On this episode, John Bailey, who advises on AI and innovation at a number of organizations, including the American Enterprise Institute, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and more, joins Michael and Diane. They discuss AI’s potential to democratize access to expertise, weigh the costs and benefits of its efficiency-boosting applications, and consider how it will change skills required for the workforce of the future.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Michael Horn: Hi, everyone. Michael Horn here. What you’re about to hear is a conversation that Diane and I recorded with John Bailey as part of our series exploring the impact of AI on education, from the good to the bad. Here are two things that grabbed me about this episode that you’re about to hear. First, John made the point that this technology is really different from anything we’ve seen before. Specifically, how these large language models could, from the get-go, produce artifacts of work that would rival what an entry-level person in a variety of professions would create. And how we’re just scratching the surface of their capabilities. And most people don’t even realize that yet. So what could this mean for education? Second was John’s observation that just because we can do something faster doesn’t mean it’s being done

better. Said differently, making the wrong work more efficient isn’t necessarily the right solution. Now, when we finished up the interview, I had several reflections. But one I wanted to share with you now is this. John’s big framing is that through AI, everyone now has access to an expert in virtually every field. So if the internet democratized access to information, the analogy essentially is AI is democratizing access to expertise. But I’m curious if someone isn’t as skilled or knowledgeable or experienced as John, would they know what to do with or how to use such an expert at their fingertips? I’m excited to be in conversation with Diane for more sensemaking after we’ve talked with a number of people. And we’d love to hear your thoughts and reflections. So please, please share, whether over social media or by dropping us an email through my website at michaelbhorn.com. But for now, I hope you enjoy this conversation on Class Disrupted.

Diane Tavenner: This is Class Disrupted, season six, and the first. I know. Can you believe it? The first of our AI interviews. And we, in this case, we have the first best person, John Bailey, as our guest. Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. Good to see you.

Diane Tavenner: It is always great to see you. There’s so many things we could talk about. But I’m really eager to jump in today to our topics. We’re going to go there right away. When we kicked off last season of this podcast, Class Disrupted, we said that one of the things that we really wanted to delve deeper into was our curiosity around AI. And it’s hard not to be curious about AI right now. In our most recent episode, we were pretty straightforward about kind of where each of us are at this point in time and our understanding and our perspectives. And we overviewed some of the kind of current debates that are taking place specifically around education and AI. And today we get to go deeper with someone who, I think you’ll agree with me, frankly, knows a lot more about AI than both of us.

Michael Horn: So I agree with that. I think it’s very fair. It’s one of the many reasons I’m excited for this conversation, because, as you said, it’s going to be the first of many where we bring folks on who, frankly, have very different views from each other around the impact of AI, sometimes from ourselves as well. And so to start this, we’re welcoming back someone to the show who’s been with us, I think, twice before. So this is like a three peat, if you will. So he’s clearly one of our favorites. None other than John Bailey.

John Bailey: It’s so, so good to be on. Congrats. Six seasons. That’s huge.

Michael Horn: Yeah, we’re still kicking, right?

Diane Tavenner: Thank you. And just in case anyone has missed John previously, quick, quick background here. John’s served in many, many posts in the state and federal government around education and domestic policy more generally. He’s a fellow at AEI. He holds numerous posts supporting different foundations. I could go on and on and on, but what some people might not know, John, is that you originally entered education as an expert on technology and ed. And, you know, we’ll hear that expertise coming through because you have gone deep in the world of AI and how it’s going to impact education, and so, welcome. We are so excited to have you back.

John Bailey: Oh, my gosh, I’m so excited to be here, and I just admire both of you and I’ve learned so much from you. So it’s so good to be on the show today.

John’s Journey to Education AI Work

Diane Tavenner: Well, before we get into a series of questions we have for you, we’d love to just start with how, I guess how. And maybe it’s a how/why did you go so deep into AI specifically? We know you have a lot of experience with sort of frontier models, and maybe you can describe that term for us as well as we sort of begin this conversation. But tell us how you jumped into the deep end and come to this conversation.

John Bailey: It’s such a good question. And it’s also like, my point of entry into this was interesting because, as you mentioned, I’ve been involved in a lot of technology and policy intersections for a number of years, including in education. And if I have to admit, like, I’ve been part of a lot of the hype of, like, we really think technology can personalize learning. And often that promise was just unmet. And I think there was, like, potential there, but it was really hard to actualize that potential. And so I just want to admit up front, like, I was part of that cycle for a number of years. And. And then what happened was when ChatGPT came out in December of 2022, everyone had sort of like a moment of ChatGPT, and for me, it wasn’t getting it to write a song or, you know, a rap song or. Or a press release. It was. I was sitting next to someone with a venture team and I said, what is, like, what is an email you would ask an associate to do to write a draft term sheet? And she gave me three sentences. I put it in ChatGPT and it spit back something that she said was a good first draft, good enough for her that she would actually run with it and edit it. And I was like, oh, this is very different. And then it just sort of started this process of seeing, like, what else could it do? And it just became insanely fun to kind of play with it. And then I was posting a lot of this on Twitter, and that caught the attention of some of the AI companies. And then they gave me early access. So I got to play with something called Code Interpreter for OpenAI, which was the ability of analyzing spreadsheets and data files, and then did some work with Google beta testing, Bard, and a handful of other things as well. And so I get to work with some of the companies now on safety and alignment testing, but also seeing kind of a little bit what’s over the horizon, Google Notebook LM I’ve been playing with for the better part of Over a year and giving them some feedback on it. So I think what’s happened though is that for me this feels very, very different from all the other technologies I’ve been exposed to at least over the last 20 years. And that has caught my excitement. I’ve rearranged my entire work portfolio to spend more time on this, just because it’s rare to see something that I think is going to be so transformative. I don’t think that’s going to be immediate. I think that’s going to play out over years and over decades. But also just the pace at which this technology is improving and new capabilities are being introduced is something like I’ve never experienced. In just the last two weeks of December, you saw so many announcements from OpenAI and Google that you can’t even wrap your heads around it. So better models that do deeper reasoning did not get a lot of attention. But OpenAI released Vision Understanding so now you can use your camera. And so I walked around a farmer’s market and it analyzed all the produce and the meats and it was giving me recipes on the fly.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, we were playing with it at the holiday dinner table. Yeah. And just like what, what’s on the table and what are ,you know, and, and I think the amazing thing was with my 82 year old mother in law who was like into it and so, and wanted us to get it on her phone so she could go show her friends.

John Bailey: Oh yeah, it’s. Yeah. I mean it just feels different. It feels like something I want to just dedicate a lot more time and attention to understanding it. Both the benefits, lots of risks, lots of challenges on it. But it just like I’ve seen, you know, my mom’s using it to your point, like it’s just an advanced voice and the style of. Is just great entertainment for kids too with telling stories and whatnot. So anyway, so that’s my journey into this space.

The Best Case Scenario for AI 

Michael Horn: My kids have started to leapfrog me by just taking their search inquiries right to ChatGPT themselves and then get frustrated with some of the answers. Let’s dive in then John, because you’re getting to see a lot of these large language models clearly up close. You’re getting to experiment and help advise these companies that are at the leading edge in many cases. And I think what we want to do in these conversations, frankly is have both the advocates for and skeptics of AI and you clearly have a little bit of both from what you just said, make the case for both sides. You know, how’s it going to impact positively, how’s it going to impact negatively? So we can start to unpack the contours and figure out where the puck’s really going in classrooms and schools. And so I’d love you to start with this, which is to make the argument for how AI is going to positively impact education first. So leave aside your concerns and skepticisms for a moment and in your mind, like what’s the bull case, if you will, for AI?

