Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Reimagining Math Education in the Age of AI with Ted Dintersmith
While you spent thousands of hours studying math in high school, odds are you never use any of it. There is math that really matters – it’s just not covered in school. Just as Freakonomics made us rethink economics, Aftermath does the same for math. Today’s guest, Ted Dintersmith, is a bestselling author, education advocate, and former venture capitalist who believes math has been weaponized—and it’s time to set things right. If you’re curious about the math you missed, and how it can empower you, you won’t want to miss this conversation.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Why most high school math is irrelevant — and what truly matters instead
- The impact of standardized testing on creativity and curiosity
- How mathematical thinking can help students interpret real-world data
- The role of AI in reshaping math learning and career readiness
- Practical ways schools and parents can rethink accountability and purpose
✨ Episode Highlights
[00:02:29] Ted introduces Aftermath and the shift from formulas to ideas
[00:07:08] Why estimation skills matter more than test prep
[00:15:48] The hidden costs of standardized math testing
[00:26:12] AI and automation forcing a reset in math priorities
[00:39:39] Portfolios and creativity as new measures of learning
[00:50:21] Restoring creativity in schools inspired by Ken Robinson
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[00:00:00] Ted Dintersmith: And you know, like when you think about hollowing out the purpose of kids, when you say it's all about jumping through hoops and duking it out with the one kid next to you to get slightly better SAT math score on math, you're not gonna use as an adult that even if you did your smartphone is perfectly.
You just say like, have we lost our collective minds? And I think we have.
[00:00:26] 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. 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 enjoy today's pod.
We have a really exciting episode today on EdTech Insiders. We're talking to Ted Dintersmith who has been thinking. About education and education technology in really deep ways for quite a while. So his new book is called Aftermath and give a little bit of an overview when you spend thousands of hours studying math in high school.
Odds are you never use any of it. I think we've all been there, but there is math that really matters. It's just not covered in school. And just as Freakonomics made us rethink economics, Ted Dintersmith's Aftermath does the same for math. So today's guest is a bestselling author. Education advocate, and former venture capitalist who believes math has become weaponized and it's time to set things right.
So if you're curious about the math you've missed and how it can empower you, you won't wanna miss this conversation with Ted DinterSmith, author of Aftermath. Ted, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:01:55] Ted Dintersmith: Well, I'm beyond excited to be here and I love what you guys are doing with your podcast is fantastic.
[00:02:00] Alex Sarlin: Oh, that's so nice to hear.
That means the world to us and I, I really hope that others feel inspired. We just wanna keep the conversation going. There's so much interesting stuff happening. So tell us a little bit about Aftermath. You argue in this book that schools spend thousands of hours teaching math that most people never. I think that is a very common perception among students and alumni of school alike.
So tell us, what is the math that truly matters and why is it so often overlooked in traditional school curriculum?
[00:02:29] Ted Dintersmith: Yeah, it took more than my share of math in school. So you know, like high school math, a lot of math in college, even more math in graduate school. And I noted along the way, and this was more in my business career.
That I used math ideas a lot, but I used none of the math that it was taught in these courses, and it was underscored when I went to a reunion in my old graduate school where the chair said, well, we just have all this here so you can get a PhD done. But it's really the ideas that are important, not the formulas and symbols and equations.
And I was really lucky, right. I was lucky to be in a graduate program on applied math at Stanford where the ideas were phenomenally interesting and they're almost entirely modern era of math. You know? You get conditioned to thinking of math going back to Archimedes or Newton or Leitz or whatever. Yeah.
And I've been itching to write this book, and then a couple things happened three years ago, and I just said, okay. I'm going to write this book, and so I did. It took longer than I thought, and I'm nervous. I have to be honest. I'm nervous because when I say to people, Hey, I've got a book coming out about math, most people say, oh my gosh, I never wanna revisit that topic.
And I say, no, no, no. It's actually really interesting. You'll understand it. And. Will change the way you look at life.
[00:03:48] Alex Sarlin: Yes. So when you talk about the math ideas as opposed to the formulas or the symbols or what we often picture when we remember that ninth grade math test, the math ideas, what are some of the math ideas that you talk about in the book and how do they become relevant even outside of the school context?
[00:04:06] Ted Dintersmith: Yeah, I could reel off the topics I cover and there are eight of them. Best for somebody to just look at the book. But yeah, I started each of my chapters with something that K through eight kids have done. That I've either worked with them on or observed. So I wanna underscore the fact that these interesting ideas are not graduate school stuff, right?
They're stuff that before you've ever taken introductory algebra in eighth grade or high school, you can dive in on these. So I'll give you a good example. The first chapters about how do you estimate something, and I talk about how many kids get excited about, you know, put a glass vase in front of them full of gummy bears.
You say, how many gummy bears do you think are in this phase? I actually carried this out with a school in Austin, Texas, and I asked the head of the school to experiment with kids. They came up with a million different ways to try to estimate it. Mm-hmm. Some not very good. Some pretty good and some actually like, wow, that's really interesting.
But that whole topic of estimation leads to important concepts like sampling theory, like margins of error, and like maybe most importantly. The importance of what you're defining and trying to estimate how you define it. And so I then, after explaining the ideas in the context of estimating gummy bears in a jar or ornamental balls on the ceiling of a diner, which is something my kids and I did, I talked about how connects to the real world.
How do you go about estimating census numbers? How do you estimate vote count? Yeah. How do you estimate all the economic indicators we get, like employment like GDP. How do you estimate species? You know, how do you estimate COVID deaths in cases and you realize like, these are the numbers coming our way every day.
Often that we just blindly accept. But every number has a story. And I'll give you an example. Like in the last election, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris ran on the most amazing economy in our life. They, you know, omics created this great economy 'cause unemployment was just 2.9%. Well, you have to look, what do we define as unemployment?
