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the median Texas Elementary School had a particle power CO2 of 1,400 parts per million which by its in Ru map is enough to reduce cognitive capacity by like 35% if you grow up if your parents buy a house in a cancer cluster and your Zone
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to a school in the shadow of an oil refinery that is going to dramatically change your learning environment and your ability to focus in class of course yourth box is a box fan taped to four air we prioritize cost and Effectiveness and
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how much would that $100,000 be able to cover in that particular District that would cover the whole District easily for years I tell you what I wasn't planning on this but I will commit to you on podcast I'll give you $100,000 to do exactly
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that well hello everyone it's Jim o shanos with yet another infinite Loops today my guest is somebody whose work is really fascinating to me his name is John Kennedy he's a founder of edtech companies the chair of Clean Air
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k12.com and a director at Cory Rosenthal foundation and an AI leader at Panorama education John welcome thank you Jim it's great to be here I appreciate it we were talking before we started and like it astounds me that we haven't really
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done much looking at the quality of air and how it affects students you're you're focusing on K12 um and I'm just gonna let you start out here because like I was blown away not only by the fact that we were doing so
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little but also the results of the um putting in the uh air filter systems from Cory Rosenthal um just tell us about that because that alone kind of like blew my mind absolutely we treat every input to our bodies except for air we are very
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deliberate about the food we eat we have extensive Civic programs uh government programs to address the water quality but nobody gets to choose the air they breathe and it is a frontier of Public Health and educational productivity educational
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outcomes that has really been underinvested in it is something that we all became more aware of in 2020 when indoor air was the front what was the vehicle for covid transmission but whether it's other you know common cold flu Etc the quality of our indoor air has tremendous on effects on our bodies and our minds and our society r large this is a very solvable problem many of our buildings are very old unfortunately but you can improve the
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quality of your room that you're in for a very small amount of money I have with me a Cory Rosen box and I'm a director of the Cory Rosenthal Foundation Cory Rosenthal box is as you can see a box fan taped to four air filters this is
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not particularly pretty our tradeoff is that it's very effective it outperforms things that you can buy for much for a few hundred dollars on Amazon it's been significantly tested by the EPA and adopted all over the world but it cost
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$60 and when you the way it works is you plug it in the Box fan runs creates a negative pressure differential sucks the air in through the filters and speeds it out through the top you leave it running for an hour and the EPA is test that it
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removes 99.4% of aerosols that cause and spread diseases asthma alone drives 10 million this school days per year and the pollutants that cause that can um be removed by these filters as well so the course Ro rosenfall Foundation Advocates
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the spread of course rosenfall boxes which are just these very simple ways to improve into air quality there's other similar paths there's bigger structural root cause interventions that you can take but but we think that this is one
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of the highest Roi things that we can do to improve K12 improve Society large and when I first was reading your research and chatting with you before uh when we first met um I I really am astounded that a $60 error purifying box
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can have those kinds of impacts you know you you had a great line uh about you know we didn't boil water like 2,000 years ago and and now we would like we know like the when you don't boil water you expose yourself to all sorts of
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pathogens all sorts of problems and and yet we're doing nothing about the air I know you are and I obviously support this but my my big question is why has nobody looked at this I mean with the billions and billions and billions that are spent both at the
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state and federal level on K12 education was it just overlooked it's a great question it has been I don't know if it's been over it's certainly been overlooked the first problem is that air quality does not have I'll say the the
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sour taste that bad food or poor water quality might it is you know carbon monoxide is invisible carbon dioxide is invisible the median Texas Elementary School there's a study done in the early 2000s and I'll say that conditions have
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probably gotten worse since then not better because the buildings have gotten older investment has reduced but the median Texas Elementary School had a a particle CO2 of 1,400 parts per million which by S Ru map is enough to reduce me capacity at like 35% so you can think of all of the ventilation challenges that we face all the filtration challenges is just making our kids Dumber making us Dum if you've been in a conference room for an hour
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and the door opens and it you you know I'll use the phrase breath of fresh air here and it feels like you know you're a whole new person you're thinking so much sharper it's because you are poorly ventilated spaces slow down our brains
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inhibit our creativity reduce our Focus and attention and there there's just so many educational social outcomes left on the table by accepting the poor state of systems the way we are we have given grants not we but OB Society uh it's a
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government we have given grants to support you know like new onetime oneoff things to prevent Cent schools for example or modify HVAC systems but the root cause is really expensive to solve the GAO the government accountability
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Office of the federal government did a study in 20120 that found that 41% of school districts need to replace at least half of their HVAC units so there's this enormous surface area of the country that you know is just kind of forc just use K12 as an
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example is forced to go to school in a poorly ven room that's going to mitigate their educational outcomes there is a natural study in Los Angeles when so there's a gas leak in 2015 in the Los Angeles area and as part of the
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settlement the um offending party was forced to install new air filters in all the schools surrounding uh sorry in all the schools surrounding the leak the test scores and the student achievement outcomes went up dramatically like m of scores one to2
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standard deviations which is roughly in the range of sending a k to Kip top Charter network reducing the class Eyes by a third it's Tennessee study that transformed uh educational reform in like the late 90s early 2000s and I mean
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I've worked in K12 for my entire life since I was 16 was student for a while most K12 problems are really hard to solve because they come down to really ingrained systems they come down to structural Community issues they come
