Week in Edtech 02/04/26: Brisk’s AI Curriculum Launch, Kira 2.0 LMS Expansion, Texas ESA Surge, UK $23M AI Pilot for SEND, Microsoft’s Teacher AI Push, Data Battles in Schools, and More! Feat. Karl Rectanus of Really Great Reading & Dan Meyer of Amplify Artwork

Edtech Insiders

At Edtech Insiders, we interview founders, investors, operators, educators, and thought leaders about the future of education technology. You’ll hear from leaders across the education technology industry and learn about all of the important edtech trends happening globally.

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Edtech Insiders

Week in Edtech 02/04/26: Brisk’s AI Curriculum Launch, Kira 2.0 LMS Expansion, Texas ESA Surge, UK $23M AI Pilot for SEND, Microsoft’s Teacher AI Push, Data Battles in Schools, and More! Feat. Karl Rectanus of Really Great Reading & Dan Meyer of Amplify

February 16, 2026 • Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell

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Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they unpack a fast-moving week in education. From AI-native curriculum battles and literacy leadership shifts to voucher surges and national AI pilots reshaping special education.

✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:01:48] ASU+GSV preview and the expanding global EdTech ecosystem
[00:06:25] The 2026 EdTech AI Map launches with 240+ companies
[00:07:14] Brisk introduces AI-powered curriculum integration
[00:09:04] The race to own the AI layer in schools
[00:13:10] Data ownership becomes the key AI battleground
[00:16:59] Kira 2.0 expands into a full AI-native LMS
[00:21:16] Texas ESA applications surge past 61,000
[00:30:20] UK launches $23M AI pilot for special needs
[00:33:40] Microsoft invests in AI teacher training
[00:34:59] Google expands Gemini in education
[00:35:57] UX emerges as EdTech’s new advantage
[00:36:43] The AI grad profile prioritizes human skills

Plus, special guests:
[00:38:33] Karl Rectanus, CEO of Really Great Reading, on literacy outcomes, science of reading implementation, and scaling impact
[01:02:22] Dan Meyer, VP of User Growth of Amplify on AI skepticism, social AI in math classrooms, and keeping learning human-centered

😎 Stay updated with Edtech Insiders!

🎉 Presenting Sponsor/s:

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This season of Edtech Insiders is brought to you by Cooley LLP. Cooley is the go-to law firm for education and edtech innovators, offering industry-informed counsel across the 'pre-K to gray' spectrum. With a multidisciplinary approach and a powerful edtech ecosystem, Cooley helps shape the future of education.

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[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: The UK Education Secretary announced a $23 million program. Over a thousand schools are trialing AI tools specifically aimed at supporting special needs students. And it's like such a good example of something happening at a country scale, trying to specifically focus on high needs students so they, it's not just throwing it out in the world.

[00:00:21] Ben Kornell: I feel like we're back to our original point, which is we're in a dynamic moment around education and technology, but we're similarly in a dynamic moment around education systems and systems change.

[00:00:39] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders.

[00:00:55] Ben Kornell: Remember to subscribe to the pod. Check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoy today's pod.

Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. We're back, back into full effect. Alex Sarlin, Ben Kornell OGs of Week in EdTech with another great episode. You know, Alex, life at GSV must be so great. You're having martinis and little fruity drinks with umbrellas and stuff. It must be coasting ahead of A-S-U-G-S-V.

What's it like being behind the world's biggest EdTech show?

[00:01:48] Alex Sarlin: It is pretty amazing actually. Like it is so fast paced. There is so much happening. You would not even believe how much work goes into this summit. It is massive. It includes so many people in the entire EdTech ecosystem all around the world.

So many CEOs, so many university presidents, so many people from like every like micro corner of the EdTech ecosystem. So there is a lot of communication. There's a lot of back and forth, there's a lot of planning, but it is a lot of fun and you know, it's been great to be able to connect with the GSV Cup fifties, like the 50 top companies.

We've been working with them to set up how they're gonna present at the summit. We've. Making sure the best startups in the world are there, making sure the best investors are there. It's been wild. It is very interesting being on the other side of anything that public and it's like, wow, I'm learning so much every day.

That's what I could say. Like, I mean, this is gonna be a big year and it's just like the theme of the year. Actually, I'm not even sure if I can, if the theme is out yet. I won't even talk about the theme of the year yet. But it is an incredibly interesting experience and the team is unbelievable and they know more about, you know, I always think you and I are like so deep in the EdTech space.

We know so many people. We know so many things, but man, if you opened up Deb Quas brain, it would be like this universe she knows. Everybody. She does everybody and everything they've ever done and the people who are coming up from young to people who have retired, for people who have been in the tech space for a long time, people who are just, just got funded yesterday, like, and everybody in between.

It is wild. So I'm in fire hose mode and I've been there over a month and I'm still drinking from the fire hose. A lot to learn. It's wild.

[00:03:29] Ben Kornell: Yeah, well, just like our students, part of why we love EdTech is it's always an opportunity to learn, so we're very, very excited. By the way, for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, Alex has joined the GSV team to put on the most amazing show.

We're looking at April 13th through the 16th. Is that right?

[00:03:50] Alex Sarlin: The 15th. 13th through the 15th.

[00:03:52] Ben Kornell: 15th. And we're also planning to have a big blowout EdTech insiders party as we are want to do so please stay apprised. Of course, if you join EdTech Insiders Plus as a subscriber, you get automatic admission into it.

Last year our. Open signups, I think lasted a full 30 seconds maybe. It was

[00:04:14] Ben Kornell: really fast.

[00:04:15] Ben Kornell: So we're working really hard to open that up, and we're excited to also do it this year in partnership with GSV and with the Entrepreneurial Ignite Program where essentially all of the entrepreneurs that are at A-S-U-G-S-V have a happy hour that then leads into ours.

Exactly. So very excited to be connected and dialed in with the full ecosystem.

[00:04:37] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. The entrepreneurs and investors reception at the event is gonna be amazing and also sort of lead right into the EdTech Insiders event. We're gonna have a whole entrepreneurs and innovators evening all together, so please look out for those emails and be there.

It's gonna be amazing. And Ben, there's events happening just this week as well, right? We're right on the verge of the, the Stanford event. Tell us what's going on in February.

[00:05:00] Ben Kornell: Yeah, so we've got a lot going on in February. We've got the Stanford Human-Centered AI Summit, where they're focused on education put on by the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

That's on Wednesday this week. And then on Thursday we have our Bay Area Annual EdTech Summit, sponsored by Cooley and our amazing sponsors here at EdTech Insiders. But at the Cooley offices where we have panels, we have a happy hour, we have a dinner. It's a great way to bring the EdTech community together in 2026.

And meanwhile, I've been busy with some great conversations. We've had Karl Rectanus, who just started a new role working on reading and literacy, Stewart Brown, Brandon Smith, and we've got Dan Meyer coming up like, Mr. I don't like EdTech himself. Talking about is EdTech product. And I'm saying that only jokingly.

It was a great conversation where we really talk about efficacy, impact, and use cases, which ultimately that's what we're all about. And those of you who are listening, just in one week, we've got our new EdTech Insiders AI map coming out. That includes a new special map that I won't give away the secrets on now, but you're gonna love over 240 updated companies on the map.

If you ever thought things were slowing down, just look at the map. It things are only speeding up.

[00:06:25] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, this field continues to just expand in every direction and we continue to see incredibly interesting startup movement and incredibly interesting movement from the incumbents in the space. From the, we saw SchoolAI launch some really interesting research.

We've seen Brisk and Kira Learning, Preply obviously been around for quite a while and it became a unicorn since we last spoke. Ben, that's like so amazing. So you're seeing companies that are sort of blowing up in the space, especially sort of turbocharged by AI and you're seeing giant tech companies do amazing things in the space.

You know, we saw Google Launch a whole suite of different things at the BET conference a couple weeks ago, we saw Microsoft, we saw Intel and Lenovo. Like it's an amazing moment for education and EdTech when you have people coming from every direction, and we, we've talked about this for a couple years now, but it just is not slowing down.

[00:07:14] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Two headlines that I wanna highlight. Just normally we jump into the world of AI first, but it's, you know, kind of been a hot time for EdTech and new launches. We have Brisk launching their AI curriculum intelligence product. We also have Kira launching Kira 2.0 on the Brisk side. What we've been hearing from a lot of folks is that quality of instructional materials continues to be a concern around AI generated content.

