The talk was about a big, take-home essay, and Liang, then a sophomore at a Bay Area high school, recalled that it covered the basics: the rubric for grading as well as suggestions for how to use generative AI to keep students honest: They should use it as a “thinking partner” and brainstorming tool.

As he listened, Liang glanced around the classroom and saw that several classmates, laptops open, had already leaped ahead several steps, generating entire drafts of their essays.

Liang said his generation doesn’t engage in moral hand-wringing about AI. “For us, it’s simply a tool that enables us not to have to think for ourselves.”

But with AI’s awesome power comes a side effect that many would rather not consider: It’s killing the trust between teachers and students. 

When students can cheaply and easily outsource their work, he said, why value a teacher’s feedback? And when teachers, relying on sometimes unreliable AI-detection software, believe their students are taking such major shortcuts, the relationship erodes further.

It’s an issue that researchers are just beginning to study, with results that suggest an imminent shakeup in student-teacher relationships: AI, they say, is forcing teachers to rethink how they think about students, assessments and, to a larger extent, learning itself. 

If you ask Liang, now a junior and an experienced — he has penned pieces for The Hill, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and the conservative Daily Wire — AI has already made school more transactional, stripping many students of their desire to learn in favor of simply completing assignments. 

“The incentive system for students is to just get points,” he said in an interview. 

While much of the attention of the past few years has focused on how teachers can detect AI-generated work and put a stop to it, a few researchers are beginning to look at how AI affects student-teacher relationships.

Researcher Jiahui Luo of the Education University of Hong Kong that college students in many cases resent the lack of “two-way transparency” around AI. While they’re required to declare their AI use and even submit chat records in a few cases, Luo wrote, the same level of transparency “is often not observed from the teachers.” That produces a “low-trust environment,” where students feel unsafe to freely explore AI.

In 2024, after being asked by colleagues at Drexel University to help resolve an AI cheating case, researcher , who teaches in the university’s , analyzed college students’ , spanning December 2022 to June 2023, shortly after Open AI unleashed ChatGPT onto the world. He found that many students were beginning to feel the technology was testing the trust they felt from instructors, in many cases eroding it — even if they didn’t rely on AI.

While many students said instructors trusted them and would offer them the benefit of the doubt in suspected cases of AI cheating, others were surprised when they were accused nonetheless. That damaged the trust relationship.

For many, it meant they’d have to work on future assignments “defensively,” Gorichanaz wrote, anticipating cheating accusations. One student even suggested, “Screen recording is a good idea, since the teacher probably won’t have as much trust from now on.” Another complained that their instructor now implicitly trusted AI plagiarism detectors “more than she trusts us.”

In an interview, Gorichanaz said instructors’ trust in AI detectors is a big problem. “That’s the tool that we’re being told is effective, and yet it’s creating this situation of mutual distrust and suspicion, and it makes nobody like each other. It’s like, ‘This is not a good environment.’”

For Gorichanaz, the biggest problem is that AI detectors simply aren’t that reliable — for one thing, they are more likely to flag the papers of English language learners as being written by AI, he said. In one Stanford University , they “consistently” misclassified non-native English writing samples as AI-generated, while accurately identifying the provenance of writing samples by native English speakers.

“We know that there are these kinds of biases in the AI detectors,” Gorichanaz said. That potentially puts “a seed of doubt” in the instructor’s mind, when they should simply be using other ways to guide students’ writing. “So I think it’s worse than just not using them at all.” 

‘It is an enormous wedge in the relationship’

Liz Shulman, an English teacher at Evanston Township High School near Chicago, recently had an experience similar to Liang’s: One of her students covertly relied on AI to help write an essay on Romeo and Juliet, but forgot to delete part of the prompt he’d used. Next to the essay’s title were the words, “Make it sound like an average ninth-grader.”

Asked about it, the student simply shrugged, Shulman recalled in she co-authored with Liang.

In an interview, Shulman said that just three weeks into the new school year, in late August, she had already had to sit down with another student who used AI for an assignment. “I pretty much have to assume that students are going to use it,” she said. “It is an enormous wedge in the relationship, which is so important to build, especially this time of the year.”

Her take: School has transformed since 2020’s long COVID lockdowns, with students recalibrating their expectations. It’s less relational, she said, and “much more transactional.” 

During lockdowns, she said, Google “infiltrated every classroom in America — it was how we pushed out documents to students.” Five years later, if students miss a class because of illness, their “instinct” now is simply to check , the widely used management tool, “rather than coming to me and say, ‘Hey, I was sick. What did we do?’”

That’s a bitter pill for an English teacher who aspires to shift students’ worldviews and beliefs — and who relies heavily on in-class discussions.

“That’s not something you can push out on a Google doc,” Shulman said. “That takes place in the classroom.”

In a sense, she said, AI is contracting where learning can reliably take place: If students can simply turn off their thinking at home and rely on AI tools to complete assignments, that leaves the classroom as the sole place where learning occurs. 

“Because of AI, are we only going to ‘do school’ while we’re in school?” she asked. 

‘We forget all the stuff we learned before’

Accounts of teachers resigned to students cheating with AI are “concerning” and stand in contrast to what a solid body of research says about the importance of teacher agency, said , senior vice president for Innovation and Impact at the Carnegie Foundation.

Teachers, she said, “are not just in a classroom delivering instruction — they’re part of a community. Really wonderful school and system leaders recognize that, and they involve them. They’re engaged in decision making. They have that agency.”

One of the main principles of Carnegie’s , a blueprint for improving secondary education, includes a “culture of trust,” suggesting that schools nurture supportive learning and “positive relationships” for students and educators.

“Education is a deeply social process,” Stafford-Brizard said. “Teaching and learning are social, and schools are social, and so everyone contributing to those can rely on that science of relational trust, the science of relationships. We can pull from that as intentionally as we pull from the science of reading.”

Gorichanaz, the Drexel scholar, said that for all of its newness, generative AI presents educators with what’s really an old challenge: How to understand and prevent cheating. 

“We have this tendency to think AI changed the entire world, and everything’s different and revolutionized and so on,” he said. “But it’s just another step. We forget all the stuff we learned before.”

Specifically, research going back identifies four key reasons why students cheat: They don’t understand the relevance of an assignment to their life, they’re under time pressure, or intimidated by its high stakes, or they don’t feel equipped to succeed.

