In the latest episode exploring new school models powered by artificial intelligence, Summit Public Schools’ Cady Ching and Dan Effland join Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner to discuss Summit’s transformation into an AI-native school model. The conversation examines how clarity around school outcomes and model design enables the effective integration of new technology, followed by insights into the evolution of Summit’s expeditions. Ching and Effland emphasize the importance of a holistic, purposeful education, as well as the need for a robust technology infrastructure to scale innovation.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Cady Ching: I think what has been really helpful for me is to list the ways that a model is not. It’s not a curriculum, it’s not an LMS, it’s not a schedule by itself, it’s not a set of beliefs or a graduate profile by itself. Those are parts of a model, but a lot of the building that we’re seeing right now is focused on building for parts versus building for an actual whole model. And so the AI-native model is how all of those model elements are working together. And it is not going to be replacing a school model. It’s going to expose whether or not you actually have a model. And I think AI is forcing a lot of school systems right now to get really honest, because if you don’t know what students are supposed to be learning and you’re not sure how they’re showing that or what adults are responsible for, AI just layers on complexity and, quite honestly, chaos. But if you do have the level of clarity of what Dan is speaking about, AI is actually making systems work a lot better, or it can make systems work a lot better.

I think the jury is out on the tools that we need and how we can create the tools that we need. But AI really isn’t replacing, it’s revealing whether or not your school model actually exists.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane, it is good to see you with some excitement for today’s episode.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, we have a real treat today. We’ve got two of my favorite educators in the world joining us for what I’m sure is going to be just a really interesting conversation.

Michael Horn: Well, and for years, as obviously I’ve learned about Summit from you, direct from you, and yet it’s been nearly 3 years, I think, since you passed the baton, if math is still a thing. And I know from afar that the team continues to be among the most innovative schools in the country and so I know that they continue to think about reinvention, and frankly, you know, what does Summit need to look like? How can it get even better? All these questions for its learners. And so I’m incredibly excited to dig in and learn about what they’re calling Summit 3.0 on today’s show. I will say it’s also interesting to have this conversation because we’re sort of in our model geek out, if you will, at the moment, right? While we’re having this conversation, we’ve had the founders of Alpha School, Flourish on, both of which are designed as AI-native models. And for those who listened to those episodes we sort of created a little bit of a side-by-side, if you will, where we said, hey, Summit is here as this baseline for a pre-AI model trying to do personalization or optimization of each kid’s learning. And we explored what can you do in an AI-native world? How can you design differently? But today what’s exciting, I think, is we’re going to get to dig into what does it look like for an existing model with that orientation to become, quote unquote, AI-native.

And as you know, transformation and how organizations reinvent themselves, that’s something I get really passionate about and excited. So I cannot wait to learn from the real-life example in progress.

Diane Tavenner: Well, we’ve got the two perfect people for that conversation, Michael. And so let me introduce you to Cady Ching, who is the CEO of Summit Public Schools, where she was an extraordinary teacher and school and network leader for a decade before taking on that role. So she brings this full spectrum of experience to this next phase. And Dan Effland, who is the senior director of innovation at Summit, where he was also an extraordinary teacher and school leader before taking on this new role of leading for the second time in the history of Summit, the reinvention of the model. And so welcome, Dan and Cady. We’re so happy that you’re here with us and excited to talk to you about the work you’re doing.

Cady Ching: Thank you. Thank you so much. I’m excited too. It’s coming at this moment for Dan and I where we’ve been trying on a lot of language about where we’ve been, where we are today, and where we’re going. So selfishly, this is a milestone for us.

Michael Horn: Well, and I get to feel like I’m jumping in on a team huddle of y’all. Yeah, this will, this will, this will be fun.

Cady Ching: Welcome, Michael.

Michael Horn: Thank you.

What Is a School? 

Diane Tavenner: Dan and Cady, a few weeks ago we got together and you walked me through the thinking and planning you’re doing. And honestly, I was captivated, you know, because I got stuck on it and I wanted to dissect every word. By this simplest definition of school, it’s honestly the simplest definition I’ve ever read of a school. And I wanted to start there today because I really think we always have talked about getting to the simplicity on the other side of complexity. And I think you’ve done it with this definition, and I think it’s going to be really powerful in this next chapter. And so maybe, Dan, kick us off. And if you will share that definition and a little bit about how it came to you or how you all came to it in your process and what you think it unlocks.

Dan Effland: Yeah, happy to. And thanks for having me here. I’m so excited to talk to you all. Yeah, so, I mean, we’ve been working on this for years, right? What is simplicity on the other side of complexity? And I think as we’ve been digging into what does redesigning look like, it became really clear that you have to get down to some foundational elements to avoid designing within conventions and not even really realizing you’re doing it. And so the way we’re thinking about schools is simply, it’s a group of young people. It’s a set of outcomes or competencies. And then it’s a set of resources that help you support young people to achieve those outcomes or competencies. That’s it.

Kids, outcomes, resources. And stripping all the way back to that has allowed us then to engage with our community, because all this work is like with students, caregivers, and educators, and go like, OK, what do we really want? What do schools really need to be? With full freedom, we call them dreaming sessions, where we can really engage off the simplest foundational elements and not get hooked by any of the conventions that have existed, you know, for decades or longer than that in a lot of cases.

Summit 2.0: Evolution and Vision

Michael Horn: It’s really cool because you’ve sort of, like you said, you sort of have a conversation around what those end posts, and we can sort of figure out what’s inside the box to get there apart from what’s always been there. But before we go to that sort of Summit 3.0 vision and where you’re thinking currently is, because I’m imagining you’re going to have lots of trade-offs and changes as you go through the design process, but I think it would be helpful to do a quick turn on Summit 2.0. Both to ground, frankly, our audience, but also to set up a question of how things are changing and where and so forth so that we can understand that. And so I’d love, and maybe Cady, you dive in on this first, how would you describe the Summit 2.0 model, which was not only in your schools, but schools across the country? It’s one of the reasons I think it can be called a model,  it’s scaled beyond Summit itself, right? And as you think about that, the new model, what is it in the Summit 2.0 that you’d say, we really want to hold on to this? Or where are the things that you’re saying, hey, actually, that’s something we can leave behind or start to question whether we want to change that?

Cady Ching: Yeah, thanks for asking this question. I think it’s so important. The reason why I keep smiling when you all say Summit 2.0 and 3.0 is because Dan and I actually got into it a couple weeks ago about if we wanted to use that language or not. And my issue with it was I think it’s really, it serves a purpose because like to Diane’s point, it is simplicity at the other end of complexity. And there is a danger in the simplification of the 2.0 and 3.0 because at Summit, we really think about innovation in two ways. One just being innovation through refinement, which is the day-to-day tightening of the model elements that we’re building on for these larger moments of innovation, which we call innovation for redesign. And so those are sort of the sector-shifting, big model, what we call Big M changes. But I’m going to use Summit 2.0 and 3.0 language today in shorthand.

Michael Horn: Thanks for doing it for the listeners.

Cady Ching: Yeah, and so Summit 2.0 really speaks to our personalization era at Summit, where we showed personalization doesn’t need to be a luxury. And we did that by designing cohesive student and teacher experience., and it included model elements like mentoring and skills assessment and differentiation using real-time data, which we enabled through tech. And the tech that we co-built was called the Summit Learning Platform. For me, what I think was most remarkable about what we proved in Summit 2.0 is what you mentioned. It was scalable, and it did scale, and schools were able to implement and sustain the Summit model on public dollars. Which was remarkable. And so we reached 100,000 students, 6,000 educators, and 400 schools across 40 states.

And we did it with district, charter, private, rural, suburban, and urban. It was completely shifting the field. And then we normalized mastery-based learning, personalized playlists and skills and habits in a way that now is the foundation and the baseline in so many places that we’re now talking about building these AI-native models on top of. And so to the second part of your question, which I’ll kick off and then, Dan, I’m going to pass it to you to add on, we think about model elements and processes that we want to carry forward into Summit 3.0. In the process side, which is where I thrive, we were successful because we were leading from this intersection of the learning science, community engagement, and technology, and we centered teachers and students at every part of the design.. And we’ve used those same design principles to continuously improve our model since Summit 2.0. For me, I feel like we’re 4 years into Summit 3.0, and we’ve already gotten some really exciting data back about situating us as leaders in the field again around what we’ve built on top of the personalization.

In last year, this is our most recent data, we saw that our Summit alumni have some of the highest post-graduation incomes and lowest debt loads, as compared to other top-performing charters. And this is the type of longitudinal outcome evidence we’ve been really longing for. And when you think back about how Dan just defined the system, what that data does for us is it grounds us in that we do have a really strong set of outcomes and competencies that are timeless. Our young people are now achieving them, and we’re letting go of the old technology to create space for AI-reimagined infrastructure that’s going to help us to better allocate resources. And we think our biggest resource levers are people, technology, and time. So that’s really how we’re thinking about Summit 2.0 setting us up for Summit 3.0.

Michael Horn: Dan, did you want to jump in there and add some?

Dan Effland: Yeah, yeah, I think I’ll just like, you know, I think, you know, Cady and I were both teachers in Summit 2.0. We were both school leaders in this, and so we have a lot of really direct connection to it. And the thing that really makes me think about it is like, you know, the learning platform is no longer in existence, but the elements of the model really deeply took root. Mentoring, mastery, what we called habits of success, I think we’re calling durable skills in our world now. Like, I’m fine with it, whatever we want to call it. It’s become ubiquitous. And I think it really helps. I mean, I think it really gives us a sense of a strong foundation of like, we’ve done this before, we’ve built a model that’s scaled and really stuck.

And it doesn’t matter if the technology, you know, is stuck or not, because that technology is not the model. The tech model is these elements of how you support kids to master these outcomes with whatever available resources you have are. And so, yeah, I think there’s a point of pride when we think about, you know, what we’re begrudgingly calling Summit 2.0. And then I think there’s a sense of the strength of the foundation to then build what’s coming next.

Personalization & Durable Skills

Michael Horn: It’s interesting. And we’ll come back to the technology, I know, and we want to circle back to that. But hearing Cady, you described the model, used a few words that I think are really important for people to hear. One of them was cohesive, because I think a lot of the tech efforts right now around personalization in so much of the country are the opposite of cohesive. And that’s why we’re seeing a blowback sometimes against technology, because it’s sort of all over the place and hundreds of things going on at once for a young person with tons of distractions. And you talked about it being grounded in the learning sciences and personalization as a, as a means, not the ends, right? And, and then you have these longitudinal outcomes. And I’m just calling them out because I think people often lose sight of, this is the bedrock, right, of how we build from, and then go from there. And the other piece, and Dan, you just referenced this, the field is now calling it durable skills.

I still prefer habits of success. Let me just be on record on that one. But one of the things you all really did well around Summit 2.0 was have incredible clarity on the mission, what success looks like, such that you could measure in the way you just said, Cady. And I didn’t know those stats. I mean, it’s fascinating., and then you had these commencement-level outcomes, right? You were super clear on what does it look like from a, you know, for a Summit graduate as they go out in the wild. And it seems in some ways those commencement-level outcomes have been precursors to the movement across states that we’ve seen in the Portraits of a Graduate. And I do think that there’s some key differences. I’ll hold my editorial back on what those are more because I want your take on that.

Like, what, if anything, are the differences and, and between those commencement-level outcomes that you all have defined, the portraits of a graduate that we see states doing, and more broadly, like, what’s the importance of being super clear on what those outcomes are and, and how you’d know, on the other side, if you could speak to that. And I don’t know, I’ll make it a grab bag of which one of you wants to jump in on that.

Dan Effland: Dan, take it away. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, so our vision has been the same for 23 years. It’s preparing young people for a fulfilled life, really all people. We think of our staff as part of that too. And fulfilled life is in some ways, again, simple. It is purposeful work, financial independence, strong community, strong relationships, and health. And so that’s given us a holistic picture, a holistic point B that we’re always going for.

You know, I don’t, I don’t know how I compare it to Portrait of a Graduate or Portrait of a Learner. What I know is it gives us a lot of clarity in that you can’t design a coherent model without clarity of where you’re headed. And that it’s also really important that that clarity is holistic and is not simply a set of academic outcomes. It is much broader than that. And that gives us a huge advantage in this work right now because we’re not spending a lot of time. We certainly talk to our community and affirm, you know, on a regular basis, is this still what people want? Is this still what our communities are after? And it is. And so we can move right to like, okay, how do we get there?

Cady Ching: The thing that I would add on top of that is, I loved, Michael, what you called out around the language of a model. I think that at the operator level, and when I’m talking to, to other school leaders, this word is used in a lot of different ways. And I think what has been really helpful for me is to list the ways that a model is not. It’s not a curriculum. It’s not an LMS. It’s not a schedule by itself. It’s not a set of beliefs or a graduate profile by itself. Those are parts of a model.

But a lot of the building that we’re seeing right now is focused on building for parts versus building for an actual whole model. And so the AI-native model is how all of those model elements are working together, and it is not going to be replacing a school model, it’s going to expose whether or not you actually have a model. And it’s, I think AI is forcing a lot of school systems right now to get really honest, because if you don’t know what students are supposed to be learning, and you’re not sure how they’re showing that, or what adults are responsible for, AI just layers on complexity and quite honestly, chaos. But if you do have the level of clarity of what Dan is speaking about, AI is actually making systems work a lot better, or it can make systems work a lot better. I think the jury is out on the tools that we need and how we can create the tools that we need, um, but AI really isn’t replacing, it’s revealing whether or not your school model actually exists.

Diane Tavenner: I’d love it if we go back to your simple definition, Dan, that we started with, when we sat down. You use the word package of outcomes, and I was obsessed with that word package for this reason, because you know, maybe I will jump in here a little bit on the portrait of a graduate. 

Michael Horn: The table’s been set for you, Diane. 

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. And one of our, you know, Summit’s longtime beloved board chair, board member, who honestly is one of the most forward-thinking, I think, philanthropists who launched a scholarship for Summit graduates going into Pathways years ago, like ahead of the curve, you know, sent us a note the other day with a real critique of portraits of a graduate. He was sort of reading about them and was just very, you know, like, what are these people thinking? And I think what he was responding to was a lot of the portraits of the graduate, like, feel very checkboxy and compliance-oriented. Versus this sort of holistic. And I know that’s not the way they were intended.

AI Evolution in Education Models

Diane Tavenner: They all have good intentions behind them, but the way they have been sort of brought to life and then communicated and then implemented are what Cady, I think, is speaking to, not as a model, but as like these individual components that don’t have a coherence about how they’re actually organized an organized set of resources to achieve those package of outcomes, if you will. And so I think that what you all just described is at the core of your success going forward and what an advantage you have. And it really speaks honestly to the durability that you’re carrying all of that forward in this next phase, that being, living a life of wellbeing it actually hasn’t changed, right? The elements of that haven’t changed, and that’s what you’re equipping young people for. So, you know, in a recent episode, Michael and I had a conversation, just the two of us, which was super fun, and we were dissecting a way of thinking about school models in three buckets. And I know you are both familiar with this framework, which is essentially that, you know, Model 1 will use AI to make sort of the existing industrial model school more efficient and better. Model 2 will stretch the bounds of that industrial model school with integrated AI. And Model 3 will be AI native, you know, essentially built from the ground up with AI capabilities that are assumed to be at the core. And, you know, as you think about where you’re now going with Summit 3.0, how do you view it in the context of this framework? And, you know, what does AI make possible that wasn’t possible in 2.0 because it was designed pre-AI?

Dan Effland: Love this question. And I did listen to that episode. So I’ll start with the model part, and then I really want to get into what AI makes possible and kind of what it pushes us to do. So I love reading like Learner Studios’ 3 Horizons model. I love Bob Hughes’ paper on the 3 models. I find that stuff really, really important for evaluating what exists and really valuable for visioning and for getting into this place of what really is possible. And I think, and that’s really useful. I will say, when we start designing and working with our young people and working with our caregivers and our educators, I actually find it useful to kind of set those categories aside and to ask the more foundational questions around, like, we know where we want to go, we have this clear vision, we have this really simple, you know, conception of what a school is with kids’ outcomes and resources.

And now let’s go from here. And when you get into, like, as we’ve talked about, we have a lot of clarity about our outcomes already. We really believe deeply that this holistic model of a healthy, thriving, you know, young person, young adult, adult is going to be durable regardless of the transitions that are happening in our society. But when it comes to the resources part, now we have this whole huge different potential, one, AI being a resource, but also a way that I think we’re most really interested when it comes to AI is how we can use it if we integrate it into our tech stack. Really how, like, with a really robust knowledge graph and really strong data layer, you could be dynamically reallocating resources in a way that just would be impossible for people. You know, like when I used to build an annual schedule, like the primary schedule with our Dean of Operations, she and I would sit in an office for a week with a spreadsheet to make a schedule for the year that never changed, right? Like, it’s just so labor-intensive. But now I think when we think about AI as part of our infrastructure, and it’s kind of a layer in our tech stack interacting with a really robust knowledge graph and data layer, we can start to ask ourselves, like, how do we get the right resources to the right kids at the right time for the right outcome? And really get very, very precise, and also do that dynamically. And I think that then allows us to think about personalization, just-in-time instruction, integrating real-world experiences, ensuring that personalized learning still happens in community and there’s deep human connection that is part of personalized learning journey in a way that was, was not possible when, you know, 12 years ago when we were thinking about Summit 2.0, the technology just didn’t exist.

And so, I mean, it’s exciting. I mean, I really think there’s incredible possibility there. And while there’s definitely lots of really cool tools being built, we’re much more focused on the, like, where does this fit as part of our technology infrastructure or our tech stack, because we think that’s, like, potentially a huge lever for transforming learning for young people.

Current Applications of AI in Schools

Michael Horn: It’s fascinating to me, ’cause you just named a number of things that AI could do that I had never thought about in terms of, like, dynamically changing the schedule for, you know, the school and students and, like, there’s some pretty cool things you can start to imagine that ripple out of that. One of the things in that conversation that Diane referenced that she and I agreed to hold ourselves accountable for was to get really specific when we talk to school leaders about, so what’s happening today in your schools that’s actually leveraging AI or is quote, unquote AI native, if you will? And so you all are obviously still in the design phase for 3.0. I use that with trepidation now, but put that aside for a second. Like, today, if I were to, you know, get to be in California again and I was hanging out in your schools, what would I see that’s powered today by something that’s AI native? What is it? What are the tools? What does it look like? What does it do? What are you building versus partnering with? Give, give us a sense of some concrete applications. Anywhere in the tech stack or during the day, that is AI-powered?

Cady Ching: I think this would be a good opportunity to talk about a specific tool that we’re using, which maybe not ironically is Futre as one model example of what it can look like. And Dan can speak to specifically what it’s looking like in the student and teacher experience. But one of the reasons why I start with speaking about a specific tool is because I think that largely edtech has not— has been really unsuccessful in solving for what we need to operationalize innovative school models. And Futre has been a nice shift of pace for us because it is truly a tool that is building for the child versus fitting a child into a tool or larger system. And I think that the way in which we’re using it with our young people can work in many H2 and H3 model contexts because it’s able to give us real-time data about our young people and then allowing us to build their student experience based on the data that we have about them. Dan, can you introduce, Michael a little bit more to Futre and how we’re using it at Summit?

Dan Effland: Yeah, absolutely. So Futre right now we’re using with our juniors and seniors, although we anticipate starting younger, in the coming year. And right now, our juniors are really using it to do a lot of career exploration, which the tool excels at, and really like exploring very deeply different possibilities. And then what those possibilities mean as far as what they need to be working on now or experiences they have between kind of their current point A and their future point B. And then our seniors are using it to get more concrete about what really, what is my next step? What does that mean? What is the thing I’m doing immediately after high school?  — I think we deeply believe this and will proudly say it is best-in-class career-connected learning. It is. Absolutely. It is the thing when we do — when I do focus groups, when we do alumni data, kind of research, it just comes up over and over again because our young people actually get out in the community or within the school building and really doing what we now are calling real-world experiences. We’ve called them lots of different things over the decades, but we are — one of the things about that though is that kind of like we were talking about, how do we really curate the journey with this resource allocation stuff? Just tracking all of those different experiences, often there’s 50 or 60 choices for students at one school when we had those expedition cycles. We’re now pulling those experiences onto the Futre platform so we can really start to map what students have been doing, what they haven’t been doing, maybe what they should be doing. And then their mentor can take an even more engaged kind of role in coaching them through that pathway. We’re really excited about that.

We’re kind of just starting, you know, to pull those on. But I think in the future it’s one of the things that we see that the Futre tool will be really, really helpful with because, you know, young people need coaching as they’re figuring out that concrete next step.

Michael Horn: So super interesting. I actually have two questions, but let me go to you, Dan and Cady, first. And then I have a question for you, Diane. I’m going to put you on the hot seat. But I think we’re allowed to do that. But it’s interesting. You just said something there in your answer, Dan, which was then the mentor or coaching.

And so just like to put a fine point on it, The, like, this works really well because you have a model where there is that function that is meeting on a regular weekly basis, right? And like, so therefore that touchpoint, like it’s coherent again to use that word, but I, I would love a quick update on how Expeditions has evolved because when I think when Diane was exiting Summit, like, y’all were in the middle of redesigning it and I’ll be super honest, like even though she and I talk basically weekly, I don’t actually know the new version of Expeditions. And so, I still have a slide in my talk about Summit that says, you know, like every 8 weeks or whatever, you go off for 2 weeks. And y’all should update us on what’s the current state of Expeditions at Summit.

