In the final episode of the season, Michael and Diane welcome Stacey Childress, Senior Education Advisor at McKinsey & Co., back to the show to discuss the world of education philanthropy. Stacey draws from her previous experience at New Schools Venture Fund and the Gates Foundation to analyze troubling trends in the sector. The three discuss what funders and operators can do to grow philanthropic investment in education and better deploy those funds. 

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. It’s good to see you.

Diane Tavenner: It’s good to see you as well. I think the unofficial start of summer has happened. I know that because I had a big graduation last week. My son graduated from college, which is quite surreal. It’s also the last episode of the season, which I can hardly believe.

Michael Horn: First, congrats to you and to Rhett on the graduation. It’s very exciting news. I can’t believe it’s the end of the season. We’ve had the chance to interview many interesting people, and we’ve particularly enjoyed having one guest back on the show.

Diane Tavenner: That’s true. I’m excited to reintroduce Stacey Childress. Regular listeners will be familiar with her. We originally teamed up for a two-part series on higher education and had so much fun that we decided to do it again for K-12 education. 

Hopefully, folks are enjoying those episodes. During those conversations, we had some off-the-record dialogue about a big topic in education right now, and we decided it was an important conversation to have. So, welcome back, Stacey. We’re thrilled to have you here. We’ve covered your credentials before, but today you’re really in the expert seat, having been involved in multiple aspects of philanthropy, which is the direction we’re going.

Michael Horn: Hi, Stacey. Thank you for joining us again.

Stacey Childress: I am happy to be here. There are two things I’m reflecting on now that this is my fifth episode in a row.

Diane Tavenner: Yes

Stacey Childress: One, never say anything to you guys in an offhand way because it might become a podcast episode. Oh, we ought to do philanthropy, and now here we are. I’ve learned my lesson.

The second thing is, I feel like I’ve moved from guest to long-term guest, almost like we’re in roommate mode.

Changes in Education Philanthropy

Michael Horn: We’ll see. Diane and I are persuasive. Either way, thank you for joining us. We’re excited to dive into this topic of education philanthropy. As you both alluded to, it feels like the water around philanthropy and education is really churning right now. It feels different from how it has in the past. Maybe it’s my imagination, maybe it’s not. There was recently an article in Inside Philanthropy talking about the changing nature of education philanthropy, which struck a chord with us. Many of our listeners are running school networks, starting education nonprofits, or interfacing with donors. We wanted to dive into this important sector of the education reform movement to discuss how it is or isn’t changing and its implications for our sector. Diane, what did I miss before we dive in?

Diane Tavenner: I think you captured it well, Michael. Just a minute more on the philanthropy aspect. The article did a good job of capturing the feeling. The conversations I regularly have with folks in education, whether in nonprofits or school organizations, or anyone in the ecosystem who relies on philanthropy for their initiatives or operations, there’s a real sense of worry, stress, and fear. There’s a belief that there is less philanthropy available, and it’s confusing what is being funded, if it’s going to be there, and if long-term philanthropists will stay in the sector. This is a big conversation happening all around. Stacey, you’re in this a lot. Many people look to you as a whisperer in this space. Is that capturing what you’re experiencing?

Stacey Childress: Yes, it is. There’s a lot of uncertainty. Michael, you asked if these foundations routinely change their strategies every five years or so. Is that what’s going on here? We can talk more about that trend, but this feels different. What I’m hearing from people raising money is not just the uncertainty of where we’ll head next and what priorities givers will coalesce around, but whether they will stay in this field at all or continue funding at the same level. If you were giving $300 million a year, are you going to pause and then go to $100 million instead of $300 million? That shift pulls a significant amount out of the philanthropy market. If you were giving $100 million a year, are you going to reduce that, and what are the new priorities? The feeling is different. I had a concentrated period of fundraising from 2014 to about a year ago, and it didn’t feel like this. We always shaped the priorities of the big givers, knowing they would do a strategy refresh, but we never worried about the money going away. In fact, we were confident we could bring more dollars in. It does feel different now, and I’m glad I’m not a fundraiser at this moment.

Michael Horn: Well, with that context, but also a bit of sobering context, let’s dive into the first question. Diane and I have a bunch of things we want to ask. Can you give an overview of philanthropy in education? What are we talking about in terms of dollars? To the extent you see it shrinking, can you quantify that a little bit so we have a sense of what and who we are talking about?

Overview of Education Philanthropy 

Stacey Childress: I feel a little exposed. You called me an expert, and I have to say two things about that. One, I have an arrangement with McKinsey & Company as a senior advisor. This is not informed by my work with them, nor does it reflect their views. This is Stacey Childress: speaking personally. 

Michael Horn: But let’s put it in context. New Schools Venture Fund, obviously raising dollars and giving, Gates Foundation, you were Next-Gen Stacey, right?

Stacey Childress: Yes, I was Next-Gen Stacey.

Michael Horn: Even with the book that Rick and I did, you wrote that incredible piece around the role of philanthropy in markets. So, you’ve thought a lot about this.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, I have. I just wanted to make sure that I know a lot. So I’m not trying to be falsely modest and say I’m not an expert.

I have expertise in this area, particularly in a very concentrated part of the space. But nothing I say today has anything to do with what McKinsey would say about this stuff. It’s not related.

It’s been a while since I looked rigorously at the shape and size of this part of the philanthropic capital market for education. I can tell you what I know firsthand and how that may or may not have changed over time. When I joined New Schools in 2014, it was the first time I had to raise money after giving it away. I wanted to understand with a lot of specificity what that philanthropic capital market looked like because I wanted to get more of it for New Schools. I wanted to increase our share of that wallet if it wasn’t going to grow.

At the time, education innovation and reform philanthropists were giving a little over a billion dollars a year. So it was about 1.25 billion dollars of philanthropy to things like charter schools, charter school networks, some ed tech stuff, human capital initiatives like Teach for America, new leaders for new schools, and similar projects. There was about a billion plus dollars in philanthropy.

My sense is that it stayed pretty stable the whole time I was at New Schools. Over about an eight or nine-year period, we stayed at about a billion and a quarter as a sector.

I’m talking only K-12 and only the innovation reform wing of funders. Think of Gates, Walton, CZI, Schusterman, Dell, and similar players. There’s a kind of an East Coast, West Coast, and some middle of the country folks. That group stayed at a little over a billion, with some comings and goings within, but overall about the same.

My sense is that that’s still true. It might have ticked down just a little bit, but I could be wrong about that since it’s been three or four years since I’ve taken a firm look. Even with the pandemic shifts, that’s still what we’re talking about here.

Now, it sounds like a lot of money, and I don’t want to diminish it. It is a lot of money, especially once you’re in the billions. The thing is, I learned this the hard way, but it’s something you learn as you go.

A big question for philanthropists, whether you’re in this sector or any individual philanthropist, is that Gates was and I think still is the biggest K-12 funder of this type. They’ve stayed in the 300-350 million dollars a year range. So about a billion plus every three years, just Gates, about 1.2 or so billion, 1.5 billion every three years. But the public funding for K-12 education has grown from about 600 to 800 billion a year over the last few years. That’s 1.8, almost 2 trillion dollars every three years.

So you match up Gates’ billion plus dollars every three years against government funding for schools at over a trillion and a half. It’s vanishingly small.

It’s a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, not so much. The goal is to create the most impact possible in a sector that has enormous funding and is in vast need of improvement. How do you put those dollars to work in a way that, even though they’re small, they have an outsized effect on improving student outcomes, access to opportunity, and those kinds of things?

So it’s a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, not so much. How do you get that wedge of innovation capital in? Diane, it looks like you’ve got…

Diane Tavenner: Well, Stacey, I think this is such an important point for this conversation because I want to make sure people know what specifically we’re talking about. I think you’re really zeroing in on that. This conversation is about philanthropy that isn’t generally funding operational funds. That isn’t to say that philanthropy isn’t out there.

There are a lot of individual donors and people in communities who give money to their favorite nonprofit, schools, charity events, and galas. We’re not talking about any of that money here. We’re talking about a relatively small set of substantial foundations giving specific types of money for specific purposes, not for ongoing operations.

So let’s spend a minute on what those grants look like when that money comes in. What do they not look like, perhaps?

So people can be really clear.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, that’s great. So, yes, that segment of donors we’re talking about funds innovation. Whether it’s startups or existing organizations in this ecosystem, they fund innovation—starting something new, creating something new within an existing structure, or radically changing the way something is done. 

Innovation capital and growth capital help when you’re on to something, have good results, and want to serve more kids, train more teachers, or expand your core business. This kind of capital can help you grow and do more in more places or with more people. The hope is always that this will lead to sustainability without ongoing funding beyond what you receive per pupil if you’re a school or a program that gets money through taxes for serving students, or through earned revenue.

If you’re more of a service-based nonprofit, you need to figure out who and what you’re going to charge to continue operating without a constant philanthropic subsidy.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, we always call it growth capital. We would call them bridges versus piers. You’re not just putting someone in the ocean; you’re building a bridge to something sustainable, hopefully new, better, and scalable.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, exactly. The size and time frame of these grants vary.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, obviously, it depends on what you’re doing, but it’s rare for one donor to fund your whole need. If you’re an operator, you have to think hard about that because you probably don’t want that. It sounds easier to get one big check, but it’s actually good to have a mix of revenue or investment capital with multiple investors. This dilutes the power and governance of any one investor.

Stacey, you’ve raised a lot of money too. I like having several investors because it allows us to do what we committed to our donors without answering to one set of priorities or perspectives.

In this space, you’re usually looking at multiple donors to fund what you and your team want to do, whether it’s innovation or growth. These grants are usually three years.

Diane Tavenner: Sometimes.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, sometimes they stretch to five, but often it’s a year at a time. You do a little bit, get a little more, do a little bit, get a little more, which can be quite dynamic. There are expenses associated with this that aren’t necessarily yearly. You’re usually investing in people.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: To get good work done, so payroll is always a consideration. It’s a good discipline. Three-year grants were common. I had a very small number of five-year grants, which were amazing but hard to get. Very rare. A lot of one and two-year grants.

Diane Tavenner: A lot of ones and twos. If it’s okay, I can put a little shape to this in terms of dollar numbers from my time at New Schools. We launched another fund while I was there. Between 2015 and 2022, I raised 550 million dollars, about half a billion, in seven or eight calendar years. Two hundred million of it was on five-year grants. For New Schools, the other 350 million had nothing longer than three years.

Stacey Childress: But we only raised that from about 15 donors. I had multiple donors, but still very concentrated.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: Any one of them stepping off would have been a risk, but we kept renewing them for almost nine years. The risk was always there that one of our multi-million, multi-year donors would decide we weren’t for them anymore, they were reducing their education spend, or they could do it themselves without needing us. It was a constant process of selling what we were up to and our ideas during the three-year terms because we always wanted to renew.

Diane Tavenner: I think it’s useful to reiterate that you raised all that money to give it away thoughtfully to operators. There are two groups: one raising money to deploy it to operators and another group, like me, raising money from both you and directly from big donors. It’s a lot in the weeds, but hopefully, it’s helpful to understand what we’re talking about. Michael, maybe we should return to you because you’re wondering if this is different from the past.

Michael Horn: I think that’s the question. When I was running the Christensen Institute and raising dollars, the Gates Foundation would change strategies every five years. Is the current moment different from other times in the field when we’ve seen similar shifts, or why are people asking these questions right now?

The Impact of the Pandemic 

Stacey Childress: Yeah, I alluded to this earlier. Let me get more specific about this current moment and the difference as I see it.

Michael Horn: As you perceive it, yeah.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, as I perceive it. Somebody ought to do a really good analysis of this, an actual bottom-up analytic project to sort this out.

But here’s where I think we are. The pandemic was an exogenous shock that threw us all for a loop and put us back on our heels. None of us knew what to do during those early months of the pandemic in 2020, trying to figure out how things would sort out. 

You know me. I’m generally an optimist, a sarcastic optimist if that’s a thing, but I really am an optimist. I always think we’re going to figure this out and things will work out.

During that time, I thought, this will be a wake-up call for all of us in philanthropy in two ways.

One, if we reflect back, are you kidding me that this is really where we are in March, April, May of 2020? We couldn’t even get kids learning at home effectively with decent digital content. I was devastated. I was next-gen Stacey at Gates Foundation, and we envisioned kids learning anytime, anywhere, in deep, rigorous, and engaging ways, and that learning should count even if it’s not in the classroom.

I still believe all that, but here we were, unable to do that on any kind of scale. There are lots of reasons for it, but I thought this would be a wake-up call because maybe we’ll have another pandemic, or at least the mindset shift to anytime, anywhere learning is valuable.

The other thing was, as a philanthropic sector, I hoped it would shake us out of some bad habits, or at least some standard operating procedures that don’t serve children or grantees well.

Michael Horn: Can you give a couple of examples?

Stacey Childress: I was part of two different coalitions of philanthropists that met often on Zoom during 2020, trying to sort out what we should be doing. A lot of energy and good intentions, but no principles, just staff people. Many were heartbroken, stymied, and frozen because their ways of doing business were no match for what was needed. They couldn’t provide the size of grants or the flexibility that operators needed to respond quickly.

Operators needed resources immediately, especially those with a vision for how to respond. Their current budgets didn’t allow for it, or they were doing something new and needed the money right away because kids were stuck at home, not learning.

I had off-the-record conversations where people said they couldn’t move fast enough or weren’t set up to respond quickly. I told them they could, but they had to lead and make the case to their principals or decision-makers. We had to throw standard procedures out the window, at least temporarily, to respond to the crisis.

Some institutions equate time with rigor, thinking a long process means rigor. But often, it means 15 people have to look at something, and it takes months when three people knew everything needed in the first month. Grants could have been made in a month instead of six or eight months.

I’ve seen this as both a fundraiser and inside the world’s largest education funder. Things just take too long, and I don’t see that changing. Some figured it out on an emergency basis but have reverted to standard procedures, possibly with new organizational charts and consultants. It still takes a long time.