Even in the age of AI, said Gorichanaz, teachers can lessen the allure of taking shortcuts by solving for these conditions — figuring out, for instance, how to intrinsically motivate students to study by helping them connect with the material for its own sake. They can also help students see how an assignment will help them succeed in a future career. And they can design courses that prioritize deeper learning and competence. 

To alleviate testing pressure, teachers can make assignments more low-stakes and break them up into smaller pieces. They can also give students more opportunities in the classroom to practice the skills and review the knowledge being tested.

And teachers should talk openly about academic honesty and the ethics of cheating.

“I’ve found in my own teaching that if you approach your assignments in that way, then you don’t always have to be the police,” he said. Students are “more incentivized, just by the system, to not cheat.”

With writing, teachers can ask students to submit smaller “checkpoint” assignments, such as outlines and handwritten notes and drafts that classmates can review and comment on. They can also rely more on oral exams and handwritten blue book assignments. 

Shulman, the Chicago-area English teacher, said she and her colleagues are not only moving back to blue books, but to doing “a lot more on paper than we ever used to.” They’re asking students to close their laptops in class and assigning less work to be completed outside of class. 

As for Liang, the high school junior, he said his new English teacher expects all assignments to come in hand-written. But he also noted that a few teachers have fallen under the spell of ChatGPT themselves, using it for class presentations. As one teacher last spring clicked through a slide show, he said, “It was glaringly obvious, because all kids are AI experts, and they can just instantly sniff it out.” 

He added, “There was a palpable feeling of distrust in the room.”

In the first episode of the new year, Diane and Michael look back on the past three discussions of Class Disrupted’s fifth season through the lens of disruption. They discuss the future of AI education tools; consider the opportunities and challenges as the Carnegie Foundation embarks on creating innovative new assessments with the Educational Testing Service (ETS); and highlight how Americans’ ideas of a success are changing and what that means for schools.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. I know you have had a hectic last few weeks, but I still have been excited to catch up with you as we say goodbye to 2023. That still doesn’t sound right coming off the tongue. And I’m hoping that the pneumonia cases in China that are starting to be reported are not portending something worse for 2024. But here we are.

Diane Tavenner: Oh, Michael. Pneumonia in China. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I don’t want to know what you’re talking about.

Michael Horn: Don’t look it up.

Diane Tavenner: I’ve been heads down. Wow. That makes me realize that we started this podcast during the pandemic, sort of the beginning, the height of the pandemic, and I can’t believe we’re in our fifth season. And I kind of feel like we’re starting to see some opportunities that haven’t been there for the last few years. And so I really hope pneumonia is not on our way because our kids and our system and our country really need us to be rethinking how we’re doing school. For us this season, to that end, we’ve just been talking to some really interesting people and people who we think are kind of pushing our thinking and everyone’s thinking and the work forward. And so that’s been amazing. But one of the things I’m realizing is I’m craving the opportunity for us to just talk and process and think about what they’re saying. So I’m hoping that we can do that today.

Michael Horn: A good plan. And hopefully our listeners are excited for the same because that’s what we’re going to do: use today’s session to step back and think about the last three conversations that we’ve had with Todd Rose, Irhum, Shafkat, hopefully I pronounced that correctly, and Tim Knowles, so that we can reflect on a lot of the points that they made and how they stretched our thinking and how they might intersect with each other and, frankly, ask each other any questions that we have as we march into the new year.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, that just is crazy. And I always have a lot of questions. So I’m excited to talk with you about this. But one of the things I noticed, Michael, when I think back across the last three conversations is there is an undercurrent of disruption in all of those. It’s maybe more than an undercurrent, quite frankly. And while I will acknowledge that people in education don’t really like the word disruption, they don’t like it in reference to schools and education. And I get that. But I think it’s useful to say it here, because when I say disruption, I’m referring to the work that you study and you write about and you talk about, and quite frankly, a lot of the work that I have done in my career, because innovation doesn’t come without disruption. Those two things sort of come hand in hand. And so I think we need to be mindful, but we also can’t be afraid to talk about what is really happening and needed.

Michael Horn: I want to return to that theme as we go through today, but let’s start where you just left, which is afraid and fear, and I think a lot of fear is being sparked by AI. And so would love to dig into the conversation as a starting point, if you’re good with it, with Irhum, because my big takeaway from that was that the art of building valuable tools in education will firstly be based on a deeper understanding of what large language models the current AI phenomenon that has people’s imagination, but really understanding what they can and can’t do when you train them appropriately. And then second, and I think this is maybe reassuring for educators, I hope it is, the actual real life use cases in schools are the other thing you really need to understand. And what I took away from it was when you have both of those things, then you can create robust tools with presets in essence – that’s sort of my word – but think scripted buttons instead of wide-open chats that you put a lot on the individual that support the things that you’re trying to accomplish. And not only can that be more efficient, but it can also be much more valuable and efficacious. And I think it can lend toward a real purposeful use of AI, which is what I think we should all be hoping for. What did you take away from it, and how does that add up?

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, well, I want to linger on the combination of your two points together because I think this is a persistent issue in education and I’ve been thinking about it a ton. I think we’ve acknowledged this a lot. Education is one of the few industries that has been relatively unchanged by modern technological advances. And I’m not talking like printing press modern advances, clearly that had a significant impact, but that was a while ago now. And so I’m talking software, personal computing, and now AI obviously. The big question is why. Why is education sort of untouched or unfazed when everyone else is really impacted by these advances? And one of the things that I’ve been noticing over the last six months in being out of the direct working of and leading of schools is just how complicated schools are. And my beloved former board chair would call that a BGO, a blinding glimpse of the obvious.  So there’s that. But I think it’s hit me pretty profoundly, kind of in two ways now that I’m leading a company that is focused on education, but not running a whole school or a whole system. You know that I’m a student of leadership, and I have studied and practiced for a very long time, and I love learning about it. And one of sort of the universally accepted truths in leadership is that an organization can only focus on, like, one, two, maybe three things at a time, and that’s really stretching it. And really, the best organizations have that sort of laser focus. And for 20 years, I tried really hard to live that as truly as possible in schools. But the reality is that in a school, if we only had one or two priorities, we would literally be shut down. Like, schools have so many obligations and responsibilities just to keep the doors open. It’s not real to think that they only have one or two priorities. And you can play all these sort of Jedi mind tricks, if you will, and say, we’re prioritizing here, but the reality is you’re doing all of these other things that ultimately take priority because they’re compliance oriented or they’re legally mandated or all of those things. And so to pretend that those are not priorities really is not authentic. And so it’s just really hit me to be leading an organization now that truly can have only one priority and what that actually means in terms of our ability to focus and to innovate and to really integrate new technologies and advances and think about how to use them in powerful and meaningful ways. And so I’m just thinking a lot about, and we come back to this theme a lot, like, can we expect of schools what I think everyone expects of them, which is to be these innovative places that are going to redesign and sort of remodel themselves using modern technology, AI in particular. It just feels like such a heavy, heavy lift. I’m dancing around this because I’m nervous about where this line of thinking takes me. And I think it’s also important that we have this conversation.

