What Students Want

Our guest today is  Dr. Brenton White. Dr. White is the Superintendent/ CEO of A+ Charter Schools, INC. He has more than 23 years of experience in education, serving the last five years as a superintendent. 

In this episode, Dr. White discusses the challenges of being a leader, the importance of education for underserved communities, how competition improves school performance and gives insight into teacher shortages.

Quotes:

• “When people say, “Oh, you can't color trees purple.” the ones that persist continue to be artists. The others acclimate to the norm.”

• “I think any leader must jump in and do what's needed to make things happen.”

• “We have a lot of students who graduate and become teachers. And in fact, we have five teachers right now who were students.”

• “Retention has a lot to do with culture and so we're trying to create the best culture possible.”

Where to learn more about Dr. White:

Our guest today is Deborah Quazzo, the cofounder and managing partner of GSV Ventures, one of the earliest and more prestigious venture funds investing in the entire spectrum of education from PreK to Gray including companies that we all use daily such as Coursera, Classdojo, Clever, Quizziz and many more. Deborah is also the cofounder of the annual annual ASU+GSV Summit which attracts over 5000 visitors each year, now 13 years in, and is where the major education trends are revealed each year.

In this episode, we look at EdTech trends post-pandemic, glean a couple of key takeaways from the latest ASU+GSV summit, speculate on the race to the first $100B EdTech company, and, most importantly, talk about Return on Education and what a ROE school would look like.

Here are some resources mentioned in our discussion:

Our guest today is Daniel Pianko. Daniel is a Managing Director at Achieve and University Ventures. He has a long experience adviser and innovator in student finance, medical education, and postsecondary education.

In this episode, we talk about how people's focus is shifting from the inputs to the output of education, how personalization is a misplaced idea, and how to successfully invest in job-training for young people.

In our discussion, we cover:

• 02:06 - How people are increasingly focused on the outcome of education
• 04:22 - Why personalized learning is a misplaced idea, the holy grail that will never be achieved. Team work is a better strategy to enhance learning
• 10:34 - We describe an example of a charter school that transitioned successfully from a directive learning style to a more aspirational, student-led curriculum
• 17:21 - Why Zoom schooling has just exasperated the equity challenges
• 23:22 - How last-mile training may be the answer to pull things along
• 27:45 - The concept that schools do job-training in a vacuum is part of the problem. Companies should pay for job training instead
• 29:04 - The public school system should embrace last-mile job training to increase relevance and enrollment

Where to learn more about Daniel:

Our guest today is Mercedes Bent, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mercedes is focused on education and consumer early stage investing. Previously she was working in VR and a General Manager at General Assembly.

In this episode, we explore how EdTech is shifting and giving more power to parents and students. We look at social learning and gaming, which together offer a lot of promise for the future of education.

Here are some resources mentioned in our discussion: (links)