Diane Tavenner and I welcomed Stacey Childress, Senior Education Advisor at McKinsey & Co., back for our second episode in our two-part series on the challenges facing K–12 education and promising strategies for addressing them.
Truly a magnificent productive discussion by 3 of my favorite thinkers. So much food for thought I could eat this for a couple weeks.
I interviewed an Arizona "Homeschool ESA" mom yesterday.
Two thoughts.
1. Stacey called it. Unbundling shifted lots of time costs to this mom.
Separate from her role as teacher, there's her role as a "shopper." Finding the karate academy. The dance class. The math tutor. The volunteer art teacher.
Then there's her role as paper-work do-er. Just last week AZ Dems evidently managed to increase friction here.
This Mom is fierce - she'll get it done. But for many parents the time cost is too high.
2. Michael: Just in our 40 minute chat, this mom mentioned 2 examples of unbundled values building.
a. They have family travel to Germany for a wedding, so she'd assigned an age-appropriate Anne Frank biography. They'll visit the museum in Denmark in 2 weeks. "Opportunistic" values building - resonates 5x more than typical school-assigned stuff.
b. Karate is another great values builder. Moreover the supply side of martial arts school in Arizona = "one on every block" as she put it. Meaningful choice on which place connects with your kid, transmits your values, etc.
Second, fascinating insights on all. Great pt on the friction. What would you do to help with that? I'm interested in how many FL families seem to be doing more and more a la carte... but not sure how far it would stretch. It gets easier over time I imagine as more and more do it so there are more trusted networks of friends you can rely on to make the choices, but there's still time cost. Thoughts?
Generally, would love "Navigator" to become a thing - like the Geriatric Care Manager who helps me with Mom, or the high school college counselor who helps me with Kid 1.
Travis Pillow wrote an essay about that on Fordham, perhaps a year ago.
Truly a magnificent productive discussion by 3 of my favorite thinkers. So much food for thought I could eat this for a couple weeks.
I interviewed an Arizona "Homeschool ESA" mom yesterday.
Two thoughts.
1. Stacey called it. Unbundling shifted lots of time costs to this mom.
Separate from her role as teacher, there's her role as a "shopper." Finding the karate academy. The dance class. The math tutor. The volunteer art teacher.
Then there's her role as paper-work do-er. Just last week AZ Dems evidently managed to increase friction here.
This Mom is fierce - she'll get it done. But for many parents the time cost is too high.
2. Michael: Just in our 40 minute chat, this mom mentioned 2 examples of unbundled values building.
a. They have family travel to Germany for a wedding, so she'd assigned an age-appropriate Anne Frank biography. They'll visit the museum in Denmark in 2 weeks. "Opportunistic" values building - resonates 5x more than typical school-assigned stuff.
b. Karate is another great values builder. Moreover the supply side of martial arts school in Arizona = "one on every block" as she put it. Meaningful choice on which place connects with your kid, transmits your values, etc.
First, thanks!
Second, fascinating insights on all. Great pt on the friction. What would you do to help with that? I'm interested in how many FL families seem to be doing more and more a la carte... but not sure how far it would stretch. It gets easier over time I imagine as more and more do it so there are more trusted networks of friends you can rely on to make the choices, but there's still time cost. Thoughts?
On the latter -- wow. That's cool.
Generally, would love "Navigator" to become a thing - like the Geriatric Care Manager who helps me with Mom, or the high school college counselor who helps me with Kid 1.
Travis Pillow wrote an essay about that on Fordham, perhaps a year ago.