Week in Edtech 5/27/26: AFT Reverses Course on AI, i-Ready Faces Backlash, New Federal School Choice Tax Credit, AI Remediation Gains Momentum, Anthropic Surges, and More! Feat. Noah Pickus of Duke University

Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they discuss the growing backlash against AI and screen time in schools, the launch of a federal education tax credit, promising new evidence for AI-powered remediation, workforce disruption from AI, and the future of higher education with Noah Pickus of Duke University.

✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:40] AFT shifts its position on AI and screen time in schools
[00:07:25] i-Ready faces growing parent backlash despite strong adoption and efficacy data
[00:13:36] New federal Education Freedom Tax Credit could accelerate school choice and supplemental learning
[00:17:46] Education savings accounts create new opportunities for edtech business models
[00:20:09] New research highlights AI's potential to help students catch up academically
[00:23:16] Guided practice emerges as a promising framework for AI-powered learning
[00:24:56] Survey finds 99% of executives expect AI-driven workforce reductions within two years
[00:31:29] Anthropic's rapid growth reshapes the competitive landscape for generative AI

Plus, special guests:
[00:35:39] Noah Pickus, Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships and Senior Advisor to the Provost at Duke University, on the Future Universities Alliance and reimagining higher education globally

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: 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.

This season of EdTech Insiders is brought to you by Starbridge. Every year, 

K-12 districts and higher ed institutions spend over half a trillion dollars, but most sales teams miss the signals. Starbridge tracks early signs like board minutes, budget drafts, and strategic plans, and then helps you turn them into personalized outreach fast.

Win the deal before it hits the RFP stage. That's how top edtech teams stay ahead. 

There's a lot of different edtech movements that this could feed into if the infrastructure was built to be able to get parents the visibility and the ability to pay for some of these programs upfront. And it's gonna be wacky and wild, but I'm hoping it's gonna be positive.

Hopefully, this moves us a little past the sort of school choice as a boogeyman and into there's an actual market here. 

[00:01:17] Ben Kornell: Meanwhile, I think we're also starting to parse out where is AI and efficacy working and where is it not. So again, this backdrop of backlash and also unbundling of school and school choice

[00:01:35] 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. 

[00:01:51] 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. It's Ben and Alex again with the graduation edition of EdTech Insiders. You are all graduating to the twenty-twenty six, twenty-seven school and university academic year, and boy, what an academic year it was. Before we dive in, Alex, anything coming up on the pod? What's the latest in our world?

[00:02:40] Alex Sarlin: So we talk in this episode to Noah Pickus from Duke University. And then there's so many interesting people out there that we're talking to. We talked to Vikas Pota, who does the EdTech Global Prize, and that will be coming out in just a couple of weeks. And a number of different amazing people. Jason Katcher from Superhuman, I think you talked to, Ben.

Superhuman/Grammarly has been doing incredibly interesting work with AI. But we're getting into the summer, which is a really interesting time 'cause a lot of educators and education-adjacent folks are available and have sort of have a moment to take a breath and think about the year that was, the year that's coming, and, and what we can do better next year.

So it's gonna be a good one. 

[00:03:19] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I feel like everyone's doing a take stock moment right now, and the idea of what can we do better is pretty front and center because of the growing AI backlash, screen time backlash, insert word here backlash that's affecting ed tech space. Give us a rundown of what you think the latest update is on that.

[00:03:40] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I mean, I think the, the headline for me that really jumped out this week that was a, a real stamp on the backlash was seeing that the AFT, the teachers' union, has now basically tweaked/reversed its position on AI chatbots and on screen time. We saw President Randi Weingarten come out and say basically that they're starting to really wanna curb the amount of screen time to make sure that elementary school students don't have access to AI.

And if you remember back a year ago, it's almost a year to the day, I think it's just almost exactly a year ago when the AFT and the UFT were working with OpenAI to create this enormous AI training academy, and they were basically coming out on the exact opposite side of this saying, "AI could be a really meaningful accelerator for learning, and teachers have to be prepared."

And here we are, and they specifically cite in this article that, this is a Times article, that Randi Weingarten changed her position after listening to a compelling talk from Jonathan Haidt. And I was like, "Oh, wow." You know, it's one of these funny things where, you know, we've been talking about this forever, but people underestimate, I think, the power of anecdote.

I mean, not that his stuff is anecdotal. He's a great psychologist with lots of research behind it. But small arguments that are very clear and very specific coming from a, a trusted person can go an incredibly long way in changing the trajectory of millions of students and hundreds of thousands of teachers.

I thought this was actually pretty sad, and there's even some pushback saying that it undermines teacher autonomy because you-- as we all know, there are a lot of teachers who are leaning into AI, who are sort of bucking trends and saying, "I think this can be incredible. I'm doing amazing things with it."

And this actually sort of tries to put the kibosh on it. What, what stood out to you about that news? 

[00:05:23] Ben Kornell: I mean, I think in general, Randy Weingarten is reading the political tea leaves- Yes ... and he has a very political role. And so I take it less as a definitive truth of the teachers union and where this will all net out, and much more of a political signal of we fully flip to the other side where the mainstream opinion is ban tech, period, full stop, EdTech or not, from elementary schools.

I think the thing that concerns me most is if you look at early math education, that's one of the areas we struggle with the most in K-12 education, and most elementary teachers aren't trained mathematicians. They're often liberal arts teachers. I myself, history and lit major, K-8 credentialed. I took one math training course when I was getting my teaching credential, and I tested out of it in undergrad.

So as somebody who really cares about math, I had very, very little training on it, and it's very hard to teach conceptual math really, really well. And so many of the tech tools that are out there are great with pairing an engaging, awesome teacher with really high-quality instructional materials in math.