With these shifts, Michael, people are getting stuck mid-process and can’t get good information about what happens next. The staff inside these institutions are unsure of what will happen next, trying to respond to their decision hierarchies, leading to stalled processes.

Stacey Childress: I know someone working on a multi-million dollar, multi-year grant that should be a renewal. There’s no unknown about the grantee or the work, but it’s stalled due to internal churn. They need the money last month and thought the first payment would be made then, but now it’s stalled for another six or eight months with no visibility into what’s happening.

I feel like I’m rambling, but there was a moment where we could have shaken off standard operating procedures. It was clear that even with good ideas, we haven’t funded them at sufficient levels, smartly, durably, or for long enough to get where we need to go. Part of that is about how we do business. Could we take this moment to throw out old processes and reinvent them to be more responsive? We’re funding innovation and growth, but this isn’t how innovation and growth investing happens in other sectors of the economy. It’s just not. 

Sorry, I have one more thing to say about the pandemic lessons.

Diane Tavenner: It’s interesting to have this conversation, and it’s surprising to me we haven’t had it before. I’d love to share what I was experiencing at that time. Michael and I started the podcast because, like you, we were optimistic that the pandemic would create an opportunity. We hoped people would see what was wrong not only in philanthropy but in how schools were being operated, offering a moment for change. And here we are, season five.

Reflecting on it as an operator, everything you’re saying is right. People don’t understand how expensive it was to survive during the pandemic as a school system. The amount of money we had to spend on tests, masks, computers, hotspots—everything was immense.

I would argue that Summit was one of the best in the country at getting things up and running effectively, just as you described, Stacey. I had to make some tough decisions, extending ourselves and thinking the money would come in. Interestingly, the money did not come in from philanthropy, as it couldn’t cover the entire system. It came from the government, which moved pretty quickly, I would say.

One of the challenges is, and I’m a pretty savvy fundraiser, I didn’t know what to ask philanthropy for at that moment. We couldn’t innovate; we were just trying to survive. We had a lot of money flowing in from the government.

We did have one amazing funder, Arthur Rock, who came in within weeks, giving generously without a team or staff. His money allowed us to set up a mini-fund to help families in crisis, preventing them from being thrown out on the street, and ensuring they had necessities like a working refrigerator or internet access. It was immediate emergency cash for survival.

Stacey Childress: Yes.

Diane Tavenner: Thank goodness for Arthur enabling everyone who didn’t have internet to have a hotspot within days. But that was it. That was all that came through. Arthur has an interesting way of thinking where he doesn’t believe time will give him more information.

Stacey Childress: And he also trusted you to know the best way to deploy those resources. Arthur trusted me and my team, and that’s another challenge. As foundation staffs get bigger, they hire smart people who become experts lauded for their knowledge. They’re less inclined to just give the money to someone like you and let you do what you need to do.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: Instead, they take nine or twelve months to put you through a process that yields no more information than they had at the beginning. I’m not insulting the people who work in these places. I have many friends and people I respect greatly. But the institutions and the culture create processes that are inefficient.

Diane Tavenner: Same with schools, right?

Stacey Childress: Right. Same with schools.

Michael Horn: I remember this from over ten years ago. Giselle Huff was frustrated that they would hire people like you and not give you the autonomy to move quickly. It’s an organizational issue, not the individuals per se.

The bigger issue I’m hearing is that the pandemic didn’t break these tendencies; it exposed them. It created an existential crisis internally where people questioned their identity and purpose, leading to more pause and churn. This indecision has created a lingering hangover.

Stacey Childress: The hangover is still here. Gates might be an interesting exception, which I’ll come back to. Many institutions faced a crisis in the first months of the pandemic, realizing that what they’d spent years and billions of dollars on hadn’t made the progress needed.

For institutional funders, there was a sense of, “What did we get for it?” The principals, whether trustees or living donors, were asking good questions but not getting great answers from teams trying to figure it out and not wanting to be wrong. There was a fear of going back to donors like Bill Gates, Mark and Priscilla, or the Walton family with another failed initiative.

Giselle went to the president of the Gates Foundation a year after I was there and asked why they hired me but didn’t let me spend my budget freely. I wished she hadn’t done that, but it highlighted the issue. What are we waiting for? Who do we think will come up with a better answer? Where’s the boldness that created the wealth in the first place?

Shifting Strategies 

Michael Horn: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. Let me ask the question this way: I’m hearing from a lot of nonprofits, and I sit on boards of nonprofits, that it’s as bad as it’s ever been. We’ve seen a bunch go out of business or be acquired for virtually nothing.

Maybe that’s what should have happened, I don’t know. But it seems different in many ways.

Another question I have is about the shifting strategies every five years and the churn you’re describing. Education is a space where change isn’t going to happen across the country in five years. This is a big, complicated 50-state country with lots of challenges that interfere with the operations. It’s messy. There’s a huge installed base.

Are we guilty of impatience, not just sticking with a good theory of action? Or is something else going on?

Stacey Childress: Yeah, yes.

Michael Horn: I didn’t mean to ask a one-word question.

Stacey Childress: No, I know. I was recently talking with someone from one of the large institutional donors. This person joined relatively recently, post-pandemic, and had been an outside observer and fundraiser from this institution. They had an insight that rang true for me: we’ve got a theory of change for what should happen in the sector over many years, but it’s not very rigorous or periodically examined with any rigor.

It’s shaped around the personality of the donor and some senior staff preferences. It sounds fine, but then we’re applying a lot of rigor at the individual grant level, creating 47-row outcome trackers for 18-month grants. We spend months creating these, and every quarterly call with the grantee digs into line items.

But there’s no intermediate view of how the ecosystem around these grants is doing because we’re not clear about what those are. We’ve got four or five areas we’re willing to fund, but even then, we’re not looking at the portfolio. We’re not seeing how individual grants add up to those areas.

So, big idea, not a lot of rigor around developing it, and then intense rigor at the grant level. My time at Gates wasn’t quite that loose, but there were features of it, especially the one-at-a-time approach, which isn’t true rigor. It often meant lots of people, lots of rows on a spreadsheet, and many conversations, but that’s not true rigor. 

You spend five years and have three model grantees to show the principal, but you’ve spent $800 million or more. The pandemic opened up good questions for which there aren’t good answers yet. 

Gates narrowed its focus to math, committing $1.2 billion over three years. This isn’t an additional billion; it’s their regular funding but focused mostly on math. This narrowing means if you were funded by Gates before but aren’t focused on math now, you’re out. This has led to many organizations no longer fitting into Gates’ funding categories. 

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: The downside is if, after three or five years, they can’t achieve what they want in math, then what? We’ve been through system-wide transformation, charter schools, standards, teacher systems, next-gen schools, and now math. If they keep switching every three to five years, what’s next? 

Michael Horn: Right.

Stacey Childress: If the next cycle doesn’t work, they might consider an exit.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: I know what I would do, but in that institution, now 25 years in, by the time the math cycle ends, they’ll be 26 or 27 years in. Now what?

Michael Horn: That makes sense.

Stacey Childress: People worry the “now what” will be an exit.

Diane Tavenner:  Yeah, that’s what people are worried about, for sure.

Stacey Childress: And Gates isn’t the only one. I use them as an example because it illustrates the issue cleanly.

How Operators Can Help 

Diane Tavenner: Everything Stacey is saying resonates with me. Michael, what I’m thinking about a lot is our conversations about innovation. If we go back to the top of this conversation, this is philanthropy for innovation.

I won’t go into the long history we’ve had of trying to innovate within a giant, decentralized system because that is a massive challenge. What you’re talking about, Stacey, is how does anyone tackle that? Clearly, no one can tackle that entirely, so we start to narrow our focus and aim to be successful at something specific. 

I’m not going to quibble with focusing on math because, in the work I’m doing now, I see how critically important it is for the future of the workforce and the country. However, that’s probably not going to transform schools in the way the three of us want them to be transformed.

This creates a sense of angst for me because most schools in America are just doing the same old thing. They’re taking federal, state, and local money and running the same schools, with no real prospect of change.

For those of us who believe change should happen, what are the levers? How does this relatively small amount of money create the change we want?

Stacey, as we were talking through this, you mentioned a list of things you want funders to do. I thought of a list of things I want operators to do—those who want to innovate and raise philanthropy to do it. It’s worth spending a moment on that because I think there are two sides to this.

There are things that operators, like myself and my peers, need to do to be compelling and retain capital in our space. If you’re not doing compelling, interesting things, your projects aren’t going to get funded.

First, I’ll call it “getting your conditions in order.” This refers to work done by several people, including folks at the Gates Foundation years ago, and more recently, Transcend has partnered with others to define the conditions of an organization ready to innovate. Michael, you and I talk about this all the time. You need structures and mindsets to be able to innovate. Use the available tools to ensure you have the right conditions. If you’re trying to get innovation money without knowing if your conditions are in order, you’re not primed to raise money.

Second, do you actually have innovations that others aren’t working on that could potentially move the needle? You need to understand the field and what others are doing to ensure your innovation is truly unique and impactful. This requires discipline and hard work.

When you do this, you earn trust and face less scrutiny because it becomes apparent that you’ve done the groundwork. Lastly, I have always tried to see this as a collaborative venture rather than a competitive one. My experience is that many operators fall into a competitive mindset, seeing funding as a zero-sum game. This competitiveness is counterproductive because no one can do this alone. Acting more collaboratively could attract and keep more money in the innovation space and sector.

That would be my wish list for operators.

Changes Funders Can Make

Stacey Childress: That’s very good and definitely rings true. As an operator running a fund and having to raise money, I share your perspective. You mentioned visionary leadership, and both words are important in fundraising—a vision you can articulate clearly and compellingly about what the world should look like if it worked better for young people. Lead on it. Don’t wait for a funder to have a strategy you can fit into. Lead.

Spend time socializing that vision with other operators and donors. Donors will follow a compelling vision and leadership. You and I have both seen it happen and have caused it to happen as leaders.

For the donor side, the first thing I wish they would do is just give away the money.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: Remember the fundamental purpose of what you’re organized to do and what you’re given significant tax breaks for: to give away the money. You’re not organized to have internal meetings, PowerPoints, memos, politics, reorgs, and conferences. Those things can help your aims but can also distract from them. Give the money away. That’s your whole job, not the coalitions and communities of practice. Those should support moving the money. 

It sounds silly, but it’s frustrating. Your whole job is to give the money away. Increase, not decrease, your giving now. What are you waiting for? If not now, when? There’s not one answer; there are many. Fund them, learn from them. Stop with the 47-row spreadsheet metrics. 

Fund the people doing the work, listen to them, believe them, recognize patterns, and fund lots of things. More gifts, bigger gifts, right now. Go. What are you waiting for? Go. Make decisions faster. 

You’re not going to fund everything. Say yes fast and no faster. As soon as you know it’s a no, tell the operator. You can’t imagine how much time and energy is spent waiting for a yes. 

Diane Tavenner: And say no fast.

Stacey Childress: Say no faster. It’s not the last day of the process that you decide no. As soon as you know it’s no, tell the operator. They spend so much time waiting for your decision, having conversations with their board and other donors, making plans. Time is huge. Tell them no fast. Yes fast, no even faster. If your processes get in the way of that, rip them down.

Diane Tavenner: Yep.

Stacey Childress: Do something different and do it now. One of the reasons this animates me so much, beyond the obvious good of getting the money into the field and letting smart, intelligent, visionary leaders and their people do what they can with it and learn from it, is that for donors who have, say, over a billion dollars in net worth, their fortunes are growing faster than their lifetime philanthropic commitments suggest they will get the money out the door. 

A few years ago, when I was in a fundraising cycle and was counting on a donor to come in at a certain level on a renewal, I got the sad news. I was trying to get tens of millions and got multiple tens of millions, but not as much as I had hoped. It was an enormous grant, something to celebrate, but I was disappointed because I had planned for more. Silicon Valley is like a neighborhood, and the donors all talk to each other. Many of them talk to me, and I knew that this person was at cocktail parties and other gatherings saying they had a billion dollars in their donor-advised fund at a community foundation because they couldn’t find enough good things to fund, including education. And they had just given me multiple tens of millions.

What are you waiting for? When I first joined New Schools and was figuring out the investment footprint before we did a specific strategy, I realized that what we had wasn’t working. It was a quiet secret in the field. The theory had run its course, and New Schools had been struggling to raise money for a couple of years. It was time to rethink it.

Someone who was a contemporary of Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, told me that when he first became a VC, he realized something new was coming from closed network systems. It had to do with packet switching and the internet. He convinced his partners at Kleiner Perkins that they needed to fund everything in these nascent categories because they didn’t know who would win. They backed great teams and more than one in each category. This humble approach, funding lots of things with a vision for how the industry would change, led to massive financial success.

From where I sat at New Schools in 2014, I felt like we were in a similar moment. We had glimpses of what the future could look like for kids, and our strategy was to push everything onto the table for this vision. Rather than trying to find the answer, we should take a broad view of the space and fund every good team and idea.

Stop thinking that you have all the answers inside your foundation. Most of the smartest people don’t work for you. Fund, learn, and fund again. Give the money away.

I wish people would do more with intermediaries. If I were the leader of a foundation with $350 million a year to give away, I would convince my principal to give $300 million to four or five grantees in large chunks, and those would be intermediaries. I would have a staff of no more than 10 people, each managing relationships and helping us learn and adapt. Intermediaries offer leverage, expertise, and nimbleness.

Follow MacKenzie Scott’s example: big gifts, unrestricted, lightweight process, fast decisions, little to no reporting requirements. It’s not perfect, but it gets the money out the door.

Diane Tavenner: It is.

