 Can I ask you to tell us your name? Yeah, absolutely. My name is Michael Horn. And can you share a little bit about you so we can get to know you a little bit better? Yeah, absolutely. So I've been working in the field of education for about 15 years now. I had a public policy background, went to business school to get away from it, failed in that endeavor, and ended up co-authoring a book with the man who became my mentor, Clay Christensen. I called disrupting class. We started the Clayton Christensen Institute for disruptive innovation together, non-profit think tank. I ran the education team there for just under a decade and then moved to a group called the entangled group in 2015, which just got acquired by a group called Guild Education. And now I'm a senior strategist there. And as you know, I still write a lot of books and articles about the future of education, really spanning the entire system from early learning, K-12, where my roots were, but the last really seven years or so has been much more focused on higher education and Guild's work is in helping employers spend dollars on helping working adults get education and upskill, which in this current pandemic, given all of the disruption, different sort of disruption in people's lives, has felt incredibly gratifying to be able to help a lot of folks right now. So I work across those ranges, as I mentioned, written a number of books on the topic. I have a couple of podcasts on the future of education and just try to help people chart a course to a better system that serves all individuals better. Well, I can say I've been a fan for a very long time, even when you were interning under Mr. Christensen. I read a lot of his work and I was really moved by his thoughts and he was very really clear and kind of really poignant to think about where he was, because a lot of people talk about education. Education is the black sheep of the family all the time is something wrong with it. There's all these things. I think some of his work was really clear and he articulated his vision very, very well. And then you came along behind him and just took it up and took the band and started running and he's done basically the same thing. And I try every time you send something, I try to post it, because I think people need to hear and read those things because I mean like we make assumptions about education that are not always correct. I don't know if you know this, my husband is a third grade teacher. He's been teaching for 28, 29 years. He's been teaching for a long time. And my view, my lens from education comes from his work and then where I am in my work. So I think it's really important and one of the reasons why I wanted to have this chat with you is because I think you can give us some insights that many of us may not have, specifically about education and race and wealth equity, if you will, how those go together. So if you could, can you just talk a little bit about the structure of education from elementary education on a way to post secondary education? Yeah, absolutely. So in our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools, they were literally designed after factories. Most people don't realize this that if you went before the 1850s really, everyone attended a one room school house. And by necessity, there were a lot of kids crammed into a classroom and the teacher was individualizing and personalizing for every single student there. The students were teaching each other. There was a lot of differentiation going on, acknowledging the reality that, you know, all students learn different ways, different needs at different times, different paces and so forth. And it was just laid bare by the fact that we had so many different ages. But what a lot of people don't realize is the vast majority of Americans didn't go to high school back then. Very few, like we're talking single digit percentages. And that all started to change really in the late 1800s and early 1900s when we moved to this factory model education system that we had imported in essence from Prussia and that system. And the theory basically said, okay, we're gonna batch students up by their date of manufacture, if you will, their birth year. And we will put them in classrooms where the teacher, in order to educate massive numbers of students, because remember, there wasn't compulsory education before in the United States. So to create a universal system, we're gonna deliver the same learning in the same way to them at the same pace on each day. And every couple of days, we'll switch to the next concept and some of them will get it and some of them won't. And that's okay because our system was essentially built to sort students, sort them out. So those students who, you know, didn't have high academic achievement, they'd move into career and technical education, which would mean that they were line workers in factories. Those who did pretty well, they would become managers. And the really creme de la creme, they would get to go to higher education to become sort of the leaders of the political class or corporations or et cetera and sort of run the country, if you will. And that's how our education system was built in the case of all the system. And I'll get to higher education in a moment, but you hear that it's a system built on sorting, not on learning and developing every single child's potential and passions and so forth. And so when we, as a society over the last 30 years, since a nation at risk in 1983 was published, pointed out all the students that weren't making the grade, weren't learning, were dropping out and so forth, what I think we've never connected as a country in a conversation is that was actually the design of the system. It was designed to produce the exact results that it does and it's a success by that standard. The problem is we now live in a knowledge economy where that doesn't actually get you a stable living wage and a stable job and so forth in today's day and age and we need a very different thing from the education system. In higher education, again, it was a system built to serve a minority of students. Because most people wouldn't be going there and when we started expanding dramatically, the