Student-Centered Learning, AI, and School Redesign with Julie Young of Florida Virtual School

Julie Young is the Founding CEO of Florida Virtual School (FLVS), where she helped pioneer online public education and expand access to millions of learners. She later founded ASU Prep Digital and is the author of Say Yes: How Virtual Became Reality, continuing to shape the future of student-centered learning.

💡 5 Things You'll Learn in This Episode

1.  How Florida Virtual School grew from a small pilot into a global model for virtual education. 
2.  Why putting students and not systems at the center changes everything about school design. 
3.  Lessons for driving innovation within public education while earning trust and support. 
4.  How ASU Prep Digital is blurring the lines between K-12 and higher education. 
5.  Why AI should be a catalyst for redesigning education, not simply automating existing practices. 

✨ Episode Highlights
[00:02:42] Why Julie wrote Say Yes and the philosophy that shaped her career.
[00:03:46] The origins of Florida Virtual School and overcoming skepticism about online learning.
[00:10:56] Building innovation inside public education without working against the system.
[00:23:09] How ASU Prep Digital is rethinking the transition from high school to college.
[00:32:01] Why AI challenges the very purpose of school and creates an opportunity to redesign learning.
[00:37:20] The rise of robotics, coding, and authentic assessment as the future of education.
[00:39:33] Julie's recommended books for educators and innovation leaders. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: 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. 

[00:00:31] Julie Young: We had to be fluent in the language of the institution. Even when you're trying to change it, you have to speak the language of the institution. I couldn't walk into a Florida legislator or a school board member or a superintendent and speak like a tech founder.

I was an educator, and I had to speak as an educator and ground every conversation in student outcomes and demonstrate that what we were doing, what we wanted to do was an extension of the system's values rather than a rejection of them. And that was super important because a lot of people had the attitude within the system of, why are you doing this?

And you know it won't work.

[00:01:18] 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. 

[00:01:34] 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 backchannel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoy today's pod.

[00:01:58] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to Edtech Insiders. We have a real Edtech legend with us today. She's an edupreneur, an innovator, a pioneer, and an author. She was the founding CEO of Florida Virtual School, and Julie Young built it into the largest state virtual school in the US, reaching over two million students globally.

She's also the author of a recent book, Say Yes: How Virtual Became Reality, and recently she founded ASU Prep Digital, redefining the boundary between K-12 and higher ed. As founder of Julie Young Education LLC, she helps leaders reimagine what school can be. Julie Young, welcome to Edtech Insiders. 

[00:02:40] Julie Young: Thanks, Alex.

It's a pleasure to be here. 

[00:02:42] Alex Sarlin: It's great to have you here. So first off, we mentioned the book, and I'd love to dig into it. Your book is called Say Yes: How Virtual Became Reality, and it's all about this philosophy of life in the Edtech world. Tell us about the book. 

[00:02:57] Julie Young: Yeah. Thank you for bringing the book up.

It's exciting. It took me seven years to write this book. Lots of interruptions, lots of peer pressure. But the title is really, the Say Yes part is about saying yes to opportunities as they come along. I never had a plan. I never had a, you know, I'm gonna be a principal by this date this year, or superintendent by this date this year.

I just took advantage of opportunities as they presented themselves and took the attitude of I can say yes, and if it doesn't work out, I'll do something different. So that's the say yes part. The how virtual became reality is really the story about how Virtual School and ASU Prep Digital were designed and built, and the very messy journey along the way, certainly at the beginning, back in the '90s.

[00:03:46] Alex Sarlin: Right. So let's talk a little bit about that messy journey. It was a really important journey. You founded Florida Virtual School, you said early '90s, at a time when online learning was really quite unproven, and it was not a known commodity. It was not fully understood. Tell us about the idea behind it, and what were some of the biggest obstacles to convincing people that a virtual school could actually be credible, transformative, a meaningful educational experience at a time when that was not an accepted idea?