And the negative outcome of AI and its generative capabilities would be a teachers pay Teachers where there's a ecosystem of curriculum. But where's the quality bar? And the Brisk announcement is really a big stake in the ground signaling a move towards integration with high quality instructional materials.

Basically the idea that every generative AI object lesson plan item would be fully integrated in whatever curricula the school district has adopted. I think all of our publisher friends are giving a little bit of a sigh of relief, like, okay, we're not going to be totally disrupted here. But it is also important to understand that this.

AI layer, which can create personalization, it can create additional teacher workflows. It is complex to understand who's gonna own that layer. Is it Brisk or Magic School or SchoolAI, or these other players that have that wraparound, not just of chat GPT or. The curriculum, but really they're creating this durable AI layer.

Will they capture the value here or will curriculum providers themselves launch new products that are, have these same features? I don't know. What's your thought with this new Brisk announcement?

[00:09:04] Alex Sarlin: I think that the word that jumps out to me of exactly how you're describing how this is all moving is integration.

You know, we saw in the SchoolAI study, they analyzed over 23,000 teacher created AI learning experiences, and they found that more than 75% of them were anchored in core curriculum. You know, you use the word high quality instructional materials. That's sort of code for a particular style of core curriculum right now.

But the idea that they're anchored in curriculum, that it's not teachers pay teachers 2.0, it's not teachers being like, well, I'm teaching this, but I'm gonna go over here and have chacha BT make me something interesting that's kind of related ish. That's sort of like just a fun activity I'll do on Fridays.

That's not how they're using it. They're using it. In an integrated way with the material they've already bought, with the material they're already using in the classroom with what's needed for the standards. And I think all of the providers are starting to really lean into this and Brisk their curriculum intelligence product is exactly this.

It's saying let's build right on top of the core curriculum as well as the standards, as well as the materials that are already in your hands. And to your question, Ben, I don't think anybody has the answer. 'cause it's gonna come from all sides, right? If you are a publisher, you're gonna try to make your material AI customizable in one way or another, whether that's a customizable module inside your delivery system or, or in inside an LMS.

If you're at LS, you're trying to make materials customizable. If you're Brisk or SchoolAI or Magic School, you're trying to integrate with publisher's material. So like everybody is sort of headed in a pretty convergent direction. Not, not entirely. There are some startups that are trying to say, you don't even need the publishers anymore.

Come here, build your own curriculum from scratch. You could still use the standards, but you don't even need either the, your materials. But a lot more are saying these materials are embedded in schools. Some of them are really well proven. Let's not reinvent the wheel here. So as to who's gonna own it and who's gonna win.

I don't know. I don't think anybody knows. I think it's a race towards exactly that question of who can build the most effective, useful, efficient, usable, really just like product that actually fits into the flow of schooling, of teaching. And whoever does, I think, you know, is gonna have a huge advantage.

So I think they're all racing towards it from whatever direction they started at. And that includes people like the Googles of the world.

[00:11:23] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and the challenge with any of the individual curriculum providers is their bias towards you using their curriculum. And in a school context, you're navigating 15 to 450 different learning apps and systems.

And so it probably makes more sense that you'd have an independent third party layer as the connective tissue. The question I always go to is where does the data set? Because he who has the data, I think, has the fastest path to insight, and if you're creating a across 50 different products, a uniform data table that compares like student outcomes, for example, that's a lot of power to basically push back the learning into those products and make them better.

That's something that Dewey Learning, D-O-W-I-I has been pursuing admission has been working on the interoperability. And so I think this is actually a, a pretty important question for CTOs of K 12 organizations and higher ed institutions is who owns the data? Where does the data lake sit? Who has access to the data?

And are we giving full access to everybody? Only a few. Because AI is great at comparing apples and oranges and making everything uniform in a way that could drive better outcomes across kind of all of the curriculum. So my hope is that the curriculum is this raw material, but then the insight layer fueled by AI can be crosscutting.

That it really connects those things together rather than having them be distinct.

[00:13:10] Alex Sarlin: Totally. And, and I mean, it's also, you know, saying who owns the data, it is exactly the right question, but it's like, well, everybody has different data and that, that's what's so tricky about the EdTech space in general. I mean, anybody who's worked in data analysis or data science or product in any EdTech company knows you have a lot of data.

If you're an EdTech company, right? If you're, you have click data, you have achievement data, you have assessment data, you have some student data, you have behavioral data, you have, you have all sorts of data that you have access to. And then of course if you're an SIS, you have a whole different set of data.

If you're an LMS, you have a whole different set of data. If you're Google Classroom, you have a whole different set of data. So it's not that there's, you know, one data that it's not that one tool. In fact, there's lots of data sharing already built in through lots of different systems. It's including admission, which is doing great work in this.

It's like who has the right set of data that can do something amazing and transformative in a pedagogical. Way in a classroom. And what that data is is I think, being determined right now. Do you need to know somebody's MTSS tier to be able to give them the right kind of material? That's a really good question.

And it, that kind of data is very well protected. Do you wanna know their interests? Do you wanna know the. The language they speak at home, like this is why this is such a crazy moment. AI eats data, as we always say, and everything in education, especially education technology has data. It's just what is the right set.

If you're a publisher, for example, to your point, right? If you're McGraw-Hill and you have used a textbook for, you know, chemistry for the last many years, it's now a digital textbook. Of course, you know absolutely everything about every question in your textbook. You know how difficult they all are. You know which chapters are the most used, you know, you know all this data, it's proprietary data related to your particular curriculum and your publications.

That's a set of data too. So I know I'm not offering solutions here, but I just think that it's like there's no one data to fight over. It's how do you use the data you have access to and the pipelines keep getting bigger to do something amazing.

[00:15:09] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and, and this is not a new problem. This is actually one of the things we often highlight is.

These age old problems that now AI can solve. These data silos are actually becoming way more technically easy to solve. Whereas it's the structural behavioral issues that, you know, it's the human condition that, that we're gonna have to navigate here. So very, very interesting. On the flip side, we have Kira.

Kira Learning was actually one of our early podcast. You know, Andrea was one of our early podcast guests. Kira, for those of you you don't know, actually started as computer science training for students out of the AI fund, which is Andrew ENGs lab. Andrea Ang, founder of Coursera, and it was one of the first examples of applied AI to learning, and my initial impression was it's a curriculum company building computer science curriculum.

To me, this story is really about how AI native organizations evolve. What started as native AI curriculum around computer science is now blossoming into Kira 2.0, which we got a sneak preview of, which is basically a full stop learning management system with curriculum, with assessments. Basically everything that a student knows, everything that the student can do, there's teacher planning sides, there's assessment sides, all kind of birthed from a curricular origin, and now they have even full countries using this as their preferred LMS.

March 3rd is their launch date, but I was just blown away by the demo and it made me feel like we are just at the beginning of our AI journey. Given how broad and how deep the feature set was that Kira demoed for us.

[00:16:59] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I think it speaks to what we're talking about in general here, which is that, you know, you have companies that have been around for quite a while, really deeply embedded in the education ecosystem at K 12 and, and in higher ed.

And then you have new companies that are only, you know, three or four years old, like these SchoolAIs and the Brisk and Magic Schools of the world. And, and there are a number in that area that are these suites of tools with lots of. Really robust affordances that are racing towards these incumbents and saying, we can do a whole lot of this ourselves, including curriculum customization, including moving assessment and personalization.

We can do all these pieces. And then Kira has been sort of underground doing this because they've been working on this for a while, but it hasn't been fully out there. And the fact that they can build so many parts of a really powerful end-to-end system, I think speaks to two things. It speaks to how fast people can develop with ai, especially if they are AI experts, as the Keira team is.

And, and, uh, many people on the Brisk team too and other teams. But Kiera comes from an AI origin story. So if you know ai, you can do things very quickly and try them and really build some very powerful software. But it also, I think, comes from the fact that there's an evening that's starting to happen where everybody is trying to learn this stuff at the same time and it's not that much of an advantage.

It is for the big, big tech companies, but for the big EdTech companies, it's not necessarily that much of an advantage to have the proprietary data likely that it can be. But it isn't always, it, it isn't not necessarily that much of an advantage to have a big engineering team. So you're seeing sort of everybody coalesce on this one stop shop, this like idea of we can be the AI hub for a school, a AI fueled hub.