Stacey Childress: Yes, it can be tough to figure out how to get in the pipeline and some transparency issues, but those challenges are far outweighed by getting the money out the door. Let’s do it. Get that money out the door. If not now, when? Be honest with yourself. What are you afraid of from going big and visionary and moving lots of resources quickly to people doing important work?

Michael Horn: Well, Diane, as we wrap up five seasons here with our final episode, I think we finally had our Jerry Maguire moment. It’s no longer “show me the money,” it’s “give away the money.”

Stacey Childress: Give away the money.

Media Recommendations 

Michael Horn: And Stacey, you have nailed it. So with that as a segue, as we wrap up an episode, I’ve learned a lot from both of you. Thank you both. Let’s finish up with some things we are reading, watching, or whatever. Stacey, we’ll call on you first. Hopefully, it’s not Jerry Maguire, but if it is, we understand.

Stacey Childress: It’s not Jerry Maguire. Sadly, I’m still watching and listening to heartbreaking, disappointing Astros baseball, but hope springs eternal. 

A new thing: there’s a relatively old, about 10 years old, documentary on Prime Video called The Wrecking Crew. It’s a deep dive into a loose group of studio musicians in LA in the ’60s and ’70s who backed 60-70% of the big radio hits of that era. They backed artists like the Righteous Brothers, the Mamas and the Papas, Sonny and Cher, and the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys performed live, but The Wrecking Crew played on their studio albums. They were behind so many iconic songs. It’s fascinating.

Diane Tavenner: Well, this is what happens when you have an episode with two of Stacey’s passions: philanthropy and music. It’s so exciting. I agree with everything you’re saying. I hope it happens because I feel like we’re at an early 2010-2011 moment again. I hope people jump on and in. No one else in the world is ahead of us yet in redesigning their education systems. We have an opportunity in America right now, and I’m deeply optimistic.

I’m reading an early advanced copy of 10 to 25, Dr. David Yeager’s new book. I love him. He had such an impact on our work at Summit. He’s an amazing researcher who connects research with actual work in schools. The book talks about a mentoring mindset, a continuation of the growth mindset. It’s incredibly powerful and will be out in August.

Michael Horn: You’re going to have to dig in then. That sounds exciting, Diane. I’m glad you’re reading it. I’ll just wrap up mine. My kids went away for their outdoor nature’s classroom for a few days, so my wife and I went to New York City and saw a couple of shows. We saw Merrily We Roll Along, which I highly recommend, and Enemy of the People. Both were terrific. 

Like you, Stacey, I’ve been watching a lot of sports, but the Celtics are having more success than your Astros. I recently finished Outlive by Peter Attia. It was great, with a few new tips, some things I already knew, and a lot of common sense.

Stacey, thank you for joining us and enlivening the last five episodes. We’ll see where that goes. Diane, as always, thank you for the partnership. For all of you listening, thanks for joining us for five full seasons of Class Disrupted.

Michael and Diane welcome back Stacey Childress, Senior Education Advisor at McKinsey & Co., for the first of a two-part series on the challenges facing K-12 education and strategies to address them. In this episode, they outline the nine roles/players of the public K–12 education system in the U.S. and the problems each is facing in 2024. They highlight the disconnect between current teaching models and the latest learning sciences, unravel the operational challenges schools face, stress the importance of intentionally teaching character and values, and more.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Well, hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. How are you?

Diane Tavenner: I’m well. It feels like it’s been a minute since we’ve been together here, but I am excited about how we’re coming back together. We are so pleased to be welcoming back Stacey Childress to the podcast. What fun! Great to be here. We are getting the band back together again. For those of you who’ve been following along this season, the three of us spent two pretty extended episodes talking through the elements of higher education, the problems there, and potential solutions. We did that in response to a podcast by Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

We were all pleasantly surprised at how much great feedback we got from our listeners. They loved those episodes, enjoyed them, and wanted us to do a parallel experience for K-12. We couldn’t say no to that. So here we are again, and I’m looking forward to this conversation. The last one was quite rollicking, and I suspect this one might be fun as well.

Michael Horn: I’m glad, Stacey, that you chose to, against your better judgment, I’m sure, rejoin us for this conversation.

Stacey Childress: Listen, I’m thrilled to be here. I had such a great time with you guys last time. I heard some feedback from people I know and some people I didn’t know. Through LinkedIn, people sent me messages. That’s been happening in the last week, which is interesting. I’d love to do it again. I also just left that conversation feeling certainly challenged but also energized from the quality and dynamism of the discussion. So I look forward to doing it again.

Michael Horn: Well, we are glad you are back. Go ahead, Diane. 

Introducing the Two-Part Series and the Nine Roles of Education 

Diane Tavenner: Michael, I should just say, I guess I’m assuming that everyone knows Stacey, but let me do a quick introduction for those of you who may have missed those episodes and don’t know Stacey. Stacey is a good friend of ours and a good friend to education. She has a long, amazing history of being a teacher, a very popular professor at Harvard, and working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, NewSchools Venture Fund, and AirDef. I could go on and on about her credentials, but most importantly, she deeply cares about what happens for our young people in America and has always been at the center of what we can do to serve them better. We are super grateful for her rejoining us.

Michael Horn: Yes, indeed. With that, let’s frame the episode today and get into the meat of it. For those who remember the higher ed episodes, we did two responding to the Mark and Ben podcast about the challenges facing higher ed. We reacted to those challenges they identified in the first episode and their solutions in the second episode. For this one, because we are doing it from scratch ourselves, Diane has been willing and generous enough with her time to come up with the core functions of the K-12 system, and I’ll put it in air quotes. Right, it’s sort of tasked with providing in this country. Diane will go through her list of, I think, nine areas at the moment. Stacey and I might supplement a little, but then we’re going to dive into each one. Diane, you’ll tell us why you put that on the list and the problems or shortcomings right now. We will withhold solutions and thoughts about how we can make it better until the next episode. With that as prelude, Diane, dive in. Tell us, what are your nine areas? Just give us the overview, and then we’ll go from there.

Diane Tavenner: Great. Thanks to both of you for your comments, feedback, and help in organizing, because, as you know, the original list was very long, and we’ve done some grouping. There are nine. The first six are broadly related to the student experience and their actual education and learning. The next two are more about the function and role of schools in the community and the local environment. The final one is more about the role that K-12 schools play in America. I think it’s fair to say that we’re focused on public schools in this conversation. Obviously, there will be some overlap with private schools, but we’re here talking about public schools.

Just quickly, those first six include what we’re calling the core education, the role of teaching character or values to young people, the role of the school in terms of custodial care (Michael, we’ve talked about this several times on the podcast), and the security of those young people you’re charged with caring for. Number four, we’re labeling it a social services agency—school as a social services agency. Five is policymaker. I think this one’s interesting to dig into in terms of the policies that schools and school systems make. Six is what we would call evaluator or recommender. We could start with six. There’s a big argument about what comes first, chicken or egg.

Nonetheless, those are our first six. In terms of the local community role, the first is that schools and school districts are, in many ways, local government agencies. That’s a very important role they’re playing. They are also a community hub. Those are seven and eight for us. Finally, we’re calling it social reformer in this national role. But I’ll be curious as we get into it. I think we might come up with a different name as we talk about it.

So those are the nine that we’ve landed on for today.

Michael Horn: It’s a good list of nine. I’m not sure I would add much to it. Stacey, how do you think about that list before we dive into each one?

Stacey Childress: Yeah, I think it’s a good list. I can’t think of things that aren’t contained in those categories. I’m excited to dive in.

Michael Horn: Let’s do it. Diane, why don’t you take us through that first one, which is core education? Talk to us about what’s in this grouping, what’s maybe not in this grouping if that’s relevant. Then let’s start to go deep into the problems before Stacey and I react.

Core Education

Diane Tavenner: Great. I think when people think of schools in the most traditional sense, they think of the three R’s: reading, writing, and arithmetic. This starts there and then grows a little bit. Obviously, over time, it has grown, but it is what most people think of as the most core function of a public school: to teach kids academic skills and knowledge, including reading, writing, and arithmetic. Of course, we’ve expanded to history, science, second languages, and I couldn’t even begin to list all of the elective and interest courses that have come into schools. But there’s still that core set of knowledge that is generally tested, assessed, and common across schools.

Then there’s also how that is done. Schools are places where lots of people come to learn together. This is not individual tutoring. So, how are you part of a community, a group, a classroom? What do those skills look like? A big part of schools has become extracurricular activities and interests—all of the activity that happens in schools for young people. Regarding core education, which is a little more about how we do it, we have a very significant and robust special education component to our system. This is driven by federal legislation providing supports, resources, and accommodations for young people who qualify for having a learning disability and therefore an individual learning plan. That is a significant part of what happens in the core program now, in terms of resources, people, focus, etc. So that’s what’s in this bucket.

I started listing problems, and when I was at the micro level, I was getting into hundreds of them. So, I rolled it up to one big problem from my perspective. Thank you both for laughing at me. I would argue that the core education model in America, in the vast majority of schools, is just not aligned with the current science of learning. I would say on two fronts: what we teach and what we prefer to teach, and very much how we teach it and how we expect people to learn. As I went through my laundry list of all the things that were wrong, every time I thought about what was wrong, it was because we’re not following the science. You can take this all the way down to the youngest kids. As the country is waking up to, we have not been using the science of how kids learn to read. We haven’t been doing that in most of our schools. It’s everything from that all the way up to something we are all very passionate about: how you actually personalize learning as young people get older, enable them to self-direct their learning, drive their learning, build those skills around it, and everything in between. I’ll stop there, but that’s my macro problem.

Michael Horn: Stacey?

Stacey Childress: Yeah, I definitely agree, Diane, with that as a way of thinking about an umbrella category for lots of things that we might list in more detail. Alongside that, maybe not always the choices that folks are making in the system and in schools within the system about the academic program and the social aspect of schooling and all the other things you mentioned. There’s not always agreement at the community level or, if you think not quite that broadly, at the family level. What’s our overarching idea as a community or bundle of ideas that school is for? How do we ensure that what we’re doing every day for twelve years for young people, from kiddos all the way through late teens, is driving towards some common vision of what it means to leave our system ready to do whatever’s next?

Sometimes there’s either ambiguity around that or, where there’s more specificity, tensions and disagreements about the end goal. This can filter back through, especially at the high school level, but it can go all the way back through what frame within which we are making choices as a community and a group of professional educators about academic programs, how we’re approaching the social learning aspect of school, how much emphasis and what’s the mix of interest in extracurricular activities, and how these tie back with a longer-term view of purposes, skills, and mindsets that kids might leave their experience with. I think that ambiguity or lack of coalescence around purposes makes it hard to balance all those things, Diane, on your list, all of which are absolutely functions of school within its core education mission.

Michael Horn: Yeah, it’s interesting to hear you say that, Stacey, because my head went one way when Diane was giving the list. I was noting that as you look through the extracurricular or non-core classes in American schooling over the 1900s, it was just an ever-expanding list of classes. The proverbial grocery store analogies were so prominent in “A Nation at Risk,” of course, in 1983. At some point, it became, well, actually the definition of school is how much you are learning, which shifts much more to how we teach and learn, as Diane referenced. I would argue that schools continue to expand in scope along the other eight dimensions you listed, Diane, which we’ll get into later on.

Another point within core education is that special education has continued to expand in terms of resources and identifying students who need special education. Diane, you spoke passionately and persuasively last season about how our incentives in special education are not around innovation, efficiency, and delivering, but around more resources and a lot of box-checking.

I reflect on that expansion theme. Stacey, when you jumped in, I loved where you went with the purpose conversation. What’s the purpose of this education? As you both know from my most recent book, my big argument is that communities need to have that conversation almost tabula rasa. What are we trying to go for here? They don’t. Instead, they just accept the four math, four social studies, three or four science, whatever it is, and just accept these structures that have been handed down without getting behind the intent.

So many of the food fights, even within the camps trying to find their way through what the science teaches us about how and what we learn, are because we are guilty of not having an “and” conversation. We’re too often having an “or” conversation, talking past each other in some of these rooms, and missing the changes we could make if we started with Stacey’s conversation around what we are driving toward and why. Those are my three reflections from this list. At the end of the day, it means we’re teaching a bunch of things that don’t have a lot of coherence. We haven’t given a lot of thought to why we’ve privileged this branch of math over another one, and we’re not following all the lessons from the science of learning. We’re not incorporating them or at least trying them out with different populations to learn what works and why.

Diane Tavenner: Yep. We’re off to a rough start, friends, because that’s the thing we’re supposed to be good at. Oh, all right.

Michael Horn: Well, then tell us your second one. Maybe we’ll surprise you.

Teaching Values and Character

Diane Tavenner: Okay, here we go. This one we’ve labeled as the teaching of values and character. I almost hesitate to say those words, but I do think some of this conversation is designed to provoke a little bit. Those are provocative words in our country, as we know. It’s confusing to me why because young people are in schools for a good amount of time, as you said, for twelve or thirteen years and for significant parts of their days. It seems logical to me that a school should help them figure out basic norms of being a person and being in a community beyond just the learning side. How are you preparing to be an adult and a participating member of our democracy? When public education was conceptualized, these were huge aims of what we were trying to do.

We could go back in history and talk about some of the ill intentions, such as forcing certain groups of people to adapt to other norms. But at a macro level, just the idea of being a citizen of our community, our country, and our nation, and how you actually do that and become an adult, it seems logical that the school would play a role in partnering with families to help that come about. There are very significant challenges here. I’ve expanded to two this time, but they’re still broad. The first one, for people who’ve been listening, will not be a surprise: I think it’s the college-for-all push. In recent history, we’ve gotten away from preparing people for careers, employment, and life outside of school. We’re so focused on preparing them for the next educational institution that we’ve lost focus on that front.

Michael Horn: We’re all going to generalize.