And so I specifically am worried about that space. I think the other story that we've been following is the i-Ready story. Yeah. And it almost feels like there's a very broad anxious generation theme, which is screen bad In all walks of life. But then I think there's also, I think we underestimate the potential threat or challenge because there's also very targeted attacks going on around i-Ready.

And i-Ready, for those who don't follow along at home, Curriculum Associates, it's their assessment tool. They do benchmark assessments multiple times a year, I think three times a year. And it's become almost a universal coin of the realm in terms of outcomes tracking 

[00:07:25] Alex Sarlin: It's used by a third of schools 

[00:07:27] Ben Kornell: And it's specifically for elementary and middle school students.

And so this kind of vitriol coming out at i-Ready, there's, I think, reasonable analytical arguments around the amount of time spent or is it all productive time or are kids just gaming the system? Those are valid, but some of it is quite emotionally charged. 

[00:07:47] Alex Sarlin: Yes. 

[00:07:47] Ben Kornell: And I think those two combine together to hit EdTech on a weak spot, which is most of our companies don't have great evidence bases- Yeah

to defend the efficacy of their work. The irony is i-Ready has a fair amount of efficacy data. Khan Academy has a fair amount of efficacy data, and yet there's a one-two punch with the two of them. Khan being that AI doesn't work, and i-Ready being like this testing industrial complex with screens is bad.

And the net total is if we swing the pendulum too far the other way, now we have no accountability systems already. Now you're gonna basically take out high-quality instructional materials that leverage tech. I think we're gonna get a patchwork quilt of learning going on, and the variance will be very, very high 

[00:08:40] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.

I think it's worth noting y- you're talking about the evidence base. This reminds me a lot of the fight over the Common Core, right? You had these individual parents looking over the kids' shoulders at their homeworks and saying, "This doesn't look familiar to me. This is not how I learn things. This looks really confusing.

I don't get it." And starting to complain, and complain publicly, and complain to other parents, and then complain to the administrators. And I feel a very similar vibe with this i-Ready backlash, where people are saying, "My kids don't like i-Ready. They're bored by it," or, "They don't wanna go to school 'cause they're spending time on it."

And I think i-Ready's a powerful tool, but there is something to be said of there are different generations of EdTech, right? And i-Ready, it's been around for quite a while. The company's been around for quite a while. It's not designed to be the apps. They have gamification. They have some really great things in it.

But the idea of it as the poster child for all of EdTech would be anathema to many, certainly entrepreneurs who are starting their own things, certainly many AI native companies. It can be strange when you have parents sort of on behalf of their kids with this very intense sort of noble intention saying, "I wanna protect my kids from having unpleasant experiences, or being bored, or being confused, or..."

One of the stories in, there was a story in Chalkbeat this week about i-Ready as, as sort of parents starting to push back on it, and one of the anecdotes they talked about was a kid who was getting low test scores because they liked the sound that the alien made when they got the wrong answer, right?

You get down to these, like, little specific choices, these design choices, these tiny little product elements, and because people have very little insight into what happens in EdTech products in general, these tiny things can go very viral. And that's what happened with the Common Core as well. You'd have, like, single questions from the test going viral on social media and being like, "This is what people are being tested on.

Isn't this crazy?" And I feel like we're at risk of that again. And I mean, to your point about evidence base, evidence is incredibly important. It's hard to know. I think in some ways, part of why this story is coming about, we've seen some popular editorials a- about this, is that parents are seeing i-Ready.

They're seeing tools like i-Ready, where they're like, it's lots of testing, it's lots of questions. The students aren't necessarily thrilled about it. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. But then they say, "Oh, I looked into the evidence, and I don't feel like there's enough evidence." It's not like a medical-- There's no Food and Drug Administration for EdTech.

There's no stamp of approval that says, "No, this is absolutely the best tool in the world. It advances people by three grade levels." If they don't see sort of overwhelming, shining evidence, they're like, "There's not even enough evidence for it, and my kid doesn't like it." And that one-two punch is stronger than it sounds for EdTech.

I'm sure that the Curriculum Associates people, several of them are quoted in this article, are really scrambling to figure out the sort of PR around this, because they don't want it for their own company, but they certainly don't want to be part of the EdTech backlash writ large 

[00:11:35] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and we've lost a lot of nuance in our political discourse.

We've lost a lot of nuance in our educational discourse, and I think your analogy to Common Core is a great one because really Common Core was poorly implemented at the end of the day, and we never got to see what a coherent competency-based assessment system with scaffolded standards and all that truly looked like because eventually the popularity of it was so under fire that you had a lot of states that had to tweak it, and then it made it so that most curriculum providers couldn't fully invest all the way.

I will say In all of these things, though, there's a reality, a grain or more of reality to it. And so I think that's the hard part. It's difficult to push back on these when there either isn't evidence base for the specific product, in which case the reason why everybody buys i-Ready is people implement i-Ready and the test scores go up.

The truth is, they've got a lot of case studies of that happening. That's why people buy it. So I think i-Ready has a pretty strong case that if what you care about is improving student outcomes via test scores, it's a great fit for that. I think the challenge is, like, not every parent believes that that's the right outcome either.

And so the net of this is EdTech is under fire in schools, meaning that schools are pushing back, but also they're losing trust in their EdTech vendors and their screen time. Parents have already lost a lot of trust in schools through COVID and through also a lot of culture war stuff going on in schools.

[00:13:18] Alex Sarlin: Yes. 

