Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Why American Public Education Reverts to the Mean And What We Can Do About It with Tom Vander Ark of Getting Smart
Tom Vander Ark is an advocate for innovations in learning. As CEO of Getting Smart, he advises schools, districts, networks, foundations, and learning organizations on the path forward. Tom is the author of Getting Smart, Smart Cities That Work for Everyone, Smart Parents, Better Together, The Power of Place, and Difference Making at the Heart of Learning. He has published thousands of articles and papers through GettingSmart.com and LinkedIn.
Previously he launched one of the first edtech venture funds, was president of the X-Prize Foundation, served as the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tom served as a public school superintendent in Washington State and has extensive private sector experience. He serves on the board of Digital Learning Institute, Latinx Education Collaborative, Mastery Transcript Consortium, and Getting Smart Collective and advises schools, impact organizations and edtech startups.
đĄ 5 Things Youâll Learn in This Episode:
- Why education systems struggle to sustain innovation
- How nonprofit governance supports lasting change
- The transformative potential of platform networks
- Why AI shifts learning from preparation to contribution
- What keeps Tom optimistic about EdTechâs future
⨠Episode Highlights:
[00:04:50] From retail exec to education reformerâTomâs origin story
[00:07:03] Why governance challenges cause schools to revert to the mean
[00:10:11] The rise of platform networks and their power to scale learning
[00:14:48] AI and the shift from intelligence to agency in learning
[00:16:15] High school as a launchpad for real-world contribution
[00:21:01] âWeâre automating bad pedagogyââTom on todayâs AI tools
[00:25:16] Bright spots: Watershed, Open School, and SparkNC
[00:27:54] Tomâs advice to EdTech founders: âThis is the most important work in the worldâ
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This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Tom Vander Ark: We suddenly all, and at least everyone that's connected to the internet, so maybe four of the 8 billion people on the planet now have access to expertise. Even the beginning of access to capability, right, which is enacted expertise. So an expertise that can act on your behalf, an agent or an operator. I. And this is a really profound threshold to go through as a species.
[00:00:29] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood. K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders.
[00:00:45] Ben Kornell: Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar.
And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod
today. We are joined by. Tom Vander Ark. Tom Vander Ark is an advocate for innovations and learning as CEO of getting smart. He advises schools, districts, networks, foundations, and learning organizations on the path forward. Tom is the author of Getting Smart, smart Cities that work for everyone, smart parents better together, the power of place and difference making at the heart of learning.
He has published thousands of articles and papers through getting smart.com and LinkedIn. Previously, he launched one of the first EdTech venture funds, was president of the XPRIZE Foundation, served as the first executive director of Education for the Bill and Melinda Kates Foundation. Tom served as a public school superintendent in Washington State and has extensive private sector experience.
He serves on the Board of Digital Learning Institute, Latinx Education Collaborative Mastery Transcript Consortium, and Getting Smart Collective and advises schools, impact organizations and EdTech startups. Without further ado, here is our interview with Tom Vander Ark. Hello, EdTech insider listeners. I have a truly special guest, Tom Vander Ark, the Man, the myth, the legend, Tom, we first met when you were engaged in some advising for alt school, but long before that you were leading the Gates Foundation and their work and education.
You've got experience as superintendent. You also have an incredible book that was transformational for my thinking around networks and the power of closed and tight versus open and freeform networks. I mean, there's so much to talk about. We are so glad to have you here on the pod today.
[00:02:57] Tom Vander Ark: I'm thrilled to be on the best new podcast of the decade, EdTech Insiders.
You and Alex are doing such amazing work. It's at the top of my must listen to podcasts for my daily bike ride.
[00:03:11] Ben Kornell: Well, same to be said for anything coming from getting smart. You did this visiting of schools across the country where you wrote profiles and you brought innovation and education to life in ways that I think continue to this day to be the calling card of getting smart.
