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We're Funding the Wrong Side of AI in Education — with Bree & Babak

• aiEDU: The AI Education Project • Season 1 • Episode 43

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In 2017, before ChatGPT existed, a 180,000-student district in Georgia decided to build the first AI-ready high school in the country. Babak Mostaghimi was one of the people who built it. Bree Dusseault, at Center on Reinventing Public Education/The Strategic Education Research Partnership, was one of the people who later studied what made it possible — and what stops most other systems from following.

This conversation, recorded at CRPE's Think Forward Fellowship, lives at the intersection of those two views. Bree's research keeps surfacing the same five conditions: leadership longevity, a community-rooted vision, deliberate talent flows, integration across departments — and one resource almost no one is funding, which is time for adults to think. Babak's lived answer, after eight years inside the work, is the sharper version of the same idea: center the people and the problems they're trying to solve, not the tool of the moment.

 What follows is less about which AI tools to pilot and more about the architecture underneath — a "grammar of learning" rather than a grammar of schooling, parents who've played with the tools before they form opinions about them, and a kindergarten teacher whose target is 2035, not next September.


aiEDU: The AI Education Project

Choosing The Future On Purpose

SPEAKER_01

The future doesn't just happen. We make it happen through our choices every single day. And in too many spaces, I'm seeing people just like abdicate the future to big technologists. And I just really think we should take an active role in building the future of our world, the future of our democracy in ways that are good for kids and families.

Why This AI Education Fellowship Exists

Alex Kotran

Thank you so much for joining the uh CRPE Think Forward Fellowship edition of AIEDU Studios. Um here in Albuquerque, well, just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, in Tamaya at the beautiful, I think it's a Hyatt resort. Yeah. Um Rhee, you're on the team at ASU. Uh and Babak, you are also behind the scenes. You're gonna be facilitating a lot of the sessions tomorrow. I want to get to your introduction, but why don't we start with just tell us about what we're doing here and maybe even give a preview of some of the things you learned this morning, what's what's to come.

unknown

Sure.

SPEAKER_00

Why don't I kick us off and I'll pass it over to you. We are here with about 40 other uh leaders in different seats uh around the table uh looking at ways that AI has the potential to and is already impacting education. Or there are folks here with a lot of different hats on. So the the participants include everything from educators to ed tech leaders to district leaders to state superintendent leaders, um, nonprofit researcher advocacy hats. So the idea is to bring folks who represent many of the different aspects of the larger education system to have a conversation about how to be more intentional and to build coherence, which we could talk about what we mean by that, but to build more coherence into long-term strategies to utilize AI for the benefit of all children and society, especially in America.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And I mean, I think the only thing I would add is as we have been going through the couple of days, it essentially has started from a place of uh the the first night of if you could go back in time, what would AI not be able to replace in your own education that you really loved? Uh and then what could it have allowed you to do more of? And essentially starting at that point and fast-forwarding all the way through like what do we think should be and ought to be for young people, uh all the way into the 2030s, uh that that's a conversation that we're now in in the midst of. Uh and it's just really fascinating. It's it's been really cool.

Escaping Utopia And Dystopia Thinking

unknown

Yeah.

Alex Kotran

I think this is the first time that I've gone to an AI convening where we spent so much time sort of imagining the future. And it's interesting because everybody has a slightly different take on what that future is. And it's helpful to understand sort of like the trajectories that everybody feels like we're on. Um, because as you're thinking about how do we course correct or you know, optimize that trajectory, it's like, well, where are we actually going?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. One of the things that we have talked about prior to today and this the conversations we had today is this tendency for humans to, when we think about what's unpredictable, the future, which is what we're being asked to do here, is you want to go to one binary or the other. You want to go to utopia or dystopia. And that's just how our brains work. And the reality is like we're probably not going to see AI or the future play out in a fully utopian or a fully dystopian reality. It's going to be somewhere in between. And we have some locus of control with intentionality. And so the hope is that we do ground in some intentional thought and to surface the fact that we may be joined in common goals but have very different perceptions of what change looks like and whether change is even good or bad, or even if those are the right words to use. So yeah, I think this pre-mortem activity we did of looking out to 2030, um, 2035 and saying things did or didn't go well, now back map and what happened to get get us there is a was a cool starting point.

Personal Paths Into AI And Schools

Alex Kotran

Yeah, I want to hear your takes on that. But before you give the take on what does the world look like in 2035 and what went well or what went wrong, yeah, what is your see? Where are you, how are you sort of entering this conversation? And also it maybe a little bit about your, you don't think of your whole resume, but a little bit about your experience and what led you to your current work and and bring me, why don't we start with you at Arizona State University?

SPEAKER_00

Sure. Uh yeah. So I work at CERPI, which is a educational research organization. Um, and we're out of Arizona State University. Prior to that, though, I mean, my educational journey started in, you know, my going to high school. I I went to school, I grew up in uh the pain handle of Florida, went to the public school system, and uh college really changed and shifted my uh trajectory. And then I've worked um more on the ground, actually for before joining SERPI for about 20 years in systems. So actually in public school systems as a teacher and a principal and ran a school incubator, then I'll also worked in the district and charter uh central office and systems. Uh and now at SERPI, I research those things. I research how systems work. And I also now look at how AI becomes or could become a catalyst for exacerbating good or bad scenarios in those systems. Uh so that's that's some of how I got here. Um was the second question around like what how does that connect to today?

Alex Kotran

Well, yeah, I mean, the the the opening sort of prompt was imagining the world in 2035. So about 10 years from now. Um what do you imagine the world looks like?

