YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris

lines on the record: 46
first: 2024-12-06
most recent: 2024-12-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Story seven childcare programs, like this belief that teachers are against the system, or the system is slow, it's not true. You have to go in there with a clear vision, get everybody invested, train, upskill, coach, be maniacally get every single end user inspired because the teachers are inspired, their kids are going to be inspired.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A really hopeful note. I remember I was in a grad school class once, and the professor made a comment that social justice is like a barge. You're not going to really see it move much in your generation. You just got to keep working. You got to keep working in your grandchildren and their grandchildren. And I was like, no, we can get outcomes. We can get them fast. So after two years of presenting and sharing this vision to schools, we're in hundreds of districts in 38 U.S. states. We have tens of thousands we train every single day. So this belief that education can't change quickly. Chris, I forget the number. I think you said it was like 30 something childcare.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'd say it's a tragedy to deny a child access to high quality early childhood education, whether that's from a parent, a nanny, an au pair, a teacher. It's just a tragedy because you can't get those five years back in the child's brains just develop. And then essentially exposing ourselves to a sizable amount of catch-up that you just really can't do. And so what I'm seeing is it's really important for government leaders, for parents, anyone listening to this podcast to make sure that we're all committed to not only our children, but the children in our communities and making sure that they're getting the right access so that we can all take advantage of the American dream.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking about how their solutions actually solve those challenges. And so much of it really is just communication. The technology is there. We can do better. The tools are there. Frank Chen and Andreessa Horwitz often describes what we do in Venture Capital as the smartest minds give their view of the future and what it will look like. I hope the future of education looks a whole lot different than it looks now and has a lot more impact. And two of the areas that I think have enormous potential. One is better preparing students for school with the child care issue. And the other is we got to get better at STEM. It does happen to be where the world's going and the opportunity to continue to be a world leader in government and business and tech and everything else is going to be predicated on getting better at both of these. And we love supporting the efforts of these dynamic entrepreneurs to do that.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there's such an opportunity to bridge connections. And a lot of it is semantic, right? There are challenges that parents see for their children. They want to see more engaged students prepared for future jobs and have economic mobility. You see education district leaders and state leaders that want to address math and ELA achievement gaps. And you see policymakers that want to use policy to do that. And then on the other hand, you have entrepreneurs that have these incredible visions and solutions. Oftentimes the biggest gap in actually getting those solutions into the hands of those stakeholders that need them is just the way we talk about the solutions. And so that's really what I would urge is thinking about stepping out of the rhetoric that sometimes exists and really clearly defining problems that are trying to be solved. And then from the provider side, stepping into the shoes of all of those stakeholders.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we are building builders. The purpose of school is to build. Is to create, you talk about value creation, it's to figure out how you're going to create value. And for that, you have to help kids fall in love with the problems that they're going to dedicate their lives to. Me and Chris are sitting here All the time, not sleeping why? Because we fell in love with what we do. And there aren't enough moments where children get to fall in love”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who have no idea What they can do with their education. I'll share a few different disparate thoughts and then bring it together. In terms of my origin story, it started at MIT where I saw huge drop offs of women, students of color, students experienced poverty.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think asking what is the value or impact of a good education is like a vast ocean. I'll hone in on a couple things that Chris talked about. I ran and supported the college process in Boston and New York. And I With their personal statements Would ask them, what do you want to contribute to? What do you want to build? And kids could say music They could name five jobs. In the most sophisticated economy. In the world, the US economy. So we are graduating. Generations of children.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Childcare programs. And when I talk to parents, they're just so happy for these childcare providers because they're getting so much of a benefit by putting their kid in these programs. So it's such a clear win for everyone.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“90% of it develops in the first five years of their life. If everyone gets access to it, then so many more of these children will be able to go to the K-12 system and get better use of it and then essentially go on to be a productive American citizen, a productive folks in the workforce. And frankly, just live better lives. There's so much research that supports this. And so what we found is that the best way to actually achieve this in a capitalist society is to empower business owners to start these businesses, to create wealth for themselves, but also give back to the community. We work with probably about 30,000 childcare providers right now, and some of our childcare providers are earning over $2 million a year. We have childcare providers that are making $100,000, $200, $300,000. We have childcare providers buying homes in the Bay Area based on everything that they've done starting their own.