I’ve always prided myself on my ability to teach myself things. Whenever I don’t know a lot about something, I’ll read a textbook or watch an online course until I do.

I thought I was pretty good at teaching myself—until I read Tara Westover’s memoir Educated. Her ability to learn on her own blows mine right out of the water. I was thrilled to sit down with her recently to talk about the book.

Tara was raised in a Mormon survivalist home in rural Idaho. Her dad had very non-mainstream views about the government. He believed doomsday was coming, and that the family should interact with the health and education systems as little as possible. As a result, she didn’t step foot in a classroom until she was 17, and major medical crises went untreated (her mother suffered a brain injury in a car accident and never fully recovered).

Because Tara and her six siblings worked at their father’s junkyard from a young age, none of them received any kind of proper homeschooling. She had to teach herself algebra and trigonometry and self-studied for the ACT, which she did well enough on to gain admission to Brigham Young University. Eventually, she earned her doctorate in intellectual history from Cambridge University. (Full disclosure: she was a Gates Scholar, which I didn’t even know until I reached that part of the book.)

Educated is an amazing story, and I get why it’s spent so much time on the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It reminded me in some ways of the Netflix documentary Wild, Wild Country, which I recently watched. Both explore people who remove themselves from society because they have these beliefs and knowledge that they think make them more enlightened. Their belief systems benefit from their separateness, and you’re forced to be either in or out.

But unlike Wild, Wild Country—which revels in the strangeness of its subjects—Educated doesn’t feel voyeuristic. Tara is never cruel, even when she’s writing about some of her father’s most fringe beliefs. It’s clear that her whole family, including her mom and dad, is energetic and talented. Whatever their ideas are, they pursue them.

Of the seven Westover siblings, three of them—including Tara—left home, and all three have earned Ph.D.s. Three doctorates in one family would be remarkable even for a more “conventional” household. I think there must’ve been something about their childhood that gave them a degree of toughness and helped them persevere. Her dad taught the kids that they could teach themselves anything, and Tara’s success is a testament to that.

I found it fascinating how it took studying philosophy and history in school for Tara to trust her own perception of the world. Because she never went to school, her worldview was entirely shaped by her dad. He believed in conspiracy theories, and so she did, too. It wasn’t until she went to BYU that she realized there were other perspectives on things her dad had presented as fact. For example, she had never heard of the Holocaust until her art history professor mentioned it. She had to research the subject to form her own opinion that was separate from her dad’s.

Her experience is an extreme version of something everyone goes through with their parents. At some point in your childhood, you go from thinking they know everything to seeing them as adults with limitations. I’m sad that Tara is estranged from a lot of her family because of this process, but the path she’s taken and the life she’s built for herself are truly inspiring.

When you meet her, you don’t have any impression of all the turmoil she’s gone through. She’s so articulate about the traumas of her childhood, including the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of one brother. I was impressed by how she talks so candidly about how naïve she once was—most of us find it difficult to talk about our own ignorance.

I was especially interested to hear her take on polarization in America. Although it’s not a political book, Educated touches on a number of the divides in our country: red states versus blue states, rural versus urban, college-educated versus not. Since she’s spent her whole life moving between these worlds, I asked Tara what she thought. She told me she was disappointed in what she called the “breaking of charity”—an idea that comes from the Salem witch trials and refers to the moment when two members of the same group break apart and become different tribes.

“I worry that education is becoming a stick that some people use to beat other people into submission or becoming something that people feel arrogant about,” she said. “I think education is really just a process of self-discovery—of developing a sense of self and what you think. I think of [it] as this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.”

Tara’s process of self-discovery is beautifully captured in Educated. It’s the kind of book that I think everyone will enjoy, no matter what genre you usually pick up. She’s a talented writer, and I suspect this book isn’t the last we’ll hear from her. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

When Chat GPT 4.0 launched last week, people across the internet (and the world) were blown away. Talking to AI has always felt a bit surreal—but OpenAI’s latest model feels like talking to a real person. You can actually speak to it, and have it talk back to you, without lags. It’s as lifelike as any AI we’ve seen so far, and the use cases are limitless. One of the first that came to my mind was how big a game-changer it will be in the classroom. Imagine every student having a personal tutor powered by this technology.

I recently read a terrific book on this topic called Brave New Words. It’s written by my friend (and podcast guest) Sal Khan, a longtime pioneer of innovation in education. Back in 2006, Sal founded Khan Academy to share the tutoring content he’d created for younger family members with a wider audience. Since then, his online educational platform has helped teach over 150 million people worldwide—including me and my kids.

Well before this recent AI boom, I considered him a visionary. When I learned he was writing this book, I couldn’t wait to read it. Like I expected, Brave New Words is a masterclass.

Chapter by chapter, Sal takes readers through his predictions—some have already come true since the book was written—for AI’s many applications in education. His main argument: AI will radically improve both student outcomes and teacher experiences, and help usher in a future where everyone has access to a world-class education.

You might be skeptical, especially if you—like me—have been following the EdTech movement for a while. For decades, exciting technologies and innovations have made headlines, accompanied by similarly bold promises to revolutionize learning and teaching as we know it—only to make a marginal impact in the classroom.

But drawing on his experience creating Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutor, Sal makes a compelling case that AI-powered technologies will be different. That’s because we finally have a way to give every student the kind of personalized learning, support, and guidance that’s historically been out of reach for most kids in most classrooms. As Sal puts it, “Getting every student a dedicated on-call human tutor is cost prohibitive.” AI tutors, on the other hand, aren’t.

Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. As you work through a challenging set of fraction problems, it won’t just give you the answer—it breaks each problem down into digestible steps. When you get stuck, it gives you easy-to-understand explanations and a gentle nudge in the right direction. When you finally get the answer, it generates targeted practice questions that help build your understanding and confidence.

