Kim Smith on Recalibrating Innovation and Next Steps for Educators

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast Tom Vander Ark is joined by repeat guest Kim Smith to discuss a landscape analysis, the rise of learner-centered education and the three horizons. 

Kim is the founder of LearnerStudio, a nonprofit intermediary accelerating progress towards a flexible, rigorous, equitable, and learner-centered education system, to ensure all our young people are inspired and prepared to thrive in life, career, problem-solving, and citizenship.

Previously, Kim was also the founder of the Pahara Institute, co-founder of NewSchools venture fund and Bellwether Education Partners, and a founding team member at Teach For America. She has helped to incubate numerous education and social change organizations and has served on a range of boards.

Outline

• The Current State of Education
• Philanthropy’s Role in Education Reform
• Generational Shifts and the Need for System Re-architecting
• AI and the Future of Learning
• The Path Forward: Building a Third-Way Coalition

The Current State of Education

Tom Vander Ark: We are at such an interesting time in education. It feels like there’s a growing consensus around learner-centered education, rich learning experiences, broad measures of success, and embracing well-being. There’s a lot of excitement about new pathways, using credentials and learner records to unlock opportunities. At the same time, there’s a lot of snapback post-pandemic, with people just wanting a taste of something normal. We have many states experimenting with new policies, unlocking opportunities outside the traditional system, and then there’s AI—the rise of AI—and many of us are contemplating what it means to be an augmented professional, an augmented learner, and how that’s going to change the way we work and learn.

I’m Tom Vander Ark, and this is a Getting Smart podcast. Today, we’re talking about this new, unsettled, exciting landscape with repeat guest Kim Smith. Hi, Kim.

Kim Smith: Hey, how’s it going?

Tom Vander Ark: Kim is one of my favorite people in the world and someone I admire for her work. She started a New Schools Venture Fund. We had the opportunity to work together in that space 20 to 25 years ago. Then she started this very interesting human capital leadership development initiative called the Pahara Institute, which has benefited hundreds of people. She’s spent the last two years looking at the education landscape and trying to make sense of where we are and what the opportunities are going forward. What did you find out?

Kim Smith: Thanks for having me. I always love being in discussion with you, and I wanted to start by appreciating what you all at Getting Smart are doing, keeping us in dialogue on this learning edge. So thanks for everything you guys are doing. I thought if it’s okay with you, I’d share some headlines and then dig into a couple of them with you in terms of how we could all move forward.

Over the last two years, Jen Holland and I did a project. We talked to 200—actually, it’s probably closer to 300 at this point—innovators in the space, convened leaders in a few different contexts, and really wanted to take stock of where all that change is happening, as you mentioned at the beginning of the call. And what does it mean for moving forward? There are a number of areas of convergence, as you said, and then some interesting areas of divergence, along with some fronts in front of us.

Tom Vander Ark: That’s what seems so interesting to me: these areas of convergence. At the same time, there’s this bipolar nature with new areas of dissonance, where we’re seeing the beginnings of multiple systems—a bifurcation. It’s an interesting time to be looking at the landscape.

Kim Smith: It is. It is. I feel like there are a couple of very high-level headlines worth sharing. The first is, and all of this is stuff that you and most of your listeners know, but I want to preface by saying it’s also a moment when we need to slow down a little bit and explain this to people who haven’t been as nerdy as the rest of us on this sort of frothy edge of change. We have an opportunity to bring a lot more people along. So apologies if some of this seems a little elementary, but the first header is: this really, truly is a different moment than we’ve ever seen before.

The second headline is: there are amazing innovators and change agents at every level of this system that we need to change, but they’re fragmented. They don’t necessarily connect into a coherent story, but they’re great building blocks on every front.

The third headline is: those amazing innovators have been operating around the dysfunctional architecture of the current system. We’re now at a moment with real potential—if we can rally a much wider base of allies—to rearchitect the system so that people can function in it more smoothly, instead of against all the infrastructure set up against them. You mentioned a few folks who are working on that already, but to do that, we need to bring in a much wider set of allies—rural, suburban, urban—a much bigger set than we’ve considered as our allies in the past. I think to do that, we need to slow down, explain things, and sew together information in a way that new allies can understand where to start.