access to higher education first in the 1860s, but then really with the GI Bill after World War II, you had a flood of students coming into colleges and universities, which did a lot of good in many ways, but the fact that we have the 55% graduation rate over six years in this country, that community colleges, it's something like in the 28% or something like that, graduation rate. I mean, appalling numbers, right? That was how the system was built and as you know from your part of Duke, like the sign of a good professor is not one who coaches and coaxes and really helps every single student succeed. It's the one that serves as a gating function to say, you're not physics material or you're not legal material or you're not this or you're not that and again, sorts them out and the higher education system was built on the primacy of research, not the primacy of teaching and learning and too often we've mistaken teaching for learning, right? Teaching is what I do when I convey information, but learning is what a student actually does or doesn't master and our whole higher ed system was not built upon doing that effectively. So again, we get the results that we designed for. And so, and also there's a component that education was based on farming, right? So we went to school when farming, we didn't go to school when crops are ripe and had to be picked and then we went to school when it was dormant time. Yes, it's actually even worse than that. I just, we just covered this in the upcoming episode of my class disrupted podcast that'll be going live on next Monday. But so that's been the conception and that was my conception. It's actually worse than that. Schooling actually used to be year round during the agrarian model of our economy. But what happened was that as we started to have a middle and upper class emerge in this country in the late, sorry, mid to late 1800s, the upper class in particular, but also middle class they would just pull their kids out of school for the summer months because it was hot. They wanted to be on the beaches where it was cool. They want to be in the mountains. And so there was just empty seats in schools. And so basically schools and then the administrators and teacher unions and legislatures solidified it and created what we now call the agrarian model calendar, but it actually wasn't built in the farming cycles. It's worse than that. It was built on inequality of those who had the means to escape it. And then we created a system around it. And now as we talk, we literally, this is the topic we talk about in this next episode, we have industries now built around that. We have summer camps, we have summer businesses, right? All these things built on maintaining this status quo that works for a very small subset of families in this country. And I would argue it doesn't even really work for those families either. Like, I mean, I consider myself one of the lucky ones before COVID hit. We had spreadsheets upon spreadsheets, trying to figure out what our kids would do over the summer and make it work for a two family working, family and it's tough. And to your point, so with COVID being progressing pretty quickly in certain areas, there's been a push to send kids back into the classroom. And more and more parents are finding themselves doing more teaching than the teachers are doing, because the way the system is built, I always say this between healthcare and education, every few years they throw out their philosophy and start with something new, right? So we have common core, workout left behind and all these things. So now we get to where we are right now. So I think that there is a very important point to that because early on and in the agrarian model, girls were home with mom cooking and learning how to do this. Sons were either out in the farm or either in class. So we had discrimination in education between girls and boys. And even the teaching force, right? Normal schools were developed for women to become the teachers because it was thought that they were good at child rearing and working with children and men became the administrators. So it's even in the labor force as well. Yeah, absolutely. So as we look at education today and one of the things that I write a lot about is the need to publish how schools do, right? So elementary school specifically, you get this from the Department of Educational Statistics, they put out a report, and then I don't know if all schools districts those but it happens here in North Carolina. So they'll tell you by gender, by race, how poorly the children have done. And so when there was all this pushback with Silicon Valley about why they weren't diverse, why they didn't have more blacks, more browns, more women in these roles, for historic times we've been told we had the bell curve, there was dad and all these other studies that said that black and brown people weren't that smart. So, not politically correct, but you could see why some of these companies went toward hiring Asians or white males because it had been perpetuated in the system forever never to these other people who were smart and not the black and brown people. And there's been no accounting for the fact that when the first slaves arrived in America and for some period almost to the point of emancipation proclamation, they were prevented from learning. So how long do you, does it take you to catch up? How long does it take for you to have however many years that is to brown versus board of education to where we are right now? How long does academically, does it take a black or brown or a girl for that matter to catch up in the education model that we have in America and probably all over the world? Yeah, no, it's significant. And what I think I would add is what you're pointing to which is essentially achievement historically correlates very strongly with class, right? And so those with means tend to do well not just on academic achievement but also in the IQ measures which are really academic achievement. And hence why you see I think some of those bell curve type statistical models out there is that they're reflections of something else that they're not, they're measuring something else, right? And what we also