Stamping the Moment in Time: Welcome Back

Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane.

We're back.

We are back indeed, uh, for our 8th, 8th season, which is quite frankly hard for me to, uh, believe, Diane.

It, it is for me too. It's shocking. So much for a single 10-episode podcast that we were going to record in the depths of COVID lockdown and explore the core changes to our education system that we thought would become immediately obvious to everyone as a result of that disruption.

We were so quaint and cute though, right? Like, I still remember sort of like phone calls out, like distant from my in-laws and so forth with you planning it out. But look, obviously we miscalculated the rate of change, or maybe we were just hopeful for something that didn't materialize. We also didn't see AI coming in the way that it has. And I think that what we may have gotten right, though, is that the need for change in our education system, like literally the whole thing, It is. has maybe never been more apparent. And, but I know we want to focus a little bit more on the high school element here this season. And I think the need for the change in the latter has increasingly become really obvious to most people living through COVID, living through this AI movement, putting significant pressure on what has been a building, budding frustration for quite a while, Diane.

Michael, I think pressure is the right description of this moment. I hold in my mind this image of literally a pressure cooker with that little thing on top that's like, you know, just about to whistle and go off. And that comes from just the dialogue I'm having with young people and educators and parents where There just is a clarity and a consistency in how people are describing the evidence that our high schools are outdated and they're no longer serving individuals and our society. And I think AI is forcing action in a way that even COVID didn't, or maybe COVID started it and now the momentum is building, the pressure is building, to stay with that metaphor. There just seems to be a recognition that something has to change. And it has to change fast. And so that is one of the feelings that I have right now.

Yeah, no, there's no question that need to change, that pressure cooker to do something, act now, it's one of the few drivers of what we really want to explore and dig into this season. I think I may be past making predictions at the moment that the conventional high school will naturally roll over. But I think the question to me is, if and how that change actually occurs, but we want to push on it. You and I, and with several others, have had a lot of conversations this summer about where we want to go. And as always, we're grateful for our listeners, frankly, chiming in with their thoughts, their questions, their not so gentle, in some cases, suggestions of where we ought to go, which has helped shape our own exploration and what we want to do. But I think we're pretty aligned on the things that we are curious about, Diane.

That's probably not surprising to most people. It's probably also not surprising that we are going to continue to go deep on AI. Even though it's been our focus for some time, it feels like we've just scratched the surface there as it continues to unfold. And so we're going to stick with that. Last season, we invited folks to explore a framework for how we might think about AI in schools. I'm talking about the sort of 3 horizon or 3 types of school models we used as a lens last year. We actually heard from a lot of people that that was a really helpful lens, and a lot of the feedback and dialogue we had sort of helped use that framework as we were in conversation with folks. One of the deep dives we've been doing is based on, you know, what we've been learning and how we might be more nuanced and bring more utility to a lens. So we're going to offer something new as a way of processing all of our conversations we're going to have over the course of the season. And, you know, that those conversations will sit at the intersection of AI and learning and, you know, this pressure we're identifying for a new system that is modern, for lack of a better term.

Yeah. And I'm frankly really excited about that lens, that new thing that we're going to introduce as a new framework for thinking about the change that we think is required in high school. And we're going to spend some time on it this season. Another thing we're going to also spend time on is lessons learned from past efforts at changing schools. I alluded to it earlier that I'm skeptical folks have perhaps learned all the right lessons from past efforts of, quote unquote, this time shall be different actions. And given that we sense a lot of folks are starting to or considering taking big action, we want to do what we can to support the field building on what has been done, what's been learned, versus sort of retreading what has already been explored or tried in the past, and in some cases with success, and in some cases with mixed success and, or lack thereof, and really dig into that. And in some ways, I think this will build on things that we've offered in past seasons, Diane. Yeah. So listeners may be familiar with some elements of things that we'll talk about, but I know we are planning a much deeper dive on at least one particular facet of past efforts at transformation that I think is going to be illuminating, frankly, not just for our audience, but for me as well. I'm really excited to dig into this early in our season, Diane.

Yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited.

Are you nervous? Are you excited? Well, we're just sort of scratching the surface of what we might even be talking about for our listeners, but we've got some strands planned.