Lastly—and this relates to the new allies part—one of the biggest takeaways for me was that this is an $800 billion-plus system, and philanthropy is not showing up at the level it needs to for us to have the capacity to do this rearchitecting. What came to mind was this Paul Ylvisaker quote, a famous program officer at the Ford Foundation, who said that at its best, philanthropy is society’s passing gear. This is a moment when we need that passing gear, and we’re going to have to count on philanthropy stepping up in a bigger way to help us with that.

Philanthropy’s Role in Education Reform

Kim Smith: So, one thing I’ll do is put a link in the show notes. Jen and I are releasing a paper this week to help philanthropy step into its role a little bit more. We were asked by a lot of foundation folks who said, “We see all this great innovation that’s happening, Tom, that you referenced, but we’re not quite sure where the right entry point for us is.” So we’ve got a little paper to try to provide a primer and give them some entry points.

Tom Vander Ark: Let’s just do a quick three-minute sidebar on philanthropy. It feels like there was a well-intentioned shift 20 years ago, when I was in philanthropy, to strategic philanthropy—where people tried to nail down a strategy, a theory of change, and a set of metrics. The net result is, I think it’s made American philanthropy, including new-money philanthropy, more risk-averse and less responsive to the field. In some respects, it’s had the opposite impact. Maybe it’s reduced the number of complete disasters, but it’s made the sector less interesting, less helpful, and less responsive to innovation. I’m afraid we’re back to where we were 20 years ago, where there’s just a big lack of R&D capacity in this sector. Is that an observation you share?

Kim Smith: I think that’s right. I might frame it slightly differently, perhaps in a more hopeful way—maybe it’s a personality Rorschach or maybe it’s true, I’m not sure. I think strategic philanthropy can make sense when you’re in a steady state and what you need to do is continue to expand and iterate within the old system. That was the case 25 years ago when we started working together at New Schools—not 10 or 15 years ago. So, at that moment, I think strategic philanthropy made sense because the system was steady.

But to your point, when we’re in this big paradigmatic shifting moment, you have to approach philanthropy differently. You have to be willing to take more risks, as you said. You have to be willing to loosen your grip on the theory of change and place many more bets. Particularly in respect to metrics—if you’re trying to rearchitect the whole system, it doesn’t make sense to look at metrics for years one, two, and three. That’s ridiculous. You need to know the direction you’re moving in and have early indicators. We’re not saying don’t have any indicators, but so much learning will happen in that shift. You need to be ready as a philanthropist to learn alongside your grantees, right?

So, I definitely agree with you that the strategic philanthropy risk aversion is not helpful to us right now. That’s part of why Jen and I presented this little primer paper to philanthropists who asked what they could do differently. We said, “Here’s what’s happening in the space, and here are ways you can think about it.” At the end, we framed the opportunities in three layers of risk: not that risky, a little more risky, and really bold change. Philanthropists will need to figure out where they sit on that risk profile for this next stage.

Tom Vander Ark: So, what are the headlines of the report?

Generational Shifts and the Need for System Re-architecting

Kim Smith: One headline I really want to highlight, which often gets underemphasized, is why this is such a different moment. You mentioned several reasons—pandemic mindset shifts, the science of learning and development, evolving technology with AI—but a couple of other factors don’t get as much attention. One is the generational shift. People often overlook this, but it has massive implications.

Sometimes people acknowledge how it changes how learners approach learning—they’re digital natives, they go to YouTube, they self-direct. That’s true. But another way it’s creating a real force for change is on the talent side. They don’t want the old teaching jobs. We can’t keep going forward the way we have been for the last century. The generational shift is hitting us on two fronts: an appetite for a new approach to learning and an unwillingness to take on the old teaching roles. The pipelines into teacher education programs are drying up, so we don’t have a choice about whether to rearchitect the system.