And I think the word AI is gonna fall outta that. You've been saying this for many months, Ben. It's like, it'll be like we are the one-stop shop for the school. And AI is just implied in that, in that solution. And a here is sort of coming outta nowhere. And I, and yeah, as you said, they're launching at some pretty decent scale.

It's pretty wild. And you know, very few people we've talked to in, in EdTech talk about doing things country by country. But Kira is making country deals and of course OpenAI has a whole bunch of countries and they are promising to announce more and more and more so. This is a land grab, for lack of a better metaphor.

[00:19:20] Ben Kornell: Yeah. There's a land grab element of it, and then there's also like a change in what's easy and what's hard,

[00:19:27] Alex Sarlin: right?

[00:19:28] Ben Kornell: What used to be really hard was building a diverse feature set. What used to be really hard was internationalization. These things are now quite easy, but one of the things that I came away with is there's actually a lot of hard questions that it introduces in terms of user experience and workflows.

Because there is so much optionality. How do you actually find that core golden loop?

[00:19:55] Alex Sarlin: And marketing and navigating this really curious, strange moment in tech history where people do not know what to make of this. Technology fuels everything from really amazing education tools and medicine tools to really horrific stuff that people are seeing every day.

I mean, one of the things in this SchoolAI study where they talk about Denver public schools blocking chat GPT for students and maybe even for teachers because of the group chat feature or because of, yeah, and I'm sure that includes also some of the thinking, which amazes me by the way. 'cause I think the group chat feature is, is incredibly useful for education.

I've talked about that, but that it's not just that it's itself, right? I mean, it's the ecosystem of technology being used for cyber bullying, being used for deep fakes, being used to create chaos in all of these different ways, or to create isolation. So that becomes hard to your point, right? I, I love that point, right?

Internationalization becomes easier, launching all sorts of features very quickly at scale becomes easier. And prototyping almost anything becomes incredibly easy. But actually figuring out how to take what you've launched and make it work in an educational ecosystem, both from an integration standpoint, which is what we've been talking about, and from an actual like acceptance standpoint, an appropriateness standpoint, a privacy standpoint, you know, a, a security standpoint, those suddenly become not so easy and there's no shared infrastructure underneath it quite yet.

[00:21:16] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I feel like we're in a world where things have really flipped. And it's not just the tech world, it's the education world too. You know, part of why country deals are easier to do than individual school district or state deals is because we're also seeing upheaval and change there. One of the headlines that caught my attention was Texas families, that they opened their ESA window where they could apply for private school vouchers.

And in the first two days, 61,000 students had already uh, filed and the deadline is still a month away. What they're finding is over a billion dollars that lawmakers set aside in Texas are basically the billion is going to be taken up just in the first few weeks, and applications for more than 42,000 students came in on the opening day.

So you really have a big surge. Our EdTech insiders chat was kind of awash with. Dialogue on what does this all mean? And as you look at the data, and this is in the Texas Tribune, it seems more and more like families who already are sending their kids to private schools are taking advantage of the voucher.

So it isn't necessarily a big shift of where the students are, but the state budget expects this to be 4.8 billion by 2030, and if they've already underestimated the billion, this could end up really gutting funding for public schools in Texas. You know, it was a great debate in the chat about pros and cons, just because I think there's a strong movement towards parent choice and.

Parent optionality, and there's this concern about are we actually undermining the option of free public education, high quality public education for all? I mean, what's your take? Given that everything is changing in AI and education now we've got these systemic changes on top of it all.

[00:23:22] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I mean, you sometimes people refer to this as like educational pluralism or.

Depends on sort of how you stand in relationship to it, this choice, freedom, empowerment. You know, there's a lot of different ways this is framed and phrased, but I think that it's a pendulum swing because I think we have seen, and we've talked about this a lot, we've seen since 2020, a pretty dramatic swing in the US away from trust in traditional educational institutions.

This is not news to anybody listening to this, and I've said this before, but I think it's important to contextualize it there because I think in a world where people are have like really sort of whole hog lost faith in the public education system as such, which I think really a lot of people have, then it becomes much easier for a lot of states to start saying, look, we gotta try something really different, and even if it's gonna be expensive, maybe it's gonna be incredibly expensive.

Like these billions of dollars you're talking about there, it still becomes viable in a world where people just are like, well, what else can we do? We cannot. Stop and just think that the existing system is gonna write itself. We are now five, six years off of the pandemic and we're still seeing not very effective outcomes from schools, from public schools.

And I, so yes, it makes sense that the first wave of people doing this are already believers. There are already private school families, there are already people who are sort of, have opted out of the traditional public ecosystem in a lot of ways, and they probably, they may have more cultural capital, they may know more about how to access these systems as well, but.

The bet here is that swinging the pendulum, you know, hard the other way, like really opening up few restrictions as they can get for a lot of these movements in states, it's gonna be this vast experiment in what happens and, and it's happening very differently in every different state. We hear that from a lot of people, right?

So it's like, you are gonna have this experiment, just as we said with, with race to the top. We sort of had this experiment with what different states were doing, you know, in, in one way. Now we're gonna have this experimental time period where all these different states, Arizona, and Florida and Texas, that all these states are, are going in different directions here, are going to try this thing out and will it work, quote unquote.

It's gonna be very, very messy. It will work for some students. I think it will fall absolutely flat or be bankrupt. Some districts in in other places, but I'm hoping that we will learn a huge amount and come to a sort of dialectic at the end and say, well, okay, these are the aspects of education that should be choice-based.

These are the aspects of education that should be a common good and really run by it more centralized systems. I'm hand waving here because it is incredibly politicized and it's incredibly difficult to predict because it's all of these different things happening at the same time. But I think that there will be some really intense surprises that cost may be one of them in some of the states that are going as hard as they can towards this, and I think some of those surprises will be positive.

[00:26:23] Ben Kornell: mean, as you said there, there's like a burning platform here, like they can't keep the same system going just as is now. Does that mean the new system is better? It also has to do with your philosophy. Do you believe that we need to raise the boats for all kids or is it every man for himself?

[00:26:41] Alex Sarlin: Hold on. I think that narrative has even shifted though, because the idea of raise the boats for all kids, I mean, this is not a no child left behind.

Like the narrative of this is not everybody take the money and run in whatever direction you can. It could be framed that way, and I think a lot of people see it that way. But I think the narrative is this money that should be helping your kids has been locked in a system that isn't helping your kids.

And I think there's validity to that as well. So it becomes really tricky. Narratively.

[00:27:09] Ben Kornell: True.

Yeah, no, I mean, just even in that interaction, like how you frame it, can really change the public perception. The one thing I will say that bothers me about it is if you believe that this unlocking can work for K 12, why not for preschool programs?

As well and like do more to empower parents to get subsidized preschool. 'cause we basically all know that early childhood investments pay back three to tenfold. And I feel like if you could pair policies that have more choice, but also push funding into three year olds, four year olds, five year olds, where, you know, working families, having a good choice of an academic minded preschool program could actually really help regardless of whether they're in the public system or private system that could really help.

That to me feels like the missing piece of this policy move. And basically all Americans agree. Uh, there was actually a, a report, the new national poll shows strong bipartisan support for federal childcare programs. And this is such a winning issue that would basically help us on all fronts, 80% of voters.

Believe in this, 82% believe that it should be done by the federal government.

[00:28:37] Alex Sarlin: You're pinpointing exactly The complexity of how this is gonna have to play out is that there's this feeling of like people simultaneously, and I mean people have said this for years and in responses to surveys, it's so confusing, but you know, people simultaneously want there to be a really successful working system in their.

Neighborhood in their district and their state. They often believe that their kids are in pretty successful systems, but they also believe that the system as a whole is like broken beyond repair. So I think you have this really odd and intriguing dynamic where you, you know, when you say the evidence shows that early childhood education is incredibly effective.

Yes. So how much is the evidence going to inform the policies in each of these states? And then especially true for underserved communities, which tend to have the worst experiences in schools. And it's like, well, that's the second part. How do you make sure this actually gets to the people who need it most and not just to the existing private school parents?

So that combination of sort of equity of access and evidence. As a basis for the policy. If we can get that right and by I'm talking about the royal we here, you know, any given state is trying to find the right combination. Some are going this very hardcore freedom narrative. They're saying we want as few restrictions as possible.

We, we trust families as their narrative. And others are saying we need to be really, really prescriptive. We need to be really, really careful about what these things can be used on. But they need, it needs to be evidence behind it. You can only, you know, only buy something that has some real pedagogical, might as defined by X, Y, Z.