Diane Tavenner: Systematically, right? So, I think that’s problem number one. The second one is the obvious one in our current society: whose values and whose role is it to teach these things? These are not small, little bickerings; these are big societal questions, and schools are caught in the middle of them. School systems, using the fight, flight, or freeze analogy, do one of the three. Some are duking it out, some are running away as far as possible, only teaching the three R’s, and some are frozen, not knowing what to do. There you have it, category two.

Michael Horn: Stacey, you get to go first again.

Diane Tavenner: Great.

Stacey Childress: I love that fight, flight, or freeze analogy in this context. You’re right, Diane. Going back to something we talked about in the higher ed episodes, the original podcast we responded to called this “moral instruction.” We weren’t crazy about that phrase. The podcasters had a particular point of view about it that we didn’t entirely share. I’ll go back to part of our discussion there. I grew up in a very religious and politically conservative part of the country and moved back here. I went to high school about 13 miles from where I’m sitting today. These issues are still fraught with challenge.

Part of what I think about this is, I get why it’s hard. It’s hard because it’s very important, and it’s hard because of the multiplicity of points of view about which values and whose values. Schools are in the context of our larger political and cultural moment, which is very hard. We know it because we’re trying to work through it and bridge it in our own lives with people in our families, friends, and colleagues. Of course, it’s hard in schools. The flight or freeze option is not happening because, as I said about college, values are being transmitted, messaged, inculcated, shared, and massaged even if it’s not intentional. As you said, Diane, kiddos are in school from a few minutes after they wake up until right before, right as, or right after their parents get home from work. It’s impossible for your eight most active waking hours of the day to be values-neutral or values-free.

If you are fleeing or freezing, what you’re opting into is almost anything goes until somebody is mad about it. Individual educators and administrators are making almost individual choices about which values they’re bringing to bear and which norms they’ll prioritize or not in their classrooms or cohorts of students. That’s a recipe for more tension and more upset because there’s not an overarching perspective. There’s not an overarching, even loose agreement about why we might be committed to ensuring that a set of values and some character attributes are prioritized in our experience. This while allowing for plenty of different perspectives and points of view across families, religious traditions, countries of origin, and other factors. Fighting over hot-button cultural issues or freezing or fleeing because it’s hard and you don’t want to upset anybody is missing the boat both at the micro and macro education levels. 

Acting as if it’s not the role of schools and educators to provide some underpinning of values, character, and moral reasoning is misguided. You need to filter it through age appropriateness, but we need to be more intentional about it, not less. Lean into it with intentionality and good intentions rather than trying not to offend anybody, which usually offends more people than being intentional about what you’re doing.

Michael Horn: It’s interesting to hear you say that, Stacey, because you mentioned age appropriateness. The last time we were recording, you said moral instruction was one of Ben’s lists. The thought I had at that time, which has been borne out based on recent events, is that college is too late to build in a lot of these things we want to see students do—having civil conversations across disagreements and recognizing disagreement as a strength rather than a threat. Obviously, there’s age appropriateness regarding not introducing content that is inappropriate for, say, a six- or seven-year-old. But I think building these character skills, these habits, what I think of as fundamental democratic values, is incredibly important. And to your word, intentionality—very intentionally. This was the purpose of the public school system. This is why we got public dollars.

Stacey Childress: That’s right.

Michael Horn: To do this enterprise above anything else—preparing for careers or anything. With all the caveats that Diane alluded to, where it was misapplied and certain groups were discriminated against, the purpose was to knit us into something larger. The debate now is often, should we or shouldn’t we, not acknowledging that we are. And then it’s this weird pose, like the right being, “Character matters,” and the left, for a period of time, was like, “I don’t know about that.” Now, it’s the opposite: actually, it’s important, and here are the values we think. 

And the right saying, “Wait a second.” It’s a weird conversation against a backdrop where I’m going to get the number wrong, but 80% of the population largely has a common set of answers for what these values are. That’s what is so frustrating. It goes to your first point when we were talking about the core program. If individual school communities came together and said, “What’s our purpose? Where’s the agreement that we can all get behind?” My wife and I were having a conversation recently, and she said, “Isn’t that great?” Or I can’t remember it exactly. I said, “I don’t know if they should be doing this.” She said, “Good point. We ask educators to do a ton of stuff for society that probably overstretches them.”

I don’t know if it was in reference to the bad therapy book by Abigail Schreier or what. The point, which I learned deeply from you, Diane, is that a lot of these things can be done in the context of academics rather than a special carve-out lesson that’s going to offend some group. My fifth-grade graduation speech comes to mind. I remember talking about learning the value of fair play, respecting your classmates, in just the lessons themselves. David had three apples, and I took two. That sort of stuff communicates a lot of this. We pull these things apart in strange ways that provoke fights. As I’ve learned from Diane, you actually learn it better when it’s all knit together rather than atomized. One other quick point, Diane, before you react: you also mentioned the notion of college for all distorting a lot of this, which I completely agree with. It looks like Stacey’s going to jump in after this. What’s interesting is that I think preparing people for careers, life, etc., outside of school is spot on. That’s also a controversial statement.

Many would say it can’t be about those material interests or shouldn’t be about whatever else it should be about. I’m not sure what they think college’s purpose is. They would say it’s about something larger, and college represents it. In the backdrop we are in right now, that seems absolutely crazy to me. 

Stacey Childress: Yeah. Diane, Michael, I’m glad you flagged that because, Diane, I was glad you named this value in the system that many of us had been working on for a couple of decades—the college for all value and the expectations we were trying to build in for students to see themselves as capable and worthy of being on a path to college. The Ed reformers from 1995 to 2015 had college for all as a driving purpose. I always try to be cautious about this and say it wasn’t in a vacuum.

It was in the context of very real national data that showed up in medium and small ways at the state, local district, and school levels, where you had significant gaps in outcomes. If you traced them back, you could see why those outcomes were so different because we developed a great way of sorting kids pretty early, before they were preteens.

Michael Horn: Yeah. Deeply disturbing ways, right?

Stacey Childress: Deeply disturbing ways. You’re either on the path to college, which only a small percentage of you are headed towards, and the rest of you, well, we’ll do other things for you. Much of policy in general and different sorts of social issues and reform efforts end up being these pendulum swings. To counteract that undesirable state we were in 30 years ago, we ended up narrowing our focus. We’ve got to get everybody to college or at least ensure everybody could go to college. It’s hard to do all the things on our top six things that we’re going to talk through. We’re only on the second one. It’s hard to do all of them, so we focused on a few things. Let’s do reading and math to ensure our kids are ready to take important tests that will make or break this college-for-all path.

When it comes to character or whatever other words we use, it’s in service of good grades and doing well on tests—the persistence, grit needed to get to and persist in college. I don’t mean to suggest those things are bad, but because we narrowly focused and hyper-engineered an accountability system around it, we ended up in a place where a broader notion of what it means to be a successful human, a young adult who has what they need to choose a path and navigate it effectively, got chipped away. So the three of us and a lot of other great folks we’ve been on this journey with have been pushing in a different direction or an adapted direction. It does have values embedded in it. That’s why I was glad you put it here. Those values affect young people, families, and educators. I talked too much on the last podcast, so I won’t do it again.

Custodial Care

Diane Tavenner: No, it’s a robust conversation, and I think we are too ambitious when we begin, but I will encourage us to pick up the pace here on these next ones. Those are two big ones, and probably the rest are as well, but maybe we might not be as passionate about them. Let me go to number three. I’ll start with the problem here. No passion here, conflict with the first two elements in many ways. This third one is the role that the school system plays in providing custodial care. If we’re going to be provocative like Ben and Mark, we’d say babysitting. With that comes the obligations around protecting the security and safety of young people. 

That’s two levels at least now: their physical safety and emotional, actually three, as well as their data and privacy. This is as big in the virtual world as it is in the physical world in many ways. The biggest problem here is that people who work in schools, for the most part, don’t want to do this job. They don’t conceptualize it as their job. They don’t like it, and they don’t do it terribly well, probably because they don’t like it and don’t want to do it. Most school people think of themselves as academic teachers, learners, not babysitters or security guards.

I think that’s one of the biggest problems. The conflict is that families want and expect this. It’s also not done well because the people doing it don’t want to do it. I’ll stop there.

Stacey Childress: Yeah. You want me to go? You want to stay in our order?

Diane Tavenner: Michael?

Stacey Childress: I would say a couple of things about this. I don’t have children in our public schools. I see all these videos now. I’m not on social media often, but when I am, I see these videos. If I went by that, I would assume not just our high schools but especially our high schools are in chaos with physical safety concerns. Thinking about the physical safety of kids from each other, and sometimes from teachers, and teachers from students. I don’t know how widespread that actually is. I have educators in my family. They teach younger ones, and I do not hear these stories about their schools.

But I see these videos, so there is a sense in the popular consciousness that at least our high schools are out of control. Part of the contributing factor, maybe the biggest driver, is discipline policies. I know we’ll talk about policy later, but the approach schools have been taking to ensure good community order in the building has changed over the last decade to think more about restorative practices and ways of building community through tough moments rather than just a punishment philosophy. There’s this tension playing out and who knows where it’s headed. It’s not only physical safety from outside in, but physical safety from kids, kids from each other. What it makes me think about is school shootings. You know that some young people in my family were high school students in a school shooting in our hometown back in 2018. There’s so much to talk about there, which we’re not going to, but the idea that kids are a danger to each other.

In my niece’s situation, the shooter was a student, an 11th grader that people had known since third or fourth grade. It wasn’t an outside threat. That shifted the culture of the community and the school, with kids as dangers to each other. The stakes and incentives that creates around safety result in an enormous amount of community time, attention, emotion, and real dollars. The dollars have to come from somewhere, so they come from something else, probably those things we were already talking about, academics, values, etc. The interplay between physical safety and what we have to do to signal to the community that we’re providing safety and what it turns our view of young people into, and therefore, how that affects the culture of the school, is a uniquely American problem right now, and a real one, certainly for the concrete reason of physical safety but also this cultural notion of how we think about our schools and young people. We used to have fire drills when we were kids, and now active shooter drills start as early as they can.

So there’s a real issue here. I’ve already spent too much time on it, but it’s a real challenge that our professional educators are facing day in and day out in their communities.

Michael Horn: I’ll try to be brief, but just pulling from that, I’m having a déjà vu moment because it occurs to me the three of us were at an elevator in a hotel about a year ago having this very conversation, and it spurred Diane and me to have a podcast on the issue you just talked about, Stacey.

Stacey Childress: Yes, folks should go back and listen to that. It was very good.

Michael Horn: So, with that acknowledgment, the couple of things I would say are, one, the tension in this one seems ironic at this moment in our society’s history, between the childcare piece, not having adequate hours or time and availability for the working families of today, and on the other end, chronic absenteeism being the highest it’s ever been that I can remember. Those are two things in direct tension with each other. It connects to a couple of things here, which is, it connects to the safety and discipline piece of this. It connects to the formation of character in the second one. It connects to the relevance of the curriculum in the first one, and whether people have passion for this and see a place for it in their lives. That all connects to mental health, which then connects to the shootings.

So these three actually connect in interesting ways. The last piece is this is yet another place where we fight a lot on the edges with each other. One of the fights is the restorative justice, don’t discipline versus the zero tolerance policy. A lot of people pushing for restorative justice get lumped in with the restorative view, but that’s not quite what they’re saying. Like Dr. Becky or someone like that, they believe in consequences for actions and hard lines and limits. They just don’t believe in arbitrary ones that have nothing to do with what you just did. Again, there’s this third way through these poles that we keep missing. Maybe I’ll just leave it there.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. It’s hard not to go to solutions, and it’s hard to do all of these in short periods.

Michael Horn: Sorry, I jumped.

Diane Tavenner: Right.

Michael Horn: Let’s get to the next one. Because it connects also to these.

Social Services Provider

Diane Tavenner: It does. It’s deeply connected because, quite frankly, a big element of schools’ purpose, or at least what they’re spending their time and resources on, is essentially as a social services agency. When we go through the responsibilities of most schools and districts, transportation—many school districts run full transportation fleets. Meals—they are serving not just lunch anymore, but breakfast and oftentimes snacks. They’re providing full feeding of large numbers of people and some basic health elements.

So, they’re testing your eyesight, for lice, and dealing with all of the COVID-related issues. Schools literally turned into clinics. I’m not even going to talk about how I felt when California started encouraging every high school to have the ability to administer Narcan if there’s a drug overdose. What more, please? Schools have always played this role, but it’s more complex now. They have to connect families and children to other agencies that support them, especially during crises. Let’s not forget the role of schools as mandated reporters. It is incumbent upon schools and everyone in them to report if they suspect child abuse or neglect. Some schools now employ social workers, counselors, and school resource officers. So, they’re running huge systems that go well beyond just the classroom.

The most obvious challenge here is that these are operationally intensive endeavors. They require a whole set of skills and knowledge that are not necessarily aligned with everything we just talked about. Most people in schools don’t want to do these extra jobs. They feel extra, on the side, added on. When you treat jobs that way, without operational efficiency and excellence, they don’t get done well, which ends up being this whole spiral.

So, those are the big problems.

Stacey Childress: Yeah. I have nothing to add on this one. I agree completely with your explanation and identification of problems.

Michael Horn: Yeah, I’m in the same boat. I think this is maybe the best evidence of the expanding nature of what we have thrown on schools. Every social ill, it seems, we ask schools to solve. This is where we have thrown another one. I’m not sure they can completely get out of thinking about these things if they’re trying to accomplish the first three, which we can get into maybe in the second episode.

So, Diane, why don’t you march on?

Policymaker

Diane Tavenner: Great. A lot of tension there. Number five shifts us to what we’re calling policymaker. I think later, I’m going to offer a local government agency. Some people might say, what’s the difference between the two? Aren’t those the same? Let me make the case for why I have separated them here. When people talk about government, they spend a lot of time thinking about the federal government, less time thinking about their state government, and even less time thinking about county government. We’re talking about people in school buildings and on school boards who are literally making policy decisions regularly that have the biggest impact on the lives of children and families. Everything from grading policies, discipline and behavior policies, and health and safety policies. All of those decisions during COVID were made at local school and school district levels, generally with guidance from the federal and state governments.

