Future U Live from NAIS

In this episode of Future U, Debra Wilson, the incoming president of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), interviews Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn about key takeaways from the pandemic for schools and higher education. They discuss the importance of pluralism in schools, emphasizing that there is no one-size-fits-all way to serve families, as their needs and priorities are varied. They highlight the need to empower groups of educators to experiment, test, and learn from different approaches, and to allow parents to opt into these alternative models.

Selingo and Horn also emphasize the importance of patience in risk-taking, as the post-pandemic experience is still uncertain and may take a few more years to fully understand. They encourage boards and institutions to avoid rushing into decisions and to be more patient in evaluating the outcomes of various initiatives.

Overall, the conversation revolves around the need for diverse approaches to education, the benefits of having various systems in place, the role of technology in education, the need for flexibility in learning, and the potential for new models of education to emerge. Other topics include the value of internships, the role of teachers, and the future of higher education institutions.

Transcript

Presenter:

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

This episode is brought to you by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information, policy, and institutional transformation.

How much would $2,000 help your class project this fall semester? Course Hero, an education technology community with more than 150,000 educators is awarding 50 teaching grants to fund fall 2023 class projects that promote digital literacy and equity. Imagine new ways to use technology to support learning and understanding and you might just receive up to $2,000 in funding applied by May 26th at coursehero.com/educators/grant. That's course hero.com/educators/grant. Applications are due by May 26th, 2023.

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Jeff Selingo:

Michael, it was fun to get together at the recent National Association of Independent Schools, or NAIS, annual meeting for school heads to do a joint conversation and for us to sort of flip the script, if you will, and have Debra Wilson, who is the incoming president of NAIS, play the role of host and interview us.

Michael Horn:

It was a lot of fun, Jeff, and I enjoyed talking about everything from lessons for leaders of schools to some of the big experiments that you're intrigued by in higher ed. And so listeners have a little bit of background into this and why we did the conversation this way, Jeff is a current board member at NAIS, and I'm actually a past board member there, so there were a lot of friends for us to catch up with and it was also fun to take off the anchor roll completely and let Debra just run the show and interview us. And we had the opportunity to record the conversation, so on this episode of Future U, we're bringing you excerpts from that keynote conversation. So we hope you enjoy this episode of Future U live from NAIS.

Debra Wilson:

Let's start off with a softball. We're not quite post pandemic.

Jeff Selingo:

We don't want to say that word.

Debra Wilson:

What do the kids say? We're post pandemic-ish.

Michael Horn:

Ish.

Debra Wilson:

One to two key takeaways schools should just have in this time.

Michael Horn:

I was wondering what a softball review constitutes.

Debra Wilson:

That's a softball.

Michael Horn:

Because I don't know if that's the softball. To answer the question and not duck it, even if it's a brushback pitch, I would say the two things I would pick are one, the importance of pluralism in schools. Just if you can imagine if we had had only one system or one way of doing things during the pandemic and how hard that would've made it on society, that we only had one way to do things and we were all sort of marching lockstep in the same way as opposed to the variety I think in diversity, frankly, the independent schools themselves that really showed there are ways to navigate this, there are ways to get kids back in school safely, there are ways to serve this.

But also, I would say frankly, we all knew that there was no one-size-fits-all way to educate a child before the pandemic, but I think the pandemic showed us that there's no one-size-fits-all way to serve a family either, that the needs and priorities, frankly, of families around this country are deep and varied, and we need that robust pluralism of schools to be able to serve them properly. The second one I would just say is I think we also saw that before the pandemic, we would sort of tell ourselves, "Well, traditional schools are not serving a certain group of society well." I think we saw that they're not really set up to serve the majority of folks well regardless of demographics and that we need to all innovate to create a system in which all individuals are capable of fulfilling their potential.

Jeff Selingo:

So I'll probably approach it a little bit more from the higher ed angle where I saw most of the changes after the pandemic in higher ed. And the first one is a little bit of related to Michael's pluralism in terms of optionality. And I think that what we saw during the pandemic, especially at colleges, universities, but also in the K-12 world, was this idea that there are multiple ways of delivering education. And so we could be face-to-face, we could be hybrid, we could be online, we could be even in terms of how we're delivering, we could be more hands-on, more experiential in many ways. And I think that a lot of that is there was a hangover effect we're seeing on college campuses, Michael and I have taken the podcast on the road over the last year.