You mentioned the broadening definition of success, which is another piece. We’re shifting from a focus on success in school—which was important—to success in life, career, and democracy. When you add all this up, and I’d maybe add the last piece that hasn’t gotten much attention—education as a national security issue—it creates a very different moment. It’s cyclical in this country, but we come back to thinking about education as a national security issue, going all the way back to A Nation at Risk. That kind of fell off the radar but is back now, with the U.S.-China competition and the global reorganization of power. The Aspen Security Forum recently put out a piece saying we need to modernize our education system to stay innovative and competitive globally. So, all of these things together mean that it’s not a question of if we need to rearchitect the system anymore—it’s already happening. We just need to figure out how coherent it will be, to what end, and how we’re going to bake in some public goods. Those are some of the big headlines.

Kim Smith: The last big headline is that we’re getting clearer on the fact that the really big problems we have to solve—like the climate crisis, pandemics and other pathogens, how AI will affect society, and the next phase of democracy and capitalism—are intertwined with education. I know this sounds like a stretch, but you’ve mentioned this too when you talk about purpose: this crisis of meaning and purpose, faith, and how people stay connected while combating loneliness and isolation. All these first-order big problems cannot be solved unless we fundamentally rearchitect our education system to prepare people to be problem solvers. Many of the innovators who are doing this work know that. But that’s a message that the general public hasn’t yet connected the dots on. That’s another piece of what we need to help make clear in terms of the context. So, I’ll stop there on the context, and then I’ll share where we saw convergence.

Tom Vander Ark: Your study focused on K-12, right? But you could say many of the same things about higher ed, which is clearly in crisis. Americans are calling BS on higher ed. We could add that to the mix, making the same observations that a transformation is underway, whether people acknowledge it or not. There are many alternatives to both K-12 and higher ed that are emerging quickly.

Kim Smith: Yeah, most of the folks we talked to were focusing on the 6-14 space, the big blur that comes down to maybe sixth grade up to 14. A little less attention was focused on the earlier grades, with the exception of the role AI will play in changing instruction around basic skills like reading and math. Aside from that, most of the attention was on grades 6-14.

AI and the Future of Learning

Tom Vander Ark: Since you mentioned that, could you do a quick recap on your take on AI? This all happened while you were in the middle of this landscape. What are your headlines on where and how AI will make things better, and where might it make things more challenging?

Kim Smith: In our original proposal for this research, AI was listed as factor four out of six for why change was going to happen. By the end of the study, it was at the top of everyone’s list. Honestly, I don’t think we know the answer to your question yet. I’ve been talking to folks who are deep in AI, and so far, all the innovations they’re seeing are marginal efficiency plays, which is fine and an expected place to start. I do think it will reshape basic skills instruction—because we’ve had such a hard time with reading and numeracy, AI will change how those things happen.

There will be a ripple effect. I think everyone will get a personalized tutor bot for basic skills learning, freeing up human capital to focus on social and emotional development, and the science of learning and development that we know is needed to be human. It makes me think back to Joseph E. Aoun’s book Robot-Proof, where he talked about “humanics,” the idea that in an age of AI, we need to leverage what it means to be human.

We’re going to have to figure that out. The net effect on the systems change conversation is that it’s stopped people from arguing that the old system will stay the same. People say, “Everything’s going to stay the same,” but then they add, “Except AI is going to change everything.” So, it’s opened the door to those conversations. Beyond that, how radical the disruption will be remains to be seen, but I’m curious about your thoughts on that.

Tom Vander Ark: I’ve listened to Sal Khan a few times talk about his enthusiasm for Khanmigo, and he’s certainly long on the idea of a personal digital learning assistant. I’ve also heard Reid Hoffman many times discuss his new company, Inflection, which has announced a chatbot called Pi that is much more conversational and human—almost in a creepy way. It reminds me of the movie Her from 10 years ago, about having this life partner. I’m coming to terms with the idea. I’m not yet super enthusiastic about it, but it does feel like the idea will mature, probably in the second half of this decade, and substantially change how we think about learning models.

