Rochelle Newton's "Diversity Chat" with Michael B. Horn [video]

Michael B. Horn
Speaker, Author, and Senior Strategist
Guild Education

Rochelle Newton
Assistant Divisional Chief Operating Officer
Duke University

Newton: So, may I ask you to tell us your name?

Horn: Yeah, absolutely, my name is Michael Horn.

Newton: And can you share a little bit about you so we can get to know you a little bit better?

Horn: Yeah, absolutely.

Horn: So I've been working in the field of education for about 15 years now. I had a public policy background, went to business school to get away from it, failed in that endeavor. And ended up co-authoring a book with the man who became my mentor, Clayton Christensen, called "Disrupting Class". We started the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation together, nonprofit think tank. I ran the education team there for just under a decade and then, moved to a group called the Entangled Group, in 2015, which just got acquired by a group called Guild Education. And now, I'm a Senior Strategist there. And as you know, I still write a lot of books and articles about the future of education, really spanning the entire system from early learning, K-12, where my roots were. But the last really seven years or so has been much more focused on higher education, and Guild's work as in helping employers spend dollars on helping working adults get education and up-skill. Which in this current pandemic, given all of the disruption, different sort of disruption in people's lives, has felt incredibly gratifying to be able to help a lot of folks right now. So I work across those ranges. As I've mentioned written a number of books on the topic, I have a couple podcasts on the future of education, and just try to help people chart a course to a better system that serves all individuals better.

Newton: Yeah. Well, I can say I've been a fan for a very long time, even when you were interning under Mr. Christensen. I read a lot of his work and I was really moved by his thoughts and he was very really clear and kind of really poignant, you know, to think about where he was. Because you know, a lot of people talk about education. Education is the the black sheep of the family. All the time, it's something wrong with it. There's all these things, and I think some of his work which was really clear in he articulated his vision very, very well. And then you came along, behind him, and just took it up and took the banner and started running and you've done basically the same thing. And I try, every time you send something, I try to post it because I think people need to hear and read those things. Because I mean, like we make assumptions about education that are not always correct. I don't know if you know this, my husband is a third grade teacher. He's been teaching for 28, 29 years has been a teacher for the whole time. And you know, my view, my lens from education comes from of his work. And then where I am in my work, so I think it's really important. And one of the reasons why I wanted to have this chat with you is because I think you can give us some insights that many of us may not have. Specifically, about education and race and wealth equity, if you will. You know, how those go together. So, if you could, can you just talk a little bit about the structure of education from elementary education all the way to post-secondary education?

Horn: Yeah, absolutely. So, in our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools, they were literally designed after factories. Most people don't realize this that if you went before the 1850's really, everyone attended a one-room schoolhouse. And by necessity, there were a lot of kids cramped into a classroom and the teacher was individualizing and personalizing. For every single student there, The students were teaching each other. There was a lot of differentiation going on acknowledging the reality that, all students learn in different ways, different needs, at different times, different paces and so forth. And it was just laid bare by the fact that we had so many different ages. But what a lot of people don't realize is the vast majority of Americans didn't go to high school back then. Very few, like we're talking single digit percentages. And that all started to change really in the late 1800's and early 1900's. When we moved to this factory model education system that we had had imported in Essen from Prussia. And that system, and the theory basically said, okay, we're going to batch students up, by their date of manufacture, if you will, their birth year. And we will put them in classrooms where the teacher in order to educate massive numbers of students, because remember, there wasn't compulsory education before in the United States. So to create a universal system, we're going to deliver the same learning in the same way to them at the same pace, on each day. And every couple of days, we'll switch to the next concept and some of them will get it and some of them won't. And that's okay, because our system was essentially built to sort students, sort them out. So those students who, you know didn't have high academic achievement, they'd move into career and technical education. Which would mean that they were line workers in factories. Those who did pretty well, they would become managers. And the really Crème De La Crème, they would get to go to higher education to become sort of the leaders of the political class or corporations or et cetera, and sort of run the country, if you will. And that's how our education system was built, in the case of K-12 system. And I'll get to higher education in a moment, but you hear that it's a system built on sorting, not on learning and developing every single child's potential and passions and so forth. And so, when we, as a society, over the last 30 years since "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, was published, pointed out all the students that weren't making the grade, weren't learning, were dropping out and so forth. What I think we've never connected as a country in a conversation is, that was actually the design of the system. It was designed to produce the exact results that it does and it's a success by that standard. The problem is we now live in a knowledge economy where that doesn't actually get you a stable living wage and a stable job and so forth, in today's day and age. And we need a very different thing from the education system. And higher education. Again, it was a system built to serve a minority of students. Because most people wouldn't be going there and when we started expanding dramatically, the access to higher education, first in the 1860s, but then really with the G.I. bill, after World War II, you had a flood of students coming into colleges and universities. Which did a lot of good in many ways but the fact that we have a 55% graduation rate over six years in this country. The community colleges that's something like in the 28% or something like that, graduation rate, I mean, appalling numbers, right? That was how the system was built. And as you know, from your , like the sign of a good professor is not one who coaches and coaxes and really helps every single student succeed. It's the one that serves as a gating function to say, No, you're not physics material or you're not legal material or you're not this, or you're not that. And again, sorts them out. And the higher education system was built on the primacy of research, not the primacy of teaching and learning. And too often we've mistaken teaching for learning, right? Teaching is what I do when I convey information but learning is what a student actually does or doesn't master. And our whole higher Ed system was not built upon doing that effectively. So again, we get the results that we designed for.

