“I had nothing, no resources,” Defreese said. “I built the curriculum from scratch.” 

Though Defreese was the lead teacher in her 11th- and 12th-grade English classes — designing and delivering lessons, grading student work and offering feedback — she was not operating alone. Technically, she was still an apprentice. Her first year in Beech Grove was part of a partnership with local Marian University, a residency program where she’d agreed to be the “teacher of record” at the school while still receiving training and taking courses to earn her master’s degree in teaching. 

During her first year, Defreese had both a mentor teacher at the high school plus professors at Marian providing her with ongoing coaching and training.

Marian professors said the design of the program, which began in 2019, was intended to increase the skill set of new teachers by exposing them to the research on learning, but also to get teachers “on their feet” and into classrooms sooner. “We have a teacher shortage,” said Karen Wright, director of residencies and clinical experiences at Klipsch Educators College at Marian. The one-year residency, she said, “gives an opportunity for us to truly partner with our community as well as fully train our candidates.”

It covers the $21,000 tuition for a new teacher’s master’s degree, plus provides a living stipend that ranges from $18,000 to $39,000, depending on teacher qualifications.

Local schools and the university see the arrangement as a win/win: understaffed schools get qualified teachers into classrooms quickly, and new teachers get ongoing coaching and support to hone their skills.

Marian University is one of a growing number of programs overhauling how teachers get trained, moving away from short, uneven practical experiences in classrooms to something more closely resembling a medical residency. Residents do more of the day-to-day work of a licensed teacher but in a more junior position, under the supervision of more experienced teachers. 

Apprentice teachers take education courses at night and on weekends while spending their days working directly with students, through tutoring and academic intervention as well as full-time teaching. And unlike traditional programs, apprentice teachers often get paid for their time.

Though the number of residency, apprenticeship and mentorship programs is hard to quantify, experts say the model is not just in university programs, but in non-traditional, alternative certification and “” programs as well. 

Program leaders say longer residencies are happening in part due to the profession’s rising demands and changes in the field. Some residency programs focus on specific targets, like equipping teachers with the research— such as on the science of reading —  to understand how learning works; others look to create a more diverse workforce or address chronic teacher shortages. 

The apprenticeship model has promise, said Suzanne Donovan, executive director of the incubated at the National Research Council. Programs like SERP — the Strategic Education Research Partnership — are looking to add a research element to new teacher residency programs, making early teaching look much more like young doctors training in a research hospital.

“I’m convinced it’s the thing that could make education a system that continuously improves in the way that,” she said. 

New teachers now outnumber any other group

improving student teaching is one of the most efficient ways to strengthen student achievement and teacher retention overall. Over the last 30 years, novice and first-year teachers have grown to make up the of the workforce, researchers say, outnumbering teachers who’ve worked for five, 10 or any other number of years or more.

According to a 2017 analysis, about 7% of all teachers, or 245,000 out of 3.5 million, are either first-year or novice teachers. In 1987, by contrast, those just entering the field made up 3% of the teacher workforce. 

Since new teachers tend to be less effective than experienced ones, and leave in higher numbers, especially the that work in high-poverty schools, the student teaching experience becomes critical to success. Teachers in training who have positive student teaching experiences with effective, experienced mentor teachers to teach. 

But according to a 2023 report from EdResearch for Action, many state regulations come up short, offering bare minimum requirements ranging in quality. Only 27 states require at least 10 weeks of student teaching under a mentor teacher in the building; even fewer, the report says, mandate a student teacher work full-time during those weeks. Few programs set criteria for what student teaching should include. Mentor teachers often receive , and if they are paid at all, receive an average $200 to $250 stipend. 

 “The frequency and quality of support provided to teacher candidates by mentor teachers and field instructors vary significantly and are often inadequate,” researchers wrote.

“People are not paying enough attention to this issue,” Dan Goldhaber, director of the at the American Institutes for Research, told �鶹��Ʒ. “There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to making student teaching better.” 

Studies have shown, for example, that a for novice teachers reduced teacher attrition within the first few years. 

�ҴDZ���󲹲����’s links mentor teacher quality to how effective new teachers are once they get in front of students. While only about 5% of working teachers volunteer to be mentors, student teachers who do get highly effective mentor teachers perform substantially better once they’re in classrooms. 

“If you work with a very effective, two-standard-deviations-above-average mentor teacher, you end up looking almost like a teacher who has two years of teaching experience instead of a novice,” Goldhaber said.

But several obstacles stand in the way of higher quality training for novices, said Matthew Kraft, an education economist at Brown University. Teacher compensation continues to be a factor, and districts and universities can’t pay for long training periods like in medicine. No such thing exists for educators. 

“It’s alluring to characterize teaching as medicine, but we’re not going to have anything close to that until we have something that even approaches medical pay,” Kraft said. “Those things go together. You train many, many years to become a doctor, not only because it’s necessary, but because there are returns to that multi-year investment in your education.” 

Getting into the nitty-gritty of teaching 

Some new residency and apprenticeship programs are paying more attention to breaking down the steps of teaching. They’re spending more time on research and practical tools in the way new doctors practice the “how” while learning the “why” of treating patients. 

When professors overhauled the student teaching program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in 2020, school of education dean Douglas Cost said they needed better measures to know whether their clinical teacher training was doing a good job preparing teachers for the classroom. Teacher licensure was the bare minimum.

“Accreditation is an important goal,” Cost said. “But it doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of teaching. Understanding the science behind learning has given us a real lever to begin thinking about what makes a good teacher.”  

Cost and colleagues adopted , an evidence-based educator curriculum focused on improving student learning. It gives new teachers specific techniques like connecting students’ prior knowledge to what they’re learning, or how to make sure all students are thinking about the material. 

“Our professors gave us a template for designing our lesson plans, based on prior knowledge, gaps in knowledge, how to get students up to speed who might have gaps,” said Sarah Cardoza, a former resident and social studies teacher at Wasilla High School in Wasilla, Alaska. “What do you want students to know, and how do you know if they know it? It takes that simple concept and gives you a roadmap for it.” 

Cardoza said her first year as a resident teacher, her class had eight students with mandated special education support, three English language learners and several Ukrainian refugees  — a lot for a new teacher to handle. 

“I appreciated having a plan for how you are going to handle those situations when everybody’s needs are so different,” she said.

New teachers often don’t have the experience to know how to execute these techniques in a classroom full of students, said Zach Groshell, an independent coach and teacher trainer in Seattle, Washington. Giving them step-by-step specifics — like how to gather students on the rug in an organized way or how to capture attention with a simple arm gesture — might seem basic, but can make the overwhelming first days of teaching much more manageable. 