[00:04:14] Julie Young: Sure. I always like to clarify that I'm the founding CEO. State of Florida is the founder. We collectively did that work with a whole bunch of people. And the original idea, there were two districts that actually responded to a grant by the Department of Education. It was called a Break the Mold grant.

And the Orange County, where I was from, Orange County, Florida, there was a teacher that was a computer science teacher, and she actually wrote a two-page concept paper about if she could teach this online, she could teach computer science online, she could teach kids in other schools. Mm-hmm. And there was a huge shortage of computer science teachers at the time.

Our schools were very overcrowded at the time. And that two-page concept paper turned into a full-blown grant for two districts, Alachua and Orange County, which started out as a district program for each of the schools, turned into a state program pretty quickly. And then as other states became interested, we realized that it really had a global reach.

So in terms of credibility and transformative programming, et cetera, the biggest obstacle wasn't skepticism about technology. It was really the skepticism about whether or not learning could take place outside this building, this building with this hallways and lockers and cafeterias. And somehow virtual education didn't count because it wasn't encased in this building.

And so the credibility that had to be built in terms of proving that learning could absolutely be done in this way was, was deep and steep. And the credibility piece came from holding ourselves highly, highly accountable and being very, very transparent and inviting the outside in. And so if someone wanted to do a quick study or a little survey or wanted to have a demonstration or talk to teachers or talk to me, it was always yes.

Always said yes And so credibility did come as soon as we started to be able to demonstrate success with our students and people started to realize that students who had been either struggling or not being served by our traditional public schools were having these great experiences. And we had students who were starting to discover that they actually were learners and they weren't dumb kids and really became engaged in the different types of academic learnings that were offered.

So that was really awesome. We spent quite a bit of time taking students, parents, teachers to meet with legislators, policymakers, superintendents, et cetera because again, the skepticism, which was kind of interesting, came more from internal teachers and leaders within education than it did from parents, legislators or students And the transformation just followed because once we started to demonstrate that students who were not being successful really could be learners, the transformation was really visible and people were kind of amazed.

[00:07:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I can imagine. Actually, let's deep dive into that amazement. I would love to ask you about the transformational change and the idea of districts doing something so big. We'll get to that in a moment, but tell us some stories from those early days about what the transformation really felt like for families and parents when they reoriented themselves as learners, not students within a specific school, but learners online making sense of the world.

What did it look like? 

[00:07:55] Julie Young: It was truly amazing, and what we started to see, my favorite story has to do with we were doing a presentation for BellSouth at the time, so that tells you how long ago it was, for a grant opportunity. And we wanted to do a student and a parent panel. And so we had some students that were participating from one of the schools in Orange County, and we called the counselor of those students and said, "Hey, we have this opportunity.

It's on a Thursday afternoon at 1:00. We'd like to take these kids out of school and bring them to this presentation." The counselor was very, very quiet, and then she proceeded to ask us, "Why do you want those kids? And why don't you take these kids?" And we said, "No, no, these are the kids that we really want to be able to talk about their experience."

And we explained a little bit more about the day, and she really did try to talk us out of choosing those students because those students were different kids in their schools than they were in their online classes with us. 

[00:08:55] Alex Sarlin: Interesting. 

[00:08:56] Julie Young: So we said, "Nope, these are the kids we want." So these were kids that were C, D, F students in their schools, and they were A, B, C students with us.

Wow. And so we brought them in. Their parents came with them. They were all dressed in their Sunday best, and they did a beautiful job. And as they started to talk about the lack of peer pressure, the lack of pressure to complete things because they had to hurry up in the classroom and the class was moving on, the feeling of insecurity or feeling like they were less than because they just couldn't grasp the information in a timely fashion.

When they started to talk about this, one of the folks from BellSouth started to cry. And of course, we did, too, and so the parents. And that story right there was demonstrative of Many, many, many, many more students who had similar experiences 

[00:09:55] Alex Sarlin: Yes. And then if you zoom forward to today, Florida Virtual School has reached over two million students, and there are lots of other virtual schools that have come in its wake in the similar model.