And in this particular example, so each chapter has the basic idea. Something young kids have done and then 6, 7, 8 real world examples described in about a page. Mm. But you realize like, hey, there are actually multiple measures of unemployment. And the one that's actually most telling is the so-called true TRU measure that counts.
People who've given up. Counts. People who have a measurable job they desperately like to get out of but can't. Well, the true economic numbers during the election still to this day are in the 20, 25% range. Wow. Not 2.9%. So if you just take the number put in front of you in a news story or on a radio broadcast, yo and employment's 2.9%, you're lulled into thinking that tells you what you need to know about unemployment.
You need to have that math mindset to say that's just an estimate. Estimates depend on how you sample, how you extrapolate, and what you define as the measure of interest. And you start to look at that. You say like all these numbers beg for scrutiny, beg for cross checks, beg for
[00:07:08] Alex Sarlin: deep and interesting thinking.
And people don't always do that kind of thinking because they don't always make the association between the math they learned in school and the idea of. Being empowered to use that type of mathematical thinking after school. I think so many people get through the math they're doing in school, even if they like math, I think they often get through it and say, okay, well either I have a choice to be a math person, quote unquote, be somebody who thinks and works with numbers and formulas and mathematical estimates and thinking or theories as a career, or I'm gonna sort of put the math behind me and I think.
What's so interesting about this idea approach is you're saying no, that's just like with Freakonomics with economic theory. It's like if you think about certain elements of how math works or how a sort of mathematical ideas work, you can carry them into your understanding of society, your understanding of statistics that you need to know about in your life.
You might. Take them into personal issues. If you're trying to estimate things about your own budgets or estimate things about your own salary over time. I mean, estimation is not something that is left in high school. We all use that every day. So how do you think about that in this book? Like how do you help people make that leap and say, well, whether or not you liked math, whether or not you thought of yourself as a math person.
I know I'm using some ridiculous phrasing here, but how do you take those mathematical ideas out and actually. Embrace them no matter what your relationship to math was in your academic days.
[00:08:31] Ted Dintersmith: Yeah. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of people think of themselves as, I'm not a math person. Right. I know.
And bear scars from their high school math experience, you know? And in my talks, and if you wanna post it in your show notes, we could do that. I've got this mosaic, I call it my, where's Waldo? And it's the blizzard of math concepts covered in high school. And I'll put it in front of large audiences and I'll say.
Can anyone here find something on this chart? It's got like 60, 70 items. Find one thing on this chart they actually use, or even one thing on this chart they can explain, and it's like no one, right? I mean, it's like, it's not just that this is the gateway to the best jobs or things that every scientist and engineer does every day.
You know, it's just this. Barb wire fence we put up in front of kids. Yes, it's particularly powerful and effective in ranking and sorting. It's perfect to tell a few that you're in the top few percent and everybody else, you're somehow deficient. And boy couldn't we do way better than that. And I hate to, you know, there are a lot of people, well-intentioned people who are trying to help and so I feel bad casting shade on anyone.
But I really got going on this when I read an an interview with a top education person at the Gates Foundation in the New Yorker. And the quote from him, which I have in my book, is, the math is unique among all disciplines because there is always one right answer in math. Right. Which is not true all.
And I said like the only reason you say that is you don't understand math, right? I mean, there is no one right way to estimate COVID deaths.
[00:10:05] Alex Sarlin: Right?
[00:10:05] Ted Dintersmith: And that's where it gets really interesting, right? There are multiple creative logic based, rigorous. Ways, but creativity is an important part of the math that matters.
And when we dumb it down to these 30 to 45 second math micro tidbits, and by the way, weaponize it in schools where we hold schools and teachers and students accountable. What do you see in schools, right? You don't see kids given an interesting problem. That doesn't happen. Maybe occasionally it's Maisie and Joe, bag of donuts.
Go to the flower store with $5 and roses, or 25 cents and tulips or 40 cents. You know, like, and the kids look at that and say like, uh, I'm not buying that. I mean, that's, that's baloney. But we hide behind. And this is the defense I get from the math agenda, designers. Is it? It is teaching us how to think.
Yeah, I know you're not gonna use it. I know scientists and engineers don't use close four integrals by hand anymore. Right. But it's, trust me, it's teaching you how to think. And only one group. All this money we spend on data and it's billions of dollars a year, and we obsess about these scores and the nation's report card goes ballistic when there's a one point drop or a three point drop in math scores.
And every time you read about the performance of a school or a district of a state, it's reading and math scores. It's half. The wait on math. Nobody uses a math that your phone does perfectly and on math that actually crushes out of kids their confidence, their self-esteem, and their creativity, and I felt like this deserves a book, right?
Because it is just not true that the math that matters has one right answer.
[00:11:40] Alex Sarlin: I think that concept of math advocates say, Hey, whether or not you use it, this particular formula or this particular concept, it teaches you how to think. There's lots of ways to interpret that, right? In some ways it's a kind of a hand wavy, it's a little bit of an excuse, I think, but in another way it seems to dovetail a little bit with what you're saying about these mathematical concepts.
If math was taught. In a way that really was actively about how you think like probability estimation, exponential growth are some of the examples you used in the book. Like those are ways to think, those are teaching you how to think. So it helped distinguish between that traditional slightly excuse version of you might not use a quadratic formula but it taught you how to think and the kind of mathematical ideas that you are advocating for in this book.
[00:12:22] Ted Dintersmith: Well, well the teachers you how to think. I do find it interesting with all the billions we spend just one group, the Rand Corporation. Squirreled together the money to look at how much real deep learning is taking place in America's high school math classes. And they looked at the math that's tested on the high stakes exams that determine whether you get your high school diploma or not.