“The generalities of ‘build relationships,’ ‘have a positive classroom climate,’ ‘plan your lessons effectively,’—they’re just too nebulous and vague for new teachers to act on them,” Groshell said. “You need to get more specific.” 

A  ‘gradual release’ to full teaching responsibility 

Traditional student teaching offers new teachers two stark realities: practice lessons in controlled environments, and then full responsibility in a classroom of students. But residency models emphasize “gradual release” to full independence, especially in hard-to-staff areas like special education. 

“My first year as a teacher, I cried almost every day,” said Geri Guerrero-Summers, a special education teacher at Mariner High School in Everett, Washington. New teachers went from “you’re going to observe” to “jump right in,” she said. “Student teaching was unpaid. … It’s really a rough type of process in becoming a teacher.”

Guerrero-Summers now works as a mentor teacher with the Washington Education Association’s , the first teachers’ union to step into training and licensing teachers. Originally funded with federal pandemic relief money, the union residency launched in 2023 and has recently obtained status as a registered apprenticeship program with the U.S. Department of Labor, which comes with an investment of $3.4 million. 

“We strive to make sure our residents are classroom ready, no matter where they’re placed,” said Jim Meadows, dean and director of educator career pathways center at WEA.

Future educators begin with 18 weeks working as a paid assistant in special education classrooms, often called a paraeducator, followed by seven weeks of classes, finishing with 36 weeks of clinical rounds, slowly taking over responsibilities as full-time teachers. 

Apprentices spend time in a variety of special education settings and age groups. The residency was created to address a specific challenge, an of special education teachers in Washington state. A found that 1.5% of special ed teachers were unqualified to teach, nearly three times the state average for other types of teachers. in the state make up more than all other vacancies—including STEM teachers and English language teachers—combined. 

Gradual release has been critical for learning the detailed skills of a special educator, said current resident Beck Williams. For example, writing, reading and interpreting Individualized Education Programs, which lay out a student’s classroom supports and accommodations and their learning goals, are covered in coursework but look much different when working with families and young people.   

“In special education teacher training, there’s not enough practice with IEPs and parent interaction,” said Williams’ mentor teacher, Angela Salee. Special education teachers often have to play several roles in IEP meetings, advocating for the student’s best interest while explaining accommodations to other teachers, administrators and families. 

In Mississippi, where have a teacher shortage, alternative licensure programs like the Mississippi Teacher Corps offer two-year residencies and accompanying master’s degrees to get more teachers up to speed as quickly as possible. 

Residents jump right into classrooms and start teaching summer school. They plan lessons and figure out classroom management, all under mentors and supervisors, right away. 

“Part of the difficulty of teaching is that you can’t fully prepare someone for the classroom,” said corps director Joseph Sweeney. “So part of it is that experience they need in the classroom. You have to get them on their feet to show them what it’s like.”

On a recent afternoon, Caroline Able, a first-grade teacher at North Frederick Elementary School in Frederick County, Maryland, sat in a small office with her principal, Tracy Poquette, carefully practicing the next day’s math lesson.

Able, who is in her third year teaching, walked through each step, demonstrating how she was going to present comparisons between two numbers, then what students would do. She sometimes stopped to focus on granular details: Should she go over math vocabulary words like sum and difference beforehand, or will her students remember what they mean? Should students write down problems and answers in notebooks, or on mini-whiteboards?

Poquette recommended the whiteboards. “You’re going to ask them to hold them up,” Poquette coached Able, miming holding a whiteboard in the air. “Then you can see their answers, and how they got to that. Every student is responding.” 

Giving students multiple chances to “respond,” or provide answers, is a learning strategy , and part of why Able is here — to ensure that she’s incorporating evidence-based practices into her teaching. The sessions are meant to accelerate student learning and take some of the guesswork out of becoming an effective teacher, part of a larger district plan to incorporate research from the fields of neuroscience, educational psychology and cognitive science — often referred together broadly as the ‘science of learning.’

Frederick County, situated about 50 miles north of Washington, D.C., and 50 miles west of Baltimore, is a diverse district , and one of only a handful to use learning science research to try to improve schools at scale. Launched in 2015, it’s the centerpiece of a school improvement plan, and leaders say the goal is to raise academic achievement overall, as well as shrink stubborn gaps between more advantaged students and their less advantaged peers. 

“As a district, we’ve been talking about achievement gaps for a long time,” said Margaret Lee, Frederick County’s director of organizational development who has led the charge toward the science of learning. “I’ve seen it in every role that I’ve had, always looking at what could make the difference. Like every district in America, every silver bullet that people thought up had been peddled to us. It started to frustrate me that none of these things were making a difference, and that was a catalyst that led us here.” 

The district is seeing steady progress in a positive direction, even when accounting for pandemic-related learning loss. Third-grade , for example, on the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program test, rose from 49.5% proficient in 2018, to 60% proficient in 2023 — 12 points above the state average. In math, students from disadvantaged groups have also seen steady gains. African-American third graders were 38% proficient in 2018, but rose to 43.8% by 2023; over five years, low-income Title I third graders slowly grew from 32% to 37.6% proficient. 

Amid a of learning science and a spotlight on curriculum reform, experts are beginning to look to districts like Frederick County to gauge whether it can be a model for academic improvement. Unlike more common state plans reforming how , or increasing support for struggling students, the Frederick County plan is tackling learning as a whole — across subjects and grades — to systematically alter the paradigm of how teaching and learning happens throughout its schools.

Training adults on how the brain learns

Frederick County’s plan turns on a single premise: who work with kids don’t know how the brain learns, and haven’t been exposed to the body of research on which teaching practices are more likely to support it. 

that applying cognitive science principles and strategies to classrooms are “significant factors affecting rates of learning and its retention in many everyday classroom situations,” with certain caveats regarding the limitations of what scientists currently know about when and where to implement them. But within universities, scientific research on learning has historically been separate from teacher training, and misunderstandings about how learning happens are common in the field of education. They’ve led to such disproven ideas as children having “,” like being a “visual” or “kinetic” learner, or using the to teach reading, prompting students to try to guess at unfamiliar words using context clues like looking at pictures. 

The district has made educating faculty and staff on cognitive science a top priority. In 2017, Frederick County formed a partnership with and began training teachers, instructional coaches and leaders in the , including an understanding of how memory works and its pivotal role in academic learning; creating classroom environments that reduce obstacles and distractions while maximizing student memory; and creating effective ways to test whether students have learned the needed material.

The training homed in on how to translate findings from cognitive science and educational psychology into classroom practice, including in learning new material, meaning direct instruction heavily guided by the teacher, and why students need to understand what they read and form connections to new learning. Classroom changes also include specific learning strategies like retrieval practice and interleaving, in which teachers go back to learned material in multiple ways, spaced out over time, which has been students’ memory of what they learned. 