SPEAKER_00

That's a great question. I I mean, I think I'll start with that. I am uh you know, optimistic pragmatist. So, and I've lived in a lot of different parts of the country in very different communities, um, rural, urban. Um, I've lived in three of the four kind of corners of the country, uh, have a lot of different relationships built with different people, a lot of different across a lot of different spectrums. And I do generally think that I trust humans uh to make decisions if given uh resources and if we put enough resources in place to ensure that all humans get access to appropriate resources and maybe even some are getting access to more because they need more types of supports. And I think that we have examples of where that's worked. So I think what I look for when I look to the future is where have we seen possibility happen and take place and what can we learn from that? Uh, I do think that that takes a fair amount of disruption and moving outside of kind of the tendency for systems to persist uh and and tend back towards the mean. And so I do think that this moment, in order to realize an optimistic future, we're going to have to see discomfort, we're going to feel uh and live uh and lead rational, reasonable, and and and caring discomfort and disruption on behalf of uh you know, broader good.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, that's that's really good. So I'm a partner at Learner Studio. Uh, and at Learner Studio, we are an education intermediary organization looking to build and invest towards the future of learning. Uh, and what that means is that we believe in a future where the purpose of education, purpose of learning is to ensure that every young person is inspired and prepared to thrive in life, career, and democracy in the age of AI, which is today and like for the future, right? Um, for their individual good and for their common or community good, right? And we think that if that's the purpose and that's the goal of education, and we started sort of mapping backwards, we would have a fundamentally different architecture around schooling, around learning, around what what's credentialed where and all that sort of stuff. And so uh my my role with learner CEO is thinking about and helping to support how do we get from where we are today to that future where every young person is inspired and prepared um for their life, right? Um, and so I I come to that uh sort of similarly to Bree and through the public education system. My my family came to the United States as refugees uh from Iran. Uh, I was born in the US, I grew up in uh Blacksburg, Virginia, went to uh sort of all the regular Blacksburg schools, Blacksburg High School, all that sort of stuff, went through a very traditional system, but with amazing teachers and really good people, and then um took a slight detour to go into defense contracting for a minute, but from a place of like public service and like helping to support our country, and then realized that I want to make sure that our country is great for everybody. Um, and so you know, was a classroom teacher, ended up helping to sort of advise a charter school in Mississippi, um, ended up uh spending about seven years with Gwinnett County Public Schools, uh leading all our innovation work and our AI work and those sorts of things. Uh and I think in Gwynette, that's where I really started recognizing the promise of public education in terms of our ability to innovate. I mean, you're talking about a massive system, right? Like 183,000 kids at this point. We had like schools in a mall. We had the first AI high school in the in the world, potentially. We had like an amazing health science high school. We had all these really remarkable innovations and we could do it already. And they they weren't really costly, they were within the regular budgets of a like we're just a regular system, right? And so when I saw that, I started thinking about how do we help to re-architect the entire infrastructure of our of our national public education system so that we can do that for everybody. So that like it's hard for me to come off with like four or five examples because everything is an example of what we want, right? And so why I'm why I'm here today and and and with this convening is I really think that uh having a good answer to what AI does to the future and all that stuff is really important uh to where we want to go. And to your question of like, what do I see for the future? I'm a real believer in the reality that like the future doesn't just happen. We make it happen through our choices every single day. Uh, and in too many spaces, I'm seeing people just like abdicate the future to big technologists and those sorts of things. Uh, and I just really think we should take an active role in building the future of our world, the future of our democracy in ways that are good for kids and families. Uh and uh and I think it starts in places like this where we come together and go, hey, what is what does the future look like? How do we make it so that AI brings about the best in us as opposed to the the worst in us?

How Gwinnett Started Its AI Shift

Alex Kotran

So Babak, you I think you're underplaying Gwinnett County. So I'm gonna I'm gonna sing some praises on your behalf. First of all, 100 for for those listening, 180,000 students put Gwyneth what top 10? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Like 11 or something like that.

Alex Kotran

Yeah. So one of the biggest districts in the country. Um and truly probably the first, certainly the first district of its scale to implement what you call it an AI initiative. Like, I mean, I'd love for you to just talk a bit more about like what happened there. And then Bree, I'd love to step back and ask this question of what would it look like to emulate what happened in Gwyneth and sort of like what might be standing in the way of other districts following suit. But yeah, tell us more of what happened in Gwyneth.