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down to things that are really hard and expensive to solve we love the course r b box but fires the up about this work is that it's $60 per classroom per year to make this difference it's so cheap it's so transformative I want to get to all of
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the many many ills that I hope uh you and others like you are going to be able to solve in cage2 uh but before then I I I had a personal experience which made me really intu L understand the importance of the air quality and uh my
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family and I were uh lucky enough to be in Napal and we took a helicopter up to see Everest one of the uh one of the things that you have to sign uh this is sort of funny uh we we were had to sign uh releases before we were able to get on
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the helicopter and I'm reading it and I'm you know you're going through it and and well wait a minute the h opter can drop us off anywhere if it gets an emergency call how does that work but then the one at the bottom was by
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signing this I acknowledged that I most likely will die and so I started laughing and pointing it out to my wife and saying oh well obviously this was a translation issue and our Australian helicopter pilot came up and he goes no mate they
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really need it and so as it happened uh he got an emergency call he had to go save somebody who was climbing Everest who had badly broken their leg luckily where he put us down was a restaurant at 18,000 ft or something like that and
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they had oxygen but they didn't have enough and so my son-in-law and I didn't use the oxygen my wife and my daughter did and I had the experience that you talking about but writ large like literally I could feel my mind shutting
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down and as I'm talking to my son-in-law I'm like I'm just this is flowers for algeron man I am getting Dumber by the second and it I that feeling I'd never experienced anything like that literally your cognitive the degrading of your
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cognitive abilities was in real time like fascinating to me right but I'm like this is this is really bizarre and then so he came back he got us and he did kind of a fast descent um and literally we all felt the oxygen hitting our systems and it was
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the coolest thing ever because all of that you know confusion the feeling like you had a headful of wool all of that went away so after that experience I I talked about it quite a bit with people who were Mountain climers everything and
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uh but but to experience it that's why I was so very interested when I met you I'm like wow I you know you don't obviously when you're 18,000 feet and and waiting for a helicopter to come back and get you you understand that's a
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unique circumstance but you don't think about the fact that we have this today in our American schools so now to like the the plethora of problems plaguing K through 12 in the United States like you've picked a I I admire you because you picked a really
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really difficult place to make a difference right because as you mentioned all sorts of different school districts they have different rules they have different objectives Etc how do you scale a project like this
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do you do proof of concept do you do you put them in the worst schools do you put them in average schools I just like your game plan for where the impact would be seen the most absolutely the K 12 Market I think is really misunderstood most
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because most people have a very direct experience with the K12 system as uh consumers and customers of one uh District or property tax payers in one District or parents of one District we have very few you know repeat players in
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K12 folks that see a variety of districts and there's a a variety of challenges so in the the market let's there's a few ways to define a school district or a loc local Education Agency there's roughly 14,000 of them in the
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country several of them predate the United States there's some in Los in in Long Island that go back to the 17th centur it is the classic example of the 10th Amendment it's the thing that is not enumerated in the Constitution so it is
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left to the states to figure out so we do not have one overarching K 12 system in the country uh there's you a new political change happening in discourse around eliminating the Department of Education uh without commenting on the
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the motives or the faith behind those people I will say the the Department of Education uh it's a relatively low influence on the quality of your school district in the country the federal government only really got involved K12
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uh with the brown B board enforcement and decision and the main investment of the Department of Education has been in civil rights enforcement but also they do really important work in that I want to be very specific about in supporting
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what are sometimes called wraparound Services which are social services that a school district performs to make sure that for example if you are a title one student and you are eligible for free prod lunch that when you're not in
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school you can have food that is something that school districts can often be on the vehicles of the front lines and we have put a lot as a country a lot of uh we we've kicked a lot of cans or we passed a lot of bags to somebody further along the food chain
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and that can often end the school district so there's 14,000 school districts in the country I'm reporing this from New York City New York City Department of Education has one out of every 50 of those students it is by far
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the largest school system in the country go down uh further down the market there's another 25% of a student body nationally in the next 200 schools then there's at the bottom 20% of students go to a school district that is fewer than
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300 students I talked to a district in Montana a couple months ago that has 350 students outside of cell I believe and they are in the top Des deck aisle of Montana districts there's a there's a district in Montana that has six
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students wow so when you think of how to steal a problem you're not dealing in this market you're not dealing with one market you're dealing with 50 markets you are dealing with you know States like Montana you're dealing with States
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like Hawaii that are just one system then you're dealing with States like New York for example where we have the biggest District we have over a thousand really small districts we have and then we have intermediate ERS uh in New York
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for example are called the bosis where these smaller districts can share services and get financially reimbursed for things that they purchase through so it's bantine at times it's complicated and it does not receive a fraction of
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the funding that other socially important systems like healthcare for example have the in K12 software the elephant in the r company is power school Power School is was was the first cloud-based student information system
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in the late 1990s it was acquired by Apple in 2001 for around 73 million in Apple stock which now is worth around 28 billion do which wow which is by rough mat I think five times the amount that Bane Capital just paid to take power school