John Bailey: One is, I think you have to do a lot, I’ve been wrestling with this a little bit. I think most of the other technologies up until this point have been about democratizing access to information. So that’s everything from the printing press to the computer, like CDs and with disks to then the Internet, the Internet democratized access to Wikipedia and you could get any information you want within your fingertips for almost no cost whatsoever. What I think is different about this technology is that it’s access to expertise and it’s driving the cost of accessing expertise almost to zero. And the way to think about that is that these general purpose technologies, you can give them sort of a role, a Persona to adopt. So they could be a curriculum expert, they could be a lesson planning expert, they could be a tutoring, and that’s all done using natural language, English language. And that unlocks this expertise that can take this vast amounts of information that’s in its training set or whatever specific types of information you give it, and it can apply that expertise towards different, you know, Michael, in your case, jobs to be done. And so for the first time, teachers have experts available at their fingertips, just typing to them the way they would type to a consultant. So give me a lesson plan. Here’s an IEP of a student, help me develop three lessons that I can use for that student that’s based on their learning challenges and the interests that they care about. So I think that’s going to unlock both, it’s going to be an enormous productivity tool for teachers potentially. I think it’s also going to be an amazing tutoring mechanism for a lot of students as well. Not just because they’ll be able to type to the student, but as we were just talking about, this advanced voice is very amazing in terms of the way it can be very empathetic and encouraging and sort of prompting and pushing students, it can analyze their voice. And then this vision understanding which was just sort of introduced. Google’s had this in a studio kind of lab format for a couple months now, but I think that’s going to just unlock, imagine a student to be able to do a project and presentation and having an AI system give them feedback and encouragement. That is like science fiction two years ago. And it feels like it’s very much within the realm of possibility. Maybe not right now, but you see the building blocks for where that could actually be assembled into a pretty powerful set of tools for both teachers as well as students.

Diane Tavenner: So John, when you, when you step back from everything you sort of just described of what’s possible in schools, teachers. Well you didn’t say schools. So among teachers and students, I sort of mental mapped a school on top of that concept. What part of that do you actually believe is going to be real, you know, for students and teachers and why. And maybe I think you’re probably going to put a timeline on it too is my guess based on what you’re saying.

John Bailey: Yeah, I think, I mean if other industries are a bit of a roadmap here, what you’re seeing in almost all the other sectors is that where AI is getting deployed first is a lot of back office functions. It’s in their IT shops. With coding, we don’t have that in education. But there are other, a lot of back office things where again the benefits can be pretty high and the risks of it being wrong are a little bit less than if like it’s engaging in a tutoring lesson with a student and hallucinating. That’s like high risk. Right. And so, you know, I suspect we’ll see a lot more sort of back office improving parent communications. I think we could see this, you know, beginning. There’s already been, you know, decades of legacy of trying to use AI or technology computer based scoring for assessments. I could imagine that. And then I think you’re going to see it roll out with a handful of tools for teachers. You’re seeing companies like that already with like brisk teaching. But also, I mean all these capabilities we were just talking about with Google, I mean they, if the moment they flick a switch and roll that out over Google classroom, that’s bringing AI into 60, 65% of classrooms and teachers around the country. And, so I think what you’re going to see is a lot of teacher productivity tools and then over the next, let me call it two to five years, a lot more sort of student facing things. As those technologies mature and as we build more robust products around it that have some of the safeguards that you want and need that ensure accuracy and quality as well as safety, I think for students as well. So I think there’ll be a lot of potential, but I think we’ll roll it out to students over a longer period of time. Meanwhile, like the teacher productivity, you know, enhancements for this could be pretty huge immediately.

The Risks

Michael Horn: It’s interesting to think about building off that Google classroom platform and just the access. Right. That solves in terms of distribution that perhaps historical products have struggled with in schools and gaining access to teachers and students. Let’s turn to the other side for a moment, John, and just like, where is AI not going to help things with teachers, students, schools, learning, you know, what’s sort of the, the place that people are dreaming up right now that AI is going to do something and you’re like, I just don’t buy it.

John Bailey: Oh, it’s interesting. Don’t buy that’s a different I, where I was going to go. I worry a little bit of, just because something done faster doesn’t mean it’s done better. And I know like, if any of the white papers are like, teachers should always be in the loop and teachers should always use their judgment, but teachers are also human. And I think one of the aspects of human is that if you’re overworked and you’re tired, sometimes the fastest response is the one you go with just because you’re just, you’re trying to maximize your time. And that’s one of the reasons we see teachers using like not great instructional quality resources from Pinterest, you know, and from Teacher Pay Teachers and from some of these other websites. That is a problem that exists now that I worry AI will exasperate. You know, if you’re a teacher and say, give me a lesson plan on literacy or reading something of reading in the third grade, you have no idea if that’s based on the science of reading, if it’s based on, if it’s aligned to your curriculum, if it’s adding coherence. And so there, there could be a sense of this instead of really augmenting a teacher’s judgment it could lessen it. In the same way that I think we worry about this with students, that part of the way you learn is through struggle, and struggle comes with not writing a perfect first draft. It comes from the first draft, the second draft, and the iterations and revisions on top of it. And I worry that the moment like students have just have a button that can automatically improve a paper, a paragraph or a sentence, they’re atrophying a muscle that is really critically important for this going forward. And then lastly, you know, we’re in the midst of this national discourse and debate right now about social media and phones and is that leading to more social isolation, loneliness and mental health issues with young people and inject into this these AI tools that I think as much as people say this will never happen, the risk of an AI companion where you’re talking, literally talking to an AI that’s empathetic and warm and adopting Personas and that’s going to be easier than the friction of talking to real life people. And so I worry that there’s a scenario where this AI companions will start leading to exacerbating the social disconnectedness and divide. And that is something that if you look at kind of the headlines that we’ve already had a couple cases with some tragic situations with kids who have committed suicide, I don’t think it was because entirely of the AI, but the AI was a contributing factor in that. And that’s something I think if we want to get ahead of where we are in the social media debate now, that’s something we should be thinking about researching and adding some guardrails to as well.

Diane Tavenner: John, I’m wondering, as you’re sharing these perspectives, how you think about. I guess what’s coming up for me is I feel like the main structures of school and education are still in place. And I agree with you, like the efficiency plays are the first places people go and does AI sort of risk reinforcing the existing model of school and education because it will make it more efficient? So like if teachers were just like barely, barely holding on and now we can keep everything sort of the same but just give them this like boost of efficiency we can keep things the way that they were. And obviously I’m biased because, you know, I want to, yeah, change up the way, pull apart everything but I’m curious just how you think about that, especially as things will unfold over time and like the easy places to start and the asymmetry of adoption too, you know, I mean, not every teacher in America has even ever logged into ChatGPT before. And then there’s some that are like power users at this point.