know is that reading after third grade, so your husband's right in the middle of this, after the third grade and below it's a skill like phonics, phonemic awareness, how to do it, right? And then once you get past that it becomes reading as a way to learn in everything else. And the reading tests in fourth grade, eighth grade, high school, et cetera. I would argue are less tests of reading skill than tests of background knowledge because there's this famous experiment that was done many, many years ago with so-called high achieving readers and so-called low achieving readers where they gave them a passage on baseball. And the high achieving readers they had selected for people that knew nothing about baseball and the low achieving readers they selected for people that knew a lot about baseball. And magically when you read a passage about baseball and you asked questions about the main idea what was, you know, things like that the low achieving readers all of a sudden tested high and the high ones who knew nothing about baseball tested low. Why is that? Because I mean, just imagine the sentence like, you know, the hitter stole second base. That sounds like a terrible thing if you don't know anything about baseball. What they stole it, that's terrible. Well, that's actually a great play, right? And so we discount, that's obviously like a lighthearted example if you will but you think about your point all of that background knowledge that gets locked up and told in families over time as a key to economic success. And it actually is a reservoir of knowledge that doesn't just appear before kindergarten. It appears over and over at unpredictable times throughout a child's development that gives them a vastly superior advantage over time. And those schools that I think have done the best at closing that gap are those that have been very intentional about saying we're gonna build your background knowledge and all these things that, you know someone might say is not important or whatever else but it's an unwritten code of our society to get ahead. Right, absolutely. And so one of the things that, you know they say third, fifth and eighth grade are the determinant grades, right? Those are the two grades that will say whether you'll make it or not. And I don't know how long ago it's been a minute now but I used to teach adult literacy. And so one of my favorite things of all times is the Canterbury Tales. I love the Canterbury Tales, love everything. But try teaching a room full of black and brown children about the Canterbury Tales, right? So what's in this story that matters to me? So you're gonna tell me about a pilgrimage of white people on their way to someplace, what? And what I did with the course was I did a back flip on it. So I, every student got to pick a character whatever the character was and the Wife of Bath is probably one that stands out most. I said, so now I want you to turn that person into a sports figure. So who was the most flamboyant sports figure at that time? And so Russell Westbrook became the Wife of Bath and when students got that they were just so intrigued by this pilgrimage because now you could identify with it, right? Because if I'm- It's a universal story but you just needed to make it identifiable, yeah. Right, and that's what I find in most times in our teaching adult literacy because they told me I couldn't teach it that way it was taught. But I will say that a lot of what expectations are for black and brown people is that we are supposed to be able to grasp these concepts that are foreign to us, right? So, you know, when I was younger another one of my favorites was Mbeth. And the only reason why I like Mbeth is because she couldn't get the blood off her hands. It had nothing to do with the rest of the stories. I don't know what happened in the rest of the story. I don't know what a character was but she could not get the blood off her hands. And so when you think about education from the perspective of me I graduated from high school in 1976. So I'll be 62 this year. My understanding of education was not necessarily to learn but to get out. So my mother said all the time, get out. You know, get a good education and get out. I wasn't interested in learning. So, you know, when he told me that Christopher Columbus discovered America I was like, okay, that makes sense to me. I'm getting out. That's all I know I'm getting out. And so now the system that we have in education for black and brown kids is to teach exactly the same one size fits all. And I don't think you can make education one size fits all because I can speak for my own experiences. So why is that such a common theme in education? Whether it's an elementary or high post-secondary education why is that such a common theme? Yeah, I mean, I think it's an outgrowth of the factory model on the one hand, right? Because the theory was we teach them all the same thing in the same way in the same day and sort them on to the next side. The second piece we haven't talked about is the other part of a factory model system which is that time is the constant and every child's learning is variable. And my big push would be that we need to flip that and say, learning is the constant and the time is variable. And so you're gonna learn. So here's where I get to confess I haven't read Canterbury Tales. My brother and my father have and they can still recite it however many years later. But maybe this is an objective, right? And we're gonna assume it takes people different pathways and different paces to do it. And that's not just okay, it's encouraged because it's actually more like equity is often mistaken as I'm gonna give you the exact same learning. That's a mistake. You actually need a different pathway to relate it to your experience to make it understandable to fill in gaps and background knowledge that maybe you have. I need clearly something very different because I'm starting from ground zero as we just discovered on this one. And so we need to acknowledge that because and then it continues to compound, right? Because you get an illusion in another professor's lecture on the Canterbury Tales, I don't. And in our current system, we treat that as a deficiency on my