[00:13:18] Ben Kornell: So there is no winner because at the end of the day, now we see a ton of parents opting out, and it's tech-forward parents who are like, "This is ridiculous. My kids should be using AI because those are jobs of the future." And others who say, "I want nothing on a computer screen." 

[00:13:36] Alex Sarlin: That's right. 

[00:13:36] Ben Kornell: And so, you know, our second story is really about the acceleration of that.

So we have our first federal education savings account in effect. It's a tax credit. It's a $1,700 tax credit from the Trump administration. And the basic gist of it is per child, it's called Education Freedom Tax Credit. Per child, you get $1,700 and you write it off on your taxes 12 months or 13 months later, and you have to spend it on nonprofits that are for enrichment for your students.

But what turns out is there can be these intermediate nonprofits that can take the money or essentially provide the service that then farm it out to for-profit companies. These are called scholarship-granting organizations, SGOs. And those SGOs can-- Basically, they become these funding administrators to help people purchase additional materials.

Now, $1,700 may not sound like a lot of money, but when you think about some states where it's $8,000, $9,000 per student total, and then the 1,700 can be on top of whatever education savings account they have in the state, now you're really talking about a meaningful amount for parents that either wanna go to a private school or an independent school, or if they want to unbundle and do homeschooling.

And the fact that it's federal tax credit means that it's actually not coming out of any education budget. So the critique that, "Oh, this is unfunding public education," this is new money And you don't have to fully opt out of the system to access it either. This could be supplemental after school. I think this is gonna supercharge choice opportunities.

Families can dip their toe in the water of supplemental, and this idea that the school provides it all and is full stack and I sit it and forget it, I think that era is over. Right now, I believe there's 22 states that have not opted into the tax credit, but it's free money to the states. So it's, like, politically untenable.

All the states that haven't opted in, as you would guess, the vast majority of them are blue states because they oppose Trump. But I think this is a turning point, and I see some really interesting entrepreneurial ideas around it. There's a company called Pathfinder that's doing credit card for ESAs, and there's a lot of talk about fronting the money for the families so that they don't have to wait until their tax credit.

I think there's gonna be a bunch of innovation here. 

[00:16:09] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I agree. It's also interesting that it's, it's such a specific amount coming from the federal government that would be on top of state programs that are doing ESAs as well, right? So I think it creates-- As you say, it's a sort of accelerant for the school choice budget.

They estimate in this it could be up billion. It says, "Recent report estimates that the Education Freedom Tax Credit could generate an additional $24 billion in education funding annually." And as you said, that's new money, right? That's not being pulled out of existing education budgets. We're coming off the ACG SV Summit.

There was entire multiple choice track there trying to track this highly politicized, but also in some ways very I don't even know what the word is. In some ways very commonsensical, but also problematic. It's something that incenses a lot of people, but it also is very clearly an opportunity. And because it's coming from the federal government, because it's involved in the tax system, I agree with you, Ben.

I think the people who are really gonna innovate here are those who sort of find a way to make this easier to use. I mean, we, we've talked to Jamie Rosenberg from ClassWallet, who-- one of the founders of ClassWallet. Pathfinder just got funded to do that work. There are others who are Odyssey. We've talked to Joe Connor from Odyssey.

There's a lot of people. This is relevant to tutoring programs. This is relevant to micro-school movement. There's a lot of different EdTech movements that this could feed into if the infrastructure was built to be able to get parents the visibility and the ability to pay for some of these programs up front.

And it's gonna be wacky and wild, but I'm hoping it's gonna be positive. Hopefully, this moves us a little past the sort of school choice as a boogeyman and into there's an actual market here 

[00:17:46] Ben Kornell: Well, and anybody who's selling B2B to school districts right now, you're experiencing a brick wall, and you've gotta step back and say, "Is there a B2C motion here where this is government funded, so it's B2G in a way, but how do I get myself into this channel?"

Because a math program that a district might pay $8 per student for, a parent would gladly pay $25 per student for a year of that. And if they're able to use these tax credits, you start having meaningful budget for supplemental programs, and that's the total opposite of where things are going budget-wise for public school districts 

[00:18:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's a really good point.

It's gonna be interesting. I mean, I feel like there's so much... You know, I've talked to a number of people in this space. We've interviewed a lot of people in this space, and I think it's really important that we keep an eye on the sort of how technology can not only deliver the actual educational services, but technology can create enabling infrastructure that allows this to actually work in a large way.

Because you're talking about tens of thousands of students in Louisiana and Alabama and Florida, and all of these parents who are not used to buying supplemental education off the shelf. They don't know how to do it. They may not know how to navigate the tax system. They may not know how to... People have criticized the Democrats for many years for always giving tax credits for everything, which are often unused.

But if you can turn that tax credit into something that is truly feels like money in hand, and then, as you say, say, "This is the best proven program. You can get Zearn for this many dollars, and this is how it works, and this is how you use it at home," it could be a really amazing... There's a path, but there's still some obstacles in the path.

[00:19:31] Ben Kornell: Yeah. 

[00:19:32] Alex Sarlin: And this SGO thing, you mentioned these scholarship-granting organizations, they do have to get on approved lists for each state, and then EdTechs would have to get on approved lists for them, I would imagine, or s- in some way. So there's a lot of downstream complexity that has to be navigated. 

[00:19:45] Ben Kornell: I mean, the most coherent vision I've heard is that this should behave like a healthcare savings account where you get a card, like a debit card.

[00:19:53] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. 

[00:19:54] Ben Kornell: You've got a balance in there, and you just can spend it on pretty much most things that are related to medicine, in this case, anything related to education. So they'd have kind of categories that they would approve. That would be the easiest. 

[00:20:08] Alex Sarlin: Yes. 