So anyone who needs to check that out, Google it. Getting smart that you also have essays and podcasts too.
[00:03:34] Tom Vander Ark: Well up on the menu, you can find schools worth visiting, I guess they call it innovative Schools Now. We've tried to keep a relatively updated list of that for 15 years. It reminds me of a project, Ben.
We did Smart Cities book Seven Keys to Education and Employment. Anyway, I traveled the country and I wrote profiles of the learning innovation ecosystem. Mm-hmm. In about 20 cities. And it was one of the most interesting projects that I have taken on. Just learned a lot about the EdTech space, about the impact intermediaries, about new school networks.
[00:04:13] Ben Kornell: Yeah, that one resonated with me. I was living in Denver at the time, and Denver had this truly unique innovation ecosystem. Totally. And you had both a superintendent, but also charter school community and funding partners, and it was big enough ideas that it could be revolutionary, but also a small enough.
Community that you could get everyone in a room. And of course Mike Johnston's now the mayor there and doing amazing things. But also there's been a like rewrite of the Tom Boberg era. So that's also been an interesting arc to see how those communities evolve over time.
[00:04:50] Tom Vander Ark: So, Ben, lemme go off on this for a minute, because I grew up in Denver.
I had a business career and I was helping to run a, a big $5 billion national retailer in my twenties. And the CEO said Tom. You're gonna be a leader in education. I want you to get involved in Denver education. And I'm like, why would I wanna do that? We're running a $5 billion company. I got like a a real day job.
And he said, I want you to join the Chamber leadership group called Leadership Denver. I want you to join a nonprofit organization and I want you to chair the Chambers Education Committee. And after a month of doing this and visiting schools in Barrio West Denver, I had this road to Damascus. I'm doing the wrong thing with my life.
I know that I am called to work in education for the rest of my life. I. And a few months later, I became a public school superintendent, but it was at Denver Ecosystem. Colorado Children's campaign was at the beginning of that. Barbara O'Brien ran that and she helped grow this network of nonprofit impact organizations that helped elect a really aggressive board.
They hired great superintendents in Denver. That for 20 years made it really the best urban example of a public school portfolio with a strong district and great charter network. So that places a really special spot for me 'cause it's really what drew me into education innovation. I.
[00:06:19] Ben Kornell: Yeah, so profound and anybody who needs to read more about that, you can find it on getting smart.
There's also, they were profiled by Broad as one of the most innovative cities and districts. I think there's so many of us that grew up in that era in Denver where it was so special. And then I think because of a shift in politics, there's been some like. Rewriting of what was good, what was bad, all of that in history.
I'm really good friends with Bill Kurtz at DSST. And how has the charter movement been either outside or integrated with the portfolio? As you reflect back, what meaning making do you make now a decade removed?
[00:07:03] Tom Vander Ark: The sad thing about American Public Education, Ben, is that it's built on a really lousy governance layer and it results in a reversion to the mean.
Over time. It's very difficult to. Sustain an innovation agenda over a period
[00:07:23] Ben Kornell: of time. As a school board member myself, I raised my hand as a lousy governance player. No, it's, it's hard. And the regulations drive you to mediocrity. Yeah.
[00:07:32] Tom Vander Ark: It's hard for a set of elected officials. To really sustain an innovation agenda, you have so many different pressures on you, and I think back to Boston was the best urban district in America in the nineties, Tom Peon and Tom Menino, the mayor.
Yeah. Had this beautiful partnership that for 10 years did the best work in the country. I think about Houston and Terry Greer and the work that he did there for 10 years. And then the board fell apart. And you know, we had a state takeover of what had been America's best urban district, and Denver is another one.
So the takeaway is it's very difficult. To create and sustain community support for an innovation agenda. And what most leaders are experiencing is this revolving door where you just get started on an agenda and then there's a lot of pushback, board changes, superintendent gets kicked out. And so this is why I became an early advocate for nonprofit governance and why I'm just, I'm so impressed by Hastings, CEO.