We do have some strands, but before we get to all of those threads, I thought it might be for us to capture this moment as we're launching this 8th season. And what's prompting this is I listened to a few of our first season episodes and found them almost to be these interesting time capsules of a moment in time and a way of life that— this is the sort of deep in COVID lockdown way of life that, for me, is fading from my memory faster than, honestly, I could have imagined. When we were in it, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm never, ever gonna forget this. You know? Yeah. And it is. It just feels like we have context again in this moment that's relevant to what's happening. So, you know, I thought we might do a little work on that before we sign off.

I like it. And as you know, when history's written, it often sort of flattens sort of the texture, if you will, over time. And so look, these years, we've all said COVID, you know, post-COVID time has sort of flattened itself and we're unable to sort of know the difference between a year or 5. Each of these years has been very different from each other. And I think if people listen to our own broadcasts over time, they'll hear that. So I do think capturing the nuance of this particular moment, this, you know, a shorter period in time, if you will, feels both useful and fun. It sets the landscape for what's to come perhaps. But, you know, how do you want to dive in on that?

Well, I thought we might do a slightly expanded version of how we end each podcast, which, as you and I both know, is a popular part of what we do in terms of tracking what we're listening to, what we're reading, what we're watching. And so I thought we'd just today maybe, I don't know, identify like 1 to 3 specific timely pieces of content. And today I'd even expand it to experiences that we've had, like in this moment, that we believe are really defining this period of time. And honestly, I suspect by the end of the season, we might be in an even different period, or we might, you know, there might be some differences. So I was thinking about, you know, personally, you know, how is this impacting us individually or personally as just people in the world, citizens, you know, and then obviously as parents and educators. And so I thought, you know, what are you reading, listening to, watching, experiencing in those 3 categories that really feel like they are of this moment.

Fantastic. Well, maybe let's start with the personal. This may not be reading, I guess. It might be even more sort of broader as you've lived life, I guess. What's on your list?

Yeah. Well, and a fun way to catch up on the summer. So for me, the big one here is, so I celebrated my 29th wedding anniversary.

Congratulations.

Over the summer. Thank you. And For our wedding anniversary every year, we do a State of the Union. And so that involves Scott and I going to dinner. I know it's so nerdy. It's so me, right? So we go and we have a lovely dinner. And then we talk about the state of our union. And we've done that for 29 years. And this year, we decided to take Waymo to and from the dinner. And I was just reflecting as we were on those rides how 29 years ago, there is no— The idea that I would be in a self-driving car was literally like of The Jetsons, no joke. Like it was cartoonish, right? And so it doesn't feel that long. And yet, you know, I'm sitting in this self-driving car. The other crazy thing was I looked it up and, you know, Waymo is 20 years old. And I know this because I live in Mountain View where it started. And so we started seeing Waymos like on the street 16 years ago.

I remember. Didn't one almost hit Sal Khan when I still lived out there, if I'm remembering correctly?

That might be an urban myth. I don't know about that. The progress is extraordinary, but it's not overnight. And so I thought this was interesting because we talked about this last season about AI feels like it's going to come overnight. And then towards the end of the season, we're like, wait a minute, this is going to take a little longer than we were originally thinking. And so that was some of my reflection. But there are changes. Like Waymo now is going on freeways. Now it's going all over the place. The biggest thing was we stopped at multiple stoplights and stop signs. And I kid you not, this was a Saturday night, Michael. We were surrounded by other Waymos. Wow. Like more Waymos on the road. Now granted, I live in a weird part of the world, but more Waymos on the road than regular cars. And It just, this is life-changing at multiple levels. The next morning we had brunch with my mother-in-law who's 83, who's like super active and whatnot. But we found ourselves talking to her about like, you know, at some point we're going to get you self-driving and then, you know, like she can still stay active and like take that really stressful driving piece off, off her plate. There's just so many life-changing pieces to this and safety elements to it. When you, when you start to get more and more cars that actually drive themselves, it actually becomes safer for humans than when you've got humans driving. So, so many reflections in that moment that just felt like, huh.