Michael Horn: Yeah. Reflecting on that, I guess I have a couple thoughts. One, our friend Paul Peterson, the professor at Harvard, who’s studied and written a lot about education in schools, he has this line in his book, Saving Schools. I think that’s the title of it, where he talks about, it’s a very economist sort of view of the world where he says, like, one of the big things that creates innovation in the world is when organizations shift tasks to their end consumer. And the example he has is like Walmart. As opposed to a department store back in the day where you would have someone follow you around and curate the experience with you, like your shopper. Walmart’s basically like, “Diane, you walk in there, figure it out. It’s all on the shelves, but it’s on you.”

Diane Tavenner: Well, now you even check yourself out, right?

Michael Horn: That’s a very good point. Look at the Amazon stores. And Whole Foods and stuff like that. And I think it’s interesting in terms of education, because if we’re serious about building agency and learners, actually having them take over things is actually good, like, that’s a goal, right? I think so. A second thought I had is on the do one thing well in my head right now when you say that is Mallory Dwinnell, who’s the chancellor, as you know, of Reach university. And I’ve been with her a few times in the last few months, and she knows Reach University exists to do one thing and one thing only, and it’s trained teachers in rural contexts. And as a result, they’re able to be incredibly focused and optimized and so forth. When I zoom up from that a little bit, one of the lines that we’ve had – because I don’t know the answer to your question, so I’m going to use theory here – through a jobs to be done perspective, the way we’ve said it is organizations can only really be good at one job to be done. So, for example, like Ikea, it’s not that they do low-cost furniture, it’s that they’re really good at helping you do the job of, like, I need to furnish this apartment today when I move into a new city, right. And everything is built around that. They do lots and lots of things, but that’s the job to be done, and they integrate around that. And I guess my reflection on that is, and I love your take on this, is that schools, as you know, we’ve been asking them to do multiple jobs. Like when we analyze this through why people switch schools, we’ve now done this with micro-schools, independent schools and charter schools. We see that there are four reasons or jobs to be done that cause people to change schools. And the design of those are pretty radically different depending on what job it is to get it done. And so I guess I wonder, to your point, have we just been forcing schools to do all the jobs and therefore they stink at all of them. And they’re pulling against each other and maybe like moving back to a smaller-size school where we allow individuals to choose not based on race, politics, or other unsavory characteristics, but based on job to be done. Like what’s the progress you’re trying to make? Might that help us a little bit? I’ll give you my other thought in a moment, but I just want you to react there.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. And what you’re making me think about is – this wasn’t the current conversation we had with Todd Rose a few episodes ago – but certainly the body of his work, which is the introductory body, and you did The End of Average, which is why do we think that everyone needs the same thing. We’re in this race where everyone’s trying to be exactly the same, only a little bit better than everyone else on a very narrow set of things. And I think what you’re offering is schools could have different purposes and look really different. And why is that bad or wrong? And the thing that’s coming up for me and what you’re saying though is the approach you’re taking is that the school’s actually primary purpose is to serve their students and their families. And here my experience is that’s not who they’re serving. When I talk about compliance and legality and all of those things, there’s a whole bunch of other people that end up stack ranking above parents and students. And that is the fundamental – well, there’s so many – but that feels like a fundamental challenge.

Michael Horn: I’m going to point us to something really uncomfortable. But this is why I think some of these new school designs that are fundamentally focused on the learners and the parents are probably a really important force in education because they’re not confused about who they’re serving. And I think my hope would be that it helps districts wake up and be able to do the same sorts of things. But TBD on that one, I guess.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, districts, states, policy.

Michael Horn: A lot of layers, right? Yeah, it’s a lot of layers. So let’s maybe leave that conversation there. I have other thoughts, but I think that’s a good provocative place to leave it for the moment.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, I agree with you because there’s another provocative space we can go. When we talked to Tim Knowles from the Carnegie foundation, he of course brought up one of my favorite topics, assessment and the promise of assessment to sort of enable a lot of what we talk about, which is competency-based and personalized and talk about student autonomy and self-direction and all of those things. Because if individuals can show what they know in valid and reliable ways, that frees up the space of how they actually learned that and how they know it and gives us a lot of different options and possibilities there. And if we’re measuring things that are more directly related to valuable work people do in the world, that should both better prepare people and help clarify what things are valuable to teach and learn. And so I’m so curious. I know you went into that conversation like a little bit…

Michael Horn: I’m nervous. I want them to really succeed. But I love both of your points. And I loved the broader conversation, as you know, with Tim. I left with a much clearer idea of what the partnership with ETS is trying to do and why. And I feel like when he anchored it in the why, it just helped so much. And I left with a deeper understanding of, to that end, why they’re not tackling assessments for the learning standards as they exist today and are already in place, because there’s so many players that do that, rightly or more wrongly, but nevertheless, there and then I left with an understanding of why they are tackling these cognitive skills and habits of success. To use your language, Diane, not Tim’s. And I like that the effort is demand driven. I think that’s really important. There’s some grassroots nature of it in the sense that, as Tim pointed out, all of these states, both red and blue, are building portraits of a graduate that at least pay lip service to the notion of developing students with agency and executive functioning skills and critical thinking on and on. But as he pointed out, they’re kind of empty promises because those states have no way at the moment to measure these skills or habits or assess whether they’re delivering. And so I like that Carnegie and ETS could be an answer to that problem where there really is none at the moment. And I think my questions from that, that sort of follow on for it, are one, or I guess, thoughts more broadly. And I have five of them. I’ll do three maybe and then let you jump in. How about that? Okay. One, I really like the approach from a disruptive innovation angle, as I mentioned, because it tackles non-consumption, where the alternative is nothing at all at the moment. They are competing against nothing, rather than going headfirst into this heavy space of formative, summative interim assessment providers, and they can really define something. The performance bar in some sense is simple. All it has to do is be better than nothing. I said it earlier. Second, I think that they are chasing what seems like real demand. That’s good. It’s not top down. I hope we keep it that way and don’t force something on people. And third, I think from a worry perspective, and this is going to contradict number one a little bit, but disruptive innovation, I think the theory suggests over and over again that you should tackle the simplest problems first. And I guess my concern is that figuring out how to assess these skills and habits in a way that is accepted outside of the school networks that exist doesn’t feel simple to know. Your point that they can learn it anywhere and we’re going to assess it. I know you’ve done this at Summit, but that’s one network. And Carnegie is now trying to assess across a student’s life, not just in school. That seems really complex and complicated to me, even if all the bar is is better than nothing. And so I guess I hope I’m wrong, but it’s a question that I have coming out of the conversation.