John Bailey: Yeah, I mean a common theme for both of your works and including over the six years you’ve done the series too, has been, you know, we have this system and institutions within the system that are remarkably resistant to change. And I think what we’ve seen is like technology doesn’t change a system. The systems have to change to accommodate and harness and leverage the benefits of whatever technology or sort of new innovation has been introduced to it. So I’m a little skeptical there. I think you’re going to have capabilities of AI outpacing the institution’s ability to harness that. It’s going to take time to figure out what that looks like and what that means going forward. I do, I come back though to this idea of like it’s access to expertise and I wonder if that mental model starts unlocking things as well, that if you’re a school principal, all of a sudden you have a parent communication marketing expert just by asking it to be that Persona and then giving it some tasks to do. And if you’re a teacher, it means all of a sudden every teacher in America can have a teaching assistant like a TA that is available to help on a variety of different tasks. And going back to what Michael’s point was saying with like Google Classroom, imagine if you’re a teacher, you’re in Google Classroom and you have your TA that’s able to look at student folders and just answer questions. You have. Like, I see like John and Michael really struggling in algebra what are some ways I could put them in a small group and give them an assignment that would resonate with both of their interests and help them scaffold into the next lesson? That was impossible to do before. Like that those three sentences could easily do that. And, and that’s why I think you’re going to see this idea of assistance very much kind of entering not just the education narrative but also the, the more sort of broader corporate landscape as well. Where you see that also by the way, is, is a little bit in how OpenAI is thinking about the pricing for this. There is an OpenAI model. Most people probably didn’t see it. The most robust, smartest and the one that has the most reasoning and they’re charging $200 a month for that. And most people are like oh my gosh, like I would never pay $200 a month for software. And that’s because it’s the wrong way to think about this as a software. The way to think about it is will you easily spend that much on a consultant or in a part time staff person. So OpenAI is even adopting almost like a labor market pricing strategy or the expertise that they’re giving you. And so I think this is an amazing thing for schools to think about at time of tight budgets is, you know, again, if you want to maximize your teachers, how can this fill different types of labor market roles in the education system to enhance and support teachers in the limited staff, given budget tensions that are going to be coming out in the next couple of years here.

How AI Is Changing the Skills Landscape

Michael Horn: It’s interesting hearing you say that and draw that analogy, John, because actually Clay Christensen, before he passed away, one of the big interests he had was how do you scale coaching models in education, in health care, in lots of these sort of very social realms as the recipe, if you will, for sustained behavior change and success and things of that nature. Never got to really dig into it and write about it. But as I’m hearing you talk about this, it suggests that maybe a disruption of that might be afoot. I guess that’s the question I want to lean into though, as well, which is you named a few things that this could hurt. And so the flip side of it being a great coach is that it might take away social interaction. Or you talked about essay writing and that, you know, actually the learning is in the process of doing it in revision and sort of pushing the easy button, if you will. Right. Jumps you ahead to the product, but not necessarily the learning and the struggle from it. I guess what I’m curious about, and I’m going to borrow an analogy that Brewer Saxberg, former chief learning scientist, I think was his title at CZI Chan, Zuckerberg Initiative and you know, Kaplan and K12 and a variety of places. He talked a lot about how Aristotle back in the day worried a lot about as the written word became a thing, that people weren’t going to be able to memorize Homeric length epic poems anymore. Aristotle was absolutely right. And I don’t know that we regret the fact that most of us.

John Bailey: Speak for yourself, Michael.

Michael Horn: Two of the three here could do it, but I, so but the question I guess would be, you know, of these things that might hurt, which are really going to, are they still going to matter in the future or are there going to be other things that we, you know, other behaviors or things that are more relevant in the future? And how do you think about sort of that substitution versus ease versus actually like really, you know, frankly, I think when you talk about social interaction that could be, forget about disruptive, that could be quite destructive.

John Bailey: Yeah, no, it’s, it’s a great question. It’s a good point. It’s also this is an area where some of the best studies of this are happening in the labor market and looking at like, how is AI changing? There was just one study I was just reading today with Larry Summers and Deming from Harvard that are looking at, you know, AI, one of the things that they’re finding is AI is chipping away at some of the entry level jobs. It is for the same reason that, you know, you don’t like, if I’m in Congress, now all of a sudden, I don’t need an intern to just summarize legislation. I have something could summarize it for me better in five seconds. And that actually hurts that intern because they’re not developing the skills of reading legislation and analyzing and summarizing it. But it also means the other thing that they’re talking about in labor market sort of terminology is that it’s really raising the skills for those entry level jobs. Now you’re not expected to summarize, now you’re expected to do more and a higher level cognitive functions with it. That, that’s interesting. But I also mean that’s going to place a huge strain on our education system. Like if you’re looking at just the results of TIMSS and NAEP and where kids are, they’re not in that higher cognitive function in terms of being able to ask those questions or do those capabilities. And so in many ways I think if this is going to change the future of work and going to raise the level of what’s expected, that’s going to put more strain on our education system to make sure that we get kids that are capable of doing all those different things. I think about that with myself. Like I’m not like, there are many people who are Excel gurus, very good at analyzing data and they do P tests and other things that statistical things that are very important and I would not be able to do. And this was one of the first experiences with code interpreter, with OpenAI is that all of a sudden I had again an expert, a data analyst who could do that for me. But what that meant is that for work I can no longer say, well that’s not something I can do. Now I could do it because I had an analyst that could help me with it and that in some ways don’t tell my employers this, but like now that could like raise their expectations for me as well. But I have to get smart on the type of questions and the type of direction to give it in order to get the answers that I can use to synthesize into some sort of response. So anyway, I think this is going to be a very messy way. It’s going to change the labor markets, but it feels like it’s lowering the floor in many respects and access to these higher cognitive tasks, which in turn then raises expectations in a lot of different ways. And that’s very powerful. But it’s also, I think it probably a huge strain on our human capital systems. Did I answer your question?

Michael Horn: Yeah, I think it does. Before I think Diane has another set of questions. But before we go there, just one quick follow up, which is it strikes me that then you knowing that you can ask those sorts of questions and sort of having a sense of the contours, right of like what are relevant questions, what are. What is knowledge base that is out there, that I could ask this in meaningful ways and how to structure it. Like those are topics that I might not need to know all the mechanics of how to do it, but I need to know that they are questions that can be asked and, and the relevant place to ask them is that a…Where am I on or off on that?

John Bailey: Yeah, I think that’s right and also again, this is where AI is amazing. Like you could give it a spreadsheet and say what are 20 questions you can ask with this? Or give me 20 insights that you glean from it if you don’t know where to. Like I’ve started again, treating a lot of AI people will tell you not to do this, but if you treat it, if you treat it a little bit, almost as if you’re talking to a person, it does unlock a lot of capabilities. There’s risks of doing that. But also I just find sometimes like I want to do X, like give me the prompt in which to do that or I want to do Y. Like what are. Ask me all the questions you need to be able to answer that. And then it asks me 10 questions and then spits back an answer. I just helped someone with, she’s coming up with a name for her social impact advisory firm and so we created a little GPT and AI assistant that was a brand advisor and it asked her questions the way a brand advisor would and then it spit back 20 names and one of them she’s going with. And so that’s like incredible. But again, she had expertise that could ask questions and facilitate a conversation to unlock some of her thoughts and preferences and then spit back an answer from it.

The Interplay Between AI and Policy

Diane Tavenner: So much there especially given my current focus of sort of 15 to 25 year olds and who are going to be intensely impacted by, I think every, are already intensely, I think impacted by everything you’re talking about. I want to flip over to policy and I want to come at it from the angle of, you know, most people think about AI policy around safety and you know, what are we controlling and what are we, you know, protecting people from, et cetera. But let’s come from the other direction that you sort of introduced a little bit ago about the structure of education in schools. We’ve got some pretty interesting policy movement happening in education right now. We are seeing the rise of ESAs or educational savings accounts, which, you know, puts money in the hands of families to spend it where they want to spend it. We’re seeing a lot of states adopt sort of portraits of a graduate or graduate profile that are these more inclusive, holistic views of like what someone should be able to graduate knowing, doing, being able to do and an openness to how they actually get to that place and the different pathways. Talk to me about like those things going on sort of in the policy world and AI happening over here is that kind of the intersection where we could sort of start seeing some structural differences. And again like a more user centered approach to educate, you know, a student centered approach potentially. So I’m curious your thoughts there.

