Conduit Connects

Beyond The Building Bias

• Amy Oswalt • Season 3 • Episode 2

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We challenge the “building bias” that confuses shiny facilities and glossy tech with true expertise, and share Leo’s story to show how a remote specialist outperformed a prestigious campus by explaining the mechanism behind his errors. We end with a practical set of questions parents can use to find real experts and avoid costly detours.

• the halo effect of impressive schools and tools
• Leo’s multilingual profile misread as dysgraphia
• linguistics-based diagnosis versus pattern matching
• why AI tutors can be technically correct yet useless
• pandemic lessons about portable expertise
• the real cost of cheap generalists versus specialists
• how tech should connect families to experts
• three questions to vet the human who teaches your child

Keep asking those hard questions, look past the fresh paint, and we'll catch you on the next deep dive


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SPEAKER_00:

Okay, I want you to close your eyes for a second. Well, don't close them if you're driving. But imagine this scenario. You're a parent and you're touring a potential new school for your child. And this place is impressive.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I I know exactly where you're going with this. It's the aesthetic of competence.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. You walk in and it uh it smells like fresh paint and potential. You see a makerspace behind a glass wall with like three different 3D printers just humming away. Yeah. There's a library with these adorable little reading nooks built to look like hollowed-out tree houses. It feels credible. It feels like a real school.

SPEAKER_01:

It feels safe. It triggers this really primal instinct that if you put your child in that building, they are guaranteed to learn. It's what psychologists call the halo effect, but you know, applied to architecture.

SPEAKER_00:

A beautiful facility must mean the instruction inside is equally beautiful.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

But here's the counterintuitive twist we're unpacking today. According to all the research we looked at, when you pay for that high-end experience, quite often you're just paying for the carpet.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a provocative idea, isn't it? The source material for this deep dive comes largely from the work of Amy Oswald. She's the founder of Conduit Academy, and she makes this really compelling argument that we've completely confused environment with expertise.

SPEAKER_00:

And what's so fascinating is that this isn't just about brick and mortar versus online schools. It digs into this weird technological paradox we're living in. Right. We're reading about billions being poured into AI and apps to try and replace experts when Oswald argues we should be using technology to connect with them.

SPEAKER_01:

That's it. So the mission for this deep dive is to really dismantle that assumption that a real school has to have a physical campus. And to show you why true expertise, which let's face it, often has to be accessed through a screen, is the only thing that actually differentiates instruction.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell We need to stop looking at the container and start looking at the content.

SPEAKER_01:

That's the perfect way to put it.

SPEAKER_00:

So to get into this, we have to talk about Leo. Because Leo's story really anchors this whole concept of why the building might be lying to you.

SPEAKER_01:

Leo is a fantastic case study. It's a bit of a roller coaster, so you know, stick with us here.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell So Leo is an eight-year-old boy. He's living in Amsterdam. He goes to a prestigious English medium international school. It's exactly the kind of place we just described. Waiting lists, incredible facilities, the works. He's bright, eager to learn. But the school calls his parents in with some bad news. They've flagged him for dysgraphia.

SPEAKER_01:

And just for anyone who doesn't know, dysgraphia is a learning disability that affects writing. It's difficulties with spelling, poor handwriting, trouble getting thoughts down on paper.

SPEAKER_00:

So it's not just messy handwriting.

SPEAKER_01:

No, no. It's a neurological disconnect between the brain and the hand.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And the school had their evidence. They showed the parents his worksheets. Leo was confusing his letters, his spelling was strange. He kept forgetting to capitalize words.

SPEAKER_01:

And the teachers who are trained professionals working in this very expensive building, they said, look at the data. This looks like a disability. We need to assess them.

SPEAKER_00:

And this is where the expert intervention comes in. Leo's parents, they want a second opinion, maybe some help, so they hire Amy Oswald. Now, here's the crucial detail. She's an online tutor.

SPEAKER_01:

Based in the US.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. She's working with Leo through a screen thousands of miles away.

SPEAKER_01:

So she has none of a physical context. She can't see his posture in the classroom, how he holds his pencil, none of that.