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The K 12 system wasn't great, and they just had all these pretty poor outcomes, and there was a lot of crime and a lot of folks like selling drugs. They ended up going into the community and giving all of the children free access to child care out of people's homes Supported a lot of the teachers in the area to support the children. And over a 30 year period, Crime rate essentially went to zero. A lot of those children offered to give them scholarships to college and you found that I don't think any of the kids actually needed them because they did so well in the K-12 system and they were able to get their own scholarships. And so I went to go visit him. And he said, Chris, there's all of these”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big reason why I started this company is I had a couple of key moments leading up to starting it. One of them is I met a woman, Lorigana. At the tech conference, and she's a Harvard educ Pediatrician. And she decided to leave her career and start a childcare program in her community. She came to the conclusion that she could have a bigger impact running a childcare program than being a pediatrician. Another thing I saw is this. Named Harris Rosen. He runs the Rosen Hotels in Orlando, has made a good amount of money in real estate. And he noticed that a lot of the service workers in his hotel weren't putting their kids in early childhood education programs”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, you have yet to see a governor's webpage that didn't emphasize early education as one of the priorities. It does solve a whole lot of their long-term problems. Both these companies are selling into an eager audience.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Longstanding investments, whether it's districts or states in certain programs. And it can be hard because there are entrenched staff members inside of the agencies operating the programs that have always worked with these programs. And so there's a lot of infrastructure that's been built around the status quo. And then what's happening at the state level in reprogramming budgets ultimately helps to inform what we see at the federal level as well. So we're hoping that all of the state innovation and what we saw, for example, in the shift from no child left behind in terms of accountability to ESSA was that what states were doing actually helped to inform what the new version of the federal law looked like. The hope would be and what Governor Polis as chair of the National Governors Association would tell you with his big education initiative, which focuses on early childhood and K-12, is that what states are doing and leading on this?”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way Wonder School has approached these state partnerships is truly as a piece of the puzzle of solving this crisis of childcare, the fact that a number of the slots that you open up for childcare, parents that receive subsidies then access the childcare. And when the subsidies run out, then they're like, well, maybe we don't need to open more slots. And so Chris not only has to go in and advocate for a state partnership and help increase supply. But then in many cases also to advocate for increased subsidies so that then families can continue to have the demand and take the slots. And so I think you're really smart to think about the solution also amongst other solutions that help to solve a crisis. And then that comes off as very authentic to state leaders. And then Anarupa, I loved your point, the idea of like reprogramming budgets. There are”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“States are paying for a part of it. Education's a state mandate. But Title I through four is all federal funds, though that's the money that all of our districts currently use. So the feds also have a big role in supporting innovative solutions.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“K 12 operating budgets are typically what we use for the software, the services. There are other like plush funds and other CapEx budget sources, Title I through four that can be used for the hardware. But at the state level, I have not seen much price sensitivity at all, frankly. But going back to the question of outcomes, if we can deliver what we are endeavoring to deliver, which is I'm going to close your achievement gap in Algebra One, the number one predictor of future life wages, the brooking institute found it. It's a big problem. The US has been trying to solve. They will pay for that problem. We already put billions into this problem. So I don't think it's a money issue. I think it's an implementation issue. It's getting the right person to drive fidelity of implementation and get those outcomes. But you can get all those players in their roles and situated. I just have not seen price sensitivity at the state level that I have seen a bit at the district level, which we again, we're able to now supplement the funds that you don't have at the K-12 level with state funds. So it's a shared revenue model. Districts are paying for part of it.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason why I was convicted to start a company around this versus a nonprofit or another entity is unbeknownst to many, there's a lot of money in education. It goes to all kinds of tools. If you go to an average district, there's somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 ed tech tools being used. So the money's there. The big question is, how do you redirect it towards a strategy and really bring a cohesive vision? And that's what great entrepreneurs do.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are certainly networks of state leaders. So you've got the National Governors Association and you can look at who's really leading on education and workforce and child care issues within that organization. There's the National Conference of State Legislatures. And so you can start to see the leaders that are rising among their peers nationally and outspoken on certain issues. So that would be a way to start to identify where there might be a state based on leadership that would be good to focus on a lot of it is having conversations because the number of at bats you have increases the likelihood that you meet with a state leader that immediately catches the vision and says, let's go and let's move fast. It's a combination of paying attention to what's happening nationally, who is outspoken in terms of state legislators or governors on the issues that you're working on and getting in front of them because they're the influence.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are state leaders willing to take a risk that know that they have a problem that they need to solve. They don't want to wait around and pass it to the next governor that comes after them. And so really figuring out who those innovative leaders are, building relationships with them, understanding their challenges and articulating the solutions in the context of those challenges is really important. And then to Jeff's point about kind of land and expand, Once you have the first five states going, it starts to become a trend. And then the neighboring governors are all watching their PRC success.