Their conclusion, 0%. This is not a TED number. This is the Rand Corporation funded to look at how much is really learned, and it doesn't have to be that way. Even the rote math in school could be a window
[00:12:56] Alex Sarlin: right
[00:12:56] Ted Dintersmith: from creative thinking. And if you visit schools in Finland, whereby the way there are no standardized testing, the teacher will put up something and say, come up with as many different ways to solve this as you can.
They might even go further, which would be interesting. I'll give you a good example. Every kid will be required to learn how to factor a polynomial, you know? So break down XQ minus five x squared, plus two x minus three into its constituent elements. I mean, no adult uses that, right? Mm-hmm. And what you see in schools is they by and large will say, we're going to teach you the way to do it.
Mm-hmm. We're not gonna ask you to think of different ways. We're certainly not going to ask you what's the origin of this? When did it matter? How is it relevant to the real world, at least in the world? Before we had computers that would teach you how to think, but I feel for the teachers. I'm a big fan of our teachers.
Sure. They just do what they're held accountable to. And if you're held accountable to student performance error free under time pressure. On low level math mechanics, you will say, we're gonna teach you the one way to do it. And if you're lucky enough to be in a family circumstance where you can pay for an expensive SAT tutor for your kid, what's the most important piece of advice they give a kid taking the SAT math.
If you come across a question that will slow you down, 'cause you have to think about how to solve it, skip it. If you spend five minutes on that question, you will not get to the last eight questions on the exam. Anything hard that actually requires creative, thoughtful problem solving is something to be skipped.
And what a, I mean, what a dispiriting life lesson that is. Yeah, and kids listen, right? I mean like these kids are not oblivious to this. I'd say, okay, great. We just like it's a game. My first film, and we could put this link in your show notes as well. Sure. Was most likely to succeed and it's a one and a half hour film premiered at Sundance, 25 major film festivals.
We film 10,000 community screenings with that film, so it's had a big reach and it's outstanding and it actually predicts. 10 years in advance, computers writing better prose in journalists. Okay, so it was not like lagging in terms of understanding where we're headed. But my favorite scene is it's a Denver high powered school, and the math department chair is trying to teach kids more important, more relevant math.
And the kids reject it. And we had these kids look at the camera and they're saying like, you don't really think we come to school to learn. We are here so you can train us to ace the tests. Right? And maybe, maybe we'll learn in college. And you like, when you think about hollowing out the purpose of kids, when you say it's all about.
Jumping through hoops and duking it out with the one kid next to you to get slightly better SAT math score on math. You're not gonna use as an adult that even if you did, your smartphone does perfectly. You just say like, have we lost our collective minds? And I think we have.
[00:15:48] Alex Sarlin: There's definitely a major tail wagging the dog aspect to the role of standardized tests.
And even when you mentioned that quote about math is a subject where there's one right answer, quote unquote, that in terms of educational technology, for many decades, math has been the subject that EdTech tends to sort of. Hu towards, and it does, because of exactly the reasons you're saying. Usually not for the reasons we want, but for the reasons that it's relatively easy to test.
It's relatively easy to test any multiple choice format or in relatively simple formats that could be very simple data. I mean, almost a hundred years ago, they were doing these intelligent tutoring systems that were basically. Series of math questions where you'd get something right or wrong and then it would branch you in different ways.
And I think there's something so convenient about math, and I know you write about this in the book and you just mentioned the role of standardized testing. But let's talk a little bit about that because if we were to get to a world where math was deeper, more interesting, where they were talked about different methods to get to different answers, and it wasn't as cut and dried, I think it would upend some of the way.
We test math, which would be a good thing, but how would this change? Like I think the testing drives the agenda as you just mentioned. How might we pull that out by the roots and get to a higher order thinking about math education?
[00:17:01] Ted Dintersmith: Yeah. And there's what do we try to pull out by the roots? And so there's high school.
Those roots are deep. You know, I, I spent, you know, like almost 15 years trying to get high schools to think differently about priorities is very difficult. We could go after the roots of accountability metrics. I was on a long call yesterday with one of the governors of our states, and this governor is articulating things, and I don't disagree with you.
I think some of the things you're saying makes sense. And I said like. Just so you know, before I got on this call, I looked at your state's accountability measures and what you're expecting your kids to have to be good at to get a high school degree in your state. And I guarantee you, none of your state legislators could pass the math that your eighth graders have to pass.
So those roots maybe, you know, like a, a leader, a governor, a state superintendent, a man from heaven, a secretary of education for the country, or a president who said we're gonna rethink accountability, that would be fantastic. But I think one of the things that's interesting and where my experience with this goes deep, I mean, my kids are now 29 and 27, but boy, when they were growing up, we used every walk and car drive.
They never got sick of it. Right? I mean, like, I just would love to look at the world with the lens of math.
[00:18:10] Alex Sarlin: Yeah,
[00:18:11] Ted Dintersmith: and it's like all these, and I try to bring that to life in my book about look at things that are real around you and you can get your kid excited and the point. Most of my book, it's like eight parts of joy in uplifting.
And then my last chapter is the Tragic, ironic Consequences of Math, ignorance. And I just go after the folly of what we do and how damaging it is for kids. And I just say like, why wouldn't it be a better world? Right? If kids are graduate from high school, understood the important ideas, thought math was really interesting and relevant, and they the ones that want to go deep with a math-based career.
Had a really great grounding for it and motivation for it, but we don't do it that way. Right? And we make every kid dwell in the world of inverting one over X to the minus seven. And you say like, I never do that. I mean, the ratio of, you know, two hairball polynomials, I never, you know, it's like I never, never, never do that.