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private so the uh this is a market that is very very fragmented Power School uh you know was backed by two really big private Equity firms they made 15 Acquisitions they went public and when they got taken private uh last year
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their market and this is what I'm getting to their market capitalization was in the mid 10 figures their annual revenue was 650 or so million so the biggest company in the space at 650 million in annual revenue I think by comparison Google makes 16 billion in
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income every quarter these are not big Market markets so when you scale something in K12 school districts there's there's a school district has two functions that are separate but bundled together daycare and instruction
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there's a you know Duty that you drop your kid off uh to school and the school is going to take care of them and so there's great companies that have been built in K12 on like the naen side you know I know of a company that all they
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do is attendance this Niel management for kwell that process of picking kids up in carpool uh that's a that's a vertical SAS company but then on the instructional side you know when most people think of entech they think of
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something that's going to help kids learn better you know when we think of the promise of AI one of the enormous Frontiers is creating these personalized learning environments to simulate one-on-one tutoring you know when we go
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back thousands of years what's the most durable form of History uh mostess durable form of Education it's one-on-one tutoring it's Alexander the Great being tutored uh by Aristotle right maybe you're better on this I Aristotle was his Twitter yeah so we now
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you know you know if you go to a classroom it is a teacher teaching to 30 kids or so the teacher is uh you know been a life at that school perhaps the teacher is perhaps part of a union that has lobbyists the students are not the
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um teacher is presenting to 30 kids who are going through it without their own Pace the teachers trying to keep Pace them all at the same time and it's very at once very personal very fragmented um and we have some you know fantastic
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teachers in this country but they have you know it's a really rough time to be a teacher right now and that's who when we're going to spread clean air K12 that's who our primary audience is right now so when you go to cleaner k12.com if
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you're a teacher you can apply to receive a course who Ros andol box and we will probably give it to you where you can go and we will send you a box fan an air filters to install in your classroom and you can put it together as
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a stem project give kids agency over how to improve their own indoor environment so you as a teacher the kids can learn better if you were a parent if you a grand parent you would love to be able to support your kids classroom we just
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have to make sure that the teacher is involved and the principal knows about it and stuff like that but teachers and schools they they are not doing that for the money they are doing it for the love of what they do and they as a result are
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tend to think of themselves as practitioners where they do not for example they do not adopt products they adopt practices so they do not adopt you know like a name brand they or they're not adopting gemini or chat gbt
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they're adopting Ai and they're doing something with and when you're uh creating a new solution in k12 and broadcasting it and evangelizing it there's a really strong Loop that you have to tap into of creating a success story enabling that partner to broadcast
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that success story to an audience of their peers creating more interest turning that into more success stories and turning that into more interests so this you know kind of product Marketing sales implementation Loop is what drives
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successful cage 12 companies there's also obviously a lot of other ways you can you can grow that involves you know getting uh K getting State funding or being the solution of Choice by state you there's Enterprise like really
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strong Enterprise motions K12 but for us we are trying to drive bottom up adoption first where we can create a volume of success stories teachers can adopt these boxes have kids build them and have kids take agency over their
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improved class and use that to drive more interest we're trying to speak a lot of conferences this year and ultimately work with districts and higher level systems to go top down because unlike for example student information system or another uh big
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expensive data system unlike a charter school unlike any other sort of big intervention or change you want to make in K12 this is four air filters of boxan you plug it in and it works yeah and uh as you were explaining
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I I wondered uh would it make sense to try to First convert the teachers unions who would then disseminate that down to the individual teachers because if I'm understanding you correctly Any teacher could in K through 12 could request one of these boxes and as you said you'd likely give it to them um how how how would you be prepared let's say you gave a speech at the annual Convention of uh teachers unions and everyone was like holy that's
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amazing for 60 we gotta let all of our teachers know could could you could you satisfy if suddenly a bunch of K12 teachers were requesting the box is that a is that a scale solution yeah we've been deliberate so far to um make sure
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that we don't overextend ourselves uh we are a nonprofit or I 1c3 but we've been backed by 3M and we're very grateful for 3M they've donated filters they topof the line 20 inch uh square one inch thick double pleated filters which are really really
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strong that's not what I'm uh showed I showed kind of a many for fory Roos and box but uh to say who Cory and rosenal are they are the two founders of this box design they you know have open sourced the box design and we estimate
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that a quarter million built of them have been built around the world but Rich Cory is the dean of engineering at UC Davis formally UT Austin is a renowned air quality and air chemist expert and speaker on these issues and
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Jim Rosenthal is the founder CEO of Tex Air Filters which is one of the leading air filter manufacturers and suppliers in state of Texas so we have both a really strong academic and research credibility wing of the board and then
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we also have practitioners like Jim and volunteers and Endor equality Advocates who have promoted this work so we are really lucky to have some a really strong board but we looking to build our capacity and so you know if we have right now been deliberate and
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intentional about who we try to work with to get these off the ground earlier obviously if you're if you're part of an organization that can fund this in other ways you know as philanthropy we do prioritize need and try to work with
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those first but we are looking to grow our capacity uh we are looking to raise money to scale up more of this work in 2024 we you can see the annual report on our website or cleanar k12.com we did not spend money as a nonprofit on