It's like. This is just a world we've never been in before in the us. We haven't had to adjust things, in my knowledge, adjust things in such a specific way where you're sort of giving people, say you're giving people funds to go partially run their child's education, but then you as a state or as a, as a governing unit get to sort of set the parameters and every state's doing it really differently.

It's gonna be like an incredibly interesting showcase of different philosophies. As always, I say this every episode, but the EdTech companies are gonna really play a big role. I mean, just to get out outside of the US context for a moment, one other thing that caught my eye, Google announced at bet, they announced a lot of things at at BET UK over the last two or three weeks ago, but one was that the UK Education Secretary announced a $23 million program.

Over a thousand schools are trialing AI tools, specifically aimed at supporting special needs students. And it's like such a good example of something happening at a country scale, right? Pilot at a national scale, trying to specifically focus on high needs students so they, it's not just. Throwing it out in the world.

It's like we have a specific target here and then it's tr you know, trying to do it in a trial way where they can gather evidence and see if it works. It's like, will it work? I sure hope so. And, and it's a really interesting thing and they're obviously doing this in conjunction with Google, but like it's just gonna be a crazy moment because I think some of the sacred cows of education, especially public education, are just really not, they're really not there anymore in some pretty extreme ways.

And some places will fall flat and some might see some really, really intriguing and interesting results that end up becoming something that other states and other countries follow.

[00:31:50] Ben Kornell: I feel like we're back to our original point, which is we're in a dynamic moment around education and technology, but we're similarly in a dynamic moment around education systems and systems change.

And these things tend to go hand in hand together. When we went from the rural farming economy to the industrial revolution. Schools changed and education fundamentally changed. And in many ways what we have today was actually inherited by some of those things that were birthed at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

And so it goes hand in hand that we would think differently about our school systems. I just don't know that it's as thoughtfully connected, really as one would want it to be. Basically, the future has changed. We need to change our schooling, therefore, X, Y, Z. No, it's kind of happening in a much more.

Anarchic way, but at the same time, hopefully there can be a flight to quality and we can see what's working and that will fuel some more of the innovation. Before we close out any other headlines that captured your attention or other items you wanna highlight?

[00:32:59] Alex Sarlin: There is one more, but I just wanna do slight correction there.

This EdTech Testbeds program in the uk, not actually directly related to Google. I just said that, but it's not really true. It's called the Send Program and it's about EdTech. Testbeds trying out different things, but it's not a Google initiative. So I just wanna rewind and say that what may have misspoken there?

I mean, I think what's really interesting about this moment when you, when you look at all the things happening. I thought that Microsoft did something kind of interesting, right? So everybody has these different takes on how to get, so there were paired announcements that I thought were intriguing from Google and Microsoft at BET.

And over the last month, the Microsoft one was this idea of this comprehensive teacher education program, which parallels in some ways what we've seen from open ai, you know, free ai, professional development, industry, recognized credentials. Microsoft has just created their own internal model. They're been trying to find exactly where they lay on their AI story.

Copilot has not been as successful, but they're really looking at a very, very educator first perspective. And then Google announced a lot of things, one of which was an Oxford. Collaboration. And a lot of what they're doing in Oxford is really about making sure that the tools themselves are able to be used in a higher education setting and obviously a very elite higher education setting.

And I feel like this split, they're also, you know, they're injecting Gemini into Conmigo for Khan Academy. I feel like there's this really distinct split right now between tool first approaches, trying to make the tools as powerful as possible and sort of PD focused approaches trying to make the people as knowledgeable as possible.

And sometimes they go together. But I just find it interesting how, you know, if you sort of look at what all of these different companies are doing, they're often having to choose and sort of trade off between making really, really powerful tools or getting the tools to a certain level and then doing a huge amount of training and professional development and thinking a lot about the people and how it's gonna fit into their workflow and all of that.

And I feel like that back and forth is just really definitional of this moment.

[00:34:59] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and you know, I'm seeing just uh, like a plus one on that. It's such a great point. And we've all been trained to be narrow tool oriented because that's the way things have grown in the past, so is hard to know, like what's going to win out and on.

What verticals is it at the infrastructure layer, is that at the feature layer? Is it connected to data assessment and insights? One thing that I'm seeing though related to all of that is that user experience is becoming premium. It's like if you can win on ux, you can swap out the engine underneath over and over and over again.

But if the UX is no good, you're toast. And I've been part of a number of EdTech companies and I've seen a lot of EdTech companies when they do those big layoffs, UX is one of the first things that goes, and now I think people need to really, really rethink. It's just very, very challenging to figure out what the playbook is

[00:35:57] Alex Sarlin: exactly.

And the humanities are sort of making a comeback in higher ed after all these years for the same reason. And I think it's like when the machines can do so much, the skills that you need suddenly become empathy building and critical. It's, it's, it's such a wacky moment, but it makes sense in a lot of ways, right?

If the computer is doing its own coding, if the computer is doing its own planning and its own documentation, it's all, all these things, then it changes what the people are doing. And, uh, I think we're just like, we're just really mentally adjusting to this moment. And yeah, I think what you're, what you're talking about is exactly that as well.

It might not be the tools entirely that get us where we need to go. I mean, it definitely won't be the tools entirely, but it might not even be the tools really as the headline. It might be the skills, it might be the people.

[00:36:43] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I mean, anybody who's. With us this far, and we can have to check out my interview with Richard Colada, where he basically is talking about the AI grad profile.

And it's exactly this. I mean, that's the irony is that it actually de-emphasizes the hard technical tools and emphasizes the quote unquote softer skill sets. Because learning how to learn and learning how to use the tools and apply them in a way that demonstrates critical thinking and demonstrates clarity, communication, all the Cs, I mean, as an OG educator, everything always comes back.

It's all circular back to these core competencies. Well, with that, we have two great guests coming up on the pod. We're gonna start with Karl, and then we'll go to Dan. But thank you so much. It's so great to have you back, Alex, for Week in EdTech. Can't wait to do this again with you. And thank you listeners for joining in.

Please join EdTech Insiders subscriber plus addition. You can have access to our WhatsApp group. You can support our incredible work. Check it out on our substack. It's Substack EdTech insiders slash subscription. So thank you so much for another weekend. EdTech, why don't you take the honors of taking this out.

[00:37:59] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And keep an eye out for these amazing events coming at A-S-U-G-S-V in April. It's gonna be fantastic. I think admissions is one of the core sponsors internally. It's gonna be amazing. If it happens in EdTech, you'll hear about it right here at EdTech Insiders. Thanks for joining. Bye everyone.

[00:38:17] Ben Kornell: Hello, EdTech Insider listeners, it's a pleasure to have an OG of EdTech, a great friend, a incredibly inspiring leader, and also the new CEO of Really Great Reading.

Karl Rectanus. Welcome to the show, Karl.

[00:38:33] Karl Rectanus: Ben, it's great to be back. It's great to be calling in from a new seat. I'm looking forward to chatting

[00:38:39] Ben Kornell: before we go too far. Really Great Reading is an outcomes driven effort to improve literacy through evidence-based practices grounded in the science of reading, ensuring that every student joyfully learns to read in ways that support long-term success.

And as an educator and entrepreneur, you previously co-founded and led platform, which we all know and love, pioneering how districts evaluate EdTech effectiveness to scale what works for teachers and students to thrive. A whole lot of jargon in there. But at the end of the day, it's like what works and what the needs are, and you've always been sitting at that intersection.

I guess the question I have is what inspired you to really focus on literacy and reading and step into the role of CEO at Really Great Reading?

[00:39:26] Karl Rectanus: Yeah. Thank you, Ben. You nailed it. Look, the reasons were both professional and personal. I've been blessed over the last few years I've been working with, you know, funds, companies, policy makers on systemic challenges.

How do they use impact and focus on changing the system to serve everyone, especially those who have been underserved, not just in education and women's health and affordable housing and and AI and other places too. But as I dug in and have been doing strategy work with some great leaders and teams, you know, one of the things that came almost surprisingly was how frightening and how critical our literacy rates in the US are becoming.

We're talking about, you know, two and five students not being able to read coming out of third grade. The numbers are even worse for those who have been historically marginalized by eighth grade, we're talking about one and three. And, you know, reading is foundational not just for success in school, but for success in life, right?