The training has changed the way the district is approaching content subjects like math. Stacy Sisler, a secondary math curriculum specialist for Frederick County, credits increased knowledge of learning research with steady gains middle schoolers have seen in math across the district. She first learned about the science of learning through the district training, and admits she was initially reluctant to adopt the changes. The more she learned, however, the more Sisler began to think the research made sense, and was applicable to every math classroom.

“As I started to learn more and gain a deeper understanding, then it became — how does instruction change because of this?” Sisler said. “We don’t just say it and it magically happens, so what does that actually look like?” 

Under her leadership, curriculum and instructional practices were re-designed to better reflect the research. Middle school math teachers have been trained in practices like teaching math more directly using example problems, checking student work multiple times during class time to gauge student understanding and incorporating more math practice both into each lesson and across lessons. 

Lee said even when considering how hard it often is to pinpoint what caused learning gains, the instructional changes coincided with significant improvements for students in Frederick County. Over five years since implementing the changes, middle school math students’ benchmark assessments have grown, in some schools by as much as 20%, especially among students of color and English learners. Over the same five-year period across the state of Maryland, students of color and English learners’ math proficiency has declined. In 2023 for example, only 8.2% of Black middle school students were proficient in math, down 8 percentage points from 2018. 

‘Using the time we do have differently’

New teachers across the district are onboarded in a three-year science-of-learning coaching program, which includes lesson coaching like first-grade teacher Caroline Able’s, but also group study. The aim is to give new teachers evidence-informed knowledge and tactics to decrease some of the trial-and-error that comes along with being a beginner. 

First-year eighth-grade math teacher Elizabeth Sypole’s monthly training is currently focused on evidence-based classroom routines that foster students’ attention.

Sypole has learned techniques like , a simple hand motion followed by a pause meant to help students get quiet quickly. Previously unaware of the technique, Sypole said it has been instrumental in her classroom management. “Literally within two days of doing it, everybody is quiet. It’s so much less stressful than trying to get everybody to quiet down. They know exactly what to do now and it’s just the routine.” 

Leaders get the training, too — principals, assistant principals and supervisors are focused on equity, and how schools can eliminate learning gaps between groups of students. Kent Wetzel, the district’s leadership development specialist, trains leaders in researcher , which include presenting new material in small, manageable steps and providing extra support for students if the task is especially difficult. The idea is to make learning as accessible as possible to everyone. 

The training, book studies and coaching sessions focused on the science of learning make up the heart of the district’s professional development, and therefore don’t require tons of extra funding or extra time for educators and leaders outside their contract hours, said Lee. In the past, professional learning brought in from outside vendors were “one-off” learning experiences not tied to any bigger picture or goal. Now all professional learning must meet a set of district standards for being “evidence-informed and equity-driven,” ensuring the entire district is swimming in the same direction. 

“We haven’t made extra time, we are just using the time we do have differently,” Lee said. 

While much of the district training is mandatory—like district-wide professional development and leadership training—other parts are optional or opt-in, like teacher book studies and principal coaching. The district is hoping that by making the science of learning training something gradual that takes hold naturally, it will win buy-in from the most experienced staffers over time because it was not a one-and-done push. 

Bernard Quesada, the veteran principal at Middletown High School, has embraced the science of learning approach to teaching. He said the organic approach and long-term picture has been key to its success at his school of mostly accomplished, veteran teachers. 

“When these things become mandates, and schools have to comply, you get a lukewarm reception,” Quesada said. “Schools get initiative fatigue.” 

Middletown teachers have adopted the new learning, Quesada said, because administrators have been intentional to connect the research to what teachers are already doing well. Quesada quoted learning researcher and retired University College London professor — a speaker he heard at a recent science of learning conference. 

“Wiliam said, ‘There’s no next new, big thing. It’s a lot of old, small things that work and are boring,’” Quesada laughed. “That’s about as true a statement as I’ve heard in my life.”

‘Guilty of chasing the next greatest thing’ 

On the other side of the country, in rural Delta County, Colorado, teachers are working on asking students better questions to get them thinking stronger and deeper — moving beyond basic factual answers to more “how” and “why” questions that require students to think not just about the answer, but how they got there.  

Like Frederick County, the small southwestern Colorado district with one-quarter English language learners and 65% low-income students has been training all their teachers and school leaders in the science of learning. Also like Frederick County, the district has taken a “no-silver-bullets” approach and has revamped professional learning, putting learning research at the center, with deep dives for teachers and leaders into cognitive science principles like “,” a technique where teachers design lessons that require students to evaluate, provide reasoning and detailed explanations for learned material. 

The district’s science of teaching and learning lead, Shawna Angelo, said she’s looking to help teachers “align how the brain learns with how we are delivering instruction.” 

The focus on effortful thinking was supported by , an organization that has worked for nearly a decade to improve teaching by getting the scientific principles of learning into more classrooms.  

Executive Director Valerie Sakimura sees districts like Frederick County and Delta County as models for improving academic achievement in more school systems across the country. “The priority for our work is helping teacher preparation programs and partnering districts trying to support teachers around the science of learning,” she said. “Our particular focus is aspiring and early-career teachers.” 

Deans for Impact is also brokering partnerships between school districts and local universities, offering coursework and training on cognitive science principles for student teachers. Teacher training facilities as varied as the and are breaking down the longstanding barrier between teacher training and research science, teaching future educators about how learning happens long before they step into a classroom. 

Frederick County has partnered with Hood College, where many local teachers get their degrees, to design coursework and provide instruction based on the science of learning for student teachers. District instructional coaches and mentor teachers work with teachers in training as well, giving them a chance to watch evidence-informed techniques in action and practice them in their student teaching.

Michael Markoe, deputy superintendent for Frederick County, said through all this work, the district is trying to create a throughline, where all teachers, coaches, principals — everyone is moving in the same direction, speaking the same language, all based on the research. When school leaders recently inquired about personalized learning, for example, where students progress and master subjects at their own pace, Markoe reminded them that the district is, for the time being, focused on only one thing: evidence of effectiveness. 

“I’ve been in education almost 30 years. I’ve been guilty of chasing the next greatest thing,” he said. “If we are going to advance personalized learning, we have to see the research behind it and ensure it’s the right thing for our children.” 

Getting the entire district on board is long, slow work. Because there are no mandates, some schools haven’t embraced the science of learning, or have chosen to focus on other priorities, despite leadership’s wholesale commitment to the methodology. 

But Lee, the district’s organizational developmental director, isn’t deterred.  