We spent some time on college campuses, and what was interesting to us is that on almost every campus we were on, the students and faculty, and presidents are struggling in some ways to figure out how to do this, but there was a desire among the student body to want that optionality because that optionality gave adult students, for example, a chance to work while going to school, it gave more traditional 18 to 22-year-olds a chance to do everything from undergraduate research to internships, to co-ops, and even work while going to school. And so that optionality I think is really critical.

The second is that what was interesting to us during the pandemic, and especially on this tour, and we saw this especially in the early days of the pandemic when college campuses were closed, you heard students going to live near campus because they wanted that sense of community and being together. And so to me, the two things that really are apparent from the pandemic is that students really need a sense of belonging and purpose, and we talk a lot about this on the podcast, that in effect when you look at enrollment in higher ed, which is dropped by 1.3 million students since 2019, which is still a number when I say it, that shocks me, 1.3 million students we have lost during the pandemic, and in many cases we don't know really what happened to them. They're not engaged in any sort of higher education.

It's because they didn't have that sense of belonging, they didn't quite find their people during the pandemic, but more than that, they didn't quite know why they were in school. They lost that sense of purpose, that end result of education.

Debra Wilson:

Jeff, you have written extensively on how higher ed needs to redefine itself post pandemic, discussing ideas like differentiation, unbundling services, and designing new types of programming. Could you talk in greater detail about how you see this differentiation and how this impacts K-12, particularly in our sector as we're looking forward to preparing kids for higher ed?

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah. So I've been covering higher ed for more than 25 years, and when I look at the American sector in particular, the thing that's still amazes me is we have 4,000-plus institutions in the US. 40% of them, by the way, are under 1,000 students, so there's a lot of small colleges out there. And for the most part, we talk about mission differentiation, we talk about differentiation, but for the most part, they're a lot alike. They're small and big, and public and private, and two year and four year, but for the most part, they really operate alike. And one of the things that I think is going to happen largely because of demographic trends, cost trends, business model differentiation, which we'll be talking about, is they're going to have to be different.

And I think the pandemic really forced that to think about what is the future student and what do they need? So among the things that I'm seeing really starting to gain ground now is much more of a focus on experiential learning. We're even seeing that among more of the elite and more selective institutions. So I was with just at Georgetown University yesterday, where they're about to launch some new degree programs where experiential learning is core. It's not just bolted on, it's not just learning with a little work on the side, it's more work with learning on the side. And that's even at a place like Georgetown where they kind of don't have to do this. They could kind of just stay and do what they've always done.

We're starting to see a lot of reimagining of the degree. There's a big project out of the University of Pennsylvania right now to really start to think about the three-year degree, which is an experiment that I feel like has been tried a billion times and has constantly failed, because often what we try to do is take four years and mash them into three, but we're now seeing institutions reimagining the degree. So there's this great thing now at the University of Minnesota Rochester. It's a two and a half year degree in health sciences in partnership with the Mayo Clinic, with Google, everybody gets an internship, everybody gets a coach.

So again, what they did is instead of taking the four years and try to match them into two and a half, they started from the right beginning. I think that there's a lot of focus on mentorship and building that into the college experience in a much more central way. We all know that, for us who went to college, that you remember the people more than any class you took, but those relationships are often by chance. And given higher ed's success, or I should say lack of success, in getting students through. Only about 50% of students still get a bachelor's degree even after starting college, that I think that relationships are going to have to be much more central, the student experience is going to have to be much more central to higher education.

And the way we do that is through people and developing relationships and mentorships, giving students that sense of a belonging and purpose that they need. And all of this I think is going to lead, Debra, at the end of the day to what do we want that post-high school experience to be, right? We talk about college, we talk about students being college ready, but what I think is missing is what is the purpose that we're trying to set these students up for? And some of it is around the workforce, some of it is around civic engagement and other things.

And I think that we just often think that college is the next thing, it's the automatic thing, and we don't often think about what we're trying to achieve. And I think what's now starting to happen on more and more campuses, it's still not enough, is that they're starting to think we need to design programs that help students achieve what they're here for rather than look like everyone else.

Debra Wilson:

Who do you think in higher ed is seeing the most lift from the initiatives that they've launched on that front?