part. And to your point, not to make it about me as a white person, the point is black and brown students disproportionately because of the history that you have just cited, those gaps are bigger. And we need to be very intentional about it. I would also argue the second thing we need to be much more intentional about is what really are the core skills and knowledge that you need to be successful in today's day and age? Are they the same from community to community? Which ones are and which ones aren't? And can we have fewer of the requirements to give more breathing room to those in the communities to figure out the right path to chart? And I think the other addendum to that is and also to create a more coherent curriculum across the science and social studies in English and arguably the mathematics as well, although maybe that's a little bit more up and down, so that like what I'm doing in science relates to what I'm learning in social studies and that I can actually start to draw threads together and maybe I cover marginally less of a deep dive on the middle ages. Like I know it exists, right? But I go a little bit less deep on it as long as I get the currents of history and then I can go on deep in one particular piece and like do cause and effect and how does it relate to today's day and age and why is it important to understand this and yada yada, right? Like maybe that's what we really want to achieve. We don't have those conversations though as a society about what really is the core knowledge and skills you need to do to be a functionally literate and civically minded adult in today's country and what are the skills that we can allow communities to choose different knowledge pathways to demonstrate and achieve this? So I have two questions for that. The first one is this. So McKinsey has written several articles about the future of work and automation, right? So technology is gonna come over, come in and just place all of us, they're gonna breathe for us. We're not gonna be able to do anything and robots will do everything. But in reality, I mean, I do see that. So where do you live? You live in Massachusetts, up north, yep. So like here in the South, we're not as progressive as some of these things out west of the Cone Valley, maybe even not up north, but we are pretty progressive. North Carolina is pretty good, yeah. Yeah, because we have a lot of colleges and institutions here, but Sam's Club. So we have a Sam's Club that's about two or three miles from our house. And when I renewed my membership a couple of years ago, it said download the Sam's Club app. So of course I downloaded on my phone and I've been in seven heavens ever since because I go to Sam's, I never see a person. So I'm not stuck in a line, I'm not waiting on whatever it is that they're doing. But what that immediately brought to mind was that person who was my checkout person when I was going through that line is gonna eventually be completely displaced because now they've got cameras watching me so they know I can't steal. They're gonna check my QR code before I leave so they know I bought what I said I bought. So now the store does not need as many people. And I'm doing a presentation later on this year, hopefully, you never know, but on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, most people say, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I said there's one small piece in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that everybody should get. So when the father was let go by the factory because someone was stealing all the steels, the recipes for the chocolate and all the things that they did, he fired everybody and put machines in place. So the factory was run by machines. And the way the movie ends is the father comes back and has to fix the machine that replaced him. So this is to me how what Mackenzie wrote and what you are talking about kind of merge to each other, right? So there was no indication in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that the father had any kind of higher learning. He just knew how to do what it was he did, worked in a factory as you described earlier. But then when the machine would break, who's going to go fix it? So when we look at education and what they keep talking about the future of working, disrupting, disrupting automation, what does this mean in terms of what do we have to do to get all people, not just not white people, but black and brown and anybody else on the same level to participate fully in that change? Yeah, I think that's, I mean, that's literally the, however many trillion dollar question right now hanging over us, right? And I think what we need to do, I mean, this is what we're focused on in guild education now that I have that hat on as well, right? Is how to upskill people given the fact that jobs that can be automated are being automated. They're going, that's happening, right? And I would argue the pandemic is going to accelerate it because we had tons of layoffs and a lot of those jobs ain't coming back. Right. And a lot of economic loss. Huge economic loss. And I mean, you think about the black community in particular against that, right? Like, the black community was at its best unemployment and now I think it's worst in, what, two or three generations right now? And so, and a lot of those jobs, as we just said, the ones that got laid off, they're not coming back because they're going to be automated. And I think the real magic is, as you started to say, is in actually complementarity, right? So understanding the digital, understanding the machines and being able to apply the human next to it. So you build an artificial intelligence algorithm, having an ethicist alongside of it is actually incredibly important, right? Having a human being to check it as an audit, right? And then being able to communicate about what it has done and what it hasn't done, really important. And so I think what we'll see, a lot of people are arguing right now that the net sum of jobs is going to be negative. My own sense is it's going to look more like the industrial revolution, which is to say that there'll be a negative in the short run, but in the longer run we'll actually create more value