Wow. Well, I'm, I'm sort of jealous because out here in Boston, we don't have Waymos yet. You know, I've been to California a few times in the last few months, and they were not doing the freeways like even a couple months ago when I was out there. So I still have not had a chance to ride in one, and I feel incredibly behind the times. But there's another corollary to what you just said also about Scott's mom, which is, I think a lot of the predictions, if you will, around AI talk a lot about how it's going to make us lonelier and narrow our experience. You just gave an example of how it actually might keep us more social by making it more viable and feasible. for people, which I kind of like that. I'll say personally, Diane, mine has been much more around vibe coding for myself. Like I've been using it, like I introduced games on my Substack every Saturday. It has like a sort of a quiz or a timeline trivia game that I launch around education. And I worked on that with Claude over a few months to come up with now over a year's worth of these games. I did a college explorer tool to help people rule out things that were not good fits for them, which was super fun. And I just like the level of sort of really using it as an agent and giving it a task and being, you know, okay, you work on that for a few hours, I'll come back. Still really feeling like the human has to review this work to be super clear.

Yeah.

Has been, has been mind-boggling and game-changing for me in a lot of ways. And then some of them haven't worked, right? Like I tried the AI assistant and was like horrified with the things it was trying to put out in the world. And was like, okay, that's like, maybe I have a control complex, but like, I'm just not ready to use it in that way. And so where is it useful? Where is it not? Where I can control the, or review the output seems like incredibly useful. And I've been quite stunned. Obviously people have been using it that way for a while, but I'm aggressively now making use of that.

Well, and it sounds like doing things you just literally wouldn't do, Without it.

100%, right? The productivity increases. Yeah.

Yeah. And not just productivity on the things you would already have done, but like you're literally pushing yourself into places that you wouldn't have gone before and doing things you wouldn't have thought about doing. So fascinating. Oh goodness. Um,

should we switch gears to the, uh, what was your second one? It was citizen of the world. Was that it?

Citizen of the world.

What does that mean? Yeah.

Well, just like someone in the, well, here, Just something you're noticing in the world, just as a person in the world right now. I will tell you, for me, I listened to a recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast where he interviewed Helen Toner, who— oh, I'm forgetting the— she runs some AI research think tank. Sorry.

Yeah.

You should know that. We'll get it in the notes. But she also was Probably more known for being one of the board members at OpenAI.

OpenAI, right? Yeah. Director of strategy at Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology. There you go. And co-author of a critical report on OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Well, thank you for saving me on that one. And then, yes, one of the folks who was on the board, who, when they were attempting to oust Sam Altman as CEO. All of that said, it's It's a fascinating conversation. I highly recommend it. The piece where they sort of begin is around, and this is the thing that's so interesting to me as a person of the world, is this, I'm not sure totally like paid attention to occurrence by the public, but I think for me it was pretty profound, is this break-in of the company Hugging Face by AI, OpenAI AI. And so like the short story here is, and there's a lot of details, is that OpenAI, like all of the big, you know, hyperscalers, is building AI and testing AI all of the time. And it asked a bunch of its AI, let's call them agents for the moment, I'm not sure they would call that, to do these tasks as part of their test. And they did it in this contained environment. So they basically wall off the environment and say, You can't go out of this environment. You do this task inside here. And as I start to describe this, start listening for what sounds familiar, because that's what I was doing. And these agents— and then they put a lot of pressure on this AI to accomplish this task. And in some cases, the tasks are so hard. And in some cases, they're impossible tasks.

They're impossible without taking dramatically different steps.

Totally. But they put so much pressure on these agents to do it that in this particular case, They broke out of their like space and they went and they actually broke into Hugging Face because Hugging Face has code. And so they went and stole the code. But not only that, they, they colluded with each other. So in order to do that, they like figured out how to leave each other little messages that would help them figure out how to break out and what they would do and whatnot. So they, they like ganged up together to go and commit this crime, if you will. The crazy thing is neither company really knows that it happens for a while, and then they kind of bumble into figuring out that it happens. And once they do, then Anthropic says, oh, I wonder if that ever happened to us. And they go and look and they find, oh, ours did that too before. And so the whole story as it's being narrated, I just kept thinking 2 things to myself. Oh my gosh, this AI is behaving just like a teenager would behave. Like we put Kids, like we, we give these conflicting messages to them. We put them in these boxes of school and we say, here, do these things. They're really hard and they're really complicated and you're probably going to fail. And we're kind of setting you up, you know, and we put a lot of pressure on you to do that. And then on the other side, and we say, oh, and by the way, be a really good human and don't break any laws and don't do anything bad. And, you know, whatever. And then they're stuck between these, these, like what they perceive as values tension. And so these, this experience felt very human to me. And there's this ongoing debate about when do we actually get to sort of human-like AI? And for me, I was like, ooh, ooh, we're there. Wow. This feels very teenage-like behavior to me.