And so a, a very real, very timely problem that needs to be addressed. Secondly, as I dug in and working with learning scientists and understanding where the sector was, there's been a lot of shifts. Obviously, Covid, the last five years have been either a class four or a class five rapid for every organization in every sector period.

It's been a challenge, but there are shifts. There's also been the expansion of AI and other opportunities here. And so what I saw in Really Great Reading is. A highly effective product that is deeply beloved. And when you look at an organization that was grounded in the science of reading before, the science of reading was cool, launched in 2005, primarily print.

They've been innovating new tools, manipulatives, et cetera, to help kids figure out how to learn to read with joy within the time period allotted. In elementary schools, you know, they've been doing that and supporting educators to do that. And when you talk to the customers, when you talk to those folks who have worked with Really Great Reading, both inside the company, 'cause most of them are former educators, as well as those who have been using RG R'S tools and technologies, it's just joyful.

And so all the ingredients are there, but the opportunity finally, professionally to think about how to push the entire sector, not just this organization, to innovate and expand with the type of impact centered leadership that I led at Learn Platform and have helped other teams grow. But to help the entire sector start to focus on outcomes, not just the responses is a real fun challenge that I get to dig into.

But finally, and. I mentioned the professional reasons, but really the personal one, I have three teenage daughters now, which mean my home life is emotions and logistics. That's what we mostly do. But my youngest, you know, was diagnosed with dyslexia and we were blessed enough to be able to support and engage and help her through that process.

But I've seen firsthand as a parent how challenging that can be. I saw it in the classroom. I saw as a secondary teacher because when I was trying to teach history, if the students couldn't read, which was a real challenge, you, you know, it didn't matter about the history. They weren't gonna be proficient in history or social studies or civics.

You know, they needed to be proficient first in that foundational knowledge and those foundational skills.

[00:42:59] Ben Kornell: Yeah, as a school board member, I remember several parents coming up and saying this like, you know, reader's, writer's workshop is just not working for my child. And I keep being told, just be patient.

It will work out. It will work out. But now you know, they're in third grade and it's not working out. And all of the reading science. I think there's been this intersection of learning science with literacy that's been really exciting about some breakthroughs, but unfortunately it's really had uneven implementation in schools.

So it's like we know what works now. We know what we were doing wrong. Why aren't we doing it in the classroom? Is it a lack of research? Is it a lack of implementation support? Is it a lack of tools and resources? All of the above. Like how do you think about this? Because five years ago this was front burner, hot topic, you know, podcast fodder, and yet here we are five years later and it's still incredibly uneven.

[00:43:57] Karl Rectanus: Well, I think there's a few issues, right? We can't overstate the fact that we have asked educators and our education system to be basically the final social safety net for everything else, whether it's security, health, food, you know, we're asking our schools and districts, our individual educators and principals to have so many competing responsibilities and priorities that it's a real challenge to understand and know and how and how to deliver.

And quite frankly, in many states, we are under resourcing them. That's just a statement of fact. So that's part of it. However, we do understand the science of reading and let's be clear, we know exactly what it takes and I'll oversimplify it. Science of reading aligned pedagogy, content curriculum, right?

You need the right stuff. That will help. That's proven to show that students. Can learn and achieve and retain and grow. You need a caring human who motivates and holds the other humans accountable, right? And usually that's a teacher, but sometimes that's another human sometimes. But learning is a relationship.

Learning science shows us this, right? And then finally, you need a feedback loop for both of them to understand where they are and what to do next. And to oversimplify, those are the three things you need. And so you have to deliver on that. However, we've required, implementation is challenging because we force so many different priorities, so many different messages, so many different responsibilities.

And so with RGR, what I've been very impressed with for a relatively small part of the market that has been using RGR, but it's certainly growing that consistently. Two things, one. Joyful learning, right? The engagement is there and it happens because people enjoy it. The kids enjoy it, the adults enjoy it, but it's grounded in the science.

So it's transitioning and translating what is good practice into things that are enjoyable, that fit into the time period that are required. I mean, that's sort of the mandate. And so not everybody does that. That's not always the call. And so Really Great Reading has strong evidence. You aren't surprised with me coming over that they've got a lot of different evidence.

They're all green on Ed reports, they've got essa. Uh, studies will continue to expand that. In fact, I think we'll be expanding evidence quite a bit in what we do, but focusing on the partnership between schools and providers on building those foundational skills within the tact and really being measured on outcomes, not just on an RFP checklist or what's been purchased is gonna be an important step too.

[00:46:35] Ben Kornell: Yeah, so it sounds like really deep, deep work, and you talked a little bit about some of the origin in physical materials and instructional materials. Both of us have always believed that in EdTech, the ed comes first, the tech comes second, and in this current environment, we're seeing a lot of backlash against screen time for kids and tech first solutions.

How is Really Great Reading, positioning itself to succeed in such a tight and challenging business environment?

[00:47:06] Karl Rectanus: The space has changed since 2005, 2006, when Really Great Reading came to market with books, with physical goods and then started to expand. The other thing that has changed is children's brains, the engagement model, what's going on in these both teachers and students' lives?

And so, you know, ultimately Really Great Reading is an education and a learning outcomes company, right? It's not a technology company, it's not a, not a technology. It's a multimodal delivery mechanism to do that. So obviously print is an important piece of learning to read. We knew that in a bunch of different ways.

We also know manipulatives and other physical goods things that can help kids learn, especially in these early grades, right in K 2K through second grade are great and you know, there's great opportunity there. However, AI and digital delivery and development, you know, to be able to do rapid assessment, to understand and leverage these tools that were simply not available to us before, but can be used to allow teachers to recapture more time, that can equip students to share what they're learning in a way that delivers clarity on what they should be learning next or maybe where the gaps are to be able to leverage those technologies and understandings along with those other things along with coaching and mentorship and professional development.

I came out of Peabody at UNC Chapel Hill, Peabody Hall School of Education. Right. I didn't get a bunch of science of reading training when I was there. It wasn't the role or the goal, but it is foundational. So being able to support everybody, the humans in the building, the big ones or the small ones with the type of multimodal learning that delivers for every single student is important.

And being able to have the options to do different things with different students and groups effectively and efficiently, I think is the pathway to getting these outcomes changed in the us.

[00:49:08] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I love it. And there's a way in which when we think of. Technology as one of the tools in the toolkit, but not the only tool in the toolkit.

When you're talking about being an outcomes oriented company, you have to be deep, you have to be holistic, you have to think about all the levers. And literacy is one of those areas too, where whenever I talked to superintendents or when I was on the school board, we kept thinking, gosh, if we could just get reading right in K through three, the gains there will pay off all the way through.

You know, we are a K eight district, so all the way through our middle school students. So there's this weird way in which like over investing in K one two actually saves you a lot in later grades of kind of intervention or catch up. You know, I was a middle school teacher and so much of my work was actually just trying to go back to fourth grade standards and catch kids up.

[00:50:03] Karl Rectanus: Yeah, that's right. When you improve foundational literacy skills, everything else improves. Math improves, right? You're reading the problems, social studies improves all these other challenges, but as long as it is a problem, it will always be a problem and you will have a bunch of amplified problems. So I think to your point, your first point on technology, I like to say, look, I don't care if it's a pencil with two erasers.

If you show me data that helps, you know, a kid learn to read more effectively, like we should do it. If AI or some of these other technology tools can allow us and equip us to support more students, let's go. That's what we should be doing. But fundamentally, we know what it takes to teach students how to read, to equip them, and to empower them to do that.

And to do it joyfully actually leads to better learning outcomes as well. And so that's where we're focused.

[00:50:54] Ben Kornell: So. You know, we've talked a little bit about outcomes. We've talked a little bit about ai. Let's talk about the business side. You're a founder, but this is not a founding situation. You're doing a founder follower here and you know you're coming in where there's uh, RIA group, I believe there's a street who's like the pod where fans of a street and it is just a great impact investor.

For those of you who don't know about a street, look it up there. It's a great organization. So you have some impact oriented investors that come in. You're kind of carrying the ball forward from the founding group of 2005. You know, you're new in the chair. What's it been like being a founder follower versus starting up your own?

[00:51:34] Karl Rectanus: Yeah, it's great question. It is part of the motivation, right? Great investors, RIA Group, a street, and others, like other investors. I've worked with, you know, very impact focused, and over the last couple years what I've been honing in on and working with other founders and company leaders was the type of impact centered leadership that we took at Learn Platform.