“I compare it to moving an aircraft carrier. To move the ship, you are making lots of tiny moves in the same direction. If you spin a wheel in a school system, you will throw people off the ship,” she said. “Public education isn’t patient. Everyone wants to fix it tomorrow, but those things don’t work.” 

How can this persistently be so? How is it that children are so thoroughly, exhaustingly curious … but so many schools feel that they need to cajole, coax, even trick their students into learning? 

Perhaps the problem stems from a misunderstanding of how human curiosity works. In their new book, , co-authors — and identical twins — American University associate professor of philosophy Perry Zurn and University of Pennsylvania professor of bioengineering, physics and astronomy Dani S. Bassett offer a reframing that could help educators dissolve their frustrating paradox. The book is an outline of curiosity as relational, as a connecting function instead of the more traditional view, what Zurn and Bassett call an “acquisition” function.

Clearly that has implications for school, other learning settings, and curricula — for, as they put it, “the architecture of what is learned and the arrangement of learners in the process.” 

This article has been edited for clarity and length.

�鶹��Ʒ: I’m wondering just as best you can, can you describe relational curiosity for a layperson? What does it mean to compare curiosity to edgework?

Dani S. Bassett: So for a long time, curiosity has been studied as information-seeking in the sciences. Neuroscientists are particularly interested in understanding what is happening in the brain when people are curious. One of the current challenges is that we have trouble figuring out which piece of the brain is related to curiosity specifically versus motivation, attention, or, say, excitement about particular kinds of information. There are so many sub-processes in the mind and in the brain that are used in the process of curiosity that it is very difficult to figure out what it is we are actually studying.

Perry Zurn: Meanwhile, there’s a debate in educational theory about motivation versus interest, for example, and which one is actually the thing that’s more aligned with curiosity, and therefore with learning — hopefully. So there’s just a lot of stuff that we assume is related, but how it’s related isn’t clear.

I’m trained in philosophy. One thing I notice when I read over philosophical theories of curiosity, is that typically curiosity is considered (much like in the sciences) on an acquisitional model: If I want to know something, I want to gain knowledge of that thing. I want to acquire knowledge, facility or skill with that thing. This characterization appears over and over again, and there’s some usefulness to it? I want my kid to learn their letters, their numbers. You acquire, you gain a facility with these very specific tools or symbols.

So the characterization is useful, but it’s really limited. What we argue in the book is that what’s more fundamental to understanding how curiosity works is not its capacity to acquire any one piece of information, but rather to connect information that we currently have with information that’s new, or to make connections between pieces of information we already have.

In the book you explore the implications that this reconceptualization of curiosity has for reimagining education. What are some concrete ideas that teachers, schools, and policymakers can use to facilitate this kind of relational curiosity?

Zurn: We write about styles of curiosity extensively in the book. There’s a presumption that curiosity looks one particular way in a classroom. Someone curious asks a lot of questions. They might sit at the front if they have the chance. They maintain eye contact and seem eager, etc. But this image of curiosity really doesn’t do justice to all the ways in which curiosity actually is expressed in humans. We need a much larger palette of curious behaviors that educators can recognize and encourage in their students.

I think this is increasingly relevant given the rise of anxiety and depression in our country and among our students. But that’s just one reason. Students with learning differences and neuro-atypicalities fill our classrooms with all kinds of different curious behaviors. Thinking about styles of curiosity can help us better understand and support all of those students.

Sure. So it’s a case against tracking and for educators attentive to diversity and aiming for personalized learning opportunities. And, of course, the big question is: How do you do that structurally? What’s the lever you pull to shift the mindsets and behaviors of millions of teachers?

Bassett: I think there is also a place for changing the way that we structure textbooks or classroom materials, because I think those materials themselves are emphasizing or supporting certain kinds of curiosity. They’re also emphasizing certain kinds of knowledge, and often it’s not the connective knowledge that one could emphasize.

Instead, they frame learning like building a wall of bricks. You have this piece of information that you add onto this piece and then you add on this piece, and then you stack them just so until you have a wall.

Alternative materials would try to pull in links that help expand the child’s mind in new and different ways, to stretch them to build different kinds of knowledge architectures. So I do think that there may be a place for altering the education of teachers, but we also need to change the materials that you give them.

You each have young children, right? How are you connecting your work with that work, that joy, that fulfillment of raising a kid? You can’t write a book about curiosity and also spend time with the toddler without seeing the links, right?

Bassett: So my kids are 11 and 8, both in elementary school. For me, it’s taken a while to recognize what it is that they are most excited about reading, and put aside my own preconceptions about what good literature is. In the book, we emphasize that we need to notice and follow what the child is desiring and how the child’s mind wants to move. I’ve had to stretch myself to engage certain reading materials I wasn’t expecting to.

You’re talking about , right?

Bassett: [laughs] Yes. And . And . And .

Zurn: I have a toddler and we’re currently touring preschools. It’s terrifying how some of them are super gadget-focused. They’re putting each kid in front of an individual iPad screen at their little individual desk — and for hours. And then there’s the complete opposite: your kid plays outside, with other kids, for eight hours a day with very little direction. Kids just explore their bodies and the world and each other. 

Dani and I were homeschooled. We were given immense freedom to direct our education and follow our interests and much of our learning happened in the great outdoors. 

When I think about my kid, I want that connective approach to curiosity. I want education to be individualized, but not individual. I want it to be attuned to the individual differences of each student, but not to create isolated learners — isolated from each other, from themselves, and from the natural world around them. That’s what I’m looking for.

[Speaking of the connective approach to curiosity], it isn’t as though there’s a truth, a fact of the matter out there that we didn’t know until we got curious and went out and got it for our storehouse of facts. Rather, it’s that we have a series of knowledge networks that we wander through life with that work more or less well, but they’re clearly not perfect. They’re just good enough to get through the day… until we encounter something new that prompts us to add, update and revise, right?

Zurn: Right. Curiosity becomes this capacity to connect, and in a greater sense to build knowledge architectures, those ways that all of our knowledge hangs together in our head in some way. And those architectures are unique to each one of us, because each of us knows different things, but they also tend to be socially curated. They depend on where you live, both the country you live in, but also your specific neighborhood, even who you hang out with.

You will know or believe you know a certain set of things, and they will constitute the stars in your sky, the constellations around which you start to navigate your world.

You have those preconceptions, those habits of mind that you use to make sense of things, and then — suddenly, inevitably — they don’t work to make full sense of something.

Zurn: Right. So it’s important to think about the flexibility of our knowledge networks. How do they grow? How do they move? How do they change? How do they respond? How are they responsive?