One of the challenges we had was that they didn’t actually tell us what to do. They gave us guidance, and then we had to decide what to do, which basically meant they told us what to do but gave us no cover for doing it. Local people have a lot of power to create policies that impact families. For example, when schools and districts decide to have professional development during the workday, parents have to pick their kids up at noon or whatever schedule. To your point about not being family-friendly in terms of care and things like that.

The problem here is that under any circumstance, good policy is hard to write. I would challenge anyone who has never written a policy to try to do it and see how hard it is. We have about 130,000 schools and almost 14,000 districts. We do not have people who are well-resourced experts capable of writing the best policies under hard circumstances. Instead, you get whatever people think sounds good, and the implications are extreme.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, totally agree with that. The policymaker, the local school district, plus any school-based policies are the biggest policy influence on the day-to-day life of families. It dictates what time people get up in the morning because whatever time school starts, you have to count backwards from that. Wake-up time is dictated by the school schedule and then on from there. We just make it very concrete and embedded in our lives. One of the things that was so hard about COVID, or a thing about COVID that was difficult for families, was just how central school policy was in their family clock and calendar. 

Diane Tavenner: Right.

Stacey Childress: When you go with what you said, Diane, I totally agree with just how hard it is to make good policy at any level. It’s hard, and we ask folks to—well, it’s their job, it’s their responsibility as board members and educators—to make policies that touch every family with a school-age child in their community without a lot of support and knowledge building. It’s very complex, and we have it here. It could be elevated depending on how you want to structure a list.

It does flow through almost everything: grading, course schedule, graduation requirements, all the things.

Michael Horn: Yeah. I don’t know that I have much to add. It spills into transportation or transportation spills into it, and all these things just show how interdependent these are. What I’ll observe is that pulling them out and naming them, Diane, in this way is useful because we see all of the complexity and all of the possible areas for breakdown. As you said, people aren’t trained to do a lot of these roles, and yet they are core functions that they have been asked to play or defaulted into playing in many cases. With that, let’s go into your sixth, which I think is sort of an exclamation point for a bunch of these.

Evaluator

Diane Tavenner: Well, and it sort of rounds out the student experience grouping. I could have led with this one because then everything sort of falls from it. The role of the school district in K-12 is to evaluate young people—their skills, their knowledge, their character, etc.—and to recommend them for what comes next in their life. This is a profound role that the school and the people in it are playing in terms of the outcomes and lives of young people and their families. This is true in terms of determining the grades of kids, which we know makes a big difference. They confer the credential on them. They make recommendations to colleges and employers. The quality of their school signals to those other folks the type of education that the young person has received and the experience they’ve had.

Okay, there’s a problem with every one of those things. They assign grades, but this is discounted now because of grade inflation. They assign the high school credential, but that isn’t valued in our society anymore, so it’s pretty meaningless. They write recommendations for colleges, but those are undervalued, partly because it’s the same people having to write them over and over again with no time to do it and not a lot of resources. They all start to sound the same. In fact, a lot of people kind of copy and paste, and colleges know that. So those are undervalued. There’s this huge, giant role that they’re playing, but no one values them playing it. What I would argue is the most important—and this is sad to me—role that K-12 is playing, and this is primarily high schools, is the reputation they have. Colleges and universities have these perceptions about high schools, mostly aligned to the socioeconomic status of the student population, of how good those schools are. They factor that into their admissions decisions. There’s this giant, important role that all this time and energy goes to that I would argue is not actually being valued or used in meaningful ways. Big problem.

Michael Horn: Stacey, would you like to jump in?

Stacey Childress: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think when we go to solutions in the next episode, we can get a little more detailed about how some of these components of this function play out and how we could do it differently. It’s interesting, Diane, this last one that you mentioned about school reputation being the signaler, especially to those applying to selective colleges. Then you tie that to the higher ed conversation we had on the last episodes. It’s a very small percentage of kids go to a selective college. Even in the college for all concept, it is a very small percentage of institutions, higher ed institutions that fall in that bucket. So then what about for everybody else? What’s happening here with this evaluator recommender function? It’s a weak signal.

Back to some of the other things we talked about, not very intentionally conceived and organized around outside of compliance. Transcripts have to get created and all that kind of stuff. Like, what’s. So what are the use cases for a credential and to what end? And how does that backward map to things we might do in the core education component and then the social component?

Michael Horn: So, yeah, that’s interesting. The compliance observation. When I was looking at this, I was struck by two things. One, Diane, question: Would you put the counseling function, the guidance counseling function here, would you put it in courses? Would you put it in social service agency, all three, because that’s something we know schools are tasked with doing. But do it. I mean, we know the ratios are like 400 something to one students, to guidance counselors. But it seems to fall into a bunch of these.

And so this is the one where I thought to mention it, because you have this signaler or helping shape, right, where students will go after in this one. And then I guess the other one that occurred to me was this last bullet that you had as well. I heard Raj Chetty speak recently, and I hadn’t focused on this before, but he put the slide up of schools that disproportionately get their students into selective colleges. And I had just assumed. I live in Lexington, Massachusetts. I had just assumed Lexington high School, closer to where you live, Diane, Palo Alto High School. I just assumed that they would be on par, frankly, with the top private schools, and they’re not.

And I was struck by that statistic. It’s like, basically a title one Lexington high school sort of count for about the same andover. Whoa. Okay. Now, that counts for a lot. And so I thought that was just interesting against this backdrop then that you mention it. And it seems to me, obviously incredibly problematic because it’s completely decoupled, as we know, with the actual work that students are, in fact, doing. And the rate of, as Ryan Craig would call it, the distance traveled.

Right. We would call it growth, but of individual students and what that might signal about where or where not would be a good fit for them.

Diane Tavenner: On the positive front, I think this category is ripe for solutions, and there’s a big opportunity there. So I’m excited to talk about it when we get into the next episode. 

Local Government Agency 

Diane Tavenner: So that sort of rounds out the experience of the young people. Now I want to shift to two that are more about the local community and the role that schools play there. And so this first one is what we’re calling local government agency. And I just want to tick through the role that schools and districts play. So, number one, they generally have elected school boards. So we’ve got a full election that’s going on. And this seated board that holds public meetings and are beholden to all of those public meeting laws and rules and regulations and all that goes on there. I will just quickly say that many superintendents say that they spend literally half their time, this is the chief executive of a school district.

They will argue that they spend half their time managing their board and those meetings. So take that. The next thing that they do at schools and school districts, most of them can levy taxes, they can issue bonds. I mean, these are government agencies taxing the people. Maybe the most important role of the government in the US or the thing we take most seriously schools can do. They also are required for collecting an extraordinary amount of data and reporting it at the local, state and federal level. This goes on and on all year long. It keeps getting bigger and bigger every year.

They are, when we think of this, they are entrusted with significant dollars, state and federal dollars. I was talking to a state superintendent the other day, she, as the chief learning officer, the state superintendent of instruction controls half the state’s budget. And that is not abnormal. Most states are spending about half their budget on education. These are significant dollars that these boards and these people are entrusted to spending. Well, thoughtfully, etcetera. And then finally, they control huge amounts of the public land, you know, and it depends on the state and how that goes. But in some cases, they are even the people who perform the tasks of zoning and entitling land.

Diane Tavenner: This is the role that the city or the state is often playing for everyone else. But, you know, schools can get exemptions and do that themselves in a lot of cases and places. And so massive, massive governmental roles that schools and districts are playing. And as I thought about this one, I just, I think about my experience in schools and how people who do things like this that involve a lot of money and a lot of land, I would argue, and I’m not going to give a value judgment here, but that is more valued by our society than educating people or providing care for children. Like, when we think about who do we think is more professional, who do we pay more, who do we get? You know, it’s the people on the side of the land and the money. So if you revere that a little bit more, where will your time and attention go in a system? But to that, in my experience, there’s very little connection between the six things we just talked about.

And this part of the house, and there’s very few people who work on it in K12. And I contrast that to our conversation about higher ed, where one of the critiques was, we’re starting to see like a one for one, an administrator for every student, not so in K12 at all. So you have far fewer people with different areas of expertise kind of disconnected from the mission and the purpose doing all of these functions. That’s a big problem in my mind.

Stacey Childress: Yeah. I don’t have data in front of me, but I want to push a little bit on that last point you made, Diane. I think this is where a broad brush might smooth out a lot of variability. So what you described, with far fewer people charged with managing, governing, asset, revenue generating, and liability functions, with far more educators, where these fewer positions are paid a lot more. I think in midsize to small communities, that’s probably right. In medium to small size school systems around the country, it might break a little bit when you get to the largest school districts in the country. If you look at the 100 or 200 largest school districts in significant metro areas around the country or in those large counties in Florida and Maryland, there are a lot of administrators. You start to get ratios that are closer.

So if you look at the headcount allocation in large systems like that, classroom fair headcount FTEs as compared with non-classroom FTEs, you get closer to that one to one or sometimes even one plus to one. But your point is well taken. Depending on system size, it might look different in most places. What you said, I think, is exactly right. The other contrast I’ve made is I agree with the way you framed it. As educators, their value in terms of what we are willing to pay and the people who manage this stuff in the school district, that’s one comp. Another comp would be, some of these places, like the larger mid-size and the large ones, we’re talking billions of dollars of assets in terms of real estate, physical plant, cash debt, all of those things. You’re looking at 300 grand for somebody to be the head of one of these systems. That fits in the public sector. But start to think about the private sector. Somebody who’s got billions of dollars of assets under management that they are accountable for, then you put the extra, what should be accountability and transparency of it being my tax dollars and yours and yours and all of ours are actually kind of underpaid. Well, I will be underpaid in terms of the kind of judgment, leadership ability, ability to bring people along into some of these, public levees that we need to do and the kind of expertise at the general management level to even know what right questions to ask, of the financial people who are managing all these assets. I can see it both ways. Underpaying educators relative to administrators. Yeah, maybe underpaying some of these administrators relative to comparable jobs in the private sector, managing this level of resources and complexity. I don’t know. I could make that case, too.

Michael Horn: It’s interesting, Stacey. I was just thinking about AI as it comes in and perhaps maybe changes some of these dynamics. We want more human-facing roles, and some others can change because I had the same reaction as you did. I think of places like in New York City or Newark, where it’s like half the dollar doesn’t even reach the school. It gets stuck in central admin and what the heck is going on there? The second thing I had more as a problem because I think this is a good one to identify, Diane, is how many of these places, like the elections are off cycle. Voting is not very high, and yet you realize what a disproportionate impact.

Stacey Childress: Yes.

Michael Horn: These places play in our society and they’re kind of decoupled from the democracy. Sometimes we hear an argument, oh, I just wish you were out of politics. Well, guess what? When it’s public dollars from taxpayers, it’s part of politics. We can hate it, but it is. We’ve done a lot to sort of take it out of the politics, and I’m not sure that that’s been a good thing given to your point, the gravity and enormity of some of these decisions.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. Just to close this one, I’ve spent a lot of time in school board meetings over my career, and I think it’s just so clear, the tension and a charge that I think is an impossible charge where you have, like this school board that is in the same meeting deciding, if an individual student is going to be expelled from a school and considering whether or not they should sell or buy a gigantic piece of land and whether or not they’re going to exempt themselves from zoning and then how to spend bazillions of dollars. There’s a problem with that. That’s what your regular school board looks like.

Stacey Childress: Absolutely. As you were kind of tying those two things, might want something. Michael was saying, what you just said, Diane. Oftentimes, school board election turnout is in the single digits. It can pop up above that in some smaller communities where there’s a lot of, but not much like it’s still a pretty low percentage of people in a given catchment area that are actually making these decisions about who is going to do all of these very critical functions indeed.

Community Hubs

Diane Tavenner: All right, number eight, staying with this community theme, schools are a hub of communities. They are a centerpiece of many, many communities. When you get to smaller communities and rural communities, they literally are the heart of the community in many cases. If we have seen this over time, when anyone tries to close a school, even in a large city, the response from the community is generally overwhelming in terms of trying to protect that school from closure. So community hub is a huge role, partly because oftentimes schools are a very significant employer, a regional employer in some cases, and a union employer. So this is a significant role they play. They also are a huge part of something that everyone cares about, which is traffic. The comings and goings and the traffic are always a big issue around schools. 

As we’ve talked about, a lot of things happen in schools and their buildings and their campuses, everything from they are the polls, polling places in most cases where democracy is where we do go to vote, they host a whole bunch of events for communities and become the place of that. So this community hub is a significant role they play. The problem I would point out here, in addition to what we’ve already talked about, which is just like mission creep and capability and all of those things, is oftentimes we talk about in schools that adult interests get put above those of students. I think you start to see it here, where a lot of this is much more about the people in the community and the adults who are working there than it is about the kids. Those interests will preempt those of young people on a variety of topics.

Stacey Childress: Yeah. Nothing to add there, Diane.

Michael Horn: Yeah. The only thing I would say is there’s a parallel to higher ed, right? Small colleges in danger of closing in many areas, many of these in rural areas. The argument you hear, we got to save them, is employment, not some deeper community value necessarily, which I think speaks to the dynamic. Not to say that employment isn’t a deep community value. It is in service of what, right? So I think that’s often a question.

Pathway to the American Dream

Diane Tavenner: All right, well, let me bring us home then with number nine. Now we’re going to zoom way out to schools and back to the beginning, Michael, of maybe the original purpose of them or some of the original purposes at the most inspirational level. Public schools are the way that Americans achieve the American dream. The idea is that every single American can go to school, a good public school, and have the opportunity to achieve whatever they want to achieve. There aren’t doors closed to them. Everything is possible. The American dream is possible because of our public education system. I think over the years, we’ve sort of layered onto that.