And obviously, during the pandemic, everybody became a virtual student for a little while, and people got a taste of that lack of peer pressure, lack of having to be walked down the hallways with other people. Just a very different sense of what school could be and your relationship to academics. Let's ask about the institutional change part, because I think one thing you're mentioning that's so important here is that you said it wasn't-- the pushback didn't come from families and parents about online learning necessarily.

It came often from the district and just this concept of you can learn outside of this building. We have defined school as here. This is what school is. It's this place. And Florida Virtual School really changed that perception, obviously within Florida, but I think for a lot of people in the space, it changed that perception.

Tell us some of the lessons that you learned from building something new within the public education system that then became a real movement. 

[00:10:56] Julie Young: First of all, I always want to say, as I answer a question such as this, that I have been a public education advocate and employee for my entire career. I believe in public education.

I believe in choice as well, and I believe that we as public educators have a responsibility to give our students and our families whatever opportunity they need to be successful. And so the more models that we can provide where students can have an experience that works for them, I'm an advocate of So that I think is really, really important to just make the point.

[00:11:33] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:11:33] Julie Young: So when we think about the lessons, first and foremost, within public education, change is slow, and we know that. And the pace of public education is genuinely frustrating sometimes, even to those of us that have dedicated our lives to it. The world's moving faster than our systems, and the gap is real, and I think we struggle with that constantly as we try to keep pace with reality while we live inside our school bubbles.

So first and foremost is that you have to find people inside the system who are ready to say yes before the system is, and that was absolutely key. And so as I mentioned before, many of the educators were incredibly afraid of this type of learning. They were very put off by it. There were two reasons.

One was the idea that learning could take place outside the bubble, the school building, and the second was money. In Florida, money follows the student. And so we were very fortunate that we had a commissioner, Frank Brogan, who was in office while we were getting started, who was genius in identifying us for funding as a line item.

So what that means is, is that the, basically, the state wrote us a check every year for a certain amount of money, and therefore, we did not take money from the districts. No money followed us from the districts for six years, and that was intentional because his idea was, find a way to get started, demonstrate success, and make yourself so meaningful and so useful that when the time comes, and it will, that the funding model will have to change.

People won't be able to live without you, and students will have had great success. So I think that was very timely and, and a very important part of our start. In terms of finding people inside the system who were ready to say yes, we started with a foundation of homeschool families. 

[00:13:36] Alex Sarlin: Mm. 

[00:13:36] Julie Young: Florida's always been a leader in the homeschool, home education systems.

So in Alachua County, the homeschool community really became the catalyst for their grant response. And so we had this foundation of people who were believers. At the same time, we also had some key legislators who were also key believers in the homeschool movement And so we were able to identify the early adopters by following the homeschool movement in the state of Florida.

What we also did was following the advice of the person who hired me, Bob Williams, when I kind of went, "Why are you interested in me? I'm an elementary person, and this is a high school." And he said, "We want someone to look at education differently. We want someone to think about the students who don't like the pep rallies."

His point being, we have a lot of disenfranchised students in our schools. Oh, yes. And so we looked at, okay, what course offerings are most needed in order to fill the gaps that the schools have? So we really started with core courses that were honors courses because the rural districts had difficulty attracting teachers that could teach those courses.

And then we also started with advanced placement. So again, we looked at, okay, who are our allies? And what are the greatest gaps that we can fill that will be helpful? And then I think another thing that was really important is we had to be fluent in the language of the institution. Even when you're trying to change it, you have to speak the language of the institution.

I couldn't walk into a Florida legislature or a school board member or a superintendent and speak like a tech founder. I was an educator, and I had to speak as an educator and ground every conversation in student outcomes and demonstrate that what we were doing, what we wanted to do was an extension of the system's values rather than a rejection of them.

And that was super important because a lot of people had the attitude within the system of, "Why are you doing this?" And, "You know it won't work." So lots of interesting lessons there. 