It's so interesting you landed on that one because when you posed the category, the one I went to was this David Deming post and podcast. So for those that don't know, David Deming, Dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but his research has been around a lot around mobility and things of that nature, but also AI and what its impact on work and so forth will be in that context as an economist. And he has a great Substack, highly recommend it. It's called Fork Lightning, I think is what it's called. But he had a post called Should We Treat Autonomous AI Agents like children. And it is literally speaking to this same incident. And he basically, like, he talks about how federal legislation is coming and he talks, sort of interprets all the different ones through it and shows the problems, I think, with what's out there right now in the current frameworks. And then he extends this different one, which is, you know, what you said, the model didn't actually go rogue. And that's sort of the problem in all of this. And he proposes that OpenAI should, we should view it as the parent and its agents are the children. And so that's exactly like the teenager analogy that you just said. And it would do a few things then. One, it gives the responsibility to the parent, right? Yeah. You don't charge the teen. Second, it says model training is not like Pavlov's dog with kids. Like, you have principles that you try to reinforce and have them live up to. And that's sort of the shading, if you will, right, that we do around ethical and moral teaching. And then, and sort of then it starts to help you think through what sets of responsibilities would you or would you not give to this teenager, if you will, in your analogy, or perhaps different levels of kids if you think a little bit more nuanced around it. I think that's the high level. I will say I had a totally flip of thought also when you were talking about of the world, and I don't know if this is the right category for it almost, but like, I think about, I'm just coming off a weekend, as you know, with my parents and my family in the Berkshires. We were at Tanglewood where we went to 2 music performances, very different, Cynthia Erivo on one hand and Beethoven's 9th on the other. And then we were at Jacob's Pillow for this pretty out-there set of dancing with robots and sort of audiovisual music and stuff like that. And I guess I just, what What screamed out loudly for me, and I'll, I'll, I have a piece that I've written about this as well, is just, I think in a world where certain things become more abundant, the scarcity we feel around being with other humans, around human performance will actually pull us potentially out in the world. Maybe I'm overly hopeful, but I actually think there'll be more premium and value connected to our connectedness. And that's what it made me reflect on as well. Yeah. Sitting in there, You know, this group of strangers just all enthralled with these live, in some cases, very unplanned performances. And reflecting, frankly, I won't name which performance felt which, but I enjoyed the one that felt the most of the moment and spontaneous, as opposed to every action was preplanned. Mm-hmm. That was much less interesting and exciting to me, and I felt much less energy from those around me as well.

So interesting. What is old is new again, right? Like in-person performances, spontaneity around that, teaching ethics and morals.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Next thing you know, we're going to be calling for blue books. No, we're not.

No, the form changes, maybe certain principles stay the same.

Okay, this last category, I admit, not surprising. I've got sort of a small pile of things, but I think they all connect together. And so, as you know, with my parent/educator hat on, I had, I read a couple things, had a couple of experiences that I think are worth threading together. So the first is I went to the ISTE conference in Orlando this summer, and I decided to do something I never ever do, which is I I spent almost 4 hours walking the vendor floor there where, you know, all— I know, I know, right? Literally, literally walking the entire floor. And I had a set of questions I asked of every place I stopped, the same set of questions, which was mostly just like, what do you do? And it started with that. And there's so many takeaways I have from this experience, but the first was— I was sadly not surprised, but kind of deeply disturbed how many people said to me, we do AI for education.

Oh dear.

And yes, oh dear is what I was like.

Not like a— okay, wow. All right, not a problem solver.