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a good question, and I've been doing this for 20 years, so it's kind of all I've focused on and worked on for a long time. We love data and companies that love data. And so first, identifying ideal customer, just like an indie industry, and then thinking about the characteristics and the market environment in which those customers are going to be able to make purchases is really key. So we like to do 50 state analysis looking at what makes for a favorable market environment and start to work with entrepreneurs to figure out we want a solid budget situation. Maybe we don't. Maybe if there's a budget crisis, it's easier to go in and sell. I do think that there's at the state level an X factor that is really important to know that is, particularly as a company is getting started with the first set of one to five states to really launch a state level program, which is really strong and innovative leader.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, Jeff. For Wonders School, childcare is actually managed by health and human services. And so a lot of our go-to-market doesn't really have a district model. And childcare is regulated by the state. So we end up spending the vast majority of our time working with states.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a couple of agencies that we can sell into. So Department of Education, Department of Early Childhood Education, Department of Labor sometimes work directly with the governor. And what we found is we have a number of products. And our Land and Expand motion is usually we start with one or two of these products, and then we show success. We show outcomes with the state. And that ends up leading to states wanting to essentially adopt more of our product so that they can help solve the child care crisis.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is classic bottoms up because you're starting at a few schools in the district. And if you produce results at those districts, it's the classic land and expanding it all the way up. I remember once when I was at Salesforce, the first big bottomed-up company in the internet era, Mark Bennioff, met with my boss, Meg Whitman, and said, I just wanted to thank my largest client in person. And Meg's very gracious with Mr. Bennioff walks back to my tube and goes, we're sales force's largest client. I'm like, I didn't know and go, we were a very large client because it was solving individuals' work needs. So the hope in the case of PRISMs is if we can do a great job at a subset of schools, it becomes super compelling to expand into more schools in the district. We're doing a great job at a district. It becomes more compelling to involve at the state level. So it is a classic sales strategy done.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the House speaker and say, Hey, Senate President, you have a real focus in rural counties. You care deeply about urban education. So then you're able to take the successes and the outcomes and the results that you've been collecting at the district level and you take that up to the state. And now we're doing a pretty significant statewide deployment across Florida, but it was completely grassroots. It started at the district level. We delivered outcomes. We had to pick those right senators who were the right voice for what we were trying to do and then push an appropriation through. And I think what's really interesting also, I thought I was going to be going through the DOE. I'm not going to the Department of Education. Everything is through either the workforce development infrastructure channel. In the case of Oklahoma, it's directly with the governor in Rhode Island, directly with the governor, and it's all around regional workforce development strategies in light of both fear and anticipation of what AI is going to do to their local economies.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cabinet that sits underneath a superintendent. But then you have your instructional coaches that will actually oversee the operation implementation. You've got to get them on board. But last but not least, you have your principals and your teachers. So we will not close a deal unless we've gotten full buy-in of all teachers. They put their hand up and said we opt in. Because you don't get that, you will not get the expansion. You will not get the renewal. You're going to get a lot of pushback in implementation. Now, you might say, oh my gosh, those are a lot of presentations. No, they move really, really quickly because our problem statement is aligned to their problem statement. That's a very important part of this. The tech review takes about a week. The biggest question is around the RFP process. If there is an executive champion and they want it, they're going to make sure it closes. So that just kind of the high level emotion. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the state. For example, in a state like Florida, is we launch across all the large urbans, tons of rural, we're in so many districts in just about a year and a half. So then we were then able to go to the Senate.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to come back to your question about convincing. Ultimately, workforce and economic development are the main drivers of governors and state legislators and what they're thinking about and the investments that they're making. So An Arupa can contextualize what she's doing in creating future employees that have the STEM skills to fill high tech jobs that the governors are trying to recruit in their states. Similarly, Chris is able to talk about the reason governors and state leaders might not be able to recruit employers is because there aren't enough childcare slots to help their workers actually go to work. And so this is a way to tap into an untapped workforce by providing enough childcare slots. And so I think that is a really compelling part of the narrative that's driving a lot of state interest.