Fundamentally, there are five parts of the every organization, the product, you know, and solution strategy, the business model, the financing, the operations, how you do it, and the culture. And those five things are difficult. Each of them is tough. As a founder, when you're coming outta the gate, you have to figure out how to do all of those things and figure it out.

But ultimately, your scale is governed by how you synchronize those five things to grow together. And what I've found in working with others and seeing our work, what we did at Learn and applying that in other situations is that when you center that around impact your positive non-financial outcomes, right?

Along with your financial and business and other metrics, things start to click. People start to understand and see, oh wait, we're moving the needle for students. And every time we do that, we're getting more contracts, or we're doing, you know, it impacts our NRR or GRR. We can talk all about all those. Fun acronyms on the financial side, and realistically that's the scoreboard to take a look at.

But for a lot of the people we work with, for our customers, for our team, it's really the student outcomes that motivate them to drive this work. And with RGR, I saw an opportunity to work with some great investors who deeply care about impact, not just the marketing of that or seeing that as an outcome, but seeing that as a driver and a chance to maybe skip the line.

I don't have to start from zero, let's go after a big problem. RGR and in no way is the largest player in this field, but it's a legitimate, good sized player with highly effective product. And so it's been, I can gladly say the body has not rejected the transplant. It's been very receptive. I'm very excited about where we go from here.

It is different. I sleep a little bit differently. I sleep pretty well actually, given where we are compared to coming right outta the gate. But I do, I am excited about where we go from here.

[00:53:55] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean I think a lot of the work that many of us do in this space, you and I included, is really like find what works first and then scale.

And I think too often we find folks chasing scale, figuring out, well, we'll build up to a quality standard over time. But if you're always chasing growth. Growth and you don't hit that quality standard first. It's really hard to ever get there. But once you've hit it with quality from a long-term perspective, that's really what creates high growth companies in our sector.

But you need to have backers or investors who are willing to go for that longer ride rather than chase quarterly results or things like that. I think the other is we're finding that just distribution is power, and this idea that everything, and you and I first met back in like 20 17, 20 18, when everything was like a RR got a scale like pd.

Anything that's not recurring revenue, that just doesn't even count. But what we know about schools and how they work is that you've gotta pair the solutions with the training and support, just like we might do that in healthcare. Where you train people on a new treatment or a new drug, you gotta train people in education.

And so it's deeper work now, but it pays off in spades long term. I guess the thing I'm wondering about is risk factors. I feel like there's this concern that there's a fad around reading science or that some of the stuff that led to the prevalence of maybe some mistakes in literacy policy and literacy practices are going to happen again because everyone's hitting science of reading, science of reading.

But at the end of the day, they may not have the results to back it up. What do you think are the biggest risks for this space, especially for school districts as they're thinking about their reading programs?

[00:55:47] Karl Rectanus: I think everybody's heart's in the right place. I mean, like you said, 40 states have passed science of reading related laws and structures.

We now have a situation where most states are defining their own pathway. And let's be honest, the legislative process is usually called sausage making for a reason. So one of the risks is either politicizing or overemphasis on, you know, good idea of a poor execution is a risk factor. I think also fundamentally, you know, right now there's a huge buzz around ai.

I was always taught that your freedom ends where harming others begins. And so while I think there's huge opportunity, I think we need to leverage these new tools as productive supporters of learning, not automation or, uh, an excuse not to learn or a pathway away from learning. I think there's real risks there.

And then fundamentally, we've always seen the looky-loos and the risks of look in 20 11, 12. If you slapped a common core sticker on the top of your textbook, you were in sale, you were in market, right? You didn't have to do anything differently. They didn't do anything. You know, sometimes they didn't. And so what I get worried about is, you know, talk is cheap, is sort of saying that you're here for the science of reading.

So the way we will combat those risks, and the way I would encourage, you know, whether it's district leaders or our provider partners and collaborators is, hey, the kids learn to read. Let's focus on outcomes because we have a multimodal approach. We've been adopted in states like Texas. We just got an announcement in Utah.

We've been highest rated meeting there. Part of the Mississippi Miracle, which is no way is a miracle, it's a manifestation of focusing on what actually works, right? We're in dozens of states now and meeting their criteria, but let me tell you, those criteria were sort of all over the place sometimes, and some of them our team looks at and says, I'm not sure that's gonna drive learning.

And so we are really focused on working with school districts and states that are absolutely focused on driving outcomes. We're willing to go to the turnaround schools, the places that have been under-resourced in the past, the places that have not been able to address this and prove this out with them.

And we'll focus on outcomes to avoid the idea and some of these risks that are coming and, and very alive right now.

[00:58:17] Ben Kornell: Yeah, it does seem to me like finding evidence and finding research that backs the claims is such a critical piece. And when you're a new startup, you can't really manufacture that. If you've been doing it since 2005, there's a real strategic advantage there.

You know, and on the AI side, you know, we talk about cognitive offloading of the student side, but I think one of the interesting takeaways from this conversation is also really upleveling educators and their knowledge around literacy. We have so many platforms, they're like, don't worry, I'll make it efficient for the teacher.

I'll just tell them what to do next. And that's not what teachers want. We don't get into the profession to just follow a paint by numbers thing. We wanna learn, we want to be professionals, and we wanna be part of the process of understanding where our learners are and thinking about, okay, what are the strategies that I should be using with these whole groups, small group individual, to really support that learner in their literacy or numeracy journey.

[00:59:21] Karl Rectanus: That's right.

[00:59:22] Karl Rectanus: I've been amazed with a number of videos from teachers who have used RGR just thanking us and telling us about how much they love the practice and how it's, it's improved their practice. Additionally, you know, in having conversations with some of our success and support services team who are engaging in schools with principals and teachers around the culture that they're building around those real challenges and professional development that they need and that those are legitimate challenges.

And so you know, when they're hearing in the classroom or at a principal's level, they hear the loud announcements from the school board meeting or all these different things. It can be hard to prioritize and understand what to do next. And so having people who have been in the field and lived experience doing this is really critical.

That's not something that AI is gonna replace. However, are there tactical approaches? Are there pathways to deliver new technologies more quickly and scale services to automate assessment or to leverage new tools? Absolutely. But learning is a human endeavor. And if we take that away, I worry about the types of small humans.

We're turning into large humans. We need them to be able to differentiate and I think reading is so foundational to that. That's why I've chosen to dive into the deep end of the pool again with a bunch of people who have been swimming here and doing great work, but excited to be here and looking forward to the next few months and years.

[01:00:53] Ben Kornell: Well, it's been incredible to catch up. Once again, Karl, if people want to find out more about Really Great Reading, where should they go?

[01:01:01] Karl Rectanus: They should go to reallygreatreading.com to learn more. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention our Pathway includes building on the foundational work that we've already done with an innovative, and frankly, we're gonna have to build the best team in literacy.

So check out the careers page while you're there.

[01:01:18] Ben Kornell: Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Karl Rectanus, CEO, of Really Great Reading. Thanks for joining EdTech Insiders.

[01:01:24] Karl Rectanus: Thank you, Ben. Always a pleasure. And thank you for all you do for this sector.

[01:01:28] Ben Kornell: Thank you. Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. This is a truly special podcast.

Today we've got the one and only Dan Meyer joining us. For those of you who don't know Dan or his blog or his incredible work at Desmos, as well as at Amplify a little bit background, Dan taught high school math to students who didn't like high school math. He has advocated for better math instruction on CNN.

Good Morning America, Everyday with Rachel Ray and ted.com. And now today, EdTech Insiders. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University go Cardinal in math education, and now explores the future of math technology and learning at Amplify. He has worked with teachers internationally and in all 50 United States.

He lives in Oakland, California. He is an incredibly salient voice in a time where we need clarity. Thanks so much for joining us today, Dan Meyer.

[01:02:22] Dan Meyer: Thanks, Ben. Happy to be here first time, long time.

[01:02:25] Ben Kornell: Yeah, so let's jump right in. You've been quite public about being bearish on AI and education. What patterns or promises around AI have you seen that make you skeptical, especially from the perspective of someone who spent years working with students who already feel alienated by math?

[01:02:44] Dan Meyer: Yeah, for sure. I do wanna just name, like, I work at Amplify an EdTech company, so I would love to find, you know, the magic wand solution to transform all learning using new technology. That's part of my job description, but I also have spent a lot of time in classrooms as a teacher, as a, as a doctoral student.