Jeff Selingo:

In terms of institutions or students?

Debra Wilson:

Well, institutions who have launched things sort of centering around students or preparing them for later.

Jeff Selingo:

So I think that there's been a much bigger focus now on career success coming out of college. Often, if you ask the average faculty member in higher education about helping their students get a job, most of the responses will be, "It's not our job to help them get a job." But most students and parents, particularly since the Great Recession, think they're sending their kid to college-

Debra Wilson:

To get a job.

Jeff Selingo:

... to get a job afterwards. And so now you're starting to see, and it really started at Wake Forest 15 years ago, where they're integrating career services from day one. From the moment you get on campus, they're helping students figure out what do they want to do? Because most students come to College saying they want to major in X, but they don't really know what it means. As Michael said, they don't really know what... Most of these jobs are a foreign language to them, it's a foreign concept to them, most of these job titles, so it helps them guide them through that college experience. So I think that's the biggest change that I'm seeing both on small liberal arts colleges and bigger universities where career services is not something that happens the second semester of senior year or junior or senior year, it happens really as orientation now into the first year of college.

Debra Wilson:

Wow.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, just to stay on that for a moment, I think some of the schools that have had the most success of this, they're really building that into the courses themselves as Jeff mentioned. So you'll have a course that'll partner frankly with some of these institutions like Riipen or Parker Dewey, and stuff like that. And they'll get a micro-internship as a project for the class that they're taking. And this is something that K-12 schools could do as well, start to partner with organizations in your community, bring the project as part of the class itself.

You're learning the academic knowledge and skills, but to apply it in something and to gain some understanding of what does it look like to work with those people? Build some relationships with people who are in those workplaces, and so forth. And then as Jeff said, by the time you get to junior year, senior year, and so forth, you have a Rolodex of people you've tried out, you've prototyped in essence in your own life what these fits look like, and you have a sense of where you'd fit in and where maybe is not the right thing for what gives you energy as an individual.

Jeff Selingo:

And the other thing gaining ground now is embedding industry-based certificates or some sort of credential on top of the bachelor's degree, so that students not only graduate college with a bachelor's degree, but they're graduating with an industry-based credential that could be like an AWS certificate or a Microsoft certificate, or some type of other badge that carries some currency in the job market, whether that's from around negotiation, or project management, or something like that. We're seeing the University of Colorado and a couple of other colleges really take the lead on doing that. So that, again, the bachelor's degree, first of all, differentiation, but also the bachelor's degree carries some real skill built into it in going into the job market.

Debra Wilson:

That's interesting, I hadn't really thought about it. Some of our schools, they'll have entrepreneurship classes and things that have that direct connection with the local area, and students build up a portfolio as they're applying to schools and get that experience.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, 100%. And it's interesting, some of the efforts you've seen around like Mastery Transcript Consortium or things like that are really how do we collect this portfolio of activities and represent it to colleges? So I love engineering, Olin College is going to find me. It's more matchmaking as opposed to me scouring the rankings list and just trying to find the best ranking, even though it may not fit me or RISD reaches out because you show a great sensibility in design and art and things like that. And so it's really able to reflect your interests and they have a lot more data, so they're not selecting based on a narrow test score, a GPA that does or doesn't mean that much, and they have a much deeper sense of who you are as an individual.

Debra Wilson:

So Michael, many Gen Z students are looking for alternatives to college. They don't want any part of this rat race that Jeff is talking about over here. Do you think we're going to see the birth of alternative post-secondary pathways over the next few years? And is this an opportunity for independent schools? And I will say, I've spoken to graduation last year and I did a last-minute gut check and I said, "Do you have students who are not going to college?" And the school said, "Actually, for the first time, yeah, we've got kids who are choosing alternative pathways, sort of doing apprenticeships, doing different kinds of to work for tech companies that will eventually pay for them to go to college part-time."

Michael Horn:

Yeah, this is fascinating right now. Jeff and I have talked about it a bunch because where we live, the dialogue has really changed. I'm in Lexington, Massachusetts, he's in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and the folks we're around, the parents, they come up to us in ways that they wouldn't have a decade ago and they say, "Will my kid need to go to college in five years from now?" That that's not something that you would've heard a decade ago outside of the education conferences where Jeff and I would argue. So I do think something's changing in the air at the margins, and we're starting to see college alternatives pop up.