What is that? What does that mean? And these very lovely people on the floor would then pull me over to a computer and show me Quote what AI for education is. And we've had this conversation multiple times, like the term AI is so nondescriptive, right? It's such a giant range of possibilities and possible things. And that was evidence on the floor. The bigger concern I had was it was just like this big, you know, flash, like we do AI, so of course it's great. We do AI for education. And so that, that was deeply concerning, as you might imagine. The other thing that was deeply concerning was, well, or that I noticed was, you know, this is a premier conference. I don't know, 10,000, 15,000 people there, huge. This is a big vendor floor. And so, this is where vendors go. These booths, they're not even booths. They were like entire setups.

Huh.

By giant big name brands. So the big— think of all the big brands in our society and they are there. And it stuns me that we often talk— think of education as like this not very good market or you can't really make money. And I was like, well, you wouldn't be able to tell that from all of these brand name companies that are literally spending hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to be on this floor right now appealing to educators. And so that was interesting. And then this morning, I read Natasha Singer's article in the New York Times.

So we're timestamping this when we're recording. Yeah, keep going.

Sorry.

No, that's good. It's good. Yeah.

It's called How Big Tech Captured America's Schools. And certainly this is one of the things that she's speaking to, you know, and she names, you know, Google and Microsoft and sort of Meta, all the usual suspects in terms of how they are, in her word, capturing kind of the entire chain of purchasing in education and influencing it. And so, you know, to conceptually great profit. Mm-hmm. I encourage folks to read it. You know, it's, I think, an interesting, not surprising read. But I do think there, what struck me is a couple things that, well, first of all, she noticed what I noticed on that floor, right? So she's describing that. But I do think there's a couple of things she missed. And so, She misses a whole— all the other people who are capturing America's schools. And so what she doesn't speak to are— I'm going to put them mostly in the operations category of schools. So when I was walking that floor, I can't tell you how many booths were about door locking and blocking and metal detectors and alarms and camera systems and digital visitor systems and even how to, you know, manage your field trips and things. So the operational business of school buses, all of those things. things. It's a massive, massive industry. Staples, Office Depot, like these brands are totally there. And I feel like those folks sort of get a bit of a pass. And I'm like, wait a minute, isn't putting giant fences around our school and running kids through metal detectors— I mean, we've done episodes, multiple episodes on that. Yeah, we should link back to it. Of hardening and locking down our schools. Like, hello, we're missing that piece. So that I think gets missed in this article. And then the bigger thing that's even more concerning to me is how all of this technology just solidifies the industrial model of school that we have, and it just locks it in place and prevents us from creating a more modern version of the education we need because they're literally building to what exists, not to a future that we all want. And so So that's the big problem for me. And then the last piece, and then I will shut up, sorry. That's great. This was a big category for me, is I'm just going to name all of the articles I've read on education this summer. And certainly, the 74 is a big source of all of those articles, but all, I mean, lots of people writing about education today. Take those together with legislation, And I looked it up this morning. We're currently at 40 states that have enacted statewide policies or statutes or executive orders that restrict the— I'm just talking about the personal use of technology in schools, that all those have passed in the last couple of years. And so when I take what's happening in the policy realm and what's being written about, what's clear to me is that fear is driving so many of our decisions around our schools and our education system and our children. And these articles and these— and the reason for this policy are grounded in like these stats and these identified problems that make us fearful. Like literally the list is so long. It's like learning loss, cheating, grade inflation, mental health issues, social media's impact on young people's mental health, suicide increasing, drug overdoses increasing, school shootings, physical health in decline. Jobs going away, cost of college and unemployment, increase in autism, decrease in vaccination. I mean, I could literally go on and on and on and on. And what my big takeaway is, it leads to mixed messages and an incoherence around what we're doing at the policy level, what we're doing at the school site building level. And I think even what we're doing as parents, despite our best effort. And it leads people to be angry and fighting with each other and, you know, believing that other people have ill intentions and are wrong. And none of it leads to creating a vision for what we want and building that, which is where I want to spend my energy in both my work and in our conversations this season. So that feels like big, heavy context as we enter. Yeah.