[00:20:09] Ben Kornell: That also means that it could be a very fragmented spending bucket.

This vision that you shared around whitelisted products, that is a much more concentrated world, and there's some people that will benefit or some companies that would prefer to have a much narrower state list- Of course ... and others that would prefer to have a broad one. So all of this stuff I think will be playing out in twenty twenty-seven.

I don't think this is gonna get fixed ahead of time, but right now they're working on the rules of how the SGOs work and how this will all come out. So stay tuned. Meanwhile, I think we're also starting to parse out where is AI and efficacy working and where is it not. So again, s- this backdrop of backlash and also unbundling of school and school choice, we're running a special series right now sponsored by the Overdeck Family Foundation that really highlights evidence from scale.

And we came across a great article from The 74 Million, which really talks about AI as a differentiated remediator for kids who need to catch up. Alex, what stood out to you about that story? 

[00:21:15] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I thought this was a really interesting-- It's an opinion article. It's from Daniel Weisberg, who is a former CEO of the new TNTP, New Teacher Project.

He's also been a d- deputy chancellor in the New York schools. And what I liked about it is that we talk about AI in education all the time on this show. Obviously, we talk about it at conferences, we talk about it everywhere. But this is like a very specific vision of ... And it's a vision. It's, there's research cited, but it's not fully, fully baked out yet.

But it's this vision of where can AI truly make a difference? Maybe it's in remediation, because the traditional schooling has a really very poor track record of remediating students. We have huge numbers of students getting to the college level while they're still doing middle school math or, or below.

That's been a problem for decades. We just have many, many students are off grade level in reading, they're off grade level in math, they're off grade level-- They're falling behind, and we don't have a great track record with our traditional system of being able to differentiate and catch each student up.

Phil Khan used to call this the Swiss cheese, right, of education. Fill the holes that were missing in previous subjects, previous concepts. We've wanted it forever, and we've never quite been there. And this is a-- The editorial is basically saying AI could be uniquely good at this because it is so personal, because it can have the entire curriculum at hand, because it can actually work in context with teachers.

They mention a pilot with Kiddom and, and some of the people who are trying to basically give teachers the tools to be able to create differentiated AI products. So what stood out to me is that this is a pretty specific vision of AI in education that is a lot less scary than screen time or AI as grader or AI as integrity partner.

Like, there's all these boogeymen there. This is AI is the remediator. AI, when student falls behind, this AI can catch them back up, and this vision of sort of could we get to being able to do two years of growth in one year, which is always something we've needed in school. So I recommend the article.

It's an interesting one. It's called "America's Schools Are Terrible at Catching Kids Up. How AI Can Help." And I think it's a powerful narrative. 

[00:23:16] Ben Kornell: Yeah. We've talked before about AI is really good when you need to go to the learning gym and do practice. It also is good at filling in the Swiss cheese holes if the AI is directed to do so.

And I think one thing that's clarifying more and more is how important it is to be intentional about the role of the human being, the instructor or the student, in the kind of AI co-evolution. What we started with, I think, was a search bar where AI can tutor you or teach you on anything Now where we're going is much more towards guided practice as a pedagogic concept.

And the idea is that the AI is very good at executing on the guided practice, but it's good for the teacher to set up the guided practice, and it's good to have that scaffolded for students so that it's not just blabbering out the answer, but it's actually walking you through pedagogically scoped and sequenced guided practice.

This is where companies like CourseMojo, I think, are making really big breakthroughs in that it's all based on assessment, it's all in the supervision of the teacher, it all follows like learning plans and learning arcs, and it can do so much with diagnosing misconceptions or gaps. This is the kind of positive news where I think if we could say, "Hey, everybody, AI is not for everything, but here are specific situations that it's really good at amplifying the educator."

And essentially its access and its quality in what he's describing in this article, that's got to be the antidote to our backlash. 

[00:24:56] Alex Sarlin: I always think we have to have baselines when we think about what AI or tech can do, right? I mean, people can complain about i-Ready, but as you said, if you take i-Ready out, you have no benchmark assessments and you have no personalized recommendations.

You lose a lot. And if you look at schools that aren't using i-Ready, it's not like they're outperforming schools that do. We've never seen anything like that. So I think it is really important to compare the capabilities of AI with the capabilities of traditional education, and it has shown for many years that remediation has always been a really weak spot for traditional education in a lot of ways.

Big segue here, but one other article that stood out to me, Ben, and I'd love your take on it. You mentioned the sort of tech-forward parents and how they might backlash to the backlash against AI in schools because they see this incredible job holocaust. I don't, I mean, I don't know what's gonna happen.

There's all this crazy thing that's gonna happen with jobs in the future. There was a survey reported in Inc. Magazine, a new survey that basically says that 99% of executives expect AI to drive headcount reduction 63% believe that redesigning work around AI is what'll drive the greatest value return.

And already there have been almost 150,000 people laid off this year with an estimate of almost 400,000 by the end of the year, which is a almost 50% increase from 2025. So we are already seeing increased layoffs, and executives are basically saying unanimously that there are gonna be more. And that is a big deal for everybody in society, but it's a very big deal for anybody who's educating, especially educating with a goal of career readiness.

What do you make of that? 

[00:26:31] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, I think you're gonna not get a lot of pushback on that view from me. I think I just spent the week up in San Francisco, and everyone is redesigning how work happens. Our friend Joel Hellermark from Sana, which is an AI workforce solution, they were acquired by Workday.

He's now becoming their chief AI officer for the company, and the vision is they will eventually have armies of finance and HR agents, and you won't need a finance or HR department. Those are good jobs. Those have been good jobs, and they're all going away. And what do you need in a finance department?