And with the help of an AI tutor, the past comes to life in remarkable ways. While learning about Abraham Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War, you can have a “conversation” with the 16^th president himself. (As Sal demonstrates in the book, conversations with one of my favorite literary figures, Jay Gatsby, are also an option.)

When the time comes to write your essay, don’t worry about the dreaded blank page. Instead, your AI tutor asks you thought-starters to help brainstorm. You get feedback on your outline in seconds, with tips to improve the logic or areas where you need more research. As you draft, the tutor evaluates your writing in real-time—almost impossible without this technology—and shows where you might clarify your ideas, provide more evidence, or address a counterargument. Before you submit, it gives detailed suggestions to refine your language and sharpen your points.

Is this cheating?

It’s a complicated question, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Sal notes that bouncing ideas off friends, asking family members to critique work, and using spellcheckers and tools like Grammarly—which can rephrase entire sentences—aren’t considered cheating today by most measures. Similarly, when used right, AI doesn’t work for students but with them to move something forward that they might otherwise get stuck on. That’s why, according to Sal, a lot of educators who first banned AI from class are now encouraging students to use it.

After all, mastery of AI won’t just be nice to have in a few years—for many professions, it’ll be necessary. Employees who can use AI effectively will be far more valuable than those who can’t. By incorporating this technology into education, we're both improving students’ experiences and outcomes and preparing them for the jobs of the future—which will become more enjoyable and fulfilling with AI in the mix.

That includes teaching. With every transformative innovation, there are fears of machines taking jobs. But when it comes to education, I agree with Sal: AI tools and tutors never can and never should replace teachers. What AI can do, though, is support and empower them.

Until now, most EdTech solutions, as great as they may be, haven’t meaningfully made teachers’ lives easier. But with AI, they can have a superhuman teaching assistant to handle routine tasks like lesson planning and grading—which take up almost half of a typical teacher's day. In seconds, an AI assistant can grade spelling tests or create a lesson plan connecting the Industrial Revolution to current events. It can even monitor each student's progress and give teachers instant feedback, allowing for a new era of personalized learning.

With AI assistants handling the mundane stuff, teachers can focus on what they do best: inspiring students, building relationships, and making sure everyone feels seen and supported—especially kids who need a little extra help.

Of course, there are challenges involved in bringing AI into schools at scale, and Sal is candid about them. We need systems that protect student privacy and mitigate biases. And there’s still a lot to do so that every kid has access to the devices and connectivity they need to use AI in the first place. No technology is a silver bullet for education. But I believe AI can be a game-changer and great equalizer in the classroom, the workforce, and beyond.

I recently visited First Avenue School in Newark, New Jersey, where Khanmigo is currently being piloted. We’re still in the early days, but it was amazing to see firsthand how AI can be used in the classroom—and to speak with students and teachers who are already reaping the benefits. It felt like catching a glimpse of the future. No one understands where education is headed better than Sal Khan, and I can't recommend Brave New Words enough.

What if you were given the chance to design a new school from scratch? And there was no need to follow the typical education model: a teacher at the front of a classroom lecturing to 25 to 30 seated students. No need to follow an existing curriculum, either. You could completely re-imagine what a good education is all about.

What kind of school would you make?

One person who took that question on—and came up with an intriguing answer—is Diane Tavenner, founder of Summit Public Schools, which operates some of the top-performing schools in the nation.

In her new book, Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life, Diane shares the story of how she designed a new kind of charter school with a simple but very ambitious goal: “We wanted to teach kids not just what they needed to get into college, but what they needed to live a good life.”

A few years ago, I had a chance to visit one of the Summit schools to see how Diane had turned this vision into reality. I was blown away. It was unlike any school I had visited before. Some students worked on their own, moving at their own pace through their courses. Others worked together on projects. Instead of lecturing at the front of a class, teachers acted like coaches, providing one-on-one guidance to students. Everyone was engaged.

Summit schools are rooted in the unshakeable belief that all students have the potential for success. This belief fuels the staff’s relentless drive to test new approaches to continuously improve the student experience, so they graduate prepared for college and life.

As Diane explains in her book, Summit’s unique model is built on three key elements:

Self-directed learning: With the support of their teachers, all students are responsible for setting their own learning goals, developing learning plans, testing their knowledge, and assessing their performance. The personalized learning approach allows students to learn at their own pace. This is an incredibly important skill that will benefit them throughout their lives.

Project-based learning: Summit schools emphasize hands-on project-based learning, allowing students to dive deep into a topic and collaborate with other students, building skills that employers are looking for in today’s workplace.

Mentoring: All students have a dedicated mentor. More than a guidance counselor, these mentors meet regularly one-on-one with their students, building a deep relationship that can help students achieve their personal and academic goals.

What I love about Summit is that its vision of success is bigger than getting students to master skills in reading, writing, and mathematics. Those skills, of course, are incredibly important, but there are also other, very necessary skills that will serve them their entire lives, such as self-confidence, the ability to learn, ability to manage their time, and a sense of direction to help them determine what they want to do with their lives. I think the kids who get to attend one of the Summit schools are lucky to go there.

Like everything in education, Summit’s schools are not without controversy. Some parents and educators are wary of Summit’s focus on computer-enabled learning, a key tool for the school’s personalized-learning approach.

Since opening its first school in 2003, Summit now operates 11 schools in California and Washington state. And I expect many readers of Diane’s book will wonder how their kids can have the same extraordinary learning experiences as Summit students. That’s also a question we have at our foundation, where we are working with Summit to help share some of its most innovative practices, like tailoring instruction to meet students’ individual needs, with other schools in the country.