I have to tell you one, you know, like, okay, so here I'm pointing fingers, but I think they deserve to be appointed. So the cheerleader for rote math in our country is the National Center for Education Statistics, and they're the ones that issue and administer the Nappe exams, right? And half the nappe.
Math half reading, and that was the other thing that got me going is when schools were beginning to emerge from COVID, they had to delay the 2021 test to 2022. Kids take this test. It's one of these random tests. They have no incentive to perform. They've been in and outta school. Parents are getting skeptical about these tests, boom, boom, boom.
Well, they roll out the results. And Miguel Cardona, who I think had a real opportunity that I think he blew, announces the test scores with the phrase appalling and unacceptable. Hmm. And so I, I looked at the test scores and I said like, the worst decline was eighth grade math scores. And on their scale, not mine, NCE S's Cardinal Scale of zero to 500.
The decline on the math exams was 1.6%. I said like 1.6% decline after two years of being in and outta school with many kids traumatized with a very flawed, you know, the way they get their sample is schools have to opt in and then families and kids have to opt in,
[00:20:28] Alex Sarlin: right? And there
[00:20:29] Ted Dintersmith: are potentially significant systematic biases and how that evolves over time.
So I'm like, I tried to get an op-ed published on this and, and all these education journalists who wrote about the disastrous plummeting scores, one was willing to talk to me. They went through, it was a bit condescending, honestly, and they said, well, you know, like it dropped eight points and the difference between fourth and eighth grade scores is about 40.
So eight points out of 40 over a four year period corresponds to nine months of learning loss. I said, well, like, like, do me a favor, let's go to right here on the Nation's report card website where it says quite explicitly. Do not equate shifts in scores to learning loss. Mm. So you assume something that's not true.
Would you be willing to write a retraction or a correction? They never did. Right? They never did. And I realized, my gosh. Like the other thing, by the way, Alex, is that when you looked at how Cardona presented, those score drops. And then how the journalist did, they have a, like a scale of zero to 500. So how do you make a few point drop look massive when you massively compress the scale?
[00:21:34] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. You zoom into the,
[00:21:36] Ted Dintersmith: so you show a 10 or 20 point range. So you show a three point drop on a 10 point range or a six point drop on a 20 point range, and you look at it, say like, oh my gosh. Those scores have dropped through the floor and, and you say, wait a minute, it's a data visualization trick. Right?
It's not a score of performance reality. And then the last thing, I used some connections and I was able to, to talk for an hour and 15 minutes with the head of that group. And you know, I said to her, I said, like, I've looked at all your practice questions on eighth grade math. If you and I walked around the National Mall in Washington, DC and asked a thousand adults how much they use.
Math on the eighth grade exam, nobody uses it. And her answer was, well, you know, like we only test what's being taught in schools. And I said, well, you know, the circularity of that right? Is what's taught in schools is what you test, right? Somebody's gotta have the courage to break free. But as I talked about it, I said like, let me just understand, because we have chased higher math scores.
We have said that the data will lead to better learning somehow we're gonna be doing a great, and I think one of the things you guys do a great job of. In your podcast is being honest about is it working or not?
[00:22:45] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And
[00:22:45] Ted Dintersmith: so NCES their own study. Thousands of hours. Every adult in America has spent thousands of hours in high school math, 82% can't compute the cost of a carpet given length, width, and cost per square yard.
I mean, we can't even compute the cost of a carpet, let alone estimate something or debunk a study that throws out a meaningless correlation number and as though that's proof positive of something being causal in relationship. And I just said like, no, we need to do much better, and you have the chance. I mean, I'm just a lone voice.
Your guys' podcast makes these points, but I mean, we're not sitting on the organization that rolls out these tests. And, and yet it just rolls on. It just rolls
[00:23:26] Alex Sarlin: on. So incredibly, you have so many amazing points there. I have so many different reactions. Let me just throw a couple of ideas out in a row and I think we, we will get to the question here.
So I tend to agree. I mean, my own history with math parallels a lot of this. And I always loved math as a kid. I did the math Olympia, I did math for fun a lot as a kid, and I. Went pretty far and it, I did well enough in my AP in high school to actually place out of college requirements of math. So I never actually even took math in at the college level 'cause I didn't wanna take it anymore because the fun kind of got knocked out of me over time.
So I feel like I come at this from a very particular personal angle where I feel so sad for people who have math anxiety or who feel like they're not math people who have. Fixed mindsets who have, I mean, there's a million different reasons that math has sort of knocked people onto their sides in education, and I just feel so sorry for them, even though it wasn't my actual experience.
I still got a little taste of that. Even though I never failed math, I never got a bad grade in math. And so many of the things you're saying resonates so. Much with me personally, but they also make me think of so many different aspects of the education landscape, the ed tech landscape right now. I mean, we're at a moment.
You're mentioning the NAP exam. You're mentioning the NCES. There's a little bit of a reset moment now, as you know, right? I mean, a little bit. A little bit to say the least. I mean, we might be seeing the last Secretary of Education in our lifetime, potentially right now. So there's a pushback against almost the whole technocratic.
Apparatus around this right now. And I'm curious how you think about that, because obviously that's scary in a lot of ways. In some ways. Maybe there's an opportunity here if there is a rethinking of the circularity. You mentioned that. Oh, we test what's taught. We teach math. People parallel math to reading.
They say, oh, well, literacy and reading comprehension are core to everything you do in life. So we're gonna teach them as a basic literacy, and we're doing the same with math. That's why we teach. Polynomials. That's why we teach fractions because it's core to life. Even though as you've said many times, it isn't.