SPEAKER_01

Sure. So uh Rewind is 2017, right? Uh Alvin Wilbanks, Jay Alvin Wilbanks is a superintendent of Gwynette, really amazing leader and superintendent. And he says, Hey, I think we are blockbuster video and Netflix is coming. Uh, and so he brought me on board to figure out how we can build a system for innovation that makes it so that we can be ready for the future. And the question that we had was, well, what are we building towards? And so as we started examining, and again, remember this is 2017, we started reading reports and all sorts of things. And uh, I read a World Economic Forum around like jobs lost, jobs gained as an automation report, right? Automation and AI. And it just like hit us, and we were like, oh, we got to do something. And at that point, they were saying 2040 is the time. So we thought we had a long run runway. Uh, but we realized it's probably gonna be sooner than that. So we aimed for like 2035, maybe 2030. Obviously, we're laughing now because like that wasn't the case. But what we did was without much knowledge of anything, we didn't have any AI experts, right, or anything like that. We're like, hey, what do we think it means for a young person to thrive in an AI-infused world? So not just like technical capabilities with tools, but like, could they be collaborative leaders? Could they be creative problem solvers? Could they have the ethical understanding of how these technologies work so that they know what to do and not to do with them and all that sort of stuff? And so we built out with the help of 160 teachers, uh, this like framework and infrastructure. We have an AI ready framework, which we even from the beginning, we're like, we're gonna eventually call this the future ready framework, uh, because it is about AI, but not exactly. It's about just being ready for the future. And um, we're gonna make it something where it's not extra. Uh, and it's something that's embedded and integrated into everything a teacher does from the beginning of the day to the end of the day. Um, and we're not there yet, obviously, right? But it was one of these ideas of like, it's not about throwing the baby out with a bath bath water, but you take your great lesson and then you infuse it with these like principles that come out from this AI ready framework. Uh, and in the process of doing that over and over again, day after day, um class after class, the the sort of feel of the entire school changes, right? Like you have a completely different experience as a learner. And so fast forward ahead to today. And we in the in that whole process, we ended up building with the state of Georgia uh a three-course pathway for career and technical education around AI that was based on our framework. And we're like, hey, we want to make sure that every kid can uh swim, snorkel, or scuba dive in the age of AI, right? So we don't want anybody drowning. What does that look like? How do we build it? Um, and we decided like the scuba divers are kids who like love AI and want to do it for the rest of their life and build the thing and all that sort of stuff. And so there's like a three-course pathway for them in particular. But every other kid, no matter what what sort of thing you're interested in, whether it's art or PE or science or whatever, you would get that embedded uh sort of feel of AI learning throughout your day. And since then, since I've since I've left actually, I've been out for two years now. Um, we've taken the basic principles from that school and we've started expanding them to the entire system, right? And I'm talking about as though it's like one high school, but we also like transitioned how we were doing the K-8 feeder patterns into that school. So essentially like a 7,000 kid pilot was where it started. Um, and now when you look across Gwynette, you have robotics in every school, you have computer science in every school, you have um like deep, engaging, career-based learning in every school. Like all the sort of things we learned in that high school are starting to be emulated across the entire county.

What Made Gwinnett’s Change Possible

Alex Kotran

Yeah, I mean, Brie, it's a it's a bit of a panacea in terms of the type of things that I often will hear from folks who are painting this picture of the potential for STEM and for technology to um to bring other people in and sort of like break out of some of the silos that we've had. Like when I was in school, I didn't even have a computer science track. Um but it would have been a track, it would have been a specific class with a specific teacher. Like how much of an outlier is Gwynette and to whatever extent that's the case, you know, what is standing in the way of other districts sort of following suit?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's a great question. And I'll I think I'll start with the question of what are the conditions that Babak uh is explaining and talking through. And and the great thing is we actually were able to study Gwinnett County when Babak was there um three years ago. So we actually collected a fair amount of data. We interviewed um folks um on Babak's team uh and have done a lot of work together around this. So I I um I'm excited to be able to share some insight and Babak just build on to you know what what you hear from me. But so we study systems and um we've actually been working with a cohort of districts that we consider to be pretty ready to innovate on a bold idea and to sustain it because there are different layers of innovation. And so for Gwinnett County, the first thing I'll say that that that Babak mentioned is um they had a superintendent who had been in place for a long time. Alvin had been there for, I think, 15 or 17 years.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, he was like bordering 20 at the beginning of this year.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So one is leadership longevity is a critical factor. Uh, then paired with that is vision. So you also heard Babak speak to a vision, right? And you and was even a vision grounded in terms that that I imagine your community help actually know, because we I know that you, your community informed your vision. AI ready is not the same as future ready, but every parent, I think, wants their child to be future ready. They may or may not want AI ready, but so you can hear that there is a vision, and the vision is grounded in what you all heard from your families and your community. And I know that the Babak and his team did a big uh listening tour and they brought in the community to help inform the nature of the problem that they were trying to solve for. Uh so that combination of a strong leader who's been in place for a while and has stability and a vision are the two kind of foundational conditions that we see and that have persisted over decades. Um, then layered onto that, that another thing I'd add is there's an element that you're hearing and we're seeing here in Babak, which is the talent strategy. So the fact that Babak was there and he was in a role, I forget your name, the title, but you you and you, there are a few of you who we label these as invidextrous leaders. Um, but there's a role in the central office that is allowed to innovate and they're allowed to work kind of alongside other traditional longstanding departments, but they are integrated into it along and alongside. And within the central office of a school district, there is alignment across academics, um, human capital, human resources, technology, and an office of transformation or whatever it may be called. Those things really matter. Um, and then the last thing I'll say is that I actually had worked with Gwynette prior to this. Um, and they just they are, they were, this was five or 10 years ago, they were just known as the place where you want to work. Uh, so they have a talent pipeline. They have folks who transfer in from other systems uh because of the um the opportunities that Gwinnette provides its educators and its leaders and the ways that they're treated. So there is a base of talent. So the fact that this happened isn't accidental. It actually had been brick by brick built over years and actually over almost two decades to prepare for um some of the work that you all are doing there. And also name it, there are other innovations happening in Gwinnett County alongside this that this works in tandem with. So there's also uh a de-siloing or kind of a trying to integrate across initiatives across different departments or smaller visions. So all of that leads to is this an outlier or not? And I think it's it's an outlier of it's certainly an outlier in the AI work and that you're the first in the country to do a lot of this work. Uh, we study early adopters at CERP, and you know, we have found about 80 other districts that are meeting different thresholds that we have set to look for other early adoptive strategies. But there are other districts out there doing work in AI, and we're just looking for AI-related um adoption. Um, and it's hard. The other thing I'd name is that conditions can change. And so a school board can get re-elected, a superintendent can leave, leader talent can change, and the conditions change. And so I think the other thing we don't ever want to take for granted is that a system stays. We want to always be investing in and keeping that talent and keeping the vision and the leadership there. So there are a lot of conditions and they never stay stable. They're always in dynamic uh flow.