Maybe one person who can manage your agentic third-party partner. The other thing no one is talking about is offshoring. The reason why offshoring kind of hit an equilibrium point, there was massive offshoring, but in the '80s and '90s. And even with tech, there's been a fair amount of offshoring with tech.

But the belief had always been that quality was here in the US and that with something that needed creativity or development or design, it has to be onshore here in the US. Now that you have agentic-powered people in other countries, their capability is surpassing the US employee who doesn't have AI and will soon be on par with the US employee who has AI, and it's a fraction of the cost.

So ultimately, there's a capitalistic reason why this is going to happen, and there will be a flight towards AI agents purely, but also offshore talent using AI agents I also think there's a social component, which is companies looked bad when they were laying people off in the past. That was like a signal, "Oh, the company's going down.

We can't do a layoff. It'll look so horrible. Our stock will tank, or investors won't like it." Now, if you're not laying off, what the hell are you doing? You're asleep at the wheel. You've got bloat. And so I think that the other thing is whether or not the AI is really taking the job, people have lost a sense of compassion for their employee base, and they really are being ruthless and increasingly encouraged to be more ruthless about cutting roles, even if there's not an AI agent to replace.

What that does when the job market gets so scarce, your existing employees, AI or not, end up doing three jobs because they need the job So I think we're gonna be in a really tight work period here. And, you know, the Industrial Revolution took 30, 40 years to play out, and what we're having is this AI revolution happening in a period of three to five years.

That's just too fast for us to adapt, and I think it's gonna get worse than it is now in, over the next year. 

[00:29:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And I mean, goes without saying that this has ramifications for the education system and especially for higher ed, but for the education system and for workforce training because it's just gonna create this incredible desperation among many people who are trying to either keep their job or expand their own capabilities or be able to work with AI and keep up with the trends or keep up with the tooling.

It is a little bit scary. By the way, you know, you mentioned the timeframe. I don't think I even said this in the headline, that 99% of executives expect layoffs within two years. Two years. I wanna double-click on one point you made there, which I thought was really poignant, which is the signaling effect of this.

It's like everybody wants to look forward-thinking on AI. Everybody wants to look like they're really doing the right thing, and if laying people off because you're retooling your workflows around AI and AI agents is the cool thing to do, layoffs become a status signal, a status symbol for the tech intelligence of a company, and you're seeing that in a lot of different industries.

It's pretty scary. Last headline, we can just wrap it up here, is that we saw a giant valuation change for Anthropic for their new funding, which actually puts them above OpenAI. Anthropic now has a $965 billion valuation. It's a little hard to get your head around a number like that. That's nearing a trillion.

There's only a few companies that have ever been worth a trillion dollars in the history of the world. And there was an interesting article in The Information, and I've heard this from a few different sources, where Claude has really taken off as a consumer tool, especially with the coding, but it also in the wake of that Pentagon scandal.

And Information estimates that Anthropic may be generating at least 35% more revenue than OpenAI. So I think that's part of the valuation thinking as well, is that OpenAI's whole strategy was consumer apps, and Anthropic was supposed to be the sort of infrastructural B2B, and yet Anthropic, I think, is maybe even starting to move ahead even in a consumer space.

Or it's hard to say whether that revenue is business or consumer, but they're sort of becoming the tool of choice for a lot of society. What did you make of that story, Ben? 

[00:31:29] Ben Kornell: Yeah. You know, it's so interesting the stories about Anthropic, but it also is a story about OpenAI OpenAI had the early leads, but they had this funky nonprofit for-profit structure, which I think also slowed them down and complicates their structural valuation.

And then you had the coup d'état on Sam Altman, which he survived. 

[00:31:52] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:31:52] Ben Kornell: Then you've got essentially their playbook was a pure consumer ChatGPT playbook, a la Apple iPhone kind of thing. And the entire time, Anthropic has just been laser-focused on B2B solutions, and it spilled over to C. I think you're right, there are a lot of consumers- 

[00:32:13] Alex Sarlin: Coding did

[00:32:13] Ben Kornell: just using it. But the way the vast majority of Americans at least are getting introduced to Claude is at work. And I think that the questions on these valuations notwithstanding, the burn of Anthropic is like a third of OpenAI too. And so everyone that I talked to this last week said the race is now between Google and Anthropic.

And- 

[00:32:38] Alex Sarlin: Wow ... 

[00:32:38] Ben Kornell: in some ways, Google needs Anthropic to be there so that it doesn't threaten Google's ability to operate, because then it would be monopolistic And neither of those companies like OpenAI. And so my sense is OpenAI has done a great job of weaving themselves into the fabric of the whole ecosystem, so it's hard for me to imagine them fully going away.

But it would not shock me if there was some sort of Microsoft, OpenAI alignment- 

[00:33:07] Alex Sarlin: Yes ... 

[00:33:07] Ben Kornell: that happens out of convenience because they need more grounding in like a real business model. And the last thing I would say too is there's a lot of controversy about the data centers. I'm sure everyone's hearing that.

Limited compute is starting to become a real problem for education and social impact entrepreneurs, and it's not the price of tokens, it's the actual scarcity of compute. And I think that we're really starting to see as like more and more companies are built that rely on it, these power outages, kind of like in the late '90s and early 2000s Enron crisis when there'd be these rolling blackouts.

We're getting to a place where there will be rolling blackouts of your AI, and you can't run a business that way. So I really do think that a bunch of people are going to invest on-prem, on-device backup plans so that if the large server, most high-powered AI isn't available, you at least have some lighter weight models that you can fall back on.