It just isn't. I mean, it isn't, but I think there's this sort of false equivalence there. There's a moment, and of course AI is coming in. So not only do kids have calculators and ti 80 fives at this point, you can get very, very, very, very complex math done for you with your computer or your phone these days and not have to do an integral yourself.
So like we are in a very transformational moment and I'd love to hear you. Talk about what is the opportunity like if the education and ed tech community were to say, okay, we are at this crazy moment for a lot of different reasons, where some of these things are starting to not be inevitable the way they have been for the last 30 years.
And of course there's been amazing math educators, amazing math curriculum writers, like many people have been fighting against the irrelevance of math. Let's give them credit. Many people, but it hasn't really changed the system. We have a chance, I think, to change the system.
[00:26:12] Ted Dintersmith: What should we do? It's so interesting to me is that I think it all starts with accountability.
If we're talking about the formal infrastructure of school, then what we tell them we're gonna measure them with is what they're going to teach. And I think we've lost, there's a great social scientist, I think it's Charles Goodheart, who any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.
Right. And I think that's, is reading an important skill? Yeah, it's an important skill. I would actually say, and this will draw a flack. But it's important is declining over time. And I'm not to say I would love for every young adult to be a passionate, energized reader, but here, few relevant things on the reading front.
So many people learn by watching videos. You know, you can listen to audio books. I listen to, you know, at least two audio books a month when I ask educators, okay, so yeah, I get this, I get this. What are your goals out of reading? And generally it's two, to be able to dissect and understand complex material.
To experience and feel the joy of reading. So I say complex material. You guess what I do? Anytime I get a legal document, I put it into chat, GPT and say, explain it to me in terms a 10-year-old can understand, right? Actually, ai, if somebody's not reading a grade level, and I know people are gonna say like, this guy's lost his mind.
But if you're not reading a grade level chat, GPT can. Purpose it. Now, I'd love to have them read on that path to being a passionate reader. 'cause I read a ton and I'm a fierce advocate for LI Liberal Arts. But what do you find when you poll kids in school in terms of attitudes about reading? I mean, over 80% hate to read.
Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. And so what happens is, in my book, what School Could Be, I profile this superintendent in a public school district in New Jersey, and he's doing great things and I admire the guy and I talk about the great things, but he says, I'm having to look over my shoulder, the adjacent district.
Is getting better improvement in test scores than we are. So we went and poked around to see what they were doing and what they were doing. They, and this is true, this isn't one district, this is true across high schools and colleges in America. Kids no longer read entire books. Yeah, they're reading agenda.
Is read these antiseptic boring passages and train on answering multiple choice questions about signs of author bias. And if you train enough on that, you can eek up some gains in reading scores, maybe. You drive out of kids the joy of learning. And I said like, does that make any sense? I mean, like to me that's tragic, right?
And it's the same thing with math, right? Is that over 80% hate math of adults. They don't see why they use it. Kids, when I interview kids in schools and I visit a ton of schools, I'm not like a guy. Who talks through my hat on this. I've been to, you know, in the last 10 years, probably 500 schools. I've been to all 50 states.
I interview kids and over and over it's, again, I don't see when I'll ever need this. As somebody that lived and breathed math for an entire career, I say back to them, you don't, you know? Right. Exactly. You're not gonna get up every morning of your life burning to use arc sequence that day, you know? And then you're left saying, it's just a game.
These are hoops put in front of you. It's pointless other than generating data. And ultimately, if you want to play the school game and get into a better college, take it seriously. And then we wonder, we wonder why kids deal with. Severe mental health issues. We wonder why kids see no purpose in life. We wa we wonder why kids aren't optimistic about the future.
We wonder why Everybody says like, oh my gosh, they're gonna cheat with ai. There's an epidemic of cheating as it is, right? And when you interview these kids about the cheating. Their answer is, it's not a big deal. We're never gonna use it. I mean, if this were important, we wouldn't cheat. And, and if I had to add one point to this, it's like, I think we just lose sight of what is the purpose of education.
And to me, the purpose is to prepare kids to pursue fulfilling careers, to equip them with the skills to be responsible and form citizens and define joy and purpose in their life.
[00:30:19] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:19] Ted Dintersmith: And we do none of that, and we actively work against that. And it's like it with AI blazing ahead with AI poised to wipe out millions of jobs.
To me, it's like code red, right? We either get our priorities right and start equipping kids with the skills and mindsets that matter, or we're sending them into a world of hurt, likely to cause an already fractured civil society to collapse. Seems like high. You know, if we're talking about high stakes in education, those are the high stakes we need to be talking about.
Not whether math scores on math, no one uses went up 0.3% or down 0.7%. 'cause you're just chasing fool's gold with that.
[00:31:02] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Well, if we are getting to a moment where I think there is a potential to rethink some of the traditional beliefs about education that have been so embedded. For so long, and I believe we are, I think technology will play a role in that, but it won't only be technology.
I think there just is going to be a little bit more of an understanding. I mean, you, you've done a lot of thinking about career and technical education. People in the us we've been trying to figure out the relationship between education and career preparation. You mentioned it as one of the, you know, three goals of education for.
Generations and you know, certain other countries have been much more formal in how they've instituted it and we just go in and out and back and forth and there's all of these movements. But the statistics on this, when you ask students and parents, especially at the higher education level, you know, why are you going to college?
The numbers of people who say, I'm there because I wanna fulfilling and lucrative career. I want to, I wanna get the job are so high. If there is now this sort of universal acknowledgement that we're in a really tricky economic environment job, the job world is changing faster than it ever has. There's I think, a little bit more of an embrace on both sides of the political aisle of maybe we should align education more to career outcomes.