Alex Kotran

Someone said something to me that was really we were talking about sort of the urgency of this moment. And, you know, right now it's AI, but really it's just the future is happening really fast. I actually just bought the domain, I think futureed you.org. Because I I've been kind of I've been kind of thinking about, you know, sooner or later we're gonna, it's like the internet. We don't have like internet summits. Um and and I forget who said it. I I actually it was it was Jared Chung. Or no, no, it was um it was John Calabrazard. And it was sort of his closing statement on and actually for for a podcast conversation. Um and he said, you know, what we need right now is more leaders. And specifically, it wasn't that there aren't there isn't a capacity for leadership, but there isn't necessarily the space. And when I think about what what you just described, so 2017, you're reading this report, you and I are probably there's a very small club of folks who are thinking and talking about AI in the future of work in K-12 settings prior to let's say the year 2021, 2022. Um that's not for lack of this. I mean, it wasn't a secret. There was a 2013 study from Oxford, the theme of Davos in 2016 was the fourth industrial revolution. It was this report from WEF in 2017, I think I believe the OECD had its own report. Um but you described there being an a space for that exploration. Someone who said, Hey, I actually want us to really pay attention and talk about what this means for us as a school, and it gave Gwyneth an incredible head start. And I'm struck by my experience actually just two weeks ago, my uh the the guidance counselor at Copley High School where I where I graduated called, emailed me and said, you know, hey, could you hop on the phone? And like I have all these students who are just asking lots of questions about their jobs and they're trying to figure out, you know, they're reading all these articles about all the jobs are gonna disappear. And they're asking me, like, oh, like, should I still go to law school or should I still go try to become a nurse? And I don't really know what to tell them. This is actually a very common uh experience for me. It's like the the folks at schools who we envision as the people entrusted with guiding students through these conversations, they don't necessarily have the resources, and it's not for lack of their ingenuity or desire that they don't have the space and there isn't really the channel. Most of the conferences I attend don't really have, you know, scholarships for guidance counselors. And and yet we hear people on these panels opine about all the jobs and how are we going to make sure kids are ready. And so it feels like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit like that, not just for guidance counselors, but everybody for school leaders. Um what is the forcing mechanism to create that space? Is it a budget question? Is it prioritization and just getting school administrators to kind of see this as part of their imperative? Um, or is there even standards or some sort of you know, career connected learning push that, you know, like yeah, just like how do you because we're really talking about like human systems. So, like, how do you sort of motivate these human systems? systems, is it is it through sort of forcing them to do it or incentivizing them somehow?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I can kick us off. I I I love this question and it tracks to what we hear from early adopter school leaders or and system leaders that we're talking to, I think you actually nailed uh it seems so simple, but it's so hard. This idea of time is our most important resource. And in order to vision, dream, and sustain for the future, you have to have time to do that. So when we talk to early adopter leaders who are, I think this profile of leader, they're the folks who are actually putting in place um innovations and a new vision, and we say, what are the things that you needed? What, what, what, why, how did you do this? It's that they had time to step back. Secondary to that, I think resources help. And so right now what we at SERPC, and we've been um interviewing a lot of different players in the space, is that a lot of the investments right now are on the supply side. So they're on the tools. They're like, you know, they're countless investments and tools. But the demand

Creating Time And Space For Leaders

SPEAKER_00

side needs equal, if not more investment to uptake the tools and to even inform the vision of what those tools can and should be. I think that there's actually a limitation right now in our own on the ground, on the demand side, our own ability to articulate what we would like to see be created using AI and be put in place. And so this is very simple, but when we ask superintendents, I've heard so many of them say what I really needed was I needed a cohort. And I needed a cohort with my peers. Many of them said that they needed to be able to consult, to have a safe space. I think this gets into that that's the concept I mentioned earlier about kind of healthy disruption. You there have they have to be disruptive to put these things in place. You were back you were disruptive you have to build a safe container for that and you also have to be responsible and have developed and thoughtful ideas. So that is I think one ingredient to the recipe and it extends to every role including you said guidance counselors, educators, any role in the system ideally would be getting space and time. Now what that runs up against is the reality that the school day affords maybe one hour a week of if you're often like negotiated collaboration time for educators that's bargained if you're in a a bargained state or even if you're in a system where you may have more flexibility, the reality is that you have to choose this time outside of a 40 hour work week. And so there is a real limitation right now on time, giving people time to step back and to put their heads up, look out and see what the future might look like. And then also to consult and to work in peers with each other. And this is also what we know as you know how adults learn and grow uh together. This is also just kind of tracks to adult development theory um too. So we're not done growing and we need our systems leaders uh all the way to the educators uh and everyone working in our space to keep growing in space and but back I'm curious if that is part of your journey.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah no