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anything other than these box materials and sending them out so we have been in the state of kind of developing a model driving adoption demonstrating that this works and can scale and now we are looking to begin building more kind of
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systemic capacity around that so we can you know hire a full-time executive director for example so I live uh in the New York City metro area I know you're in New York what would it cost let's say somebody uh a philanthropist said I
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wantan to I want to put these boxes in every uh classroom in New York first off would New York let that happen which is a bizarre question to ask but given you know my friend Philip Howard has written extensively on this the rules that
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govern New York City teachers are thicker than a phone book uh and for you youngsters a phone book used to have uh they were very thick and had everyone's phone number listed in them uh on what they can and can't do uh
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Philip's view is that we we've let the the rules replace the human on the scene right the teacher um and and I've heard horror stories from him about you know teachers where a kid has had something horrible happen to them emotionally the
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teacher is not allowed to hug that student because of some event that happened years ago Etc but my question is what would it cost to put one of these boxes in every New York City public K through2 classroom it would cost a a small fraction of the total
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budget uh I would estimate that it cost it it would cost probably around $10 million and I believe the New York City doe total budget is $40 billion in I'll give you an example uh if you're in Connecticut perhaps you are eligible
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for a grant the state of Connecticut gave a grant to you the uh School of Public Health Yukon under their clean air Equity response program and the new University of Connecticut has a indoor air quality initiative the leader of
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that is a friend of our foundation Marina Creed she did incredible work in sheing this through and they have an 11.5 million pocket of State money that they can give out to any classroom uh in the public school in Connecticut that wants
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one of these and I think that's a really fantastic model we are looking to set those up we're in a discussion with two universities across the country right now these are Big Flagship state universities to set these up at their
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School of Public Health and I'll also give credit you mentioned the unions the unions uh were really influential in getting this on board in Connecticut and that's a that collaboration of every stakeholder looking to push their issues
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forward and protect their constituents can find something in this whether your issue is public health test scores academic achievement environmental justice chronic absenteeism is a major issue in K12 right now uh over I think
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15% our nation's student body is chronically absent meaning that they're missing 10% or more of their school days so whatever your driver for caring about public schools are there's something to like about the cor Rosen fall box
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there's something like about improving Indo air quality we advocate for the course Road of doll boox because we think it's the cheapest most effective path there again I I'm just a bit mystified here because this when you mentioned the the cost versus the budget
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of the school district this is a this is a rounding error and and it just seems to me like this is a Nob brainer what why is there first off let me not assume is there resistance from anywhere within the K12 Community a against doing this and and
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if there is why in the hell is is that the case um and and then the other question I have is a more practical one let's say I said to you because you know we give fellowships and grants let's say that I said to you we're going to give
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you $100,000 to make a huge impact on on people understanding how absolutely critical this is and how the the the price that you pay versus the outcomes I mean this is like this is a the return if if you were of VC looking at the
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returns of this you would be like I'm in absolutely um to the first point nobody's resistant to breathing clear a i it's it's a resource it's a resource that we all share it's something that it's not like you know teachers get
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better air in the break room than students do in the classroom everybody benefits from breathing better air and everybody is on board with this for the course of Rosen block specifically we prioritize cost and Effectiveness over
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um for example like size and noise so I mean it is a box fan I'd say the resistance that we've gotten so far is you know like oh I don't want to turn this on but it's cost we had a educator in a Texas district reach out to us we
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worked with our principal to Advocate a campus-wide program we are going to put a course box in every classroom through a teacher who's going to build them and distribute them and the district shut it down because they didn't want one class
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they didn't want one campus to have bigger uh sorry have better air than the others they they didn't want to just segment this to one part of their district and so if we got a $100,000 Grant I might go back to them and say
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well guess what your District can have air filters uh improved airport filtration in every classroom we can take care of that right now our foundation has been extremely deliberate about who we support because we do not have the we cannot we do have the
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funding to continue to scale our work if we were able to take several orders of magnitude more than what we've gotten so far I mean we've gotten great support from Blue lab from clean air kits from the lookout Foundation but we think this
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there's an enormous Frontier ahead that we can pursue and would there be kind of a I'm I'm going to put you on the spot here is there like what what is the worst district for the quality of the year for the students number one number two how far
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would a $100,000 Grant get you in using that as a a a focal point for people to see here's before here's after and obviously this would be a multi-year uh Endeavor because you need enough data to prove the efficacy of
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what you're talking about I know that you have that already prior to um uh recording with you I looked up uh the results of uh some of the boxes and like they're really extraordinary 20% reduction in uh absenteeism the uh you mentioned test
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course it I mean it would it would take all the rest of the podcast to list all the benefits so yeah if if you had 100,000 and I said I want you to uh put these as a best case in the worst air quality public schools in the country
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where is that and would you do it well today in January a recording this is in Los Angeles of course we even talked about Wildfire smoke but people have adopted course rais and B boxes they are tested by the EPA to be effective against
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Wildfire smoke wow okay so I a vacuum though okay yeah I would maybe pick Galina Park in Texas which is a district almost entirely on the east side of Houston in the very industrial area so you think of that significant