So I find that the folks who are really bullish on AI transformation tend to misunderstand two things, the nature of kids and the nature of teaching on the kids side. Kids do not come to school wondering to themselves, how will I learn skills to best position myself in the job market for a nice 401k package when I retire?

They're not even thinking about like, what can I learn today? They're really largely looking. I like a lot of kids come to school just wanting to see one another to figure each other out and figure themselves out. So as much as I get excited as anybody about, you know, generative content, generative text, video, audio, podcasts, you know, generative open world games, I know that if that content separates kids, if we all have our own personalized podcast, personalized text, that that severs a very crucial relationship for students and a big reason why they show up to do what they do.

And for teachers, teachers do this very sophisticated social and cognitive work. They're trying to help kids learn ideas, but also learn who they are and how to, how to be in the world. And a lot of the people who are really excited about AI and EdTech, they try to separate those and say, well, we'll pass the cognitive over to AI or a device.

And teachers will do that very crucial social work. No one says like, oh, the social is not important, but they don't understand how inseparable those two are and to try to split them winds up ultimately destroying the whole project.

[01:04:27] Ben Kornell: So at the atomic level, the atom includes the social and the learning.

And if you split it, you've got a bomb going off in your classroom. Let's talk a little bit about this concept of social ai and you know, one of the themes you're drawing on is. Is personalized, individualized, or is can personalized or adaptive actually be applied in a more social multiplayer context? So tell us a little bit about what you see as social ai.

What's your definition and maybe a concrete example of how that shows up in a learning context.

[01:05:05] Dan Meyer: Yeah, for sure. Where I agree with a lot of people that I often disagree with is that every classroom students are bringing a lot of different resources. They have a lot of different needs. Yes. But they bring a lot of different resources and good teachers and good curriculum.

They draw those resources out and you can ask a question like, how do you know that two odd numbers makes an even number? And 30 kids will have 30 different, very interesting takes on that idea. Some will draw something, some will say this, some will say that, and. The job that we ask teachers to do, which is a very hard job, as you know, is to make something greater than the sum of those parts.

And to have a conversation about those ideas, which is so hard to do in the moment of classroom, to parse those while kids are saying, I gotta go to the bathroom, and there's a lot of chaos going on, and I've been doing that work, like actually teaching our curriculum and others. For a long time, I felt that pain firsthand.

And so what I'm excited about is to put AI into that process in a very discreet moment, which is to say our curriculum and the teacher will draw the ideas out. We have these interactives that get kids' minds moving and their mouths open and talking, and then the AI will come in and start making sense of those thoughts in written form, uh, as our first pass here and say, here are some exemplars.

Here's the kid who's talking about this in words. Here's the one using images and to create, to construct this, uh, discussion resource for teachers, for the teacher, then to do the work that the AI can't do, which is to draw the students together in a moment of conversation to pull out of student A ideas that they have and connect it to student B.

But it's really just trying to figure out like, what is the social environment and where can a computer step in and help without hindering the entire project?

[01:06:51] Ben Kornell: And so there's something authentic about it. It's not pre-programmed the discussion moments. I think that's kind of how it's been talked about.

At Amplify, it's not pre-programmed. There's no set course curriculum other than the discussion moment happens. You bring together all this authentic student energy, you use the AI to capture it, and then the teacher's role is what with that information, what are they doing that's differently than what they would do normally?

What are the teacher moves?

[01:07:24] Dan Meyer: The teacher moves are largely the same. We ask teachers to elicit ideas and then develop them in the conversation. The question is, can we make that much easier for teachers? A lot of teachers don't do it because it's hard to process 30 written responses in real time. A lot of AI on the market right now will very happily create a cluster analysis of those 30 responses.

They'll create some headers, and here's the common ideas and which students said what. But we're going a step further in saying that that needs to be injected into a single screen presentational resource, really taking the end user's experience and needs very seriously there, not just outputting like a chat GPT style vanilla text B.

Style display and the net result of that, I gotta say, it gives me goosebumps thinking about it. Like you gotta understand, like if you put a kid's thought on the board and say, this is so interesting, we are gonna talk about this.

[01:08:18] Ben Kornell: Hmm. There's an ownership that the kids have in that pursuit too. Obviously it's also for reflective learning purposes, but there's an engagement element there too.

[01:08:30] Dan Meyer: Dead quiet like a, A class that is, that is hard to engage and corral. Like if you put them on the board and say they are the curriculum. In that moment, the class gets engaged and tuned in in a way that's just very uncommon and we're using AI to support that analysis while the humans around an environment all still have very important work to do.

[01:08:51] Ben Kornell: And so tell me a little bit about, for example, with Desmos math curriculum and amplify. What is a flow of how that might look in a classroom? What does this AI enhanced experience look like from a a lesson standpoint?

[01:09:07] Dan Meyer: I'll be real. We're piloting it now and I've done a lot of development of digital tools for teachers.

I am finding this particular product category of dynamically generated real time teacher support materials for use in classroom, A very tricky beast ride, like a very tricky kind of product to build. We're piling now, and I, I taught with this on Friday and I was like, Ooh, this is kind of interesting.

Like, I don't know what's gonna pop up for me. How does that feel? How can we give more transparency into what the AI might create? But essentially, we've had this curriculum for a long time. You interviewed Eli Lu Lura a while back. We developed this curriculum, this hybrid, but has a digital component and the digital side of it, it draws ideas outta kids through interactives, it collects them.

They're typing ideas in. So we have all the student responses in the back end. Now we don't need to have the teacher start taking photos of student responses or have kids wearing EarPods or whatever. Like we've got it already there. And the question is, how can we then help teachers make sense of it? The AI then comes along and our hue and authors have written specific prompts for each individual problem in the curriculum saying, watch out for these particular responses.

There isn't like one system level prompt to rule all the problems our human authors have done a lot of like in the weeds kind of context setting. And with those prompts then the AI will pluck out student responses and drop them into a a question like, how are these the same? How are they different that we know from our experiences are pretty easy for teachers to facilitate and they're high return on the investment.

And this is again, a few snapshots of where humans and the AI and our computers kind of fit into this ecosystem called a classroom.

[01:10:48] Ben Kornell: The pressure of doing real time generative AI in class live one. As a teacher myself, like unpredictability was often the enemy. There's already enough chaos in the classroom that introducing one more unpredictable thing was always a negative.

And to be fair, when I taught there was a lot of unpredictability about technology. We would've, the wifi is down or the logins wouldn't work, or 25% of the logins wouldn't work and 75% are ready to move on and 25% aren't given the potential for hallucination that ways in which kids could also game said system.

How did you design the barriers or guardrails to make sure that whatever is immediately put up in front of the classroom is, you know, teacher and classroom ready?

[01:11:37] Dan Meyer: The AI only makes a couple of decisions in this process, and there's very low risk for all this. And one decision is which of these student responses looks like it matches the design of the author of the lesson?

And the other is, do we have enough of those student responses to display to be worth the, the teacher's time in discussion? If only one student said this thing and everyone else said something different, maybe move along. But at no point is any generative text or is any content generated in front of the teacher or the class?

So we've, we've kind of cordon off the AI's power. We are definitely not using these models, so their fullest, most glorious extent, but we are using them to a very safe extent while also trying to, to maximize their value to a teacher.

[01:12:21] Ben Kornell: Math talks has been a long studied pedagogical instructional strategy in classrooms where kids basically take a math problem where there's a lot of different ways to solve it.

They go around the room visually, they solve it, and then you go around the room and chat. You know, one of the questions I have about this concept of the discussion moments, but also with AI in general is like, what's the analog substitution? And when you're looking at just the ability for a teacher to hear what students are saying and write it up, or for students to do one of those padlets where they all put their information and you could project it, what's the differentiation here between what the AI can do versus either what markers on a on poster could be, or kind of old school tech?

[01:13:12] Dan Meyer: Yeah. If I understand your question, I feel like you're asking one of these central questions in our design process right now, which is to wonder what do you do off of computers? We started with these digital lessons because we already have the student thinking and text form for free. Like a lot of these EdTech apps, like you gotta figure out how to get student thinking into the system to be able to be affected and analyzed by the ai.

And that's hard, you know, I don't think a teacher wants to like scan in a flatbed scanner, every student worksheet. Like for to what end? So we are starting with digital because we do have the data for free already. 'cause students were already interested in adding it to our lessons. But I wonder a lot about Yeah, the, the physical media and how, is there a way to get that into contact with some kind of system for analysis and.