Teachers As The Real Innovators

SPEAKER_01

I mean I agree with all those things. I think for uh for for me thing number one is that um I think educators are the innovators we've always been waiting for. Like they are innovating regularly every single day tackling remarkable problems in their classrooms oftentimes despite the regulations and things we place on them. Right. And so I think uh there's there's some people who like rag on teachers and those sorts of things. I'm like I don't think you understand what it means to be a teacher in a classroom today and all the things that you're trying to overcome in order to do the things that you know that are best, right? And so how that relates to this work more broadly is that when one of the things that happens in in any job in any position is when you get into it, you start solving a problem. And then you start over time, you stop solving the problem and you start just like making your existing solution better. And you never actually go back to wait, is that solution still solving the problem? Has the problem shifted like those sorts of things, right? And so in in Gwynette we really started off with like what's the problem? And the problem that we sort of landed on that everyone agreed to parents agreed to it family members agreed to it kids agreed to it is we want to make sure that kids were prepared for their future that was like the basic tagline. And then when you walk back from that it changed everything that people did. It made it so people knew what to innovate around because even that kindergarten teacher realized like my job isn't to get the kid into first grade. My job is to get the kid to 2035. That's a very different job if you interpret it that way. And then people being the innovative people that they are, they start adjusting their work to make sure that like yes I'm doing literacy, yes I'm doing math, yes, I'm doing science and social age, but the ways I'm doing them in are ones that integrate our latest understanding of AI and the science of learning or ways that get kids really integrated and interested in their future and all that sort of stuff. Right. And so for me I think the primary ingredient is first like starting with the problem. What is it that we're trying to solve and then creating a learning structure to get there. So like it's not like in 2017 suddenly we got out front was like all right we're going to build AI schools right we started off by saying okay we think that design thinking is important for the future and so we partner with Idea to build out like design thinking capacity within our our our district in terms of teachers and stuff. If you fast forward now six years after that partnership design thinking is the primary mechanism used for K-5 science delivery in our school system right then we started looking at like yeah in addition to that we need to make sure that uh whatever we're building is career connected. That is what caused McClure Health Science High School to emerge which ends up being a like a 95% graduation rate like 97% minority school that's fantastic. It is one of the best ones in our entire district in perhaps a state right and so that taught us oh this is how you can create active career connection in addition to the design thinking work that they're doing at McClure. So then it's like okay how do we learn from that and build it into our next model and each time also informing the thing prior, right? So you create the system of innovation where it's not accidental, where you're learning from your failures, where you're you're figuring out what's needed and always, always, always returning back to what is it the parents want and what is it the kids need.

SPEAKER_00

I think what I'm hearing you say here too is what I would call this is like, you know, from the research angle it's a culture of continuous improvement. Yes. Oh CQ and so culture is so critical and and culture of collecting data quickly, piloting, failing fast, you know, it's actually not unlike the tech space, but there are different words for it, how we use it in education and doing it responsibly, using data to track what's working, what's not um that are those are the things a culture of can you continuous improvement is what helps districts move out of pilots into scaling. And we we do we don't have to get into that here, but the actual piloting is one level of work that's hard. Piloting to scaling is a whole other whole other can of worms. And so what you're describing is the the culture that allows that to happen.

Tools Are Not The Strategy

Alex Kotran

There's like two forks let me we'll feel our way through this. Okay first first sort of fork not tangential but actually directly connected is this okay so this idea of what you're describing is a um a human capital approach to innovation which recognizes that yes there are going to be tools and there's going to be new things for organizations to both navigate and also harness um and historically what we've seen is it's the the having a system in place an organizational structure that encourages a culture of innovation is going to be the best way to harness those opportunities not being really good at buying the right tool or widget. Yeah. And this goes back to I mean the beginning of the internet right like you can imagine a school that was like the internet comes out and like they spend all their energy just trying to create a really good you know website on like Web 1.0. Yeah it's like imagine and I don't know if that actually happened it'd be interesting to kind of look into that but imagine if you had channeled those resources into stepping back and asking the question of like well what does it mean if information becomes ubiquitous and and you know we don't there we there haven't been that many technology revolutions in human history. This is what number four, three or four depending on um how you count it. So but we have now a few more revs under our belt to learn from and so what I've seen from companies that are really trying to figure out in in in the for-profit sector uh companies that are really trying to figure out how to implement AI tools, the common thread seems to be the tools themselves are not enough. Like we try just giving everybody access to Gemini and ChatGPT and there's this sort of like you know famous MIT study that's really more of a survey but what they found is that you know 95% of the implementations failed and there's nuance to that there's another study uh uh the meter study looking into the use of um cursor which is a vibe coding sort of a copilot tool and you know and even in the hands of an experienced coder what they found is that it was often it was a perception of productivity increase when actually it sort of slightly decreased their productivity. Again lots of I have lots of qualms with that study. But I think the takeaway is that you know it's not enough to just give everybody these tools. And this brings me to something that you I think you both really talked about, which is the demand side of the question. So like right now there's we are being inundated to repeat back to you this we're being inundated with a supply of solutions, but we haven't yet fully defined I think the problems are clear. There's lots of problems. But I don't know that we fully defined sort of like the vision of like how do we actually want to is there a way for us to approach these problems in a way that doesn't just sort of attempt to bridge the gaps in order to achieve a status quo that isn't you know even enough. I mean is it feasible to change demand? I mean like this is education is you know notoriously hard and I'm curious if there's anything we can look back to historically where we've been able to successfully sort of steer the entire K-12 system towards maybe a slightly refined or sort of evolved vision of what everybody should be prioritizing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah that that's a good question. Here's what I'd say I think uh with Gwynnette in particular how we approached it and I think it was a smart strategy even looking back on it now is that if you center a tool, you'll always lose because the tools are going to change every two seconds, the ways you use the tools are going to change. We see that literally every every moment right but if you center people understanding the problems that they have and the sort of mechanisms by which to pick up any new tool and to use them to do really great stuff, then you start building an infrastructure that allows you to like continuously quality improve, right? To innovate over and over again no matter what the tool is right. And I think the place that we go wrong in education is that we think that the people up top are supposed to come up with the brilliant idea and then deploy the tool to the people at the bottom quote unquote. So they just adopt it and use it. When instead what we've done like what we did in Gwynette, which I deeply believe in is uh like the way you lead like the way like a department of innovation should lead is not to be the place where innovation happens, but the place that creates a culture of innovation for a system. And recognizing to your point on uh ambidexterity, Brie, like there is an execution part of the work of just like buses have to show up on time, math has to get taught, all those sorts of things. And there's this innovation or exploration arm that always has to be searching about what's ahead and helping to see do those things that we're finding solve problems, solve real problems for people, right? And so for me as I'm like looking to the future and looking at how people are approaching innovation and thinking about tools, we're in like a really good spot in places like Gwynette where teachers are used to going and we've had literally have like teams of teachers set up to like look and explore new tools and to see is this a go or no go for us? Like should we be looking into this deeper or not? And like with young people, we like encourage them to use tools within boundaries that are safe, right? But when we encourage them to use tools, we also encourage them to think like is this tool helping me solve the problem I wanted or is it accidentally having these like bad ramifications and stuff. And so I think that like nuanced thing is really hard because in the ed tech space they just want to sell stuff to make money right and it and to have impact sure. And then on the ed side they want to like keep everything safe and secure and like protect kids. And there's like actually a place in between where I think you can protect kids and do great stuff at the same time if we give it the right space.