In a featured episode of Future U, we have Merit America and Marcy Lab School that we feature, and they are both essentially college alternatives. Merit America is a little bit more for the adult learner, Marcy Lab School is really for that 18-year-old that wants a one-year program into the workforce. They've constructed a liberal arts course of study that combines with clear industry certification and workforce credential with a lot of care and attention to the pedagogy itself, the instructional design, the connection, the mentors, all the things that Jeff was talking about, and they both are success-based models. So for Merit America, I might screw this up, but I think it's basically you don't start paying until you get a job above a minimum income threshold and then it's $95 a month for five years.

So that's really resetting the equation to align incentives with students. And I think a lot of people are going to be looking at those, they're going to be looking at apprenticeships. They're certainly looking at gap years and saying, "Are there other alternatives?" And again, gap year, not like the backpacking through Europe for 12 months, but like, "I'm going to take a set of internships, I'm going to take an externship, I'm going to work a job, and maybe I'll do a two-month sort of backpacking trip." Those sorts of things I think are gaining some ascendancy. We really don't know what percentage of the 1.3 million are in these different pathways, but it seems like it's bubbling a little bit and it's hard to know how big it will get, but I do think the air is out of the bag of just the college for all mentality, and we want more pathways into a successful life.

Jeff Selingo:

And I don't think, Debra, that means college never.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I agree.

Jeff Selingo:

It just means college not now. And what we're seeing with the growth of all these pathways is that they all give students a chance to get that degree as part of working rather than again, this idea that we would learn with work on the side, but now the paradigm is shifting in a way, working with learning on the side, and it enables students to figure out what they really want to do and then get the education that helps them do that. And then second is around cost. I mean, higher education just costs a lot of money for a lot of people and I think that even in our neighborhoods, parents are asking, "My kid doesn't really know what they want to do, they can't really get into the right place with the right fit. Is that..." I think 20 years ago people just said, "Let's do it." I think there's a lot more questioning of that if this is the right moment to do it.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, the angst and anxiety are high. And to the other part of your question, is this an opportunity for independent schools? I think it depends. I think a lot of independent schools that are built around that path to college promise, they're probably going to continue on it. And as Jeff said, the applications to selective higher ed institutions have never been higher, they're in an incredible position, the demand is incredibly high. That probably stays in that path. And I think it's a permission though, for independent schools to start innovating and cultivating partnerships themselves with community organizations to cultivate partnerships themselves with employers, to cultivate partnerships with some of these alternative pathway programs and start to just see what would this look like? Can we create different kinds of communities? And look, before the pandemic we know that there was a large set of independent schools that were struggling with real enrollment issues.

And is this a way to carve out different niches in the independent school world to create more sustainable business models themselves? I think so. Obviously the pandemic I think showed the value of independent schools to a more widespread public, and we saw a rebound, but some of those structural issues I think are calling out for a more diverse back to that world of pluralism, I think it's true in higher ed and it's true in K-12 too, sort of find that tribe that you serve and play with some of these alternative, not just delivery mechanisms, but also purpose in who you connect them with and what that value network around you is.

Jeff Selingo:

And with that, we'll take a brief break on Future U for a word from our sponsors. And when we come back, we'll talk about student success, student mental health and staffing, and more on this episode of Future U live from NAIS.

Michael Horn:

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system-level change and a student-centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post-secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first-generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners, and rural community members. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Jeff Selingo:

This episode is being brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Today's college students are more than just students. They are workers, parents, and caregivers, and neighbors, and colleges and universities need to change to meet their changing needs. Learn more about the Foundation's efforts to transform institutions to be more student-centered at usprogram.gatesfoundation.org.

Michael Horn:

Welcome back to Future U. We're going to send it right to Debra for the last half of our keynote conversation at the NAIS annual school heads meeting, which took place in February.

Debra Wilson:

I mean, we're all very vested in our students' success and the next level, whether you're a K-8 or a K-12 or high school, providing those opportunities to make sure students know why they're going to college so that you've got that level of engagement and that's sort of building those habits of mind and success.