Diane Tavenner: I’m curious to pick your brain on that one a little bit about what constitutes simple, because it seems like what you’re saying is the complexity might be coming from all these different contexts and things like that, less the actual assessment itself. And so I’m wondering, this is a little selfish too, as I think about trying to build a product that is in a space where there is non-consumption. I would argue there’s non-consumption right now, but it’s certainly not simple what we’re trying to do at some level. But maybe it is. So what’s simple mean?

Michael Horn: Yeah, I have to think through this more obviously. I guess my thought is, right, just to go again to disruptive innovation, the first application for the transistors weren’t computers and incredible consumer electronics products. They were simple hearing aids that just enabled some hearing. Steel. You take mini mills, they first did rebar, right, stuff that would show up in concrete, not finely finished, beautiful products. So maybe it’s the case that they can find their niche there. I just think it’s going to have to be sort of the simplest applications first of demonstrating these skills rather than taking on all the complexity at once and not trying to maybe, and I’m thinking out loud here, not trying to maybe bill it as like the, “Oh, we figured out how to measure perseverance across all domains and locations and et cetera, et cetera.”

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, and maybe it’s something like, I mean, you’re referring back to some of the work that we did when I was at summit with some startup partners and, for example, we just were building one sort of easy simulation that felt like an hour of video game playing to students, but really was able to say, like, “Look, this student seems to indicate higher levels of the ability to collaborate to solve a more complex problem, which for an employer was super useful information.” And so maybe something more, I would call them quick and dirty assessments like that that aren’t about taking a whole assessment schema, but are like, if that helps an employer trust and believe that that potential employee is capable of a skill, maybe that’s what simple looks like in this particular case.

Michael Horn: I like that. I can imagine a second one which might be simply looking at student effort in school, right? Do they struggle in math? And then they keep at it. And so we see perseverance in mathematics, right? I could imagine sort of simple, not survey based, but more like observational based assessments maybe as well, I don’t know.

Diane Tavenner: Fascinating, but it’s narrow and zeroed in on a particular thing that might be meaningful in the world but doesn’t have to like …

Michael Horn: To boil the ocean from day one, I think. I think that’s exactly right. And that’s maybe the way to think about it. Like, let’s take some bite-sized pieces. I guess it bleeds into the other two thoughts I had. I really do like the way that they’re connecting this to academic domains and content knowledge. I think I’d be concerned if they weren’t. And here’s my “and” I think they would benefit from taking a page from Summit and breaking out the skills or the cognitive skills versus the habits of success in the ways that you all did. Because they are different, and I suspect the approach to measuring them is different. Now, I grant you, from a public relations perspective, that might involve some education and some complicated messaging, but I think it would also be helpful for those of us in the field who are like, “Hey, agency is different from critical thinking in science.” Or whatever it might be. And then I guess the last thought I had is, I do still wonder…I love that he’s tackling this for all the reasons that he said. And I don’t know if it pulls us away from the Carnegie Unit of time, because at some point we do still need to help say, “Hey, this student has mastered these sets of learning standards or progressions or whatever, and therefore can move on.” And so maybe their role becomes sort of an arbiter of what is valid and reliable alternative forms of assessment, rather than trying to be the assessor itself. But it does seem to me like you have to solve the “Hey, I’m a student in math or I’m a student in ELA or I’m a student in civics or whatever it is.” And by the way, I don’t know that it has to be every academic domain, but that there’s some way to sort of say like, “Yeah, if you master these bite-sized assessments or show this project or whatever else, that’s a good demonstration.” And therefore you can mark mastery of that as opposed to “Gee, sit in the seat for another year.”

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, that’s interesting. Two quick thoughts that are coming up for me. One is that seems like such a good historical role that that foundation has played where they start something and they kind of figure it out because they can, but then they don’t own it and keep it. It moves out. You know, Tim in our conversation mentioned a whole bunch of different things that were actually started by Carnegie – including ETS – that spun out and continues to do the work. And the foundation then kind of moves on to putting some resources behind the initial thinking around. So that feels like a good potential role that they’re playing. I’m going to say something that I think is going to shock you, which is because you know how much I hate the Carnegie Unit and the measurement of time and think it is just so ruining everything. But I will admit that in my new work, I have been really looking at post-high school young people, young adults, and how they figure out pathways besides a straight to four-year college pathway. And one of the things I have encountered is time really matters to them, like how long is it going to take me to get a credential or a certificate or a degree or whatnot? Because that’s a real calculation and factor in their lives. And to my great disappointment, we still have the Carnegie Unit, but it’s no longer representative of a common unit of time. And so you go from college, mostly community college, to community college, and they all have these credits which are based on the Carnegie Unit, but they’re all measuring different amounts of time and sometimes even within the same institution. And so the one potentially useful job for this unit is not even usable anymore to the user, and it actually can be misleading.