Recently, Mason, our producer, wrote a piece about the idea of becoming an augmented professional. I do think we’re at the beginning of changing the way we think about what it means to be human and what each of us is capable of doing. This has a pretty fundamental impact, not just in terms of helping kids read better, but also in inviting young people to make more complex contributions to the world. It encourages them to think of themselves as augmented beings, more capable than ever before of entering the world and making bigger and better contributions than they ever conceived of. That’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about being a person and the role an education system has in that.

I think, as you suggested, this implies that we must launch a new set of community conversations, community by community. I don’t think there’s any shortcut to that. We have to have these conversations about what this means and how we’re going to walk through it together. We need to rebundle a set of agreements about what school is going to look like next year around some updated learning goals. That’s the new work for ed leaders—facilitating conversations about what all this means and what we’re going to do differently and better next year as a result.

Kim Smith: What you’re saying, which I agree with, is that it’s going to change what we think of as the outputs of the system, both in terms of jobs being different for augmented humans and in the need to bring in ethics, morality, and moral leadership. If you can do all these amazing things, they can be in service of good or bad, right? It raises the stakes on philosophy, morality, and ethics in the education system in a way that hasn’t been explicit before. I appreciate your point that communities must be a part of that conversation.

Tom Vander Ark: With so much going on, it’s time to regather and have this conversation about what’s happening, the new opportunities, and how as many of us as possible can walk into this together.

Kim Smith: Yeah, we heard areas of real convergence—this VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous), and AI is obviously a part of that. That’s a big change, far beyond education. It’s overwhelming for people; they don’t know how to make sense of it. In that world, we must prepare young people for very different futures, roles, and jobs, and the current system is not capable of doing that. Focusing on just those three areas of convergence is massive.

Then, we come down to principles: as you said at the top of the call, there’s a lot of convergence around competencies, learner-centered approaches, mastery-based progressions, designing for equity, and a new kind of rigor that we don’t quite have yet but sense we can develop. There’s also convergence around SEL (social and emotional learning), agency, and the need for a more flexible system. In principle, there’s a lot of convergence, but it’s still at the principle level, and there’s a lot of variability in how people are piecing those things together.

Tom Vander Ark: I’m really optimistic about that space—the credentialing and learning record space. It’s the next iteration of mastery, and I do think we can better equip people with ways of describing their capabilities and communicating those to interested audiences. Twenty-five years after helping to implement NCLB (No Child Left Behind), which turned into this testing frenzy, I am a little bit worried about bad versions of credentialing that could turn into micro-test taking. Secondary schools and post-secondary schools could become these endless skill sprints toward standardized tests, just with the “end of year” becoming the “end of unit.” That’s a pretty dystopian view of school that we need to combat.

Kim Smith: It’s an area of divergence, exactly, Tom, and it’s a problem area. It didn’t come out as a full area of divergence, but rather an area of question: how are we going to define rigor in this new world? If we move from a system where we had primarily academics to one where we have modernized academics—which likely means fewer facts—SEL mindsets, and future competencies, we’ll need collaborative R&D to define what rigor looks like in these domains. Once we do that, we can assess different credentialing systems and see if they align with that approach to rigor. Right now, I agree with you—it’s the Wild West, and people can do whatever they want on the output side, which is tricky.

As a parent, I put my kids into a next-horizon learning model at the start of COVID because I knew our district wasn’t equipped to handle the complexity of the moment. It was entirely student-driven, project-based, and virtual. They did a great job, but they hadn’t addressed the question of rigor. It was all support and no challenge, and it wasn’t clear to the students what their bar was. In a mastery-based system, young people need to know what they’re developing so they can understand what they’re working toward.

You’ve highlighted models like OneStone and others that are doing this, and XQ is working on it too. Big Picture has their credential system, so there are groups trying to be transparent with learners about what mastery looks like and how to demonstrate it, which is super promising.