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effect of going from 18,000 feet in Nepal having being oxygen deprived going down uh if you you know if you grow up if your parents buy a house in a cancer cluster and you're zoned to a school in the shadow of an oil refinery that is
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going to dramatically change your um your learning environment your air quality and as such your ability to focus in class and how much would that $100,000 be able to cover in that particular District that would cover the
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whole District easily for years I tell you what I wasn't planning on this but I will commit to you on podcast I'll give you $100,000 to do a exactly that that is fantastic I have worked with Cena Park in the past and I will reach out to them
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and you're you're making podcast history here but we would want to give them multiple years worth of course Rosen boxes which the ne that we already do we can reach out to our uh board and bring in capacity for air quality monitoring
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and do our best to make this as rigorous as possible get the back friend that is really really exciting and generous of VI I just again I I it's one of these problems that there is a solution the solution works and it really frustrates
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me to listen to the fact that like this isn't already in every school district in our K through2 Public School System it's absurd to me and so the other thing that I would urge you to do is like to try to find as many matching grants from
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this 100,000 uh because this is crazy it's it's literally crazy to me that you are sitting there with a $60 solution and that there are kids in you know in the shadow of oil listen but my grandfather made his entire fortune in
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oil he proceeded to give away most of it throughout his life but like I'm not preaching against oil here I'm just saying like that's a bad situation let's let's see what happens uh on delighted that we can get a project going with you
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because I I definitely think that this uh is is very worthwhile and again the the return on investment here it's just like staggering to me so we'll we'll we'll uh do the details uh after uh you look into them saying absolutely yes but
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I commit right now you you got your 100,000 to do that school district I want to change topics though because you're also an entrepreneur in the profit side of K2 I want to talk a little bit about that but I want to challenge you um and say Blank Slate
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it's you are looking at a blank sheet of paper and I tell you John I want you to use first principles to design an excellent K through 12 educational system for the 21st century it's not going to look very much like the one we
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have but tell me what does it look like so we think of the two components of that you're really putting me on the spot here as this is awesome as daycare you're putting me on a spot than this and you're putting me on a spot propose
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a $100,000 CR this is certainly not your out of the box podcast I'll bate the daycare instructional piece I think that the let start with the place we've talked about ear equality um this is ideally a a campus that has um a variety
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of natural features where students can learn and engage with the outdoors where they are not consigned to the dimensions of the classroom or what they can learn this is a place where students can um it's a it's a it's a walkable
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environment this is a place ideally in a neighborhood where students can engage uh with their families that families can come um so many so many problems in K12 come down like busing and getting kids on a you know obviously there's you know
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a racial history to when you think of busing but just the logistics of getting kids from point A to point B is complicated and I would focus on the quality of uh this students day and and the quality of their air the quality of
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their food uh the quality of their instructional environment and then going into the instructional environment teachers that can Empower students with as much agency as possible every day students who are held account accountability is important nobody likes accountability but we need scorecards but students deserve to feel comfortable in these account accountability standards Educators deserve to feel comfortable and empowered to know how
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their students are doing and to feel like they can uh do their best to support student personalized education we haven't talked about AI in K12 much yet but the the promise of AI is that it gets us back as I said to that
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one-on-one tutoring model and every student has a unique interaction a unique relationship with their curriculum every student has a unique relationship with our educator and structurally we would look to design a school around that yeah we are investors
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in synthesis School uh which is mostly math but it's entirely AI tutoring and the results over there are again like kind of ridiculously good um and and it's interesting to me and I am a proponent of aggressively using AI uh to
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transform education not just for kids by the way but for all of us um because it you know the research is overwhelmingly positive to this notion of one-on-one tutoring and what people uh who haven't like looked deeply into AI might not understand is that the AI
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can learn from its interactions with the individual student I'm I'm a big believer that we are moving from the era that our old schools were designed for mass production right so I'm sure you know most of our schooling was designed
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to satisfy the industrialists who needed people to be able to sit in a room for eight hours and take instruction on what to do making them good Factory workers Etc uh we don't live in that world anymore we live in a world where Mass
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customization is now possible um at every level and AI tutors are just one of those levels this does not replace teachers people get worried about oh my God you know it's going to replace not at all in fact the teacher will be able
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to do their job in my opinion now obviously I'm biased here because I'm investing in these AI tutor companies so let's get that on the table too but they're not meant to replace the teacher they're meant to aug me the teacher allow the teacher to do higher
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value work with the student you speak about agency you you speak about uh scorecards all of that becomes I think doable if you've got a system a new system this first principal system where teachers are are not only embracing the
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ability to use one-on-one tutoring through an AI uh program but there also interacting with the students in a completely different way than they had to in the past right where they could really make a difference you know this
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is near and dear to my heart because Early Education has been one of my family's interests for a long long time mainly my sister Molly who does monu uh but now my daughter and son-in-law are going to be teachers uh in one my son-in-law K through 12 my daughter is is looking for high school but so we there are so many better ways to to do things and then when I hear when I first met you I'm like wait wait what what why aren't these boxes in every