[00:15:52] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. So I mean, I'm hearing courageous leadership, right? Somebody willing to take a chance and give the space for something to evolve and become irreplaceable and essential and beloved before it got squelched.

I'm hearing early adopters from both the educator side, right, getting some intrepid educators who are willing to try this and get excited about it, and from the student and family side, and you tapped into the homeschool community to do that. And a sort of leaning on outcomes and the language and culture of education rather than coming from the outside and saying, "Hey, this is a technology product.

We're doing tech stuff here." It's like, no, this is an education initiative. We're educators. We care about education. We care about outcomes. I'm curious, you mentioned that six-year horizon of funding. Was that related to college outcomes? Or in general, I'm curious about whether college placement was one of the factors that mattered in those early days and something that the homeschool families cared about.

[00:16:48] Julie Young: It really wasn't part of the formula at the time. It wasn't part of the conversation so much at the time, except in that homeschool families could graduate their children earlier, faster- Right ... than traditional public education students could graduate. And so when we did have students who were genius in some way and we were able to teach them on a mastery basis, on a performance basis rather than a traditional calendar, we were able to serve those students in an entirely different way, and it would come up then.

But in terms of the six years, that was really about the fact that we had a commissioner who had a great idea about how we could be non-threatening while we built and proved the system, and it was a time when Florida had the dollars. And the six years, the only reason it stopped at that time was because the class size amendment, uh, passed in Florida And when the class size amendment passed, everything that was a line item in the legislative budget zero budgeted in order to compensate for the class sizes going down so dramatically.

[00:18:02] Alex Sarlin: That makes a lot of sense. So yeah, it was a separate legislation coming in to change the equation literally. But there's also an implicit choice in there. You mentioned to do AP courses and honors courses, and courses that specifically framed the virtual schooling experience as an accelerated experience.

It wasn't a remedial experience. It wasn't for the kids. When you say the kids who don't like prep rallies, sometimes people might define that, especially back then, as the kids who are failing out, the kids who aren't succeeding, let's give them remedial courses, and you took that in the opposite direction.

You say, "Let's give students challenging courses, AP, honors, and make this a privileged experience and mastery-based so that they can move faster through school." I'm curious about that decision because I think that's an important framing one as well. 

[00:18:45] Julie Young: Yeah, and so that ran both directions for students who were accelerating as well as students who were struggling.

So Florida Virtual School, from day one, I made a very firm decision. We would put the student at the center of all of our decisions. That was our mantra, and we were going to live that mantra and remind each other of it every hour if need be. And what resulted was if we are really putting the student at the center, what would change?

And it was like, well, pretty much everything would change. The calendar would not matter. The time of day that students worked on their classes would not matter. How fast or how slowly they moved through the academics within reason would be about the student's academic success and not the hours in the day and the Carnegie units.

Their age did not matter. Everything could change, and so we took advantage of the opportunity. We were given the responsibility and the opportunity to completely reinvent an education model. And we took advantage of that. And so that was when we said, "Okay, so we don't have a calendar. Students can start any day of the week, any time of the year.

If students want to accelerate, they can complete their courses faster. If students need more time, they can take more time. If students wanna work at 10 or 11 o'clock at night, they can. If they wanna start their day at 10 in the morning, they can." These were the students that were using us, usually our homeschool students who were not engaged in a traditional school with a schedule.

So they were using us for two or three courses at a time. The kids that were in schools that we were serving, they were almost all taking the courses as a seventh period. And so they were taking the courses primarily from home or in a computer lab after school. 

[00:20:34] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:20:35] Julie Young: So again, they had that flexibility.

And we would work with the district if the district said, "No, they absolutely have to complete the course by this date." We would work with the district or that particular school, still giving that student more time and attention, but also serving the needs of the school in that regard. So again, a lot of times where we started to see the early adopters within the schools, it was when they were having difficulty serving a certain type of student well with the resources that they had, and we had a way to fill that gap.