[00:34:10] Alex Sarlin: Totally. We also didn't mention that OpenAI is very rapidly heading towards an IPO. The scuttlebutt, which also will bring it back in the news, that will probably be an incredibly successful IPO, and then suddenly they'll have a lot of cash to move around. 

[00:34:24] Ben Kornell: The other piece for both OpenAI and Anthropic is chip makers own a bunch of these companies now.

So there's a weird way in where there's circularity, like I own equity in you, you pay me money, I buy more equity in you, which gives you more money to pay me more. So the other thing too is- 

[00:34:43] Alex Sarlin: There's a lot of it ... 

[00:34:44] Ben Kornell: it doesn't take a financial genius to see that if anything softens with the chip makers, the whole bottom could fall out on this thing because of these circular relationships.

[00:34:56] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. They're all invested in each other in this humongous way. It's really wacky. Nvidia and Microsoft are connected with Anthropic. Anthropic is, yeah, Demis Hassabis was an early investor in Anthropic. I mean, really strange bedfellows here and a lot of circularity in this space. But yeah, it also reminds me a little of Uber and Lyft, right?

I mean, the classic, I feel like OpenAI sort of took the lead, sort of created the category, but got a little bit of a reputation as being a little bit crazed, having all sorts of fights internally and stuff, and, and Anthropic was just sort of like steady, trying to hold steady, stay with their thing and not make waves.

This is their moment. This has been a great week, Ben. So now let's move to our conversation with Noah Pickus from Duke University, doing really interesting work with AI. 

[00:35:39] Ben Kornell: Thanks everybody for joining, and if it happens in edtech, you'll hear about it here at Edtech Insiders. Hello, EdTech Insider listeners.

I am so excited today to be joined by Noah Pickus, Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships and Senior Advisor to the Provost at Duke University, where he is a professor and the founder of the Future Universities Alliance. His most recent book is "The New Global Universities," and he was a founding architect of Duke Kunshan University, and he served previously as the Chief Academic Officer at the Minerva Project, our great friend Ben Nelson, often on the pod, and co-director of an ASU Georgetown Higher Education Leadership Intensive Program.

Welcome to the pod, Noah. 

[00:36:26] Noah Pickus: Ben, great to be here. Thanks for having me 

[00:36:28] Ben Kornell: So before we dive in, it just would be great, I gave a little bit of your biographical overview, but what's been the through line of c- your career, and why have you been so focused on innovating in the future of higher ed? 

[00:36:42] Noah Pickus: You know, it's one of those stories that if I had planned it out, it never would have worked this way.

It only makes some sense to me telling it in reverse. I started out as a professor of public policy, writing about immigration and citizenship issues in the US and globally, and then got pulled into running interdisciplinary programs at Duke, and then stepping in and out of Duke over almost 30 years by happenstance, working with ASU, working with Minerva, building a new university in China.

And I think the through line was encountering all the strengths of traditional universities, their reach and their depth and their capability, but also how hard it is to change them. And you can spend a lot of time moving an institution in a very small direction. And seeing, as I was building universities in China and as I got engaged with Minerva, all the innovation that was happening outside of traditional institutions and the opportunities that that presented, but also the very distinct strategies that they needed to focus on to survive.

And so I sort of happenstanced my way into innovation strategies in old and new universities, where the question was less, "What are you trying to do?" And more, "How can you actually do it?" 

[00:38:17] Ben Kornell: And when you thought about alliances, kind of the coming together, tell us a little bit about what spurred that idea, because so many folks see these same problems, and it's a go it alone approach, and yet you've really thought about connecting the dots and building community.

Where does that come from? 

[00:38:34] Noah Pickus: It came out of working in all of those different settings. I came to the realization that the criticism of higher education that is most often heard is that it is just too traditional. It's not innovative. It's not addressing the needs of various kinds of needs in the world And I came to the conclusion that that wasn't entirely accurate, that there were plenty of creative ideas inside existing and new institutions, and it wasn't what should they be doing, but it was that people were trying to create things, and innovations would emerge, but they wouldn't accumulate.

They wouldn't travel. And so you'd get isolated pilots, or you'd get a particular model that only worked in one particular context. And as a result, you often have-- We go to conferences, we have case studies, we have limited peer sharing networks, but they were less focused on the question of I'm trying to make decisions now under these constraints to achieve something that I have a big idea about, and there's nowhere to turn for that.

If you're in the business world, you can turn to a lot of people to think about entrepreneurship and new ways of doing things, but there's limits to how far that applies in higher ed And in higher ed, you can turn to a lot of people who can tell you all about higher ed, but are not necessarily thinking of new systems and new ways of doing things.

And what seemed to me was we didn't need another grand network of conferences. There are plenty of good ones like that. But we needed something that was much more focused on helping to build the infrastructure for decision-making for a lot of people where it's very lonely. You can be trying to change an established place or start something new, and it's just isolated out there.

[00:40:38] Ben Kornell: Yeah. In terms of the opportunity, of course, at EdTech Insiders, we understand the power of community, but you also have this difficulty of having people play in the sandbox together around the future of education when they're different sizes, different populations they're serving, different brand requirements and not, and also different appetite for change management.

What have been the biggest challenges in bringing the alliance together, and where do you see the biggest opportunities for transformational change? 

[00:41:09] Noah Pickus: Well, a little context here may be helpful, right? We are in our MVP year. In June, we will announce the first cohort of about 50 institutions, about a third in the US and two-thirds all around the world.

I think it's every continent except Antarctica. And these institutions-- So we are at the, in some sense, the beginning of this journey. And part of the conceit really picks up on your question. Initially, I was imagining this, having helped create a new university in China with established institutions, having really learned so much from Minerva's global model, having written a book about other new universities emerging around the world.