added jobs that's more intrinsically rewarding work for individuals. The challenge right now is in this five to 20 year period. We don't know how long it'll last of transitioning people into that. And that's where the real pain. And I would argue a lot of the unrest right now over the last five to 10 years is like the seeds of that have been in that tension. And so from my perspective, this is where education is so important because we need to create a more flexible learning system that is more affordable and more accessible and is judged based on how you propel and grow individuals as opposed to labeling and sorting them. And if we can do that, then I think you create actually a lot of different rungs to opportunity for individuals, regardless of background. And that's like the really exciting part about it is if we can construct that. And I think entities like Guild that start to put employer dollars to work as one source of this. But I also think income share agreements and new innovation that says, hey, your education's free at this short-term program to get some coding skills, for example. And you'll pay us back a small percentage of your income. It's not like debt because if you don't make anything you don't know us anything, right? So really aligning the programs with the outcomes and putting some skin in the game, I think that could be tremendous and really rethinking our education system instead of a set of linear stages, really a set of multifaceted pathways that you move into and out of throughout your life and changing the social stigma and conversation around that and the culture around that it's gonna be the last piece. Cause right now, I think it's almost like, wait, you're going back for education when you're age 45? Like what's wrong with you? Whereas it needs to be seen as, no, this is like what we all do. Cause like world's changing, how we interact with technology is changing. We always need to stay a step ahead of it. And that's actually, that's just part of your job as a human being now. I think that that was said beautifully. I think the interesting piece about that though is, so we're in unrest with this virus and also in unrest with what's happening with social justice and bringing the point that you made about COVID is I would add even further, most of these big Fortune 500 companies and really successful companies are really sitting here rethinking technology right now in their boardrooms. So how much money did they lose because their staff could not go in and support their business? If they would have had a robot, if they would have had some sort of automation, it wouldn't have mattered when this pandemic came and wiped out all these jobs and it took me away and caused the economic crash we were in right now. I think if they would have had, if they would have been really thinking about this, now we've been further ahead. And in a little bit of the same way and what you do, what I thought is is always diversifying IT. So Google's facial recognition software in 2015, disastrous, right? So, and I would bet every dime I own for the rest of my life, they didn't do that intentionally. That was not, I mean, no, no, no, I don't think people set out to do bad stuff. I mean, there are some bad apples, right? But they don't set out to do it. Right, but this is because it's the result of, right? So if you have all white men, coding, it's not going to even cross your mind to think about darker skin or whatever the characteristic is. Right, so that's what Google's for par was, but in reality, we're going to have way more of these, right? So you have all these algorithms that says, if I live in zip code, one, two, three, four, five, six, my area is a high crime rate. We have a high level of poverty. Everything for me and that zip code is going hard. So I'm not gonna ever get a loan. If I'm gonna be able to move out, so where I think education really needs intersect is really what you said earlier. So we need to think about education, not just from the point of pouring information in. And I don't remember who said that, but somebody said that we're empty vessel and you spoke before. I don't think that's true. I think what we find the tools that the person has and we amplify those tools, right? So we give them skills that allow them to improve upon it. So if you are a great graphic artist, if you can draw anything, you should be able to get the same job as a guy or girl who got a four year degree in graphic artists if you have the skill. But if we don't consider that, then we are pretty much going to stay where we are for black and brown people, really. No, I think that's right. And I know I have to go in a minute and I apologize. It's a short conversation for us, but I wanna say, I think we need to move from seeing education as zero sum to a positive sum. And what you just said is exactly right, which is allowing it, instead of to be stage gates to sort people out, instead of shift it to helping identify and build passions and what your skills uniquely situate you for and then cultivating and developing that. Like that would be, and allowing individuals the choice then, right? Like I'm good at X and I'm good at Y, I get to choose. That's a great place to give people power. Right, absolutely. I'm so grateful you had time for me today and I hope we can do this again sometime later on, you know, when you get a little slow. I would love to. I would love to. It's always a happy day when I see your name in my inbox. So thank you. Absolutely so. But I think what you bring to the table, we really need to discuss it. And these chats are really meant for the everyday man. It's not meant for CNN or wherever. It's just for to kind of have talking points that they can start addressing issues in their home. And I think education is one of those places is absolutely crucial. And I think your work and your efforts in this place really needs to be heard and heard and heard and heard until there is change. So thank you so much. I'm very grateful. Thank you. And I appreciate it. Once this video converts, I'll send you a link and you can let me know if I can upload it. Awesome, thank you. You absolutely can. Thank you. Thank you so much. Be well. Bye.