The best I can think of at the moment, and I just haven't shared this to anybody, but I am thinking about like the criteria telling a teacher, you know, go look for these two kinds of responses. So that putting the teacher in the position to be that analysis engine, like be more intentional with them and saying, all right, look for a student who used a picture to describe Y two odds as an even look for a student who said something that had the words pairs.

And making that, the sort of thing where a teacher goes out and has like a scavenger hunt almost is I think a way of preserving the same kind of intent of the discussion moments while applying it to analog media where it's just, it's just too hard to get the comprehensive full classroom set corpus of data.

[01:14:40] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I feel like there's such a range of use cases for AI and education and one of the challenges that we have is the hype cycle. It creates these like overstated camps of like all AI and education is good, all AI and education is bad. When you actually look at any technology, it, it can be neutral. It's just the use case.

And is the use case a better use case than what the alternatives are, or a worse use case, or does it really solve a problem or are we manufacturing an artificial problem? What inspired you to pick this social AI and these discussion moments as a use case? What framework did you use to analyze and decide this is one of those, and how might we extrapolate that to identify other use cases where technology or AI is advantageous?

[01:15:34] Dan Meyer: It's a great question. I would love to hear like every person listening, how you think about what you build and, and why you build it. I know that math discussions have been a source of interest for math education for 20 years. The most popular book ever in our field is about leading discussions in math class.

It's very hard to do. I would say that my process is very just high level generic, right? Like I wanna understand the tech and understand the user. No one's gonna write that down, who's listening, right? It's like, okay, great user-centered design. Right? But in education, every developer listening has like unique liabilities, is prone to a unique form of deception, which is to say, I understand a user.

I was a user for like 12 years, 12 to 16 years I was a student. Like I get students or to say I understand teachers. 'cause I observed teachers for 12 to 16 years. We wouldn't say that if we were building an app for an accountant, right? Like I, I've never been an accountant, so I would go and be very rigorous in my ethnographic approach, right?

But there's this, we're prone to deception there. And so what I do is I am in a classroom every week helping a teacher watching how this teacher operates. What's hard, what's easy. I'm teaching lessons every month, ideally, often enough that I fall down flat and feel some real pain. Like on Friday I taught with discussion moments during class.

A kid from a different classroom came in and started yelling obscenities at the whole class. And it's like, that's real. Like that's a real situation. If that is not in your mental model of a classroom.

[01:17:00] Ben Kornell: I always appreciate your blogs when you talk about that and just your humility around how hard it is just to be a good teacher, even when you have years and years of experience and no math deeply, there's an element of unpredictability and dynamism that is both the energizing force of it and also the real challenge.

[01:17:22] Dan Meyer: That was really well put. It's the best part and it's the hardest part. And if, you know, if you're imagining teaching from behind your laptop screen or your home office answering emails, like you just don't know what's going on. So anyway, if I get the users really well by doing all that, if I stay plugged into the technology and, you know, I probably gotta turn in my, my AI skeptic card if I admit to how often I listen to your folks' podcast, but like I'm, I'm tuned into all of that, and if the moment's right an idea emerges from, from the intersection of the Venn diagram of what users need and what the tech can do, and for now that's this particular idea.

[01:17:56] Ben Kornell: I love this approach almost of like forgetting your biases and coming in de novo to what a teacher experience might be like. There's elements of post COVID classrooms that I've just noticed are just totally different than the teaching environments that I taught in. And not to say there aren't like beautiful moments that happen there, but the weight and the struggle that students are going through just feels materially different.

But there's also this range of teachers, if we were gonna scatter, plot them, you know, or look at Roger's adoption curve. You have your innovators and early adopters, and you have your early majority, late majority, and laggards. And one of the challenges in EdTech is you're trying to build, or really an education curriculum, PD or anything to support teachers is there's actually such a wide range of teacher skill, ability, and willingness to change practice.

How do you think about product design? In that context. And when you're going and visiting, are you visiting both like resistant, reluctant teachers as well as like progressive forward teachers? Are you kind of consistent with the same teacher classrooms? How do you think about that?

[01:19:08] Dan Meyer: It's such a great question.

Just a couple thoughts about it. One is, I, I'm currently helping a teacher who uses a document camera, and that's it. And it's so helpful for me to like, just see here is a teacher who is low tech and fantastic. That's been very valuable for me. And the other is, yeah, just to understand. I think that the people who use our products, they are using them as a means to a particular end.

Like they're trying to get a job done, but we are also helping them become a new kind of teacher through the use of their tools. This is how tool use works, right? Like it gets a job done, but it also changes you. It gives you callouses, it changes your physionomy or psychology. So what I get so excited about, about the discussion moments is like I am creating for a teacher, a ready-made discussion resource, one click that has the words on it as a support for the teacher.

Here is a really interesting, wrong answer. Can we talk about it? And what I get excited about, we, we've all been in classes or can understand a math teacher who like really penalizes wrong answers and they feel shameful and icky. And the idea that we, through our products can help teachers change into more loving, more effective beings really gets me going.

That it'll be more likely, perhaps that this teacher might treat students and their, their evolving ideas with more generosity and even love. That's exciting to me. Uh, to keep in mind as a, a product developer is that we are supporting, that products are pd, that we are changing and developing users even as we help them get a job done.

[01:20:35] Ben Kornell: Yeah. And also that our tools and supports get morphed by the teachers themselves as they figure out their unique context and use cases. A lot of people talk about efficacy and implementation fidelity, and when I hear that people are expecting a hundred percent implementation fidelity, I'm just like, that's just not a realistic expectation given that part of the teacher's role is to understand their learners in the context in which the learners can engage with your curriculum tool or product.

So that's part of the challenge and part of the joy in our space. Stepping back in general, where do you feel like EdTech investors, EdTech entrepreneurs, are getting this moment wrong, and what advice would you have for them to get on track? Because I think there's a lot of great intention out there, but the critiques that you have that land the most powerfully with me are ones that are really about how to fuel that positive intent to actual, practical.

Impact. So what's your take? What's your advice given where the space is and where it's headed?

[01:21:46] Dan Meyer: I think I just first wanna say I'm very empathetic to anyone who feels excited by the current moment. Like, I'm not made of stone. I use these tools and, and get excited about the possibilities here. It's super important to separate who we are as adults behind a laptop in a, in a home office or an office, and the reality of schools and the massive cognitive overload of the classroom.

The teacher has the greatest in school positive effect on kids out of any other factor as, as is well known. And so whatever tool that we add to the classroom environment, if it serves to separate the student and teacher, if it puts the student and teacher in a more antagonistic relationship, if the teacher's job becomes something like coerce the kids to use the app more, like create a scoreboard to like show who used the app the most, if that's what you've reduced a teacher to, you're not gonna see the results you want.

It's really gotta fit into the grammar, as they call it, the fabric of the school. And to do that, you gotta understand that fabric and that grammar.

[01:22:48] Ben Kornell: That's great advice. Gosh, there's so much more I would love to talk to you about. If people want to find out more about what you're building at Amplify, where can they go?

And also if they wanna check out your Substack, where can they go?

[01:23:01] Dan Meyer: Hit me up@danmeyer.substack.com. Math Worlds is is the name of it, and that's mostly where I publish weekly ish about things I'm building and working on and thinking about. Get in touch. Love to hear from you.

[01:23:12] Ben Kornell: Great. And then in terms of administrators and schools that wanna get in on this pilot, how would they find out more about what you're building with discussion and AI at Amplify

[01:23:22] Dan Meyer: My marketing team, thanks to you for telling me to plug, plug, plug here.

Uh, Amplify Desmos Math is the name of the curriculum. Just Google that and hit that contact button and we'll get you in touch.

[01:23:31] Ben Kornell: And if anyone wants a prequel for this episode, we have Eli talking about. The origin story of Desmos, which is probably my favorite math tool and curriculum in the world. So AoPS Desmos, there's a warm spot in my heart for everything that you did to build that.

So thanks so much, Dan Meyer, and for those of you who want to comment more, please submit your comments on the podcast, but also email us at info@edtechinsiders.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks so much, Dan Meyer for joining us today.

[01:24:02] Dan Meyer: Thanks, Ben.

[01:24:03] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders.

If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.

Alex Sarlin

Host

Ben Kornell

Host