John Bailey: No, I think it could, I think it’s a yes. It’s a yes, but in some ways the yes is, you know, I think there’s a whole class of ways of using AI that is about navigating and navigating really complex systems. And ESAs are one of those. And I think, you know, I. One of the first GPTS I built on OpenAI to demo this was, like if you go to Arizona’s ESA, it’s like two websites, there’s a weird random Excel file of expenses and then PDFs that like a 78 page PDF. And again that was the best that team could do with limited resources and also with the limited technologies. And I just put that into a GPT and all of a sudden it was a bilingual parent friendly navigator. And if you said can I use funds for Sony PlayStation? It didn’t say no, you’re a terrible parent. It used warm empathetic letter answers to say like no, you can’t and here’s the reasons why, but here’s what you can do. And it was all conversational. And I think this friction of dealing with education systems and education policy could be immensely improved by using AI. Another example, I have a friend, she has kids in a school district and they send these terrible absentee reports and I say terrible. It’s like her daughter’s name is capitalized. So it’s like shouting. And then it’s like has missed six days of school. It’s very, it is reading, reading like a hostage like script. It’s like your daughter’s missed six days of school. It’s very important for her to go to school. We are here to help you. And then it does this weird bar chart at the bottom that’s like meaningless and like I just gave it to ChatGPT as an image and say make this better and give three questions a parent could ask their kid for why they might be absent. Amazing. It was like. And that I did in an Uber ride crossing the Key bridge in Washington D.C. like, you know, that’s an amazing set of powerful tools that can remove friction and help improve the system to make it work better for parents and for kids and also teachers and administrators too. So the but on all this is like, I think that’s going to be powerful and it’s going to make policy easier. I’m still, until we create more flexible ways for teachers to teach, for students to learn and students to engage in different types of learning experiences, I just think we’re going to end up boxing and limiting a lot of this technology capabilities. On the portraits of a graduate. I do think like again, an easy navigator on this is to take student work and student interests and student grades and say I’m not really sure where to go, like help me, Ask me the 10 questions I need to figure out. Should I pursue an apprenticeship program, a two year degree or a four year degree. It feels like again, we’re very close to being able to do something that, you know, it may not be perfect, but it’s much better than what the vast majority of students have access to right now. And if it helps them make a better decision in this process and pick a better path that’s based on their interests and their passions and their skills and their abilities. That’s great. Like we should do everything we can to help maximize that.

Diane Tavenner: Awesome. Maybe just to round out anything. What policy do you think we should be keeping our eyes on as we focus on education in relation to AI? What should we be worried about? What should we be thinking about? What should we be paying attention to? I know you spend a lot of time thinking about policy.

John Bailey: I do, yeah. A little bit. A little bit of policy. So one is that Congress is going to move very slow. We thankfully though, in this day and age of such polarization in so many of our politics, there are two remarkable bipartisan roadmaps. One from the Senate, Senator Young and Senator Schumer introduced. And then there was a House report that got reintroduced right before break that is also bipartisan, remarkably good. It’s 218 pages and they have a lot, I take great comfort in the fact that there’s a bipartisan, durable consensus. It’ll take time to enact that. That’s okay. It’ll take time. At least we have a little bit of a pathway on that. The thing I think for most of your listeners to really pay attention to is what’s happening at the state level. And there, I mean, just last year we saw close to 400 something bills that were introduced at the state level. Everything from dealing with deep fakes to copyright issues to regulating the models themselves. The most famous one was in California. And those don’t on the surface look like they have anything to do with education, but they do. If that California bill had passed, that limits in many respects the types of models that would be available for teachers and for students. There’s another bill, similarly in Texas right now that’s being debated. And so I think we need to pay more attention to what’s going on at the state level because that is going to either restrict or enable access to a bunch of these different types of tools in the models. I think, Diane, you had mentioned too in one of the previous questions, like most people haven’t used ChatGPT, and I think that’s exactly right. But I think what’s going to start happening is ChatGPT and Google Gemini are going to come to where people live already. And you’re seeing that with ChatGPT being integrated into Apple’s iPhone, that, you know, I think for the vast majority of people in the country, their first experience of ChatGPT is going to be through their iPhone. And I think for a whole other set, especially teachers, their first experience is going to be using one of the AI tools on Google. And that’s okay. But again, what’s going to either restrict or expand access to those different types of tools are going to be these laws that are either restricting or adding more scrutiny to the models themselves. And what I will say there is, I don’t think anyone’s cracked the code on how to best regulate this. Whatever policymakers think they have the models improve or they’ve done something that they didn’t think was possible. And for the longest time, policymakers are like, we have to restrict these powerful models and it’s based on computing with some astronomical number. And then on December 24, China announces something called Deep Seek that is pretty much as good as ChatGPT4 and Llama3. And they did it with far less computing power. And so that would slip in underneath as like an exception. And I think policymakers are really wrestling with the best way of thinking about this and restricting it. So anyway, I would do more of that. You’re going to see a lot of other attention to AI literacy. I tend to be. I think these literacy efforts are great, but I have lived through, we need tech literacy, we need media literacy for everyone. It has felt like it. This is by no means to disrespect folks that are approaching this that like every new technology gets attached to literacy component to it. It is not really clear we got much from tech literacy back in the 2000s or some of the other things. And so maybe there’s a way to make sure that we get right what we got wrong before. But I don’t think that’s going to be the quite the silver bullet that we need it to be.

Diane Tavenner: I think that’s right. This has been really such a good way to start. Michael, do you have anything else you want to.

Reading, Listening, or Watching

Michael Horn: No, let’s. Thanks, John. This has been a really tremendous overview of a number of currents that I know both of us have been making notes on the side as you’ve been talking and we’re going to want to dig in more. Maybe let’s pivot away from the topic that we’ve been delving in as we wrap up here and just, John, what have you been reading, listening to, watching outside of the AI education conversation? Hopefully AI is not dominating every single thing. Although I won’t be surprised if you give us some movie or fiction or something like that with AI coursed in its veins. So what’s on your list?

John Bailey: Oh my gosh, what is? Unfortunately, it is like, it’s not unfortunate. It’s just I have. I found myself waking up at like 5am like 2 years ago just thinking about this. So like all of a sudden you’re reading books on, you know, intelligence and human expertise and human psychology because you’re trying to understand like intelligence and what is, what makes something intelligent and that. So anyway, that’s nerdy stuff. The new Henry Kissinger book with Craig Mundy, the Genesis book has also been good. I’ve been reading David Brooks’s book How to Get to Know Someone, which I sort of have missed the first time it had come out. But I think also it has an AI play too because that’s trying to get to know the essence of someone and the humanity of someone. And so it’s been great kind of reading through that in light of kind of everything that’s happening kind of around then what am I watching? I don’t know. Some great series on Netflix,  the Lioness. Yeah, it’s good. Oh, and all the Landman too which has also been quite good. Coming out of Yellowstone.

Diane Tavenner: Cool.

John Bailey: I don’t know.

Michael Horn: That’s good. I’m impressed with your range. Diane. What’s on your list?

Diane Tavenner: Well, my new exciting project for 2025 is we are planning a trip to Greece. And as Michael knows, when we sort of plan these trips, one of the big parts of it is spending like six months reading and learning and exploring before we go. And so I actually had a conversation with ChatGPT like you have advised John. When I flipped to just talking to it like a person changed everything to structure a reading and listening list and like all the things I’m going to do. So I have started in on that list that we co constructed and built together, which is pretty awesome. With the Greeks by Roderick Beaton. And this is on the nonfiction side. I have fiction too, but this one rose to the top because I really asked Chat to say I, I need you to find history that’s like engaging and that’s going to keep my attention and you know, give me all the, the way that I want history, the sort of the big swaths and so, so far so good.

Michael Horn: Very cool. Very cool.

John Bailey: One other thing, this summer when I did a vacation, I actually created a GPT with all, the travel itinerary, the PDF and everything else into it. And then it was awesome because I could just ask it questions, but it would give me, it would also speak phrases if I needed it to.

Michael Horn: Oh that’s next level, that’s very cool.