SPEAKER_00:

No. But she looks at the exact same data the school saw the writing samples, the errors, and she realizes almost immediately the school is wrong.

SPEAKER_01:

This is the part that blew my mind.

SPEAKER_00:

Me too.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

How does someone on a Zoom call catch what the teachers in the room who see this kid six hours a day missed?

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Ross Powell Because the teachers in the room were suffering from what you could call pattern matching bias. They were looking at Leo's output and comparing it to a standard monolingual English speaker. Okay. They saw errors, matched them to a checklist for dysgraphia, and they stopped there. But Oswald didn't use a dysgraphia checklist. She used a linguistics lens.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell Ah, because Leo isn't a native English speaker.

SPEAKER_01:

Not even close. This kid is a linguistic gymnast. He was born in a country that uses the Cyrillic alphabet. He speaks that language at home. His parents are teaching him to read and write in it. Okay. At school, he's learning in English. And just to make it more complex, he's taking classes in a third language.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell So his brain is juggling three languages and two completely different alphabets.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. And when Oswald looked at his errors, she didn't see a disability. She saw a high-functioning multilingual brain trying to sort out conflicting rules.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, let's get specific because this is the aha moment. The school was really worried he was confusing the letters B and F.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Now, if you're a monolingual teacher, B and F looks totally random. There's no visual similarity. It looks like a processing glitch. Yeah. But Oswald has a background in linguistics. She knew that in the Cyrillic alphabet Leo's home language, the letter that looks exactly like a capital English B, it makes the V sound.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh wait, so he sees the shape B and his brain fires the sound V.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. Now, okay, do this with me for a second. Put your hand on your throat and make the V sound.

SPEAKER_00:

V V V V. Okay, yeah, it's vibrating. Uh.

SPEAKER_01:

What's your mouth doing?

SPEAKER_00:

My teeth are on my bottom lip for both of them. It feels. It feels exactly the same.

SPEAKER_01:

Precisely. In linguistics, they call those mouth position cousins. The physical shape of your mouth is identical. The only difference is for V, your vocal cords vibrate, and for F they don't.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. So Leo wasn't struggling. His brain was detecting that B makes a V sound, and since V and F are basically the same mouth shape, he was just navigating a complex phonological map.

SPEAKER_01:

He was sorting out a script conflict. It wasn't a deficit, it was interference.

SPEAKER_00:

That is wild. He wasn't guessing, he was triangulating. What about the spelling? The notes say he was writing baf instead of baff.

SPEAKER_01:

Again, look at the profile. Leo's home language doesn't have the thirth sound. Yeah, okay. His third language also doesn't have the thirth sound. English is the only place he hears it. So when he writes BEF, he is encoding exactly what he hears through his primary phonological filter.

SPEAKER_00:

So writing baff actually proves he has good hearing.

SPEAKER_01:

It proves he's listening phonetically. It's a sign that his auditory processing is working correctly, just you know, through a different filter.

SPEAKER_00:

And the capitalization. The teacher said he kept forgetting.

SPEAKER_01:

He wasn't forgetting, he was applying a rule. In his home lot word, you don't capitalize nationalities, languages, days of the week, or months.

SPEAKER_00:

So he was being a good student, just in the wrong context.

SPEAKER_01:

He was. And here's the kicker the teachers at the school are well-meaning, they're educated, but they just didn't have the specific expertise in linguistics and multilingual development to ask why the error was happening.

SPEAKER_00:

They just saw that it was happening.

SPEAKER_01:

They were pattern matching.

SPEAKER_00:

And this brings us right to the technological paradox you mentioned, because Oswald makes a really strong point here about AI.

SPEAKER_01:

She does. There's this huge push right now for AI reading tutors' apps like Elo, Amira, Conmigo. We think, oh, technology's smart, it'll catch things.

SPEAKER_00:

But an AI would have done exactly what the school did.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. It would have flagged BAF as an error, it would have prescribed more succrills, it would measure Leo against monolingual norms and spit out a report saying he's behind.