Michael Horn:

I think that's right, and it's frankly another opportunity to redefine what success is and it's not just this college, again, very narrow pathway, but it's interesting. If you look at the history of K-12 and higher ed, we sort of tried to slap down it, for lack of a better word, on the vo-tech, career technical education tracks in K-12 education because they were deeply discriminatory, and we saw that over and over again. I think as is often the case in American education, we swing on the pendulum and we don't sort of land in the middle, we go to the extreme and we sort of rooted it out. I'd love to see a system, frankly, where every single student, not just quote, unquote, "Those students," but every single student is having career and technical education as part of their middle and high school experiences.

And then they get the agency to make the choice of, "What do I want to do?" Informed by, "What does that mean for my future prospects? What are the pathways? What does this mean in terms of the activities I'll be doing on a daily basis?" And they can make that choice. And I think if you start to create more room and more options, you can hopefully create more space for different types of learners, and not even along the lines of gender, but on a whole host of metrics.

Jeff Selingo:

And we're starting to move slowly in this direction. The number of registered apprenticeships, for example, is way up than it was even a couple of years ago in the US, but we still haven't, as Michael knows, I just got back from Switzerland and seen a little bit of their model. We talk often about the German model, I actually think the Swiss model is a better example for the US because one of the things in the Swiss model is that a lot of what we would consider today white collar jobs that you would go to college for, you actually go through an apprenticeship in Switzerland. So for example, graphic design or accounting or things like that, things that we would send kids to a four-year college for, you're actually learning on the job in Switzerland.

And again, I don't want this be seen as a screed against the degree. It's not at all. I think that we want people to get the degree. I think as a country we need that, but the question is, is that the first thing they should do at the age of 18, or is it something that could be built in over the course of as they're trying to learn about themselves and what they want to do?

Michael Horn:

In the way maybe I would say it, Jeff and I probably have slightly different views on this, but I would say it's an expanding vision of what the higher education is. And we don't just lock it in sort of something we call a degree, but we're focusing much more on what are the skills that you actually can do with this piece of paper and it's not just about the paper itself. And I think employers are saying that also that the piece of paper itself as a proxy for you'll be a great employee, I don't think it was ever accurate, but it's certainly not working out that way anymore, and so they're looking for more as well. And that's changing I think a lot of these dynamics in the education space right now.

Jeff Selingo:

And it's interesting, Debra, I'm working on a paper that will come out in a couple weeks on the value proposition of the bachelor's degree in particular, the degree premium. And the reason why college enrollment just took off in the 1980s was because the degree premium went from here to here, and so everybody had to go to college because it was the only way that you could have a sustainable wage because of the decline of manufacturing in the US. And then starting in 2000, that degree premium flattened. And what we're finding, and I'm working on this project with the Burning Glass Institute, which is looking at both jobs and skills and things like that, is that the degree premium is still there.

The bachelor's degree still matters, but it's highly dependent on selectivity, which is why we are seeing so many people highly try to go to more selective colleges because there's a higher degree premium there, but it also is based on major. And then it's unfortunate as somebody who loves the liberal arts, the STEM majors have a bigger payoff than non-STEM majors. But what's also interesting is something we don't talk often about, are skills. So skills pay off just as much as major in selectivity in some cases. So if you come out of that bachelor's degree with certain skills, that actually could make up for not going to a selective place or majoring in a STEM degree because you have skills that are highly sought after in the job market.

Debra Wilson:

Well, it's a little ironic too, because you marry that with what we were talking about in terms of almost project-based learning through internships and things, and those reinforce what Gallup tells us how you report your wellness later is not about where you go, big, small, public, private. It's actually about doing six key things when you're there.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, and I saw this clearly in again, the book Choosing College, those people who continue to select not just their college based on, "I want to get into the best for its own sake," but continue to pursue that mindset throughout their lives, tend to be unhappy. There's not a deeper sort of sense of the pot of gold on the other side of that rainbow at some point. At some point, you need to move off that linear thinking and figure out what is it speaking for you? Where do you get meaning? Where's the intrinsic work itself? So to me, this is a great thing that we're thinking about, a more expansive vision of what higher education looks like, that we're thinking about these skills. And I'll just add, Jeff's observation about the STEM versus liberal arts is absolutely true in the short run, although as I understand it it flips, liberal arts has the bigger gain in the long run. And as a history major, I'm glad about that, but the-

Debra Wilson:

English.