[00:21:11] Alex Sarlin: Fascinating. And that decision, as you say, to m- put students at the center of the experience and how many changes that made, I feel like says a lot about the existing system, right? If you say, "Oh, when we put students at the center of the experience, we made it mastery-based, we separated it from a schedule," it changed so many elements of how school worked, and makes you realize how many elements of how traditional school work are really designed around the adults in the room, around parents' schedules, around teachers' schedules, around, you know, seasons, around all sorts of things.

Just a meta commentary to say, as online education started to question some of the base assumptions about school in the direction of student-centeredness, there were so many things that changed. It wasn't small changes, massive changes. 

[00:21:51] Julie Young: Really massive changes. You know, one of the massive changes was very early on, literally within our first few months, we made a decision to be a year-round school.

So that affected-- There was a small group of teachers that were in working on this project in a pilot before me, and they were all hardcore high school teachers. And, you know, we had the whole conversation that there are teachers that are teachers because they want their summers off with their families.

And so those may be teachers that never teach with us. But again, if we're putting the students at the center- Then we wanna be able to serve the students year-round. 

[00:22:30] Alex Sarlin: Completely. And I can imagine that for many students, the summer is actually an excellent time to get the schoolwork done because it's when there are less pressures from traditional school, a lot of opportunity to accelerate or do competency-based acceleration during the summer.

Yeah. So let's talk about ASU Prep Digital, which is another really, really fascinating project, but differentiated in that Florida Virtual School came from the state and the districts, this came from ASU, Arizona State University, creating a high school model that really blurred the boundary between K-12 and higher ed.

Tell us about the origins of ASU Prep and why do you feel like that divide between high school and college is continuing to blur today? 

[00:23:09] Julie Young: Yeah. You know, when, when we joined ASU Prep to start ASU Prep Digital, that was 2017. When I was asked to lead that charge, I took some leaders from Florida with me that had a deep experience in the virtual world.

And when we made the decision to go to ASU Prep and ASU, we were, a couple of us were ASU employees, we made the decision to go because of the opportunity to blur the lines between K-12 and higher education. We were very specific that we were incredibly proud of Florida Virtual School, but we weren't there to do FLVS 2.0, that we wanted to really focus on what it would look like to give students the academic freedom to move forward at a pace they're academically ready to in terms of college.

That is absolutely Michael Crow's belief, and he, you know, has, has, has mentioned the story of we didn't get into the charter school business to have more charter schools. There's lots of charter schools in Arizona. But what we did want to do was serve K-12 and look at what would this look like if we stopped focusing on these man-made boxes that we put kids in, you know, elementary, middle, high, college, all based on their age and a calendar.

What would it look like if they actually had the opportunity to start college in high school if they were ready? So it was very, a very exciting time. The surprise was that although Dr. Crow was 100% all in, and that's why we were there, there was resistance within the university from the faculty about going all in on students actually starting college in high school.

Now, important to explain, ASU does not have traditional dual enrollment courses. They have college courses. They're all college courses. And so that was the fundamental difference that bubbled up For those that aren't as familiar with dual enrollment, it's designed for high school students. It's typically taught by high school teachers who have additional and exceptional credentials, and oftentimes it is also taught within the high school.

Sometimes kids travel to a community college or a college to do dual enrollment, but oftentimes it is offered on the high school campus. So even though it's considered college material like an AP class would be or an IB class would be, it's different than an actual college course that is offered by the university.

So we did have some pushback from inside from faculty. Our 14 and 15-year-olds were ready to go. We had parents who were super excited about the opportunity for their children to do real college-level work, but we did have to take a step back and prove that this was gonna work at ASU Prep Digital as well.

So I mean, at first we just tried to win the argument. We made the case, presented the rationale, and pushed back on the skepticism, and that went nowhere. And so we stopped trying to convince colleagues and instead we put kids into ASU's universal online learning courses, which were designed to be mastery-based and risk-free for students in terms of cost and grade.