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was super interesting to me because the target market was not governments as conduits into childcare. It was families and individuals. And the pull from governments was so substantial that it led”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In respective childcare programs to understand what parents need when they're searching for childcare. And what we're finding is agency leaders are starting to use our technology to figure out where to start child care programs. And what this is leading to is we're starting childcare programs all over the country. In Mississippi, we were able to start 37 programs in a week. And this is like mind-blowing for a lot of state administrators because it's just not something that Really been done before at the speed at which we're doing it. We're focused on delivering outcomes and getting these programs up and running instead of just what's happening right now is teaching people how they could potentially start a childcare program”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably spend the majority of my time talking to legislators, staff of governors, and a lot of agency leaders. And what I'm noticing is folks are just looking for results. There's been a lot of money spent, but a lot of the systems just haven't delivered results. And that's what's led to a lot of our adoption. We started working with government in 2020 during the pandemic because states were scrambling to get people back to work and they were noticing that they couldn't get people back to work because of childcare. And so we started working with states and we've seen them partner with these like huge multinational services companies that charge them an arm and a leg are late on delivering the technology and then the price of the technology to modernize the state system can sometimes forex 5x so what we started to do is build technology to help a lot of childcare administrators get data on what's going on.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not start for technology. You walk in, there's computers everywhere, laptops everywhere, robotic arms everywhere, Raspberry Pi everywhere. There's tech everywhere. What there isn't is innovative thinking and really doing something differently because digitization is fundamentally different from innovation.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the last four years, I've been pitching and pitching. And I have this VR headset in my backpack. And it never comes out. And I'm like, why am I taking this dead weight on these trips with me all the time? And it turns out, Steph, that what people are drawn to is the thinking. It's an aspiration. It's this movement away from passivity that's come into our education system versus the active, the kinesthetic, the constant movement. Our kids are most engaged in PE, right? Let's be clear here. And so what they're actually really excited about is the learning methodology. It's the problem-based learning. And so our entire conversation is about the hope and the aspiration and what's possible. Most of the people put a headset on after the deal is closed. Everything has been signed at teacher institute, which is typically four months after those first conversations. And I think that's relevant. What is K-12 really starved for?”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's been really fascinating for me has been student voice in one of our districts. It's a very large urban system. We were in credit recovery for algebra one. And these kids took to Instagram and they started to post, I've learned this five or six times already. I never got it. This is the first time I understood it. And it turns out the board chair read that Instagram post. And we went from 120 kids immediately to 5,000 students two weeks later, right? So I say this because I think now you have so many more voices and efficacy is not just achievement on Sandersline assessments because we tried to solve the achievement problem in the US before we solved the engagement problem. We have to get our kids engaged again in their education because we're not going to be pulling teeth in the way that we are right now. So I just wanted to kind of add into that idea of measurement. There is so much more anecdotal and this very strong student presence that I was not as privy to when I was an administrator.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing parents want is if something is working somewhere else, I would like my child to experience it. And so our dream is the world flips in that this is a new modality, it's working. We need it, bring it in kind of thing.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other piece is that school districts and state leaders operate in a highly political environment where taking risks is not rewarded. And so I think having the data and the research to show the impact of the technology and changes in instructional modality has been a missing piece that hasn't been there. The entrepreneurs that are really going to succeed are the ones that also are doing massive efficacy studies or even real-time evaluation of the efficacy of their solutions that gives the comfort and peace of mind for risk averse decision makers to actually say, okay, let's bring this technology in.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About this wave of educational technology is we're moving away from the idea of like Chromebooks, computers. That's not the object of affection. The object of affection is a teaching principle in my presentation. I don't have VR anywhere because it's kind of irrelevant, right? It's just a secret sauce that, oh, by the way, you need devices because your kids have to be embodied in these real world problems. So I think that's where it's going is the more and more entrepreneurs, leaders, teachers, and educators focus on method, there will be no resistance because the focus is on the relationship between teachers and kids versus forcing function of a particular technology.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the question of technology in classrooms is an interesting one to me because there's the technology, but then there are the methods and the principles and the teaching practices that they allow. And most technology that's introduced, there's no real discipline around what are we trying to achieve here? What's the problem statement that tech is trying to solve? So I'm taking VR, AR, into schools. I'm not really interested in the VR and AR. What I'm interested in is in first person embodied real world problem solving. It happens that I have to use the modality of VR because that's the fastest way to scale. It democratized access to high quality experiences for all kids. So I think that what's really fun about EdTech 3.0, which is what we all kind of in the field call it fondly, is that best practice pedagogy is going to win. It's how do we scale student-centered learning so learning assets and bases in Baltimore where you go to neutralize a chemically contaminated water, not off of a word problem on a piece of paper. So I think that what's going to be really exciting.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think another thing that we've witnessed over the last few years is a shift, right? COVID was part of that, but technology is being more integrated. We're seeing different remote, hybrid learning environments. And so as that has changed over the last few years, what have we learned?”