Rethinking Schools with AI, Mastery & More

Plus, What Does the Department of Education Do Anyway?

Happy Pi Day! We’ll be celebrating with pizza later on. And, while we’re at it, we might also raise a glass to the publication of another book I worked on!

This one’s an edited volume—so I didn’t do much of the writing. I teamed up with my friends Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Juliet Squire, a senior partner in the Policy and Evaluation practice area at Bellwether to bring you this book, titled School Rethink 2.0: Putting Reinvention into Practice.

The book features 10 chapters from on-the-ground leaders presenting education innovations and ways to implement—complete with the success stories and pitfalls. The contributors include Sal Khan, Beth Rabbit (The Learning Accelerator), Larry Berger (Amplify), and more. It’s a natural follow-on from my 2022 book, From Reopen to Reinvent, as it takes a lot of the ideas in that book and offers practical tips about how to implement them.

I asked Rick and Julie to share a bit more about the book—and interspersed some videos about it as well.

Q: Why this book?

Rick: After I wrote The Great School Rethink in 2023, you and I got to talking about how the real work of rethinking comes down to where the rubber meets the road. The problem is that I can talk in terms of examples, intuitions, and analogies but I'm not rolling up my sleeves and doing it. That means I just can't speak first-hand to crucial parts of the work. You related that you had similar reflections after writing From Reopen to Reinvent. So, we said, "Let's grab a bunch of our favorite rubber-meets-road people and ask them to speak to that." This book is the result.

Q: What's it about? Tell us a bit about the authors of each of the chapters and why we wanted their voices?

Julie: The authors are all rubber-meets-road people, who have an on-the-ground perspective that rarely gets elevated. Each of the individual authors shares lessons relevant to their particular domain, whether artificial intelligence, personalization, or curriculum. But the collection of authors is even more useful. As readers move from one chapter to the next, they will see commonalities and lessons emerge that are broadly applicable to anyone working to create transformative change: the importance of getting clear on what's changing and why, recognizing that success often starts small and changes as it grows, that teaching and learning are deeply human enterprises that require managing motivation and emotion alongside process and outcomes, and that strong policies may be necessary but are far from sufficient.

Q: After you finished editing the book, what were some of your new takeaways that you hadn't considered before?

Rick: For me, the biggest thing was how divorced so much talk of educational improvement is from the actual work of, well, improving education. When I read the contributors, I'm struck by the myriad ways in which procurement rules, cultural habits, school routines, teacher mindset, balky technology, and any number of other things shape what happens in schools and classrooms. Yet, mostly because it's hard for advocates or policymakers to do much about all this, we tend to talk about blunderbuss instruments like funding, choice, and "what works". Maybe that's inevitable, but it's also a reminder as to why the contributions to this volume are so valuable—and why we should listen less to those busy celebrating the need for this work and more to the people actually doing it.

Building an AI-Ready College

Speaking of rethinking, Jeff Selingo and I gathered a top-notch panel for a conversation in front of a live audience at Google’s New York City headquarters for a conversation about AI and higher education as part of our Future U. Live series. Joining us were Ann Kirschner of CUNY and ASU (and Hunter College’s former interim president); Pace University President Marvin Krislov; and Chris Hein, field CTO at Google Public Sector.

Three takeaways I had that all revolved around the need for deeper integration across different groups:

1. Changes to Entry-Level Roles: As AI continues to up the skills required for a graduate’s first job out of college, students are going to need real work experiences as part of their education. Which will require deeper integration with employers.

2. Building Access Through Partnership: No college is going to be able to go it alone when it comes to AI. Google, for example, will spend $75 billion building better AI infrastructure this year. For perspective on that number, consider that MIT’s operating budget for 2024 was $4.8 billion in total. Harvard’s total endowment was valued at nearly $52 billion.

3. Not AI for Its Own Sake: This isn’t about teaching AI classes for their own sake, although for some students that will be important. It will be about the thoughtful and intentional integration of AI into classes so that students know how to and how not to use AI when they enter the workforce. Which will be expected.

Listen to the episode here at “Building an AI-Ready College” and let me know what you think.

Speaking of Integration

It’s no secrets to subscribers of The Future of Education that we’re intrigued by apprenticeships. And we also acknowledge that there are a lot of reasons why they haven’t really taken off in the United States. On the latest Future U., Jeff and I interviewed Katie Caves, the Director at Switzerland’s Center on the Economics and Management of Education and Training Systems, to learn more about the Swiss model and what we can (and can’t) take away from it.

A few highlights?

First, how pervasive apprenticeships are. As Katie told us:

“70% of Swiss young people are doing an apprenticeship in high school. So from starting in about 10th grade to 12th or 13th grade, [that’s] instead of just doing the college-prep curriculum. And if you're coming from an American perspective, that's really surprising because you're like, whoa high school is all about college prep.”

But this isn’t accomplished through tracking—the other natural reaction people in the U.S. have. Instead, the Swiss system is highly permeable. As Katie told us:

“The people who get the most out of their education, they have the highest earnings, they have the lowest risk of unemployment. They're those super highly educated professional people. And we also know that the people who take mixed paths. So they're… using those crosswalks in some way, they do better than the people who take either the pure academic path or the pure vocational professional path. And so this is where it starts to get really interesting.”

In other words, students don’t have to do all one thing or the other in their education.

And finally, Switzerland offers a professional degree that is the same level as a PhD—so it offers prestige. We don’t have an equivalent in the United States, although that didn’t stop me and Jeff from speculating about it.

Check out the full episode, “Learning from the Swiss Apprenticeship Model” here and let us know what stood out to you.

What Does the Department of Education Do?

The Trump administration has now effectively laid off half of the Department of Education. That’s on top of the discussion about whether the Department of Education will continue to exist—and if it does, what it will continue to even do.

For a variety of reasons, I don’t think this is the most important topic impacting the future of education. But it does raise the question: What does the Department of Education do?

Diane Tavenner and I actually tackled that question—back in November of 2020 when we asked: “Who will replace Betsy Devos?” Check it out.

Also, there have been many good takes on the impact of the latest cuts at the Department of Education, but if you’re looking for just one smart read, I recommend Mike Petrilli’s here: “11 thoughts about the massive layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education.”

Why Tech Didn’t Fix Schools

I had a blast joining Joe Philleo, cofounder and CEO of Edia, an AI platform for math education, on “Smarter: The K-12 Education Podcast. We went deep on why technology didn’t—and I contend won’t—fix schools, as well as what’s been misunderstood about my first book Disrupting Class, as well as some of the things we got wrong in that book. This was a super fun conversation with an entrepreneur with a lot of energy for improving education.

As always, thanks for reading, writing, and listening.