John Bailey: It was kind of, it was just kind of a fun little, little thing. But I’ll share the prompt with you later. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Horn: Because we used it for itinerary planning for, for all the different interests in our group, but did not jump to that level. John, that’s, that’s a good one. Mine has just been a book, so I feel boring compared to you both. I polished off Israel: A Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby, which has remained in my mind quite heavily. And so I highly recommend it. I thought it was quite good and quite humorous and quite engaging the way she wrote about it. So I enjoyed it. And that’s what I’ll, I’ll recommend for folks, and I think we’ll wrap there. But John, huge thanks for joining us again, kicking this off with a lot to chew on for all you listening right in with your questions, thoughts, things that are on your mind coming out of this conversation. We’ll look forward to the next one on Class Disrupted.

Students won’t have to quarantine or take a COVID test to attend school if they were exposed to someone who tested positive, according to  from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Thursday. The guidance is in line with a version leaked last week.

Students also won’t have to stay in groups, called cohorting, which was intended to limit transmission and make contact tracing easier. And schools are no longer urged to conduct screening tests of students participating in “high-risk” activities, such as contact sports, band or theater. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the new recommendations allow families and educators to “head back to school this year with a sense of joy and optimism.” 

But Leah Perkinson, director of research translation and evaluation at Brown University School of Public Health, said it’s important not to forget lessons learned over the past two years. 

“A lot of schools [and] districts might be relieved to turn the screening testing corner if it means that teachers, leaders and staff focus more on the social, emotional and learning needs of students,” she said. “But we’d be remiss if we didn’t take time to look in the rearview mirror and document what worked [and] what didn’t … when we need to stand up school-based testing again.”

Quarantine rules last school year may have prevented COVID from spreading, but they also contributed to high absenteeism, with some students sent home multiple times because they were a “close contact” of someone who tested positive.

Students missed an average of 15 days between September and January alone due to quarantines, according to But now, after more than two years of disrupted learning, new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could keep more students in the classroom.

The agency is expected to update its recommendations to say that those who are unvaccinated can continue to attend school if they wear a mask and test negative five days later, according to multiple news outlets, including and . recommends that those not up-to-date on vaccinations stay home for five days after coming in contact with someone who tested positive. 

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, [messaging] has mostly focused on encouraging students to stay home as a strategy for keeping healthy,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a research and advocacy organization. “We think a more balanced approach would be to emphasize that showing up to school matters for health, well-being and learning.”

The guidance would reflect the direction that many states and districts were already moving toward, noted John Bailey, a strategic adviser at the Walton Family Foundation who has monitored COVID policy since the beginning of the pandemic. In July, for example, said students exposed to the disease don’t need to quarantine if they lack symptoms. Many districts aren’t requiring masks this fall, and recently backed off last year’s strict protocols involving daily health declarations and weekly testing. By next week, of the nation’s students will be back in school, according to Burbio, a data company.

“The CDC should have released updated guidance in June or July to give schools time to adjust their plans and preparations,” Bailey said. “Releasing it this late creates needless frustration and confusion, which just further erodes confidence in both the CDC and administration.” 

Critics have pointed to multiple lapses at the agency since the beginning of the pandemic, such as allowing teachers unions to heavily influence guidance for schools and fumbling updates to mask recommendations for early-childhood programs.

Some experts think it would have been difficult to start the new school year enforcing the same protocols school districts implemented before — like masking and frequent testing. That’s despite a highly contagious BA.5 variant, being in the high transmission range, and among young children and .

“The problem is that these comprehensive efforts are meeting two powerful forces — exhaustion and apathy from the American people, and the clash of politics and public health in ways I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” said John Bridgeland, founder and CEO of COVID Collaborative, a team of experts that has provided recommendations throughout the pandemic. 

Quarantine policies also contributed to a lack of academic progress last year even at a time when students were back in school, researchers with NWEA, a nonprofit assessment organization, said when they released their latest results in July.

Parents complained about inconsistent rules. Some also violated them. In California’s , last year, parents knowingly sent a child who had tested positive to school. And three with zip ties threatened a citizen’s arrest on a principal last fall when the administrator told one of them his child had been identified as a close contact and would need to quarantine. They were charged with criminal trespassing. 

“I think that school will be much more ‘normal’ than it was even last year,” said Annette Anderson, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University and deputy director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools. 

‘Seem appropriate’

District leaders certainly hope so.

“Attendance rates had never been lower, and certainly impacted student learning,” said Tony Sanders, superintendent of School District U-46, outside Chicago. “The significant drops in attendance always correlated with spikes in COVID cases, mostly following periods when students were on break.”

The week after winter break, when the Omicron variant was prevalent, attendance fell to 72% in the district.

As the new school year begins, some districts are dropping all COVID protocols, according to .

Some parents, however, still want reassurances that schools will take precautions to limit exposure. Alexis Rochlin, a Los Angeles parent, said her preschooler was quarantined multiple times last year, “which was a huge pain.”  But she’s comfortable with the county’s . Close contacts are required to mask for 10 days after exposure and test three-to-five days later. Those who test positive can stop quarantining on the sixth day as long as their symptoms improve and they test negative.

“These policies seem appropriate to keep kids safe and limit learning loss. Anything less would be concerning to me,” said Rochlin, who also has a son entering second grade. “But we are in a post-COVID world, I guess, where everyone wants to live with it by ignoring it.”

Disclosures: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��. Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this story.

Offered the job by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, Carvalho in private, then presided over a televised school board meeting that featured three hours of supporters all but begging him to stay. In the end, Carvalho remained.

greeted the move in Miami, but it didn’t go over so well in New York, home to the nation’s largest school district: Eric Phillips, de Blasio’s press secretary, , “Who would ever hire this guy again?”

Four years later, Phillips has his answer: Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system.

The drama of the hire was underscored by Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, who likened the move to “LeBron coming to the Lakers.” But Los Angeles offers only the most recent example of an oversize personality with huge ambitions taking over a district’s top job. Right now, all three of the nation’s largest school systems are run by energetic reformers, a rarity even in big-city schools circles.

All of them greet Spring 2022 full of promise — and problems. Over the next few years, they’ll enjoy unprecedented funding as taxpayers throw billions of dollars at schools to scrub away deficits caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But all three districts are rapidly losing students. And unions, emboldened by 2021 victories around remote instruction and, in recent years, high-profile strikes, could be formidable obstacles to their priorities. In Chicago, new schools CEO has already faced down a citywide teacher walkout.

In addition to Carvalho and Martinez, who are both immigrants, New York City Mayor Eric Adams in December named , the founder of a small network of public boys’ schools, as the new school chancellor. Banks’s schools have stood out for, among other reasons, employing many male teachers of color.

All three “definitely seem reform minded, which I think is super exciting and a real breath of fresh air,” said , superintendent of the Catholic independent Partnership Schools network. 

“I think it really speaks to the moment we’re at as we’re coming out of COVID,” she said. The pandemic “provided an uncomfortable reminder” of the need for leaders who will put children’s needs first. 

Billions in new funding … until 2024

Martinez, Chicago’s new schools CEO, is of Chiefs for Change, a group that advocates for increased school choice, effective teacher preparation, and standards-aligned curricula. But it also rails against “onerous bureaucracy” in schools. That credo will certainly be challenged by the sheer scale of federal intervention: some in COVID-related relief since 2020.

In New York, state lawmakers in 2021 increased funding to New York City by nearly half a billion dollars. By next year, a lawsuit settled last year to equalize urban school funding could bring that to $1 billion, said president of Bank Street College and New York City’s former senior deputy chancellor. “So there is a significant infusion of new dollars into the school system that can be used to dig into systemic issues. And that’s very rare.”