Bassett: My background is in physics and in physics, you can build different sorts of structures that have different functions. Compare the Eiffel Tower and a nearby telecommunications tower. If you squint your eyes, those two things look similar. But if you think about the actual pattern of the scaffold, they’re really different. And the differences in the scaffold impact how flexible or rigid the system is, and also how much space it takes up in the physical world.

Now, take those ideas back into the mind. What network structures could we build in our minds that are relatively rigid versus more flexible? Some folks have knowledge networks that make it feel like the world is more rigid than it perhaps is. Others build networks with some gaps or holes, with more morphing as they move through life. If you hold the connections between ideas more tenuously, understanding with some intellectual humility that there’s more that you don’t know … then you’re allowing for these spaces that can then change with you as you grow.

Zurn: So how do we facilitate flexible learning among our students? We don’t want to say, “Here’s how it all works,” or, “This is the stuff you have to know,” and “It’s always been this way.” No. We want to show the stories about how we’ve thought about this differently, how it’s changed, what are some of the ongoing questions. To show how we hold the tension between something that we’re learning now, whether it’s in math, the social sciences, or art history, with another perspective from another region of the globe, for example, or with other mythologies about what the world is and how it works.

A lot of educators talk about how important it is to fail, and for failure to be OK. Well, in a similar way, I think part of facilitating learning is facilitating a familiarity and a comfort with unlearning, with realizing, “Oh, I don’t think I think that anymore. In fact, I have a totally different question now.” That’s a part of what it is to learn! It’s that moment of transformation, where the way in which everything hung together for you just fell apart. It can be scary and hard! But if you can get comfortable with that, I think, it has great implications for your learning in general.

And for our social and political context these days! Where so many folks dig in their heels and refuse to consider ways of seeing the world differently, or the history of the Earth differently.

There must be a social aspect of relational curiosity, right? That is, curiosity isn’t just about investigating our relationship to the past, but also about exploring how “here’s how it all works” is also embedded in networks of power right here and now.

Bassett: When we are curious we are often curious with another person or about another person or someone else is supporting our curiosity or policing our curiosity. The connection between two people is very relevant for understanding our personal experiences of curiosity. The same is true for students in the classroom.

But that’s just the start. It’s not just about interactions between two people. It’s about broader social networks — inside the classroom, in our lives, at home — that impinge upon, or support, or contribute to, or change the kind of curiosity that we engage in. Think of it like mentoring: we see a kind of curiosity in somebody else. We watch their mind move from idea to idea. We watch how they ask questions, and we think, “Oh, I want to think that way.”

The more kinds of curiosity that a person can observe through their social network, the more they can pull the bits that they like, and that they want to emulate. That can create, I think, a richer experience for students and adults alike.

Zurn: I like to talk about curiosity “formations.” Curiosity takes particular shapes: how we come up with a question, why we think it is justifiable, what kind of methods we pursue in order to answer it, and then what we think it may be useful for or contribute to. How you answer those questions will show you the shape or the contours or the formation of your curiosity.

Think about the ways in which we teach students to write essays — the really basic kind, the five-paragraph essay. This is how you pose a question, this is how you fill out an answer to it, this is how you rehash what you’ve shown in the writing.

Or how to solve or first formulate specific algebraic equations. How we ask the questions hints at how we’ll unravel the answers. We are constantly functioning within these different curiosity formations, and many of them are inherited in some way. Typically that’s because they have been especially useful.

But then it gets sticky. Useful for whom? A lot of times it’s for most humans in a particular geographical region. But also for those who’ve had the upper hand socially and have rewritten history to serve their ends. For instance, English itself didn’t just drop from the sky. It’s developed amidst a lot of linguistic policing over time.

So, we have to gain facility with those inherited forms of curiosity in order to succeed in the world socially, but we also need to be critical of them. That’s part of how we can break the fields open, and anyone of any age can do that.

In this week’s episode, Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner talk about one of the biggest things to come out of the pandemic: the groundswell movement from parents and others to finally teach children how to read in line with the best evidence from the science of reading. And they express misgivings of whether a legislative approach that bans certain teaching approaches will ultimately help each and every student learn — and ponder the downsides of such an approach.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Horn: Hey Diane. I’ve been thinking and hopefully I’m not jumping into this thought prematurely, given we still have a couple of podcasts left in this season, but I can’t believe that the school year is nearing its end. You must have a lot of mixed emotions right now.

Tavenner: Well, it’s definitely not too early, Michael, and this is the season in the year when it feels as if it’s already over because we’re planning for next year, even though this one isn’t finished yet and it always feels that way. It’s a little bit weird for me this time around since, as you know, I don’t have another school year in my current role. And so yeah, I’m feeling, I use the feelings app, how we feel, and so I’m trying to think of the right adjectives here. I’m feeling a little bit unmoored.

Horn: That’s a good one.

Tavenner: Feeling exhilarated, I would say by watching Summit’s new leaders really plan for the future and also thinking about what I’m going to be doing. So it’s super interesting, Michael, because pair that with the fact that we started this podcast in a time of incredible uncertainty and as it turns out at the start of the pandemic, although we didn’t realize just how long that would actually be, we thought it would be a lot shorter. And we started this podcast because we both believe that the disruption caused by all that was happening in the world created a real opportunity for all of us to rethink schools in a much more profound way than we had been up to that point. But both of us were, and continue to be striving for more urgency I would say, and boldness in the redesign of schools.

And I think that’s why we’ve continued having conversations and it’s why this season we’ve been toggling between getting really into the weeds about how innovation actually happens in schools and zooming out to the sort of hot topics and issues that are either driving or impeding that change. And I’m pretty sure that one of those hot topics has been nagging you for a bit. I know we’ve been talking about it for a while and so I think today might be the day. Let’s hear it. What do you want to talk about?

Horn: All right, well let’s do it. I’ve been thinking a lot about the so-called reading wars, and this is a topic that plays a big role frankly in the school interruptions and upheavals of the past few years. And it’s something we have mentioned before in the show, but I wanted to dive a bit deeper into it, but from a slightly different angle, from I think where a lot of the coverage has been if you’re game.

Tavenner: Well, yeah, so I won’t bury the headline, Michael. I’m totally game to talk about reading, always game to talk about reading and learning to read and how we teach reading. And quite frankly, everything about reading. I love reading. And in fact, I grew up in a preschool that was literally in my house where tons of kids learned to read and later because… I became a reading teacher during the summers when I wasn’t teaching in my schools. And so the only part of this topic that I don’t like is the “reading wars” title and quite frankly, it’s just because I’m just tired of having wars in education of any sort and especially when there really shouldn’t be anything to fight about when it comes to reading. And so if you promise we can have a scene conversation that doesn’t paint this as a war, let’s do it.