He is been one of the most important national. Advocates of nonprofit governance just because in the private you have the chance to hire a board that's committed to an agenda. And you can build with it. It's why I think school networks, but particularly charter networks have been really the most important innovation in American education.
It's why, if you look at Mackey Raymond's third study that came out last year, it's really the bright spot that these big networks have produced very high quality schools, even serving very high challenge communities. So I'm in favor of. Nonprofit governance, but I've tried to spend 30 years working both inside and outside the traditional districts.
'cause it's where the majority of kids are. Yeah. But it's built on a tough foundation.
[00:09:23] Ben Kornell: Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is part of why I got into tech ed tech. The original alluring part of EdTech is scalability. And through technology you can create non-linear scale. But what I found out was the most redeeming value proposition was sustainability.
When we would work with school districts and leadership would turn over, it was like a sand painting where the wind comes and just blows it all away. Right? But if they've installed your software, God forbid that you try to uninstall it and there's something. So I. Powerful about it's sticky people. Yeah.
The stickiness of things that have both like a learning layer, but also a technology layer and their ability to persist despite these leadership and governance pendulum swings back and forth.
[00:10:11] Tom Vander Ark: It's true. That's one of the reasons that I'm really bullish on platform networks. You talked about that at the outset.
I, I think platform networks are the future. One, because we've learned so much in the last 30 years about the science of, of learning and development. But it remains really challenging to build a sophisticated learning model K to 12, full of rich and deep learning experiences in purposeful sequence. And it's hard to support that with a tech stack.
It's still very difficult to build an integrated tech stack that supports an integrated learning model. We in America, we sort of expect the 20,000 LEAs districts and charter networks to be able to do these two things of building a learning model and a tech stack, and then improve it over time. And there's maybe 200 leadership teams in a country capable of doing that, not 20,000.
And so I really encourage schools and districts to work together in networks where they can take advantage of platform resources over time. I.
[00:11:17] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and there's a way in which there's horizontal scale, where in a single district you might have two or three different platforms if you as a superintendent, during that golden era in Colorado, it was de ur to talk about a portfolio approach where.
All children aren't served by the exact same uniform model, and we would want to have diversity in school models. Right. I think in so many ways this battle between charters and school districts has receded in an overall battle for public education overall. But I do think I. The potential for platforms is especially high.
Now, given that we've got data and ai, and one of the things we most recently talked about was this move from information scarcity to information abundance. Can you talk a little bit about the unlock that you're seeing today with tech and how it maps to platforms?
[00:12:11] Tom Vander Ark: I'm smiling 'cause in my recent speeches I've actually been inviting people to stand up and take a step forward to symbolize the big steps that we've taken over the last 30 years.
I think about the day that I became a public school superintendent and watched my daughter in a one-to-one classroom, 19 95, 94, just connected to the web and with a teacher that really understood powerful learning. And it was the first time that. I saw this shift from information scarcity to information abundance.
They were doing a project on Egypt, and instead of running down the library and fighting over the three books on Egypt. Every student was engaged in research and suddenly they had more information than they could ever imagine. And so watching that, mm-hmm. Slip happen is similar to what we just went through in the last 60 days.
I would say with this second, some would call it third gen AI models with reasoning engines. We suddenly all, and at least everyone that's connected to the internet, so maybe four of the 8 billion people on the planet now have access to expertise. Mm. Even the beginning of access to capability, right, which is enacted expertise.
So an expertise that can act on your behalf, an agent or an operator. I. And this is a really profound threshold to go through as a species. I was even thinking in 2010, I, I wrote getting smart, and I said, the goal of every young person, every family, every community now is to get smart. We just went through this threshold.
Well, not everybody has smarts in their pocket. Yes. And so some, like Andre Pathy would argue, agency is greater than intelligence. He just tweeted that a few days ago. And so suddenly the goal isn't getting smart. It's getting age agentic about how you put smart tools to work. And as Reed often has been doing, trying to encourage us to think about possibilities.