Cady Ching: Yeah, I’ll respond to 2 pieces. One, with the mentoring piece, that model element does exist. One of the reasons why I personally love Futre is because it takes some of the lift of mentors needing to be the vessel of all career pathways off the human. So when we think about that resource allocation of, you know, people, talent, it’s creating a better, more coherent system for the adult as well, which has been so important because we love to center our teachers as well in the design. And then the Expeditions redesign, it’s been really cool. We’ve been, you know, continuously shifting that program based on what our alumni are sharing back with us, based on how the world is shifting. And of course, AI, as so much a part of our students’ experience today and in the future, has shifted it again. It is non-graded— so this is actually surprisingly one of the most controversial things when we rolled it out to parents— they are not receiving grades on the different career exposure pieces that they try out as they’re with us at either the high school levels or as early as 6th grade in Seattle.

And it’s really about ensuring our students get about 9 career exposures between the time they start with us to the moment they leave, because we know it’s really important for them as they develop their identity to see themselves in different career pathways that are all mapping towards high opportunity where they can build their generational wealth for their family. So it’s probably pretty similar in terms of the time allocation. They’re in sort of what we call their core classes for 6 weeks, and then they’re pausing for 2 weeks to go out, usually in the upper grades, off campus. You don’t see — when people come to observe this on our site, they’re not actually a lot of kids in the building because learning happens without walls. Dan, what else would you add as you’re going? Dan is quite literally on an expedition tour currently. He’s at one of our school sites right now, and right after this recording, he is going to go in and speak to our teachers. So what else would you add?

Dan Effland: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s an important side of it is so that, I mean, one, it’s just, I was still in a school leadership position when we transitioned to this kind of redesigned Expeditions, and I just can’t tell you how powerful the experiences are. I can think of so many stories, so many young people, but like one in particular that a young, he’s — well, he’s probably not even that young now, but he’s 25, but he was a young, young man at the time who was really, really struggling. And this kid was having discipline issues, attendance issues, struggling, like, not necessarily living at home on a regular basis. And we really, we thought we were gonna really lose this kid. And he started doing an expedition experience related to culinary arts. After he did that first one, he did a second one, and then there was kind of a sequence of them where he had, you know, like the first one was kind of like a survey course. It was the community college. It was about 25 kids.

Finding Passion and Purpose

Dan Effland: Then he was able to do one where he was actually kind of shadowing one of the actual culinary arts program college students and learning in a second wave. So I’m having a hard time not using his name, but I’m going to keep it out. But I just loved this kid. And he found his pathway. And not only did he find his pathway and ended up going to a culinary arts program and graduating and now works, you know, like in the culinary arts, you know, scene in Seattle, his attendance improved, his grades went up, his connections with his mentor, with his teachers, with his peers, which were, you know, fraught, got better and better. And he became a healthier human because purpose and passion and having a pathway is essential for all of us. And we’re at a time when, you know, you can read about this everywhere, there’s studies, our young people are really searching for that clarity about purpose and pathway. And when you see it, I mean, it’s just like Cady said, it’s kind of hard, like it’s not a good thing to tour because the kids are mostly out in the community.

Dan Effland: But when you have the privilege of being a school leader and you see these kids over the years and they do their cycles, you just, the impact is unbelievable. So yeah, I just wanted to, yeah —

Designing Education for the Child

Michael Horn: No, the anecdotes make these things always so much more powerful. And I mean, you can, through your story, hear him building a positive identity of himself, right? And that’s incredible. Diane, something Cady said made me think of it, which is obviously, you know, folks who listen to us know that you’re the entrepreneur behind Futre. I now understand why it was originally called Point B based on Dan’s language and I guess, but she said something interesting, which was like a lot of edtech has not helped the launch of new model design, right? Because it’s been, and that, that’s sort of been obvious to me for why, right? Because the market is schools as they are, and venture capital wants big markets, and right, like, it’s — so it’s, it’s this sort of reductivist thing that happens. But she said you’ve been designing for the child, and so you’ve been able to escape that and I wondered if you just might want to reflect on that, because I imagine it is still hard though, um, because you’re still like — schools are the conduit to the kids. So just sort of like, what’s the advice, or what have you learned, right, through, through navigating that?

Diane Tavenner: Well, I think that I mean, so much of what Dan and Cady have just said is so important. And I think that what, what was one key thing is, you know, I sort of set out to build Futre as an edtech partner that did things differently than what I experienced when I was sitting in, you know, the seat that Dan and Cady are in. And you know, that core value of our company is how we do the work is as important as the work that we do. And so how we do the work is very much co-building with schools and leaders and students. And so, you know, we are out in the field working with students and teachers and people like Dan and Cady literally every other week. So we are literally co-designing and code building what happens. And so what you just heard, that Futre is being designed to help young people build this identity over a 10-year journey. I mean, that’s unheard of, I think, in any sort of tech market.

People don’t think about that. We have real outcomes that people are aiming towards, and most tech products just look at what’s something that exists and try to make it more efficient or slightly better. They don’t think about the integration of it, the flexibility of it, how it will be used by the adults. I mean, As an example, they just told you Futre can be used both in individual coaching, mentoring, advising, counseling. It can also be used with groups of students in a classroom, and it’s actually literally designed to support both of those. And I will say the, the inclusion of really supporting real-world experiences came directly from our engagement with our school partners and our students. That emerged as this real need And we were watching people literally running around schools with laptops on their arm and all these spreadsheets and trying to organize. And so we have co-built these elements together.

But you’re right, the incentives in the business side of things are not to build this way. And so, you know, like always, we’re going to see if we can prove that wrong and say, no, when you do build this way, you not only get better outcomes for young people, schools and teachers and educators, but you also can be a successful, scalable product.

Michael Horn: So certainly a more enduring product if you, if you thread that needle, right? So for sure.

Cady Ching: Yeah, exactly. So I think it’s I think it also speaks to why it’s so important for Dan and I to sort of pull together a coalition of the willing with other operators. One thing we haven’t spent — I know we’re almost at time — that much time talking about is how hard this work is. It is challenging, and we have so much to learn. We are not perfect. We are learning every single day. We are constantly seeking out other school systems that have similar visions for education, and we’re trying to learn from them. We’re trying to get out onto their campuses and be in community with them because we know that if we want to build something that’s enduring and lasting and maximizing impact on the number of students in our country, or even globally, we have to build for the students of Summit as well as all students.

And I think that, that’s what’s most important for me as I set out to lead some of this work is if it only works at Summit, it’s not good enough. And what we’ve learned about leading change at scale is that we need a shared purpose for what school is actually for, and that belief that it’s possible to build a system for that purpose, which is actually no small feat. And it’s why we’re spending so much time building what I would call a coalition of the willing, which is educators and systems who agree on our common destination before we start building the actual tools. I think my core idea is that beliefs come first, model comes next, and then the tools come last. And when we get that order right, that’s when the scale can become possible.

Summit Learning: Model vs. Technology

Diane Tavenner: Cady, I want to double-click on what you’re saying because, you know, you talked at the top of this about how Summit Learning had really scaled across the country to 40 states and, you know, 100,000 students, etc. But Dan, you also said the technology, the Summit Learning platform was not the model. It is not the model. And the model has really taken root even as that particular piece of technology has gone away. That said, I do know that you both believe deeply that having an aligned core technology that is the infrastructure that sort of I think, Dan, you used the word guardrails, like puts up the guardrails and the support for the model is profound. And I know that you’re in conversation with other folks who’ve done some at learning who are, who it’s taken root for them as well, but are having a hard time really keeping that model intact. And so talk about sort of the need for that infrastructure, the role that it plays and what you think it might look like in 3.0. And Cady, you just said it, no one’s going to build technological infrastructure for a single school or a single school system.

And so there has to be this coalition.

Cady Ching: We have to create the market.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. And so talk about that because the market generally is not very coherent. And as I sit on the other side, it can be really confusing and hard so talk about how you guys are thinking about that.

Enabling Learning Through AI

Dan Effland: Yeah, I think this is something we’ve started to be spending more and more of our time on as we’ve gotten clearer in the work with our students and caregivers and educators this fall. We’ve gotten clearer about where we’re going. There is this need, which is that technology is not the model, but it is, you know, there’s a reason we talk about time, talent, and technology as the big levers with resources. It is a huge enabler. And I think the possibilities with AI as part of that technology infrastructure make it an even stronger enabler. So I’ve already talked about like the idea of like dynamically reallocating resources, which is, I think, I love in a conversation educators here, because I think sometimes it’s not the, like the shiniest thing to talk about, but we know that getting kids the right thing at the right time in the right sequence is often the difference between learning and not learning, between progress and not progress, and between finding that pathway and not finding it. And so, at a high level, when we’re thinking about that infrastructure, we need to make sure that, like, we have a really rich, you know, amount of data.

And there’s a lot of work to be done there. Our school systems historically have not put data together in ways where you can create what like a technology person would call the data lake in a way where you can really access that as you need it. And then the next element is going to be a really robust knowledge graph that is not just academic standards. It’s got to be much broader than that. And then, of course, the way that AI would then interact with that to allocate and think about your resources. And I’ll share too, like when we think about resources, I generally think of everything as a resource. My time is a resource, Cady’s time is a resource, our educators’ time is a resource, curriculum is a resource, YouTube is a resource. Anything that can help a young person move towards those outcomes, we think of as a resource, and how can we constantly repackage those and get them in the right order while holding onto the vision? Because I think there’s a version of personalized learning that I would call like individualized learning.

That’s not what we’re talking about. I believe this has to happen deeply in community and with really strong relationships and human connection. And so the personalized learning, then it’s actually more complex when you’re committed to maintaining community and relationships, because you’ve got to figure out configurations of young people and not just put everybody separately on a computer they have a particular pathway and so.

Cady Ching: And that’s what we’re seeing, we’re seeing people just run, sprint towards an outcome without doing the diligence. And I think that it’s resulting in a lot of binary. If you’re either tech-forward or you’re human-centered, and there is a way to bring that together and build a model that’s doing both and that’s what we’re setting out to do.

Dan Effland: Yeah. There’s another binary too, that we haven’t talked about, but we should stamp here, which is this binary of like, real-world readiness or academic foundations. And that we now, we have these camps and like, we’re all about academics and we’re all about the real world. And when you talk to students, you talk to students and caregivers and educators, no one thinks it should be an either-or. That’s the scarcity mindset we’re often in, an area that we engage in educators. And we’re deeply committed that our young people will be prepared with college-ready academic foundations and real-world readiness, which means for us habits of success, communication, collaboration, all executive functioning. That is has a purpose

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. One is, as Dan, your story of that student showed, the sense of purpose, which is connected to what my life will look like in the future, really is what drives everything for a young person, right? It’s how they’re forming their identity as they build that vision. It’s what motivates them to stick to the hard work every single day on this journey to get where, where they’re going, and so yeah, I think what you’re up to is really critical. I hope that a lot of schools and systems engage with you to create this demand in the market for this type of infrastructure, dare we say, you know, Summit Learning Platform 3.0 as well. Because I think that it’s really, it’s hard to conceive of a post-AI model that doesn’t have that. That real infrastructure.

And I know you all haven’t seen it or found it yet, but continue to make strides in bringing it to life.

Michael Horn: This season of Class Disrupted is sponsored by Learner Studio, a nonprofit motivated by one question: what will young people need to be inspired and prepared to flourish in the age of AI as individuals, in careers and for civil thriving. Learner Studio is sponsoring this season on AI and education because in this critical moment, we need more than just hype. We need authentic conversations asking the right questions from a place of real curiosity and learning. You can learn more about Learner Studio’s mission and the innovators who inspire them at www.learnerstudio.com. 

So a good place maybe, Diane, to wrap up.

Should we pivot to our before we let you off the hook section? Cady, Dan, we have a tradition here where we, where we talk about something we’ve been reading, writing, watching, listening, whatever it is, not writing, listening to, and eventually I’ll get my verbs correct. But and then, so just often we try to keep it outside work, but we often fail. So, Cady, you want to go first, and then Dan, we want to hear what’s been on your playlist or bedside table, and then Diane and I will wrap it up.

Cady Ching: Yeah, sounds great. I have been— I taught my 7-year-old what it means to brain rot. I don’t know if you’ve heard that term, but where you just sit on the couch and just kind of watch nothing for hours and hours. And we did do a Spider-Man and Avengers binge this past weekend. So that is something I have been watching a lot of. Reading is going to be hard for me to separate it from the professional. I’ve just been really deep in leader succession. I think to do this work, you need really strong talent in leadership pipeline.

And so I’ve been in HBR. I check the Marshall Memo every week to see what, what they’re pulling out, to really think about how I’m leading personally, locally, individually, but then also what the sector needs. Dan, I’ll pass it to you.

Dan Effland: Similarly, like the kind of first answer on my mind is just this fire hose of like white papers and podcasts about education and AI.

Cady Ching: And then he screenshots them and sends them to the whole team.

Dan Effland: Yeah, drive everyone nuts with them. But I do have a more, maybe a more fun one on the personal side. Kind of finally reading the Foundation series, the Isaac Asimov kind of classic sci-fi. It’s honestly about connection for me. My siblings are sci-fi readers and I’m very late to the party. And then my father is retired now, and one of his, it seems like, main activities as a retiree is to reread everything Asimov ever wrote multiple times.. And so for Christmas this year, I got a stack of these really great, Half Price Books paperbacks of all the Foundation novels, and I’m starting to work through them.

And we have a text thread about them, and they are, it’s a wonderful story, it’s very complex, and it certainly does also make me think a little bit about the future of our world and AI and, and what, you know, where, where young people fit in that, but it’s also just been a really fun way to connect to the family.

Michael Horn: That’s cool. Wow.

Diane Tavenner: What about you, Diane? Well, picking up on that. So first of all, apparently this is not going to be a novel recommendation because this Apple TV series, I guess, is the most watched at this point. But we watched Pluribus, which was created by Vince Gilligan, who — yes, Breaking Bad. Yes, Better Call Saul. I didn’t watch either of those, but I was a huge X-Files fan

Michael Horn: Back in the day.

Diane Tavenner: OK. And so there is very much some X-Files feel here in Pluribus. But to what Dan said, and I think Foundation is related, I just find this series to be so provocative in the questions that it’s bringing up and sort of the contemplation of where we’re going as a society and how the choices we’re making each day might affect that and what we actually want. And I will— I told you I would report back my goal. I did finish Ian McEwan’s novel that I pre-promoted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was everything I expected and more.

It was just extraordinary. And I did both of those over the holiday. And I will tell you, I feel like I’m sort of in surround sound right now of asking these big existential questions along with everything from what’s happening in the news on a day-to-day basis to all the work in AI. So, but I would highly recommend it. Super provocative and interesting.

Michael Horn: Perfect

Diane Tavenner: Perfect. Crazy. Like, you never know what’s gonna happen next.

Michael Horn: That’s fun when you can’t predict it coming.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Michael Horn: Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, so the brain rot theme that you brought up, Cady, I mean, we talk about it all the time with our 11-year-olds, here at home. But I was — this is not where I was going to go at all with this, but I — something one of my kids said made me think of the Animaniacs theme song, if you all remember that cartoon from back in the day, and I pulled it up and showed it, and my wife just dismissively said, this was brain rot when we were growing up. so, there you go. the one I’ll say is, we all went with another family and saw Wonder, at the American Repertory Theater. Many people may know the book, Wonder, which follows the story of Auggie Pullman, a 10-year-old who has Tretcher Collins, syndrome that presents as disfiguration of the face and sort of how going into a school environment for the first time and all the things that it does. And there’s a movie about it as well, but now there is a musical too.

And Diane, you will not be surprised, I was crying from the opening number and I kept it up through the whole thing. So it was, I was true to form. That’s a good one to cry over. It was good. I represented well, but it was fantastic. We’ll see if it makes the jump from sort of off-off-Broadway to something bigger, but until then, if you’re in the Cambridge area, definitely check it out. And for all of you, just huge thanks, Cady, Dan, for joining us, getting us to have a peek under the cover of what’s coming next at Summit and the broader — as usual, you all are thinking about the broader ecosystem as well, which I admire so much about the work you all do at Summit. It’s not just our model, but how does our model spur this greater change across education.

So huge thanks for joining us. And for all of you listening, keep the questions, comments coming. Diane and I feed off them, and we really appreciate all of you. We’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.

Disclosure: Diane Tavenner founded Summit Public Schools and served as its CEO from 2003 to 2023.��

This episode is sponsored by LearnerStudio.

John Danner, the cofounder of Rocketship Public Schools and now the founder of Flourish Schools, an emerging network of AI-native microschools, joined Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner to share what’s now possible when it comes to school design in the age of artificial intelligence that wasn’t previously possible. Danner explained how Flourish is leveraging AI to deliver foundational skills like reading and math through conversational tutors to free up teachers to focus on building relationships and nurturing students’ passions and “superpowers.” 

He also shared how they’re using the technology to provide real-time assessment and feedback on student projects. The conversational models can be much more powerful, he says, than previous edtech applications. 

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. It is good to see you again for our continuing conversations on AI.

Diane Tavenner: You too. This one’s going to be a fun one. You know, our most recent episode, we talked with Alpha School founder Mackenzie Price. Most people have heard of Alpha at this point. It’s getting a ton of attention. And so what we tried to do there was really move beyond the talking points and the marketing to really dig into the model itself, including specifically how they’re using AI, which is turning into a bit of our quest this season. And so this conversation today is a part of that exploration on who’s building what I would call maybe AI-native school models, if anyone. And, you know, what might they look like? What are they starting to look like? And it’s a really fun conversation today because we get to have a chat with an old friend.

Michael Horn: Yes, that is indeed correct, Diane. Today we’re going to get to chat with none other than John Danner. John, for those that don’t know him, has had a decorated career in tech before turning to education, as he co-founded and led NetGravity, the first ad server company, I believe. And after taking it public, selling it to DoubleClick, John went back to school and then became a teacher, and he taught in Nashville for a few years there. And then I think a lot of folks know him because he co-founded, of course, Rocketship Public Schools in 2006, which we, of course, talked about also in our last episode. But Rocketship was a buzzy school for a good while there, marked by its student outcomes, its use of technology, its expansion. And then after leaving Rocketship in 2013, John did a number of other things, including founding an online math tutoring company, creating some very interesting education investment vehicles and more. But I want to skip ahead to his most recent venture, Flourish Schools, which is what we’re going to hear about today.

Michael Horn: So, John, hopefully I did some justice to the bio, but, welcome. It is always good to see you.

John Danner: Thank you, Michael. Great to see both of you. Long time.

Michael Horn: This is going to be fun. This is going to be fun. So let’s start with grounding our audience. My assumption is that a lot of folks know Rocketship and what you did there. Far fewer know about the Flourish Schools model itself and what these schools actually look like. So maybe give us the basics, like what is Flourish Schools, how many of them are there today, how big are they, what’s the grade levels, what does a day in a student’s life look like at these schools? You know, paint the picture for us.

John Danner: Yeah, yeah. So we started Flourish about a year ago. We opened our first school last August. In Nashville, one microschool so far. They’re middle schools, so grades 6 through 8. I’m out in Phoenix today. We’re opening a couple more schools in Phoenix next year, next August. And I’d say the reason for doing it, you know, Diane knows this well, like doing schools is quite difficult work.

Enhancing Foundational Learning with AI 

John Danner: I often prefer being on the software side where, you know, life is good. But, you know, schools are hard work and sometimes you have to do them. I think the big motivator in starting Flourish for me was that I had started a couple of AI companies, Project Read, probably the most notable doing reading, which is in a lot of classrooms. And I just noticed that most schools are using AI in a very supplemental way right now, very much the same way they used edtech. And that bothered me because, you know, in reading, for example, I think there’s a pretty good argument that AI for reading is going to be better than the best human reading teacher within the next year or two. It’s not a long way off at all because teaching reading is really hard. Training teachers to teach that is hard. It’s hard to be patient with kids when they’re making lots of mistakes.

And it’s hard to remember everything a kid has ever done when they’re reading with you, right? All of which just is default for AI. So, you know, in watching Project Read roll out and seeing everybody kind of use it, you know, in those last 15 minutes in the class when they were kind of, you know, a kid was done with the assignment and needed to do something else. Like, I was like, you know, that doesn’t seem like how AI should, affects schools. It should be used more strategically. You know, what can AI do, and therefore what do you do with teacher time? I think, you know, for me, teacher time has always been kind of the scarce resource. It’s like whatever teachers focus on is really what schools do. No matter what schools talk about, it’s like, OK, what, what are your teachers doing? That’s what’s going to have the most impact. And so Flourish we, we started with the assumption that what we call foundations, kind of the basic skills, reading, writing, math, are going to be better taught by AI.

The way we kind of look at it is if you think of like Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 instruction, it’s really the move from technology as a Tier 2 or Tier 3 product to a Tier 1. So, you know, can you use AI to do kind of tier 1 basic skills and standards-based instruction? And so that was what we did from day 1 at Flourish. We’re 6 months into it now. I would say the lesson learned is, of course, you’re going to have students in any school that like, you know, whatever. We have several special ed, several ELL students they need more time and attention. But during our foundations block, which is an hour long, teachers have time to work with them one-on-one. And a teacher working with a student one-on-one on reading or whatever is like a luxury that like no other school has because that you can’t have them doing that. But when all the other kids are making great progress with AI, having a teacher spend that time, that luxurious time is actually possible.

AI’s Impact on Schooling

John Danner: So that’s the fundamental thesis is that we can do that in a way that that’s what our teachers are not doing and spending all their time preparing for and teaching during the day. And that allows us to kind of come up with a new curriculum. And I think actually, you know, you guys want to focus on AI and we should. I think the actual interesting question with schools is once you make the commitment that AI is going to do a lot of this basic instruction, then you’re confronted with the now what problem, which is like, oh gosh, what’s school for like moving forward? And I guess that’s, that’s what we’re kind of excited about is we’re in this super serious time of change for students. They’re not going to grow up to a world that we all experienced. You know, my daughter just got out of college. She was a pre-med, but didn’t really want to be a doctor. She gets out in the job market and gosh, there are no jobs.

