut once it’s once it’s ready to and the transcript if you’re someone on your team wants to kind of go through and Okay.

Red line. Thank you, Alex. I appreciate the opportunity.

Really appreciate it. Of course.