So lifting our sites and imagining what we can do individually and collectively. So. Our work today is really about helping people imagine in this new space with access to expertise, how we can reimagine learning experiences and learning environments, and how we have to start by describing new learning goals.
I really think it's time to refresh. Your portrait of a graduate or your learner profile, because I think we have to express a new set of priorities about what it means to work with this co intelligence, to have a co-author, a co-agent, around the new ability to just do more than we ever imagined possible.
[00:14:48] Ben Kornell: I.
[00:14:49] Tom Vander Ark: Yeah.
[00:14:50] Ben Kornell: One, this opportunity to uplevel agency, because we've got this co intelligence, as Ethan Mullin calls it, I think also puts pressure on change in districts more from, instead of it being technical change, while we might be focused on the ai, it's actually adaptive change. And what I've been seeing and observing with teachers where students are tapping into this expertise, they're moving fast and they're moving ahead, and I hear the complaint from the teacher, yes, this is great, but I don't know what to teach them.
They've gone off over the weekend. They were so obsessed with math. They've come back. I don't know what to do with them. And the response I have is. That's wonderful. Like this is great. What if you could do that for all the learners? And so I think we have a really important challenge and opportunity to reshape educator mindset on single track personalized learning, which is that you're moving at different speeds, but it's along the same.
Course to what really is unlocked is a roadmap where you can be exploratory and you can move at different speeds. Yeah. Combining that with goals around competency-based assessment, which yes, of course we've been talking about for 20 years, but now we actually have the tooling to do efficiently, you know, dynamic competency based assessment.
So clearly the roadmaps there, it's gonna all work out. Right
[00:16:15] Tom Vander Ark: Tom? Lemme build on this, 'cause this won't be well articulated, but I have this sort of growing sense that high school, it should be an on-ramp to contribution. It's where we shift from my whole career. I've thought about high school as preparation that you're preparing for, and that we're making the case with young people.
You need to prepare for work 10 years down the road, you know, after high school, after college. But I think the new opportunity now that we all have access to expertise, the new opportunity is. To invite them to step from preparation into contribution, to step into meaningful work with the goal of creating value for their community.
So as a citizen or as an enterprise leader, but we now, we don't have to tell 'em what it's like. We can invite them to do. Work against the world's biggest problems in their local community. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And create value. And my last book was called Difference Making at the Heart of Learning. And I argued in that book that doing these community connected projects using smart tools is not only a shortcut to building all the important skills it.
Reward and the agency and identity and purpose that come from it, of experiencing yourself, helping your community. And so I guess my big push today is, or these days, is really how can we get more kids into more meaningful work? How can we help them find that, not give that to them, but help? Because the new skill is, is opportunity recognition and, and problem finding, right?
And then designing solutions and then delivering impact. How can we create more space where we invite kids into doing that kind of work, using smart tools where they can make a difference today?
[00:18:05] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean it's so interesting because age agentic AI is the, we're in the third inning of the AI wars and it's like agents, and it's actually our ability to have students be agents of their own learning.
Yeah. That is going to be our unlock, so there's a nice parallelism there. I, it does make me. You know, we were talking initially about networks and we were talking about governance challenges, and this leads towards more performance assessment. Yes. And performance task oriented school systems, which are best delivered or managed through networks and platforms.
Yes. Rather than having each school district come up with their own, or each teacher come up with their own, I think. There's a responsibility now then for these platforms to deliver on a rigor and relevance in a performance assessment package. Leveraging efficient ai Yes. To empower teachers to make this flip, it reminds me also of education reimagined and their big report around what are the systemic changes.
It's, we've finally got some bridge technology to help us move.
[00:19:17] Tom Vander Ark: I think you've described the future. It will be groups of schools around a common outcome framework. Using common assessment strategies, typically platform based and assessment practices. The first time I saw this happening, first time I really imagined it was at New Tech Network, Napa New Tech, and I remember that initial conversation where you said, this could be a network.