As in districts large and small elsewhere, the three leaders are “all drinking from a firehose” of funding, said of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. But that also places extra responsibility on them: “No one can blame lack of funding as their excuse for not getting things done,” she said.

But unless Congress acts, all that extra funding will run out in 2024. None of the three new leaders agreed to be interviewed for this piece.

, who leads the AASA, the nation’s school superintendent’s association, said many leaders are using the cash to upgrade facilities. But spending it on generous raises or new instructional positions could actually put them at odds with unions, since those jobs won’t be sustainable.

“The financial cliff is only two years away,” he said.

A ‘friend of charters back at the helm’

A product of New York City’s public schools, Banks cut his teeth founding and the network of five unionized Eagle Academy public schools in New York City and Newark.

While the schools aren’t charters, Banks has said he supports charter schools. He told in December that families “are desperate for quality seats, quality schools … And if the traditional public schools were offering that, you wouldn’t see such a mass rush to the charter schools.”

Banks created the Eagle Academy schools to serve academically struggling boys of color in grades six through 12 who often face harsh discipline. As chancellor, he said, his first priorities are to expand early childhood education, improve career pathways for older students, and to combat students’ trauma.

, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s union, has known Banks for years. “I’ve been at his schools and I found them to be quite well-run,” he said. All the same, running the largest school district in the nation will force him to tame the city schools’ “mammoth bureaucracy.” 

The last two mayors have restructured the school system six times, Mulgrew said. “And every time, all they did was add another layer.”

In his , Banks on March 2 acknowledged that many families have “decided to vote with their feet, and to say, ‘We’re going to find other alternatives and other choices for our children.’” 

He promised an overhaul of the bureaucracy, including requiring district superintendents to reapply for their jobs. And he took direct aim at the way many schools teach reading, criticizing a method developed by a Columbia University Teachers College professor that “has not worked” with many children. He promised to shift to a method that emphasizes explicit phonics instruction, among other changes.

Banks has also said he’d like to transform city schools from the bottom up by handing to “principals who know what they’re doing,” according to the speech. He also wants to tweak how standardized tests are used, allowing students to show they’ve mastered content in other ways.

His ascendance stands in contrast to previous leaders who have looked suspiciously on the charter sector. New York actually caps the number of charter schools statewide at 460, with just 290 allowed for nearly 1 million students in New York City. While it’d take a state-level change to allow more, choice advocates said Banks can eloquently make the case.

“It feels to me like this is the moment where we can really see that there is a friend of charters back at the helm of New York City schools, which I think is really great to see, and I know is probably sending some shockwaves,” said Porter-Magee.

So far, at least, Banks hasn’t forcefully pushed to lift the cap, in December, “We want to scale excellence. So if that means opening a few more charter schools, that’s what we’re going to do … if we can get the state to approve it.” But he said he’s also encouraging the philanthropic community “to lean in on the traditional public school system, because at the end of the day, most of our children will continue to go to our traditional public schools.”

Enrollment downturns

Carvalho, who led Miami-Dade schools for 14 years, has been able to compete with charters by creating centralized data systems that allowed him to keep track of students’ academic progress better than most big-city leaders during the pandemic, Rees said. 

A Portuguese immigrant, Carvalho grew up in Miami and worked restaurant and construction jobs early on. He came up through the ranks in Miami-Dade, starting out as a high school science teacher and becoming a new breed of area leader: one who sticks around. Before he took the top job in 2008, Miami-Dade “was a revolving door for superintendents coming and going,” Domenech said.

Sticking around paid off. In 2012, the district won the coveted $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education, which recognizes school districts that have shown academic improvement while narrowing the achievement gap. More recent findings from the district’s Office of Academics and Transformation paint a : While Black students’ graduation rates rose from 62.4 percent in 2011 to 85.6 percent in 2020, just 40 percent of Black students in 2019 were proficient in reading; 44 percent were proficient in math. 

With parents clamoring to remediate lost instructional time during the pandemic, Domenech said Carvalho brought in “a very creative” program that contracted with camps to provide summer school.

Carvalho’s long tenure — the average big-city leader sticks around — is “a testament to his savvy in terms of the politics, in dealing with the board, in dealing with the community, in dealing with employee groups,” Domenech said.

He’ll need that savvy in Los Angeles, which also has recently featured a revolving door of superintendents, a strong union and an outspoken, ever-shifting school board — it currently has three seats open in the next election. In Los Angeles, Carvalho will work at the pleasure of the school board. Meanwhile, Banks and Martinez will work for the mayors of their respective cities.

During his second week at LAUSD, Carvalho unveiled a that includes expanded preschool, year-round learning and a “Parent Academy” offering coursework to help parents understand their children’s education. He’d also lengthen the school year and offer teachers more professional development. He acknowledged that he’d have to negotiate with the city’s teachers union about those last two ideas.

Carvalho last month told ����Ӱ�� the district must expand school choice if it wants to keep from “bleeding out students” from a system that, while much bigger than Miami, has fewer than one-third as many school choice options.

Los Angeles students, he said, basically have two choices at the moment: magnet schools and charter schools. “Whoever decided to restrict choice on the basis of those parameters?” he asked. “Where are the programs in L.A. where we see long waiting lists of parents? Why aren’t we expanding more of those programs to where the demand is?”

He has the district consider an “explosion of offerings” for students, including dual-enrollment programs, International Baccalaureate programs, fine and performing arts magnet schools, and single-gender schools, among others. “I’m less concerned about the dynamic of dialogue that usually separates people into two camps: charter versus non-charter. I’m more interested in programmatic offerings that benefit kids — period.”

Carvalho suggested that the district analyze which programs motivate students to travel long distances from their neighborhoods and offer more of these. “I can fill an entire wall with a repertoire of options for parents. Why aren’t we offering all of that?”

Throughout the pandemic, all three cities have struggled to retain and, in some cases, even find their students. All have seen in .

of the California Charter Schools Association said a crashing birth rate across California is a cause for concern. And net migration has actually dipped “into the negatives” as home due to anti-immigration policies and economic uncertainty.

“This is not about ‘The affluent went to Tahoe during the pandemic to hunker down,’” she said. “This is real and it’s permanent and it’s creating challenges across the state.”

An ‘innovative and data-informed’ school integration experiment

Born in Mexico, Martinez emigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 5. He is in a family of 12 children with deep ties to Chicago’s public school system — three of his sisters and some 28 nieces and nephews attend local public schools. 

Martinez was working in finance for the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2003 when then-Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan hired him as chief financial officer. He remained there until 2009 — Duncan moved on to serve as U.S. Education Secretary under President Obama. Martinez made a name for himself leading the San Antonio Independent School District through a redesign, beginning in 2015, that ����Ӱ�� dubbed “one of America’s most innovative and data-informed school integration experiments.”

Using family income data, he mapped poverty levels for each city block. Then he integrated schools not by race but by income and, among other factors, by parents’ education levels. Three years later, San Antonio’s 90 schools and 47,000 students were among the fastest-improving in Texas.

In Chicago, he faces something entirely different: a 330,000-student system that’s as families leave the city. Recent enrollment data show that while 43,500 new students enrolled for the first time this year, 54,000 left between the last school year and this one.

On the job in Chicago for seven months, Martinez has already his first major crisis: the city’s teachers in early January voted to not show up for work until COVID-19 safety demands were met. 

Martinez proposed a host of measures, including building-level testing to determine when to close schools. But the union, with memories of an that ended with millions in extra spending, insisted on more strict measures, including negative PCR tests for all staff, students, and volunteers in order to keep schools open. 

The strike lasted just under a week after the district agreed to increase testing options, allow remote learning on a case-by-case basis, and secure more KN95 masks. Despite the agreement, union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “unfit to lead our city. She’s on a one-woman kamikaze mission to destroy our public schools.”