[00:32:16] Ted Dintersmith: I think for better or worse, the fact that corporate America is being honest with people that AI is going to replace yes, millions of jobs and it's, it's not that AI does it on its own, but one person with the skill to use ai. We'll be replacing a dozen people who don't know how to use ai. And so to me it's like code red, like K through 12 schools, get on this train, you know, like let kids use it and get far more productive.
And yet they don't. You had a, a recent podcast where you featured that MIT study, right? About how it dos down things. And one of my goals in my book, by the way is, and I say it right at the beginning, is after you read this book, you will never. React the same way to the phrase studies show Exactly.
Exactly. You, you look for what the studies are measuring and whether it makes sense. And so if in fact, the challenge in school is to write a formulaic five paragraph essay, four to five sentences per essay, and Chachi Beta does that perfectly, instantly. Then somebody who just boom flashes that out, won't have developed in some narrow sense a set of skills that the kid who does it by hand does.
Right. But, but it's like, that's not the goal, right? Right. What if the goal is to write something astounding? What if it's to write something way better than what chat GPT could do? Then would you rather have the kid who knows how to use AI as a thought partner be able to do something remarkable in two days?
Versus the kid who doesn't never do it. You know, I mean, like, do we really think college grads have learned how to write? You know, it's like everybody sort of has this myth that it's all working. Well, 82% of adults can't figure out the cost of a carpet. Most college graduates can't write a coherent essay, and it's like, whoa.
If we continue to think. Our best path forward is to have kids toil away without any leverage to be really flawed, mediocre, expensive, hard to manage versions of ai. I mean, could we let down those kids in a worse way?
[00:34:18] Alex Sarlin: Sometimes people come to the educational technology field and they come with this extremely skeptical mind frame, and they say, look, we thought the technology was gonna change education.
There are all these unfulfilled promises, and I definitely understand that. I've been involved in many unfulfilled promises. I've seen a lot of, I've read a lot of the books about it. I know that there's unfulfilled promises there. What I always wanna turn around and say is exactly what you just said. You are defending a system.
That should not be defended. You know, if you actually look at the facts around our educational system in the US it is failing in so many different ways for educators, for students, for adelbert. I mean, almost every way you look at it, there's these huge gaps. And it always makes me feel frustrated when you, you know, I talk to education technology advocates and founders and thought leaders all the time here, and everybody's just trying to find a way forward and they, they don't all have the right answer, but they're all trying to find a way forward.
And when people just sort of. I wanna throw out the whole enterprise and say, why should we change things? I go, have you looked at the numbers recently? I mean, no matter how you, whether you're looking at the nappe numbers and trying to, you know, your comments make a lot of sense, but there still has been some problems with the, the test scores.
Even the test scores, which is what everything is optimized for, are still not going up and let alone everything else. So obviously I'm preaching to the choir here, but like I'd love to hear how might we. Take advantage of this moment. I think people are starting to realize en masse, especially since the pandemic, frankly, that our education system is just not the self-fulfilling nature of it.
The idea that it just perpetuates and it's always the same and you've gotta do this so you can go to college and get your SAT score and get your grades. I just think it's starting to crumble and people are starting to really question just the very basic nature of it. And then of course, you know the government is pulling things out left and right.
They're making parents be able to opt out of curricula so. What can we do? I mean, let's, let's be solutionist here. If we were to take some of the eight mathematical ideas in your book and say, let's create a new accountability curriculum for that. How can we avoid that kind of thing, becoming the target?
How do we measure without distorting educational outcomes? How
[00:36:19] Ted Dintersmith: do we assess versus how do we measure, right? How do we assess? And when I engage audiences on the topic of what is the purpose of school, very few audiences will say, I want my kids to have slightly better test scores. Right. And and your point, I mean, we've turned US schools into test prep factories, and it's been over a 40 year period with escalating amounts of priority and and anxiety over test scores.
But they've been flat for 40 years. I mean. Flat. So we've thrown aside all these other subjects. We crush outta kids their curiosity and creativity and audacity. We've made this our sole focus in life and we've made no progress on the wrong goals. Okay, so then, you know, you say, well, it's one thing to throw bricks at what we're doing, which, you know.
It's easy to do because it's not working, but then what could we do that's better? And I say like, we really don't have a challenge in life on a micro to micro basis, evaluating somebody's ability to contribute. Right. You know, like if you're interviewing somebody. Shame on you. I mean, like I, I can't imagine a company would do well if they just hired people with the highest GPA, you know, what do we do?
We interview, we sit down and talk to them. We ask them for examples they've done before that provided real value to their organization or to their community. And could college admissions do that? Yes. Could that be the defining criteria to get a high school degree? Yes. Evidence. You can create and carry out initiatives that affect positive change in your world, you know, and if kids coming through school developed a growing deep portfolio of examples, and if we said, let's make sure some of those initiatives have to do with.
Understanding aspects of history, and some of those initiatives had to do with applying math to make the world better. And some of them had to do with creating a science experiment that affected positive change. You could imagine a portfolio of distinctive initiatives, the rewarded kids for diving in, and then you'd say like, I don't care if you used AI or not.
I don't care how you did it. Right? Because the fact is, I mean like no employer is gonna say. Oh my gosh. Your market research was fantastic, but I think you use chatt, so we're gonna ignore it. Right. And in my book, I purposely draw an example if you know the ideas right? If you understand the ideas. And know what to ask and know what to look for, and know what to challenge, and know what to kind of call BS on.
These tools are incredibly powerful enhancers.
[00:38:55] Alex Sarlin: Oh yeah.
[00:38:55] Ted Dintersmith: And people will say, I mean, like one of the things I get torqued about is people, well, it makes mistakes. You know? It makes mistakes. And I say, look, here's the deal, right? If chat TPT tells me something, and I think it's important that it's right.