What’s so striking about Diane is how incredibly modest she is about what she’s accomplished. And she doesn’t make any grand claims that she has all the answers. Much of the book is deeply personal. Diane shares stories of her childhood, growing up in a troubled family. She recounts her years as a young, idealistic teacher and administrator. And she opens-up about her own experience as a parent, raising her teenage son, Rett, as he navigates his path to adulthood.

Many of the most memorable parts of the book focus on Diane and her husband wrestling with challenges all parents will appreciate. Diane shares the story, for example, about their struggle to get Rett to do his homework. You can find out how she found a solution in the free book excerpt above.

In the final section of her book, Diane offers some parenting advice she’s developed over the years at Summit, guiding thousands of students to graduation. I expect many parents will flip to the end of the book to read this brief but useful list of tips. Much of her advice is based on her belief that parents should support their child’s independent growth. Parents need to mentor, not direct. They should seek out their child’s opinions, encourage them to be self-directed learners, and expose them to as many new ideas, people, places and things as possible.

I know from my own experience as a father that I’ve enjoyed watching my children get curious about a topic and then seeing how their knowledge deepens and grows. And the most rewarding part is when they can teach me about what they’ve learned.

Preparing our kids for college, a career, and life is a long journey. And as any parent or teacher will tell you, it’s not always easy. Diane has written a wonderful guidebook to help all of us make the most of the adventure.

The title is a question that seems to get more attention every year. The authors are good about not pointing fingers but instead talking about how America’s labor market affects the cost of college. My view is that as long as there’s a scarcity of college graduates, a college degree will be quite valuable. So people will pay more to get one. And if they will pay more, then colleges and universities—whose labor is provided mostly by people who paid a lot for their own degrees—can ask for more. Until you get an excess supply of graduates, then you don’t really get any price competition.

What’s the answer? Archibald and Feldman lay out a number of policies that could help. I also think technology can help control costs by improving distance learning. Colleges and universities can also do a lot to root out inefficiencies and duplication. (How many physics courses should be taught in, say, Chicago? Could some be consolidated?) This book is a useful introduction to a complex problem.

It’s a hot topic because of efforts to improve classroom learning by using improvement in student test scores as one of multiple measures to evaluate teachers, and then make decisions about their retention, promotion, and pay. In the past, most school districts have made these decisions based almost entirely on seniority and whether a teacher had earned graduate degrees. Results in the classroom weren't considered at all. President Obama’s Race to the Top Initiative began encouraging states to use improvements in test scores as part of evaluating teachers. And today some 30 states do so.

Harris is a proponent of using value-added measures that get at how effective a teacher is at helping students progress from whatever level they're at when the year begins. By analyzing how a teacher’s students improve during their time in his or her class, rather than looking at absolute test scores, you don’t unfairly reward teachers who happen to have a lot of top students. And you don't unfairly punish teachers who take on the challenge of teaching kids who may not arrive well-prepared or very engaged with school for whatever reason, often because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Some people argue that standardized tests distort the learning experience—that teachers will “just teach to the test”—and that tests don't measure creativity. That’s an interesting point in subjects like art and music. In these and some other subjects, knowing what to test is complicated. You need to be very careful.

But it seems to me that well-designed tests in science and math are useful in determining proficiency. Teaching students to pass such tests is a good thing. Creativity is important too, but in fields such as, say, economics or nursing, first you need to be able to do the math. No one is so creative that the person is a good nurse although unable to do the division needed to figure the right dosage of medication to give a patient. 

Harris is careful to say that test scores should be just one of several kinds of data used in evaluating teachers. Scores alone can be misleading, although field experience in the states has shown how to minimize random variance, such as by looking at two years’ of a teacher's student scores. For the most part, Harris does not acknowledge this field experience, although he discusses the statistical reasons to be cautious with test results.

Still, I think he’s right in emphasizing that while value-added measures can help principals focus on working with teachers who may be struggling, the principal and peer-teachers should sit in on classes and provide feedback the teacher can use to improve. This is the big benefit. Only if all else fails, over a reasonable amount of time, should a teacher who's weak (based on experts' observations as well as scores) be counseled to find another line of work.

Including test data as one component is the key to creating that feedback loop. Research from the foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project has found that by using a balanced combination of measures—including value-added test scores—it is possible to identify aspects of teaching that ultimately lead to what we want most—better student learning.  Among these measures, classroom observations and even student surveys can offer teachers real guidance for improvement tailored to their particular needs. When evaluation systems have professional development aims too, teachers can improve, the system can target supports that are actually working, and students benefit.

Testing alone is not enough. Harris provides a theoretical explanation of the statistical reasons why testing is vital but should be used carefully and as part of a system of classroom observations and professional development. His overall conclusions are validated by several years of field experience with teacher evaluation in states such as Tennessee. His book is a solid introduction to how value-added measures can work, although he could have made better use of actual field data to show how pitfalls can be avoided. That would have done more to ease some fears of these measures and of teacher accountability overall.

Through the use of multiple measures, evaluation systems can serve professional development as well as accountability goals, supporting teachers as they work to improve, building trust among teachers, and ultimately benefiting students.

We’re spending twice as much on education today as we did 20 years ago. Yet, U.S. students ranked 17^ththth in science, 25 in math, and 14 in reading in the latest data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the most widely used global assessment of student achievement.  Who’s beating the U.S. in these important categories – and how?

Vivien Stewart in her book, A World Class Education, looks at five countries—Singapore, Canada, Finland, China, and Australia—where students are doing significantly better on global assessments than students in the U.S. Despite differences in the political systems and cultural contexts of these countries, there are some common policies and practices that drive success. Understanding how other countries are succeeding can offer insights that help us do a better job here in the U.S. 