My focus initially was on essentially Y Combinator for new universities. That was the talking point But what happened was there was a moment when we brought together the leaders of a lot of these new universities that were sometimes two, five, 10, 15 years old from Africa, from Asia, from Latin America, from around the world, and institutions like mine, like Duke, long-established institutions.

And what became clear there was each of them offered something to the other that they didn't quite know they were missing. So for emerging institutions, some of it was simple. There was visibility and credibility that they needed back home in order to convince people, the ministries of education or funders, that they were a real thing.

But they also needed exposure to some of the depth and the knowledge and the experience that established institutions have. And established institutions faced an almost adverse problem, which is they were only gonna grow so large. They were only gonna have so much they were going to go online, depending on the institution.

And if they got any bigger, they were gonna be dominating with essentially a very often US-centric model And so how could they be force multipliers without opening up a thousand branch campuses? And how could they both invest in, and I don't mean financially, but invest their experience in helping institutions navigate new things while getting exposed to the key thing that established institutions often lack, which is the energy and the drive to try something fundamentally different.

They don't have an incubation space. They don't have the experimental space that's as available as new places starting from scratch. And they needed to expose their constituents, their stakeholders, to all the change taking place in the world without having to necessarily buy into it and sign a joint venture agreement every time.

So the conceit there is that it's the very heterogeneity where there are different needs, but those different needs are what the others can help meet, as opposed to what you correctly point out, which is when you just have people doing wildly different things, but they're all looking to get one thing out of it, and those don't match.

[00:44:39] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I think there's often a belief that it's a zero-sum game, that these universities are in competition, when the reality is, at EdTech Insiders, whenever we break it down, there's a lot of important segmentation in higher ed, where different universities are filling the gaps for different student populations, different subject areas, different parts of someone's life, whether it's radical upskilling of additional workforce or whether it's first time in higher education.

That being said, there are also pretty foundational gaps in the existing patchwork quilt that we have that is higher ed. What do you think are the biggest gaps in higher ed, and how is the Learning Alliance moving to fill those gaps, and where do you see the most urgent need? 

[00:45:27] Noah Pickus: So to try to respond to that question, I think it's important when we say higher education, not only even in the US context, as you know, is it segmented and there's a great deal of variation and complexity in the ecology, but When you think about this in a global sense, right, then you have both some through lines of commonalities and you have a lot of differences.

So at an abstract level, what I would say is the problems are the same, but the contexts differ significantly. And we give much too little attention to that context because it turns out you can have an AI invention and you think it's terrific, or you can have a science of learning approach to active learning that is excellent, but the ability for that to translate and transfer is very much dependent on how it works in the particular context.

So if you're looking at the whole continent, if you look at sub-Saharan Africa, right, you have this enormous gap just of access to quality higher education Whereas if you look at Europe and the US, there are gaps, there are access issues. But there the challenge is, particularly if you come to institutions that have been long and well-established, is their impact is only reaching a small number of students.

And the thing that we've seen is that often the inventions that are forced by constraints of having to create something new in a situation where resources and legitimacy and branding are not all in place, leads people to imagine and do new things that established institutions would not on their own think of doing, but actually offer solutions to some of their kinds of problems.

You can think about this, the fundamental question about to what degree are we focused on learning content, and to what degree are we actually focused on learning underlying habits and skills? This is what Minerva has been so good at. And that's a problem that newer institutions have a greater ability to tackle fresh, even though that's a problem that exists back at established institutions.

[00:48:02] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I feel like you're breaking down so many barriers here with global, domestic, basically thinking about post-secondary as a incredible lifelong learning through line that you're already stepping out of some of the typical constructs. So even the thought, even helping people think outside of their current context is probably a benefit alone.

I'd love to like fast-forward. So we kind of talked about past, your journey here, present, where the state is of the alliance. Future, what do you imagine the future of post-secondary looking like globally, and how do you think, maybe from a student's perspective, what would it look like if you had your magic wand of what that ecosystem looks like in 2030 or 2035 or 2040?

What do you think it looks like? 

[00:48:55] Noah Pickus: So I think the other, I guess I'd call it an insight. It was an insight to me. I don't know if it is to anyone else. It was a recognition. The recognition was that we tend to think about scale and quality, and the biggest challenge is how do you scale quality? 

[00:49:13] Ben Kornell: Yeah. And often their intention, but is there an opportunity for them to be in sync with each other?

Mm-hmm. 

[00:49:22] Noah Pickus: That's right. The biggest recognition to me was that the way, I don't want to say around that challenge, but the way to think differently about that challenge was to think about a much more pluralistic, open source kind of sharing. What we don't want is One by one by one models. Everybody has, my university is one example, and then there's 10 other examples, and they're all precious and unique.

On the other hand, the other end of the spectrum, which is one ring to rule them all, right? The killer app, the single system, is fundamentally, I think, opposed to the way knowledge works, the way learning systems work, which is kind of ironic, and the fact that most of the constraints on this are local.

They are not technological constraints. They are not global constraints in the sense of there's a single solution. The ways in which a small liberal arts school in Pakistan is navigating how to be relevant in a fundamentally cultural and civilizational way, as well as to get employment for its students, is very different from an institution trying to seek to build a larger model of quality education in the African context that depends heavily on not having a traditional faculty-student ratio.

And the goal is not to do away with that difference. The goal is to maximize the possibilities and to see where you can learn from some of those examples, but it's less of a franchising model and it's much more of an open ecosystem kind of model 

[00:51:12] Ben Kornell: Hmm. Policy is one of the levers that people often look at as a barrier to transformational change.