‘This is the moment that unions should be at their strongest’

, a school consultant and occasional columnist for ����Ӱ��, said the political climate in all three cities reflects a desire by voters more broadly and parents specifically, to pull back from “super-progressive” policies, such as the Defund the Police movement, to more centrist strategies that simply ensure a solid education for all. Parents “just want a school system they can count on, that’s reliable, that is just serving their kids.”

, president of the education advocacy group 50CAN, said Adams, the New York mayor, campaigned on not just a return to moderation but normalcy: “The schools are open, the subways are safe. The restaurants work. People are back in their offices. That’s almost nostalgia now, and people crave that. And I think these candidates got that. And their education choices reflect that too.”

At the same time, unions are on the ascent. With their to in-person instruction amid COVID-19 spikes and a handful of recent in recent years, they’ve seen their and influence grow after years of declining membership. 

“This is the moment that unions should be at their strongest,” said , a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a libertarian Washington, D.C., think tank. “This is a health crisis, and unions are designed to make sure that they’re protecting the health and safety of their members.”

But over the past few years, he said, unions in many places have “overplayed their hands” by demanding that instruction stay remote. The arrival of these new leaders may signal something different altogether: The new leaders are by no means union supporters, even if voters in each of their solidly blue cities are.

Rees, of the charter schools group, noted that Banks hired Dan Weisberg as first deputy chancellor. Since 2015, Weisberg has served as , a national nonprofit (formerly called The New Teacher Project) that has trained thousands of teachers outside of traditional teachers colleges. Since its founding in 1997, it has had a complicated relationship with unions. 

In 2018, after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt unions a blow by making a portion of members’ dues optional, Weisberg wrote that he disagreed with the decision, calling it “a matter of basic fairness that teachers who reap the benefits of collective bargaining should also share in the costs.”

But Weisberg also called the decision “a blessing in disguise” for unions, which he said “are now forced to finally confront an existential threat that’s been brewing for years: They’re losing touch with more and more of their members.”

Rees said Weisberg’s hiring “gives us confidence that there’s a new sheriff in town and that things are going to be a little bit different, or at least that the reform community and the charter school community will have a seat at the table.”

When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured South Bend, Indiana’s Madison STEAM Academy in September, he made a quick impression on the district’s superintendent, C. Todd Cummings. 

Cummings remembers the secretary’s interest in COVID protocols, the facility’s STEM makerspace, and that he spoke Spanish to students at the bilingual school. By the time the visit ended, he came away feeling like he could pick up the phone and call Cardona if needed. 

“He’s done a lot to make the department more approachable,” Cummings said. “He understands running a district, but he also understands teachers in the classroom.”

Having one of their own helming the U.S. Department of Education has gone a long way toward mending the fractured relationship between district leaders and the agency that existed under Cardona’s predecessor. Betsy DeVos was the consummate outsider. She warred with unions, made comments that many teachers found , and attempted to direct relief funds meant for the public system to private schools. In contrast, when the former Connecticut state chief meets with superintendents and school leaders, “he’s talking shop” on everything from bell schedules to graduation rates, said Ronn Nozoe, head of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

But almost a year into Cardona’s tenure, and with the pandemic showing no signs of abating, his department has sometimes struggled to keep up. COVID-19 has thrust the agency into the public eye almost as much as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and, like the CDC, it has often come under fire for being slow to respond to a fast-changing virus. To some, Cardona’s camaraderie with educators helps explain why he has sometimes appeared reluctant to embrace another constituency, whose power and visibility has grown with the pandemic: parents. 

Sarah Carpenter, executive director of The Memphis Lift, a nonprofit that trains parents to advocate for their children’s educational needs, said she hasn’t forgotten that parent leaders weren’t asked to speak at Cardona’s first virtual summit on reopening almost a year ago. 

“They know we’re here, and we’re just not accounted for,” she said, adding that parents “in those communities where this pandemic hit the hardest” should have had a voice. A June event focusing on equity didn’t feature parents either.

Cardona hasn’t ignored parents, and often reminds the public that his two teenage children, still attending public school in Meriden, Connecticut, have endured their own disruptions in learning. His first act as secretary was to write to parents and students acknowledging the hardships caused by the pandemic, and he has urged schools to rebuild trust with families.

More recently, when schools began to shift to remote learning because of the Omicron variant, Cardona told ����Ӱ��, “Our parents have done enough.” That same week, the announcement of another round of grants to state came with Cardona’s statement that, “Meaningful parent engagement … has never been more important.”

But observers say his messages tend to emphasize over student recovery. When the department last month to use federal relief funds for teacher pay raises and hiring bonuses, Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said “the balance feels a little off.”

The pandemic has mobilized many parents to take a more central role in their children’s education, and their frustration over extended school closures likely tipped the Virginia governor’s race in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, has tried to drive that point home. She regularly participates in “stakeholder” meetings with the department, and shares monthly parent survey data with Christian Rhodes, chief of staff for the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. But she described the department’s parent engagement efforts as a “box-checking exercise.”

“That’s not what this moment calls for. It calls for listening to people’s pain,” she said. “Parents expect to be engaged on a whole new level because we had to hold it down for [schools] while they weren’t there.”

‘Not a slow-moving moment’

Leaders in education said Cardona has shown skill in managing the mountain of challenges he faced when he entered the job: more than half of schools still not fully open, expectations that he quickly reverse the previous administration’s stance on students’ civil rights, and low morale among what Nozoe called the department’s “beat-down career staff.” Cardona, he added, is trying to rebuild an agency that DeVos shouldn’t even exist.

Cardona said his top priority has been helping schools reopen and stay that way. Others credit him with steering billions in federal aid to states and districts on a short timeline.

“They’ve made a huge amount of progress in a very, very difficult time,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, a think tank. She led President Joe Biden’s transition team for education and as the nominee.

She specifically noted his team’s work to get the American Rescue Plan funding for schools “out the door with guidance and support for how to spend it” and early efforts to make the CDC’s “wonky and mysterious” school reopening guidelines more accessible to educators. Recent confusion over whether the agency’s updated quarantine guidance applied to schools, however, drew fresh .

Some noted that communication from the department often hasn’t matched the urgency state and district leaders have experienced during the pandemic. 

In November, the department said it was OK to use relief funds to pay for alternate forms of for students in the face of a bus driver shortage. But that was a month after New York , a Democrat, asked for the guidance, and two months after Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker called in the to drive students to school. 

In mid-December, the department issued a on jumpstarting school accountability systems, but state officials started calling for that in September. 

“They are slow moving,” said Roza, “and it’s not a slow-moving moment in public education.”

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Cardona said the department responds with guidance when “we hear from the field.” He noted the staff’s efforts to host multiple webinars and respond to questions from educators, but acknowledged that guidance from the department has sometimes lagged. He vowed to do better. “We have to stay ahead of things, and we’re going to continue to improve communications.”

‘More influence’

As he nears his first year as a cabinet member, Cardona reflected on what the department has accomplished under his leadership. 

While Omicron has led to short-term closures of as many as 5,400 schools, according to a frequently updated , Cardona noted that in-person learning had hit of schools by early December. And he takes pride that the department is addressing problems with Public Service Loan Forgiveness — a federal program meant to encourage students to go into nonprofit and public sector jobs, like teaching, in exchange for debt relief. Under DeVos, the department denied most requests for relief, and borrowers complained that loan servicers gave on how to meet the program’s strict criteria. The department’s management of the program prompted the American Federation of Teachers . Since Cardona started, the department has wiped out roughly $12.7 billion in college debt, including almost $2 billion for the public service program.

“Not only are we providing some loan forgiveness, but we’re fixing the systems that led to the problems that we have now,” he said, adding that he wants to continue to “make higher education more accessible to more students without having to be tethered in debt for the rest of their lives.”