43:11
school right now and then the the next part which we're talking about now which is then this is a much harder thing to conquer right because of the entrenched uh interest and systems that we already have in place let let again since I'm
43:31
going to be grilling you with hard questions here and I had you just design a new K12 I'm going to ask you this H how to overcome the inertia or um opposition to Innovation because one of the things uh that I see from outside is
43:53
there does seem to be a lot of opposition from especially teachers unions towards Innovation towards these things because and I think quite rightly there's a fear there oh you know we're going to be replaced or we'll get paid
44:08
less or whatever I don't think that's the case but help me understand how you might overcome if there was like an organized opposition to now I'm speaking spec I'm not talking about the air part I'm talking about the AI tutor uh aspect
44:27
right yeah nobody is like in charge of the opposition here and I think every interest group exists for a reason teachers unions are quite effective at advocating teachers because teachers are not paid well at all let's
44:43
look at the teach let's look at the the labor market for teachers we are in a environment that is gr hostile to teachers right now two-thirds of teachers who leave their jobs leave the system entirely and when a district tries to open a new
45:00
position on average they fill 0.55 positions for every position they open so we are replacing just barely half of the open teacher vacancies we have that just proportionally you know hurt the the neediest populations and more importantly it's
45:19
great to hear that you're the generation under you is becoming teachers because for the first time since this this switch happened in 2016 but for the first time in decades since this was measured the net favorability of uh parents on their
45:36
children becoming teachers was negative so in other words since 2016 parents have not wanted their kids to be teachers on that so we're not we are we are short a lot of teachers they certainly are not paid very well they've been very
45:53
high-profile strikes and movements get teacher salaries up and the um like pipeline of teachers is not where it should be there there are a lot of issues here and I think the one driver of this I have I have a view the default
46:11
state of any organization is calcification without change you just stay the same and grow more set in your ways the things that mitigate this are competition and growth you know when somebody else is you know competing
46:28
against you that's a far more effective Catalyst typically or your own uh Improvement than just in a vacuum you know there's like the Michael Jordans and the Kobe Bryants the merciless competitors out the real of us need a little push myself included need a
46:44
little push to get something going you've set the bar very high we're now all right figure out how to yeah know get spend $100,000 on Cory Ros and B boxes wisely and have a really really good out atend that's that is a bar that
46:58
I was not going to set for myself before and now I'll looky but then also growth I think that Dynamics the hostility is nature of a zero sum or negative sum game and in many big school districts enrollment is decreasing which means
47:16
that funding goes out the door with it and if you're looking at the root cause of maybe why our buildings in K12 haven't been invested as much it's because I've Miss seen from our former board chairman but 82% of the costs of a school district are fixed so as you lose students you you're you're the the rule of th is that a student gets $10,000 in state funding to attend the district gets $10,000 per student so if you know rural areas that
47:52
can be invested more the students taking for example Career Technical education classes there can receive more funding for them but when those students leave big Urban school districts the funding goes out the door with them and the pie
48:03
gets smaller for everybody you see these Dynamics on the you know much friendlier side you you remove this hostility when you're in a district that's growing that has to build new schools that has to try new things for the first time a lot of
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our Urban schools right now are closing schools that Happ to make really hard choices about the future of their schools you know Chicago is a really notable example of a a district that is choosing to layer on more and more debt
48:33
but is refusing to close schools and um that's just a really tough situation for everybody involved and so how do we avoid these we play positive some games we look for the growth and that guess it's so much easier said than done but
48:52
these are you know Suburban districts that are seeing uh really strong growth these are places where there's new funding coming in you know k12 and you know the quality of our nation schools has not been as nearly as vocal as
49:09
pronounce of a political discussion as it has been in decades past you know this was a major U Democrat issue Republicans George W bush oversaw enormous amount of educational Investments it's been a bipartisan concern with different views but a lot
49:27
of discussion about how we can make our schools better that I feel like in the last couple of election Cycles I have not heard nearly as much about it and it speaks more broadly to the continued fragmentation of America where the
49:40
systems and institutions that we all used to go to together are now uh dissolving in the same way or fragmenting uh George Packer has a great book The unwinding which is a good way to describe it you know I went to University of North Carolina
49:55
Crown tarel my grand mother said when the Seventh Generation Tar Heel I don't know if that's true but if she says it is it absolutely is and the University of North Carolina is one of the best public schools in the country you know I
50:07
have a really close friend who one of the best friends from school didn't turned down pen to pursue a program that he got into at UNCC it's the oldest public school in the country chapel holds a beautiful place i' lived there on and off went to
50:22
school there I still a place there and what makes it such an attractive place is a variety of factors one it gets to choose the students it lets in it is there's only around 200 universities and they most people think that like there's all these
50:38
selective schools all these colleges are selective that's not the case at all the median college would love for you to spend their money there and for you to go there's only 200 schools really that reject more students than they accept
50:51
University North Carolina is in that category um the they're great you you know for many reasons basketball program ending coach K's career and beating beating Duke multiple times in 2022 is high up there have to plug that but we
51:07
get to choose who we let in we get to be intentional about the um community that we build and we have significant investment from all pockets of the state and a variety of stakeholders and a lot of what I just said is not true for most
51:23
public school districts across the country so I think in general you know North Carolina is a state that is the has the second highest rate of domestic migration in the country the public university is a key economic driver it
51:39
has been 70 years ago North Carolina was in the bottom deck a States and quality of life now it's in the top deck a and a huge driver of that is besides the air conditioning is University Carolina and the other systems around it so I think
51:54
transitioning from finding places where we can play positive sum games much easier said than done but that's how you remove hostility and that structural imp what about the uh Charter School System um that I've seen several uh documentaries on it I've read many books uh about it um and and it does seem that there is a lot of hostility from the teachers in public schools uh to Charter Schools do you do you think that that's a a wedge issue
52:34
like for example dropping the boxes into charter schools first I'm I'm literally spitballing here I want your charter schools first like do they work does going to a charter a median Charter provideing better educational experience
52:52