We did empathy interviews—can I share some of the outcomes of those? We partnered with Conmigo Education to do empathy interviews with parents, students, and educators who had moved into this next horizon already. We wanted to ask them what new skill sets they needed, why they made the choice to move into that space, and how they talked about it with others. One of the biggest areas of divergence right now is communication. We’re in an R&D and innovation space, but we’re also in a communications problem when it comes to bringing new allies in.

Tom Vander Ark: I think so.

Kim Smith: The parents we spoke to said one of the biggest challenges was getting comfortable with this new question around rigor. How do they know if their child is on track for what they want them to be able to do? They understood it was a different finish line, but they were used to reading grades and courses, and they didn’t know how to make sense of these competencies. So that was an uncomfortable process for them.

Some parents who were a little further along said that, while they were initially uncomfortable with the shift, they saw the payoff when their kids moved on to college, the workforce, or other next steps. The adaptable skills, communication skills, and ability to ask questions—those are the skills their kids needed. Anyone who’s a parent and has seen kids cross those gateways knows that’s true, so we need to communicate that better.

Ninety percent of the young people we talked to said one of the biggest skill sets they had to develop was time management, which we can all identify with—time management, work planning, adaptability, and self-direction. One thing that stood out across several interviews was the ability to ask questions of adults in the learning context. One student shared a great story about being prepared to have a conversation with a college professor during office hours in a way that their peers were not, because they’d already done that in high school. So, learning how to ask for help and be self-directed was a key takeaway.

Kim Smith: The educators we talked to mentioned that one of the biggest challenges was the discomfort with the fact that the learning process wasn’t linear. They had to release a lot of power to the students, who were at various levels of self-direction, and that was really uncomfortable. They had students at all different stages, and they had to constantly pay attention. It wasn’t a predictable, linear process, like grading one quiz at night. It was the opposite: full of variability, where they had to release power and manage many different paths. That’s one of our divergence areas—how much variability are we willing to tolerate in young people’s learning paths?

Tom Vander Ark: Let me just add that it’s not only about advanced personalized learning skills for teachers. At its extreme, it’s about inviting them to think about themselves differently as professionals—as learning facilitators, team members, or team leaders. It’s an identity shift, not just a skills shift, and thinking about yourself differently as a professional is a profound ask.

Kim Smith: Particularly when we haven’t prepared them for that. Most educators are making that shift with little to no preparation.

Tom Vander Ark: It can make the work more interesting and sustainable. This is why I think we’re both bullish on the work that ASU’s Next Workforce has led for almost 10 years. Other folks, like Opportunity Culture, are doing the same. We can make the job of school more interesting and sustainable.

Kim Smith: Rewarding, yeah, for sure. That old adage, where your last day of teaching was exactly the same as your first day of teaching—that’s crazy. So, yes, we can move away from that.

A couple of other areas of divergence include communications, which I mentioned. We have a huge problem there. Another is the question of what school will look like. What is the vision? You’ve done some great work on unbundling, and there are some folks who believe the system will become entirely unbundled. There are many who don’t think it will be, because people still need to come to a quote-unquote “school.” But the question of how unbundled it will be is up for debate, as is how we’ll achieve coherence.

There’s a second layer to this, which you and I have talked about: how do we balance the individual good, which is served by highly personalized learning and even unbundling where students get exactly what they need, with the public good? One of the purposes of the public education system in this country was to bring people together. So, what if anything is going to be standardized in this future system? What will be left to the student or the parent, and what, if anything, will be common to everyone?

For those pushing into the future, many believe content won’t be standardized. But we still want a strong democracy. So, what if we totally changed the approach and said, “Everyone has to pass the citizenship test we ask of immigrants, and everyone has to do a year of national service to bring people together”? I know that’s a bold suggestion, but it’s an example of a solution that’s very different from a set of academic standards. We may want something common that’s not content-based but helps hold our democracy together, instead of going completely tribal. This is a big area of divergence—how do we strike that balance?