Michael Horn:

English, there we go. The reason I couldn't be an English major is because I couldn't figure out how to write a paper in English, but I think the second thing is we're about to go through another pendulum swing with all the AI, and no code, and all this stuff that is about to commoditize a lot of these more quote, unquote, "Technical STEM-like fields." And the value I think is going to shift right back to the liberal arts because it's sort of, "What do you do with this?" Philosophy majors are going to have a lot more importance when you're looking at an AI algorithm trying to figure out what do you do in this very deep ethical conundrum? And they're not going to be simple answers.

Jeff Selingo:

Well, and I think that's interesting because Michael mentioned the Marcy School and they build in the liberal arts into those technical fields because even as we saw in this research that we're doing with The Burning Glass Institute is that those foundational skills are absolutely critical to all these jobs. And those foundational skills come in through the liberal arts largely, so you might not major in English or history, but that you need the elements of the liberal arts and the humanities in order to do even more technical jobs or STEM jobs. In fact, those are the students or the graduates who end up having a lot more mobility, not only within their firm, but also outside in terms of occupations.

Debra Wilson:

And to speak for the philosophy majors in the room, there's invariably some of them in here, that ethics morality piece, if we've learned nothing over the last 25, 30 years of American history-

Michael Horn:

Matters.

Debra Wilson:

It matters.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, it matters a lot. And I think we want people grappling with these questions, and I totally agree with Jeff, it can be in the context of technical fields, it can be in the context of new disciplines that are emerging and things of that nature, but we can't neglect it. And I think that's the bigger thing is again, there's pendulum, STEM, liberal arts, or humanities. Let's not think of these things as at odds or false dichotomies, how do we blend these in the middle? Which is really what Joseph Aoun of Northeastern constantly talks about. He says, "The humanics," and he's thinking about how do we combine these disciplines to take the best of being able to do something for machine learning with thinking in these ways to guide fundamental questions of humanity and what kind of society do we want to live in? And that's also the strength, I think, of independent schools, is to be able to have the space to ask these questions and have these conversations.

Debra Wilson:

So Jeff, we hear from many college presidents that although the kids they get from our schools are academically prepared, many of them are experiencing mental health issues. I don't think our schools are alone on that front. How could schools and colleges work together to emphasize the health and wellbeing of students in this very competitive atmosphere, and I would argue maybe even for a more sort of continuous approach, so that it's a sort of smoother handoff maybe?

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah. And I mean, it's one of the reasons why I think admissions needs to change, because I think that we're really seeing, at least at the high school level and the junior and senior year, a lot of these mental health challenges coming around. And then they come to college after having gone through this gambit of getting in, and it's kind of in some ways a letdown because it was all about the game of getting in and then they're in, and now they're not quite sure why they're there or what they're supposed to be doing. And then you play another game, and that game is getting out of college and getting a job. And I feel like a lot of this is about slowing things down and spending more time in the senior year of high school and in those first couple of years of college, of trying to figure out what's next of experimenting of failing a little bit more.

But I think some of this is because there's so much pressure to get the kids into the right college. And once you're in college, as Michael and I talk about all the time, student success now is such a big thing, so it's about getting students through as quickly as possible, keeping them retained, and getting them to graduation because of the rising costs. There's no time and space for this consideration and to think about what do I want to learn? What am I learning? How do I transfer those skills into other domains? None of that is happening because we're rushing. That's what I would love to see. And I think it starts with the admissions process. It probably starts earlier, but in terms of how I think right now, in terms of admissions, that's where I would start.

Michael Horn:

Jeff, when he interviewed me actually about the book From Reopen to Reinvent, ask the provocative question, "Can you really move to a mastery-based model unless higher education embraces it?" And my answer was, I think schools can make some big steps in that direction, but I do think that higher education has a disproportionate impact on this. And again, like middle school for example, create the room to have a couple cracks at something until you've mastered it, embedding small failure as part of the learning process, which is how we learn and don't make that a bad thing and something that goes on your quote, unquote, "Record" that you think then higher ed is going to evaluate. So I do think that there's a lot of things we as schools can do right now to reduce the temperature, and I would love to see higher ed on the other side of this make some changes.