SPEAKER_00:

So the algorithm would be, what's her phrase, technically correct and diagnostically useless.

SPEAKER_01:

Diagnostically useless. It's so powerful, right? The problem isn't human versus machine. It's pattern matching versus deep expertise. You need someone who understands the mechanism of the error.

SPEAKER_00:

And for a kid like Leo, getting more drills on something he physically can't hear yet, that's just going to frustrate him and make him feel broken.

SPEAKER_01:

Which brings us back to that parent's intuition that I need to send my kid to the school with the nice building because that's where the experts are.

SPEAKER_00:

But in Leo's case, the expert was on a laptop screen, and the people in the building were about to give him a label that could have followed him forever.

SPEAKER_01:

That is the building bias. Oswald tells this story about visiting a school that had just spent$2 million on a renovation.

SPEAKER_00:

This is the one with the treehouse reading nook.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep. And the makerspace with the 3D printer that nobody knew how to use.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. It was just a prop.

SPEAKER_01:

It was a prop. But worse, Oswald looked into the credentials of the reading specialist at that same school. The person actually in charge of teaching kids to read. A basic teaching certification and six months of experience.

SPEAKER_00:

Six months.

SPEAKER_01:

Six months. So you walk in, you see the$2 million renovation, and you think, this is a serious educational institution. You just assume the teaching matches the furniture.

SPEAKER_00:

You think you're paying for education.

SPEAKER_01:

But you're paying for carpet. And you compare that to someone like Iiswalt, who might be sitting in a home office, but she has degrees in linguistics, structured literacy, special education, and decades of experience.

SPEAKER_00:

It's the difference between a generalist and a specialist. And traditional schools, they often hire generalists. A standard teaching degree might only have one course on reading instruction.

SPEAKER_01:

One semester. A specialist has spent their entire career studying how the brain processes language.

SPEAKER_00:

This all became so obvious during the pandemic, didn't it? That was the moment the curtain got pulled back.

SPEAKER_01:

The COVID experiment, as Oswald calls it, it was a massive stress test. Schools that relied on the building, on the routines, the proximity, the sit-in-your-seat structure to mask thin instruction, they fell apart online.

SPEAKER_00:

Because when you take away the walls, all you have left is the teaching.

SPEAKER_01:

And if the teaching wasn't solid, there was nowhere to hide. But teachers with deep craft, the ones who really understood how learning happens, they thrived online.

SPEAKER_00:

Because expertise travels.

SPEAKER_01:

Buildings don't.

SPEAKER_00:

There's a story in the notes about a parent who was actually embarrassed to tell her friends that her child went to a virtual school.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. Even though her child had advanced two grade levels in a year, the results were undeniable. But she felt this credibility deficit because there was no campus to brag about.

SPEAKER_00:

We care so much about the optics of education versus the reality of learning.

SPEAKER_01:

We do. And that leads right into the economics of this because when we talk about expertise, people hear expensive.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And let's be real, specialized tutors are not cheap. We are talking significantly more than the high school student down the street.

SPEAKER_01:

No, they aren't. But Oswald argues that cheap is expensive.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell Okay, break that down for me because$40 an hour certainly feels better on the bank count than$150.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so picture a parent who hires that$40 an hour tutor. That tutor is likely a generalist. They're selling their time, not deep diagnostic skill.

SPEAKER_00:

So they come over, they do some worksheets.

SPEAKER_01:

They drill phonics. But if the child has a complex profile like Leo or a child with dyslexia, that generalist might be practicing the wrong things. Drilling phonics with Leo doesn't fix the problem.

SPEAKER_00:

Because the problem isn't that he doesn't know the sounds, it's that his languages are conflicting.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. So you do this for what, 18 months, you spend thousands of dollars. But the financial cost is actually the lesser evil here. The real cost is that the child stagnates. The child starts to believe they are broken or stupid.

SPEAKER_00:

That's the heavy part. It's not just the money, it's the kid's self-esteem. You can't buy that back.

SPEAKER_01:

You can't. So compare that to hiring a high cost expert for one month. That expert diagnoses the root cause immediately. Oh, it's linguistic interference and creates a targeted plan.