Tom Vander Ark: I agree. I sit in on a Civics Now call every couple of weeks, which includes a couple hundred organizations interested in civics education and a stronger democracy. There’s a lot of conversation happening. I don’t yet see much momentum in school models or community agreements about what kids should know.

Kim Smith: That’s the fragmentation problem again, right? The civics conversation includes important competencies, and the durable skills conversation includes important competencies. There’s overlap on that Venn diagram, but the work isn’t being sewn together into a coherent system where we know young people are developing these competencies. Careers, civics, talent—there’s good work happening in all of those areas, but it’s siloed.

There’s a great quote from one of our interviews, where someone who used to be a funder and is now an operator said, “One of our biggest problems is that philanthropists want systems change, but they fund projects.” It’s true. We have all these amazing projects and initiatives, but they aren’t being brought together into a coherent system that works.

The Path Forward: Building a Third-Way Coalition

Tom Vander Ark: I want to ask you about what feels like a bifurcation of the system. It seems like a third of America isn’t interested in anything that includes a public school system, at least as we’ve historically thought about it. Are we inevitably headed toward a bifurcated system? Is there a European alternative? How is this going to play out?

Kim Smith: That’s a great, deep, hard question, and it segues into some of what we’re trying to do with the Learner Studio. I think we are on that track right now, and it’s going to take real intentionality to get us off that path. Of all the things we’ve talked about today, this is the one I have the most concern about, and I’m least clear that we’re aligning the right resources and people to address it.

One of the ways I think about it, and how it relates to what we’re doing at the Learner Studio, is that we’ve had a soft launch of the Learner Studio this past year. We’ve got four different prongs: making common purpose, convening people, and bringing them together around some key questions. Our best hope, I think, is to create a true third-way coalition of people who bring a deep dedication to individual learners getting what they need and parents having agency. That camp is currently being served by folks with a libertarian bent. There’s a separate center of gravity made up of, I think, liberal traditionalists, who don’t want to rearchitect the system but care deeply about belonging, SEL, and changing how we approach the science of learning and development.

Each of these camps has something incredibly important to offer. But we need to bring together a third-way silent majority that wants both of these things. The problem is that the really loud minorities on either side are making it hard to hold the center. So we have to get more active in convening that third-way coalition. There’s great research out there showing that most Americans agree on pragmatic, centrist solutions, but centrist, pragmatic solutions aren’t loud or emotionally evocative. Rallying the base on the extremes is easier, so that’s part of what I hope we can all collaborate on.

Kim Smith: We’ve been focused on various technical things, which are super important, but we also need to focus on the civics and public conversation aspect. We need to put more people and resources into crafting that third way, and this ties into the communications problem. We don’t have the answer to that yet, but we need to build it collaboratively.

Tom Vander Ark: I guess I worry that there will be a crash in the ESA (Education Savings Account) space. It might be a fiscal crash, but I also think we’re heading for an outcomes crash—there will be disappointing outcomes with some of these ESA solutions. I wonder if we can create some kind of accountability superstructure with shared goals and safeguards to ensure the options available to families are truly valuable. It sounds like a European system, where you have multiple pathways with national learning goals. It might work in a few states. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Kim Smith: I think that’s right. It is the Wild West. And I also think we’ll have to ask our left-progressive allies, who are unwilling to rearchitect the infrastructure, to loosen up a bit. If we want to come back from the brink with ESA issues and have a shared space, we’ll have to define what core elements we want young people to have. This is why we need that third-way space, because both camps are at the extremes. We need to find a common space that will look different from what we’re used to. It’s not going to be a giant binder of academic standards, but there will need to be something core that can keep a productive, diverse democratic republic together.

Tom Vander Ark: Yeah.

Kim Smith: That sounds highfalutin, but the stakes are high.