Can you talk a little bit from a policymaker standpoint, what advice would you have for them to encourage or create that highly scalable, high quality, and open collaborative system? What kind of policy change would you wanna see? 

[00:51:38] Noah Pickus: I wanna respond to this with a global context here, not just a US one. 

[00:51:43] Ben Kornell: Yeah.

[00:51:44] Noah Pickus: I think the biggest challenge I've seen is that policymakers and other funders globally tend to say, "We wanna do something different. Let's be just like them." And we know why this is the case, right? The reason is that it's actually very hard to tell what matters, what counts in education. The bottom line of what helps students learn or what makes research better is something that turns out to be maddeningly difficult to pin down.

And so as a result, we rely on basically branding or legitimacy as proxies, or to use a different word, prestige. And so the number of times I've been called up and somebody said, "Well, how can we be like Duke?" Or, "How can we be like one of the best universities in the world?" Is the biggest mistake, I think, because then you're not actually creating something new that you have an opportunity to leapfrog and bring forward.

You're actually basically building a model that is already creaking, right? If you take the American model for all its strengths, it's under enormous pressures. It's too expensive. It doesn't serve enough people. It doesn't focus enough on actually student learning. So why would you wanna imitate that?

Well, you imitate it because that's who's in the rankings. And so the biggest advice I always wanna give to policymakers is you have to generate something that can draw on different sources, but your goal is there's all this information out there. People will talk to you about their universities. When we built our joint venture in China, I was amazed to go around the world and say to people, "Show me your IP."

And they said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, how do you do your curriculum? How do you do teaching and learning?" And of course, they said, "Oh, we'd love to." So there's an opportunity to build on that, but people are faint of heart, and they wanna do something, and their policymakers say, "Well, this is how we accredit the existing things."

This is how we recognize what is the right rankings. And so they end up, in fact, being not even fast followers, but very, very slow followers. So I think it's important to embrace what is the distinctive thing you're trying to bring that you actually can believe in the genius of your own people about, as opposed to what is the copy and paste, which usually doesn't work in your own context.

[00:54:24] Ben Kornell: So from a policy standpoint, it's really more instead of just focusing on replication, it's more on knowledge sharing and collaboration and encouraging those types of situations. Is it relaxing policy requirements globally in higher ed, or is it actually establishing global standards? If we had five ministers of education here and it was like, what's the one policy you could have to really open your university up to being like a global anchor institution, what would that mean?

[00:55:00] Noah Pickus: Well, I mean, to that specific question, there's a specific and a broader question there. On the specific question, I think the importance is recognizing that we've seen a great wave of globalization, and we've seen a pushback against globalization. Those are complicated stories we all know to navigate, and my point is not globalization is great, nationalism is bad.

I don't think that at all. I think navigating that is actually what is most important today, and to be a globally open and based institution today is actually to be one that is seeking not to replicate yourself elsewhere, but seeking to be a force multiplier in the way this alliance is. And so what that means is that what we're trying to do is say, you have an innovation in AI.

Oh, you're trying to do-- Right? Everyone is trying to do this right now. The issue is not what is AI. There's a universe of ideas out there But in many cases, the ways in which institutions deal with AI is very different, and their ability to actually implement it so that it is enhancing rather than substituting for learning, that is a how question.

And the alliance, as my example of what a globally based institution would be, is one in which you are prototyping, prototyping and iterating on how did we apply AI in this case? How are they applying that, and how in this open source way can we share it, rather than we have the AI solution, where would you like it?

That, I think, is the fundamental difference of what it means to be a global institution today. And so to your question about policy, I think the most important thing is I worry much more-- Look, like everybody in academic life, you know, we all have our, I think these are the great standards. This is what we should be doing.

But I think your question opened up more the issue of relaxing standards, so there's more opportunity, again, ironically, for learning. So somebody does something with AI and experiments with-- in the context of Botswana, and someone else is doing it in Germany, and we are so busy getting it accredited in ways that smooth it out and simplify it, that there's no way to actually say, what did we learn in these cases, research rich and research poor.

And so I think policymakers need to fundamentally relax that so that the pluralism can expand rather than what we end up with, which tends to be more of the, here is the model that is going to try to rule them all. That's what we have to get away from. 

[00:57:55] Ben Kornell: I mean, this conversation, we could go on for hours.

I think we're gonna end up doing a special series with Matthew Rascoff here in the fall to talk about the future of higher education and post-secondary. So it feels more like the beginning of a conversation, Noah, than an endpoint or a coda. But if people do wanna learn more about the alliance that you're building, wanna be a part of it or learn from it, what's the best way for them to reach you?

[00:58:21] Noah Pickus: You can find out more about the Future Universities Alliance at futureuniversities.org or 

email us at futureuniversities@duke.edu. 

To your point, Ben, we've been speaking at a broad level here about systems and structures and trying to build an alliance which is focused less on past sharing of best practices and more on real decision-making under real constraints.

And what we're gonna be working on starting in a month from now is with these fifty institutions that are all working on these issues we've talked about, from AI to work integration to rethinking interdisciplinary problem-solving. Those are the kinds of issues that'll make this, I think, more tangible than the sort of foundation we've been able to start with today.

[00:59:14] Ben Kornell: Wonderful. Well, so excited to continue that conversation and have our community engaged. Thanks so much, Noah Pickus. We will talk to you soon. And for those who want to see in the notes, we'll also include a link for the alliance in there. Thanks so much for joining us at EdTech Insiders. 

[00:59:34] Noah Pickus: Thank you, Ben.

Much appreciated. 

[00:59:37] 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.

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