Michael Horn: Wow. Okay, so that’s fascinating. I’ll let you transition us to Todd in a second. But one quick thought is I do think rate matters through these different things that we expect. It’s one of the reasons I think Joel Rose’s work at New Classrooms has always been so interesting because they have this notion of, they probably call it something different now, but it was originally par. Like, how many times or days does it take for a student to learn a particular concept? And you’re sort of above par or below par. You all at summit had the. Are you on track? Ahead of track. And so I do think it’s not, that time is not relevant. And Paul LeBlanc makes this point beautifully in his writing, which is, frankly, those who have low incomes, they have the biggest deficit of all, which is not just money, it’s time poverty. And so that’s a very relevant number, and it’s not a number that the Carnegie unit helps us with at all. And in fact, it disadvantages them further I think.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. Well, note to me and to others that time, we can’t just totally do away with time as we really try to rethink this, that it is, as you point out, an important factor, and we need to think about that. So, learn something every day. Michael, I was having this super interesting conversation with the parents of a Gen Zer, and they’re particularly interesting because they also have two millennial children, and they feel like there’s a real difference between the two. That’s a different conversation. But they were in their sort of conversation, talking about how their perception that their Gen Z daughter has really got a different definition of success than they do, than is familiar to them, and that they understand. And this is causing some tension. And I shared Todd’s work that he shared with us, and I was, you know, I think you’ve got your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in America according to Todd’s work, which is there is an evolving, changing definition of success. And the response I got back was, well, if you’re someone who hasn’t been reading that work, it can be a very jarring experience. I just thought it was such an interesting grounding of what Todd was talking about and what that actually means in families and across generations. And I don’t know that I want to go here, but we’re at a moment in time where there’s just societally so much anger and angst and division. And it did make me wonder if this generational divide along these lines might be underneath some of that. So I’m curious what you think, what you thought about Todd’s…

Michael Horn: Wow. As always, I’m so impressed with Todd. But just to stay where you were. And then I have a question for you, I do think, and I’ll go here, because obviously the Israel-Palestine stuff has really been on my mind, as you know. And I’m going down rabbit holes every single day on it. I’ve been really struck by how, when you provide some basic level of education to younger people, all of a sudden phrases that they thought were innocuous, they realize, “Oh, that might be really harmful in a way I hadn’t understood before.” And so I guess my thought is, I think we have to hear and honor from where they’re coming because there’s some real good there in terms of, like, if they’re resetting definitions of success. And that doesn’t mean we as educators should back off grounding them in some of the things that we know to help inform that conversation. And that’s sort of our role, I think. Not sort of – that is our role. David Gergen always loves saying education literally means lead forth. And that’s how I might think about it here. But let me ask you a different question – you may want to reengage with that one – but let me ask you a different question, which is you said disruptive innovation pervades all three. I get the first two, and I think our audience do. I’d love to hear your thinking on how this one does as well.

Diane Tavenner: Well, thanks for keeping me honest, as you always do. And I might loop back because this might just be too rich of a week in the news to pass by. Okay, so I did say it was a theme across all three. This might be a stretch, but this is sort of how I was thinking about it. I think we’re living in an era that we are moving out of. And I think this changing definition of success is related, where education has sort of been perceived as the end, if you will, versus the means. And for, I think, most of our nation’s history, which is not that long, but still, education was a means to an end. And one of the things I think we’re hearing from younger generation, especially coming out of the pandemic, is like, and this is related to their disillusionment with higher ed. And a lot of what Tod was talking about is like, I need a job. I need a career. I need to be able to support my family. I need to have a life. I don’t want to go into debt. I don’t want to get a degree that gets me a job that doesn’t actually pay for itself. And I don’t know that they use ROI, but there’s not an ROI on what my education is. And so, if we take that, and I think that suggests a shift to what you’re doing in education, what really matters is what you’re learning and the skills you’re building. And that I think necessitates pretty disruptive changes in our learning models and our schools and the experience. And again, these are the things we’re always advocating for. But I think this takes us back to the root of why we’re advocating for it, because I think you and I actually are embracing that changing definition of success. And I’ll speak for myself, it’s also hard because I have benefited from the old definition and that was an undercurrent of that conversation I was having with these parents who have been very successful by conventional definitions, and that’s hard to let go of. And that some of that tension underlying these conversations with younger folks. And I will connect it back because I just can’t resist. Who knows? By the time we release this, this might be all over and done, but we are sitting right in the moment where I can’t help but say it. Three top university presidents were called to Congress to testify. I will note that they were all women. And the vast majority of top 50 presidents are not women, they are men. So I’m curious about that. But that’s a separate side story. One has already resigned for her comments. The second is under massive pressure. There’s so much going on here in this whole conversation. But for me, the interesting pieces, and I think it’s tying back to what you were just talking about, which is what is the role of an institution that is designed to educate young people? I think at the heart of why people, there’s so many reasons why they were unhappy with what the president said. But one of them is where’s your responsibility to actually take a stand and guide and mentor and do exactly what you just said, Michael? Educate them about the things they don’t know about because, yeah, they’re brilliant and they’re young, but they don’t know a whole bunch of stuff yet. And that’s our job. And so where are you in that equation, I think is the question that’s being called of those educators.

Michael Horn: No, that is brilliant. It reminds me, a friend of mine, Gunner Councilman, used to always say students are much more like clients than customers. And his distinction was that clients are often wrong. It’s your job as the organization is to guide them. And whereas we have the saying the customer is always right. That’s not really true with students. And so I think that’s interesting. On the second one, another point you made about the changing sort of framework of education where for a while a place where I went, Harvard, was seen as like success. That was the destination, if you will. And that was a big finding, as you know, from my Choosing College book was how many individuals were like, they wanted to get into the top college for its own sake. They had no sense of what came afterwards. It was just like that was the prize. A lot of admissions officers did not like that that was the prize. But that’s how they thought about it. And we just did a Future U podcast recording with a couple folks from Wake Technical Community College and Portland State. And one of them made the point that increasingly people see college as a station, not a destination. I thought that was a really good language to sort of capture this shift. And I guess finally I’ll say, I see your point. Like disruptive innovations fundamentally, in the words of the theory, change the Y axis of performance, as we like to say in Wonkland. So in normal speak, it just means that the way we think about performance changes, like what we measure and value, and that’s what disruptive innovations fundamentally do. And frankly, traditional organizations really struggle with those changes because they’ve organized, to your much earlier point about how schools are complicated places, they’ve organized themselves around one set of things that we have measured and valued, and disruption tends to change that in line with new individuals that haven’t been served. So I take your point. It’s a really interesting one. Maybe let’s leave this conversation here for now, because I think it makes for a juicy ‘24 as we go in. But as we wrap up, let’s just sort of round out the 2023 year. It occurs to me, by the way, in future years, maybe we’ll look back at our year and name some of our top reads and things that we’ve watched. But I am not in the mood for that at the moment. I will be totally honest. So I’m just sort of curious what’s on your TV at the moment or your bedside table that you’re reading at the moment?