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a few sectors in the economy that have proven to be very, very resistant to technological change. Education is high on that list. But there's nothing, in my view, structural that should keep that from happening. So the bets on what is working in other parts of the economy can have a large impact in education, which is at a point in time where they really need impact.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are you paying attention to? What we should be focusing on. I actually see so much hope at a moment where you could be really discouraged because we have massive declines in student achievement that are still pervasive coming out of the pandemic. 51% of Americans live in childcare deserts. And we had this massive investment in federal funds during the pandemic that actually resulted in a 20% increase in purchasing power over four years for the K-12 school districts and states and then additional investments that went into early childhood. We have now spent hundreds of billions of dollars in those funds are gone. And now what? But I think we're at an interesting point where because those funds really did help to infuse a lot of innovation, I think we'll start to see a real close look at what's actually now producing results and then that evaluation will help to inform the new”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably working for a small percentage of the American population, but for the majority of folks, it's not. And when I think about early childhood education, one of the things I'm coming to terms with is that it's really no one's job to fix it. And so it's not really getting fixed. If you look at the agencies involved in early childhood education, HHS serves low-income families. And what we find is that a lot of states aren't able to generate enough funding from the federal government to be able to serve all the families that need it. For working class families and just all children in general, there's actually no agency and there's no one's responsibility to actually fix the childcare problem. And so it's left to sort of the private sector to fix it. But what we're seeing is that the best way to make inroads is partnerships with the private sector and the public sector to be able to fill in those gaps.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a math director in one of the largest systems, and all we did was drive kid outcomes towards these state tests because that's the thing that we could agree on. Thinking back, there have been a lot of efforts to create new standards in the NGSS, which are the new science standards, the Common Core, which was a step towards the math standards. But they didn't go far enough. It was an incremental change. Instead of learning ABC, they should kind of also learn XYZ. But that's not what I'm talking about when I say the redefinition of purpose. It's saying 80% of the current jobs in the economy will be fundamentally reimagined by 2030. If that truly is the case, then we need to take a real scalpel to going back to the purpose and the delivery of our educational methods. And I think that's exciting, but a daunting task. Chris, as we address that question of where we are today, are things working. I know Anna Rupa just talked about maybe there's not even alignment on what that means.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Childcare in particular has stayed pretty consistent despite a lot of the remainder of our world changing. Why is it Our world has changed, but maybe the classroom has not. I think about the inconsistency that lies and just what is the purpose of an education? If you ask the teacher over here versus a superintendent over here versus a chief academic officer over here versus a chief technology officer here, you will get a different answer from everybody. So there isn't a consistent narrative around is a purpose to expose kids to the jobs of today and tomorrow's workforce is the purpose to teach them the canon of all the discoveries in math and science thus far is the purpose global citizenry such that people can make educated choices and vote on issues pertaining to AI, the future of different advanced technologies. What is the purpose? And because that purpose is not clear across constituencies, you don't have a comprehensive set of state nor national standards. So what everyone does is we just fall back on the lowest common denominator, which are the status.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every year, we have the chance to rewrite how things are done and change the trajectory of millions. But it's a complex calculus involving federal, states, and local government, school districts, teachers, parents, and more. So how do you make Enroads with the government and get a new product into a school or district? And what's working or broken about the incentive system and whose jobs is it to fix? Plus, is risk ever rewarded? We'll explore all this and more with founders and policy advisors who have navigated this complex system. That includes Anarupa Gangouli and Chris Bennett, two founders currently trying to disrupt the status quo. Anarupa is the founder of PRISMs, a spatial learning platform that uses augmented and virtual reality to teach math and science through physical human experiences. Chris, on the other hand, is the co-founder of Wonder School, a platform designed to help educators build childcare programs while supporting families in locating”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been a lot of talk about the government recently, but wherever you sit along the aisle, one thing that almost everyone can agree on is the desire to set up the next generation for success, often through high-quality education or childcare. But despite increased funding toward these sectors, we're not really getting the results that we're paying for. We have now spent hundreds of billions of dollars and those funds are gone. And now what? But this is something that we need to figure out because, as one of our guests says, we are graduating generations of children who have no idea what they can do with their education. So in today's episode, we'll explore the history of education and where technology fits into that equation. I mean, why is it that 35 years into the modern internet, we've gained access to 5G networks, 3D printing, and augmented reality, yet so little has changed in the way we teach?”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tried to solve the achievement problem in the US before we solved the engagement problem. School districts and state leaders operate in a highly political environment. We're taking risks is not rewarded.”
2024-12-06 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source