As Stewart points out, even a small improvement in the skills of a nation’s labor force can have a big impact on its economy. In a global market where companies can find well-educated workers in a growing number of countries —often at lower-cost— the U.S. will face greater competition if this trend continues. 

Finland is an interesting example because as recently as 1970, only 40 percent of Finnish adults held a high school diploma. Today, its students rank among the top on global assessments of student learning. 

One key to Finland’s success was the decision in 1979 to require a two-year master’s degree for all teachers, even those teaching primary school. Teachers are trained to spot students who aren’t doing well early on, and each school has a multidisciplinary team of education professionals available to support students and help them catch up. Finland also did away with traditional structure and replaced it with a more flexible approach that encourages creativity and problem solving, individualized learning, and a wider range of academic and vocational options.

The modernization of Finland’s education system has helped put it in the ranks of the most innovative and prosperous countries. Per capita GDP in Finland is higher than in the United Kingdom, France, or Japan. And teaching is a much sought-after profession that is held in high-regard.

Like Finland, Singapore decided that its future lay in tapping its human capital. In the Singapore system, all the key elements work closely together to produce continuous improvement. Over the last decade, Singapore has introduced innovative and flexible learning choices for students. It even has a policy called “teach less, learn more” that’s designed to encourage more innovative curricula and use of classroom time.

Singapore also is investing significantly in teachers—with strong teacher evaluation and personnel systems and intensive training. With all this, it’s not really a surprise that Singapore’s students rank near the top in international assessments, or that its per capita GDP is higher than the U.S., Canada, or most countries in Europe.

I agree with Stewart that the quality of student learning is only as good as the quality of the teachers. In the U.S., it will require investing in strong evaluation and development systems that involve teachers from the start, include multiple measures of effective teaching, and that fuse teacher evaluations with high-quality professional development.

I recommend this book as a good overview of what other countries are doing, although I would have liked to see more data. For example, the book spends very little time on the length of the school day or school year, which many people think are key factors in educational achievement. And it doesn’t explain how the U.S. manages to spend so much on education without having smaller class sizes or higher teacher pay.

All in all, it’s an interesting view into five countries which are making remarkable educational progress and that offer lessons for us in the U.S.

We’ve seen for some time the disturbing data that America is falling behind other countries in the number of students who attend and complete post-secondary education. Now, new data suggests that many U.S. students who make it to college, and even succeed there, are actually learning very little.

The data comes from the book Academically Adrift, which raises some fundamental and surprising questions about the quality of U.S. undergraduate education. The authors, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, are sociologists who analyzed results from essay tests and surveys given to more than 2,000 students at the beginning of their freshman year and the end of their sophomore year. Between 2005 and 2007, data was collected from 24 four-year institutions, including state universities and liberal-arts colleges.

Two key findings have received a lot of attention:

• About 45 percent of the students showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or written communication during their first two years in college. (On more recent tests, the students didn’t show much improvement in their junior or senior years, either.)
• Students said most of their courses required surprisingly little effort. They reported studying only slightly more than 12 hours per week on average. Few of their courses required 40 pages or more of reading per week or writing as much as 20 pages over the course of a semester.

Before reading this book, I took it for granted that colleges were doing a very good job. But there is really no measurement or feedback system that tracks results, to help guide students and help institutions improve. Not overall, and not for individual courses of study. What do students in different programs learn, how many graduates get jobs in their field, how much do they earn? The outputs of higher education are a deeply understudied question.

The dismal results presented in Academically Adrift are based on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test in which students are asked to make a practical decision, such as what kind of airplane a company should buy, and explain their choice based on a set of goals and facts about different options. One criticism of the book is that it doesn’t look at subject-matter learning. But I think most people would agree that skills like critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing—the things the test does measure—are pretty important.

Beyond the top-line results, the authors gathered thousands of data points, different variables that you would hope might explain why learning is so limited. Unfortunately, most variables don’t seem to make much difference. The book nevertheless analyzes many of them, making it a hard statistical slog at times.

Not too surprisingly, more learning takes place among students who take demanding courses and who say their professors have high expectations. Science students make better-than-average progress, even in their writing skills.

Overall, the book depicts a culture in academia where undergraduate learning is only a peripheral concern; where the professors don’t want to assign complicated papers because grading them is hard work; where the main feedback is course evaluations from students who  dislike writing complicated papers; where there’s an attitude of, “Don’t mess with us and we won’t mess with you.” And there’s no accountability for any of it.

This may be a caricature. There are people going to college who are still doing very hard work. U.S. graduate education is still highly rigorous and leads the world. And many community colleges have made serious efforts to build programs around employers’ needs and to make sure students gain the skills to succeed in the workplace.

For example, Melinda and I were impressed a couple of years ago when we visited the Tennessee Technology Center in Nashville, an institution that provides young adults with technical training and certificates. Its graduation rates are significantly better than those of its peers because it focuses on teaching job skills that are in high demand, and it has adapted to meet the needs of students who are juggling school with work and family.

I’m also impressed by the results in places like Western Governors University. Its low-cost online programs rely on competency-based progression, not class-time or credit hours. It uses external assessments to evaluate student proficiency. And because its students are a little older and possibly more focused in their goals, its graduation rates are high and the salaries its graduates earn are good.

Because of institutions like Tennessee Tech and WGU, I’m optimistic about the potential of innovation to help solve many of the problems with our post-secondary system. But we need more and better information. I’m reminded of a point made by Andrew Rosen of Kaplan, the for-profit education company, that colleges today know more about how many kids attend basketball games and which alumni give money than how many students showed up for economics class during the week, or which alumni are having a hard time meeting their career goals because of shortcomings in their education.

That needs to change.