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, well, I will definitely answer that, and I will just say, I’m so glad we had this conversation because I have so many questions for us to explore in the new year and so many people popping in my mind that I really want to talk to now based on this conversation. So I’m very excited to hang up here and then start brainstorming with you for the new year. So I think you had this moment, too. When we interviewed Tim and asked him this question, he said that between December 1 and January 1 he always reads poetry. And I think we both were like, whoa. And so I took that as an invitation and have been reading – this summer I got to meet a poet, David Wyatt – and I’ve been reading some of his poems and pieces, and he’s got this one, I’m going to mess up the title, but where he takes words and he just really has a whole contemplation on the meaning of that word that is just like, so mind shifting. And so that’s been really fun. And on my bedside table. How about you?

Michael Horn: That’s good. And good for you to actually follow the advice. I have not because in classic sort of efficiency mode, I’m like, but there are a few other books I need to read first. So that said, I’ve put aside Klossovitz for the moment. It’s just I’ve not made the progress that perhaps I had hoped for and have delved into a few different books, one of which I finished over the weekend. And it’s called Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. It’s by a friend at Harvard, Todd Rogers, and another professor or member of the community, Jessica Lasky-Fink. And it’s a good, quick read and some good tips as I’m finishing up my next book on helping people better navigate the job market. And so, I will say their big messages, not surprising, are less is more. And so, with that wish, maybe for brevity, levity, clarity and charity in the new year, I’ll just say, thank you, Diane. And thank you to all of those tuning in for joining us on Class Disrupted.

Simultaneously, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie hoped to kick-start the expansion of higher education by donating $10 million to bankroll pensions for college professors. This posed a parallel dilemma: How to decide whether a scholar had put in enough time to earn the annuity?

Thus was born the wonky educational anachronism known as the Carnegie Unit, brainchild of the trustees of the . A certain number of hours spent in a high school classroom added up to a credit, the trustees decided in 1906. A set number of credits earned a diploma. So quantified, the diploma could be used as the entrance ticket to a college or university, where Carnegie Units would add up to a degree — or the right to retire.

Carnegie Units went on to become the central currency of a dizzying number of aspects of education, ranging from what subjects students are exposed to to how states allocate school funds. But it was quickly understood that while the units were good for, say, establishing whether a public school had delivered its pupils enough hours of teaching to earn its taxpayer dollars, it was not particularly helpful at signaling what a student had learned during those hours in class — now, 117 years later, better known as seat time.

Some innovators, like the leaders of the Phoenix Union High School District, are experimenting with ways to leave the Carnegie Unit in the past. Students at PXU City, a Phoenix high school without a building, can create their own personalized educational experience from a menu of 500 options, including classes at any number of high schools, college courses and job training programs throughout the city. 

The experiment came to the attention of Carnegie’s present-day leaders, who are engaged in their own effort to replace their turn-of-the-century units. The person tasked with figuring out how better to quantify what students have learned, and how the schools of the future can help them realize the historical promise of social and economic mobility, is Tim Knowles, the foundation’s president and former director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. 

Knowles recently talked to Beth Hawkins about a pilot project to reimagine seat time that includes the Phoenix district, the possible benefits of freeing teachers from unit-driven bell schedules and how to transform entire school systems. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Tell us about the Carnegie Unit, what it is, how it wove itself into education’s very DNA and why it’s time to step away from it. 

In 1906, when the Carnegie Foundation created the Carnegie Unit, it suggested that a college degree should be 120 credits. Today, it’s 120 credits. It’s become the bedrock currency of the educational economy. It’s infiltrated everything. It’s how we organize high schools and universities, how we think about assessment, it’s instrumental to accreditation, to who gets financial aid and who doesn’t. It defines the daily work of teachers and professors. It is the system.

What it is, fundamentally, is the conflation of time and learning. It’s the suggestion that X number of minutes equals learning. The problem is, that it basically ignores everything we’ve learned in the last 100 years about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired. We’ve had neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists and psychologists and learning scientists come along and say, “People learn through solving real problems, they learn from peers, they learn from mentors, they learn in apprenticeship, they learn from experience.”

In its time, the Carnegie Unit was an incredibly important reform because it standardized an utterly nonstandardized educational sector. But it crept into the core DNA of educational practice and didn’t evolve or adapt in the face of a significant amount of empirical knowledge about how human beings actually learn. That’s problem No. 1. 

No. 2 is that it inhibits educational innovation. Competency- or mastery-based education has existed, arguably, since and . But it’s existed at the edges. It’s never been central. We can all point to schools that are breaking the boundaries of what learning should look like, how it’s organized, how it’s structured. While those examples exist, they’re often led by extraordinary teachers and school leaders. We haven’t figured out how to take it from the margins to the mainstream. That’s a problem.

The third thing is perhaps more existential, and that is the absence of social and economic mobility in our nation. This is not to suggest that education isn’t an essential solution to addressing social and economic mobility, it’s just that it’s not nearly powerful enough an engine for doing so. The Carnegie Unit is, in my view, partly responsible for that. In the 1950s, over 90% of young people would [end up] better off than their parents. That number is basically cut in half now. We’re going in precisely the opposite direction, and underlying that are some really fundamental inequities, which are exacerbated by race and by class. 

If we want to radically increase economic and social mobility, we need to reimagine what learning is, and really take into consideration what we know about the context in which people learn. Young people need to be engaged in much more experiential, hands-on solving of real problems and applied work. 

Why is the Carnegie Foundation the organization to take this on?

It’s been a narrative in the organization and beyond for decades. One of the questions was, what are you going to do about assessment, because if you are going to take on the future of learning, then you have to be thinking about the future of assessment. That led us in the last year to a deep partnership with ETS, which is the largest assessment company on Earth. It’s very good at determining reliability and validity. 

If we believe that learning, wherever it takes place, is important, then in order for that to take root at scale, we need to persuade parents first that the learning their young people are experiencing outside the schoolhouse is valuable. And is legible to the postsecondary sector if you’re applying to college. And legible to employers if you’re going more directly into the workforce. Everybody intuitively knows there’s enormous amounts of learning there. We need tools that can validate that learning. 