Students could stop and they could opt out and choose not to take the grade at the moment. So we, we had a math professor who started out really skeptical. There was a math professor at, at ASU that was pretty skeptical, and he ended up becoming one of our biggest champions, and not because of anything we said, but because one of our high school boys outperformed several of his college students in his class.

And so with the right guidance and support, the success became visible and, and word spread Now we expect every student at ASU Prep to start college in high school. 

[00:27:09] Alex Sarlin: That's amazing. I love the phrase you used, man-made boxes. Of lots of systems in society, but especially within the education system, we sort of created and, and reified, just fetishized this idea that there are these sections.

There's high school, and elementary school, and high school, and college, and post-secondary, and graduate, and everything. We have these dividing lines, and I think that we're increasingly moving to a time where people... Dual enrollment has grown, and it's a powerful one, and that's one that sort of comes from the high school level reaching up into college.

But I think we're seeing more and more comfort with the idea of universities reaching down into high school and saying, "We are actually gonna open our courses to people of any age." And I think that really ASU Prep was one of the, were the first people to do that. And Michael Crow, of course, legendary education leader who's known for breaking down those boxes, breaking down tenure, and so many of the sacred cows of the education and higher ed system, challenging them.

I'm curious if you zoom forward to 2026 how you see this education pathway landscape. I think in many ways it's become more flexible. Students do have more opportunities to earn college credit or all sorts of different micro-credentials to do more competency or mastery-based education than they ever have before.

But even so, I think a lot of them don't realize that. I'm always confused by that. The systems have been changing slowly over time but often through initiatives like, like ASU Prep, but sometimes families just don't realize that their ninth grader or their 11th grader could be doing work in, in so many different contexts.

I'm curious how you see the current state of the blurred lines. 

[00:28:40] Julie Young: Well, first of all, I believe you can't be what you can't see. 

[00:28:43] Alex Sarlin: Right. 

[00:28:43] Julie Young: And that we have to expose our children to the opportunities that exist around them, and too often that doesn't happen. There are many, many students who come to high school that, you know, would potentially be first generation college students who don't expect to go and have no plan to go So what has been very rewarding about how we've structured ASU Prep and ASU Prep Digital is the fact that if an- indeed a student starts college in high school on our dime because it is funded, we can fund that through our state dollars, then all of a sudden they wake up one day and it's not, are you going to go to college or not?

It is, I'm already in college, how do I keep going? And we have had some students that have graduated with 60 and 70 credits, and so, you know, imagine how awesome that is in terms of the reduction of cost of continuing and possibly completing at least an associate's degree, if not a full degree. So I think that's really important.

Number two, I love the fact that we are having the conversations and that we're seeing the CTE, career and technical education, come back. We used to call it vocational education back in my day, and, you know, we were talking about this the other day when some of my friends, when we were in high school, you know, we took home ec, we took shop, we took courses in how to change a tire.

I mean, you know, just there were life skills that we learned that have since gone by the wayside, wayside in many and most schools. And what we also knew back then is if a, a student was choosing or being tracked into a skill-based career, that was usually because they weren't considered college material.

So that is changing now. 

[00:30:40] Alex Sarlin: Yes. 

[00:30:40] Julie Young: And what I think is awesome about that is imagine if we can graduate students with a skill that they are interested in, and with a business degree or a finance degree or a marketing degree or a degree in entrepreneurship, and we can share with students, you know, not only can you be an electrician, but you can own your own business as an electrician And we wanna encourage kids to gain both of those skills, and I think that that is happening now.

It's slow, but it's acceptable, it's exciting, and I think it's an opportunity for the colleges and universities as well to keep those students coming. 

[00:31:23] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. We've seen a huge decrease in the number of families who think that college is worth it over the last few years. The ROI question has come up a lot, and there's a really powerful way, I think, to your point, of blurring the lines of the traditional stigma that had been attached to vocational ed.