SPEAKER_00:

So you pay more up front, but you solve the problem.

SPEAKER_01:

Expertise is an investment in efficiency. The cheap option wastes money and damages the learner. The expensive option actually solves the issue. In the long run, the specialist is cheaper.

SPEAKER_00:

It's like going to your general doctor for a complex heart problem. You can keep going back, or you can just go to the cardiologist once.

SPEAKER_01:

Perfect analogy. And this brings us back to technology because 10 years ago you were limited to the experts in your zip code.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Leo in Amsterdam would have had to find a linguist who understands Cyrillic and English and reading instruction in his neighborhood. Good luck.

SPEAKER_01:

Statistically impossible. He would have been stuck, and that misdiagnosis would have become permanent.

SPEAKER_00:

So technology is the bridge.

SPEAKER_01:

Oswald calls it a conduit. It's the paradox again. We shouldn't use tech to be the teacher. We should use tech to find the teacher.

SPEAKER_00:

Value isn't the screen.

SPEAKER_01:

It's the person on the other end of the screen. Technology decouples expertise from geography. That is the miracle of ed tech. Not the app, but the connection.

SPEAKER_00:

So if I'm a parent listening and I'm looking at schools, or my kid is struggling, what do I actually do? Because that fancy building is still really seductive.

SPEAKER_01:

It is, but Oswald has a great checklist. Three questions you need to ask.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, let's run through them. Number one.

SPEAKER_01:

Who is the specific human? Stop looking at the school's reputation. Ask, who is the actual person sitting with my child? What are their specific credentials?

SPEAKER_00:

Not just are they a teacher, but do they know how to teach my kid?

SPEAKER_01:

Which leads to number two. Can they explain why the struggle is happening? A specialist can tell you why. Is it auditory processing? Is it linguistic interference? If they can't explain the mechanism, they can't fix it.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a great distinction. Diagnosis isn't just describing the symptom.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. And number three, do they understand the specific profile? If your child is multilingual or twice exceptional, does this teacher have experience with that specific combination?

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Because if they're just applying a one-size-fits-all curriculum or an AI train on the average kid, it's not going to work.

SPEAKER_01:

It won't. And honestly, this requires parents to be a little brave. You have to step away from the social validation of the fancy school.

SPEAKER_00:

It sounds like we need to stop asking, is this a real school?

SPEAKER_01:

We do. We need to start asking: does the person teaching my child actually understand what they are looking at?

SPEAKER_00:

That is such a powerful shift. We value the visible stuff. Yeah. The buildings, the tech, but the invisible stuff, the expertise inside a teacher's brain, is what actually matters.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's what saves a kid like Leo from a lifetime of thinking he has a disability when really he just has a brilliant multilingual brain.

SPEAKER_00:

It's a lot to think about. And here is where it gets really interesting for you, the listener. We've talked about schools, but think about this in your own life. How often do you rely on the building, the fancy office, the suit, the website as a proxy for competence?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, that's good. That applies everywhere.

SPEAKER_00:

When you hire a consultant, a mechanic, a doctor, are you looking at the carpet, the presentation, or are you looking for that specific deep expertise?

SPEAKER_01:

We are all prone to the building bias. We trust the packaging.

SPEAKER_00:

We really are. So the next time you're impressed by a facility or a shiny new AI tool that promises to solve everything for$9.99 a month, just ask yourself, does this thing know what it's looking at? Or is it just pattern matching?

SPEAKER_01:

Because the building doesn't know your kid, and the app doesn't know your kid. Only a human with the right expertise can do that.

SPEAKER_00:

And on that note, we're going to wrap up this deep dive. A huge thank you to the source material from Amy Oswald and Conduit Academy for opening our eyes to what's really going on beyond the building.

SPEAKER_01:

It's been a fascinating discussion.

SPEAKER_00:

As always, thank you for listening. Keep asking those hard questions, look past the fresh paint, and we'll catch you on the next deep dive.

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, everyone.

Head Shot

Amy Oswalt

Host