We’re going to build assessments to assess the skills, not the disciplinary knowledge, that we know are predictive of success. Things like your ability to collaborate, to communicate, how hard you work, are you persistent, your creative thinking, your critical thinking. The aim with ETS would be to get to the point where every young person in America doesn’t just graduate from high school with a transcript that has grades and attendance and test scores, but a skills transcript as well.

The wonderful thing about Carnegie, it’s got this incredible responsibility to be a place that looks around the corner. It did that in 1906, for really important reasons. It created Pell grants for really important reasons. It established standards for medical schools, engineering, law schools. It’s done these things at certain times in its history that really needed to happen, because there were gaps. And it’s positioned in a way that it can take a slightly longer-term view about where we need to get.

In Phoenix, a driving factor behind the district’s decision to move away from the Carnegie Unit more quickly and widely than it had planned before the pandemic was teenagers. Students who weren’t in high school when COVID hit had no expectation of a bell schedule. 

At the heart of accelerating learning is ensuring young people are leaning in, are engaged, are inspired and are working on problems that they think are actually useful — whether it’s useful for their own trajectories, pursuing a track that is orienting them to a particular profession or sector, or more here and now. One can learn a great deal about democracy by actually practicing it, or identifying an issue that you care about and learning how civically to engage in a way that can draw attention and potentially movement regarding that issue. 

So, yes, engagement is an instrumental variable in all this, and, as you are pointing out, teenagers have already spoken. We know they’re not engaged. There have been some systems around the country that have made marked improvements in high school completion, but there are many where 50, 60 or 70% of students are biding their time. Getting through. If we’re losing 30 or 40% of our young people before they’ve even had a shot, then we’ve got to take a step back and ask what might work better, what we need to do differently. And that’s not a small incremental step, like providing double blocks in math or high-dosage tutoring. There’s something much more fundamental involved in reconsidering how we think about time and learning. 

The other thing about teenagers is that when you create opportunities which are highly engaging, and you enlist their agency in learning, you really just have to get out of the way. Versus in a set of circumstances that may feel to them far more compliance-oriented, where they’re doing seven periods for 40 minutes or 42 minutes between bells with a two-minute passing period, with seven different teachers every day who may have so many students that they can’t even learn their names until the end of October. If you turn that on its head, young people are going to rise and surprise us. 

There was a survey of high school students nationally during the pandemic, and almost to a person they said they wanted to come back to school — not surprisingly. But not all of the time. I don’t think that was a statement about not being interested in learning. I think that was a statement about not wanting only that form of learning all the time. Valuing the community that school creates, valuing the fact that there are some domains of expertise and disciplinary areas where they need to be in classrooms with amazing teachers, but also recognizing that, “Wait, I’ve been learning independently. I’ve been pursuing things I’m passionate about.”

If we could scaffold that systematically with opportunities for apprenticeships, for internships, for community embedded work, I think it’s safe to say not only would we be hewing much more closely to what empirical evidence says is the best way to learn, but we would be in a situation where the young people were much, much more interested and excited about what they were learning.

Let’s talk for a second about the obstacle that is adult time. I’ve talked to so many people in education who say, Yeah, that’s great. But we’d have to fundamentally reorganize how the adults use their time.

We would. By saying we’re taking on the Carnegie Unit, we are not saying we’re going to have eight periods a day in 10th grade and then we’re going to layer on a whole other set of things. So how we organize teacher time, and the role of the teacher, has to fundamentally shift. 

But teacher pipeline issues are real. Schools are struggling to find really exceptional people who want to spend their career teaching. Embedded in rethinking the use of adult time is the opportunity to rethink the role of teachers. There are few people who want to have the same responsibilities on the first day of their professional career as they do on the last day of their 35th year. 

If we could turn the teaching profession into something where you’re teaching in teams, for example, or where you may be teaching in the morning and then advising groups of students through the afternoon as they engage in activities in their communities and with postsecondary institutions, the job could become much more attractive and interesting to a much wider range of young people over time. Adult time is a predicament, but it’s also an opportunity.

You mentioned a skills transcript. That got me thinking about how many people you’re dangerous to if you’re successful. So many things are proxies for whether a person has a skill set. The college degree is a proxy: We assume that because you made it through this filter — which might be meaningless — you are going to be valuable to this endeavor, this institution, this company. But we don’t actually know whether you come with the requisite skills.

Right. We’ve had a very fragmented K-12-to-postsecondary-to-employment path, replete with assumptions. If you go to an elite private or highly selective public college, whether by virtue of where it is geographically or by nature of how you get in, there all kinds of assumptions that you’re going to come with these other things that we care about, in addition to whatever’s on your transcript, like your grades and your test scores. But that’s a pretty crude measure of whether you do. So there is a threat to the established pathways. 

We could credibly determine whether a young person has a set of skills wherever those skills were developed. If I’m living on the south side of Chicago, and I take my two siblings to school every morning, and then I get to my high school on time at 7:30, I do my homework, I perform well in the traditional ways, I participate in afterschool activities and I work, those are skills that that are invisible, or less visible than the proxies you were suggesting. Or whether I was lucky enough to be born in a situation where my parents were taking me to rarefied places every summer, or putting me in rarefied summer camps.

Part of the agenda is to make the education sector a more vital engine for individuals, no matter their backgrounds, to be able to succeed in a post-affirmative action world. A skills transcript would provide elite schools with a different kind of visibility on every kid. It wouldn’t have to have anything to do with race per se, but I would hope it would help make visible the skills and dispositions young people bring, even if they’re growing up in really underresourced places. 

Devil’s advocate. When the pandemic forced schools away from seat time, lots of people said, ‘Hey, wait — maybe we could just have asynchronous learning. I wouldn’t have to report to a building anymore.’ Or the variation we’re hearing a lot about now, the four-day week. In blowing up seat time, temporarily or permanently, did states just leave the barn door open?

The conditions under which they blew up seat time during the pandemic are slightly anomalous. I wouldn’t compare what we’re trying to do to that, because we’re certainly not of the view that people should be socialized in front of a laptop. But I’m sympathetic to the accountability side. Whether we have the existing system or a fundamentally transformed one, it’s going to demand that we know how young people are performing.