Let's figure out how to spin up a network of schools that join together voluntarily around this idea. And now there's about 200 of those schools around the country and they all have A-A-P-B-L-L-M-S where they stand up projects in a similar way. You can either author, adapt, or adopt a project, and then they, their outcomes are creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and agency.
Those rubrics are pulled into every project that every group of students do, wall to wall, PBL, and they're assessed in a, in a consistent way. So this is an example of high quality performance assessments executed at scale with rigor and, and accuracy. And I think that's a picture of the, of the
[00:20:25] Ben Kornell: future.
You're not gonna get disagreement here. I think there is this question around why does our EdTech ecosystem then work the way it does, where New Tech, which is a nonprofit, has to scrap and claw for funding and every new school it gets, and then you turn around and you see $20 million going to the next chat, GPT wrapper.
How do you reconcile what's going on in the for-profit EdTech space with this like systemic change vision that you have?
[00:21:01] Tom Vander Ark: It's tough, Ben. I would say the majority of what I see happening in EdTech AI right now is like automating bad pedagogy. I'm afraid it's not the fault of the innovators. They're trying hard to, to, to create value, but demand side is not really creating demand for new applications.
Like performance assessment. And so I see most of the AI apps, there's a lot of interest in math tutoring, for example, and we're, we're building apps that teach, that automate the teaching of hand calculation. So this drives me completely crazy. So we're teaching kids, it's like automating the teaching of Latin.
We're teaching these and calculation skills that I would argue. As a finance guy, as an engineer, are not relevant anymore. And, and so instead of creating simulations and math modeling, we're, we're automating hand calculations. So I think that's part of the problem I'm excited about. There's a handful of, of startups that are really focused on supporting deeper learning.
The last couple weeks I've been talking a lot about Inquire and their partnership with High Tech, high Graduate School of Education. That's a beautiful example of thinking about how can AI help frame and support deep project-based learning. Play Lab is another great example. I know you're a fan of Yusef and that the sandbox that he's created where he is invited educators into a sandbox to to create apps that support powerful learning experiences.
I'm working with, uh, school Joy, which is an exciting new mm-hmm. App that got their start really in, in creating career connected learning simulations that included performance assessments. And he's now sprinting to a full, Ian is now sprinting to a full AI, LMS mastery-based LMS. So there's exciting movement happening.
There's a lot of noise. Having been in a bunch of schools in the last week, I still, I. I see most people sort of stuck in the AI as plagiarism. It's like an unfortunate mindset. I think we need to reframe the conversation around. There's a new set of possibilities, and so we need to just change our expectations of what kids can do with smart tools.
And so instead of worrying about whether the, the kid used. AI tools in, in the five paragraph essay, it's like, well, what if we, instead of a five paragraph essay, we invited them to create a five chapter book and illustrate it or turn it into a video. Like if we changed the lifted our sites and say, kids can now do more than we ever imagined.
Let's focus on what they can do and less on. AI is cheating. Uh, just it feels like we're
[00:23:48] Ben Kornell: stuck there. Yeah. One thread that I've, I'm pulling on pretty deeply right now is the move to remediation has created a reductionist thinking around what education is and should solve, and transactional approaches to.
Learning and products. Whereas if you move towards a raise the ceiling, so rather than a raise the floor, if you move to a raise the ceiling mindset where it's how do we increase possibility and potential without worrying so much about the floor. You actually find that, you know, as a school board member, I would meet with students that were English language learners or students that were struggling with math and they would say, well, what's it for?
Like I'm going to like drill and kill this thing. And all I get as a reward is more drill and kill. Right? But if you create aspirational. Or raise the ceiling models of education. What can I do? Yeah. What can I create? And I'm learning these skills in order so that I can, and so I think we've got, because I believe AI is a transformational technology that allows us to shoot for the ceiling and ensure that we're hitting the floor.