than going to the median Public School the the science is very mixed on that uh this you know there one it's very hard to measure and I'll say zooming all the all the way out the most consistent finding in educational research is that your life is going to
53:11
be changed by your parents and those closest around you more than the school if you look at the number of hours a child spends in a given school year they only spend around 9% of their time in class so Charter Schools do they work on
53:25
net science there are some exceptional charter schools that are absolutely simil best schools in the country there are also regulatory environments that allow things to happen in charter schools that are antagonistic to Common
53:37
Sense you there was a famous Florida example of an entrepreneur who took a lot of State M need to open up a charter school and try to think well how can I um you know best increase the throughput of this building well naturally I can
53:52
use it from when kids aren't in school and so there was a combination Charter School in my Club okay so it it depends and this is another example where we don't have one overarching uh system we don't have one overarching body result we have 50
54:09
different Statewide charter school systems and the antagonism comes from the fact that as I said when the students leave a public school to go to a charter school the money goes with so 100 students roughly leave a big
54:25
School District to go to the local new Charter the district loses a million dollars in funding and they still have to keep those same buildings up S to you know make the same commitments to their staff and to their teachers and it gets
54:39
hard for them so I think that's where the antagonism comes from I think Charters have done exceptional work in creating new models and new discussions and you can see here in New York for example there's ways to mold Charter
54:53
Innovation with traditional Public School structures um in New York there's a group called the urban assembly which has a contract where they manage career programs career Focus schools for New York City doe the students are part of
55:07
New York City doe they receive New York City doe uh education public school students but the charters manage programs inside and so there is I think no dogmatic Charter approach it is it demonstrates how complicated these
55:24
institutions can be and comes down to the same community and local issues that drive K12 in the first place are there issues um that uh or processes and um uh paths that private schools are using that would be easy and affordable so
55:49
let's take the money out because like private schools obviously depending on what kind of private school it is off often have a lot more money than a public school but are there things that are going on in private schools that
56:05
could be easily and affordably ported over to Public Schools I don't think so I think the private schools by Nature are able to select the students they let in public schools are not think of any business that had no control over their
56:22
supply a restaurant that couldn't pick their produce that's the difference between public and private schools private schools get to you know pay you know attract a population that does not by Nature want to go to a public school and the thing
56:37
that I worry most about our K12 system is the continued flight out of public schools and the bifurcation of our student body into those who can leave and do leave and those that can't leave the students that are disproportionately
56:54
much more expensive to educate the students that have special needs that need special accommodations for but it's just not practical or viable or available for them to go private school and there's efforts you know in states
57:06
to offer School vouchers and subsidize this um you know private schools by Nature are just like they they are built to have more control and more resources over how they run their school I can't think of many because the keyword you said what's
57:23
affordable Innovations at private schools and I'm I'm was very lucky to go to a private school myself and I had a great education but I don't think that um there's things that public schools can look at private schools as doing
57:37
there's you know certain instructional models have been find there there's things that by private schools being you know kind of Laboratories for new ideas that they can do well but um structurally I'm a little skeptical okay so let let's change gears
57:55
and and put your as an entrepreneur on are there what what excites you right now uh that you're seeing in the for-profit sector that is edte or uh educational K12 related what what are the things that you're seeing that in in
58:15
addition to the Clean Air which seems to be kind of like table Stakes uh but um what what are you seeing there that could be really exciting for the public uh sector you're gonna be shocked it's AI so um my professional background is I
58:33
started a company when I was in high school uh automating uh back office process for school counselors we ran that for six years and got acquired by Panorama education in early 2023 and Panorama supports quarter of the nation
58:47
student body roughly we you know have strong District relationships in New York City for example we run if you've been in a cab and see the school survey adver they're trying to get you to fill out School survey we run that it's the
58:58
nation's largest nonsenses survey in the country we have tremendous amount of data which we are uh implementing with our kind of responsible L implementation so we've been able to implement an L inside that same technology environment
59:13
that has all that data and folks are coming up with Incredible use cases for it and it matters because there's two frontiers of AI that I think are going to be enormously impactable to K12 the first is as we said the personalized
59:27
learning environment the promise that you can truly create a dynamic responsive learning environment where students you you may have as a district invested in a big curriculum and AI is the vehicle to help you map that to a
59:41
specific student and their needs and do that really really easily and the second part is Educator time spent educator productivity because teachers you know you would think that a teacher is trying to spend their time personalizing their
59:55
education for student personalizing their instruction they just don't have the time to do that so roughly T only spends around half their time in their day actually working with students the other time they spent in preparation for
1:00:07
their class Administration professional development and the promise of AI being able to take things that Educators do that are really well suited to L like Lesson by generation or text leveling or taking something that like you know I'm
1:00:24
my district gave me this curriculum that we've invested in that we're excited about that's got a lot of promise but ultimately when the rubber meets the road and gets some delivered to a student there's work in just packaging
1:00:37
that the right way that AI can be really really good at so for example like coming up with a custom quiz for Jim based on what we know his needs are that's something that AI can do really quickly that used to take that take material amount of time individual to do
1:00:50
and they can do it programmatically so Solutions are coming out and I think in Panorama I'm leading our work on SOL which I think is the most exciting out of all these but I'm very biased in that where we can work with districts
1:01:02
specifically to customize their own Ai implementations and do this at scale so I think the promise ultimately of AI we mentioned those teacher retention statistics and the challenges that districts and our systems are having as
1:01:18
a whole in attracting people to become teachers and raining teachers we can remove a enormous amount of toil that teachers face in just doing their job by adopting L's around them and I think that is our offramp when we talk about
1:01:38
zero sum games the without AI it's like hire more teachers and spend more money and get that money from somewhere and where's that money going to come from AI offers an off ramp Tov really challenging zero some problems in k12
1:01:54
and I think it is absolutely the future and there's great companies that are Building Solutions in these space there's companies that are building entire schools around these Concepts at Panorama we really believe in school