Theodore Hesburgh, the former president of the University of Notre Dame, used to joke that education was one of the few things people were willing to pay for and not get. While that may still be true for some students whose parents are picking up the tab, for many others eager to land a decent job with a future, society needs to do more to ensure that all students get the education and training they need to keep pace with the evolving demands of employers.

In Change.edu, Andrew Rosen calls for greater relevance, access, accountability and transparency in higher education. He builds a persuasive case that many non-traditional students, such as working adults, parents and those at risk of dropping out, are not well served by traditional institutions. New approaches, he argues, are critical to ensure that more people have the opportunity to obtain college degrees.

As chief executive of Kaplan, Inc., a for-profit educational services company, Rosen offers a prescription that will rankle some traditionalists in academia. But I find his insights truly important for the debate on what needs to be done to improve the success of post-secondary education in America. (Full disclosure: Kaplan is a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, where my wife, Melinda, served on the board from 2004 to 2010.)

The United States used to lead the world in the percentage of adults with college degrees, but has now fallen to 10th place. That’s partly because we have such a high dropout rate. While more than two-thirds of students who graduate from U.S. high schools attend college or pursue postsecondary training, barely one-third of those will end up getting a degree. Something is clearly broken.

This is especially worrisome because more than half of jobs today require a college education, and that trend will continue. By 2018, the demand for workers with college degrees will exceed the supply of college graduates by an estimated 3 million. Meanwhile, dropouts and workers with only a high school diploma will have an ever harder time finding fulfilling work.

Rosen believes for-profit institutions, such as his own, are part of the solution because they meet the needs of a wide range of students. They do this, Rosen notes, by offering flexible course schedules in the evening and online, and by focusing their curriculum on the classes that students need to graduate and the knowledge and skills that employers value.

Over three decades, for-profit schools added students at more than six times the rate of traditional colleges and universities. However, that growth also sparked controversy over their marketing techniques to attract students and led recently to tougher regulations. The new rules require for-profit education companies to offer programs that prepare students for “gainful employment” so they can pay down their school loans and reduce their ratio of debt to income. Those changes have slowed new enrollments significantly, so it is unclear whether for-profit schools will continue to outpace more traditional institutions of higher education in the future.

Rosen starts his fairly brief and highly readable book with a quick history of post-secondary education in colonial times, when only the sons of wealthy Free Protestant families attended college. Then he describes the country’s embrace of universal secondary education and the benefits of the GI Bill after World War II, which allowed millions of returning veterans to attend college tuition-free.

To accommodate the country’s growing and increasingly educated population, a fledging collection of two-year colleges rapidly evolved in the second half of the 20th century into the current system of more than 1,000 community colleges. Rosen rounds off the historical survey with a look at the growth of for-profit colleges, including schools like the University of Phoenix, and several run by his own company, Kaplan.

Rosen notes that it is much easier for some students to get through college. He calls these students the “automatics”—they include the most talented and reasonably talented students who went to strong suburban or private schools. But they are not the norm.

To better meet the needs of all students, Rosen suggests creating a common yardstick based on seven risk factors identified by the U.S. Department of Education that make students less likely to graduate. Among these are delayed enrollment, no high school diploma, single-parent status and full-time employment while enrolled. Rosen maintains that these risk factors could be used to reasonably compare schools with similar populations and identify those that are doing the best job of helping students graduate and secure good jobs. This approach doesn’t capture all the key elements, in my view, because it leaves out one important factor—whether or not a student has a clear career goal in mind. But more transparency is a good thing.

Many of the four-year public and non-profit institutions are following what Rosen calls the Ivory Tower Playbook. They add expensive non-academic incentives, such as money-losing sports programs and better living facilities, to attract better students, rather than using that money to increase capacity and improve a student’s education. 

He is quite pointed about how the competition to have the best resort-like atmosphere has diverted funds away from the classroom in many schools. And he says these colleges know more about how many kids attend basketball games and which alumni give money than how many students showed up for economics class during the week and which alumni are having a hard time meeting their career goals because of shortcomings in their education.

For Rosen, community colleges follow an All Access Playbook, which is commendable in principle because it allows almost anyone to attend college. But without stronger state support (which is unlikely due to the struggling economy), this broad-access approach is not sustainable and has distracted these colleges from focusing on the quality of learning and reducing dropout rates.

Rosen believes the for-profit postsecondary sector is demonstrating a number of promising approaches in measuring results and improving efficiency in teaching large numbers of students. But he acknowledges that some for-profit schools following what he terms the Private Sector Playbook can fall victim to a short-term focus and, in some cases, fail to exercise adequate oversight.

Rosen has compared criticism of for-profit institutions—which he calls “disruptive innovators”—to the resistance encountered over a century ago by land grant universities, including Cornell and Purdue. Some critics will say that, because Rosen runs one of the for-profit companies, he isn’t as tough on the for-profit sector as he should be. However, I think he does an effective job of explaining what the critics have said about the shortcomings of the sector and how these issues can be handled without overly constraining these institutions. 

Yet, there is more than a little irony in the fact that students from better-off families tend to go to private non-profit schools subsidized by endowments or to public institutions subsidized by taxpayers, while many low-income students end up attending for-profit schools with the least subsidy, which means they must assume proportionately higher burdens of student loan debt. Without question, for-profit schools must do better at graduating students with a degree that is valuable in the marketplace.

For all institutions—public, non-profit and for-profit—better measurement is essential to increasing graduation rates and success in the workplace. I am in radical agreement with Rosen that data can and should be used to motivate schools to improve, and that greater transparency and accountability will encourage students and government funders to support the institutions that demonstrate the best outcomes. We should hold all institutions of higher learning accountable for results, and find easier ways to identify and support the best among them.

I had a chance to read Steven Brill’s book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, which came out last month. Brill is an excellent writer and does a strong job explaining the history of school reform, especially focusing in on the last three years and Race to the Top, the federal grant competition to encourage school reform.