That is a really, you know, as somebody who is in the classroom during NCLB. That was not ingrained in my brain. It was, yes. Get your CUSP students from far below basic to below basic. This would be, this is the transformational shift I think we can move to.
[00:25:16] Tom Vander Ark: We're still really stuck. For 20 years we've been in the focusing on grade level proficiency and everything is turned into getting kids time on task, on grade level proficiency, and that was well intentioned, but it's really a barrier to.
Inviting kids into deeper learning. Let me mention a couple of schools that I think are doing really cool stuff. There's a small school in Boulder called Watershed that adopted our 25 grand challenges, kind of the UN sustainable development goals, plus a few more that we think express the big pressing issues of of the day.
And they invite learners to take on projects off that list using smart tools and actually try to create value for their community. I think that's what high school looks like down the road. There's the open school in Jeffco, where high school is six big passages, right, where kids and an advisor create a project and it's, it's a beautiful sequence of projects, but kids get to do important work that they care about that's important to their community.
Another cool example is there's a group of 18 districts in North Carolina called Spark, nc. That have built this shared approach to standing up high tech pathways and it's modular where kids do do short projects that stack into courses and stack into pathways, but you know, includes game design and cyber security and AI and machine learning.
So these are relevant pathways that kids are really interested in. And they share a set of resources on a platform that make it possible to do this even in a tiny rural school. So there's good stuff happening around the country. That's what we try to support and showcase, uh, getting smart.
[00:26:57] Ben Kornell: Yeah, absolutely.
And just to end our conversation, you've been such an optimist in our space and there's so many reasons why people get sucked into the pessimism trap. And I think there is a. Benefit of stepping back and looking at the last 30, 40 years and saying, where have we really stepped forward? At the same time, most of us are like disappointed in the impact that EdTech has fundamentally had.
And you know, I worked in healthcare for a while there. There's decade upon decade transformation and outcomes, and here we are still struggling with some basic pedagogical pieces that have been around since John Dewey. What's been your kind of engine for optimism? How do you hold that and what's your advice to entrepreneurs who, clearly they're irrational, they're starting an EdTech business, they're already irrational optimists, but what advice would you have for them to keep going and keep holding that optimistic view?
I.
[00:27:54] Tom Vander Ark: That's such a great question. And you know, I, I had this bummer of an experience last year writing a paper that I called Unfulfilled Promise. It was like a 40 year retrospective on, yeah, on EdTech. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to write. 'cause the punchline was, well that didn't work as well as we hoped.
But I do remain super optimistic, particularly about the new thresholds that we've just reached and the new tools that now that we all have access to. So, two points of optimism. One is. There's just never been a better time to do this. It's never been easier for us or for our kids to build an app or to start an enterprise and inviting kids into that sense of possibility just remains really exciting and that the opportunity set just gets better every single week.
So that's number one is just the, the opportunity set is so good and so exciting, and that we can invite kids into that space. Not just get 'em ready for it is one And number two, this is just the most important work in the world. This is the best way to make a difference where you, you can transform a life.
A teacher transforms lives forever in, in the work that they do. School system leaders can change the way a community thinks about its kids and its future. School board members can do leadership. You can change the way a community thinks about itself and its future. And that's, that's just super powerful.
So I can't think of anything better to do, just given how important it is and, and the opportunity set that just keeps getting richer.
[00:29:35] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Well, Kent Theory, one of my mentors said, you know, shared like a Native American proverb, the biggest tragedy is to be buried with your song still inside of you. Tom, thank you for singing your song.
I'm so glad you left that billion dollar company and followed the call and wishing you a lot of great luck in the endeavors ahead, but we will have you back on the pod inevitably to talk about it. Thanks so much, Tom Vander, founder. Of getting smart, and thank you for joining us today.
[00:30:05] Alex Sarlin: Thank you, Ben.
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