Horn: Well, I love to do that and I’m glad we’re going to dig in and I will unfortunately frame it a few more times as reading wars, although your point is a very good one. But in essence there has been this tug of war that has gone on for years between… and I’m going to generalize here, two camps, broadly speaking, there’s one that wants students to learn how to decode written words on the page through learning phonics and phonemes and the like. And historically they were labeled the “phonics people,” but more recently they’ve been called the science of reading people because they aren’t just about phonics Diane, as you know, although that is a critical piece, phonics is just one piece of this branch of learning how to read and the science of reading is often thought more of a rope where you’re braiding together a variety of strands. So you’ve got phonics, yes, but you’ve also got things like phonological awareness decoding and the like as part of a branch of this rope that’s thought of as word recognition.

And then on the other branch you have language comprehension, which are things like background knowledge, vocabulary, language structure, and the like. And there’s actually been some really recent new research. This is timely, this conversation just showcasing how important background knowledge is and when you weave these strands together, you get someone who’s able to read and comprehend. Now you as the reading teacher, you’re probably sort of saying you’re simplifying at the moment, but that’s basically the gist of it.

Tavenner: It is.

Horn: And so that’s one sort of camp if you will. On the other side, you’ve had the folks who were historically labeled the whole language people, but they were those who wanted to make sure reading was joyful and interesting and they used methods like three queuing, which essentially asks readers to figure out words based on context and nearby images and the like. Now there’s a deeper commentary here I think about how we as adults probably shouldn’t assume that things that we as adults have automated into long-term memory may be boring to kids. They’re genuinely interested in cracking the codes of how adults do work and they want to get their reps in to perfect it. That’s not boring to them.

But I actually don’t want to go there per se because for a long time I’d argue Diane, that the research has actually been pretty clear that the so-called “science of reading camp” is the vastly superior way to learn how to read, and the “whole language camp,” what’s also been called “balanced literacy” in some quarters because of the approach of one of the acolytes behind the method, it doesn’t actually teach kids how to decode and read and it is short-changing them. And the adherence to that whole language method has been almost criminal in terms of how it’s shortchanged millions of kids.

And this isn’t new, to be clear, Diane, it was clear to me reading the research on this stuff when I got into education before 2010. And as I’ve spent time in schools, it’s been equally clear to me over the 2010s if you will, that there were an egregious number of classrooms using things like Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study or Fountas & Pinnell’s Guided Reading and the like. Which to be clear, those resources have not been based on the evidence of how individuals learn to read.

Tavenner: First of all, I think you did a nice job of summarizing even at the high level, but I think what you’ve just shared is why I blocked the title “reading wars.” If this were an actual war or let’s take something a little bit less violent, a sports contest of some sort, the game is over. If you check the scoreboard, the learning science phonics team, they won a long time ago. The only thing I would add to your high level summary is that what muddies the water a bit about this is some people are able to learn to read without a phonics or science-based approach, if you will. And as a result, people point to those children or those people as evidence of efficacy of the whole language approach, which is why it’s important to highlight that what the evidence shows is that vastly more people are able to learn to read as children when given the phonics based approach versus the whole language method, which makes phonics a far superior choice for a public education system.

Because as a public education system that spends on average, and I’m going to be conservative here, about $12,000 per student per year, there is no question that with reading as perhaps I would argue the number one goal of the early grades of school, every kid should be able to read by third grade. And that just isn’t the case in America. We still have over a third of our students who are not proficient at reading by the time they’re entering fourth grade. And as we both know, everything from that point on and in education and learning is dependent upon one’s ability to read, which is why people get really, really fired up about this topic because we have the science, we have the money, we have the school time. Why in the world can’t all of our children read? It’s insane.

Horn: And your point is a really important one also on the nuance about the percentage who learn, frankly not through a whole language approach, but it just seems exposure to books of learning how to read and estimates vary. Somewhere between 30 and 40% can learn that way. I actually will circle back to that nuance because I frankly hate the one-size-fits-all way that we think that there’s somehow a best way to educate kids and it sort of plays into the problems I would argue more broadly with education research in our conversations. But even in this conversation, the whole language approach still I think would not make the grade. But like we said, none of this is new per se.

What became new, and this starts to root us in the pandemic is… well, a few years before the pandemic, 2017, Emily Hanford, an NPR reporter, started investigating how children learn to read and she authored a series of pieces and then ultimately put together an incredible podcast series called that brought to light, not just that teachers had been effectively duped and ed schools had been complicit, but also sort of how this all had happened, that these tons of classrooms were not using what the science was showing.

And then we had the pandemic and parents who had been growing concerned about their children not learning to read, got a firsthand view just into how their kids were being taught in Zoom and so forth, or better said, not taught to read. And they started going to school boards and then groups like the National Parents Union really rose up and started to hold superintendent’s feet to the fire. And I think it’s fair to say that those efforts, Emily Hanford plus the parents have really started changing the conversation in much of the country around how to teach reading in line with the current evidence.

Tavenner: Yeah, Michael and it’s not only the conversation, but there’s real action that is happening, which sometimes we hear a lot of talk but we don’t see action. And what we’re seeing on this front is a variety of moves being made in response to what feels like this sort of sustained and growing pressure from the public for something different in their schools.

Horn: Yeah, and this is where I want to start to go, but we should be clear, we still have a long way to go. There’s still millions of kids being taught using those materials I referenced earlier but we’re seeing progress, you’re right. Now there’s been a lot of work to train teachers using a variety of programs to undo what the ed schools have taught or didn’t teach them and I think we actually have to go farther because there are a lot of a adolescents, as you know, that don’t know how to read as a result of those misguided teachings. So much so that I think middle and high school teachers, frankly, they probably need to learn some of the science of reading as well so that they can teach it in certain cases. And of course some of the tools will be different. They’ll be age appropriate for teens and the like but I think that in many cases they’re going to have to help some of those adolescents build these skills to learn how to read so that they can learn all the other material that they’re trying to work through.

Tavenner: One of the things I find interesting about what you’re describing Michael, is how, in some ways what is going on… it just sounds a bit like leadership 101 as we’ve often… to digress from the reading part a little and to zoom out to the process, as we’ve talked about education in America, it’s totally decentralized. We’ve repeated that theme multiple times. The federal government actually has very few tools and relatively little power over what happens in states, counties, districts, and ultimately in school buildings and classrooms. And so unlike in other countries like Singapore or China where a federal mandate is handed down and literally the entire system turns on a dime to do whatever is being mandated, in the U.S., there isn’t ever a common initiative or priority.