I hope this book is widely read because it shows just how difficult it is going to be to improve education, including creating a personnel system that invests in improving teacher effectiveness.

Brill clearly took the time to learn about some complex issues, like how charter schools compare and what the federal No Child Left Behind program did to the education system in the U.S.

The book is over 400 pages, so it is not for anyone who just wants a quick skip through the status quo and a few debating points.  If you take the time to sit down with the book, you’ll be rewarded with a ringside seat as events unfold. You’ll be introduced to about 30 key people, many of whom I’ve enjoyed working with in recent years. All have played a significant role in education reform, including Jon Schnur, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Klein.

There are some surprising facts too. One of the things that amazed me was the high proportion of people pushing for education reform who had spent time at Teach For America, the non-profit group that trains and places teachers in schools in low-income communities.

I was impressed by the key role that the group Democrats for Education Reform has played in encouraging Democrats to be willing to make changes that the teachers union resists. Brill doesn’t cover the challenges in getting Republican politicians to get behind reform as well as he does the Democrats though.

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan come across very well in speaking up passionately for a system that has to do better for the children.

The person that Brill spent the most time talking to in preparing the book is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union. Overall, he shows sympathy for the position she is in as a union leader, but he does highlight some places where she presents the union in a more reasonable light than their actual behavior would justify.

The book suggests that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg backed off from pushing for as much change as Klein, chancellor of the city’s Department of Education for eight years, was asking for and that his pension generosity was a mistake. If someone like Bloomberg – who is far braver and more committed to change than most politicians – shies away from the toughest part of changing the work rules and personnel system, then it shows how hard it is going to be.

Brill does some things really well - the foundation’s work on teacher effectiveness is clearly explained. But he doesn’t get everything right. He refers to the Common Core as a curriculum when, in fact, it is a set of standards on which curriculum will be based. And there’s the anecdote he tells about my having a pinball machine with Joel Klein’s head on it that I played during the Department of Justice antitrust trial against Microsoft in the 1990s (Klein was the lead prosecutor in the case). I can understand why he might want to include that great anecdote but I hate to disappoint him by saying it’s not true.

Overall, this book gives a real sense of the challenges that lay ahead for us in improving education in this country and it’s an important one for anyone who cares about an issue which ultimately affects us all.

Each year in the United States, the K-12 public education system spends $500 billion or about $9,000 per student. This is probably the most important investment that we make as a society, for education is a primary source of economic strength and equality of opportunity. So it’s critically important that we make sure school money is well spent.

This may be more critical now than ever before, because growth in education spending is leveling off and budgets are even being cut. The biggest contributors, state and local governments, are under immense fiscal pressure. California, for example, has reduced K-12 aid to local school districts by billions of dollars and is cutting a variety of programs, including adult literacy instruction and help for high-needs students. Illinois cut 2011 education funding by $311 million, including significant reduction in programs to improve reading skills. Idaho is raising class sizes, Hawaii has furloughed teachers, and districts around the country are renegotiating staff and teacher pay. With federal economic stimulus funds winding down across the nation, and the federal government facing large budget deficits, there’s nowhere left to turn.

For a basic understanding of where education money comes from and how it gets spent, one of the books I highly recommend is Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go? by Marguerite Roza.

What you'll learn, unfortunately, is that the complexity of the system makes it very hard to answer the question in the book’s title. Education funding is a complex mix of federal, state and local money, much of it designated for various, particular purposes. So school finance data is either very high level, like the amount per student, or it’s very detailed, like a school budget document. Either way, it’s not very useful for making comparisons and evaluating results.

Even experts have a very hard time figuring out whether school money is well spent. Say what you will about the flaws in No Child Left Behind, the law provided data that most everyone could understand: school-by-school test scores that revealed racial gaps and put the spotlight on schools that were not teaching even basic subjects very well. We need to do something similar with school finance data, so that parents and everyone else in the community can understand it and participate in a discussion of how to make sure our education spending achieves the goals we all want for our kids. Roza’s book has some very good recommendations about how we should be able to look at the data, classify the data, know what we spend and know what’s most effective.

Until recently, Roza was a professor and highly regarded senior scholar at the University of Washington Center for Reinventing Public Education. Her research has focused on how the resources available to schools and classrooms are impacted by policies at the federal, state, and district levels. Her analyses have prompted changes in education finance policy at all levels in the education system. Marguerite Roza joined the Gates Foundation in May 2010 to advise on our education work, especially our College-Ready and Postsecondary Success initiatives. She is helping us make sure that our investments are making a difference in terms of students’ success in high school, college and beyond.

At 99 pages, Roza’s book is a quick read, but it includes some stunning insights. She explains how the complexity of school funding inhibits schools’ ability to deliver services aligned with their academic priorities. For example, although federal Title I programs and many state initiatives are set up to provide equal funding for schools with low-income students, these inner-city schools still get short-changed, because their teachers are less senior and therefore paid less.

Her analysis uncovers the surprisingly high per-student cost of certain programs, such as cheerleading and crafts courses, because of union contracts, the types of teachers employed and the numbers of students involved. Roza also explores how complex, earmarked funding formulas prevent schools from operating more efficiently by purchasing services from the local community college, for instance.

One bright spot, Roza notes, is that teacher pay has improved a lot over the last 30 years. But pay is still largely based on seniority and whether a teacher has a master’s degree. Almost no teachers are given raises based on any measure of their effectiveness.

Maybe what’s most striking is how little flexibility schools have. A lot of spending is for specialists, transportation and other things that the school district, let alone the individual school, has no control over. This finding forces you to question the idea that you can fix a "failing" school simply by closing it and opening a new one under the same district policies and union contracts. Very little is actually decided at the individual school level. Charismatic principals and dedicated teachers can make a difference in some schools, but in general, the big decisions are made elsewhere.