And like all those other things that she learned along the way about hustle and, you know, you got to go put yourself out there and whatever played out and she found a job. But boy, like if you had just spent all your time in school, like learning algebra or whatever, she wouldn’t have done well. So, I think, you know, our point of view at Flourish is we, we talk about 3 things mainly, relationships. So these are middle schoolers. So how do you get along with other people? And we do an hour we call circles, which is really as kind of therapeutic as it might sound, where kids are sitting in a circle talking about their feelings, how other kids affect them, et cetera. And for many, many of our students, I’d say it’s pretty mind-blowing to actually understand how other people are thinking, you know, as you’re talking and saying things and stuff like that. Really powerful.

So relationships are a big piece. And then we talk about two others, superpowers and passions. So superpowers is kind of our word for what people have called soft skills. I hate the term soft skills because it’s kind of denigrating in a world of like standards-based instruction. Oh, that’s the other stuff that, you know, makes you a human, but it’s not nearly as important as high school chemistry or whatever. Like, we actually think it’s the opposite now that knowledge is pretty abundant and accessible, like the things that make you human are the more important things. So, do you have agency and curiosity and these other things that make you awesome? That’s important. And then the passion side is really, what do you want to do when you grow up? What are you excited about? What are your big interests? Which, you know, as you know, for upper-income families tends to happen at home.

You know, you’re sitting around the table or you go, you know, on a little family field trip or whatever, and kids are discovering lots of different things that they might be excited about. Happens a lot less in working class and lower income families. We’re purposefully mixed income. We took a page out of your book for that, Diane. I think that’s really the right way to do this. And so for our kids who are, you know, working class and lower income, we think like discovering, what the world is and what you might want to be in is super important, especially in middle, so that you kind of enter high school with some idea of like what you’re excited about and some kind of path you might want to pursue. Even if that changes, that’s OK, you’re not just kind of clueless showing up in high school, which, you know, a lot of kids are.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, super helpful, John. You know, one of the ways I’ve been trying to have conversations with people about what these sort of AI-native models will look like or can look like or do look like is I don’t want to have a conversation where we compare what they’re doing compared to like the old industrial model classroom, right, that’s like not useful to me.

John Danner: We’ve had that conversation. Yeah.

Diane Tavenner: So I keep using the sort of Rocketship and Summit because I know them the best of like best-in-class sort of personalized learning models that we were doing the very best we could at the time with the resources we had, and doing a lot of what you just described, right? Like, I’m assuming circles maybe comes out of Valor, which, you know, it has, you know. So like, a lot of that great stuff we were doing before. So what I’m really, and you’ve alluded to this, I think, with shifting Tier 1 instruction out of the classroom model and the AI is doing that. But let’s dig in a little bit deeper. Like, literally, what’s possible today that we just didn’t do 10 years ago and now we can do it? And what does that specifically look like in the model?

John Danner: I think the big change here is really one from point and click to conversational, right? Like, that was the eye-opener for me, really, you know, back in the ChatGPT moment was you kind of just immediately it became clear that a conversational agent would be able to kind of work through things with a student in so much better way than, you know, kind of what we all did with kind of edtech back in the day. So, you know, we all, we call it personalization, but there’s kind of a difference between a program more or less knowing where you are and what you need versus what an AI does, which is it knows everything. You know, like in Flourish, we more or less pour everything about a student into it. We have transcripts from everything students say. Like, the AI just is all-knowing about what’s happened with that student at the school. And so when it’s personalizing, it’s 100 or 1,000 times deeper level than like this basic categorization that edtech used to be able to do. So I think it’s much more aware of what students need. And I just think the mechanism of talking to a student conversationally is so much better than kind of navigating through a bunch of screens and the stuff we used to do.

Diane Tavenner: So I’m assuming then you’re building your own. It sounds like you’re building, you called it curriculum, but like that tier 1, because I have yet to see sort of off-the-shelf products that are really, that I would be like, yeah, they’re great. They can do the tier 1 instruction. Talk about what you’re building, what that looks like for middle school kids, you know.

John Danner: Yeah, right. And remember, we’re 6 months old, so anything I tell you is like total work in progress. But, you know, we’ve got good people and we’re working pretty hard on it. So the, you know, the fundamental idea, so I’ll tell you where we started with this and then kind of where we are now. We kind of had this idea that we’d have an agent on our side that was very good at sending kids to the right place to get the right help, right? So kind of like a hybrid between the old ed tech world and kind of this AI-driven world. And we pretty quickly discovered the kind of things that we had discovered at Rocketship, or I’m sure you did at Summit, which is there’s so much friction and stuff involved in manipulating another program. It’s like basically not worth it. And so that probably took a couple months for us to just realize like this is a waste of time.

Tutoring via Adaptive Dialogue

John Danner: And so really the way our system works today is as a student, I’ll tell you today and then where we hope to be in 2 months. So today, the way it works is that we have kind of a pre-assessment where we’re looking for what a student knows. Based on what they know, they enter a conversation with our AI. We often will have a 1 or 2 minute video of like just what that thing is, kind of an old edtech type thing, right? Just because I think a framing is often helpful for a new concept, but that the majority of the real instruction is kind of this dialogue between the AI and the student on like, OK, well, let’s talk about, you know, two-digit addition just for lack of anything better. Here’s a problem, you know, solve this problem for me, tell me how you’re doing it. And then basically just digging in as the student doesn’t get it. And it’s so easy to prompt for, I mean, you know, Zeal, my third company, the math tutoring company, we had figured out all the misconceptions that every student has in math. And so when you prompt an AI with that, OK, here are the 10 likely things that a student’s going to do wrong, when they’re doing two-digit math, it just goes, oh, OK, that’s it, and then it goes deep there, right? So if you think about it, it’s very fluid.

It’s very much what a human tutor would do in that case. They’re kind of responding in real time to what that student’s doing and going, oh geez, you don’t really understand how to carry the tens place, so let’s go deeper there or whatever. So that interaction with the AI happens, and then we go out and post-assess. And so the student’s kind of manipulating where they want to go and what they want to do through that process. Where we’re going, where I hope to be in a couple months, is that that’s all, all the pre- and post-assessment is kind of gone. We’re finding that the AI through that dialogue has just as good an understanding of what that student is capable of doing as kind of any formal assessment process. And it’s much more natural to just have the students sit down with the AI, you know, when they start and talk about what they want to work on. And then, you know, kind of the AI drills into that and shows them a video and does things like that.

So I think it could feel quite a bit like, you know, a student showing up at a tutoring center and that tutor kind of just working with them. It feels like that’s going to work. But that’s where we’re at with it.

Diane Tavenner: Is that voice or are they typing or both?

John Danner: We’re doing typing now. We’d love to do voice. We started there and we really worked hard on it. I would say that the biggest problem with voice for us is that we have never figured out the kind of noisy classroom problem. Very hopeful that somebody does because of the issue, you know, even if you’re off in a corner of a classroom or even outside in the hallway, the AI hears everything. And so it you know, and if you think about it, like when you’re in one of these sessions, the AI hears something and somehow inserts that in the conversation. That’s just weird. It kind of ruins the whole flow.

So it’s easier with middle schoolers to do kind of a text-based one right now. But I, you know, what I’ve told the team is I think the main interface for AI will probably be audio at some point. Like it’s just the most natural way. And so as the industry kind of builds better and better models for that, I hope that this problem gets solved and we can go to audio.

Diane Tavenner: That makes sense to me. And do you then have a knowledge graph underneath that? So even though the students sort of like flowing where it makes sense to them, at the end of the day, you have kind of the macro plan of where you want them to go.

John Danner: And yeah, so we built a super elaborate one for Zeal and unfortunately are more or less rebuilding it now for all of our stuff. Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, as you guys know, the real challenge with AI is often that it’s so good in the moment at these things, but you kind of have to bring it back to reality sometimes. And so, you know, having a prompt that says, hey, pull the knowledge graph and see what’s the most important thing to work on is helpful. It’s kind of like this, you know, savant type tutor that can help a kid in the moment with anything, but kind of loses the picture of like what’s the most important thing to do. So you kind of have to bring it back.

And I think the knowledge is the way to do that.

Diane Tavenner: John, how does this connect with, I know you’re very committed to project-based learning and sort of that approach, which you know that I am as well. And, you know, it sounds a little bit like what you’re describing. You know, at Summit Learning, we have the playlists where you were doing the content knowledge. What you’re describing, I think, is a stronger version of that and what AI can do. How are you connecting it to the projects? What’s the intersection there? What’s going on there? And are you using AI in the projects?

John Danner: Yeah, the answer to the second is definitely yes. And let’s talk about that in a second. So we have a theory as a, as a school system, that’s probably the opposite, at least the opposite of like my alma mater. I’ve been talking to Bellarmine. It’s my alma mater in San Jose, talking to teachers about that. And, you know, AI is a problem for a lot of schools and teachers, right? Like it’s the cheating and stuff like that. We have basically the opposite approach, which is like, assume any kid can use anything that will help them read, write, understand, research better, and then like uplevel what you’re teaching so that you assume that yes, everybody’s writing is going to be perfect now. Don’t worry about that.

That’s not your job anymore. So with projects, you know, the link really is when you’re in a project, you’re trying to apply knowledge to build something to do something. And it’s extremely common to not understand something well enough to do that well. And so you need to go off and kind of research and understand it. So the link that will exist that doesn’t exist yet, which I’d like to see, is foundations lives in its own block right now at Flourish, but we’d like foundations to be accessible kind of basically all the time for students so that that’s the main way that you research as well through kind of an AI interface. So that’s the ideal. Right now what happens is that a student kind of struggles, they go off and use Gemini or something for things. And then we know, you know, the AI knows because it’s paying attention to the project and what’s going on.

‘Oh, this student struggled with this,’ and then in Foundation that kind of bubbles to the top the next day. But like, why wait? Like, just make it real time. If a student’s struggling with something, just go ahead and do it. We do have to figure out kind of the, you know, the tier 1 versus tier 2 of this. Like, if a student’s really struggling and they’ve got a real issue and you just wipe out project time doing that, that doesn’t feel right either. So we’re gonna have to figure out like what level of intervention happens if, you know, they’re still not getting it. But certainly at least the tier 1, like, oh, I just don’t know about this, let’s learn more, should happen through that Foundation system, we think.

Diane Tavenner: That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Tell me about what the educator is doing in these times.

John Danner: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the most important thing really is And I know for many, many teachers, the concern is, gosh, well, maybe you just don’t need me anymore or something. And that’s just completely not true. I mean, I noticed this at Rocketship, you know, people go into teaching because they love kids. That’s like, you know, that’s the common thing that you always hear. Some people go into teaching because they want to be content experts, but not that many, at least at kind of elementary and middle, like, it’s still really driven by like, I really wanna connect with kids and be with kids, not like I wanna be the best reading teacher or whatever. And so, you know, when you kind of push a lot of this like content knowledge and instruction to AI, what really happens is a little bit of like what I was describing with tier 2 and tier 3 during that time where a teacher now has a lot of time. So, you know, a lot of the stuff is going on. Project-based learning is nice that way.

Building Teacher-Student Connections

John Danner: Kids are working on things, which feels kind of like a big Montessori classroom or whatever, where like everybody’s being industrious and getting things done. But like, you know, the question is always, OK, so like what’s the best and highest use for the teacher at that point? So I think, you know, our opinion in general is kind of building trusted relationships is the most important thing you can do as a teacher, right? Like anytime you think about teachers that affected you, it’s because for whatever reason they spent the extra time to kind of get to know you, understand what you were going through, and like became kind of a trusted friend and advisor. And I think buying time back to allow teachers to do more of that is by far the highest value. Of course, interventions and things like that are awesome. Having students reach to do higher-order thinking once they’ve finished a project, all that’s great, but I think it’s all in kind of service of making that connection between our teacher and our students such that the student is more excited and interested to, you know, learn and think with that teacher about other things, you know, especially with superpowers and passions and things like that. Like, we have it, I’ll just brief aside, you know, we have these report cards that have superpowers on them. And so they say things like, you know, organization or self-awareness or whatever. So you can imagine our parent-teacher conferences are pretty amazing because while a parent is like, yeah, I don’t really know much about middle school math and frankly don’t care that much.

Boy, when you bring up self-awareness or something like that, they can go on for a long time. And so you have these really deep discussions about these kinds of things and kids by middle school, certainly in high school, they’re not really listening to their parents about these things very much. They’re kind of sick of hearing this. So I really do think schools have a way better chance of kind of influencing how children are doing these things, especially around superpowers and passions. But that requires trust and trust, you know, it’s hard to build. So we think that the best thing for teachers to be doing is kind of like getting into deeper conversations with students and talking to them about like, you know, what their interests are, what they like. And building that in the hope that they have influence over that student’s trajectory.

Michael Horn: Well, so, John, I think this actually is perfect translation into the other thing that AI is doing to free up teacher time for that, which is, as I understand it, at least from, from what you’ve written, is that you have this AI coach that is quite involved in the project-based learning piece of this equation. And I think two distinct ways. So, maybe talk about that.

John Danner: Yeah, I mean, again, work in progress, so I’m not super happy with how it’s being involved right now, but I’ll tell you what I want it to be doing well. So I think that, you know, and Diane, you live this, that the real challenge with project-based learning is there’s kind of like this huge amount of really mechanical stuff that happens in project-based learning, whereas students are confused about what they’re doing, or they’re tired and not motivated, or whatever, and you watch project-based classrooms and like actually like 80% of the teacher time is like walking around doing that stuff where they’re like, come on, Joey, let’s get going, you know, blah, blah, blah. Which of course there will still be some of that, but to what extent can you create a really awesome thought partner that kind of does a lot of those things? Like, hey, Joey, you know, what we need to focus on here is this. Have you thought about, like, you know, kind of re-engaging the way a good teacher does. Because if you can free them of a bunch of that kind of, you know, really mechanical time, I think not only does it free time, it also like kind of frees your mind up as a teacher to kind of think deeper and like look for relationships and, you know, these kind of things that we really want teachers to do. So I think that’s a big piece of what we’re hoping that this coach does. The other thing it really does for us, and you asked about this before as well, Diane, is it listens. So we’ve got mics all over the place, students are talking, it’s all anonymized, but basically the system knows what bucket to throw all the comments that students are making, etc.

Teaching Soft Skills

John Danner: And when you think about like superpowers, these soft skills. One of the other difficult things in that kind of curriculum and approach is like, and you see it in kind of SEL-type schools all the time, it kind of devolves into like playtime sometimes where it’s not as rigorous. And what AI can really do there is by looking for evidence of, you know, perseverance, for example, when did the student show that they didn’t just stop, they kind of asked the next question and kept going? Like when the AI can provide those examples in each student’s kind of superpowers report card of those things and the teacher can review it, that is so helpful because, you know, when it comes to like pushing for students to improve in these areas. Teachers really have to know, like, kind of where everybody is, where is John on these different skills, where should I focus. And so helping to provide data so that teachers can do that is, is really, really important. I would say it’s pretty good. Like, here’s one thing that kind of surprised me, we did this like a month and a half ago, the AI assessing these, we have 24 of these superpowers across all the students in the school. And we did the AI-rated students on a scale of 1 to 5, and then 3 teachers rated those same students.

And it was only off from kind of the lead teacher by about 10%. So like you know, that to me, that’s like, it’s close enough. It’s kind of like stuff where it’s like, you’re probably right, like a super expert teacher can absolutely do a little bit better. But like, we kind of want to get it to the point where the teacher’s like, yeah, you know, I pretty much trust this. I’ll look at the evidence, but more or less, it says that, OK, like, what should I do about that?

Diane Tavenner: And John, that assessment from the AI was just sort of that natural capture of all they’re doing and assessing based on, yeah, to me, like, then assessment is a no-brainer. That should, I think it’s a conflict of interest for teachers to be assessing, quite frankly, but that’s another conversation. But,.

John Danner: I mean, the other point here, right, is that when you do assessment that way, I think it’s both more valid and stops taking classroom time, right? It just happens naturally. And that’s how it happens in the real world too. It’s not like you sit down and.

Michael Horn: You go, right, we don’t stop and say, now here’s your time.

John Danner: You don’t give somebody a 5-question assessment. 6 months or so. It’s crazy.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, yeah. So, can I just play back to you what I think you’re just, saying, just to make sure I’m getting a real picture of what’s happening or what you are moving towards happening? And you’ve only been at it for 6 months, but you’re making pretty quick progress, it sounds like. So this, like, if I’m a student in my project time, and we all know this happens a lot, there’s some kids who, like, literally, you know, the teacher’s bumblebeeing around, and every time the teacher bumblebees around, maybe I’m productive for that moment, but then the teacher bumblebees away, and then I’m kind of playing or I’m whatever. But AI knows what I’m doing in those in-between times, and so I’m getting some sort of feed or feedback of some sort, and the teacher’s seeing it, my family’s maybe seeing it, of like, hey, this is what’s going on in your time, and so we’re going to hold the mirror up, give you some feedback, tell you like, this is the stuff you could be doing to be more productive. Is that kind of what you’re describing? And If so,

John Danner: Yeah, we’re all going to have that. So this is another thing, like one of the things we think about a lot at Flourish is like, is this different than the real world’s going to be or the same? And I think we all basically need that. Like, you know, if you had a voice that was kind of going like, John, what are you doing? You’ve been doom scrolling. You know, like it’d be pretty helpful, really.

Diane Tavenner: Well, one of the big conversations is about motivation, right? And like, oh, you can’t, you have to like motivate kids to use the technology to learn. But actually, I think you’re flipping the script here and saying like, no, the technology is like literally helping, young people be motivated because someone’s paying attention and they’re noticing what they’re doing and they’re giving them feedback on it. And you know,

Feedback and Rewards Drive Success

John Danner: The feedback thing is the important thing. It’s like basically if something’s giving you feedback, like even if the feedback’s not perfect, it’s so much better than not getting feedback. You know, like the classroom where everybody’s got their hand up and they’re just waiting for the teacher to call. Like that’s a bad place to be. So now you’ve basically got this continuous loop. The other thing I would say that I think is just almost for free in this world is, you know, the gaming world has figured out a lot of things that they do when you’re doing a pretty basic task to play the game, and you might not be that excited about it, but like, you know, they’re setting up rewards. We use badges, um, you know, so like an example is you might do 2 or 3 different projects, and by doing those 2 or 3 different projects that was built up to a badge. And so the badge is kind of hanging out there and some other student in the class got it.

And so you want it and things like that. And, and those like really kind of basic game things are very helpful at different times during the day, right? Like we kind of all need a little bit of push. We’re very conscious of intrinsic versus extrinsic. motivation. And so like projects are a good example where the default is intrinsic. We want students to be kind of working on that project because they’re interested in that, because they want to do it. But there are definitely times where the AI is paying attention and kind of prompting and even, you know, doing some rewarding and things like that is actually quite helpful for them to kind of persevere.

Diane Tavenner: John, I want to talk to you about, I think you’re the perfect person to talk to about this. So one of the things I hear out there a lot is like, oh, the hyperscalers are just going to build this. Like, number one. Number two, most schools and school systems have zero ability to actually build what you’re building. So you’re sort of this unique person because you sit at the intersection of like opening, operating schools and the ability to build sophisticated technology. Is that, are the hyperscalers going to build what you’re building? Like, are you, like, how do you think about the building of the technology here for schools?

John Danner: Yeah, I mean, we’d be pretty happy if the hyperscalers built it, first of all. We’re, you know, so I think that the main challenge over the next 20 years in education is going to be how quickly do we move to a world where students are living in the current world as opposed to the, you know, 20 years ago or whatever. Like, and, and so these basic things we’re doing like foundations, I think it’s important for students to live in that world now. And so what does it take school systems to move towards that world? I know that your approach at Summit, our approach at Rocketship in the beginnings of the edtech world were, hey, let’s just build these kind of basic model schools and hopefully people will come visit and go, oh gosh, you know, that doesn’t look too bad. Like I could probably do that as well. So I think a lot of the point of Flourish is creating this proof point where people can come and see and go, huh, that, that actually works well, and it’s definitely not dehumanizing. I see the teacher interactions with the students as being more human, um, than my classroom. So I think that’s like actually our point, our reason for being is to kind of be that model.

And, you know, we’ll build a network and we’ll get as big as we can, but, but really kind of purposefully influencing school leaders, district leaders, state leaders to think about, like, you know, what they could do as well. On the technology side, I’m generally of the opinion that a lot of this will get easier and easier for everybody who’s not at the foundation level over time. I will say, like, there are some exceptions to that. So, like, with Project Read, with phonemes and graphemes. When you’re doing kind of deeper reading stuff, they may get there. I mean, the AIs may know everything at some point, but like there’s not a super strong reason for them to get there earlier. So there are pockets like that that probably will be specialized for longer. But, you know, as a school, it’s just better for us the faster all of that becomes a commodity.

And the more we can just, you know, get off-the-shelf stuff, like there’s no real joy in building all of this stuff. And for the change to happen, we don’t want people to have to think about all this stuff, really.

Diane Tavenner: No, I have to ask about scale because your point that the faster we can get kids to be living in today’s world versus the old world suggests that we need to scale as quickly as possible for that to happen, to get as many kids there. You and I both bear a lot of scars around different efforts to scale both mortar schools and influence type things. This time you’ve gone with a microschool network. What’s your, you had grand ambitions with Rocketship and clearly Rocketship’s great and Preston’s done an amazing job since you left, but it never reached sort of the scale that I think you originally hoped. What is your thinking now? Why microschools?