And I guess the theory was that the federal secretary of education and department could perhaps provide that type of leadership, at least from a inspirational or bully pulpit type perspective but I’m not sure they ever have. And as things get increasingly politically polarized, they just can’t because someone’s always going to oppose them just to oppose them. And so I find it fascinating that a persistent journalist and parent advocates are somehow in some ways creating enough sustained public pressure to perhaps create a national priority around reading and every child that might drive meaningful action. It’s just really interesting to watch.

Horn: Yeah, I completely agree and I’m aware that two episodes in a row now, we’re doing a lot of sort of throat clearing before I get to the point but I want to make sure folks are clear about where we’re going because what you just described I think is an absolute great thing and I have some concerns, and it’s because it’s not just frankly that the state departments of education are reacting and now finally doing something and making significant changes. We’re also seeing state legislatures make some significant changes. And again, I want to be clear, according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper by a variety of authors, Clare Halloran, Claire Hug, Rebecca Jack and Emily Oster who everyone knows quite well, I suspect, they identified something really interesting. So the pop quiz for you is, Diane, do you know the only two states to have fully recovered their pandemic learning losses in reading?

Tavenner: Yep. Well, setting aside my disdain for the concept of learning loss, but putting in from my passion for reading, Michael, I do know this answer, but I honestly think it’s a bit of a rhetorical question for me and I don’t want to steal your thunder because this is honestly a bit surprising. So take it away.

Horn: And agree with you, learning losses is not the best phrase, but I think it’s the one that’s understood. So the two states that have rebounded fully are Mississippi and South Carolina. I’m going to let that sit in there for a moment. Mississippi and South Carolina, and they are perhaps not coincidentally in my view, the two states that in 2013 and 2014 passed science of reading laws. So now what we’re seeing Diane is that more states are putting in those laws, not just regulations or guidance to districts, but actual laws to restrict or mandate certain curriculum. And this is happening in a variety of ways throughout the country. There’s been a high profile to do around this. For example, in Ohio, the governor there really went to the mat on ending the teaching of reading instruction that doesn’t follow the best evidence on how to teach reading. And then unbelievably, the teacher’s unions there pushed back against them.

Horn: It’s still ongoing as we record this and in Connecticut, the teacher’s unions have also pushed back. So it is a swirl right now there. But the question I want to think through with you is this, is enacting policies to ban certain discredited teaching methodologies or mandating the ones where the evidence is strong. Is that a good idea?

Tavenner: Whew. It’s important to stay here for a beat because you just said some really important things I don’t want to skip over and I want to be really clear and start by just apologizing for my sarcasm around the gap closing. Look, I deeply admire what Mississippi and South Carolina have done in terms of serving their students just full stop. And I’m a bit more familiar with the work in Mississippi and in my view, it’s not surprising to see the results that they’re getting. They have had excellent student-centered leadership aligned with an honesty about where they were in terms of their outcomes and student performance and a vision for where they wanted to go. And they’ve done the hard work to align things and make real progress. And so I don’t want to take anything away from those efforts. And I also don’t want to just attribute it to legislation either because there was a whole bunch of other stuff going on there that lined up with it, but maybe legislation was the igniting factor.

And then you made the other comments about teacher union opposition in Ohio and Connecticut, and they’re completely relevant because how many times have we seen federal and state policies designed to support students completely fail in their objectives when they have what I will call the classroom door slammed on them and in their face by teachers who aren’t alike? And this takes us back to the title of reading wars. Like it or not, there are a lot of teachers in the U.S. who are not teaching a phonics-based approach or a science-based approach to reading. And that’s just a fact. And we need to say that that’s why we are where we are. And ultimately this is the thing that will have to change if we want every child in America to read. And I feel very confident that state’s policies alone aren’t going to magically change that, they will not magically get teachers to do these things. So now I’m just going to do a hard pivot and I think be nervous with you on top of all of it, I get very, very, very nervous about state policies mandating curriculum.

Horn: Yeah, and we’ve talked about this before, of course, back in Season 3, we had a couple episodes that we’ll link to, early on in the season about who decides what curriculum gets taught and some of the food fights around banning certain books and materials and such. And we were both skeptical then that having legislators weigh in on these sorts of things was a good idea. So we are nothing if not consistent I suppose, but here I’ll acknowledge it’s trickier because there’s been so much harm done to so many students, kids have really been screwed. And so I am sympathetic to folks like the National Parents Union or ExcelinEd that are going around pushing hard for laws to mandate the “science of reading.” If your kids are the ones that have been failed by the system, I think you’ll do anything, almost, to reverse this and put an end to it. And there are some great intentions behind it. And I found the arguments by the teachers unions against the practice really troubling to be candid, Diane.

Tavenner: Yeah, this is such an important point and there are others I know you will uncover, but this one deserves a moment. I would argue that one of the biggest challenges we have in our education system right now, and quite frankly in our country, Michael, is that people are so angry and frustrated and righteous about how government is doing things wrong, that they feel the only solution is to vote in sort of their people and put them in government and then to have those people mandate the views that they hold and their perspectives and their approaches and their beliefs in law. And I agree, this can feel tempting when kids have been so misserved and continue to be misserved. And when there are people in powerful government positions making decisions that we believe are doing harm to children, it’s natural to want to just replace them with someone who will just make the decision that we want them to make, that we believe in, and the type of legislation we’re talking about, which dictates very specific content to be taught or very specific methods to be used is autocratic.

There’s just no way around it. And it requires penalties to enforce these approaches and it inevitably will be legally challenged and subverted. And my point being is it leads to war, it leads to the title of this whole thing. And perhaps the biggest barrier to our schools serving our children is the adults and the adults being at war with one another. I know this isn’t the only reason to be uncomfortable with state level legislation, that’s this level of prescription, but I just think it’s worth us all pausing and asking ourselves if we feel comfortable with the idea that government can mandate exactly what is taught and how it is taught in every classroom, knowing that the people in government change and they’re not always going to align with your personal views and values. So I just think that that’s something we should all be thinking about.

Horn: No, and I think it’s a really good set of points, Diane, and that we should hold seriously and people who want to legislate or mandate or regulate whatever thing should hold that… four years later, there’s going to be someone else there and they’re going to do the exact opposite and we create this pendulum that’s I think very unhealthy for society. And I think on top of that, when you mandate specific curricula or ban certain content, you have one other set of problems that I’ll add on top of the ones that you just listed, which I think are all correct. And it’s this, which is science is not a static field. By definition, science is a learning process. We observe phenomena in the world, we do our best as humans to categorize them and then we do research to figure out what correlates with what, we create theories from hypotheses we’ve tested.