Here's what I do. I cut and pasted and put it into Claude. Exactly. And I Exactly. I said, did you evaluate this flag? Anything you think is wrong? What here is potentially controversial and what are some, some sources that might counter these assertions? And then it'll tell me. Then I take what Claude says, I put it into perplexity.
You know, it's like they're tools, right? They're tools and they can be tools for good, and they can be tools for cheating. But I think when people say. We're worried kids will use AI to cheat in school. I say the problem is not the kids. And the problem is not ai. The problem is the assignment.
[00:39:39] Alex Sarlin: Yes.
[00:39:40] Ted Dintersmith: And if the assignment is something that AI does perfectly, and by the way, look at how AI AI does on all the AP exams.
Look at how AI does on the whole litany of math and these high stakes tests. If it's one right to answer crap, that's right in the power zone of ai. And I think it's really that choice, and I think that's why I wrote a book about math. I think it's a poster child for failed priorities, right? Do we teach what's easy to test or do we actually spend time helping kids?
What's important to learn for life?
[00:40:10] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so follow up question on that. I'm so curious about your answer to this. So one of the things that's been a huge limitation of education technology for a long time, as you know very well, is that the reason why everybody always went into math for a long time is that the technology to assess student work was very limited.
That's how we got, you know, bubble sheets. That's how we got all of these different, very simplistic ways to assess. AI now is incredibly sophisticated at assessing. Anything. So when you talk about that student portfolio, if you were to say, okay, to graduate high school or to get into college, you have to do a portfolio of work, something scientific that helped your community, something historical that showed a real understanding of the past, you know, that kind of thing.
In the past, you would never have been able to grade that at scale. Right. You'd have to have armies of people, of humans looking at things and trying to have all these calibrated rubrics and all of these things. Suddenly, AI actually could do that. And I'm curious if you think that's gonna play a role in the potential change.
You know, one of the things that
[00:41:08] Ted Dintersmith: drives my thinking is if an AI can grade it and AI can do it. And so, okay, so actually celebrate student work that AI says, you know, like is a bit. Ineffective because it, it's like nothing it's ever seen before. Right. AI sort of pulls together a whole vast set of resources that have already been done.
Wow. And one of the things I just want to, this is such an important point, I want to talk about it for a second, is I think there's this trade off in priorities across schools, which is, is our most important criteria to be able to compare the performance of a student or a school or a district in Columbia, South Carolina, to one in Topeka, Kansas, to one in Spokane, Washington.
Or do we wanna equip kids with the skills and mindsets that are gonna help them in life? And like one drives you into standardized bulk criteria curriculum that's just been distilled and dumbed down to prepare kids for the exact same exam. 'cause they're all taking the same AP biology exam that is essentially saying, get good at what AI does perfectly.
And there is this irony, right? And you know, again, pointing a bit of a finger here, you know you've got the Gates Foundation saying they're gonna spend a billion dollars to boost high school algebra scores. And one of the points I make in my book is, the only reason they say that is they don't understand the difference between correlation and causality.
And you've got Bill Gates who challenged, you know, OpenAI said, well, one of the hardest exams is AP Biology. How would chat GPT do on AP Biology? This is a 2-year-old challenge. And he comes away and says, oh my gosh, it's unbelievable. I mean, it's like way better than students. And, and so the question is, and this is where I think we need leaders, people in a position to influence the narrative, to stop saying, we're gonna put a lot of money and effort on doing obsolete things slightly better.
And to say, we are gonna step back and say, what do we need to do? That's just better things for kids. You know, if chat PD is already great, or any of the AI engines on a certain set of tasks. That's not the right thing to say that kids should be chasing that. It's, again, it's like there's this subtlety and I wanna make sure I'm, I'm expressing it fairly.
It's not to say that we don't want kids to, from grade one on, to never write something to just sort of like toss it. You know? Like, I mean, what's the point of that? There is no point of that. But it is to say that if the. Target we place in front of kids and schools and districts and states, and a nation is to do better in a bell curve that says only a fewer winners than everybody else is viewed as a loser on standardized content that AI devours.
You're sowing the seeds for the collapse of civil society. Like when I started saying that 15 years ago, honestly, people thought I was nuts. You know, like 15 years ago it looked like everything was great, and I started saying like, no, no, no. Like this is what's going on. We are pitting kids against machine intelligence, high stakes, uber competitive environments.
Anointing a few winners, squandering massive amounts of potential denigrating, any hands-on skills. This won in well and 15 years ago that seemed like I, it's like the, the guy with the beard on the street corner with the end, and I think now it's evident, but there's still too little focus on, you know, people will say schools can't change.
And I say, well, let's go back to March, 2020.
[00:44:33] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:44:34] Ted Dintersmith: When we thought kids' lives might be at risk. Every single aspect of school changed in two weeks. Yeah, that's true. But I think kids' lives are at risk now. I think, you know, if you send waves of millions of young adults out into adult life, totally ill-prepared with the, the very skills and mindsets they need actually eroded.
I mean, my gosh, how urgent is that? And, and could we bring the same mindset we had in 2020? But instead of saying, we're gonna take boring in-person, in-class content and send it to you on Zoom, what if we actually rethought? What it means to
[00:45:13] Alex Sarlin: accomplish things in school. I think that moment when everything went onto Zoom was this actually a real downfall moment for the uh, American education system because it basically exposed what was happening in classrooms to all the parents at home and to all of these people who sort of just assumed that what was happening in classrooms was fine.
And then they got. Insight into what was happening in classrooms and I think there was a vast disillusionment, which has been part of the situation right now. Your idea about how might we grade students on whether they can do work that actually bewilders and confuses and, and I You didn't use those words exactly, but you know, that surpasses what AI can assess is something I'm gonna chew on for a long time.