And at this point, even removing the stigma that's attached to higher ed right now. I think a lot of people feel- Yeah ... are stigmatizing traditional higher education, saying, "Oh, it's only for certain people. It costs so much. You, uh, you, people are saddled with debt. It may not be relevant." Putting these pieces together, the sort of strengths of each of these approaches, I think is incredibly powerful.

[00:31:59] Julie Young: I'm super excited about it. 

[00:32:01] Alex Sarlin: We have to ask about AI. I know it's not particularly anything that's come up in, in this context, but I have to ask about it because we are obviously in the middle of this huge change. It comes up in every conversation I have with educators or technologists in any way. I'm curious if you see AI as a positive force in some of the movements that you've been involved in and pioneering over these years.

Do you think AI can support the blurring of these lines or ability for student to make more student-centered education, or do you think AI is just making things even more complex and everybody sort of has to figure out an, a whole new set of tools and technologies? 

[00:32:35] Julie Young: I think compliance looks like issuing a strong and limiting AI policy or putting lots of guardrails on student use, and then waiting to see what everyone else does.

And I, I do think that the concern is understandable. I think it also could result in a missed opportunity. 

[00:32:53] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:32:53] Julie Young: And so I actually think about courage looking more like asking that deeper question of what is school fundamentally for? Then using this moment to actually answer that question. AI doesn't just disrupt how students write essays or complete their homework, it dis- disrupts the entire rationale of rote knowledge transfer as the core work of schooling.

[00:33:18] Alex Sarlin: Yes. 

[00:33:18] Julie Young: If a student can access information instantly and generate a, a first draft in seconds, then the things that matter most are judgment, discernment, curiosity, creativity, and the ability to know how to ask a good question and then evaluate the answer. So I think there's a tremendous opportunity, but our systems really are not built to develop those things.

We have great teachers who do, but we are still in the knowledge transfer and regurgitate model fundamentally. So I think it's a design issue, and we have to redesign this place we call school, and I believe AI will be a catalyst. I think it's going to not be the destination, but be a catalyst. And the leaders that I, I most respect right now are the ones that are kind of using this moment as an invitation to redesign rather than just respond and protect their status quo.

So I think the students sitting in classrooms right now deserve leaders who are, are willing to ask those hard questions. And if we shelter the students completely from AI rather than teach them how to use it entirely and ethically, they will not be career ready. And, you know, for this next generation of young workers, being AI literate will not be a nice to have, and it will be a must-have.

So that's a lot around that. The other thing I'll say real quickly is our dreams 30 years ago when we started Florida Virtual School, our dreams, our vision, were so far ahead of the technology's capability. If we had had AI, oh my gosh, I think about the advancement that could have been made responsibly in that type of an environment.

That was 30 years ago, and what has happened in the last two years with AI is landmark and remarkable. 

[00:35:17] Alex Sarlin: Yes. Especially for the exactly the type of students that you are serving, right? Students who want specialized types of work, who want to go deep in certain subjects or do advanced placement or do-- AI has the power, if we get it right, to differentiate so strongly to serve competency-based education.

If somebody wants to finish their entire high school experience two years early, AI is a phenomenal tool to help with that. 

[00:35:38] Julie Young: I think people are narrowly focused on, and certainly need to be aware and very responsible about the whole chatbot thing that all of a sudden we're gonna have chatbots doing all the teaching and talking to our students.

I'm not an advocate for that. What I am an advocate for is using AI to underpin content or curricula in such a way that you can truly personalize a learning experience for a student in such a way that they can advance or they can go deeper, they can spend... They don't, I don't know, they're learning division.

They don't get it this way, they try another way, try another way, try another way, and AI generates that for them so that they have that opportunity, and it doesn't become a thing. And so I do think that it is going to be an incredible tool, and we have to figure out how to allow it into our world 

[00:36:35] Alex Sarlin: I'm excited to read the book.

I really wanna get Say Yes: How Virtual Became Reality, the story of all of these amazing education initiatives that really changed how people see especially online education, but also online charters, blurring between the charter schools, between blurring between the higher ed and K-12, and so many other things.