And then ideally, we all too often don’t do this because of our egos, but we observe anomalies to our theories which allows us to make them better. And these anomalies are the things that our theories can’t explain. And by using them over time, we move to understanding causality, like what factors actually cause the outcomes we desire, and then we can really start to strengthen the theory when we start to understand how different conditions or circumstances call for different approaches or actions because they’re different in some fundamental way. And you sort of highlighted this, that there’s a group of students who learn more, it seems through exposure than direct instruction. It seems that they don’t get harmed by direct instruction on phonics, but they can learn to read through exposure to books and words. Todd Rose actually talked to us about this in season one when he said that they’re essentially broadly speaking three dominant pathways to teaching reading based on a learner’s profile.

But here’s the thing, science is dynamic and so theoretically legislation can be as well, you just described how it could change, but in reality, as we know, it takes a long time for legislators to catch up with what’s emerging. I’m going to step outside of K-12 for a moment. We had the reauthorization there, the Every Student Succeeds Act, it’s now called in 2015, that was way overdue. Higher ed, I think the last time it was reauthorized was 2008 and we’re way overdue. So in these polarized times, legislation can be stultifying and very, very static, which is the opposite of that dynamic nature of science. And so I’m just not a huge fan of creating blunt policies frankly, as a matter of principle, that inhibits schools from taking the right steps for each child as their understanding on the ground improves and we see what each individual needs to make progress.

Tavenner: Michael, this is a totally different reason to dislike the legislative mandate, but I would argue an equally important one. It flies in the face of continuous improvement, which is something we talk about all the time here. And legislation by definition is slow. It was designed that way. And what we need to be doing in schools right now is moving fast to continuously improve. And it’s crazy to think that a policy that will likely never go away because they just don’t go away and probably won’t be changed for many, many years can stay relevant given how fast things can and should move in terms of what we’re learning about learning, it doesn’t make sense.

Horn: Yeah, I think that’s right. And frankly with AI and stuff like that, the insights we might gather could even just magnify significantly over the years ahead. So I think that leaves us with the question of what do we do? And I like the moves where states and commissioners of education in Mississippi have undertaken these multi-year efforts to really work with their educators on the latest in the science and improve the understanding on the ground of the evidence about how to teach reading. I love that they’re focused on implementation and operationalizing not just curriculum but building capacity really. And I love when districts put a firm stance on the ground that we’re not going to teach the junk that hasn’t worked anymore.

Tavenner: I really like these moves as well, Michael. And I think they are attuned to the reality of the situation. If school leaders and teachers do not understand and believe that teaching, a science-based approach to reading will first enable all of their students to read and second make them better teachers and schools, then they’re not going to change their practice. It’s just not going to happen. And so rather than fighting them, we need to respectfully meet them where they are and figure out how to change their hearts, minds and practices.

And I will say on the other side, teachers unions and teachers themselves can’t be a obstructionist about this, which I’m sad to say they often are. There are these longstanding sayings and approaches among teachers that I learned as a teacher like this too shall pass and just close your door and teach, which represent far too many teacher mindsets about an unwillingness to be on an improvement journey or in any way change their practice. And that mindset that what I do is good and right and it can’t be improved unless I decide it, it’s just not acceptable. And I think that we have to figure out ways to change that.

Horn: Yeah, and then they should be modeling learning for their students also. To go back to the policy perspective then more broadly rather than mandating the inputs, I would love policy that focused on outcomes, as in policy that should be very clear what you said earlier, which is that all students should master how to read and they can’t move fully on until they do. I quite like in concept anyway, what Florida did back in the day with a clear, can you read mastery bar for moving on after third grade, and my recollection is that didn’t stand, didn’t pass muster. And I do think in today’s worlds there are other ways you could do that. You can keep a child with their peers while still making sure they’re learning at the level right for them, and we don’t let them pass those, such a critical subject is basic reading, meaning decoding, fluency and so forth without real demonstrated mastery.

And we should put some real teeth into this and I’d like to see some real choice alongside it so that families who are trapped in options that aren’t working have other options and can create some accountability on the system so that they can go to places where their children can make meaningful progress. And I guess my theory, at least for the policy, Diane, is that if we’re strict on the outcomes, reading in this case, then we can free up schools to figure out the best ways to serve the individual students so long as the departments of education and elsewhere in the ecosystem are really building capacity in lockstep with the science of what we’re learning but I love your take on this.

Tavenner: OK, well I wasn’t with you and then I was with you and then maybe I wasn’t which is to say good policy is ridiculously hard to write and I’m very respectful of that fact. My fear, which comes from deep personal experience about a policy that makes reading absolute in that it turns into finding flaws in kids and doing harm to them versus incentivizing adults to do whatever it takes to find the ways that all kids can meet that reading bar because they sound so good on paper but in practice it’s been a pretty horrible to a ton of kids. That said, I’m with you in believing that we should all get clear and aligned on what I truly think is the most obvious, literally the number one most clear objective of public education and that is that every child should be a proficient reader before they are 10.

So what I like about what you’re saying is let’s all decide that that’s going to be true, period. Every child in America is going to read and then give more freedom for how that happens. And I say that cautiously because we know we want the freedom to be within science, but with clarity that failure is not an option. And now you know why I’m not a policymaker because can you imagine a build titled like failure is not an option, create your own pathway there.

Horn: We’ll have a different course on naming policies I guess for both of us. But I guess my last reflection off that is maybe that’s one of the reasons why giving families more choice is the accountability measure that maybe I’m most comfortable with against that backdrop, because it’s a less heavy-handed way or a less one size fits all way of creating that accountability alongside clear reports of here’s how your kid is doing and progressing on the path to mastery of reading. We have to be clear not to blame or label but to empower. And I think that’s the big focus where we’ll both be aligned is my guess.

Tavenner: Most certainly. The day I get a clear report on an assessment, I will jump for joy. We could spend a whole episode on that, but for now I think we might leave it there. But let’s turn to what are you reading, watching, listening to lately, Michael, as we wrap up?

Horn: Yeah, so I’ve got to read a couple books that are in pre-print on education stuff that have been fun, but I’m going to go a different direction. My wife and I went to the movie theater the other day. We were the only two people in the theater. It was so sad. And we watched the movie Air, which is the story of Michael Jordan signing with Nike back in the day. And such great actors and particularly actress. I’m a huge Viola Davis fan, but I will say the movie was good not great, Diane, but I enjoyed the time nonetheless. What about you?

Tavenner: Your time and your private screening, it sounds like. Well, Michael, at the risk of being way too trendy, which is uncomfortable territory for me because I’m never there. We have started watching The Diplomat on Netflix and while we’re only two episodes in, I do see what all of the chatter is about and why everyone says you must watch this. It’s quite compelling and a really good watch. So highly recommended.
Horn: Awesome. Well once we get through Lasso that’s next step on our queue, so we will be right with you Diane. And with that, thanks to all of you for tuning in for this conversation and we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.