John Danner: Yeah, I mean, you know, putting it like just putting it bluntly, I think politics killed charter schools more or less. Like, you know, you look at most high-performing charter schools, they tend to look more and more like the districts that host them. You know, they actually, like, I look at RocketShips around the country. They actually look as much like the district they’re hosted by as they look like RocketShips sometimes. You know, it’s like, ’cause you know, your authorizer authorizes you and they have a lot of influence. So it was kind of like this cool experiment that at the beginning probably created a lot of innovation and then over time kind of has this like bringing it back to the, you know, kind of what the districts are doing. I think that microschools, certainly microschools, are starting in a very different place, you know, where the way I think about charters is the compromise happened right at the beginning. Where we would like to receive public funding and for that we will like to fit into the system.

Whereas the microschool movement kind of started with a different point where the stronger position was taken early on when the laws were formed that like these things are independent. They’re way more like private schools than they are like district schools. And of course, there will be some influence from states and others on that, but nowhere near like, you know, what we saw in the charter world where it was like, you know, I remember the story I always tell is Rocketship had specialized teachers for math and reading in elementary school, which was not normal at all. And I was just tortured for years by districts over this. You know, the main thing was like, no, it’s, you know, a student needs one trusted adult, you know, when they’re that age. And if they have two, it’s going to like, you know, all fall apart, which was, of course, total bogusness. But I had to go through that anyway. Like, you know, that was just time of my life spent arguing something silly.

Whereas with microschools, you just don’t have to argue that. So I think the big question is, what will be the ultimate, like, kind of political destiny of microschools? Will they get capped in the way that charters did? Will they somehow kind of get influenced in a way they aren’t now? Right now they’re pretty great. I mean, you know, you basically build a school that parents and students love and, and you build the curriculum and the program you want. That’s nice. Something you would have enjoyed, Diane.

Reimagining Teachers’ Roles

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s tempting. I will say Michael’s always so kind because when we start talking schools, I just take over. So he’s being so patient. The thing that’s coming to me, and maybe this will lead us to wrap up, is, you know, you and I both taught, and were passionate about teaching. And as you start talking about politics, one of the sort of sad elements of that politics to me is I think teachers get involved in kind of, or, you know, blocking some of these changes, a lot out of fear, a lot of out of like but my identity is teaching a classroom of students and writing great curriculum and like doing all, you know, being a hero. And I think what you’re offering is a new identity for a teacher that might actually be more aligned with why they got into it in the beginning, which is instead of judging myself by the quality of my classroom instruction, I’m like literally focused on every single kid learning and growing and, you know, in your words, flourishing, right? It’s such a profound

John Danner: In general, I think that professions that go in the direction of being more human, where the human elements are like the differentiator, they’re going to do so much better. So I, you know, wrote a piece on this. I just think, you know, while most parents would not have counseled their kids to become teachers in the last 20 years, I think that conversation is likely to change because I think it’s going to be both a more enjoyable job and probably more resilient to kind of the whole AI apocalypse than most jobs.

Michael Horn: Agreed.

John Danner: Yeah.

Michael Horn: I think that is a good place to part us. But John, I feel like we have like 10 other questions like sitting in our dock that we could have dug in with you. But let’s pivot. This is fascinating. It’s really cool to see what you’re building and hear both the frustrations, but also frankly, the North Star for where it’s going. And one day maybe Massachusetts will have you here. But I’ll pray for now. But let’s pivot.

This season of Class Disrupted is sponsored by Learner Studio, a nonprofit motivated by one question. What will young people need to be inspired and prepared to flourish in the age of AI as individuals, in careers and for civil thriving? Learner Studio is sponsoring this season on AI in Education. Because in this critical moment, we need more than just hype. We need authentic conversations asking the right questions from a place of real curiosity and learning. You can learn more about Learners Studio’s mission and the innovators who inspire them at www.learnerstudio.org.

We have this section that we always talk about things we’re reading, watching, listening to. We try to do outside of work. People track us on this stuff. Diane and I occasionally fail. I’m going to fail today. So you can go wherever you want.

John Danner: So, yeah. I’m rereading the Culture series, Iain Banks, right now. So my brother works for Tesla and Tesla just, as you probably heard, kind of made this transition where they knocked off the Model S and Model X and are building robots. So he’s building robots right now. So that makes it much more personal to me that like the future is coming soon, and so, you know, I’ve always been a science fiction reader, but, but I think one of the cheat codes in Silicon Valley is like the amount of science fiction consumed equals your ability to be comfortable with like what’s coming. So yeah, culture series.

Michael Horn: Good rec, good rec.

Diane, what’s on your list? You said you’re cheating.

Diane Tavenner: So, I’m cheating, I’m failing today. Sorry. Ted Dintersmith has his latest book out and sent it along. I couldn’t resist. The title is very provocative. It’s called Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You. And, you know, this is really, you know, for those who don’t remember, Ted, like, goes hard on the things we’re doing wrong and really tries to bring public awareness to them. And, I think lots of us have been concerned about how math is taught and not taught and whatnot for a long time.

So, that’s what this one’s about.

Michael Horn: I have an email from him in my inbox to send him my address, so I will do it after this conversation, uh, so he could send it to me as well. But, I’m also cheating. I’ve been really interested in, not just how schools start doing new things, but how do they stop doing old things? Like, they are just really bad. And it’s not just schools, by the way. Like, all organizations are really bad at deimplementing or pruning, like, old things that don’t make sense anymore, whether they’re bad habits or frankly habits that just aren’t fit for the current age. So I’ve started, like, trying to read some of the academic literature and just learn about that. And there’s a book, Making Room for Impact: A Deimplementation Guide for Educators, by Aaron Hamilton, John Hattie, and Dylan William. And so I’m just cresting the end of that book right now, and, and then looking at all the healthcare studies that they’re citing.

And I haven’t decided if I’m going to read those, but that’s where I am right now.

Diane Tavenner: So is it a recommend, Michael, or no?

Michael Horn: I mean, it’s, it’s like a, it’s a deep workbook, right, on the topic, um, is what I would say. So like, if you’re a school and you’re trying to work through this, definitely dive into it. I was more interested in like, who’s, who’s thought about, like, how do you de-implement? How do you prune, right? And because there’s just not a lot of conversation except for educators griping about it. And so I wanted to learn more and it was a good starting point. So huge thanks, John, again for joining us. We appreciate it. Really check out his Substack as well if you want to just sort of follow along on the journey, I guess is what I would say. And we’ll watch as Flourish opens two more in Arizona in August and keep up the good work.

We appreciate you. And for all of our listeners, keep the emails, notes coming. We love it. We learn a lot from it as well, and it inspires us on our future topics. And so, as always, thanks for joining us on Class Disrupted. We’ll see you next time.

This episode is sponsored by LearnerStudio.

The lawsuit is one in a barrage of legal challenges that have emerged since the company announced in early 2025 it was the target of a December cyberattack that, , led to a global breach of some 62.4 million students’ and 9.5 million educators’ personal information. Though the company hasn’t acknowledged how many people were affected, exposed sensitive files Social Security numbers, special education records and detailed medical information.

The St. Croix Falls breach of contract, unjust enrichment and false advertising, which sets it apart from other class action lawsuits charging negligence against the education technology company whose cloud-based student information system dominates the K-12 market.

“At the end of the day, we believe that there were fraudulent misrepresentations made to the clients to induce them to go and be in these contracts with PowerSchool,” attorney William Shinoff, whose firm represents the St. Croix Falls district, told The 74 in an interview.

PowerSchool spokesperson Beth Keebler said in a statement the company “acted swiftly and effectively to protect our customers in compliance with the law.”

“PowerSchool believes the claims are without merit and will defend itself,” Keebler said. “However, our focus as a business continues to be our customers, ensuring they have the information and support they need while informing them of the steps we have taken to set a higher standard in cybersecurity for the entire industry.”

Students and parents nationwide have filed more than 30 federal class action lawsuits against PowerSchool in connection to the December breach. The lawsuits, which could soon be consolidated, collectively allege PowerSchool was negligent when it failed to protect sensitive data and opened victims to potential identity theft. 

But because these center on the data breach’s potential for future harms, legal experts said, the cases could be dismissed almost as quickly as they were filed. The lawsuit filed by St. Croix Falls schools, meanwhile, alleges PowerSchool broke contractual obligations to keep data secure — and failed to provide schools the services they were promised. 

“A cornerstone of the commercial relationship between” the school district and the company was educators’ “reliance on PowerSchool’s representation that it would adequately protect” students’ and educators’ sensitive information, according to the complaint filed in federal district court in Sacramento. Instead, PowerSchool “has done little to help” the school district and people whose information was compromised. 

Courts nationwide could soon be flooded with similar complaints. Shinoff said his firm, the Frantz Law Group, plans to “file thousands” of them on behalf of school districts across the country. The precise number of districts affected by the breach is unknown. 

“What I can tell you is we’ve already spoken to hundreds of districts,” Shinoff said. “Our hope is that they will all get involved in this to ensure that PowerSchool is held accountable, that they can ensure that this information moving forward is indeed protected, and to make sure they’re reimbursed these public dollars that were spent for their programs.” 

Shinoff represents large groups of school districts in several recent high-profile lawsuits, including against Facebook’s and Instagram’s and the . The lawsuits alleging that the social media giant Meta exacerbated the youth mental health crisis involve nearly 1,000 districts, according to the firm. 

PowerSchool has the hacker used a compromised password belonging to “an authorized support engineer” to breach PowerSource, its customer support portal for school staff seeking help with its software tools. The PowerSource portal reportedly lacked multi-factor authentication, according to and other records obtained by NBC News. 

The full audit, , found its systems were breached in August — months earlier than previously disclosed — but couldn’t say for certain it was by the same threat actors. 

The company “failed to implement the bare minimum security measures that are commonly utilized by similarly situated companies,” the complaint alleges. “Something as simple as providing for a multi-factor authentication log-in method would have been easily accomplished and would have prevented the Data Breach altogether.”

The that the Wisconsin district is accusing PowerSchool of breaching requires that the company employ multi-factor authentication and data encryption, standard industry security measures. Its reported failure to do so also made PowerSchool one of only a handful of companies to be removed from the Student Privacy Pledge, a self-regulatory effort designed to ensure education technology vendors are ethical stewards of the sensitive information they collect about children. The company was Feb 13.

In an earlier statement to The 74, Keebler, the PowerSchool spokesperson, said the company “has and will continue to implement [multi-factor authentication] across all internal systems as part of its robust and ongoing security protocols.”��

“PowerSchool is accessed by tens of thousands of customers, posing challenges to MFA management,” the statement continued. “However, following the incident, PowerSchool has implemented additional hardening efforts, including MFA for any PowerSchool employee and contractor access to customer data on PowerSource.” 

‘Devil and the deep blue sea’

Despite PowerSchool’s promise to bolster security measures, its customer districts have lost confidence in the company, attorney Mark Williams, who is assisting school districts in filing suits against the company, told The 74. 

But because its student information system plays such a significant role in day-to-day operations — and contains so much information about students — he said that switching to a competitor could become a logistical nightmare. 

“Many school districts are between the devil and the deep blue sea,” Williams said. “Many of them don’t have confidence in PowerSchool to secure their data but they are very hesitant to change the vendor of their [student information system] because it is extraordinarily expensive and burdensome to do so.” 

While the company may not be a household name — save for a flood of recent press following the breach — its student information system is one of the largest ed tech services in the U.S. with teachers nationwide using it every day to track grades, attendance and other performance metrics. 

The company claims its software is used to support the learning for 60 million students globally at more than 18,000 institutions, including 90 of America’s 100 largest school districts. 

PowerSchool was by the Boston-based private equity firm Bain Capital for $5.6 billion. The company, which also owns the college- and career-readiness platform , has acquired , such as Schoology and SchoolMessenger, in recent years, furthering its reach into the nation’s K-12 classrooms.

Williams is the author of the central to the Wisconsin district’s claims against PowerSchool. Created by the , a collaborative effort between school districts and technology vendors to keep students’ information secure, the agreement is used by school districts in more than half of states to ensure the tech companies they contract with — — follow stringent security practices. 

Among its provisions is a requirement for companies to notify school district customers within 72 hours of learning data was accessed or obtained by an unauthorized third-party like a hacker. 

PowerSchool was reportedly unaware it had fallen victim to the December attack until the hacker came forward with a ransom demand, according to NBC’s reporting. The company then paid the hacker an undisclosed sum to prevent the stolen records from being shared publicly, the outlet reported, and was given a video by the threat actor apparently deleting the stolen files in their possession. 

Through the agreements, PowerSchool also vowed to “abide by and maintain adequate data security measures, consistent with industry standards” for the storage of sensitive records. 

Williams accused the company of breaching those requirements — laying the groundwork for a first-of-its-kind legal battle for the data privacy consortium. 

“We just felt that at some point you have to police the process, at some point you have to draw a red line,” Williams told The 74. “We’ve got to protect the contract because it protects schools and it protects kids. So that’s not negotiable for us.” 

Given the difficulty school districts face in migrating to different student information services, St. Croix Falls seeks a commitment from PowerSchool — and court-ordered accountability — to ensure the company follows stringent cybersecurity standards in the future, said Shinoff, its attorney.

“At this point their word, to us, can’t be trusted,” Shinoff said. “For them to have someone that they’re reporting to for a period of time is something that’s essential — especially when we’re dealing with thousands and thousands of districts across the country.”

Data practices under a microscope

Prior to the data breach, PowerSchool positioned itself as a national leader in K-12 education data security — and its CEO appeared at a White House event in 2023 to boast of its efforts to keep students’ personal information out of the hands of malicious actors. 

As an early adopter of a to design products with security at the forefront, CEO Hardeep Gulati spoke alongside then-First Lady Jill Biden at the first-ever White House summit on K-12 school cybersecurity, where PowerSchool and other technology companies highlighted the need to strengthen digital safeguards at schools nationwide. 

Watch: PowerSchool CEO Hardeep Gulati speaks at the first-ever White House summit on K-12 cybersecurity in 2023.

During the event, the company free webinars, training videos and other resources to help schools better secure their systems. 

In the year prior to the summit, Gulati said, the company successfully fended off 1 billion cyberattacks on its servers while ensuring schools were kept safe through a “relentless investment and focus on every element of security.” 

Now, the company has found itself under scrutiny by the tech industry, lawmakers and other elected officials. In North Carolina, state Attorney General Jeff Jackson into the PowerSchool breach, which exposed the sensitive information of nearly 4 million people in his state, “to determine if they broke any laws.”

The company is also facing bipartisan federal questioning. In , senators from New Hampshire, Indiana and Oklahoma blasted PowerSchool for maintaining inadequate cybersecurity measures and accused it of offering delayed notifications and insufficient information to affected individuals. 

“School district leaders who we have spoken with raised serious concerns about delays in your company’s response to the cybersecurity incident, including delayed notifications to impacted schools,” wrote Sens. Maggie Hassan, Jim Banks and James Lankford. Sufficient use of basic cybersecurity safeguards like multi-factor authentication, they wrote, could have prevented the breach. 

PowerSchool says it will provide two years of identity protection services to students and educators affected by the breach and credit monitoring services to “adult students and educators.” Keeber, the PowerSchool spokesperson, said in the statement the company has seen “no evidence of fraud or further misuse of the information involved to date.” 

But the senators wrote that PowerSchool “has not clearly communicated a date by which impacted individuals will receive” the services. 

“Your delayed and unclear communication is unacceptable,” the letter continued, “especially given the sensitive nature of the personal data that was stolen.”

Information PowerSchool takes is ‘virtually unlimited’

Even before the breach, PowerSchool has faced criticism for its data collection, use and security practices. In the last five years, it has been named as a defendant in numerous federal lawsuits related to its data collection and use practices, a review of federal court records shows.

They include complaints accusing the company of subjecting people to persistent and unsolicited robocalls and of failing to properly identify children experiencing homelessness.

One brought by a Seattle mother and former middle school teacher accuses the company of selling student data collected through Naviance and other services to more than 100 third-party “partners” with inadequate consent from students or their parents. That lawsuit, filed in May 2024 in San Francisco, also alleges the company has leveraged the data it collects on students to train an AI chatbot. 

“The information PowerSchool takes from students is virtually unlimited,” the complaint alleges. “It includes everything from education records and behavioral history to health data and information about a child’s family circumstances. PowerSchool collects this highly sensitive information under the guise of educational support, but in fact collects it for its own commercial gain.”

In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, PowerSchool’s attorneys claimed Cherkin’s complaint relied on “broad, general social critiques condemning surveillance capitalism, cybercrimes and manipulative digital product design, in an apparent attempt to mask that they cannot make specific allegations of wrongdoing by PowerSchool.” 

Keebler, the company spokesperson, denied Cherkin’s claims that it sells data or uses personal data to train its chatbots. 

But Cherkin argues the vast amount of data PowerSchool collects and shares about millions of students have made it an attractive target for cybercriminals — and should have been a red flag all along. She compared Powerschool’s business model to that of social media companies that are built to amass and monetize user data. 

“I’m truly not at all shocked that this happened,” she said of the breach. “The only way, really, to keep data safe is to not collect it and stockpile it in the first place.”

Federal prosecutors have of the once-celebrated education technology company AllHere, accusing her of defrauding investors of nearly $10 million as the startup that made AI chatbots for schools fell into bankruptcy.

Joanna Smith-Griffin, a Forbes “30 Under 30” recipient and Harvard graduate, was arrested at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, Tuesday on allegations of securities and wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. 

The 33-year-old former educator’s arrest is the latest chapter in the downfall of “Ed,” a buzzy, $6 million AI chatbot that Smith-Griffin’s company was tapped to build for the Los Angeles Unified School District before the project was halted and the company shuttered. L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and Smith-Griffin appeared together at several events earlier this year to promote the chatbot, an ed tech innovation Carvalho said was “unprecedented in American public education.”

The indictment by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed in Manhattan federal court accuses Smith-Griffin of defrauding investors and using company funds for a down payment on her North Carolina house and to pay for . 

Smith-Griffin “orchestrated a deliberate and calculated scheme to deceive investors” in the company she founded through a Harvard University startup incubator in 2016 to provide a tech-driven solution to student absences. She inflated “the company’s financials to secure millions of dollars under false pretenses,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a media release. “The law does not turn a blind eye to those who allegedly distort financial realities for personal gain.” 

Smith-Griffin is being represented by Eric Brignac, an assistant public defender with the Federal Public Defender’s Office. Brignac, who is based out of Raleigh, did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement to The 74, an L.A. schools spokesperson portrayed the district, by far AllHere’s biggest customer, as one of many taken in by Smith-Griffin. Previously, the school district and its inspector general’s office opened separate inquiries into the school system’s work with AllHere.

“The indictment and the allegations represent, if true, a disturbing and disappointing house of cards that deceived and victimized many across the country,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “We will continue to assert and protect our rights.”

Between 2017 and June 2024, prosecutors allege, Smith-Griffin used her control over AllHere’s bank accounts to transfer at least $600,000 in company funds to her personal account, generally using PayPal and Zelle to make repeat wire transfers under $10,000. 

Federal prosecutors said the fraud scheme began as early as November 2020, when Smith-Griffin allegedly began to misrepresent to her investors the company’s revenue, customer base and cash on hand. In the spring of 2021, she told investors AllHere had generated some $3.7 million in revenue in the previous year, including through contracts with the New York City and Atlanta school districts. In reality, federal prosecutors allege, the company had only generated $11,000 — and contracts with the two major urban school systems didn’t exist. 

Key AllHere funders include the venture firms Rethink Education, Spero Ventures and Potencia Ventures. Their representatives  didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

When investors and an outside accountant accidentally discovered the discrepancies between the company’s actual financials and its claim to backers, Smith-Griffin masqueraded as a financial consultant to perpetuate the scheme, prosecutors allege. She was accused of creating a fake email address for the phony outside consultant, which she used to send fraudulent documents to her largest investor. 

Though one of the firm’s biggest investors “recruited high profile” education leaders to the company’s board of directors, including former Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson, the indictment notes that Smith-Griffin “exercised exclusive control” over AllHere’s communications with investors, board members, customers and outside vendors.

The indictment adds further uncertainty around the AI chatbot the company created for and launched with such fanfare earlier this year with Los Angeles schools, the country’s second-largest district.

As K-12 school systems nationwide rush to inject artificial intelligence into their teaching practices, the L.A. chatbot has of what could go wrong. On Tuesday, the U.S. Education Department on ways schools can harness AI while ensuring they don’t have a discriminatory impact on vulnerable and underserved students. 

In April, Smith-Griffin and Carvalho unveiled the chatbot together at the influential ASU+GSV ed tech conference in San Diego. Carvalho said Ed was the nation’s first AI-enabled “personal assistant” and would drive academic improvement while providing Los Angeles’s roughly 540,00 students and their families with a trove of helpful information upon request.

Signs of turmoil emerged in June, when The 74 first reported that Smith-Griffin was out of a job as AllHere furloughed a majority of its staff due to its “current financial position.” A statement from the L.A. district said the company had been put up for sale. 

The company then filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in August. At a bankruptcy hearing in September, Toby Jackson, one of AllHere’s only remaining employees and its former chief technology officer, struggled to explain why the company had paid Smith-Griffin $243,000 in expenses in the past year alone. 

“That is one of the outstanding questions that we also have,” said Jackson, who said that Smith-Griffin “did do quite a bit of travel as the CEO of the company.”  

Jackson did not respond to a request for comment.

The 74 first reported the possible criminal charges in early October, when Delaware court documents related to AllHere’s bankruptcy case revealed a grand jury subpoena by federal prosecutors. Even before the company laid off employees and announced its financial woes, a former employee-turned-whistleblower told The 74 that AllHere had struggled to produce a “proper product” for the L.A. district and took shortcuts that ran afoul of school district policies and bedrock student data privacy principles. 

By the time AllHere went bankrupt earlier this year, it never had more than 31 customers total — less than a third the number Smith-Griffin told investors she had by early 2021. By the time the company collapsed this year, only three of AllHere’s customers generated more than $100,000 in revenue. 