We usually close our interviews with two questions. One is, what's the most exciting trend that you see in the ed tech landscape right now that you think our listeners should keep an eye on? And when we ask this question, we are specifically ideally looking for something that they may not have heard of before, right?

Something that's coming that like may be a little bit around the bend that you're like, "I spot something really interesting from all my years of, of working in higher ed-- uh, beside working in virtual schooling." I'm curious what that brings up for you. 

[00:37:20] Julie Young: I'll make this as brief as I can. I think I'm really excited about what is happening with technology when it stops being a delivery mechanism and starts being a, a learning experience in itself.

When you start to see kindergartners learning how to code and do computer science, uh, middle schoolers and high schoolers that are building robots, and high school students competing on drone teams. And that's not ed tech in the traditional sense of lessons on a screen. That's technology as a context for learning.

And you think about robotics and y- you know, building a robot that actually works and, and what it actually takes for a student to think critically, troubleshoot in real time, collaborate, fail, fail fast, and persist. You know, all of those things. They have to figure it out, and I think a plug for ASU Prep, they're doing this really well.

So those are not the read and regurgitate skills. I believe that AI is going to force us to change the way that we are teaching and learning. I think it is going to force a change in how we assess our students. Right now, if you're giving a student, um, paper to write, and they go home and use AI, and you have to determine whether or not they've used AI, why are we giving them those kinds of assignments?

Yes, they have to learn to write, do that in the classroom where you see them write. But we're gonna have to, to redesign how we teach and how students learn and, most importantly, how we assess learning. If AI can do it for the student, we're not assessing it appropriately 

[00:38:57] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. I agree that the assessment of learning and the more authentic assessment of learning, which I think ties into your robotics, drones, coding, you know, those are tasks that have very authentic assessments sort of baked into them.

But authentic assessment of learning and AI changing the equation of, like you said, rote transfer of knowledge becoming not the core concept of school anymore, which is also sort of the core of a lot of assessment, incredibly powerful if we actually can question that and pull out some of those core planks of the current system.

Last question: What is one resource that you would recommend for someone who wants to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today? 

[00:39:33] Julie Young: Well, of course, there's a new book called Say Yes: How Virtual Became Reality. 

[00:39:38] Alex Sarlin: Right. 

[00:39:38] Julie Young: That one should be at the top of your list. We also just wrote a book with the Pioneer Institute back in fall called Virtual Schools, Actual Learning: Digital Education in America, and that was a book that I co-edited with Julie Peterson and Kay Johnson with the Pioneer Institute.

That book actually is more of the historical documentation of policy, legislation, and research that over the last 30 years was done, and of course, my schools participated in, in that as well as many other virtual schools throughout the country. Beyond that, I have trouble picking one, but if I can throw out a couple, I always come back to Michael Horn and his book, Disrupting Class- Yeah

as one that I recommend for anyone who is interested in education innovation. It holds up. I also like his Reopen to Reinvent for anyone who wants a practical blueprint of what transformation actually looks like on the ground. Another one that I've just read that I'm excited about is a book by Carey McDonald And it's called Joyful Learning.

And it just makes a powerful case that learning should be something children want to do and not something done to them. And again, talks about many of the really awesome things that are going on in education that we don't often see. And then my last plug is for my friend Mickey Ravenal, who has a book coming out called School's Out.

And it's a, it's a deep dive into micro schools and interesting models such as that. It should be out in August. 

[00:41:11] Alex Sarlin: Amazing. Several of those are going on my reading list right now. Of course, Disrupting Class, absolute classic. Really, really appreciate your time. Those are great recommendations. Thank you so much.

This has been a really, truly fascinating conversation. This is Julie Young, who is the founding CEO of Florida Virtual School. She is the founder of ASU Prep Digital with Michael Crow, and has been a pioneering innovative education for decades. Thank you so much for being here with us on Edtech Insiders.

[00:41:39] Julie Young: Alex, thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it so much. 

[00:41:42] 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.

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