Schools’ lack of flexibility is especially problematic now, when state and local education budgets are under pressure, as I discussed in a November 2010 speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers. Schools have very little ability to adjust or respond creatively to cuts in funding. Roza’s findings and recommendations are very timely, and I hope they are heeded.

I wish there were ten more books like Stretching the School Dollar.

It’s a very readable examination of what’s wrong with how we spend money on public education in the United States today, and how to fix it. Each chapter is written by a different expert. Most chapters are case studies that vividly illustrate important problems and actual solutions. I’ve been reading widely about state budgets and school finance. This book is one of several (another is Marguerite Roza’s Where Do School Funds Go?) that I’ve found interesting and useful.

It’s also very timely, because school dollars over the next several years will not be growing much, if at all. State budgets are under tremendous pressure. Federal stimulus dollars are drying up. And because education takes a big share of state spending (along with rising healthcare costs, which add to the pressure), schools are facing cutbacks almost everywhere, with no sign of relief in the near future.

This is extremely unfortunate, because education is probably the most important state program, the most significant and consequential in terms of long-term impact on people’s lives, on our society, and on our economy and competitiveness. U.S. education is far from perfect; by many measures of educational achievement, we lag behind other advanced nations. We need to improve dramatically. But a lot more money is just not available. In fact, we need to do more with less.

Which is why it’s so important now that we figure out how to spend education dollars more effectively. Stretching the School Dollar is very helpful in illuminating the challenges and the opportunities.

One of the authors, Nathan Levenson, is the former superintendent of schools in Arlington, Massachusetts. He led Arlington to award-winning growth in academic achievement despite declining budgets. He explains how he did it, by challenging old ways of doing things and what he calls a "poverty mentality." He reallocated resources from clearly ineffective programs to focus district efforts on a few key priorities, including a common curriculum, professional development for teachers, and "an unrelenting focus on reading." These changes produced major gains in student achievement, but also angered laid-off crossing guards, redundant administrators sent back into the classroom, and others whose programs were cut or eliminated. In the end, Levenson faced fierce criticism, abuse and even threats against him and his family. Bruised and battered, he resigned after three years. But he has sensible suggestions on how other reform-minded superintendents might avoid his fate.

Marguerite Roza, who consults on education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has a great chapter that points out a simple change that would really help us better understand our options in spending education dollars. We’d have much greater clarity, she says, if we simply looked at the numbers on a per-student basis. For example, one school district considered remodeling a stadium to improve its running track at a cost of $4.3 million. That price tag sounded reasonable until they figured out that, over the track’s 50-year lifespan, with a track team of 40 students per year, the project would cost $2,000 per student per year. The district was spending only $9,000 per student for everything. They decided to keep their old stadium.

Surprisingly, schools often don’t break down the numbers this way before deciding how to spend their money. When they do, sometimes the numbers are just stunning. It would be great if the numbers and the tradeoffs could be simplified and made more available to the public, so that everyone has a chance to consider them. As it is, people tend to just want infinite resources for education and many other programs, but they don’t want to pay more in taxes. Everyone needs to get involved in thinking more realistically about the alternatives.

The authors of Stretching the School Dollar all work in education and believe in education. They don’t like seeing cuts in education any more than anyone else. But the authors are tackling tough questions and putting forward interesting ideas for how we can educate more students more effectively with the resources we have. Because education is so important, and the dollars available for it are getting more precious all the time, I hope many people will read the book and think about how to put some of these ideas into action.

Liberating Learning by Terry Moe and John Chubb is an important book that focuses on how technology will change K-12 education in the United States.

It looks at current efforts to use technology for online learning and to measure achievement. Although it acknowledges that there is a need for a lot of improvement, it sees great possibilities.

In particular it talks about how online learning used in a hybrid way with face-to-face teaching can free up teacher time, support better learning diagnostics, allow for a broader set of courses to be offered, and deliver material in a more engaging way.

It says that since the National Commission on Excellence in Education published the landmark report A Nation at Risk in 1983, there have been a lot of efforts to reform education, but steps that would have created major change have been blocked.

Specifically, things like teacher measurement, pay for performance, teacher choice, charter schools, and vouchers have only been tried in very limited ways.

One set of early efforts where technology is having an impact is in making courses available through virtual classes. The state-level groups that offer these are called virtual schools, but that can be a little confusing since students can sign up for a few courses from the virtual school while remaining in a normal school for everything else.

About 30 states have virtual schools. The biggest by far is the Florida virtual school with about 100,000 students. Most virtual schools are quite small.

The initial focus is kids in rural areas who can’t get the breadth of courses they want, but it can also be used by kids who want more flexibility, higher quality, or home schooling.

Another phenomenon is charter schools that offer over half of their courses online: 26 of the 40 states that allow charters have these schools. Four states—Arizona, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—have over 10,000 students in such schools.

The book talks about two Dayton, Ohio, cyber charters and an early Pennsylvania charter called PACyber. When these schools started in the 1990s, they were true pioneers, and the curriculum and software were not very good. The description of how these schools work today is very compelling.

A key question the book explores is whether the use of technology in education will be blocked in a way that will keep educators from starting up the necessary learning curve.

The authors have seen a lot of attempts at reform blocked or diluted so they don't have any impact. They are articulate about how powerful the status quo is in our political system and how someone pushing for change can be stopped in many ways. They give examples of tactics unions use to block experimentation and hold things back. The book offers charts showing that virtual schools, cyber charters, and rich data systems are less developed in the more unionized states. I agree with the authors about how tough it is to change the status quo, but the challenge is not just the unions.