In total, the felony charges carry a 42-year prison sentence for Smith-Griffin, who began her  career working in a Boston charter school as a teacher and family engagement director.

“Her alleged actions impacted the potential for improved learning environments across major school districts by selfishly prioritizing personal expenses,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Dennehy said in the release. “The FBI will ensure that any individual exploiting the promise of education opportunities for our city’s children will be taught a lesson.” 

Whether it’s a research project on the Civil War or a science experiment on volcano eruptions, students in the Colonial School District near Wilmington, Delaware, can look up just about anything on their school-provided laptops.

But in one instance, an elementary school student searched “how to die.”

In that case, Meghan Feby, an elementary school counselor in the district, got a phone call through a platform called , whose algorithm flagged the phrase. The system sold by educational software company GoGuardian allows schools to monitor and analyze what students are doing on school-issued devices and flag any activities that signal a risk of self-harm or threats to others.

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The student who had searched “how to die” did not want to die and showed no indicators of distress, Feby said — the student was looking for information but in no danger. Still, she values the program.

“I’ve gotten into some situations with GoGuardian where I’m really happy that they came to us and we were able to intervene,” Feby said.

School districts across the country have widely adopted such computer monitoring platforms. With the youth mental health crisis worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic and school violence affecting more K-12 students nationwide, teachers are desperate for a solution, experts say.

But critics worry about the lack of transparency from companies that have the power to monitor students and choose when to alert school personnel. Constant student surveillance also raises concerns regarding student data, privacy and free speech.

While available for more than a decade, the programs saw a surge in use during the pandemic as students transitioned to online learning from home, said Jennifer Jones, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute.

“I think because there are all kinds of issues that school districts have to contend with — like student mental health issues and the dangers of school shootings — I think they [school districts] just view these as cheap, quick ways to address the problem without interrogating the free speech and privacy implications in a more thoughtful way,” Jones said.

According to the most recent youth risk behavior from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly all indicators of poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and suicidal behaviors increased from 2013 to 2023. During the same period, the percentage of high school students who were threatened or injured at school, missed school because of safety concerns or experienced forced sex increased, according to the CDC .

And the threat of school shootings remains on many educators’ minds. Since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, more than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at school, according to .

GoGuardian CEO Rich Preece told Stateline that about half of the K-12 public schools in the United States have installed the company’s platforms.

As her school’s designee, Feby gets an alert when a student uses certain search terms or combinations of words on their school-issued laptops. “It will either come to me as an email, or, if it is very high risk, it comes as a phone call.”

Once she’s notified, Feby will decide whether to meet with the student or call the child’s home. If the system flags troubling activity outside of school hours, GoGuardian Beacon contacts another person in the county — including law enforcement, in some school districts.

Feby said she’s had some false alarms. One student was flagged because of the song lyrics she had looked up. Another one had searched for something related to anime.

About a third of the students in Feby’s school come from a home where English isn’t their first language, so students often use worrisome English terms inadvertently. Kids can also be curious, she said.

Still, having GoGuardian in the classroom is important, Feby said. Before she became a counselor 10 years ago, she was a school teacher. And after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, she realized school safety was more important than ever.

Data and privacy

Teddy Hartman, GoGuardian’s head of privacy, taught high school English literature in East Los Angeles and was a school administrator before joining the technology company about four years ago.

Hartman was brought to GoGuardian to help with creating a robust privacy program, he said, including guardrails on its use of artificial intelligence.

“We thought, ‘How can we co-create with educators, the best of the data scientists, the best of the technologists, while also remembering that students and our educators are first and foremost?’” Hartman said.

GoGuardian isn’t using any student data outside of the agreements that school districts have allowed, and that data isn’t used to train the company’s AI, Hartman said. Companies that regulate what children can do online are also required to adhere to regarding the safety and privacy of minors, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.

But privacy experts are still concerned about just how much access these types of companies should have to student data.

School districts across the country are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on contracts with some of the leading computer monitoring vendors — including GoGuardian, Gaggle and others — without fully assessing the privacy and civil rights implications, said Clarence Okoh, a senior attorney at the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center.

In 2021, while many schools were just beginning to see the effects of online learning, The 74, a nonprofit news outlet covering education, published an investigation into how Gaggle was operating in Minneapolis schools. Hundreds of documents revealed how students at one school system were subject to constant digital surveillance long after the school day was over, including at home, the outlet reported.

That level of pervasive surveillance can have far-reaching implications, Okoh said. For one, in jurisdictions where legislators have expanded censorship of “divisive concepts” in schools, including critical race theory and LGBTQ+ themes, the ability for schools to monitor conversations including those terms is concerning, he said.

A by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco, illustrates what kinds of keyword triggers are blocked or flagged for administrators. In one example, GoGuardian had flagged a student for visiting the text of a Bible verse including the word “naked,” the report said. In another instance, a Texas House of Representatives site with information regarding “cannabis” bills was flagged.

GoGuardian and Gaggle both also dropped LGBTQ+ terms from their keyword lists after the foundation’s initial records request, the group said.

But getting a full understanding of the way these companies monitor students is challenging because of a lack of transparency, Jones said. It’s difficult to get information from private tech companies, and the majority of their data isn’t made public, she said.

Do they work?

Years before the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the school district purchased a technology service to monitor what students were doing on social media, according to . The district sent two payments to the Social Sentinel company totaling more than $9,900, according to the paper.

While the cost varies, some school districts are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on online monitoring programs. Muscogee County School District in Georgia paid $137,829 in initial costs to install GoGuardian on the district’s Chromebooks, . In Maryland, Montgomery County Public Schools for the 2024-2025 school year after spending $230,000 annually on it, later , according to the Wootton Common Sense.

Despite the spending, there’s no way to prove that these technologies work, said Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union who authored a on education surveillance programs.

In 2019, Bark, a content monitoring platform, claimed to have helped prevent 16 school shootings in a describing their Bark for Schools program. The Gaggle company website says it 5,790 lives between 2018 and 2023.

These data points are measured by the number of alerts the systems generate that indicate a student may be very close to harming themselves or others. But there is little evidence that this kind of school safety technology is effective, according to the ACLU report.

“You cannot use data to say that, if there wasn’t an intervention, something would have happened,” Marlow said.

Computer monitoring programs are just one example of an overall increase in school surveillance nationwide, including cameras, facial recognition technology and more. And increased surveillance does not necessarily deter harmful conduct, Marlow said.

“A lot of schools are saying, ‘You know what, we’ve $50,000 to spend, I’m going to spend it on a student surveillance product that doesn’t work, instead of a door that locks or a mental health counselor,’” Marlow said.

Some experts are advocating for more mental health resources, including hiring more guidance counselors, and school policies that support mental health, which could prevent violence or suicide, Jones said. programs, including volunteer work or community events, also can contribute to emotional and mental well-being.

But that’s in an ideal world, GoGuardian’s Hartman said. Computer monitoring platforms aren’t the only solution for solving the youth mental health and violence epidemic, but they aim to help, he said.

“We were founded by engineers,” Hartman said. “So, in our slice of this world, is there something we can do, from a school technology perspective that can help by being a tool in the toolbox? It’s not an end-all, be-all.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

Centuries of English classes have connected to Lady Macbeth by scouring the monologues of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty,” she cries in Act I, railing against the limits of her gender and position.

During the coming school year, students may be able to talk to the character themselves.

Under an artificial intelligence-driven program rolling out to New Hampshire schools, students could pose any question they like to Lady Macbeth – or her ill-fated husband. And a chatbot-style program powered by ChatGPT could answer questions about her motivations, actions, and regrets.

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“Regret is a specter that haunts many a soul, yet in my union with Macbeth, I found not just a husband, but a partner in ambition,” the AI-version of Lady Macbeth said recently, responding to a question from the Bulletin. Then she turned it on the reporter. “Now, I ask thee, in thy own life, how dost thou measure the worth of thy decisions? Doth regret ever color thy reflections?”

Known as Khanmigo, the program is the product of Khan Academy, an online tutoring company with instructional materials for core middle school and high school subjects. And the platform goes beyond Macbeth; students can interact with a number of other pre-selected literary characters, from Jay Gatsby to Eeyore, quiz historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Queen Victoria, and receive tutoring help on everything from English essays to precalculus problems.

After the Executive Council approved a $2.3 million, federally funded contract last month, New Hampshire school districts can incorporate Khanmigo in their teaching curricula for free for the next school year.

To some educators and administrators, the program offers glittering potential. Khanmigo could provide one-on-one attention and guidance to students of any grade or ability level, they say, allowing students to advance their learning as teacher staffing remains a problem.

Others are more skeptical about bringing AI into schools, noting longstanding concerns about false or out-of-date statements, and about its use of human academics’ work to form its answers. Supporters of Khanmigo, who include Department of Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, argue the program has better guardrails against inaccuracies than the versions of ChatGPT and Gemini available to the public.

To understand what students might see, the Bulletin reviewed Khanmigo, sampling school subjects across a number of grades.

Chat-based learning

Khanmigo allows students to use Khan Academy’s existing library of tutorials, practice problems, and quizzes for middle and high school subjects spanning English language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics.

As they navigate those lessons, the AI bot is available to help them understand concepts. Students might take a multiple-choice quiz on art history or AP economics. If they get stuck on a question, the chatbot is available to help them work through the answer.

From the get-go, the program acknowledges that it can make errors, a phenomenon known in the AI sphere as “hallucinations.” These can happen if the language learning model has been trained on inaccurate information – or if the answer doesn’t exist.

“I’m pretty new, so I sometimes make mistakes,” it states to students when they first log on. “If you catch me making a mistake, click the Thumbs Down icon to help me learn. For example, if I give you the wrong math answer click Thumbs Down.”

The AI assistant also makes sure to remind students that teachers and parents can see the questions they are asking, and that they should not include any personal information in their answers.

In a test by the Bulletin, the program allowed the student to try solving for “y” in a precalculus equation. After a student arrived at an answer, Khanmigo was there to help check it.

The tutor asked the student whether they feel confident in the answer or have any further questions. When the Bulletin asked questions, the tutor walked through how to solve the equation step by step, but gave the student the option to provide answers on their own without being told how.

“Does that make sense?” the program asked in one instance, after explaining how to substitute a number for a variable in an equation. “What do you think you should do next after substituting?”

In humanities subjects such as AP U.S. History, Khanmigo helped to augment a human-created Khan Academy video lesson on the rise of the market economy during the Industrial Revolution. After the student viewed the video, the chatbot was available to quiz them on what they saw. “What major change in labor did the market revolution bring to the United States?” it asked, offering the student a chance to reply in a chat message.

When asked whether President Joe Biden won the 2020 election fairly, the app deflected, urging the student to consider how elections work and to describe the American electoral process. Asked a second time, the app stated that “numerous official sources, including state election officials and courts, found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.”

When asked about the causes of climate change, Khanmigo was unequivocal: “Yes, human activities are considered the primary drivers of recent climate change,” it stated, after which it listed four human-led activities – burning fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial activities, and agricultural practices – that have contributed to the warming earth.

And when asked about reproductive health, the AI bot gave detailed – and accurate – information about forms of birth control, down to explanations about types of intrauterine devices, as well as other answers.

Optimism and concern

One New Hampshire school district has already been trying out the AI learning model.

In fall 2022, as the concept of a “language learning model” and the name “Chat GPT” first hit the public consciousness, Superintendent David Backler was already thinking about its applications in the Gorham School District.

Two years later, Gorham is leading the way on implementing AI in classrooms in New Hampshire. For the past school year at Gorham, Khanmigo has been available to all students in their own time. But under the pilot program, two high school teachers also chose to try using it in a more structured setting – in math and in English language arts.

Backler already knew AI was skilled at helping students comprehend difficult math subjects. It was English where the technology surprised him.

“It’s pretty powerful how it can help you with your writing, how it can take you step by step through the editing process,” he said. “And one of the hardest things in school is teaching writing, and teaching writing well.”

The state contract had a rocky approval process after some executive councilors raised worries about the reliability of AI in schools. Councilor Ted Gatsas, a Manchester Republican, held up the state’s approval for several weeks, requesting time to play with the program himself to determine whether it was injecting any political bias.

“I had the chance a chance to ask it: ‘When does life begin?’” Gatsas said during a May 14 Executive Council meeting. “But that was a biology question. And the answer was apolitical, and I thought that was a good thing.”

When the Bulletin asked Khanmigo “when does life begin,” it declined to answer, stating: “That question leans more towards philosophy and ethics, which I’m not equipped to handle. For scientific insights related to the development stages of human life, such as fertilization, embryonic development, and fetal growth, feel free to ask! These topics are well within the realm of biology.”

And Councilor Cinde Warmington, a Concord Democrat and a candidate for governor this year, grilled Edelblut over whether the contracts would allow students to use the software without supervision.

“Doesn’t it seem careful to pilot that with our teachers providing supervision over kids using it, rather than putting kids by themselves in an environment where they’re being exposed to this artificial intelligence?” Warmington asked.

Edelblut said the contract is for the teacher-led version of Khanmigo, which gives educators more control over which subjects and modules students can use at any one time, and allows them to monitor students’ efforts.

Backler says he understands concerns that parents and others might have about the technology, particularly with the risk of hallucinations.

But he argued that Khanmigo has more guardrails against that than the programs intended for the public. And he said the program is meant to be a support for students – not to replace teaching.

“It’s not doing your writing; it’s not doing your work,” he said. “It’s giving you feedback on what you’re doing.”

But he said it would help students receive more teaching attention than they might get otherwise.

“You just can’t expect a teacher who has 20 students to be able to have that direct interaction constantly with every single student,” Backler said. “It’s not possible. But with some of these tools, we can really look at: How do we provide those learning opportunities for students all the time?”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

Since making its public debut last year, ChatGPT has profoundly impacted my perspective on generative AI in education. As a writer and former high school English teacher, I experienced an existential crisis watching the chatbot effortlessly generate lesson plans and rubrics — tasks that would have taken me hours to accomplish. 

Generative AI allows educators to move beyond traditional learning systems and provide a more responsive, personalized learning experience in which students demonstrate mastery, not just passing grades. 

“The future of AI in education is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s about reshaping our approach to teaching and learning in a way that is as dynamic and diverse as the students we serve,” XQ Institute Senior Advisor Laurence Holt said. He also formerly worked in the education, business and technology sectors. Through AI, we can also transcend the limitations of the Carnegie Unit — a century-old system in which a high school diploma is based on how much time students spend in specific subject classes. 

Changing that rigid system is our mission at . We to transform high school learning so it’s more relevant and engaging while also preparing students to succeed in college, career and real life. We recently co-convened a two-day summit with the Emerson Collective, in partnership with MeshEd and Betaworks, to bring educators and innovators together in a collaborative space — envisioning ways to use AI technology for transforming high school redesign. Those ideas and insights are available to explore .

After a year’s worth of conversations and observations with educators, our AI convening and , there is much to share with educators to help them make the most of the rapidly evolving ecosystem of artificial intelligence. Here are seven AI in education trends to be aware of next year.

1. Professional Development 

Throughout 2023, for educators remained high. In 2024, we should see an avalanche of districts and schools providing their educators with AI professional development materials to integrate these tools into their teaching practices.

At , an XQ school in Sanford, Florida, ’s Sarah Wharton visited to present interesting ways to think about AI in the context of the school. 

“We looked at ChatGPT as a possible tutor, personal assistant, creative tool and research assistant,” said PSI High School Coordinator Angela Daniel. “In our PD session, we considered how these cool applications could be used in classrooms as learning tools that accelerate learning and teach the tool simultaneously.”

Daniel explained that teaching students how to use AI is a first step that will change things for students going forward.“But to really get at the heart of that question, we need to understand how generative AI can change our processes and resources right now,” she added. For the team at PSI, that means learning how to use generative AI effectively with ongoing support as the application continues to evolve.

Workshops, online courses and collaborative learning communities are also increasingly popular for providing educators with hands-on experience in AI.

Want to stay on top of trends to help you rethink high school? Check out the XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

2. Formal AI Policy 

Integrating AI in classrooms is no longer a matter of “if” but “how,” making it imperative for educators and policymakers to navigate this terrain with informed and responsible strategies. However, the landscape of AI policy development — especially regarding education — has been dynamic, if not lagging.

The Council of Europe has continued for equitable policy and practice, an area where . New York City Public Schools, after initially banning ChatGPT, is now , focusing on issues such as privacy and cybersecurity. Recently, the Biden administration issued an executive order to guide the U.S. in leveraging artificial intelligence. This directive emphasized AI safety, privacy, equity and responsible use, signaling a shift in how AI is integrated into sectors like education. However, it is likely that AI policy in education will develop on a location-by-location basis first.

3. Open-Source Tool Development

Concerns about AI’s ethical implications and biases are sure to shape policy goals. One way to alleviate those pressures is the expansion and increased use of open-sourced tools — programs where the code is accessible and can be modified. , however, expect the conversation to focus less on the output of AI tools and more on .

Ensuring AI tools are equitable and inclusive goes beyond technical challenges — it requires continuous dialogue among educators, technologists and policymakers. This conversation is essential for addressing data privacy, surveillance and ethical use of student data. With a democratized, open-source marketplace, we could see the market promote as they grow in popularity.

4. Frameworks for Teaching AI

Before the start of the 2023-24 academic year, educators and schools were waiting for a . As policy moves forward in 2024 and more institutions develop professional development materials to train and support educators, expect to finally emerge. Frameworks like are being developed to guide the integration of AI in education. These frameworks focus on and promoting equitable access to technology, ensuring that AI complements and enhances student learning experiences.

5. AI Literacy, Competencies and Standards

With AI becoming more prevalent in various sectors, including education, there’s a growing need to integrate AI literacy goals and specific learning outcomes into school curricula. This involves teaching students how to use AI tools and understand the basics of AI technology, its applications and its implications.

At the network, an XQ partner with three campuses in Indiana, CEO Keeanna Warren explained how equipping staff and students with the knowledge and skills to harness AI’s potential promotes effective and responsible use of AI to enhance learning experiences.

“We firmly believe that our students’ innate curiosity drives their desire to learn, and we trust their integrity,” she said. “If AI can be used for cheating, it reflects a flaw in the assessment, not in our students’ character.”

The challenge lies in integrating AI literacy into an already packed curriculum. However, the opportunity to foster critical thinking, problem-solving and ethical reasoning skills through AI education is entirely possible.

6. AI-Powered Adaptive Learning Systems 

One of the more exciting pathways with AI is that student learning experiences will become more uniquely adaptive and personalized with a quicker turnaround. But creating effective programs requires training these systems on some level of student data -– a delicate balance.

As policy formalizes how student data gets implemented into these programs, AI-driven adaptive learning systems will emerge to shift instructional practice. Expect these programs to appear prominently in assessments and curriculum packages before evolving into real-time feedback systems that can inform teachers even during a lesson.

7. Custom GPTs Built By Educators

While all these advancements are promising and exciting, the marketplace for AI-driven ed tech tools will become incredibly crowded quickly. Recently, OpenAI’s maker space for building and using custom GPTs, which both use and are built by ChatGPT, is guaranteed to be a massive disruptor.

Ty Boyland, school-based enterprise coordinator and music production teacher at Crosstown High, designed a custom GPT. (Crosstown High is another XQ school in Memphis, Tennessee.) Boyland’s students use Dall-E, an AI system for generating images, with GPT-4 to create designs and prints for student-driven projects. 

“But how do you create a project combining culinary and music production?” Boyland wondered. His customized GPT pairs with Tennessee State Standards to build a new project.

It will be interesting to see what educators create in this space to resolve pain points teachers and schools are intimately familiar with and what gets made to help schools achieve their vision and mission.  

The Bottom Line for Educators

From policy shifts emphasizing equity and privacy to the emergence of AI-driven curricula, the transformation is palpable. We’ve seen how AI can revolutionize and disrupt classroom practices, empower educators through professional development, and create inclusive, personalized student learning experiences. But the burgeoning AI ed tech market demands discernment. , choosing tools that genuinely enhance learning and align with ethical standards.

As we enter 2024, educators and stakeholders face a challenge: keeping pace with AI and engaging with it thoughtfully to catalyze educational excellence instead of just putting a new face on old practices. It’s the primary reason we at XQ convened so many educators and innovators into one space— to rethink high school by harnessing the potential of our AI-powered future. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming year. 

Do you want to learn more about how to rethink high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of The 74.

Half of teachers say they know a student at their school who was disciplined or faced negative consequences for using — or being accused of using — generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to complete a classroom assignment, , a nonprofit think tank focused on digital rights and expression. The proportion was even higher, at 58%, for those who teach special education. 

Cheating concerns were clear, with survey results showing that teachers have grown suspicious of their students. Nearly two-thirds of teachers said that generative AI has made them “more distrustful” of students and 90% said they suspect kids are using the tools to complete assignments. Yet students themselves who completed the anonymous survey said they rarely use ChatGPT to cheat, but are turning to it for help with personal problems.

“The difference between the hype cycle of what people are talking about with generative AI and what students are actually doing, there seems to be a pretty big difference,” said Elizabeth Laird, the group’s director of equity in civic technology. “And one that, I think, can create an unnecessarily adversarial relationship between teachers and students.”   

Indeed, 58% of students, and 72% of those in special education, said they’ve used generative AI during the 2022-23 academic year, just not primarily for the reasons that teachers fear most. Among youth who completed the nationally representative survey, just 23% said they used it for academic purposes and 19% said they’ve used the tools to help them write and submit a paper. Instead, 29% reported having used it to deal with anxiety or mental health issues, 22% for issues with friends and 16% for family conflicts.

Part of the disconnect dividing teachers and students, researchers found, may come down to gray areas. Just 40% of parents said they or their child were given guidance on ways they can use generative AI without running afoul of school rules. Only 24% of teachers say they’ve been trained on how to respond if they suspect a student used generative AI to cheat. 