Tom Vander Ark: Speaking of high stakes, I guess one of my concerns for this decade is that we have two dozen urban districts that have seen dramatic reductions in enrollment over the last 20 years, and even more dramatic reductions recently. They are really sitting on the brink of financial disaster, given their facilities obligations and pension obligations. They’re essentially bankrupt districts that are still trying to operate like big districts, even though they’re really small now. Most of these districts have at least 50% of their students in charter schools. I saw a community effort in Indianapolis try to come together to craft a path forward for a new, innovative, sustainable model, but it doesn’t look like that has worked. These are tough opportunities, but if we don’t step into these situations soon, we’re going to have several bankruptcies with long-term consequences. So, it’s an opportunity and a crisis at the same time.

Kim Smith: Yeah, and I think it’s similar to the generational shift that’s changing the talent pipeline. There are certain unavoidable crises that are going to force us to redesign. If people are just trying to innovate around the edges of these districts, like you’re describing, it’s never going to be enough. We need some radical ideas on the table. Where are those coming from? How are we bringing people together across silos, fields, and domains? This is a city problem, in addition to being a district problem. To your point, businesses care. We need to think differently about who is at the table solving these problems. The assets thought of as district assets are really the public’s assets, right? They could belong to the city and be used in different ways, not just as school district assets. I’m not saying that’s the right answer, but it’s an example of how we need to expand the question set to come up with new designs and rearchitect the system.

Tom Vander Ark: Give us one or two takeaway headlines from the report. As you summarize the wandering conversation we’ve had, what are the big takeaways?

Kim Smith: First, this is truly a different moment in time. We have to rearchitect the system instead of just innovating around the edges. To do that, we must expand the base of allies involved in the conversation and create a third-way coalition. We’ll also need a much more significant investment from philanthropy to create that passing gear and do the redesign.

Redesigning is intentional. It’s not about just moving forward; it’s about intentional infrastructure changes, public utilities, and being deliberate about the redesign. The hopeful part is that we have amazing innovators to build upon, but most of them aren’t getting the general operating resources they need to grow and scale. They’re getting project grants, so we need to fund them differently to build capacity. One of the benefits of this will be enabling them to collaborate more. Right now, they’re set up to compete for too small a piece of the pie, so we need to expand the pie.

Finally, we need to dig into the really deep, challenging design problems you’ve put on the table—like the district bankruptcy issues. That’s the kind of work we need to collaborate on moving forward.

Tom Vander Ark: I’ll underscore that public infrastructure will be super important. We’re at a period where very important decisions will be made, and I think you and I both hope those decisions will lead to a stronger public system.

Kim Smith: Yes, and a public utility—whether it’s owned by the public sector or sits in a nonprofit governed by a group—it needs to be thought of as a public utility we invest in. It’s not privately owned. Individuals should own their data. I think we totally agree on that.

Tom Vander Ark: And you’re launching Learner Studio to take on some of this work.

Kim Smith: Yes, we’ve been launching Learner Studio. We’ll take on little pieces of it. We’re trying to figure out where we can add value—through common purpose, expanding the pie, creating brave spaces, and supporting the amazing innovators already out there. We’re just trying to do our little part.

Tom Vander Ark: We’re super excited about your next chapter. I alluded to this at the outset, but I don’t think there’s anyone in America who has done more to create good things in public education than you. You’ve developed more people and helped create more great new schools than anyone else. You already have a terrific legacy, and we’re excited about what Learner Studio means for all of us. So, thank you for sticking with education, for having this conversation, and for sharing what you’ve learned over the past couple of years.

Kim Smith: I appreciate that, Tom. I’ve been super lucky to work with amazing people like you and others, so I’m very grateful.

Tom Vander Ark: Until next week, thanks to Kim Smith for joining us. Thanks to our producer, Mason Pasha. Keep learning, keep leading, and keep innovating for equity. See you next week!

Links:

• Cambiar Education
• The Learner Studio Report
• Khanmigo
• Inflection (AI)
• Augmented Humans blog (By Producer Mason and Nate McClennen)
• Next Education Workforce
• Opportunity Culture
• CivixNow