Parents are also very conservative about new approaches in education, particularly parents whose kids are in an honors enclave inside a public school that is weak overall. The authors are clear that many of the experiments have problems when they start up. There is always a question of where new approaches should be tried initially.

I agree with the authors that technology is special and although it will take time it cannot be blocked. Clayton Christensen in his book Disrupting Class makes the same point even though his analogy to business use of technology is not a good comparison with a political process like schools.

In the case of technology there are special areas where it is clearly needed and these can be used to get it up and going.

Another critical point the authors make is that countries other than the United States care a lot about high-quality, low-cost education, so they will be contributing new ideas and content, too. The authors don’t talk enough about technology in two-year and four-year colleges. It would have been interesting to know what issues have slowed technology there. Tighter budgets could help technology since it is more cost-effective in many cases, but the lack of funding will also slow the transition down.

I am fascinated about what can be done to make content really, really great. I love the idea of having the videos of the very best lectures. I want the K-12 equivalent of MIT’s Don Sadoway teaching physical chemistry; or the Feynman Messenger Lectures (now free on a Microsoft site); or the courses available on Academic Earth or the many amazing Teaching Company courses.

I am also interested in how a known framework for what students can learn can be used to connect lots of interactive software to do skills assessment.

Online learning can work well for homeschoolers where the parents are very involved. But this creates a budgeting challenge for school districts.

There is a lot of controversy about homeschooling in terms of quality and whether educational budgets should help with it. Since this is part of the bootstrap process for online learning these issues will affect how quickly pure online learning achieves a large user base.

Even more interesting to me than pure online learning is the mixed model where some classes are given using technology but the students have a school that they attend for long hours. This is the model used in the two Dayton schools discussed in the book. The question of what age group and what classes can use this mixed model and how it can save teacher time while providing a broader set of courses and more customized learning is important.

Experimentation is needed to try out different approaches for these mixed models and progress needs to be made to get the curriculum to be very broad and very high quality.

Although I agree with the book that unions have been far too tough in blocking experimentation there still is a lot to be proven in both online learning and teacher assessment.

The acid test I have for teacher assessment is when will the average teacher see it as a plus?

If they see it as unpredictable and scary they will want to stick with the current system. If they see it as predictable, as a tool for helping to get rid of some of the worst teachers, and a path to improvement for people who want to get better, they will embrace it. The book makes it sound like teacher assessment is a very straightforward thing but deciding what to use beyond the test scores is difficult. The unions may tilt toward defending less capable teachers, but if the average teacher thinks that a new assessment approach or a new online approach is a good thing, then unions will back off from protecting its least capable members and let the new approach move ahead. So I believe the unions should allow more experimentation. But the experiments need to demonstrate clear benefits to the average teachers so they are enthused about them.

There are a lot of things I want to learn more about including what is going on with the commercial development of online curriculum. A question I have is: How do we get some very bright people who know education and are knowledgeable about technology involved in helping to drive this forward at full speed?

Jay Mathews’ book Work Hard. Be Nice. describes the history of KIPP by telling the story of Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin. KIPP is remarkable in some ways, particularly in its ability to attract great teachers and engage and inspire students.

(I spoke about KIPP a bit in a 2008 TED talk I gave and there’s an interesting report on KIPP from NBC.)

Jay did a great job writing this book.

The book gives a great sense of how hard it was to get KIPP going and how intense the focus on good teaching is.

Great teaching in 5th-9th grade is very hard because it’s challenging to get all of the kids engaged and because dealing with kids who cause trouble or are bored requires special skills.

You also have to know the topic to make it clear and interesting.

I wonder how much has been done to record best practices on video and make them easily available online.

High school teaching is somewhat different but a lot of the key skills are the same.

A teacher has to be a real performer and very dedicated to the kids to teach the way that KIPP expects.

Mike and Dave are gifted teachers but they do manage to get less gifted people doing most of what they do.

The amount of time they spend with the kids really is unbelievable. Between the long day (7:30 to 5) and every other Saturday and three summer weeks it is 60% more than normal schools.

In addition the teachers are asked to let the kids call them anytime.

I also read the KIPP 2007 Report Card which goes through every KIPP school open for more than a year.

They have 66 schools in operation today. Almost all of those are middle schools only. They have three high schools.

They have decided that kids are still open minded and can still catch up when they get them in 5th grade.

They would prefer to get them earlier and they have five schools that do that but mostly they start in 5th.

In almost every area they stop at 8th so they have to work hard to try and get their kids into good high schools.

Without more great high schools their work will not have the leverage it deserves to have.

They plan to get to 100 schools by 2011. I think most of their high school plans are in the Houston area.

I am impressed with the way KIPP does measurement. They have Mathematica doing a hard core analysis that looks at the kids well after they leave KIPP.

KIPP clearly has a huge affect on kids. Some people say they get the kids who are better to start with in terms of knowledge, motivation, or parents but this has been examined quite closely and if it is true it is a very modest difference relative to the surrounding schools. The KIPP kids are well below average coming in compared to the state averages almost everywhere. One example of KIPP’s success: while only 20 percent of low-income students in the U.S. attend college, the rate for former KIPP students is 80 percent.

People look hard at the number of kids who leave KIPP to decide how that should be reflected in the KIPP performance statistics.

I am impressed that KIPP takes all of these issues very seriously and where there is an issue they focus on it. They really have the right goals and a strong culture.

I certainly think people who care about education should read the book and a lot more people will decide to help KIPP.

The questions about costs, rules, and ability to scale will be asked by every reader of this book. I certainly want to understand these things better.

I find it stunning that the educational schools are not training teachers to use the KIPP way of teaching classes.

What the heck is going on with schools of education and what is the field going to do to get some of them to get involved in this kind of work?