That is extremely interesting. If AI gives everybody these incredible superpowers, which is going to. Have enormous effects on, on the job market because as you said, one person with AI can work. Did the work of 10 people we're already starting to see that, and we saw, I think it was the head of IBM said, 50% of white collar jobs are at risk right now.
People are acknowledging this. I'm taking the optimistic viewpoint, which is, there is a moment where we can say, okay, instead of just assuming that. Literacy and math. Assuming that cheating on a test is is a bad thing, if you're using outside sources, like just taking these things that we all just take for granted because they've been around for so long.
If we turn 'em on their heads and say, what is actually gonna work to take this kid and. Name the place and get them to be able to thrive in a world where all of these upheavals are happening. I mean, it would just lead to a totally different system, and I, I think people are starting to be open to that in a way that 15 years ago, even five years ago, right before the pandemic, I don't think people would've been.
So I'm like, I feel like we're finally getting to the moment where some of these changes you're advocating for might actually be in the works. We're coming on the end of our time, unfortunately. We could talk for another hour easily here, but I try to end with two questions. One, what is the most exciting trend?
What do you see coming that people still think you're crazy for?
[00:47:02] Ted Dintersmith: You know, I mean, one we just touched on, right? If you, if you don't mind my mentioning two trends. One is that the number of white collar jobs, particularly the jobs college grads have historically rolled into. Those are drying up. They will be gone in, you know, a matter of 2, 3, 4 years.
And, and the silver lining of that is that it is making people rethink priorities. Yes. I think the trend that gets me very excited is when people share with me and not that many are really leaning into AI at home with their kids. You know, you're not gonna generally have your kid to school that's aggressively promoting AI to, to help your kid be far more effective.
But when those families that do get on this. Come back to me and say, you know, my, I was really worried my kid hated school, or they weren't doing well in school or their, their math test scores weren't good. And they say, you wouldn't believe what they're doing now. Exactly. You would not believe what they're doing now.
And I think that's the upside of ai. And I think that's where things hang in the balance, right, is if most people are doing incredible things that can cover up for those who don't. Yeah.
[00:48:08] Alex Sarlin: What's the other trend?
[00:48:09] Ted Dintersmith: You know, it's just like the dark side and the bright side. So I'd say the dark side is, you know, I'll give you a good example, but you know, then you're probably gonna say like, get this, let's, let's wrap this up.
But anyway, at the beginning of when I was writing this book, the math of chat, GPT was pretty bad.
[00:48:24] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:48:25] Ted Dintersmith: Toward the end, I have a, a little section on how you find the, the largest prime number. It is sort of a lead in to encryption and I worked out, I'm a pretty good math person by background, so I just sort of wrote the algorithm and cut and pasted it and said, you know, can you find any technical flaws with this or Help me with the present, the notation in a good way, whatever.
And it comes back and it says, well, your, your algorithm's technically correct. But you should consider this alternative, which is more efficient, I said like, and it was, was more efficient. And so it's doggone powerful getting better by the day. And so, yeah, so that's a massive trend and I think people who.
Have the mindset of, we'll get to this at some point, or, I don't want my kid to cheat or this baloney about, you know, well, like somebody who's using AI dramatically effectively, is somehow not advancing their cognitive, I mean, if you use it as a thought partner, it is the ultimate creativity. Vehicle, right?
Yes.
[00:49:24] Alex Sarlin: This is what people think. I'm a little bit crazy for saying, I'm like, if you walked up to your average eighth grader and said, you now have a movie studio and you have a music studio, and you have the ability to create illustrations in any style for anything you want, comic books. You know, posters, anything you want and you can write books instantly, what do you wanna do?
That's where we are right now. I mean, you literally can do all those things by yourself on your computer right now, on your phone right now. And I just don't think we've grasped that reality. That is games you can make your own games, like the power that is suddenly in the hands of these young people.
Absolutely nuts. And I just don't think we as a society have gotten our heads around how powerful that is when you have that much power. The only question is, what do you want to do? And we're not used to teaching kids that. No. And you know, worse, right? It's the ex, it's the express, it's the opposite.
Exactly. Teaching them to say, no, don't do what you wanna do. You should be doing your math homework. Right.
[00:50:21] Ted Dintersmith: Like my nonprofit partner for several years was Sir Ken Robinson. And if any of your listeners haven't watched his talk, do schools kill creativity? It's must watching. And he gave that talk. I mean, sadly and tragically passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2020, but that talk was 2005.
And to this day, it's the most watched Ted talk of all time. And you realize we are all born creative, which is the point he makes. It's, it's not that you have to put this skill in kids. It's, we have to stop
[00:50:51] Alex Sarlin: driving it out. Ted, this has been fascinating. This is Ted di Smith. The book is a Math All about how math concepts and math ideas can surpass math formulas and all the things we've learned to ignore and dislike about math education in schools.
And you also have a movie coming out. Is that right?
[00:51:10] Ted Dintersmith: We have multiple choice and we've got our film festival premiere in September. It just shows kids instead of being trained to perform on multiple choice exams, diving into career-based learning, that covers a wide range of things. Anything from firefighting to welding, to AI to digital media that at age 18 have multiple life options.
It's sort of like the two go together in some ways. If we didn't waste thousands of hours of math, no one would use. It's not as though we don't have productive white places to spend that time. Right? Yeah. It's just, I call it my more of less of effort, right? More of meaningful real learning that helps kids develop hireable skills and meaningful mindsets.
Less of these barbed wire fences we put in front of kids that just blocks 'em from pursuing. I love that
[00:51:54] Alex Sarlin: flipping of the multiple choice to choices for students. Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders, Ted Dintersmith. This has been a pleasure. Excellent. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech.
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