People have built on that and added onto that, you know, this is the place where we actually bring socioeconomic classes together in public schools. And this is where we mix as people and as a community. Stacey, you cited the reformers of the last 20-ish years, or we’re moving out of that era. We’re not sure what’s coming next, but kind of Clinton, Bush, Obama eras. Many people I know have often referred to public education as the civil rights issue of our time. So it is that significant and big that the aspiration and expectation of public education. I guess I would start, I would open the problem conversation here with the idea that I think we have a growing amount of evidence that the system that is public education today is actually producing results that are counter to those aspirations I just named. They might actually be doing harm rather than good. The system might be producing those results.

Certainly we can go into depth there, but I will just leave it there for the two of you.

Stacey Childress: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a great one to spend a little time on next time. What we might do, what, if anything, we might do differently, going forward here. That civil rights issue of our time was very grand. It’s kind of a messianic evangelical plea, I think, with all good intentions. You’re trying to mobilize a broad coalition for improvement, change, transformation because many of us believed, lots of us believed, and I think still believe to some degree, that part of the promise of America is that if you work hard, play by the rules, get a good education, anything’s possible for you. There’s something deeply American about that notion. Even though we’ve got shifting ideas of what the American dream might be, I think the power of that as a concept is still quite salient. Even though it might be in transition to some updated definition, it’s still a very powerful mobilizer. Part of my stump speeches for years was a quote by Barbara Jordan, who said, “All Americans want, what Americans want from their country is just an America that lives up to its promise.”

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: Which is small and enormous. Then I would say, part of that promise is a free, high-quality public education near you in your neighborhood. That was my kind of some of the animating instinct behind entrepreneurship for education. The ed reform crowd from, as you said, ’95 to about 2015, like, we all talked about it maybe in slightly different ways, but it was that chief animating function. Again, it’s kind of, as Michael said, back to the beginning of why we ended up with public schools that then became compulsory high schools that then was, like, kind of embedded in this notion. I think there’s some critique of this both on the left and the right politically these days. On the right, the grandiose, progressive project of improving everyone all the time is kind of suspect, and on the left, what is the American dream, anyway? Who gets to decide? Are these institutions so kind of rotten at their core from the beginning, in their design that, of course, they’re producing these inequities? It’s what they were designed to do in the first place.

I think there’s contested ground. But, you know, as we said, on some of these other things, I think there’s, I won’t call it the great middle or I just think most Americans would still agree. Let me say it even differently. I think most parents and caregivers who have children in schools from pre-K to 12th grade have some things they agree on about what our public schools are for. If kids are going to be in school for 12, 13, 14 years, depending on whether they start at three or four years old, kindergarten, there are some things about our country, about our society that we want kids to understand, feel great about, be challenged maybe by some of the tougher moments in our history, and want to work to make those things not true in the future. That there’s some role for our schools to still be that kind of aspirational meeting point, great leveler among different socioeconomic statuses, where in this country, you can still be anything you want to be if you show up, work hard, work with others, figure out where you want to go, and our schools should help you get there. I think there is an element of social reformer. I still can’t think of a better word for it. There is one.

I just can’t think of it. Like reformer sounds, again, it sounds so 1920s progressive, and we’re going to technocratically fix everything through our institutions, which I’m not a huge believer in that, on balance. But I still find something very inspiring about the underlying concept here. If almost every young, well, whether it’s private or public, everybody except the percentage of kids that are homeschooled, goes to school starting certainly no later than five or six years old, and they stay there until they’re 17 or 18, the things that are going on in those years during the daylight hours, autumn means something for who we are as a country and who we could be. So anyway, I’m starting to preach again, so. But it’s still, you know, I’m still very sappy about it.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Michael Horn: Yeah. No reason to run from that, right? I think the only two observations I would have here are one, when I saw this on the list, Diane, I thought of the zip code, one that you mentioned that everyone should have a great option for them in their zip code. I guess I thought of something different, which is I thought of our broader trends in society around segregation. We know the history with racial segregation, of course, but the bigger segregation we live in with right now is not race. It’s one of ideology and political party, and that we, in fact, don’t live in districts where we mix with people who generally think differently from us. So we don’t have these conversations or are forced to compromise and live with each other at the Little League fields and in the schools, and sort of live up to what Stacey just was sketching. I guess that’s the second thing that I’ve been wondering about a lot, which is, you both echoed the rhetoric that we used to have of the civil rights issue of our time. I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s the causality? Is it actually the opportunity, maybe above, that drives education to be in service of it, or is it the education that creates? I’m sure it’s a bit of both. But going back to your original observation, and I’ll end my thought here, Diane, is if we’re not teaching in line, like, if we’re not running an institution set to, you know, fundamentally around learning, we don’t have a great what you learn or how you learn it, maybe it isn’t actually driving the causality and the success in the American dream we’ve historically had. So I guess then that’s a difficult set of questions. Is it in service of, and that’s where we need to be asking our questions, or can it be different and actually drive this in a more positive direction going forward? That I think we all would hope because we all spend a lot of time on it, so.

Diane Tavenner: Well, that’s a good place to wrap today. Thank you both for wading through my list with me. And if folks have hung in with us this long for an extended episode, we appreciate you and hope you will come back for number two, where we’re actually going to talk about solutions that are both already beginning and that we see might be possible and opportunities. So thank you.

Michael Horn: We’ll leave it with that. Right. Thanks for joining us in Class Disrupted. We’ll see you next time.

Stacey Childress, Senior Advisor on Education at McKinsey, joins Michael and Diane for the second episode of a two-part series weighing in on Marc Andreseen and Ben Horowitz’s recent analysis of higher education. In this episode, they react to the venture capitalists’ proposed solutions for higher education and add their own prescriptions along the way.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael. Hey, Stacey.

Stacey Childress: Hello.

Diane Tavenner: Well, we are doing something for the first time here on Class Disrupted. We are recording a two-part podcast. And so here we are in part two. We’ve got the amazing Stacey Childress with us for this experiment, and she’s hanging in there. She came back for number two. So, as a reminder, here is what we’re up to. The three of us all listen to a very lengthy multi-part podcast by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, very successful and respected VCs and entrepreneurs. And their podcast broke down the problems with higher education and the solutions as they sort of saw them and proposed them. And then also had a third session on questions from X, Twitter, whatever you want to call that thing. So lots of people told us we had to listen to what they were saying, and we did. And then, quite frankly, we really felt compelled to join in this really important discussion. We were super grateful they were having it. We felt like we could add some things. And so in our last episode, we tackled the problem that they had laid out in their first episode. So we did that in our first and really broke down what they got right, what they missed, what some things we had some quibbles with. And today we want to flip to their solution. So, kind of mirroring their approach.

Michael Horn: Yeah. And suffice to say, I think we had a lot we liked in the problems that they identified, some nuance that we tried to add to their conversation to set us up, I think, for a more productive set of solutions. And again, the disclosure that we’re all on the board of Minerva University, and we kind of think that we might be an interesting solution to some of the problems that they posed. But with that as sort of prelude, I think let’s just jump right in. They offered a bunch of solutions as they went down the bundle of their twelve. They talked a lot about how you could unbundle and rebundle a lot. I thought that was an insightful framing as you think about solutions to these operations and these real valuable functions that places play. So, Diane, where would you like to dive in?

The benefits of centering teaching

Diane Tavenner: Well, for me, Michael, the solution episode is where things really got spicy. And you know that really isn’t a surprise. I often find that people are really good at breaking down and dissecting problems, but they often don’t offer very satisfying or promising solutions, especially when you’re talking about big, complex systems problems. And so I’m not surprised that I wasn’t feeling satisfied in that episode. And in fact, I feel like I’ve made this complaint about a lot of the books that I’ve recommended on this podcast. So it’s not that there’s not value in there, but I definitely have some disappointment with the solutions that Marc and Ben proposed and that lots of other people propose, especially when you get into education. And so I guess where I want to start is, let’s just go through some of them, and I pulled a bunch of them out and I’m curious what you all think about them. And so let me just start on the positive, what I agreed with, and we talked a lot about this in the first episode, so don’t have to spend a lot of time here. But I actually agreed with their solution, that one of the things that colleges and universities need to do is focus on educating students and refocus, reignite their purpose around that. And in doing so, they should be able to reduce administrative overhead. And so they talked a lot about how in a number of universities, there are reports now that there are literally more administrative people than there are students, which kind of, to any person sounds insane. And I think we know that to actually be true know they have a perception of cost ballooning. Michael, you gave us some real nuance around that in the last episode, so we can take that or leave that. But this ballooning, this lack of focus, contributes to a lack of direct service to students, and we should just literally, dramatically reduce admin and in doing so, reduce cost. And so I’m curious what you guys think. The last thing I will just say quickly before I turn it to you is I do believe this is something we’ve done at Minerva. Minerva has prioritized student learning, the student experience. The three of us, as trustees know for a fact that the admin is quite lean and that cost structure is significantly leaner as well. So I do think we have at least one proof point that it can be done.

Michael Horn: Yeah. Stacey, why don’t you jump in first? And this is the format we’ll follow for people listening. Diane’s going to go through her list. Stacey, and I will react bullet by bullet, so to speak. So go ahead, Stacey.

Stacey Childress: Yeah. On this one about refocusing on students, I would say refocusing on the purpose of the time in the program, whether that’s two years, three years, four years, because I think you could play with timing as an innovation potentially. But while we’re here together, learning much more, focus on purpose and helping young people expand their opportunity set. To me, it can be an early function of a higher ed experience in your first year or two where you’re able to get better, clearer insight into a path or multiple paths that you may or may not have come in thinking that’s the path you’re on. Now. For lots of kids, they just come right in and go, and that’s fine, but lots of them don’t. And so just like thinking about what’s really the purpose of the first year, what’s really the purpose of that bridge from first to second year, what are we trying to help make sure students get to the middle of their second year at end of their third semester, kind of knowing about themselves, knowing about what comes next and what needs to happen. Just really kind of think of that backwards mapping. If we’re headed here, how would we think about what needs to happen from the beginning to get there? And I just don’t think that’s happening anymore. So I liked the idea that it might be possible for institutions that want to really focus themselves on student development and acceleration to rethink the way the experience works without having to add a ton of costs and in fact, probably be able to reduce costs if they really streamlined around that purpose, therefore that value prop, therefore that experience that needs to be created and managed over time. So they didn’t exactly suggest that. But I do think from a solution standpoint, I think there’s real power there. And we said that with Minerva, we’ve got more of that mindset, but we were able to design it from the beginning that way. Or we weren’t. I wasn’t. I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but not too long after. But that’s the purpose at Minerva, and we’re organized around it and can constantly get better at it, for sure. But we’re organized around it. And I think it’s a thing that existing institutions could move to. It doesn’t seem impossible. It seems really hard, and it would take some time. But I think we have some examples of the improvement of some credentialing. I’m most familiar with it around master’s programs, but I think that actually gives me a little bit of hope that you could think differently about the experience in ways that doesn’t require you to blow up everything but does create opportunities to redesign at the kind of major/degree level. I don’t know. I think it’s possible and desirable.

Michael Horn: Yeah, that’s super interesting. I like also how you said it, Stacey, which is, regardless of what the universities do, they need to focus around a purpose. And so for some institutions, I will be delighted if they say it’s research, because I think that’s a very important societal function that’s different from the one we’ve chosen at Minerva, which is fundamentally students. I think doing so on either end, I think, will reduce administrative overhead and cost bloat. I think you need that clarity. I will say the second add to you all that I think maybe, I don’t know that it’s a disagreement, but it follows from where you were going, Stacey, which is like, I don’t think it’s quite student centered. I think it’s student purpose. And so, meaning, if we’re backward mapping from, we want these individuals to go out into the employment world and society and be able to contribute, what does it. And I think it’s a slight addendum to the student centered language only in the sense that you could argue that the opulent dining halls and residential palaces and so forth of colleges are very student centered in a weird kind of way. But I think it’s because they’ve treated students as customers as opposed to clients. And my distinction there is simply, like, the customer is always right with a client, you kind of got to nudge them and help them because you’re helping develop them. And so that’s my one sort of maybe controversial nuance. But I think we should have teaching institutions, they shouldn’t try to do research, and we should have far fewer research institutions. But I still want some of them.

Diane Tavenner: I love that distinction, Michael. And it’s so interesting how I think about this kind of as an insider and then a parent perspective, in that I actually, as a parent, see those sort of, let’s call them resort style or luxury resort universities as detrimental to the development of people in the 18 to 25 range. And so I don’t ever see that as a positive. But you’re right. That’s what some, especially elite families want. And that’s like driving things. So super interesting. I will just say that Minerva is the opposite of that. As we both know, it really is designed to help develop young emerging adults and their skills. And it’s really impressive on this front.

Michael Horn: And they’ve done that backward mapping that Stacey just described in excruciating, incredible, awesome detail.

Stacey Childress: Brilliant.

Diversification of purpose and opportunities

Diane Tavenner: Yep. Okay, so the second solution that I agree with, and here’s where I’m really going to practice some grace, because I don’t really think they said it the way that I would. But anyway, they seem to believe that it would be really healthy to have different universities and different departments within universities offering really different opportunities and appealing to different people and interests and passions and skills. I think they say that repeatedly, and I believe that that’s really something they care about. And I 100% sign on to and agree with that. I’m super excited about that. Right now. We have one flavor and they’re all vanilla. And how could we have some really different types of offerings? However, in that conversation, they got all caught up in DEI and politically hot topics. And so their discussion of it was kind of bumbly and in some cases came across as sort of biased and stereotypical. We unpacked that a lot on the last episode, so I’m not going to go back there. So instead, what I’m going to try to do is say what I think they would sign on to, given what I tried to hear through what they were talking about, which is what I would call the Todd Rose approach. And Michael and I have talked to Todd a couple times on the podcast, but basically, he really advocates for the end of average, which in his research and work suggests that what we’re promoting in university admissions right now is everyone driving towards being on a very small number of measures, the same as everyone, only better. So it’s like, we’re all going to be good at these three things, and now I’m just going to try to get better than you versus recognizing that the world needs whatever, hundreds, thousands of different things and that different people bring those different… And we would be so much better served if we were cultivating all that diversity of talent and expertise and interest, and if we had a collective university system that was really enabling and doing that. And so I think they were trying to zoom out to that systems level and say, wouldn’t that would be ideal? And I want to throw it to you all, because I do think this concept of like, imagine if students were applying to colleges not because of their ranking in U.S. News and World Reports or wherever we’re getting it these days, but because it was really a good fit for them personally. I mean, that’s the ideal that I think Ben and Marc would sign on to. I think society would benefit from, and I think it would, gosh, just be so much healthier for our young people and our country.