Alex Kotran

And and Bree, you actually did research in Gwinnett County so I mean I'm curious like is it a pipe dream to imagine that we could scale what happened at Gwinnette um the the creation of this culture of innovation like in a year. I mean obviously in 10 years maybe we can do it but I mean is there a world where this just sort of becomes a zeitgeist moment in education and we kind of get a snowball effect?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah well the the history would say no. Not a year. But but we also are in we're in unparalleled times. So I think it's it is a little hard to predict the future right now. I think that if you go back most reform or change or innovation movements have may have succeeded but they often take five to ten years. And it just takes a long time. Even Gwynette is a story of probably I don't know maybe five to 10 years in the making if you started in 2017 and before that there were years invested to create the team that you um led. So I think that is likely that's gonna stay the case for systems is a longer timeframe than a year. However I do think that there are some things that AI enabled technology is doing for us to solve problems in different ways I think Rob's framing around solving problems that is how you get change to take place. Folks will not make changes unless their problems are getting solved. And we are seeing that teachers who have significant and valid distrust and fear of tools to shift their position when they are resourced to use those tools and this is just for their own practices and not necessarily for students, they're open to considering the technology maybe faster than previous types of innovations that they might be have might have been asked to try out because it's working, it is helping solve some problems. Now what we don't know, we're in an interesting time right now that the technology is changing quickly and we don't have a lot of proof points. So what we don't know actually is what category of problem AI will most effectively solve. So I think one, you know, we've got teacher centered problems, you know, efficiency, productivity, quality of instruction, which is I hope also moving to the forefront of the conversation then we have student centered problems all of the the range of different ways that students could be supported to learn better and especially certain profiles of students who are historically and systemically underserved in our system. Then there are a range of problems that I think we're starting to see more play with that I'll just bring out, which are actually back end operational efficiencies, especially around ways that data may be utilized and connected across all of these platforms and made more coherent and more connected in order to inform strategic decision making. But that would just be an example of I wouldn't be surprised if we see years out from now your point about the website web 1.0 is a great one. It's like where's the Alta Vista? You know like the prodigy these days it's really hard to know years out what the problems will be that we see AI technology most effectively solving on behalf of students. And I think that the stuff that's easiest to grab onto intellectually are the things that we see with students and adults. But actually there will we see a lot of companies do companies are using AI right now to reimagine how they're structured. So my hope is that systems will increasingly explore that dimension as well. And we may see some combination of tools that are in use in the classroom or behind the scenes with teachers, but all of that is being supported or buttrested with a new foundation of data and information that makes it easier to make decisions. Any of us who have worked on the ground in schools know how hard it is to make good, informed, effective decisions. The data may be there, but finding it, harnessing it, connecting the dots is nearly impossible. And I actually think that we have technology that can simplify that for us. And I think that is a frontier that we haven't explored yet enough. And I'm excited

Where AI Can Truly Help Systems

SPEAKER_00

about that.