Before Cardona was confirmed, there was speculation he’d be overshadowed by Biden’s White House advisers, who included two former high-level education officials from the Obama administration. More recently, Rodrigues quipped that , president of the National Education Association, likely has more pull with the administration than Cardona.

Conservative pundits have sized him up as Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, described him as “under-the-radar, except when he’s been waving the flag for partisan administration objectives.”

But those who support those objectives say Cardona has clout with the president. 

“I think with every passing day, he has more and more influence with the White House,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who first met Cardona when he was a teacher and now has a friendly competition with him over who has visited more states and schools over the past year. By late December, she’d hit 28 states; he’d made it to 25.

She said he advocated with the White House for changes to the loan forgiveness program and for putting teachers second in line to receive the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines, after health care workers.

Interestingly, given the coziness many of his critics assume Cardona enjoys with the unions, he has had trouble with the one representing employees in his own department. 

‘The huge political divide’

In early December, the Federal Labor Relations Authority found the department guilty of 14 violations of labor law — actions that date back to 2018 when the employee union’s collective bargaining rights. A of federal employees showed that morale within the department had declined far more than in any other agency. Those grievances have continued under Cardona, according to Cathie McQuiston, deputy general counsel with the American Federation of Government Employees.

The complaints involve inconsistent policies for working remotely, employee evaluation procedures and denying staff union representation when they have a dispute.

Under DeVos, the department was “paraded out as an example to other agencies of the kinds of things they should be doing in the Trump administration,” McQuiston said. “There has to be a political will to come in and say, ‘We’re not doing that anymore.’ At education, we struggle to get that commitment.”

According to a department spokesperson, efforts to resolve the complaints are ongoing and the agency is “committed to making sure it is a great place to work.” Both sides are scheduled to meet Thursday.

While addressing internal issues, Cardona was hit with a summer storm of public controversy over mask mandates and school equity initiatives. Superintendents were targeted with death threats, brawls broke out at school board meetings and school leaders tried to make sense of contradictory court rulings and mandates over masks.

“I wonder whether he anticipated the huge political divide over masks or no masks,” said Deborah Delisle, who served as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education in the Obama administration and is now president and CEO of ALL4Ed, a nonprofit education policy organization. 

In August, Cardona departed from his usual cordial tone to take a against states banning local districts from mandating masks. 

“Don’t be the reason why schools are interrupted,” he said at a , indirectly challenging the governors of Florida and Texas.

But unless Republicans pressed him during Congressional hearings, he avoided the fray over critical race theory — a legal argument that racism lies at the core of U.S. institutions to intentionally advantage white people — and even to the controversial 1619 Project and the work of author Ibram X. Kendi from a civics grant program.

“We don’t get involved in curriculum issues,” he said during a June budget hearing, but stressed his support for culturally relevant teaching. “When students see themselves in the curriculum, they are more likely to be engaged.”

Some observers suggest he could have done more. 

Hess, at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cardona could “perhaps carve out room for the serious center” by defending “a progressive vision” but denouncing some of the examples that critics have found so , such as asking students to label themselves as “oppressed” or “oppressor.”

But Julia Martin, legislative director at Brustein and Manasevit, a law firm specializing in education, said there was no political upside for Cardona to wade any deeper into those waters.

“These issues, by their nature, are local issues,” she said. “There’s no way in many of these instances to come out and make a principled statement that doesn’t bother some people.”

The typically controversy-averse Cardona is a departure from the activist chiefs who have occupied the department since the No Child Left Behind era. Unlike many of his predecessors, Cardona doesn’t have a presidential mandate to implement bold reforms. 

“We’re still in a crisis, versus coming out of a crisis back in 2009,” said John Bailey, a senior fellow at AEI. That’s when Arne Duncan became secretary under President Obama, with a far-reaching mission to incentivize states to embrace controversial reforms such as overhauling teacher evaluations and adopting Common Core standards.

Even if Cardona had such a mandate, Bailey said, the pandemic leaves him in the position of trying to provide a “rapid response during an unfolding crisis that continues to play out.”

If the pandemic doesn’t continue to steal most of Cardona’s focus, he said he hopes to shift attention in 2022 toward issues a little closer to his heart: “teaching and learning.”

As someone who attended a technical high school in his hometown of Meriden, Cardona wants to see “better pathways” for students to two- and four-year schools and the workforce, especially with the jobs that will be created as a result of the $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill passed in November.

“There’s funding … unlike we’ve seen in the 20 years that I’ve been in education,” he said. “We have an opportunity here to really lift our field … and to give our students opportunities that they’ve never had.”

Lead Image: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona testified during a Sept. 30 Senate education committee hearing on school reopening. (Greg Nash / Getty Images)

Under the protocol — which many states and districts have had in place for months — unvaccinated students who are exposed to COVID-19 can remain in school if all students wear masks, don’t display any symptoms and test twice a week. 

Data suggests “that a school-based [test-to-stay] strategy in a large and diverse county did not increase school transmission risk and might greatly reduce loss of in-person school days,” according to an evaluation of a program in Los Angeles County, one of two studies released with the CDC’s statement. “Thus, schools might consider [test-to-stay] as an option for keeping quarantined students in school to continue in-person learning.”

With schools breaking for the holidays and rising concerns about the spread of the Omicron variant, observers said the announcement — now part of the CDC’s for schools — comes just in time. John Bailey, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who publishes a daily newsletter on COVID-related research, called it “welcomed news” that helps schools prepare for the potential Omicron wave in January. But the agency also urged all eligible students to be vaccinated and get a booster shot, and said schools shouldn’t abandon other safety procedures, including social distancing, improving ventilation and handwashing. 

“It’s encouraging that test-to-stay strategies are proving effective both in limiting transmission of the virus and in ensuring that students can remain learning in school, so that entire classrooms or schools do not have to shut down when a case of COVID-19 is discovered in the school community,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

It’s unclear, however, how many students those shutdowns have affected. Bailey faulted the Department of Education for not issuing weekly reports on how many students are in quarantine and whether they’re receiving instruction.

“We should not be relying on third parties for that data,” he said. “An agency that is using civil rights authorities to enforce mask mandates should be curious about the civil rights of kids who are not being served in the midst of quarantines.”

The CDC’s two studies show that test-to-stay is significantly minimizing disruptions in learning.

Thirty-nine of Los Angeles County’s 78 school districts implemented test-to-stay. In those that didn’t follow the model, 4,322 students tested positive between Sept. 20 and the end of October, compared to 812 students in the districts that implemented the program.

In Lake County, Illinois, 90 schools implemented test-to-stay between early August and Oct. 29. Just 16 students out of a total 65,384 tested positive. The authors wrote that assuming students would have missed eight school days during a 10-day quarantine, the program “preserved up to 8,152 in-person learning days” for students that were exposed.

Leah Perkinson, a manager at the Rockefeller Foundation, which has worked with districts to implement testing, called this “one of the happiest days for me throughout this whole entire pandemic” and said the announcement will likely prompt more districts to adopt the strategy. “Some people are only willing to move forward when the CDC releases guidance.”

The data, she added, could also inspire other settings, such as child care centers and camps, to see if they can implement test-to-stay.

One challenge, however, is that some rapid COVID tests are not picking up Omicron, according to , director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease. 

The two studies also noted complications that limit districts’ ability to implement the model, such as staffing shortages, the need for “robust contact identification and tracing” and a lack of support from parents. 

“Some schools reported a shortage of testing supplies, requiring [test-to-stay] participants to access off-site testing, which might have presented a barrier in low-resource school settings,” according to the second evaluation on Lake County, Illinois. “State and local public health and education agencies should strive to ensure that schools in low-resource areas have equitable access to staffing and testing supplies to implement [test-to-stay].”