Debra Wilson:

I love the set of observations and they're frustrating to me because I'm, as you both know, working and student health and wellness and thinking about this for a long time. And maybe six years ago I was on a call with a few different college presidents and one of them who shall remain unnamed, she made the comment that we get these incredibly qualified students and they're great until we get into that first serious set of grades and students receive their first C and they're traumatized and they have high anxiety and they think they're going to fail and all these things. And I said, "Well, I actually, I know the solution for that." And she said, "Well, what's that?" And I said, "You should take more students who've received Cs."

And there was this long pause because none of these people knew me, and then the one guy on the phone who did know me just started busting out laughing, and then everybody started laughing and I said, "This is a reality. I mean, you can't be a bait-and-switch, you can't take straight A kids and then expect them when they don't get A's-

Michael Horn:

To be able to understand that.

Debra Wilson:

... to be able to understand that. And I know there's great inflation. This is like a whole-

Michael Horn:

I was about to say it, by a class at the Harvard Ed School, I got a lot of complaints when I gave an A minus, so you know.

Debra Wilson:

Yes, those are-

Michael Horn:

And I tried to explain to them, "No one in 20 years was going to ask, what grade did you get in Michael Horn's class?" But nevertheless.

Debra Wilson:

I hope we are looking more at mastery, more at portfolios. I don't think grades are going to go away, but we need ways for kids... I mean, everybody in this room fails on a regular basis. And gloriously, we work in places, you go back and you do it again. You tweak, you iterate, you do the stuff, and we all do it, but we don't give our students the same latitude, I don't think, and it doesn't set them up for healthy success when they get into higher education and certainly not when they get into the workforce.

Michael Horn:

And it gets into the building in resilience and grit and perseverance and things and growth mindset. And many schools, they have the 30-minute segment where they talk about the social-emotional learning, and then they go right back into the traditional system that literally ignores every single one of those. And kids watch what we do, not what we say. Actions speak way louder. And so if we're serious about this, and the research is incredibly clear on it as well, the best way to build those habits of success, those things that are going to help give you resilience to get through moments of tough times, is to integrate it in the building of academic knowledge and skills themselves. Not have them be separate, but view them as interdependent.

Debra Wilson:

Yeah. All right. So the number one concern that everybody in this room probably has is around the education workforce, so let's switch some gears. Jeff, we'll start with you. Before the pandemic, the salad days, if you will, we began to see a decline in people pursuing teaching as a career. What should colleges and universities be doing to ignite passion and students for considering an education career and what should our schools be doing to make these jobs more appealing? I mean, it may be where are you seeing schools start to experiment? When I talk about this with my schools I worry about we are such place-based institutions, and as this new generation is looking for more flexibility, they see their friends working from home, yoga pants on Zoom. Jeff, we'll start with you. What are your thoughts?

Jeff Selingo:

When I was growing up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, my father was a teacher, a lot of people who lived in my neighborhood were teachers. It was a career that I actually looked up to and wanted. I didn't necessarily myself wanted to become one, but it was something that people wanted to do. And obviously I don't think we have that anymore, I think that's a big change. And some of it is around on colleges, on the college side, and so I'll speak a little bit to that where I think colleges can make some changes on this. One of is cost, the huge cost of a bachelor's degree really changes the ROI of that degree for parents and students. And so if your son or daughter really wants to become a teacher and you start to look at the ROI of that degree, you start to look at colleges and universities, you start to say, "I'm not quite sure I really want to spend X number of dollars or take out this much in loans in order to pay for that." And so you really discourage it very early on as a result.

And then what ends up happening is that most of those students that are driven to regional public colleges, former teachers colleges, which largely educate a lot of teachers in the US, and they don't necessarily do it at more selective colleges or at other flagship institutions or private institutions. And I think that we need to put it back on the colleges and universities, the flagships and privates and say, "This is your role too. You can't just educate the coders and everybody else. You have to also educate the future education workforce." We also I think in higher education, do a poor job at talking about it as a career. Michael and I just did a podcast on, because this is a big issue obviously not only in K-12, but in higher ed as well. And here we are, we're learning organizations, but we're not showing students at a very formative time in their lives that these can actually be jobs on campuses, for example.