Alex Kotran

So I want to bring it home by actually sort of getting us into the the headspace of going back to um the session and when when we left there was a there was a lot of conversation about human connection. There was a lot of conversation about the importance of education maybe being the only space where kids are having human experiences. And I've been sitting with the the gravity of that responsibility and it also it draws a contrast with any conversation about tools being feeling like a bit of a almost like a sideshow to this like broader question of like how do we make sure kids are ready to thrive in in the future and just because that future is brought upon them by AI doesn't mean that AI is necessarily like a core fundamental part of the solution. It may or may not be maybe it's more of a um a supporting act. So about Learner Studio put out a report uh the title was a human skills in the age of AI and and the word ready being AI ready and AI readiness came up and this is something that you know I've started to see more and more of in AID with something that we've been talking about a lot which is going beyond literacy AI literacy which is also we we say it's a necessary part of AI readiness but also honing in on durable skills which is decidedly unsexy. We've been talking about durable skills and 21st century skills for for decades. And I'll ask this question of both of you but Bree I'll I'll start with you because you you made this point about that well education reform takes time. But I would posit that there was really never a time in history where people would sit down around the dinner table and talk about the future of education outside of like the wonks. And of course I assume most of us at this at this uh retreat are probably we're having those conversations but most people were not um outside of let's say ballot measures or or bonds or things like that. And so we have this moment, this is this zeitgeist moment where people are paying attention and anybody who uses an LLM I think in the back of their mind, especially if they're a parent they're they're thinking like dang this is probably going to be a really big deal for my kid. This is going to have big implications for education. So A, I'm curious if you feel feel free to push back on this like readiness I I see you nodding so I can move to maybe this the second question which is I assuming that we we do need to kind of push people to take a broader aperture towards readiness um how do we harness the the the the attention that we have now on the education space? Because I feel like it might be fake I don't know how long we're going to have this um everybody's attention. I mean attention is fickle as we know especially today. Yeah what what can folks especially advocates who are thinking about how do we best support and create more places like Winnick County and some of the amazing schools that you've also been studying and working with um yeah how do we how do we bring more people in and build a movement?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah well I'll start with the AI readiness um and an agreement that I do think that we have a the potential to see things shift and move more quickly. I hope to goodness that it is not five to ten it can't be it won't be others it's possible that the system will not move it is quite possible but what will move is other smaller or uh different school options outside of the larger traditional public school or even embedded within it there's opportunities there for systems to consider. So I do think that that's that's already coming that's here. I will say that I think that the level of readiness I agree that there are more parents engaged and interested I do think that that might break down by different levels of exposure and ability to have um time to even understand we we find a really wide swath of uh you know if you're a parent and you've got multiple jobs or you've got a lot of other responsibilities, you really may not be that plugged into what your your um your child is experiencing at school if you're here, this this is your if you've not been through the American school system, if your child is first gen, there are a lot of parameters of families that really need to get the same

Readiness Means Humans And Community

SPEAKER_00

opportunity to have those um dinner table conversations uh as parents I live in Seattle like a lot of people I know they're in tech and so they're of course they're talking about it. So almost enthusiasm or prioritization of whether this feels like a priority for parents I do think that literacy begets more excitement and exposure, excite begets more interest. I do think that once you start playing with the tools and to quote a student we heard this morning, you know, AI is only as smart as I am once you understand how to use the tools with some capacity and precision, your world opens up. And I think that some of the limitations to why systems will struggle to move is the adults themselves, including parents all of us, we went through the same traditional school system and we inherently subconsciously imagine that's what school is going to roughly look like for our kids. Not all of us, but most of us can't imagine we would want our school our child to go to a school with walls and we would want them to be clustered with children and about the same age as them. And we'd want them to study roughly the same content that we got to to study ourselves. I'm open to all of those things being put up for re-examination. So I hope that that is what parents and systems leaders and teachers can keep examining. But one of the things that can catalyze this reimagining is play. And adults need to play and we need to experiment and we need to do that. And actually the the iron, not if it's ironic, but the the potential right now is the very tool that we want our children to learn how to use better is a tool that we could be using to play. So I do think a way to broaden I think one is we need to be very intentional about access to this table, this metaphorical table that we're building for the adults and and making sure that that that it is a broad table. And then I think that we actually need to get in and and use it. And the other Challenging thing is that we need to keep using it because you could be literate last year and then think that's what AI is and not have seen like Sora or Sesame or some of the in the last one or two year madness, all of these new programs. And I can only imagine what's coming out next year. So we actually just have to be dedicating a lot of time to this and comes back to this question of how do you prioritize this? And I think it's fun. So if we can find ways to make it fun and engaging, um, and I would spread that out outside the system, including to parents, because I actually think parents are parents will not send their children to schools that they don't endorse or believe in. And we we maintain the systems we have in part because we are products of them. Um and so that is a fundamental assumption that I would love to see us play with more.

From The Grammar Of Schooling To Learning

Alex Kotran

Yeah, that's a it's a very important push. It is not the case that everybody's already on board with the education system needs to change and not everybody is on board with the world is about to, you know, be you know, radically disrupted to some level, certainly with jobs, but with information as well. Um so not moving too quickly on from that, because I think education sort of at the sort of stakeholder level is still needs to be top priority. Um yeah, I don't know. Anything you would add, Babak?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, so uh I agree and disagree with that statement. So uh if if you ask somebody, is a high schooler prepared for work or for college, on average, they're gonna be like, no, not really. Like there's like a bunch of other stuff that has to happen before they can go into their first job or go to college or whatever it is, right? And so if our entire premise right now in a system, right, and people are starting to like like show that that's how they feel, right? Like people, there's chronic absenteeism, which is not just a kid's fault. It's a parent going, nah, like you can miss today, right? That's like a signal to us that they felt that whatever was being taught that day wasn't important enough versus the other thing that they were going to do that day, right? And so I think it's imperative on public education systems, on every school out there, to start shifting from this like grammar of schooling, which is like we go to school for six and a half hours a day, you sit for 45 minutes in a class and we just keep you moving, to a grammar of learning where we're really saying, okay, what is it that you have as a goal for yourself? How do we help you reach that? How do you build both knowledge and skills to be able to do that? Like right now, yes, we've been theoretically working on 21st century skills. We're like 25 years into the 21st century, right? But in reality, we're not really working on 21st century skills. Like we're working on content. And then every once in a while you accidentally gain a 21st century skill. And I'm talking about the average classroom. Now, there are amazing classrooms where they're doing all the things, but I think once we get to a place where we're strategically building out both human skills and uh and those like content knowledge that's modernized for what kids need to know today and to be able to do in the world, that's when we truly unlock what's possible, right? And I think there's demand behind that. And I think honestly, that people want to make those moves. Uh, they're just like waiting for like the right time and the right person. And what I'm seeing in great classrooms across the country when I'm visiting is teachers just taking it upon themselves to like make the thing happen for their kids, which is a great starting point. But the question is, how do we do that systematically and at scale so that every single kid, no matter where they are, get and gets that opportunity. Um, and I think that's those are the types of questions we're asking here at this convening of like, okay, so great that people are recognizing this. Uh employers are saying this is a problem, parents are saying this is a problem, even district leaders are saying it's a problem, right? Uh teachers are saying it's a problem. Okay, now what do we do systematically together to move the needle forward?