Michael Horn: I love where you just landed, Diane, because to me, it took them a while to get there, which I think is what you’re saying. But I think that was the underlying essence, which is that they were saying it’s not just Math and English Language Arts that matter. If you’re an awesome musician, there should be a way to show that. And then I think it would make it easier, frankly, for colleges to differentiate, which is the art of strategy. Colleges don’t like differentiating right now, to your point, the opposite of strategy. That’s part of the problem. But they had this, I think, somewhat bizarrely said, SAT should be infinitely scored. I kind of agree with it. Like, if you’re really good at math, I’d love to see how high you can get. And I want lots of other performance measures that you could showcase your talents on to show who you are. And you’re going to have this jagged profile at the end of the day. And I think that’s. Again, I’m not sure that they said it that way, but I think that’s what they fundamentally were driving at, and I’d love to see it. If you get out of the SAT as IQ test, I think you can make that leap a lot easier. And then it gets exciting, and I think, Stacey, and I’ll throw it to you here, I think it also gets around in the longer run. This point you were raising in the last episode that we’re actually not ready to leave the SAT, because when we do, it actually becomes worse and more biased toward people who have lots of wealth to develop essays and projects and go on saving the whales and blah, blah, blah. Like things that we’re not sure were about that we’re trying to optimize.

Stacey Childress: For, as I used to say, not really my issue. I’m glad somebody cares about that. I do like the whales. It’s not really my issue. Listen, I am all in on, as, you know, on jagged profiles, both as just a concept and as a common sense approach to how the world actually works. And again, I think that’s a lot of what they got right, both in diagnosis and solutioning, or at least feeding into potential solutions, is there aren’t enough choices. There are 4,000 institutions, but Diane, to your point, there are a handful or maybe four or five handfuls that are really kind of driving what good is supposed to look like, whether that’s right or wrong, and then all the other ones trying to kind of look the best they can against that standard. I actually would be cautious about any one institution, no matter how large or small, how financially healthy or not. I’ll be cautious about saying, do more programs, like, proliferate programs. Michael, like, you have spent some time both advising and teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Ed Education in the last few years. And I think one really smart thing they’ve done is fewer programs. You know, let’s have fewer of these. And so you can make more sense out of what a degree from Harvard Graduate School of Education means at the end of it, because you didn’t have, however, I mean, there were literally like 42 paths or something, and it’s down in the teens now. It’s like a big step forward. And so I wouldn’t suggest more. I would suggest more in aggregate. Right. And so to your point, Diane, what opportunity does it create for institutions to find their place in the ecosystem on the few things they can just be world class in, even if they’re a smaller institution kind of in the middle of the country, someplace in a charming town, but not a destination spot. But they get really good at a few paths and us developing ways at the system level to let kids know about those young people, know about those options, these different places that you might go. And then the jagged profile, like, if you can have some services emerge for matching jagged profiles to institutions where you don’t have to be one particular profile to do well there. But if you kind of fall in these ways, this is a way to continue to develop on these criteria you want to work on or if you want to look, the guys on the podcast saw college as a way out of being a bus boy and doing dishes when they were 17 or 18. Right. And so I don’t want my jagged profile to be steady state, mostly filled in with things I’m interested in as a teenager and bus boy. But I do want some sense of where I am at that age and where I might want to push in if I’m interested in some other things. I mean, I want sports. So how does the ecosystem develop in ways that allows for, I’ll just call it the supply of opportunities to be there in a very vibrant and differentiated set of options and some way of finding those options with a little bit of intelligence as a student and as a family about my student’s jagged profile. Right. I don’t want my jagged profile to be driven by some of my immutable characteristics, like race and gender and presumptions about what I might like or not like based on that. But, yeah, I’m different from you, Diane, and from you, Michael. We’ve had a lot of things in common and a lot of things that are different from one another. And we always have. Everyone does.

Certifying competence and personalizing through curriculum

Michael Horn: Diane, can I, can I just one quick build off of that because it reminded me of two things. One, I loved it how the implication of what Stacey just said would solve the administrative overhead problem that you started with. Diane. I disagreed with their solution of just slash half the administration. You can’t, as long as the bundle is what it is. And it’s not a go back to operating like how you were in year 2000 because the world has changed. It’s incredibly naive. And so that part of it, I think, where you just went with that, Stacey, is right. The other piece of this that just occurred to me is if you truly get good at the jagged profile piece, then a part I was in total agreement with Ben on was one of the biggest solutions, I think was starting the credentialing thing, if you will. That was actually certifying competence. And I think my conclusion, I’ve written a whole paper about this, about how we’re never going to get to competency-based education unless there are these independent entities that are there to verify competency and mastery. And in practice, it’s really hard to do. Like, we have all these one offs, right? Google, Microsoft, they don’t stand in for the bundle. Once you get into the less rules based stuff, we get worse and worse at it. And so I guess I would just say if we solved it on the front end. Diane, I’m curious what you think, but we actually might build into something that could solve it on the back end. And that would actually lower the price, I think, of higher ed.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. Like, I’m bursting with things right now. So I’m going to do three things all here at once. One, I want to just add on to this, I think, this is a really important conversation. So here’s what I would offer as a counterintuitive solution to what we’ve just been talking about that I know is true in the K-12 sector. So people think that in order to offer more choice and more personalization, that you have to do it in big structural ways. You have to add, like, a new major. You have to add a new school of something. You have to add, add, add. It’s not true. The way you actually do it and reduce at the same time is in how you’re designing those programs to be significantly more personalized, significantly more differentiated. So you’re actually solving the problem of the horrible pedagogy.

Stacey Childress: Right.

Diane Tavenner: And you’re not expanding the structure of the university. Now, this is so nerdy. Like, if you don’t design education and whatnot, you would never know that this is how you do this. But Minerva is a perfect example. They literally have five majors, five degrees. That’s it. Name me another university that only has five degrees. They’ve just exploded. But within those degrees, the experience is so hands-on, so project based, so differentiated that you can. People are really matching up. And so I think, actually, the path forward on that.

Stacey Childress: It’s super fascinating. And it is counterintuitive, because you’re solving the scale system problem at the unit level. Right. At the unit of the learner and the learner experience. And it actually doesn’t add overhead. It helps trim. It’s fascinating.

Diane Tavenner: It’s my favorite kind of solution, which is, I call the kitchen tool solution. I have a small kitchen. I’m a big cook. I can’t have that many tools. They have to do multiple jobs. So I love it as a kitchen tool solution. Michael, you also took us. So there’s some other things we agree with which we might get back to, but I’m going to take us into the disagree, because you sort of led us there to this fixing the outgoing credential problem, which, look, I think we all agree there’s a lot of disruption happening in society right now about these credentials. Right. And it’s really unclear where they are, because last time I checked, all the elite employers are still hiring people from Stanford and Harvard. So that’s super real. But you led us into their solution, and this might have been one of the most mind boggling proposals. And it falls into a category that’s very natural for people, is when they don’t know what to do, they think you need to do something different. They go back to something versus forward. And what Ben and Marc did was go back to the concept that in order to fix the credentialing problem and the lack of, we should start grading on a curve again. And I almost lost it, you guys. I had to take a break at that moment because that is the dumbest idea I’ve heard in a really long time. It’s a horrible idea.

Michael Horn: Nice of you to bring the nuance, Diane.

Diane Tavenner: Quite frankly, they broke it down why it was a horrible idea. So I’ll leave that to them. What is a good idea, and that’s what we all talk about and what the three of us are driving for is competency, mastery based assessment and learning. And it’s what you’re pointing to, Michael. First of all, I just want people to understand this is a real thing. It’s true. It’s possible. There are competency based assessments that are valid and are reliable. More and more coming available every day. And in fact, one of the big problems is a lot of institutions don’t use them. So we would have way more of these in the market if people were actually using them. And I say this because I built a whole system that does competency based learning and assessments. And now we had Tim Knowles on the podcast earlier this year, like, this is Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching and Learning and their partnership with ETS is all about this. So let us not believe that these things aren’t possible and don’t exist. They are and they do. And we as consumers have to start demanding them, buying them, using them, making them better.

Michael Horn: Yeah, I mean, here was the big irony, right, which was, I totally agree with everything you just said, Diane, and I agree with them that the incentives currently suck, right. In terms of why there’s great inflation and their credentialing idea. That’s where you can go, right? Like we’re going to have a way to prove mastery and we’re going to say, yes, you got it. No, you got to keep working. Or you as an individual can say, maybe this isn’t my bag. And that’s okay. At this level, I think to learn what you really want and you’re not going to make claims of, I got a C on this because I showed up and I turned it in and what, 30% all those…I’m totally 1000%… I thought the irony was that the credentialing idea that Ben wants to invest in, I think is an answer to this. I will add, I do not think that existing institutions, I know that many hundreds of them, are saying that they are launching competency based programs. I do not believe that most of them are going to be competency based. I do not believe that they are able to untether from the credit hour and move fundamentally to learning for the reason you just said, Diane, they’re not using these assessments. They’re not fundamentally able to move to a world in which learning is the currency rather than time. And I think this is where you have to have a third party credentialer and a new ecosystem of the Western Governor’s Universities, the Southern New Hampshire Universities, et cetera, filled around them. Stacey?

Stacey Childress: Yeah. Yes. I’m not going to yet take the bait on the discrete grading curve thing. I’ll come back to that. I’m going to stay right here.

Michael Horn: You were at the Harvard Business School where you had to.

The role of employers in advancing competency-based grading

Stacey Childress: I’m coming back to it. I’m coming back. I’m going to come back to it because I love this conversation or this thread. Supply can’t continue to develop, proliferate, deepen, innovate without sufficient demand for the type of thing Is what you’re saying, Diane. And so this assessment problem, it’s more than an assessment problem, but it’s an assessment infrastructure that supports a new learning model. That gets us to mastery based, competency based, enables us to do personalization more meaningfully. And this is where I think there was a miss on the solutions part, not about a specific solution, because I love the credentialing idea. We need a few of those. I think Ben and Marc pushing the onus of, or not the onus, but the point of leverage over to others to drive these reforms, I think, is short sighted because they have more power than maybe they acknowledged, and certainly as part of a business ecosystem in the country, have an enormous amount of power as employers to require something different of existing institutions and therefore open up opportunities for new institutions to emerge. New models to emerge. And they can do that, by the way they will and won’t hire. And I know that’s challenging because they need this flux of new talent every year, and they plan for it to be able to operate their models. But unless employers, it’s a hypothesis, but I think unless employers really pressure the institutions that are currently credentialing students to do something different, it’s not going to happen. Like, even the third party credentialer has a hard time taking off if the educational models actually don’t prepare students well to demonstrate competency in the third party credentialing protocols. I think because it’s a market challenge. Even though we’re talking about higher ed and big chunk of it is nonprofit, it’s still a market. And the output of the system is talent. There’s a market for talent. Who’s driving that market for talent? On the consumer, the buyer side is companies, and they’re going to have to exert way more organized pressure than they do now. And I think it’s absolutely doable. And look, there’s a lot of one, I think I appreciate about just the podcast in general was they didn’t really take the bait on super woke versus woke versus non woke. There were some allusions to it and stuff like that, which were fine. But there are employers making noises right now about who they will and won’t hire based on current attitudes, behaviors, speech. And I don’t love that, but I don’t hate it. Okay. Employers can do that. Well, if they can do that, they can do this. They can do what we’re talking about, which is a much longer term, more systemic way to really increase quality, overall quality of learning, quality of the signaling, quality of the incoming talent pool. And so like, yeah, businesses, let’s get organized around hiring and not hiring based on some things that actually really matter fundamentally for the health of the economy, for human flourishing, et cetera, et cetera.

Unbundling the role of the professor 

Diane Tavenner: This point about the power of the employers is in the section in my mind of what they sort of overlooked or their blind spot. And I think it comes to people, we often forget the power that we have. I’d love to come back to that a little bit on another example, but I want to stick here because one of their other solutions was to fix grade inflation. And this was like a solution that was so that they could make the credential more valuable and the value proposition. So it was sort of this adjacent solution to what we’ve been talking about. I will say they got into this whole conversation about adjunct professors versus tenure professors and all of this stuff about whatever. It was a little bit confusing. Here’s what I would say about…I feel like fixing great inflation kind of misses the point here. I think the actual solution that they would be looking for and want is unbundle the role of the professor in higher ed, because that’s actually the problem that’s at the root of the issue. We see this in K-12 teachers have too many hats they have to wear. They’re supposed to teach the kids, they’re supposed to coach them, they’re supposed to mentor them, they’re supposed to counsel them, and they have to evaluate their work performance, and they have to recommend those. Mackle and I have talked about this for years. Those roles are in conflict. There’s an inherent conflict in there. We’re asking these people to play these two roles and then getting mad at them when they are trying to promote kids that they are deeply invested in and care about. And so I would say for that and many, many reasons, they love unbundling. I think they should drop down a level and say, like, how do we unbundle the role of the professor in higher ed? We’ve sort of failed miserably so far at doing this in K-12, but maybe it’s more possible at higher ed. And I think this speaks to your idea of Michael, like, disaggregating the research piece. I just think there’s so much opportunity on unbundling the role of professors.