And so a number of colleges now are building internships and co-ops into the college experience, so you could work in the student affairs office, you could work in the technology office, and so forth. And then finally, going back to what I was saying earlier about this paper I'm working on with Burning Glass, it's around skills. So I was a journalism major undergrad, a lot of what I learned back in the 1990s, you can't really use journalism anymore, but a lot of the basic translatable skills I could do in five other jobs, 10 other jobs, 15 other jobs. The same thing with educating teachers. Maybe some of these students won't go on and become teachers, but a lot of the skills that you would learn in becoming a teacher are translatable and transferable to other careers and jobs, and we should actually encourage that.

So things like, so I'm looking at the top, these are the top five foundational skills that we're going to list in this paper we're about to do, influencing, consulting, program management, negotiation, leadership, all things that you would learn in teacher education, for example.

Michael Horn:

Wow. I'm trying to think what I'll add on that. So first I'll just say on the higher ed side, and this is a public statement also, not the independent school sector, but these certification requirements are a racket and that they have gotten, because they're tied to these costly programs and salaries that don't make it pay off and so forth, and so rethinking that I think with alternative ways into the profession is important. Second, I'll just say, I hadn't thought about this until you were talking about higher ed perpetuating it. We were obviously with some people from UVA recently, and they were saying that they have created various internships in student affairs or things like that.

You know who does this well in the K-12 space? Is charter networks. They do a pretty good job of getting their alumni to come back and teach in those networks. They build such a sense of belonging and mission and purpose that I think it's part of it and really seeing it as a desirable path to impact and influence the future generation. And then the third one to me is, and it's in the book, I really think we need to redesign the teaching profession itself like a job that requires teachers to do a couple dozen distinct different tasks and layers on, all the stuff over them, I think is crazy personally. I think it obviously increases burnout, it decreases motivation on the job, it ignores the opportunities for advancement, growth, intrinsic work, specialization, things that we know are closely related to what motivates people in careers.

And so higher ed, I think there's places that are helping on this. The Arizona State Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, for example, is doing a lot around co-teaching models and they're working with districts and unions and schools to try to implement these. But I think co-teaching, not just like, "Gee, you're on a team and you have your community of practice for 30 minutes, if you're lucky once a day, but actually there are multiple adults in the classroom with lots of kids," is a model that we desperately need to, again, build in the motivators into the profession, take off some of the burden, but also introduce some flexibility and web of support for teachers. If you need to be home a day because your kiddo's sick, it's okay because there's two other teachers in that classroom who know the kids, and it's okay that you do or don't get a substitute who doesn't know the kids because there's going to be continuity.

And we create this web of support that acknowledges, just like in so many other professions, we need some of that flexibility and slack in the system. I mean, the fact that we're asking, what is it? Three and a half million teachers to be there 180 days of the year and never miss a day, that's just not how our society operates. We don't have that expectation in a lot of other fields, and I think we need to move away from it.

Debra Wilson:

Okay. So before we turn it over to the crowd, and do we have microphones set up? Yes, okay. One to two pieces of advice you have for school leaders as they face the future.

Michael Horn:

Oh boy. Well, one would be have a learning mindset yourself and model it, because I think showing that you can fail, not in a big failure way, but that iterating is part of the process of learning will extend grace throughout the community, but also model for students what this is supposed to be all about. And then the second that I guess I would say is that, because we don't know what this future is going to look like, empower little groups of educators to have their experiments and test and learn. So same theme here of learning, but to try out some different things and have the freedom from the traditional model that you run to see what sticks and does it work? And let the parents opt into it as opposed to imposing it on the community. Start small, test and learn and be a learning organization.

Jeff Selingo:

I guess my one thing is that we tend to equate risk-taking with swiftness, but I think we actually need some patience right now to kind of see how things are going to play out. So I think you could actually be patient and risk-taking at the same time. And I wish that we would move away from this, I mean, I know most boards, because I sit on boards, have this bias for action. We just have to get it done. I actually think we need a little patience right now to see how different things are going to play out. As we said earlier, we don't know what is the post-pandemic experience really going to look like. I still think we need a couple more years to play this out.

Michael Horn:

And with that, a huge thank you to Debra Wilson, the incoming president of NAIS for taking a turn as the host of Future U and interviewing me and Jeff. And thanks to all of you for tuning into this edited version of our keynote conversation at the NAIS annual Heads' Summit in February of 2023. We'll see you next time.