Alex Kotran

Yeah, I mean, this is the vibes are definitely there. Um but I I mean, Bri, I think this to sort of bring it all home, I I think you what you were pointing out is the the the next step from that, from that sort of okay, well, clearly education isn't working. And then the so what is where there's some defining still left to be done and defining towards solutions with models that are working feels we've been talking about sort of like the the hypotheticals for the last two years. And yeah, at a certain point, we were gonna have to stop talking about the future because it'll it's sort of here, it's actually under our feet.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

Um, and can I say that there's actually a lot of really good models of people already building this out, right? So you have like the big picture schools that have existed for a really long time who have been doing really incredible stuff. You have like the One Stone School up in Idaho, which is a private school, but doing really incredible stuff for kids and like rethinking how education can happen. Like we know these models exist and can work. The question is, and it's not really a scale thing, because it's not like you want to cookie-cutter that thing over and over again, because that doesn't work in our country, right? But what you want to do is like scale the principles behind what they're doing. Um, like how do you like like one swim, for example, has like kids uh who are their board chair of their school board, like they do hiring and firing of the staff, right? As students who are in the school, right? It's like a very different and people go, oh, that could never work. It's like, well, they've been doing it for a decade and it's worked really, really phenomenally, right? So, so like there, these obviously are like small examples right now that are on the on the periphery, but I think there are lessons we can learn. And even I, as like a big system leader, right? Like we were part of a new school's venture fund cohort. We were going to see all sorts of models of all different types and learning from them uh and building it within our straight frameworks and structures. And, you know, I think it's possible. I think there's less that we actually need evidence for than we imagine because we have the evidence out there. We just have to decide to accept it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I I

Scaling Principles And Building New Models

SPEAKER_00

love that we're landing on this point because I think it is where we're actually going in the conversation in the next two days. So you intuited. Um, and I think that it is the this next kind of corner that we're looking around, which is we're ready to see more models out there. And as Babak said, there it's not like this is not our first rodeo. We've been we've been redesigning and designing schools for decades and decades and decades. I think uh both Babak and I were involved with school redesign movements, you know, um, 20, 25 years ago. And I would say one thing that I'm excited about that feels different is that we do have some technology and capacities to do things that we could vision years ago. And and it was hard to execute on. I think competency-based learning is a great example of a framework and a way of thinking about reschool of schooling differently that pairs nicely with AI. Um, and we are seeing um regional cohorts of potential happening where there are conditions starting to come together. Those conditions include some funding and investment because you've got to get time. You've got to have folks need to have time to step back. And then the right kind of leaders who, like was saying, um, have they understand the dimensions and the principles of what good schooling and good learning looks like. It's not AI, um, but they know good good learning and schooling. And then I would argue, I think that there needs to be a seat at the table for non-educator teams like technology leads. We're actually seeing and hearing uh that technology experts get a seat at the table in decision making now at the central officer in schools much more readily than they did before. Um, and I would also argue just out of the box industry leaders. Um, one great example that we're curious about learning more about is uh ASU Prep's new hybrid high school that was done in partnership with the Levit Lab and ASU Prep to do bring both a hybrid uh it's a set of, it's maybe you can interview Amy who's here uh about it, uh, but there's a lot of potential there to take a dual vision of someone who is an a long-standing educator, Amy, and then someone who is an outside the system disruptor, Steve Levitt, uh, and then to pair that with a system that has a lot of the readiness conditions. So I think you are landing, Alex, on this conversation on where I think it's now our responsibility to be moving toward. And as having done school incubation and it is hard to start schools. Well, it is. You need money and investment and time and intentionality. And I think we're at that moment. And that's what I would expect to be seeing in the next one to two years are models to start testing and seeing what works. And we'll see what happens. And also we'll see some of these schools that have been in existence for some time playing in the space and innovating on their constructs. Um, so that is my optimistic hope for what we can be looking at to learn about next.

A One Year Push And Closing

Alex Kotran

And we have no excuse not to get this done. I mean, just you know, one floor down, we have some of the biggest education funders in the world in the room. We have school leaders, educators on the ground level who can like talk about, you know, firsthand, like this isn't a this isn't just some fantasy. This is actually happening and here's what it looks like. Here are the conditions, here's what I need. And you have nonprofit organizations that are literally figuring out this question of like, what is our reason for being? We're here to support schools, we're here to support teachers. How do we do that? Um and so yeah, I'm really, I'm really interested in this like I know it's gonna be a lot of work, but it's sort of like this like work session towards like what are the outputs? And I know I'll be pushing my group on like um one year, right? Like not two, not five, but like literally one like next year, if we were to come back, what what are we gonna be able to present? Um because I think at a certain point people will lose you'll lose steam. Like you can only talk about the future so long until it just becomes another just buzzword and sort of like the ether of all the buzzwords that the education system is now sort of a wash in. Um but I feel like we're in good hands. Bavak, every thank you so much for joining.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. This is a great conversation.

Alex Kotran

That was awesome.