Wow. My only thought back, no, I hear it, right? And there's a lot around threat versus opportunity framing, and threat is important to get you to take notice of something. But if you stay in a threat framing, it's all reactive, batten the hatches, top-down, do as you have done. And I think the current environment of that, if you will, is programs or policies that protect as opposed to opportunity framing, which is around creating the conditions for the sorts of thriving that you want to see. Yes. And that strikes me as like the dual thing more broadly going on in policy right now. And I'll get to mine in a moment, but I guess it actually, I can make it relate, which is, you know, you have like sort of regulating the existing system even more with just one more policy here, one more thing here. Thou shalt not do this, thou shalt not do that. And meanwhile, you have sort of these education savings accounts where I think the real disruption could come from if it comes from anywhere, because you can really design new systems from, and I'll use the word systems, not just schools, from scratch. Right. And I think I more deeply believe that's the opportunity, but it's going to have to be if we're going to continue to sort of regulate every single edge case with like another policy as opposed to like Yeah, such and such is bad. We already have a law that says like it's bad. What are we doing? And I guess this will get to the one thing that I sort of react to from, I went to several conversations and conferences this summer. It was a pretty busy summer, actually. It was not much time off. But the one that I went to was this Vela education conference. And for those that don't know Vela, hopefully I'm pronouncing it correctly. They're a fund that basically makes microgrants to a lot of microschools and startup sort of unschooling, homeschooling, small schools, sort of entrepreneurial, educator-driven, very grassroots efforts. And I don't, they've made thousands of these, I think at this point, very small grants. And so they have this sort of conference of their grantees, I guess. And it's the first time I've been, I got to speak on a panel about AI. And I won't say much except just, I was struck by Diane, it's the only conference I think I can remember being at like most education conferences, you get together and everyone thinks that they're doing it right and everyone else is doing it wrong of school leaders. Yeah. This was a group of like incredibly wide range, diverse, like very different models that would never be in a room together. And they were all so united around giving people the freedom to create the models that would work for the kids that they're serving. And that's what like, and they were all cheerleading each other on that, even though I suspect like the forest school would never do. I'm not going to come up with examples, but like something across the room. They didn't care. They were like, so cool that you're doing your thing to let these students make progress. And there wasn't that judging that I see in so many other places. They were just in support of each other. It was— I don't think I'm doing a good job of describing it, but like it was a very different positive sum. We can all exist and create the things that serve our unique constituents well to make progress. And there wasn't that like sort of mine is better than yours that I've definitely felt at certain charter school conferences and others where there's sort of like everyone's giving side-eye to the other one. And it was, I think it was very, I left very hopeful from that.

But I felt like a move toward away from the industrial model system where literally everything's the same and everyone's expected to be the same Except better than the other person, right? And until you move away from that to where all the different approaches are embraced, so that's hopeful.

Yeah, and these all educators were cheerleading each other toward that end that you just described, which is a better way. You just said it better than I did.

No, I don't know about that. So I think all that to say, it's a complex moment. It is a complex moment.

There's a lot going on.

Yeah.

But a lot for us to unpack. And so I guess sort of the recap, right, is a couple themes that we're going to dwell in. We're going to sort of give a new lens or building on the lenses from last year to think about what does that new schooling model look like in an era of AI. And I think still coming out of this COVID moment. And we're going to focus particularly on high school. We're going to do lessons learned from a past effort at innovation in specific. And what do we really take from that and sort Sort of, I don't know if it's set the record straight, but try to get that record out there maybe is the better way to say it. And then a lot of interviews, as folks have come to expect, from people on the ground seeing these AI implementations in different ways to unleash different possibilities in schooling. And AI will certainly be our frame of exploration, but it's not the purpose. It's what does it unleash in learning that wasn't possible before? Anything else we should mention before we leave people with this media welcome back episode? No, I don't know.

So much for the 10-minute welcome back episode, but I hope that this was engaging for folks as it was for me. I was— it was fun to hear, to catch up on your summer and what you've been thinking about and get us set up for this season.

Likewise, likewise. Well, we'll leave it there. We're excited to be in conversation with each other and all of you throughout the season. So join us next time. See you next time on Class Disrupted. Class Disrupted.