None of what I’ve been talking about should suggest we no longer believe in algebra or reading. There’s things that we really do think young people benefit from learning. How they learn those things is an open question. If we are in a period where people are questioning the power of our educational system and asking questions about how we might empower it further, it has to be undergirded by accountability systems that are credible. And fair. Otherwise, you’re right. It could be a slippery slope. 

What are you learning so far?

Our agenda, which we’re working in partnership with XQ on, is in short: establish proofs, create places where this is happening, build evidence for improvement. Develop policy and national discussion about transformative learning opportunities. And then think hard about the postsecondary piece. Unless the work we do in high school is relevant, legible and understandable to postsecondary, it could falter. 

There are learnings from the people who’ve been doing this for a long time, sometimes in quiet opposition to the systems in which they sit, sometimes with some support from the state within which they sit. They are there, and it’s important to recognize and acknowledge that there are educators across the country who’ve been doing this with young people from all kinds of different backgrounds.

One of the [trends] in the educational system at the moment are these things called portraits of a graduate or portraits of learners. They’re everywhere. One of the things we did with ETS was look carefully at all the ones that we could. They’re interesting, because they represent an American consensus about what the purpose of schooling is. They are really focused on skills. Often, they’ve been developed with lots of parent voice and teacher voice and student voice. Red and blue, left and right, communities, in spite of all our polarized hype, are saying there are a set of things that we want for young people. That should make us optimistic, if we can leverage that. 

The other things that that you will hear is, A) they haven’t really made a big difference, and B) we have no way of measuring the things in them. The problem is the Carnegie Unit problem. They haven’t cracked the Carnegie Unit, they haven’t cracked this architecture of learning that we’ve established. We have to do that. We want our young people to be able to think critically, and we don’t really know how to measure that. How do we measure that they’re civically involved? 

Disclosure: The XQ Institute, which has partnered with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to explore alternatives to the Carnegie Unit, provides financial support to The 74.

The new tests, to be created by the Educational Testing Service and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, are meant to usher in competency-based forms of schooling that would allow students to proceed through academic material at their own pace. Leaders of both organizations hope they will also capture a broader array of non-cognitive qualities, like teamwork and relatability, that are highly prized in the modern workforce but undetectable through conventional academic metrics like grade point average or school attendance. 

The adoption of more personalized instruction and assessment has faced a key obstacle in the form of , the namesake foundation’s strict definition of annual credit hours that students must accrue to demonstrate their grasp of material. (The calculation essentially breaks down to one hour of seat time per day, per subject, for 24 weeks.) Though largely unknown outside the education world, many high schools and universities have based their academic requirements on the Carnegie Unit . 

But Timothy Knowles, the foundation’s president, said that while the Carnegie Unit had served a useful purpose at one point, new discoveries in neuroscience and cognitive psychology have proven that pupils learn different subjects at highly variable rates. What’s more, he added, the capacity now exists to test for valuable qualities that were previously invisible to admissions officers and employers.  

“We’re in a position to do something that we hadn’t before,” Knowles said. “Unlike 20 years ago, we can actually reliably measure the skills that we know are predictive of success in postsecondary education and work.”

Competency-based learning and assessment has long been theorized as a preferable alternative to existing educational models, which critics describe as too standardized to deliver instruction to individual students with vastly divergent levels of academic preparation. Instead, they allege, the status quo came to reflect the production processes of 20th-century industry, with students replacing widgets as the product. In , Knowles himself telegraphed his desire to phase out the Carnegie Unit, calling time a “crude” metric to determine educational attainment.

With a range of philanthropic and education-focused advocates backing the movement, has promoted some version of competency-based policies. Those efforts hit in Maine, where high school graduation requirements were refigured over the last decade to emphasize proficiency on subject material. But disputes over the definition of proficiency and teachers’ differing grading standards led many to question the new approach, with legislators later backing away from the competency-based model.

Similarly rocky transitions were seen in and , which attempted similar shifts. The central puzzle facing critics of the current model (i.e., calendar-centered requirements and standardized assessment) is what will come to supplant it. 

Scott Marion, president of the , said that the challenge in executing the hoped-for switch to competency-based learning lay in designing realistic measures of achievement to replace existing tests. To deliver on advocates’ promises, he observed, such measures would need to be both tailored to individual students and academically credible.

“Competency-based assessment is not for the faint of heart,” Marion said. “It’s being done quite poorly in a lot of places. So if ETS and Carnegie can bring a little more rigor to it, it might be good.”

With interest in competency-based approaches growing, more players have leapt into the field, with the best-known among them that developed a “mastery transcript.” The project has gained adherence among high schools over the last year.  

The ETS-Carnegie proposal is also emerging at a time when traditional high school admissions exams, such as the SAT and ACT, have lost significant market share. Both the aftereffects of the pandemic and concerns about inequitable outcomes from standardized testing to go test-optional in the last few school years. With those leading indicators of secondary achievement potentially passing from the scene, demand is expected to rise for measures that could take their place.  

ETS, which administers the widely used GRE, PRAXIS, and TOEIC tests, during and after the pandemic.

Perhaps the biggest question hanging over the newly announced partnership is the proposed measurement of not just cognitive and behavioral skills — including everything from comprehension of math content to teamwork and leadership — but so-called “affective” skills as well. As described by ETS head Amit Sevak at the educational technology conference ASU-GSV, such skills could include something like emotional intelligence, or the ability to successfully convey sincerity and empathy to others. Just how those kinds of competencies can be conveyed to students, let alone measured by third parties, is debatable even to backers of competency-based instruction.

Michael Horn, a cofounder of Harvard’s Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Education, said he would be watching the development of such measures carefully.

“This part, from my reading of the literature on assessment, is both unproven and underdeveloped. So the how is going to be very important,” Horn said. “I’m going to be very curious to see what the investments look like as they go forward, and I hope they don’t overpromise.”

While no concrete timeline has been released for the conception of the new suite of assessments, Carnegie and ETS to conduct a multi-state pilot that could begin as early as next year. In an interview, Sevak said he envisioned students being able to access a digital “transcript” detailing their ongoing growth in areas like collaboration and creativity. Real-time data could build their awareness of their comparative strengths and weaknesses, he added.

“That more holistic approach is in contrast to much of the assessments in K–12 and higher education, which are really cognitive-driven and tied to logic and reason,” Sevak said. We’re looking at a more holistic approach that is more tied to the future of work.”