Newton: Right. And so, and also there's a component that education was based on farming, right? So went to school when farming, that we didn't go to school when crops are ripe and had to be picked. And then we went to school when, you know. it was dormant time.

Horn: Yes, it's actually even worse than that. We just covered this in my, in the upcoming episode of "My Class Disrupted Podcasts" that'll be going live on next Monday. So, that's been the conception and that was my conception. It's actually worse than that. Schooling actually used to be year round during the agrarian model of our economy. But what happened was that as we started to have a middle and upper-class emerge, in this country, in the late, sorry, mid to late 1800's, the upper class in particular but also middle-class, they would just pull their kids out of school for the summer months because it was hot, they wanted to be on the beaches where it was cool. they want to be in the mountains. And so, there was just empty seats in schools. And so, basically schools and then the administrators and teacher unions and legislatures solidified it and created what we now call the agrarian model calendar. But it actually wasn't built in the farming cycles. It's worse than that, it was built on inequality of those who had the means to escape it. And then we created a system around it, and now as we talk, we literally, this is the topic we talk about in this next episode. We have industries now built around that, we have summer camps, we have summer businesses, right? All of these things built on maintaining the status quo that works for a very small subset of families in this country. And I would argue it doesn't even really work for those families either. Like, I mean, I consider myself one of the lucky ones before COVID hit. We had spreadsheets upon spreadsheets trying to figure out what our kids would do over the summer and make it work for a two family working you know, family, and it's tough.

Newton: And to your point, so with COVID being, progressing pretty quickly in certain areas. You know, there's been a push to send kids back into the classroom. And more and more parents are finding themselves doing more teaching than the teachers are doing, because you know, the way the system is built, I always say this between healthcare and education, every few meters they throw out, their philosophy and start with something new, right? So we have common core-

Horn: So true.

Newton: …left behind and all these things. So now we get to where we are right now. So I think that there is a very important point to that, you know, because early on, in the agrarian model, girls were home with mom, cooking and learning how to do this. Sons were either out in the farm or either in class. So yeah, we had discrimination in education between girls and boys. You know, and-

Horn: Or even the teaching force, right? Normal schools were developed for women to become the teachers 'cause it was thought that they were good at child-rearing and working with children and men became the administrators. So it's even in the labor force as well.

Newton: Yeah, absolutely. So as we look at education today, and one of the things that I write a lot about is the need to publish how schools do, right? So elementary school specifically, you get this from the Department of Education, Education Statistics they put out a report. You know and then I don't know if all schools, district does but it happens here in North Carolina. So they'll tell you by gender, by race, how poorly the children have done. And so, when there was this all this pushback with Silicon Valley about why they weren't divorced. Why didn't have more blacks, more browns, more women in in these roles. For historic times, we've been told we had the Bell Curve, you know, there was that and all of these other studies that said that black and brown people weren't that smart. So, you know, not politically correct but you could see why some of these companies went toward hiring Asians or white males because it had been perpetuated in the system forever and ever that these other people who were smart, and not the black and brown people. And there's been no accounting for the fact that when the first slaves arrived in America, and for some period, almost to the point of Emancipation Proclamation, they were prevented from learning. So how long does it take you to catch up? How long does it take for you to have however many years that is to brown versus board of education to where we are right now? How long does academically, does it take a black or brown or girl for that matter to catch up in the in the education model that we have in America, and probably all over the world?