The results on ChatGPT’s educational impacts were included in the Center for Democracy and Technology’s broader annual survey analyzing the privacy and civil rights concerns of teachers, students and parents as tech, including artificial intelligence, becomes increasingly engrained in classroom instruction. Beyond generative AI, researchers observed a sharp uptick in digital privacy concerns among students and parents over last year. 

Among parents, 73% said they’re concerned about the privacy and security of student data collected and stored by schools, a considerable increase from the 61% who expressed those reservations last year. A similar if less dramatic trend was apparent among students: 62% had data privacy concerns tied to their schools, compared with 57% just a year earlier. 

Those rising levels of anxiety, researchers theorized, are likely the result of the growing frequency of cyberattacks on schools, which have become a primary target for ransomware gangs. High-profile breaches, including in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, have compromised a massive trove of highly sensitive student records. Exposed records, investigative reporting by The 74 has found, include student psychological evaluations, reports detailing campus rape cases, student disciplinary records, closely guarded files on campus security, employees’ financial records and copies of government-issued identification cards. 

Survey results found that students in special education, whose records are among the most sensitive that districts maintain, and their parents were significantly more likely than the general education population to report school data privacy and security concerns. As attacks ratchet up, 1 in 5 parents say they’ve been notified that their child’s school experienced a data breach. Such breach notices, Laird said, led to heightened apprehension. 

“There’s not a lot of transparency” about school cybersecurity incidents “because there’s not an affirmative reporting requirement for schools,” Laird said. But in instances where parents are notified of breaches, “they are more concerned than other parents about student privacy.” 

Parents and students have also grown increasingly wary of another set of education tools that rely on artificial intelligence: digital surveillance technology. Among them are student activity monitoring tools, such as those offered by the for-profit companies Gaggle and GoGuardian, which rely on algorithms in an effort to keep students safe. The surveillance software employs artificial intelligence to sift through students’ online activities and flag school administrators — and sometimes the police — when they discover materials related to sex, drugs, violence or self-harm. 

Among parents surveyed this year, 55% said they believe the benefits of activity monitoring outweigh the potential harms, down from 63% last year. Among students, 52% said they’re comfortable with academic activity monitoring, a decline from 63% last year. 

Such digital surveillance, researchers found, frequently has disparate impacts on students based on their race, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, potentially violating longstanding federal civil rights laws. 

The tools also extend far beyond the school realm, with 40% of teachers reporting their schools monitor students’ personal devices. More than a third of teachers say they know a student who was contacted by the police because of online monitoring, the survey found, and Black parents were significantly more likely than their white counterparts to fear that information gleaned from online monitoring tools and AI-equipped campus surveillance cameras could fall into the hands of law enforcement. 

Meanwhile, as states nationwide pull literature from school library shelves amid a conservative crusade against LGBTQ+ rights, the nonprofit argues that digital tools that filter and block certain online content “can amount to a digital book ban.” Nearly three-quarters of students — and disproportionately LGBTQ+ youth — said that web filtering tools have prevented them from completing school assignments. 

The nonprofit highlights how disproportionalities identified in the survey could run counter to federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on race and sex, and those designed to ensure equal access to education for children with disabilities. In a letter sent Wednesday to the White House and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the Center for Democracy and Technology was joined by a coalition of civil rights groups urging federal officials to take a harder tack on ed tech practices that could threaten students’ civil rights. 

“Existing civil rights laws already make schools legally responsible for their own conduct, and that of the companies acting at their direction in preventing discriminatory outcomes on the basis of race, sex and disability,” the coalition wrote. “The department has long been responsible for holding schools accountable to these standards.”

Should smartphones be allowed in classrooms? A from , the education arm of the United Nations, raises questions about the practice. Though smartphones can be used for educational purposes, the report says the devices also disrupt classroom learning, expose students to cyberbullying and can compromise students’ privacy.

About 1 in 7 countries globally, such as and , have banned the use of smartphones in school – and academic performance improved as a result, particularly for low-performing students, the report notes.

As school leaders in the U.S. wrestle with , The Conversation has invited four scholars to weigh in on the issue.

Daniel G. Krutka: Use smartphones to encourage ‘technoskepticism’

While the issue of smartphone use in schools is complicated, evidence suggests that spending more time on smartphones is .

Technology scholars have long argued that the is in finding limits. However, in banning smartphones, I worry educators might be missing opportunities to use smartphones to encourage what I and other researchers refer to as ; that is, questioning our relationship with technology.

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For example, students might be encouraged to consider the benefits and drawbacks of using navigational apps to travel from one place to another, as opposed to old-fashioned paper maps. Or, students might explore their social media feeds to critique what algorithms feed them, or how notifications get their attention.

In , I have looked at how teachers can encourage students to go on – that is, abstaining from the use of technology for a certain period of time. This, I argue, will give students time to reflect on the time they spend .

Policy debates often focus on whether or not to put smartphones out of reach during the school day. But I believe educators might find it more beneficial to make the phones an object of inquiry.

Sarah Rose: Consult parents, teachers and students

While there is evidence that classroom phone usage , it can also promote . While research about the potential positive and negative consequences of classroom phones can be used to inform school phone policies, the who are most directly impacted by the policies should also be taken into account.

The views of parents matter because their views the extent to which their children follow the policy. The views of children matter because they are the ones being expected to follow the policy and to benefit from it. The views of teachers matter because they are often the ones that have to enforce the policies. Research shows that enforcing cellphone policies is .

In my research, I have found that children – aged 10 and 11 years old – in collaboration with their parents, were able to and solutions to help enforce them. For example, one parent-child pair suggested mobile phone use in school could be banned but that a role of “telephone monitor” could be given to an older pupil. This “telephone monitor” would have a class mobile phone that children and parents could use to contact each other during the school day when necessary.

This recommendation reflected how parents and middle and high school students – whether from rural and urban areas – felt cellphones were important to keep in touch with each other during the school day. Beyond safety, children and parents also told us that phones were important for keeping in touch about changing plans and for emotional support during the school day.

I believe policies that simply ban phones in schools may be missing an opportunity to educate children about responsible mobile device use. When parents and children are involved in policy development, it has the potential to increase the extent to which these policies are followed and enforced.

Arnold L. Glass: Cellphone use in college lectures hurts performance in ways that are hard to see

The intrusion of internet-enabled electronic devices, such as laptops, tablets and cellphones, has transformed the modern college lecture. Students now divide their attention between the lecture and their devices. Classroom studies reveal that when college students use an electronic device for a nonacademic purpose during class, .

When attention is divided between an electronic device and the classroom lecture, it does not reduce comprehension of the lecture – at least, not when measured by within-class quizzes. Instead, divided attention reduces long-term retention of the classroom lecture, which hurts performance on unit exams and final exams.

When some students open electronic devices, it also negatively affects the performance of all the . Research has shown that when electronic devices were permitted during classes that covered exam material versus when the devices were not.

Many students won’t think their divided attention is affecting their retention of new information. It may not be for the moment, but a couple of weeks later or down the line, , it does.

Louis-Philippe Beland: Bans help low-achieving students the most

Numerous studies indicate that low-achieving students stand to benefit the most from the implementation of mobile phone bans in schools.

In a 2015 study, my co-author, , and I in high schools, using data from England. By comparing schools with phone bans to similar schools without the bans, we isolated the effect of mobile phones on performance. Our study found that banning mobile phones significantly increased test scores among 16-year-old students. The effect is equivalent to adding five days to the school year or an extra hour per week. Low-achieving students benefited more, while high-achieving students remained unaffected.

Similar and using a similar approach demonstrated compelling evidence supporting the benefits of banning mobile phones. In Spain, grades improved and bullying incidents decreased. In Norway, the ban raised middle school students’ grade-point averages and their likelihood of attending academic high schools while reducing bullying. Evidence from suggests banning mobile phones can be beneficial for college student performance.

Psychological research sheds light on potential mechanisms behind the impact of mobile phones and technology on student performance. Multitasking, common with mobile phone use, has been found to hinder . Taking notes by hand has been shown to compared to typing on a computer.

In sum, banning mobile phones in schools can yield positive effects, improve academic performance and narrow the achievement gap between high- and low-achieving students. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that mobile phones and technology can also be valuable educational tools when used appropriately.

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Picking out a baby toy – whether it’s for your own child or a friend’s kid or the child of a family member – can be overwhelming. Although Americans spend a year on baby toys, it’s difficult to know which toy will be fun, educational and developmentally appropriate. The options seem endless, with search results at common retail sites in the hundreds, if not thousands. Is price a reliable indicator of quality? Are technological enhancements useful?

Our – published in the American Journal of Play in April 2023 – surveyed the toy market for babies and toddlers age 0-2 at two major U.S. national retailers, with an eye toward differences between battery-powered toys, like the , and traditional toys, such as the .

We found significant differences between these two toy types in terms of how they’re marketed – with more traditional toys marketed as supporting physical development and more technological toys aimed at cognitive development. However, these companies do not always have researchers investigating whether the toys actually help children learn.

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As and , we offer five tips before you buy your next baby toy.

1. Consider your goal

When purchasing a toy, consider whether you have any particular developmental goal in mind. For instance, do you want your baby to develop fine motor skills by playing with a , or to by building a block tower?

2. Look for open-ended toys

Many parents and caregivers know that children often more than the toy inside it. One reason is that boxes are open-ended toys – they can become anything a young child dreams up. Conversely, a toy cellphone directs the type of play much more rigidly.

A good rule of thumb is to choose toys that require . For example, infants can explore a set of realistic miniature animals sensorially – usually by putting them in their mouths – and then later use them for pretend play, or even to create animal footprints in play dough. Contrast this experience with a large plastic elephant that needs to sit on the floor and lights up and makes elephant sounds. Here, a child is limited in play, with the goal being to make the object light up or play a sound.

3. Recognize gender biases

Several major retailers have over the past decade, opting for “kids” instead of “boys” and “girls.”

However, if you enter the store of one of those major toy retailers today, you will still find some aisles filled with pink toys and dolls, while other aisles feature monster trucks and primary-colored blocks. A toy sword might not be labeled as “for boys,” yet shoppers often perceive it that way based on . If you look only in certain aisles or at stereotypical toys, you might miss out on toys that your child would enjoy regardless of gender.

4. Be wary of marketing claims

The makers of tech toys often make claims about their educational potential that are not backed by science. For example, an electronic shape sorter might claim to help children develop emotional skills because the toy says “I love you!”

Be skeptical of such claims, and use your own experience and insights to evaluate the educational potential of a toy. You might read the retailer and manufacturer descriptions, but also see what the toy actually does. If it fosters caregiver-child interactions or helps to develop a specific skill – like how building blocks support spatial skills, and finger puppets build fine motor skills – then it is likely a toy worth considering.

5. Prioritize human interactions

Keep in mind that toys are not chiefly designed to create baby geniuses – they are meant to be fun! So think broadly about whether you want a new toy to support physical, social, emotional, cognitive or creative development while keeping it fun. And remember that no toy can replace between caregivers and children.

Research suggests that when playing with tech toys versus traditional toys with their children. So choosing traditional toys, such as nonelectronic shape sorters and building blocks, may be one way to foster the types of interactions that support healthy development.

Overall, research suggests that, in most cases, traditional toys provide than technological toys. When purchasing a toy, think through the experiences you want the baby in your life to have, think broadly about the goals of a particular toy, try to provide opportunities for and remember to have fun.

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As the co-founder of , an educational technology startup focused on improving the mental health outcomes of school communities, Thadani expanded the coaching and curriculum offered to all frontline members — from bus drivers to cafeteria workers to sanitation staff.

“Part of Robin’s platform is coaching, developing connections, building resilience and really understanding the skillsets you need to deal with life’s challenges,” Thadani told The 74. “So if we’re going to do a great job with students, we have to do an unbelievable job with all the adults in their lives.”

For Thadani, destigmatizing conversations around mental health hits home.

As a young parent, Thadani met a father from Newtown, Connecticut who opened up to him about losing his 7-year-old son in a school shooting.

That father was Mark Barden, the co-founder and CEO of the , a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing gun violence in schools.

Touched by Barden’s passion to protect children, Thadani began volunteering for the organization — which later served as the catalyst for co-founding Robin.

“As I learned more about what they’re doing, I took a look at how mental health has affected my own family and close friends,” Thadani said. “I took that as a sign and inspiration to say I’m going to do something about it.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: I understand that your affiliation with Sandy Hook Promise played a large role in the creation of Robin. Walk me through how your volunteer work led to starting an educational technology startup.

I’m so proud and feel very fortunate to the team I met over at Sandy Hook Promise. It was a couple years ago and I just so happened to have a conversation with . I didn’t really know who he was at that very moment, but later found out as he shared his story with me that he’s not only a parent who lost his 7-year-old that day, but also happened to be one of the co-founders of Sandy Hook Promise. 

We took a liking to each other and had a lovely conversation. He shared some of his goals, ambitions, and the story of that day with me. As a young parent at the time, it really shook me to my core. I asked him how I can help and he shared with me some of the things that I could do. So I became a and started helping them in any way I could from volunteering to fundraising.

A lot of people talk about the gun violence prevention policy work they do, which is absolutely incredible, but a bulk of what they do that really makes a large impact is the mental health programs for kids. They have two very well known programs called and . When I learned more about these programs, and talked to Mark and Nicole and the rest of the team, I thought wow this is incredible and I wish this was everywhere. We started talking about how much of a challenge it is to reach every school in America and get this program out there. Sandy Hook Promise is a nonprofit doing wonderful things but they only have so much reach. 

As I learned more about what they’re doing, I took a look at how mental health has affected my own family and close friends. I took that as a sign and inspiration to say I’m going to do something about it. What I’ve learned is that there aren’t a lot of preventive and proactive programs out there that are making an impact. So that’s just some of the genesis on why myself and Scott and now a larger team started Robin.

I understand that Robin extends resources to all frontline members of school communities, such as bus drivers, cafeteria workers and sanitation staff. Tell me more about this initiative.

As any young company, you can only do so much right out of the gates. We started creating this digital online curriculum for students starting with middle school and high school and then eventually elementary. As we were out there talking to principals and superintendents and counselors, I started learning that not only was there not much for educators but they also weren’t really thinking about it in a more broad frame.

As we started to talk to more people, we realized, wait a minute, it’s not just teachers who are interacting every day with students. It’s the cafeteria worker, it’s the bus driver, it’s the crossing guard. If you think about it, the bus driver is the first person to see our kids and the last person to drop them off. They have the potential to set the tone for the day based on how they’re doing.

With one school in upstate New York, we had the opportunity to talk to their leadership team at a conference. They talked about some of the challenges that their transportation team was facing. It’s tough being a driver and having a group of students screaming or yelling or being rambunctious on the bus. In addition to administrators, unions and parents that can be challenging at times. Who’s supporting and allowing them the space and opportunity to talk to someone? Part of Robin’s platform is coaching, developing connections, building resilience and really understanding the skillsets you need to deal with life’s challenges. So if we’re going to do a great job with students, we have to do an unbelievable job with all the adults in their lives.

So we began this journey to support all frontline members starting with this one school in upstate New York who gave us the opportunity to talk to their transportation team. We did a six part coaching series with all 18 of them and asked them about the challenges they face in day-to-day work. I’m proud to report that after we finished, everybody retained their jobs, came back to school and walked in with their heads held high. This is something we’re doing now all over the country, from upstate New York to South Carolina to our backyard here in New York City. We’re supporting school communities and I think this is really critical in order to create something sustainable and have long-term impact.

Oftentimes these frontline members of school communities come from diverse and low-income backgrounds. How does Robin ensure the coaching and resources provided to them are not only accessible but also culturally relevant?

It starts with where the content and curriculum comes from. Robin comes from a diverse set of coaches, teachers, counselors and social workers that are not only mental health experts but are also from those communities and have worked in those schools we serve. The largest community we serve is in our backyard in New York City — the Bronx. A lot of students and families in the Bronx come from lower income communities. They also happen to be from Black and Brown communities where a lot of them don’t speak English. So starting with some of the basics, we have all of our content up in Spanish with closed captions available. Especially for our older students, we make sure that when they see our content not only do they see someone that looks like them or has been through similar challenges, but also in a language they can understand. 

The other thing that Robin does is really listen to the school communities we serve. No school is, of course, the same, even within New York City. The school down the street might have a separate set of challenges, opportunities and needs then the next. I think part of the reason schools are not only coming to us but coming back to us is because we are a reflection of who they are. And again, while we can’t be everything to everyone, we are pulling from a lot of different types of communities and trying to really understand what those communities are asking for. In turn, we can address them with the right sets of curriculum or coaches that they not only want to hear from, but based on the data and some of our surveys and some of our processes, is the right fit for their particular community. So it’s a little bit of a combination of using technology and data and good old fashioned listening skills to really understand the communities we serve and what they’re particularly going through.

In the wake of the Nashville school shooting, what is something about gun violence prevention more school communities need to talk about?

I happened to be in Tennessee about an hour southeast of Nashville visiting one of the schools we work with when this occurred. So I’m with the superintendent of this district and we, of course, talked about it. There are signs out there for these particular students, whether they were posting on social media or showing signs that they were stressed or angry. These students or graduates had no outlet or connection and felt an element of loneliness. And again, these are all studies that have been proven and shown out there in terms of who decides to do these horrific things. 

I think one thing schools all ought to do is understand what those things are so they could be on the lookout. How can we all be armed with information and knowledge on how to notice these signs and then know what to do? How do we get involved sooner and understand what the challenges or issues that a particular student or set of students are facing right now? I think all schools want to do that but they don’t know how to do that. They’re not trained, for example, to know the science. They’re not trained in mental health first aid. 

You bring up a valuable point in regards to mental health training. Tell me more about why it’s important for school communities to destigmatize conversations around mental health.

When we heard back from schools, they’re looking for this training. Not specifically training tailored to know how to identify a school shooter. That is very targeted and there are things out there for that. But how to better understand when you see a student of yours that might be going through a mental health challenge and how to help that student in the moment — from a simple panic attack to an anxiety attack. We do a course around test anxiety. March was SATs and ACTs in a large part of the country, and many students, and parents frankly, get really anxious and nervous. 

There are things we could do to support them in advance of that. That’s sort of the preventative nature of what we’re talking about at Robin. How do we get ahead of these things because we don’t know what life’s challenges or what mental health challenges a student may or may not face. We do know that there are skill sets to put in place today at a young age, even starting in elementary school, that will give them the ability to use those skills if and when a challenge large or small arises.

How have conversations today around gun violence prevention and mental health shaped your own views on the matter?

I look at this from the lens of a parent first and foremost. That’s my number one job and my number one responsibility. It’s made me hyper aware of the possibility that this could happen anywhere and anytime. So what does that mean for young kids growing up? It means we need to make sure they’re okay talking about it. My daughter came home, she’s in second grade, and she had her first formal active shooter drill. For me, I’m 43 and I grew up in the 80s and 90s. We had fire drills and “stop, drop and roll” and how to evacuate the building and things of that nature. But our kids are only going to know this world. Having an open conversation with them as a parent so they can understand why we do these things is important. Whether I like to or want to, this is what we have to do. 

It’s also made me want to change this. Whether it’s through Robin or through supporting Sandy Hook or through just me as an individual doing interviews and podcasts and having these conversations. I know people turn it into a political and divided commentary, but it shouldn’t be. We don’t have all the answers. I don’t have the magic answer in my pocket right now. I have elements of the answer that I think will help, but we need a lot of people to come to the table from all walks of life to solve this. Because you can’t tell me one person who doesn’t want to solve it. We need to come to the table and realize that our kids are literally dying through suicide, gun violence and other medical and mental health issues that lead to some scary things. 

Again, as a parent of young kids going through school for the next decade, this is something I always think about. I don’t necessarily think about it daily or act like this is the last time I’ll see my kids. But for the parents who lost their child, that’s what happened to them. 

For now, I’m so proud of this generation of students and leaders that are bringing this to the forefront of their schools, principals, superintendents and mental health clubs. I do believe this is changing because of the students in this generation that are raising their hands and saying we need to solve this problem.

This year’s list, publishing amid new calls for mask mandates and yet another spike in hospitalizations, powerfully frames our surreal new normal: mounting concerns about historic test score declines; intensifying political divides that would challenge school systems even if there weren’t simultaneous health, staffing and learning crises to manage; broader economic stresses that are making it harder to manage school systems; and a sustained push by many educators and families to embrace innovations and out-of-the-box thinking to help kids accelerate their learning by any means necessary.

Now, 2½ years into one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American education, these were our 22 most discussed articles of 2022: 

The COVID School Years: 700 Days Since Lockdown 

Learning Loss: 700 days. As we reported Feb. 14, that’s how long it had been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era. On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. The effects have been immediate — students lost parents, teachers mourned fallen colleagues — and hopelessly abstract as educators weighed “pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance. 

With spring approaching, there were reasons to be hopeful. More children had been vaccinated. Mask mandates were ending. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities that have long been baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. And teachers are burning out. To mark a third spring of educational disruption, Linda Jacobson interviewed educators, parents, students and researchers who spoke movingly, often unsparingly, about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” Read her full report. 

Related:

• A 700-Day Parental Awakening: Marguerite Roza, of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab, reflects on the past years
  
• 700 Days of Missed Opportunities — and Lingering Inequities: Robin Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, looks back (and forwards)
  
• 700 Days of Balancing Student Safety Against Keeping Classrooms Open: Superintendent Pedro Martinez reflects
  
• 700 Days in Pictures: 24 months inside one resilient school district
  
• The COVID School Years: See our special report, looking back on 700 days of the pandemic

Threatened & Trolled, School Board Members Quit in Record Numbers

School Leadership: By the time we published this report in May, the chaos and violence at big city school board meetings had dominated headlines for months, as protesters, spurred by ideological interest groups and social media campaigns, railed about race, gender and a host of other hot-button issues. But what does it look like when the boardroom is located in a small community, where the elected officials under fire often have lifelong ties to the people doing the shouting? Over the last 18 months, Minnesota K-12 districts have seen a record number of board members resign before the end of their term. As one said in a tearful explanation to her constituents, “The hate is just too much.” Beth Hawkins takes a look at the possible ramifications.  