1:02:06
districts and are excited to be able to depart with as many of them as we are and so let's again I'm really gonna put you through your Paces here uh let's let's let's look 20 years hence if the public school districts um implement
1:02:26
mented several of the ideas that we have been talking about uh on the podcast what does that look like what does that look like when my grandchildren's kids are going to a public school it looks like they have a much more differentiated path and day
1:02:44
than they do right now it looks like the Investments that their districts make in I've mentioned curriculum for example are things that every individual student will take a different path related to their different interests and different
1:02:57
challenges for Panorama for example we have a ton of data about you know student well-being about student life skills like these are things that you can quantify about how well students are feeling and how they're prepared for the
1:03:09
world after and we haven't not we as in Panorama we're doing it now as a system we have not mapped student Journeys to that because we haven't had the capacity do that if we look at AI as an infinite Army of teaching assistants your
1:03:26
grandchildren will have fully unique instructional environments every day they will be offered something that's exciting to learn in the most engaging way that they can learn it in a way that's best suited for their skills I
1:03:40
think another really development that I mentioned briefly is Career and Technical education where the preparation of uh it's called College Career College and Career radius in that space in K12 has shifted dramatically away from making Mak sure kids are you
1:03:56
know graduating high school and going to college to thinking more critically about their path and preparing them for more more holistic real world and so you I grew up in Houston Houston IC was the first district that we worked with and
1:04:10
my company and Houston IC has a school at Hobby Airport that and you know produces trained pilots and flight mechanics and the immigration of these career programs into school curriculum pretty much every state across the
1:04:27
country offers some sort of increased funding for this work and districts can give their students real world experiences in ways that are much um very very different from the career just like the shop class um 20 years ago so
1:04:45
that's a Frontier where I think our districts are doing a really good job of preparing students um very practically for opportunities that are available to them immediately after graduation because that's another thing we haven't talked about school districts
1:05:02
are an adult Factory you put in a fifth you put in a 5-year-old and in a fully trained 18y old when he comes out right and that's an enormous challenge that requires a lot of investment that requires a lot of community help takes a
1:05:19
village and that's something that um you know districts are responding really well to that challenge of when a kid graduates what are they W for yeah I I think looking reframing it and looking at it which you just said I think is a
1:05:36
great way to look at it they are you know you're creating adults and one of the interest I'm or one of the reasons I am so interested in this space is because like how do you prioritize almost anything above creating the next G
1:05:55
generation of adults who are going to lead society and have jobs in society and and you know C be Society right if if if we are doing a really poor job of that guess what happens you know pretty soon Society starts to crumble and and
1:06:15
look like idiocracy was the school district as opposed to anything else so I think like to me this is just such an obvious import topic um and and so I'm I'm delighted that there are young people like you um who are are pushing this uh ball up up a
1:06:37
hill do you sometimes feel like cispus where where you just pushing that Boulder and and uh you you got rolls back down or are are you are you excited about what you're seeing I'm lucky that I get to be on the front lines of
1:06:54
District opting and that has been yeah in my I'm 25 I've not had a very long career but I this is my 10th year now as a software developer and Technology entrepreneur working in k12 and the excitement around AI the
1:07:16
momentum this is the fastest adoption C in human history and to be able to be on the front lines of it is certainly makes me feel uh like that Boulder is standing uh further up the hill every day very dir cool stuff John all right well so we
1:07:34
will you you will come back to me then with the plan uh for putting these air filters into that into that entire School District uh I will be absolutely fascinated to watch uh the results stream in because the results that
1:07:51
you've achieved already kind of speak for themselves as far as I can uh tell so I think that's exciting what what are you most excited about uh over the next over the shorter term uh in terms of 12 to 24 months in your own work or what you're seeing others do
1:08:09
what what are you like wow this is really cool the World opening up uh to the realization that I've had that you have had that you can very easily improve the quality of your nare I mean I'm I'm talking my book here but I am
1:08:28
the excited about this because this is a frontier that has a lot of political consensus behind it a lot of different stakeholders are interested in this from different angles and I think that our grandchildren are going to look at us
1:08:41
really silly for not treat taking this more seriously so far yeah yeah not not boiling our air right um well I as you can tell I'm uh very impressed by you and your efforts uh I'm delighted to see um something like again it does make my mind go a little wonky that that like this isn't already in every school district and I understand I understand the constraints I understand all of that but it'll be great to get this bigger experiment
1:09:20
going um and uh watch you uh reinvent 8 through 12 you and your companies and and other young people because I think that that's the other thing that we need to focus on we need young minds in here who are not willing to just descend into
1:09:43
stasis and you know that's what I like about this project I mean how difficult is it to put a $60 air purifier into a room right but it's these small steps that can lead to great changes in the future as you say like oh my God can you
1:10:02
believe that they put kids in that kind of environment um I I always look for things to root for as opposed to against it's really easy to find things to root against in my opinion but this is something that is really easy to root
1:10:19
for so congratulations on everything you're doing um we will of course check back in now if you've listened to the podcast uh you know that our final question is we're going to wave a magic wand and we're going to make you the
1:10:35
emperor of the world you can't kill anyone you can't put anyone in a re-education camp but what you can do is we're going to give you a magical microphone and you're going to speak two things into it and you're going to incept the entire 8 billion population
1:10:52
of the world the next morning whenever their next morning is they're going to wake up and they're going to say I've just had two of the greatest ideas and I'm like all the other times I'm actually gonna act on both of these
1:11:07
ideas what what are you going to accept in the world I'm going to the first one is a very old idea uh I'm going to treat others the way that I want to be treated and I'm going to today I'm G to wake up and treat others the way I want to be
1:11:23
treated and honor that and two I'm going to help others breath the clean the S they can I love both of them John listen thank you so much uh I understand that this is your first uh uh your your first rodeo in the podcast circuit I suspect
1:11:41
that you will be on a lot more podcasts coming I think this is a very clear issue that it's really difficult to be opposed to well Jim you have set a a remarkable bar and I'm excited to uh present something back to your team
1:11:58
about how we can uh really create the first significant study and how these work in a district level implementation so um we have a great future ahead thank you for your generosity and thank you for having me on terrific John thanks so much