Michael Horn: Well, and I won’t ding them for not knowing this, but this is exactly what Western Governor’s University has done. They have unbundled the role of the faculty member. They have five different roles for faculty members. Life coach, course coach, instructional designer, I’m missing one, and assessment. And they’re all separate. And it’s one of the reasons I wonder, Western Governor’s University has set up WGU labs. Might all of the expertise that they have developed in assessing competency, because they are a competency based institution, be something that they can spin out so other people can start building toward it and start to do this even more? Diane, I think it’s a great. I’m totally with you.

Stacey Childress: Totally.

Evaluating tutoring as an alternative

Diane Tavenner: Let me grab another one that I disagreed with, because once I get this one off my chest, then I think I’ll feel okay. Which is one of their solutions was, and they sort of said it a little bit, like off the cuff, tongue in cheek a little. But we’re pretty serious about it was like, look, if universities are charging $70,000 a year in tuition, if that’s the price tag of a university, you could literally hire a full-time tutor. It would tutor your young person, know Socrates and Aristotle and sort of in that old one to one tutoring model. And they spent a lot of time talking about a study that we all know very, very well, a study done by Ben Bloom that showed the power of one to one tutoring. It’s true. It’s a real study we all care about. And I think they really lost a lot of nuance around that study and what it actually showed. And for me, a couple of things that were problematic on just the very technical side. You can’t hire a tutor for $70,000 a year that is going to be Aristotle like, that is insane. And as business people, that’s crazy. Please. So that business model doesn’t work. And the second thing that really baffled me in the solution was their complete failure to think about scale here. We can’t even find enough teachers in America. How in the world do we think we’re going to scale one to one tutoring, even if we had the resources to do that? It makes no sense now. They were talking about, like, combos of AI, et cetera. Fine. I would say tutoring is not a solution to the problem of higher ed. It’s certainly something we should be thinking about working on using as a tool in our tool belt, but it’s not a solution.

Michael Horn: I’ll just say plus one. Go ahead, Stacey. 

Stacey Childress: Listen, I literally thought I’d gotten in a time machine and gone back to 2010 when we all started kind of professionally, really moving in the same direction when Bloom’s study was the hot topic and kind of the talisman. This is the model for personalized learning. The two sigma problem is Bloom showed it’s possible with mastery based one to one tutoring, which is a thing. Mastery based tutoring, like, it’s a very specific model of pedagogy, which is a thing they miss, I think missed. So the two sigma problem is, how do we do this at scale? And they made a very good point. We all know what it’s like. We all know the impact that one great teacher can have. And it’s just a devilish problem to try to make a million great teachers, right? That’s the challenge on the human front. And Michael, I know you and I share a perspective on this, like, Bloom’s methodology, like, overstates effect size by. It took me a while to get there on my path over the last 14 or 15 years, but effect size is overstated. Algorithmic approaches to trying to get the technology to mimic that type of tutoring just really hasn’t panned out. Lots have tried again. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropy and venture capital into that problem or goal. AI might put us on different footing there. You could really imagine something more akin in some domains to a mastery based model of individual support for young people that could approximate maybe some of the results. I don’t know about you, Michael, but I’m skeptical of the two sigma, the 98^th percentile result, moving kids at the 50th percentile reliably to the 98^th percentile at scale. I think I’d take half that. If I could get 50% to 75^th percentile in a reliable and affordable way, I think I’d be all in on that. What I don’t think is that it is a single solution. It’s always been my problem with this conversation about tutoring, which is it a thing that we’re going to do on the side because other things aren’t working. And so therefore, let’s do one on one tutoring and that works for some kids and not others. And yeah, now we need 15 million great mastery based tutors who can each support three kids instead of just 3 million teachers that we already don’t know how to do. So it starts to get at that challenge. But what I will say is what always continues to motivate me about the Bloom insight, whatever the effect size is, whatever the model is, whatever the scalability challenges are, it’s twofold. One is isn’t that really what we want education to be, regardless of how we actually operationalize it, whether it’s Aristotle and Socrates today, but really some version of ChatGPT probably not going to happen, maybe not even all that desirable or through some other I’ll just use the word bundle, even though I don’t mean it in the way they were talking about some other basket of experiences that allow for the personalization you were talking about earlier, Diane, which technology can help and support, but isn’t a point solution for it. I guess that’s the thing to break out of, like when you see, well, one to one tutoring, and no matter what, it reliably shows this. And if we could just do that. I did think that listen, it was a cheeky aside that they made kind of as a joke, and it did make me laugh. But here’s I mean, I do think this is a good push when we do get to the moment that there are as many administrators and faculty as there are students. And this is true in some institutions that the three of us know, love and give a lot of credit for helping us accelerate toward the wonderful lives we’re leading. Now you start to say, can we really not afford it? Yeah, because maybe we can afford it. We’re just not spending on it. And maybe the model isn’t really one to one, but maybe it is one to one in terms of headcount. And then you’ve got this unbundling idea, Diane, that you were proposing and that I know Michael has talked a lot about unbundling the role of the instructor, the professor. So then you still have the same number of people, and maybe the cost model stays similar, but it’s worth it. It’s way more effective. It’s way more productive because for the same amount of money, you’re getting a 75th percentile result instead of a 50th percentile result. If we could just use the inspiration of the blue model, not say, let’s try to replicate it exactly, but what might it push us to re-examine about the current structure and what might be possible if we weren’t so wedded to the operational model that we have.

Diane Tavenner: We could go.

Michael Horn: I’m just nodding. I think this is a good point. I will say the irony I thought was they said nothing in education scales except for the Benjamin Bloom thing. And it was like, anyway, I’ve gone through my list.

Stacey Childress: The problem is that it doesn’t scale.

Startup competitors in higher ed

Diane Tavenner: Let me just say quickly, because I think we’re going to all be in agreement on this. As VCs, it was interesting that they were surprisingly skeptical of startup competitors. So competitors in the space that could be universities, if you will, new startup competitors. And they cited their major skepticism around what they call the accreditation cartel, which is not surprising because VCs kind of don’t like regulated industries. For good reason, I think. I just would say quickly, I think they missed Minerva here. Minerva is literally a startup against the space that they’re talking about. So we should just say that out loud. I would also say that…

Stacey Childress: They did mention it.  

Diane Tavenner: They did mention it.

Stacey Childress: Yeah. They didn’t talk…

Diane Tavenner: In a separate place. I just want us to know there are some really key people doing some work on accreditation that, if it’s successful, I think will matter a lot. So we should just know that that’s happening. And if folks are interested in that, I think there’s people doing that, number one. Number two, who knows if it will pass in our federal legislation. But there’s some work around enabling Pell grants. So these are grants for low income students to do shorter term credentials, which could get really interesting around different types of competitors.

Michael Horn: Yeah, but I would agree with them here because I think as it stands right now, to launch Minerva took like $100 million to launch UATX took some godly sum of money. College, Unbound, Reach University, Quantic School of Business and Technology. They’re almost the exceptions that prove the rule at present. And I think supply is so limited that that partially explains why costs have gone up writ large over the last many decades. And it is really hard to start something outside the system like the short term Pell you just referenced that is locked to accredited institutions. It is like a whole set of institutions aren’t going to be able to use it. And so it is really hard to start something outside the system because you’re competing with something that does get a subsidy and you don’t. We at Minerva were accredited, but we’ve chosen not to accept that subsidy to this point. I think that’s been the right decision, but I’m just saying it’s created barriers to entry such that I think all the coding boot camps and apprenticeships and other promising sort of stabs at this have struggled. And so I actually thought their point was right. And I’ll just name it like if Stig Lesley, our friend, colleague, his postsecondary commission accreditor does get through, I do think it changes the game. And that’s probably where you’re going with this, Diane. But I think at status quo, Ben and Marc nailed this I would say.

Diane Tavenner: Don’t disagree. And certainly my experience for 20 years in the K-12 environment as a charter school operator and is consistent with the rightful fears there. And as I look about at what sort of, even if initially wasn’t blocked, what’s kind of washed away over the time, it’s a real fear.

Stacey Childress: Yeah. I wonder, just kind of on this startup as kind of some version of a bundle, which is, I think what they’re saying, right. It’s like a competitive institution that has some version of the bundle. I wonder, Michael, is there some pseudo non consumption at a big enough scale happening in the Marketplace? So some of these kids we talked about, or some of these types of student profiles that we talked about earlier, that the current setup just does not work for and creates this enormous debt load and stuff. Maybe if you’re not, Minerva’s charter is to compete with elite institutions, as are some of these others we’ve referenced. But maybe there’s more opportunity, if you really got clear about a student profile or two that is currently not being served at all or being served so badly that it puts them as worse than underserved, like negatively served, that there may be some opening for. Because maybe that kind of place, I guess the finances are still an issue, but what kind of credential does it need if it’s got good partnerships with some set of employers or a couple of industries, for instance.

Michael Horn: Maybe this is a cool place for us to wrap because I think to that point, Stacey, this goes back to the quote at the very beginning of the first episode that Ben led with on the quote unquote scam. What I might say is you got sort of two options here. One, you have an employer driven model, which looks a lot like apprenticeships, which Diane and I have gotten very excited about as an alternative. And it’s learner centered, but it’s actually employer centered as well. And that to me is the two things that actually I would anchor on in the new system, and I think it would get those incentives right, to your point. And number two, I think the other option is we’re seeing players fill the non consumption. They’re the Western Governor’s Universities. They are the Southern New Hampshire Universities.

Stacey Childress: Good point.

Michael Horn: And then my co-host on my other podcast, Future U, says, well, why aren’t more people pouring into this ginormous adult learning opportunity? And I think the reason is because we’ve said for profit, you can’t play. And capital, as you know, likes to go where there will be a return. But number two, the incentives really suck for for-profit right now because they’re incentivized to enroll. And we’ve seen that movie play out. And so that’s the other piece of this, which is I would love to see the accredited players have skin in the game so that if your students don’t get good paying jobs and are going to default on debt, that they have some penalty for that. Then you could open up the capital markets and then start to scale some different looking players against this because we’d be focused on the outcomes at the end of the day.

Media recommendations 

Diane Tavenner: I love that, Michael. I agree. It’s a really good place to wrap. We could continue talking about this for a really long time. I suspect 3 hours were offline. Maybe we should turn to, we didn’t do this on the first episode, but we should do it here because we were listening to that podcast, Stacey. We always do what are you watching, listening to, reading, hopefully outside of, quote, business.

Stacey Childress: Well, one thing I’m watching and listening to is spring training. So baseball’s back. We’re in full swing of spring training in Florida and Arizona, and so I’m drawing attention to there. But then I’m also listening to a novel called the Covenant of Water by Abraham Varghese, which I had not…I know it’s been around a while, but I am totally into… It’s like one of those multigenerational stories that I love. It spans 70 years, from 1900 to 1977. The author is actually the Vice Chair of Medicine at Stanford Medical School. So he’s a doctor and writes fiction. And so there’s like a ton of amazing stuff about the evolution of medical practice during those years. I’m loving. I’m on like chapter 19 of 87, and I’m so glad that there’s that much left of it. That’s how much I’m loving it. Yeah. So I totally recommend it. If you haven’t read it, that’s awesome.

Michael Horn: Diane, what about you?

Diane Tavenner: Well, I have read it and love, love it. So that’s an awesome one. So folks who’ve been listening know that I’m on my way to visit my son in Scotland here pretty soon, and we’ve got an upcoming trip. And so in my quest to continue to learn about that area, I’m actually reading Adam Smith’s the Wealth of Nations and David Hume’s A Treaty on Human Nature. Please do not laugh at me. Sometimes it’s important to read the primary sources I tried to mean. So when we were talking Aristotle and Socrates and stuff, I had to laugh a little and the human nature and the growth mindset. But I think what’s more interesting is at the same time, I’m playing with a new AI application, like I know we all are, that supports sort of learning journeys for people like me who aren’t trying to get a credential but are trying to learn. And I’m having a conversation with it about these readings, and it’s giving me projects and quizzes and all sorts of ways to learn and interact with the material. It’s pretty fascinating. How about you, Michael?

Michael Horn: That’s awesome. I have a few different directions I could go because I’m still on the tennis kick to parallel Stacey’s baseball, but that’s not where I’m going. Last night…So this is someone could figure out when we’re recording these episodes. But last night we went to the Somerville movie theater, which is one of these old-fashioned movie theaters, to hear an author speak. Her name is Kelly Yang. She lives in the LA area. She’s originally from China. She immigrated here when she was like five or six or something like that. And she’s written many children’s books, and my kids had read them, one or two of them. We left with like eight of them. She has a YA novel as well, but the one that I was reading was finally seen, which was what they had read. I’m literally like every chapter, I’m like sobbing. Now, that was not their reaction, but it works on many levels, I guess, is the point. And then her new book that she is launching, and that’s why everyone filled a theater last night is called finally heard, which is the sequel to finally seen. And evidently it’s about the perils of social media through the story of an immigrant family. And so it’s all about how to be happy and extraordinary, which, as she said last night, can often compete against each other in our lives. I’ve been reading so much John Haidt that I was so thrilled that a children’s book author would tackle this topic in a really fun, enjoyable narrative. I’m excited to read it once I finish the first book. But with that said, a huge thank you to our friend Stacey. Thank you for joining us, Stacey.

Stacey Childress: Thanks for having me.

Michael Horn: I will add a huge thank you to Marc and Ben for devoting so much time and thought to the challenges in higher ed, sparking our two reactions. And I hope that they’ll listen to this, and I hope that they will take it in the spirit in which we are offered, which is really building on the foundation that they have laid for a really critical conversation for society, because, as they said, universities have all these warts, and they do all these important things at the same time. And we can hold both of that in our head at the same time. And just a last thank you to all of our listeners for staying with us on this longer journey than usual. But we hope we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.