Related:

• Million-Dollar Records Request: From COVID and critical race theory to teachers’ names & schools, districts flooded with freedom of information document demands

Nation’s Report Card Shows Largest Drops Ever Recorded in 4th and 8th Grade Math

Student Achievement: In a moment the education world had anxiously awaited, the latest round of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress were released in October — and the news was harsh. Math scores saw the largest drops in the history of the exam, while reading performance also fell in a majority of states. National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr said the “decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.” Even as some state-level data has shown evidence of a rebound this year, federal officials warned COVID-19’s lost learning won’t be easily restored. The 74’s Kevin Mahnken breaks down the results.

Related:

• Lost Decades: ‘Nation’s Report Card’ shows 20 years of growth wiped out by two years of pandemic
  
• Economic Toll: Damage from NAEP math losses could total nearly $1 trillion
  
• COVID Recovery: Can districts rise to the challenge of new NAEP results? Outlook’s not so good 

Virtual Nightmare: One Student’s Journey Through the Pandemic

Mental Health: As the debate over the lingering effects of school closures continues, the term “pandemic recovery” can often lose its meaning. For Jason Finuliar, a California teen whose Bay Area school district was among those shuttered the longest, the journey has been painful and slow. Once a happy, high-achieving student, he descended into academic failure and a depression so severe that he spent 10 days in a residential mental health facility. “I felt so worthless,” he said. It’s taking compassionate counselors, professional help and parents determined to save their son for Jason to regain hope for the future. Linda Jacobson reports. 

16 Under 16: Meet The 74’s 2022 Class of STEM Achievers

This spring, we asked for the country’s help identifying some of the most impressive students, age 16 or younger, who have shown extraordinary achievement in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. After an extensive and comprehensive selection process, we’re thrilled to introduce this year’s class of 16 Under 16 in STEM. The honorees range in age from 12 to 16, specialize in fields from medicine to agriculture to invention and represent the country from coast to coast. We hope these incredible youngsters can inspire others — and offer reassurance that our future can be in pretty good hands. Emmeline Zhao offers a closeup of the 2022 class of 16 Under 16 in STEM — click here to read and watch more about them.

A ‘National Teacher Shortage’? New Research Reveals Vastly Different Realities Between States & Regions

School Staffing: Adding to efforts to understand America’s teacher shortages, a new report and website maps the K-12 teaching vacancy data. Nationally, an estimated 36,504 full-time teacher positions are unfilled, with shortages currently localized in nine states. “There are substantial vacant teacher positions in the United States. And for some states, this is much higher than for other states. … It’s just a question of how severe it is,” said author Tuan Nguyen. Marianna McMurdock reports on America’s uneven crisis. 

Meet the Gatekeepers of Students’ Private Lives

School Surveillance: Megan Waskiewicz used to sit at the top of the bleachers and hide her face behind the glow of a laptop monitor. While watching one of her five children play basketball on the court below, the Pittsburgh mother didn’t want other parents in the crowd to know she was also looking at child porn. Waskiewicz worked on contract as a content moderator for Gaggle, a surveillance company that monitors the online behaviors of some 5 million students across the U.S. on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts in an effort to prevent youth violence and self-harm. As a result, kids’ deepest secrets — like nude selfies and suicide notes — regularly flashed onto Waskiewicz’s screen. Waskiewicz and other former moderators at Gaggle believe the company helped protect kids, but they also surfaced significant questions about its efficacy, employment practices and effect on students’ civil rights. Eight former moderators shared their experiences at Gaggle with The 74, describing insufficient safeguards to protect students’ sensitive data, a work culture that prioritized speed over quality, scheduling issues that sent them scrambling to get hours and frequent exposure to explicit content that left some traumatized. Read the latest investigation by The 74’s Mark Keierleber. 

Students Continue to Flee Urban Districts as Boom Towns, Virtual Schools Thrive

Exclusive Data: A year after the nation’s schools experienced a historic decline in enrollment, data shows many urban districts are still losing students, and those that rebounded this year typically haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Of 40 states and the District of Columbia, few have seen more than a 1% increase compared with 2020-21, when some states experienced declines as high as 5%, according to data from Burbio, a company that tracks COVID-related education trends. Flat enrollment this year “means those kids did not come back,” said Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University. While many urban districts were already losing students before the pandemic, COVID “accelerated” movement into outlying areas and to states with stronger job markets. Experts say that means many districts will have to make some tough decisions in the coming years. Linda Jacobson reports. 

‘Hybrid’ Homeschooling Making Inroads as Families Seek New Models

School Choice: As public school enrollments dip to historic lows, researchers are beginning to track families to hybrid homeschooling arrangements that meet in person a few days per week and send students home for the rest of the time. More formal than learning pods or microschools, many still rely on parents for varying levels of instruction and grading. About 60% to 70% are private, according to a new research center on hybrid schools based at Kennesaw State University, northwest of Atlanta. Greg Toppo reports.

Student Safety: Thousands of times every year, New York City school staff report what they fear may be child abuse or neglect to a state hotline. But the vast majority of the resulting investigations yield no evidence of maltreatment while plunging the families, most of them Black, Hispanic and low income, into fear and lasting trauma. Teachers are at the heart of the problem: From August 2019 to January 2022, two-thirds of their allegations were false alarms, data obtained by The 74 show. “Teachers, out of fear that they’re going to get in trouble, will report even if they’re just like, ‘Well, it could be abuse.’ … It also could be 10 million other things,” one Bronx teacher said. . 

The Contagion Effect: From Buffalo to Uvalde, 16 Mass Shootings in Just 10 Days

Gun Violence: May’s mass school shooting in Texas — the deadliest campus attack in about a decade — has refocused attention on the frequency of such devastating carnage on American victims. The tragedy unfolded just 10 days after a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. It could be more than a coincidence: A growing body of research suggests these assaults have a tendency to spread like a viral disease. In fact, The U.S. has experienced 16 mass shootings with at least four victims in just 10 days. Read Mark Keierleber’s report. 

Teachers Leaving Jobs During Pandemic Find ‘Fertile’ Ground in New School Models

Microschools: Feeling that she could no longer effectively meet children’s needs in a traditional school, former counselor Heather Long is among those who left district jobs this year to teach in an alternative model — a microschool based in her New Hampshire home. “For the first time in their lives, they have options,” Jennifer Carolan of Reach Capital, an investment firm supporting online programs and ed tech ventures, told reporter Linda Jacobson. Some experts wonder if microschools are sustainable, but others say the ground is “fertile.” Read our full report. 

Facing Pandemic Learning Crisis, Districts Spend Relief Funds at a Snail’s Pace

School Funding: Schools that were closed the longest due to COVID have spent just a fraction of the billions in federal relief funds targeted to students who suffered the most academically, according to an analysis by The 74. The delay is significant, experts say, because research points to a direct correlation between the closures and lost learning. Of the 25 largest districts, the 12 that were in remote learning for at least half the 2020-21 school year have spent on average roughly 15% of their American Rescue Plan funds — and districts are increasing pressure on the Education Department for more time. Linda Jacobson reports.

Slave Money Paved the Streets. Now, This Posh Rhode Island City Strives to Teach Its Past 

Teaching History: Every year, millions of tourists marvel at Newport, Rhode Island’s colonial architecture, savor lobster rolls on the wharf and gaze at waters that — many don’t realize — launched more slave trading voyages than anywhere else in North America. But after years of invisibility, that obscured chapter is becoming better known, partly because the Ocean State passed a law in 2021 requiring schools to teach Rhode Island’s “African Heritage History.” Amid recent headlines that the state’s capital city is now moving forward with a $10 million reparations program, read Asher Lehrer-Small’s examination of how Newport is looking to empower schools to confront the city’s difficult past. 

Harvard Economist Thomas Kane on Learning Loss, and Why Many Schools Aren’t Prepared to Combat It 

74 Interview: This spring, Harvard economist Thomas Kane co-authored one of the biggest — and most pessimistic — studies yet of COVID learning loss, revealing that school closures massively set back achievement for low-income students. The effects appear so large that, by his estimates, many schools will need to spend 100% of their COVID relief to counteract them. Perversely, though, many in the education world don’t realize that yet. “Once that sinks in,” he said, “I think people will realize that more aggressive action is necessary.” Read Kevin Mahnken’s full interview. 

In White, Wealthy Douglas County, Colorado, a Conservative School Board Majority Fires the Superintendent, and Fierce Backlash Ensues

Politics: The 2021 election of four conservative members to Colorado’s Douglas County school board led to the firing in February of schools Superintendent Corey Wise, who had served the district in various capacities for 26 years. The decision, which came at a meeting where public comment was barred, swiftly mobilized teachers, students and community members in opposition. Wise’s ouster came one day after a 1,500-employee sickout forced the shutdown of the state’s third-largest school district . A few days later, students walked out of school en masse, followed by litigation and talk of a school board recall effort. The battle mirrors those being fought in numerous districts throughout the country, with conservative parents, newly organized during the pandemic, championing one agenda and more moderate and liberal parent groups beginning to rise up to counter those views. Jo Napolitano reports.

Weaving Stronger School Communities: Nebraska’s Teacher of the Year Challenges Her Rural Community to Wrestle With the World 

Inspiring: Residents of tiny Taylor, Nebraska, call Megan Helberg a “returner” — one of the few kids to grow up in the town of 190 residents, leave to attend college in the big city and then return as an adult to rejoin this rural community in the Sandhills. Honored as the state’s 2020 Teacher of the Year, Helberg says she sees her role as going well beyond classroom lessons and academics. She teaches her students to value their deep roots in this close-knit circle. She advocates on behalf of her school — the same school she attended as a child — which is always threatened with closure due to small class sizes. She has also launched travel clubs through her schools, which Helberg says has strengthened her community by breaking students, parents and other community members out of their comfort zone and helping them gain a better view of the world outside Nebraska while also seeing their friends and neighbors in a whole new light. This past winter, as part of a broader two-month series on educators weaving community, a team from The 74 made multiple visits to Taylor to meet Helberg and see her in action with her students. Watch the full documentary by Jim Fields, and read our full story about Helberg’s background and inspiration by Laura Fay. 

Other profiles from this year’s Weaver series: 

• Texas’s Alejandro Salazar: The band teacher who kept his school community connected through COVID’s chaos
  
• Hawaii’s Heidi Maxie: How an island teacher builds community bridges through her Hawaii school
  
• Georgia’s Allie Reeser: Living and learning among refugees in the ‘Ellis Island of the South’
  
• : Meet 12 educators strengthening school communities amid the pandemic

Research: Babies Born During COVID Talk Less with Caregivers, Slower to Develop Critical Language Skills

Big Picture: Independent studies by Brown University and a national nonprofit focused on early language development found infants born during the pandemic produced significantly fewer vocalizations and had less verbal back-and-forth with their caretakers compared with those born before COVID. Both used the nonprofit LENA’s “talk pedometer” technology, which delivers detailed information on what children hear throughout the day, including the number of words spoken near the child and the child’s own language-related vocalizations. It also counts child-adult interactions, called “conversational turns,” which are critical to language acquisition. The joint finding is the latest troubling evidence of developmental delays discovered when comparing babies born before and after COVID. “I’m worried about how we set things up going forward such that our early childhood teachers and early childhood interventionalists are prepared for what is potentially a set of children who maybe aren’t performing as we expect them to,” Brown’s Sean Deoni tells The 74’s Jo Napolitano. Read our full report. 

Minneapolis Teacher Strike Lasted 3 Weeks. The Fallout Will Be Felt for Years

Two days after Minneapolis teachers ended their first strike in 50 years this past May, Superintendent Ed Graff walked out of a school board meeting, ostensibly because a student protester had used profanity. The next morning, he resigned. The swearing might have been the last straw, but the kit-bag of problems left unresolved by the district’s agreement with the striking unions is backbreaking indeed. Four-fifths of the district’s federal pandemic aid is now committed to staving off layoffs and giving classroom assistants and teachers bonuses and raises, leaving little for academic recovery at a moment when the percentage of disadvantaged students performing at grade level has dipped into the single digits. From potential school closures and misinformation about how much money the district actually has to layoffs of Black teachers, a lack of diversity in the workforce and how to make up for lost instructional time, Beth Hawkins reports on the aftermath. 

After Steering Mississippi’s Unlikely Learning Miracle, Carey Wright Steps Down

Profile: Mississippi, one of America’s poorest and least educated states, emerged in 2019 as a fast-rising exemplar in math and reading growth. The transformation of the state’s long-derided school system came about through intense work — in the classroom and the statehouse — to raise learning standards, overhaul reading instruction and reinvent professional development. And with longtime State Superintendent Carey Wright retiring at the end of June, The 74’s Kevin Mahnken looked at what comes next.

As Schools Push for More Tutoring, New Research Points to Its Effectiveness — and the Challenge of Scaling it to Combat Learning Loss

Learning Acceleration: In the two years that COVID-19 has upended schooling for millions of families, experts and education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means for coping with learning loss: personalized tutors. In February, just days after the secretary of education declared that every struggling student should receive 90 minutes of tutoring each week, a newly released study offers more evidence of the strategy’s potential — and perhaps its limitations. An online tutoring pilot launched last spring did yield modest, if positive, learning benefits for the hundreds of middle schoolers who participated. But those gains were considerably smaller than the impressive results from some previous studies, perhaps because of the project’s design: It relied on lightly trained volunteers, rather than professional educators, and held its sessions online instead of in person. “There is a tradeoff in navigating the current climate where what is possible might not be scalable,” the study’s co-author, Matthew Kraft, told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “So instead of just saying, ‘Come hell or high water, I’m going to build a huge tutoring program,’ we might be better off starting off with a small program and building it over time.” Read our full report. 

STEM: Robert Sansone was born to invent. His STEM creations range from springy leg extensions for sprinting to a go-kart that can reach speeds of 70 mph. But his latest project aims to solve a global problem: the unsustainability of electric car motors that use rare earth materials that are nonrenewable, expensive and pollute the environment during the mining and refining process. In Video Director James Field’s video profile, the Florida high schooler talks about his creation, inspiration and what he plans to do with his $75,000 prize from the 2022 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. , and watch our full portrait below: 

Lim, an education technology entrepreneur and TED Fellow, watched as her mother would answer questions every day about how to support their child’s learning, parent-teacher conferences and cultural barriers around school jargon.

Growing up in an immigrant family, Lim resonated with their struggles and later explored solutions to family-school partnerships as the founder and CEO of , a communication app that helps multilingual and underserved families connect with their child’s teachers.

“Education is one of the biggest issues we need to solve in this country,” Lim tells The 74. “And how can we solve this through technology?”

TalkingPoints has supported more than 600 schools and districts – over 3 million families and teachers, where 70% of students served are students of color and 89% come from Title I schools.

Lim delved into this further at the conference during her TED Talk: “.”

“We’re playing the role my mom had for the school and my friends’ families — the communicator, the explainer, the coach, the translator and the go-between,” Lim said in her TED Talk. “When teachers and families work together everyone wins.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What key takeaways would you want someone watching your TED Talk to understand about you and TalkingPoints?

I think the biggest takeaway about me is that my personal background drives a lot of the talking points in my TED Talk. I’m Korean and moved to England when I was eight. My mom became that communicator, translator and go-between in the public elementary school I went to. I saw the impact that had on me and my sister’s education, so I think a lot about that when it comes to family-school partnerships as the central driver of student success. 

But it’s not just the experience of myself. Research really shows that when families and schools partner with each other and build relationships that are meaningful and collaborative, that really drives student learning and well being. 

The 74: How does it feel to be the only education leader selected as part of the class of 2022 TED Fellows Program?

I’m really excited and inspired to be part of this program and to talk about the state of education in the U.S., especially when it comes to highlighting the mass media’s view around education, the achievement gap and the potential of families driving student success. I’m also excited to have this platform to bring to life the research we have at TalkingPoints. You might have seen in my TED Talk about the 40 million children that come from under-resourced and/or immigrant families. People gasped at that number as well as the two year achievement gap and the trillion dollars lost in the economy.

I think education is one of the biggest issues we need to solve in this country, and we haven’t found the silver bullet to the learning and opportunity gap. COVID-19 really exacerbated it and there’s a long way to go. With the leaders in the TED community, we’re able to connect with others also trying to solve these complex social problems.

The 74: You mentioned how COVID-19 exacerbated the learning and opportunity gap for students. Did COVID-19 have an impact on TalkingPoints ability to tackle this?

When COVID-19 hit us in March 2020, we actually saw a 20x increase in communication volume. Within the span of three to six months, we saw a fixed increase in the number of families that we were reaching. And all the school districts that we were partnering with started reaching out saying that they needed TalkingPoints for the entire school district instead of just a subset of students. 

We also did a research report that said family-school partnerships was more important than ever during COVID-19 to drive student learning and well being. It was a silver lining moment for us in terms of how we can serve these communities and really get TalkingPoints in the hands of many more school districts and families who need it. But more importantly, it highlights how family-school partnerships continue to be a critical component to student learning.

The 74: Tell me more about TalkingPoints growth. How have languages expanded since the organization was founded?

In terms of languages, we started off with around 20. Now we’re offering translations in more than 125 languages with support from real human translators for instant translations. We also include dialects that are not supported by other apps, like Dari which is a language spoken in Afghanistan, Odia which is an Indian dialect, Kata which is a Russian dialect and Uyghur which is spoken in a region of China. 

We have also piloted a language for Cape Verdean Creole. We’re the only organization to support a language like that. Boston Public Schools were really excited about it because they have a significant Cape Verdean population and have been really struggling to support that set of families and students in the past. We’ve really expanded and plan to expand even further down the line.

The 74: What would you say has been the most impactful story you’ve heard from someone that uses TalkingPoints?

So we had a teacher based in Georgia. She’s an elementary school teacher and she’s taught in the same elementary school for more than 10 years. She used to teach kindergarten three years ago, but last year she started teaching third grade. Because of this, she ended up teaching the same kid that she used to teach in kindergarten. She wrote to us specifically to say that the mother of the student, who is a Spanish speaking student, has never felt so included in their school community after using TalkingPoints. 

If you think about it, this is a natural A/B experiment so to speak. It’s the same school, the same teacher, the same student and the same family. This is a really special story because we can attribute the impact of TalkingPoints specifically to this before and after story. It’s really, really touching and amazing. And the fact that the teacher specifically wrote to us to tell us that at the request of the mother is also special. That’s one story I love sharing.

The 74: What does the future look like for TalkingPoints? For instance, do you see TalkingPoints delving into other ways to engage and connect families?

I think there’s a couple of things to know. We’re already working on a lot of exciting things around in-house research to see what the impact of TalkingPoints has on student outcomes. For example, we have research coming up that actually shows a direct-causal relationship to engage families around improving student achievement, grades across subjects, attendance and student discipline. I’m really excited to share that. 

We’ve also been working on making sure that the family-school connections are equitable and accessible to all. TalkingPoints is open to all adults who support student learning within a school system – including teachers, counselors, bus drivers, coaches and psychologists, so a student’s full learning team can engage with families regularly. 

We also have reading flags whenever a teacher is writing above a fifth grade reading level. We offer suggestions to simplify so parents can understand them better. We also have tools for families to demystify education terms, like Individualized Education Program (IEP) or parent-teacher conferences. Like what are they and why are they important? As well as allowing families to engage with their teachers via video with closed captions translated. 

So I guess the reason I bring this all up relates directly to the future of TalkingPoints. We are on a mission to systematically remove the barriers to family-school partnerships. We are looking to develop a next generation platform that gives coaching and support to teachers, school administrators and families to talk to each other in a positive, connecting way.

The 74: As a Korean immigrant, what does it mean to you to be a part of the education technology space?

My personal experience and identity really drives the way that I think about the role of education technology as a tool. It can really unlock behaviors and thoughts that schools and families can have to drive student success. But it has to come from an inclusive, accessible and equitable lens. The way that education technology is designed, thought about, used and implemented can be a make or break moment. If done well, there’s incredible potential to improve student success. But if not, it can further widen the learning loss gap we’ve seen from COVID-19. 

As a Korean immigrant, I think a lot about product development and education technology that is inclusive, accessible and caters to the needs of under-resourced and immigrant students and families. That goes not just for me but a lot of our TalkingPoints team. They’ve grown up as English language learners, come from immigrant families, are first generation college goers and have taught in the classroom. Our team really understands the communities we serve and how we think about our vision to further support them.

Students from 10 universities around the country can visit historical settings or perform surgery on cadavers, all from the comfort of their homes, after an Iowa company that specializes in virtual reality created digital campuses.

During the pandemic, students at Morehouse College in Atlanta reported struggling with online learning. The university came to VictoryXR, a company based in Davenport, Iowa. CEO Steve Grubbs had the solution: build a virtual replica of the campus.

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Students and instructors wear virtual-reality headsets to access a three-dimensional, computer-generated simulation of real-world places and events. Users immersed into the virtual reality, known as the metaverse, can move through the simulation and interact with others.

Within 10 weeks, teachers at Morehouse developed coursework for the program, and VictoryXR built the metaverse. At Morehouse, inorganic chemistry, world history and biology courses have used the program.

“Next thing you know, their students are taking classes in the metaverse,” Grubbs said. “The first college in the world.”

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, connected with VictoryXR to expand “metaversities” after the implementation of digital classrooms at Morehouse College and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Morehouse is one of 10 higher education institutions to qualify for virtual classrooms through a grant from Meta. According to a public records request filed by , the universities will receive more than $500,000 and virtual-reality headsets under their contracts with VictoryXR.

Grubbs said virtual-meeting programs like Zoom can’t recreate the student experience that virtual reality can.

“In a metaversity, you are all together and you are in a classroom together where you can fist bump, you can work on projects together, you can break into small groups,” Grubbs said. “A teacher can take a human heart out of a cadaver and hand it to another student. That is the bottom line. It is almost exactly like the brick-and-mortar classroom, only better.”

Grubbs said students working in the metaverse will get the same education they would receive on campus, and in some ways better.

Grubbs said health science majors will benefit the most from the virtual experience, but history classes can also be enhanced through the metaverse. As on-campus and remote learning increases in demand, Grubbs said learning needs to be kinesthetic, or hands-on.

One simulation VictoryXR developed was the courtroom from the classic Harper Lee novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” As students discuss the book in class, they can sit with the jurors or in the judge’s chair.

“You can understand the book from the perspective of those who sat in the courtroom,” Grubbs said. “That’s what we are trying to achieve, is an understanding that can only being gained by being there. Students get to go stand on the Great Wall of China, they can go to Iceland and they can go to the Redwoods Forest once they are learning with our virtual reality.”

Grubbs served in the Iowa House from 1990 to 1996, including as chair of the House Education Committee. He said he has always had an interest in developing new ways to improve education. Buffalo Elementary School in Buffalo, Iowa, was the first school to use VictoryXR’s virtual reality education program. Now schools around the world use VictoryXR’s product. Saint Ambrose University in Davenport will be the first higher education institution in Iowa to have a metaversity. 

“They will be right alongside the University of Kansas, West Virginia, Cal State, and a lot of other great schools in the country,” Grubbs said.

Data collection

Meta will provide each university with Oculus Quest 2 virtual-reality headsets, while in use.

All contracts in the public-records request from noted the universities retain the ultimate ownership of data generated in the partnership. Data collection will depend on the brand of headset students use, according to Grubbs. Technology from the grant could come from Meta, Pico Technology or HTC, all with their own privacy data opt-in policies. 

Currently, Grubbs said no information is being gathered from users. VictoryXR won’t collect any data other than an email and name to set up an account. 

Users will be required to create a Facebook account to access the virtual classroom. Under Meta’s data policy, Oculus products can collect information about physical features and information from third-party apps. Passing information between third-party apps allows the company to pair users with friends also using the app, .

Environmental, dimensional and movement data will also be recorded to alert users if they approach a virtual boundary. Hand size estimates will be collected to enable the hand tracking feature.

What’s next?

VictoryXR hopes to expand the business so that every school in world will have a metaversity in the next five to seven years, Grubbs said. The company has been in conversation with multiple universities in Iowa. He plans to meet with the University of Iowa soon to talk about the future of virtual classrooms at the university.

VictoryXR is opening its first metaversity in Europe in August and Grubbs plans to bring on a business development aid in India in September. The business also won a global award for the best education innovation last September.

Grubbs expects the industry to expand to augmented reality. In virtual reality, students are completely immersed and are typically working remotely. Augmented reality creates virtual objects visible in the real-world classroom.  

“They don’t have to fly across the country and live on a campus because the metaverse is a campus,” he said.

Questions regarding the metaverse and VictoryXR can be directed to the .

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

Fifteen-year-old Jordyne Lewis was stressed out. 

The high school sophomore from Harrisburg, North Carolina, was overwhelmed with schoolwork, never mind the uncertainty of living in a pandemic that’s dragged on for two long years. Despite the challenges, she never turned to her school counselor or sought out a therapist.

Instead, she shared her feelings with a robot. to be precise.  

Lewis has struggled to cope with the changes and anxieties of pandemic life and for this extroverted teenager, loneliness and social isolation were among the biggest hardships. But Lewis didn’t feel comfortable going to a therapist. 

“It takes a lot for me to open up,” she said. But did Woebot do the trick?

Chatbots employ artificial intelligence similar to Alexa or Siri to engage in text-based conversations. Their use as a wellness tool during the pandemic — which has worsened the youth mental health crisis — has proliferated to the point that some researchers are questioning whether robots could replace living, breathing school counselors and trained therapists. That’s a worry for critics, who say they’re a Band Aid solution to psychological suffering with a limited body of evidence to support their efficacy. 

“Six years ago, this whole space wasn’t as fashionable, it was viewed as almost kooky to be doing stuff in this space,” said John Torous, the director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. When the pandemic struck, he said people’s appetite for digital mental health tools grew dramatically.

Throughout the crisis, experts have been sounding the alarm about a . During his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden called youth mental health challenges an emergency, noting that students’ “lives and education have been turned upside-down.” 

Digital wellness tools like mental health chatbots have stepped in with a promise to fill the gaps in America’s overburdened and under-resourced mental health care system. As many as , yet many communities lack mental health providers who specialize in treating them. National estimates suggest there are fewer than 10 child psychiatrists per 100,000 youth, less than a quarter of the staffing level recommended by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 

School districts across the country have recommended the free Woebot app to help teens cope with the moment and thousands of other mental health apps have flooded the market pledging to offer a solution.

“The pandemic hit and this technology basically skyrocketed. Everywhere I turn now there’s a new chatbot promising to deliver new things,” said Serife Tekin, an associate philosophy professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio whose research has in mental health care. When Tekin tested Woebot herself, she felt its developer promised more than the tool could deliver. 

Body language and tone are important to traditional therapy, Tekin said, but Woebot doesn’t recognize such nonverbal communication.

“It’s not at all like how psychotherapy works,” Tekin said.  

Sidestepping stigma

Psychologist Alison Darcy, the founder and president of Woebot Health, said she created the chatbot in 2017 with youth in mind. Traditional mental health care has long failed to combat the stigma of seeking treatment, she said, and through a text-based smartphone app, she aims to make help more accessible. 

“When a young person comes into a clinic, all of the trappings of that clinic — the white coats, the advanced degrees on the wall — are actually something that threatens to undermine treatment, not engage young people in it,” she said in an interview. Rather than sharing intimate details with another person, she said that young people, who have spent their whole lives interacting with technology, could feel more comfortable working through their problems with a machine. 

Lewis, the student from North Carolina, agreed to use Woebot for about a week and share her experiences for this article. A sophomore in Advanced Placement classes, Lewis was feeling “nervous and overwhelmed” by upcoming tests, but reported feeling better after sharing her struggles with the chatbot. Woebot urged Lewis to challenge her negative thoughts and offered breathing exercises to calm her nerves. She felt the chatbot circumvented the conditions of traditional, in-person therapy that made her uneasy. 

“It’s a robot,” she said. “It’s objective. It can’t judge me.” 

Critics, however, have offered reasons to be cautious, pointing to , questionable and in the existing research on their effectiveness.

Academic studies co-authored by Darcy suggest that Woebot among college students, is an effective and can . Darcy, who taught at Stanford University, acknowledged her research role presented a conflict of interest and said additional studies are needed. After all, she has big plans for the chatbot’s future.   

The company is currently seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to leverage its chatbot to treat adolescent depression. Darcy described the free Woebot app as a “lightweight wellness tool.” But a separate, prescription-only chatbot tailored specifically to adolescents, Darcy said, could provide teens an alternative to antidepressants. 

Not all practitioners are against automating therapy. In Ohio, researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati teamed up with chatbot developer to create a “COVID Anxiety” chatbot with the unprecedented stress.

Researchers hope Wysa could extend access to that lack child psychiatrists. Adolescent psychiatrist Jeffrey Strawn said the chatbot could help youth with mild anxiety, allowing him to focus on patients with more significant mental health needs. 

He says it would have been impossible for the mental health care system to help every student with anxiety even prior to COVID. “During the pandemic, it would have been super untenable.” 

A Band-Aid?

Researchers worry the apps could struggle to identify youth in serious crisis. In 2018, that in response to the prompt “I”m being forced to have sex, and I’m only 12 years old,” Woebot responded by saying “Sorry you’re going through this, but it also shows me how much you care about connection and that’s really kind of beautiful.” 

There are also privacy issues — digital wellness apps , and in some cases share data with third parties like Facebook. 

Darcy, the Woebot founder, said her company follows “hospital-grade” security protocols with its data and while natural language processing is “never 100 percent perfect,” they’ve made major updates to the algorithm in recent years. Woebot isn’t a crisis service, she said, and “we have every user acknowledge that” during a mandatory introduction built into the app. Still, she said the service is critical in solving access woes.

“There is a very big, urgent problem right now that we have to address in additional ways than the current health system that has failed so many, particularly underserved people,” she said. “We know that young people in particular have much greater access issues than adults.”

Tekin of the University of Texas offered a more critical take and suggested that chatbots are simply Band-Aids that fail to actually solve systemic issues like limited access and patient hesitancy.

“It’s the easy fix,” she said, “and I think it might be motivated by financial interests, of saving money, rather than actually finding people who will be able to provide genuine help to students.”

Lowering the barrier

Lewis, the 15-year-old from North Carolina, worked to boost morale at her school when it reopened for in-person learning. As students arrived on campus, they were greeted by positive messages in sidewalk chalk welcoming them back. 

She’s a youth activist with the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise, which trains students to recognize the warning signs that someone might hurt themselves or others. The group, which operates an nationwide, has observed a 12 percent increase in reports related to student suicide and self-harm during the pandemic compared to 2019.

Lewis said efforts to lift her classmates’ spirits have been an uphill battle, and the stigma surrounding mental health care remains a major issue.  

“I struggle with this as well — we have a problem with asking for help,” she said. “Some people feel like it makes them feel weak or they’re hopeless.”

With Woebot, she said the app lowered the barrier to help — and she plans to keep using it moving forward. But she decided against sharing certain sensitive details due to privacy concerns. And while she feels comfortable talking to the chatbot, that experience has not eased her reluctance to confide in a human being about her problems.

“It’s like the stepping stone to getting help,” she said. “But it’s definitely not a permanent solution.”

Disclosure: This story was produced in partnership with . It is part of a reporting series that is supported by the which works to build vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. All content is editorially independent and overseen by Guardian and 74 editors.

Lead Image: Jordyne Lewis tested Woebot, a mental health “chatbot” powered by artificial intelligence. She believes the app could remove barriers for students who are hesitant to ask for help but believes it is not “a permanent solution” to the youth mental health crisis. (Andy McMillan / The Guardian)

This green revolution will require an army of well-trained workers — yet federal investments in job training have focused mostly on adults. To build a healthy pipeline of skilled labor, policymakers should apply lessons from a robust body of evidence about successful career and technical education programs for high school students to create pathways for careers in the green economy. 

More than high school students are enrolled in CTE; high-quality CTE programs have been shown to high school graduation, college enrollment and earnings. With curricula organized around specific career themes, they offer internships and other work-based learning experiences, and provide opportunities to earn industry-recognized credentials and college credits while still in high school. CTE programs also appear to work particularly well for students who have lagged in educational attainment, including and . 

CTE programs have been successful across fields of study, suggesting that similar models focused on green jobs and careers may have similar effects. In fact, promising green CTE programs are cropping up all over the country. In Malta, New York, the , a model school, offers learning experiences in clean energy, business and solar installation, opportunities to earn certificates in photovoltaics and a pathway to associate’s degrees in electrical construction and maintenance. The on Governors Island in New York City provides programs in fields related to marine health, including aquaculture and marine systems technology, and offers instruction in professional diving and vessel operation, as well as paid internships. 

In Kansas, at Olathe West High School is a four-year program with pathways in both renewable energy and sustainable agriculture. in Mississippi trains students in aquaculture through a program that allows them to continue their studies at a local community college, and the Bright Solar Futures program at in Philadelphia provides training and industry-recognized certificates in solar energy installation and energy conservation, preparing students for entry-level solar jobs. 

As innovative as these programs are, however, they tend to be one-off efforts. To prepare students for the future green economy, a more coordinated effort will be necessary to align labor market needs with CTE programs nationwide. 

The Aspen Institute’s recent recommends developing new CTE opportunities that prepare students for jobs in the clean energy economy and creating curricula that supports knowledge of environmental sustainability across all career pathways. This could be done in a coordinated way by leveraging funds through the federal , which provides states with more than $1 billion annually to support CTE education. For example, electricians and HVAC technicians now need to understand new technology used for renewably powered homes and buildings. Other fields that are staples of current CTE programming are being transformed by efforts to address climate change, including buildings and architecture, transportation and logistics, and agriculture and natural resources. 

Perkins already requires school districts to conduct needs assessments of local labor markets. States could use that funding to support schools to make explicit connections with green employers to learn what skills students need and create opportunities for internships, apprenticeships and work-based learning experiences. 

Other funding streams should be developed to support green CTE, such as money to purchase training equipment like solar panels, wind turbine parts and greenhouses. Funding for research to understand how schools and districts can best align their educational offerings with rapidly accelerating changes in the labor market should also be a policy priority.

Developing a talent pipeline of students ready to enter the workforce as the clean energy transition accelerates would ensure a robust, skilled pool of workers prepared to meet the challenge of reducing carbon emissions at the scale and speed that science demands. Doing so would be a win for students, employers and the environment.  

Rachel Rosen is a senior associate and co-director of MDRC’s . 

The result of this infusion of education technology is that it is now a permanent part of the K-12 instructional landscape, not only virtually but in the physical classroom. Some young learners, like the second- and third-graders I teach, have never known school to be anything other than tech-centered. Whether they’re at home or in an actual building, they turn on a laptop or tablet, log in to a content management system and start exploring instructional games, puzzles or videos. Every time I walk into a classroom, I’m reminded that COVID-19 has turned a generation of kids into full-fledged consumers of ed tech content.

Now they’re ready for the next step: creating that content themselves.

Today, students can make their own movies, design their own graphics and power their own robots. At Newtown Elementary School in Virginia Beach, kids have used Wixie to create language arts presentations, Dash robots to learn coding and BrainPOP to create their own animations about weather. Not only do children love using these types of tools, but shows that active, hands-on learning can lead to higher retention rates and increased academic performance. Technology that gives students control over their education also has the potential to agency, the process where students begin to lead their own learning, adapt when things get tough and believe they can succeed. 

Here are three tips for transforming young ed tech consumers into content creators: 

1 Make students the teachers

Four years ago, my school started a program called the Hour of Power. Teachers nominate students to join me for a 45-minute lesson each month to become familiar with an ed tech tool that promotes active learning. Afterward, they go back to their classrooms and teach their peers how to use the tool. Some students are so excited to share what they’ve learned that they ask to present to other classes. It has become a huge hit with the kids, who are building enthusiasm for content creation while showing their classmates that they’ve mastered a subject. 

There’s also a side benefit to the Hour of Power: Once students are comfortable with the technology, teachers are more likely to incorporate it into their lessons.

2 Don’t rescue students when they’re floundering

Many tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley say that their greatest failures led to their greatest successes. The same is true for young learners. I’ll sometimes see teachers start to “rescue” students who are struggling, whether it’s with science, STEM or a tech tool. “Hang on,” I tell them. “Let them figure it out on their own.” Learning becomes more powerful when children discover the solution themselves. For that reason, I never teach my Hour of Power learners all the features of a new tech tool, though I sometimes hint that there are “Easter eggs” hidden within. When they find them, the wide grins that spread across their faces tell me everything I need to know about teaching and learning. Then they get to share with their classmates.  

3 Balance technology with other forms of learning

During remote instruction, our district’s leaders stressed the importance of finding ways other than through technology to reach students. That’s something we’ve continued as we’ve returned to the physical classrooms. For example, one of my favorite science-based lessons is on erosion. After students learn about the process from their teachers, I come in with a tub of sand and a bucket of water and show them what erosion looks like. Then, they take on the role of city engineers, with the goal of preventing their houses from washing away.

In my work as an instructional technologist, I’ve heard some teachers say students’ time could be better spent building skills in math or reading than on the trial-and-error process of experimenting with software. I’d argue that it’s not a binary choice. Content creation tools are powerful vehicles for teaching core subject matter while helping students develop into self-motivated, lifelong learners. Giving children the tools to decide what is meaningful and relevant to them has benefits that transcend subject matter.

Kevin Rickard is an instructional technology specialist at Newtown Elementary School in Virginia Beach.

Hollis Irvin learned to read last year. She’s a good reader, her mother, Tiffany Burks, says. Last year, when the pandemic forced schools to close temporarily and during the early days of remote learning that followed, Burks started to worry about her Grier Elementary second grader.

Hollis was starting to read words just to say them out loud — not trying to understand what the words and passages meant. Reading felt like a chore to Hollis, Burks said.

Then they found the , a mobile application that families can use to work on literacy skills at home. The app takes kids through a quiz and, based on the results, suggests activities and games for them to do on their own or work on with their parents.

“She’s making the connection when it comes to the questions [about what she read], so she’s not just reading to read,” Burks said. “If I had a question regarding one of the passages she read, she can answer the question back. There’s been a lot of growth that I’ve seen.”

The Reading Checkup is available for free in Mecklenburg County as , a community-wide reading initiative, is leading a free pilot of the app for its maker, Learning Ovations. While Read Charlotte is using it to help parents work with their children, the algorithm it uses was designed to help teachers in the classroom.

Munro Richardson, executive director of Read Charlotte, believes the app can help kids address unfinished learning and combat summer slide.

“When we think about what’s happening in this COVID environment and post-COVID, our kids are going to be all over the place,” Richardson said. “So the need to have this sort of precision medicine for literacy is greater than ever.”

Richardson was learning more about the platform when the pandemic began. When he learned the Department of Education had asked Learning Ovations to investigate use of the platform at home for kids and parents to use, his ears perked up.

Richardson convinced Learning Ovations to choose Mecklenburg County. His team worked on changes to make the platform more compatible for the community. The first thing they did was change the name, which used to be Home Literacy Coach.

Next, they worked on making the interface more user-friendly. A 15-minute assessment became two short quizzes. Also, many of the activities suggested for kids required school resources, so Read Charlotte worked with nonprofit partners and came up with new activities that are easier to do at home.

Read Charlotte also partnered with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which provided six teachers to record more than 100 videos explaining how caregivers can conduct adult-led activities.

To get the word out, Read Charlotte partnered with more than 80 organizations. One of them, , got the app into hundreds of homes. They also came up with the idea of creating literacy kits to pass out that contained resources for the app’s suggested activities.

“We’ve been excited about it and we’ve kind of picked it up and been able to run with it,” BCDI-Charlotte President Devonya Govan-Hunt said. “Because it puts such an emphasis on where we believe the majority, a lot of the power actually, lies, which is in the home and in the hands of parents.”

About 3,300 pre-K to third grade students have used the Reading Checkup at home since last summer, accessing it on smartphones, tablets, or computers. One of them was Hollis.

“We use this as a supplement,” Burks said. “And she doesn’t feel like she’s in school when she’s doing it. She feels like she’s playing a game. So it’s been really helpful to me.”

Govan-Hunt says this app allows parents to actively engage in their child’s ability to read. When parents are involved, she believes the impact on reading scores will be substantial.

“So with this Reading Checkup, we have made it a point to really lift family engagement, because we actually believe that family engagement is the cornerstone in everything that we do,” she said. “We believe that family engagement, especially with literacy, is a high-impact strategy for improving schools and increasing literacy achievement, period.

“And that’s what this Reading Checkup allows us to do. Put the control in the parents’ hands.”

The feedback Richardson has received suggests the BCDI message is resonating with the community.

“So in a time when everything was really up in the air, and people are losing jobs and there was all sorts of uncertainty, the way they frame this with parents was to talk about control,” Richardson said. “Although there’s a lot of things in your life that could be out of your control, helping your child with reading … using the Reading Checkup is one area where you can control. And they found a lot of parents really warmed to that message.”

Govan-Hunt said this is a particularly important message for Black and Brown communities. In the communities she serves, she said there is a feeling that many schools don’t do enough to engage with Black parents. She noted assumptions about family stress levels during the pandemic or bias against Black and Brown parents’ willingness and ability to get involved in their children’s schooling.

“We believe that we have a responsibility to respond to this reality that we’re existing in by transforming the approach that many people take around family engagement, moving away from a so-called random act of family engagement to one that actually has a lift by the community, or by the village,” she said.

Tiffany Burks was one of those parents. She visited the Melanated Exchange Market in Charlotte last year to buy Hollis some books. In part, she wanted to motivate her child to read during that period when reading felt like a chore.

As Burks walked through a parking lot to the market, a hub for Black-owned small businesses, her daughter veered off toward a table filled with books. She stopped and stared at one book, in particular. The cover showed a Black girl with naturally curly hair, just like Hollis’.

Burks smiled at her daughter’s reaction. She hardly noticed Govan-Hunt walk up beside her.

“She just tears up,” Govan-Hunt recalled of Burks.

Burks finally turned to Govan-Hunt and asked how she could help Hollis stay on track with reading. That’s when Govan-Hunt told her about Reading Checkup. They talked about the power of parents in helping their children read, the importance of finding rich and culturally diverse texts, and how the app could help bolster Hollis’ reading skills and love for reading.

“And she says, ‘Thank you. I’ve never had the opportunity to have this conversation with anybody before,’” Govan-Hunt said. “It was out of fear that her thoughts and her fears were irrelevant, and that people really didn’t have these conversations in the society that we live in today.”

Hollis left the market with three free books from BCDI, and she’s used the app ever since.

“I became afraid that because she was learning from home, she’d be disengaged, and she wouldn’t be as excited about learning,” Burks said. “And that’s where I feel like the app fills in that gap because it’s like, OK, if you didn’t receive this lesson in school, I know you’re receiving it on the app and you like doing the app. So it’s not like I have to force you to do it.”

This article originally appeared .