Horn: Yeah, no, it's significant. And what I think I would add is what you're pointing to which is, essentially achievement historically correlates very strongly with class, right? And so, those with means, tend to do well, not just on academic achievement, but also in the IQ measures, which are really academic achievement. And hence why you see, I think some of those bell curve type statistical models out there, is that they're reflections of something else that they're not. They're measuring something else, right? And what we also know is that reading after third grade, so your husband's right in the middle of this. After the third grade... you know, third grade and below, it's a skill. Like phonics, phonemic awareness, how to do it, right? And then once you get past that, it becomes reading as a way to learn and everything else. And the reading tests in fourth grade, eighth grade, high school, et cetera, I would argue are less tests of reading skill than tests of background knowledge. Because there's this famous experiment that was done many many years ago with so-called high achieving readers and so-called low-achieving readers where they gave them a passage on baseball. And the high achieving readers they had selected for people that knew nothing about baseball. And the low achieving readers, they selected for people that knew a lot about baseball. And magically, when you read a passage about baseball, and you asked questions about the main idea, what was, you know, things like that. The low achieving readers, all of a sudden tested high, and the high ones who knew nothing about baseball, tested low. Why is that? Because, I mean, just imagine the sentence, like, "The hitters stole second base." That sounds like a terrible thing if you don't know anything about baseball. What they stole it? That's terrible. Well, that's actually a great play, right? And so, we discount, that's obviously like a lighthearted example, if you will. But you think about your point, all of that background knowledge that gets locked up and told in families over time as a key to economic success. And it actually is a reservoir of knowledge, it doesn't just appear before kindergarten, it appears over and over at unpredictable times throughout a child's development that gives them a vastly superior advantage over time. And those schools that I think have done the best at closing that gap are those that have been very intentional about saying, we're going to build your background knowledge and all these things that, you know, someone might say is not important or whatever else, but it's a non-written code of our society to get ahead.

Newton: Right, absolutely. And so, one of the things that, they say third, fifth and eighth grade are the determinant grades, right? Those are the three grades that will say whether you will make it or not. And I don't know how long ago it's been a minute now, but I used to teach adult literacy. And so, one of my favorite things of all times is "The Canterbury Tales". I love "The Canterbury Tales", I love everything.

Horn: Yeah.

Newton: But tried teaching a room full of black and brown children about the Canterbury tales, right? So, what's in this story that matters to me. So you're going to tell me about a pilgrimage of white people on their way to someplace, what? And what I did with the course, was I did a back flip on it. Every student got to pick a character, whatever the character was. And Wife of Bath is probably one that stands out most. I said, so now, I want you turn that person into a sports figure. So who is the most flamboyant sports figure at that time? And so, Russell Westbrook became the wife of bath. And when students got that, they were just so intrigued by this pilgrimage, because now, you could identify with it, right? Because if I'm-

Horn: Yep, its' a universal story, but you just needed to make it identifiable. Yeah.

Newton: Right. And that's where I find at most times, now I quit teaching adult literacy because they told me I couldn't teach it that way, I should teach it the way it was taught. But I will say that, you know, like a lot of what expectations are for black and brown people is that we are supposed to be able to grasp these concepts that are foreign to us, right? So, you know, when I was younger, another one of my favorites was Macbeth. And the only reason why I like Macbeth is 'cause she couldn't get the blood off her hands. It had nothing to do with the rest of the stories. I don't know what happened in the rest of the stories, I don't know what the characters were but she could not get the blood off her hands. And so, when you think about education, from the perspective of me. I graduated from high school in 1976 so I'll be 62 this year. My understanding of education was not necessarily to learn but to get out. So my mother said, " , get out." You know, get a good education and get out. I wasn't interested in learning. So, you know, when you told me that Christopher Columbus discovered America, I was like, "Okay, that makes sense to me. I'm getting out." That's all I know, I'm getting out. And so, now the system that we have in education for black and brown kids is to teach exactly the same one size fits all. And I don't think you can make education one size fits all. 'Cause I can speak from my own experiences. So why is that such a common theme in education? Whether it's in elementary or post-secondary education, why is that such a common theme?

Horn: Yeah, I mean, I think it's an outgrowth of the factory model on the one hand, right? Because the theory was we teach them all the same thing, in the same way, in the same day, and, you know, sort 'em onto the next side. The second piece we haven't talked about is the other part of a factory model system which is the time is the constant and every child's learning is variable.

Newton: Right.

Horn: And my big push would be that we need to flip that and say, learning is the constant and the time is variable. And so, you know, you're going to learn. So here's where I get to confess, I haven't read Canterbury tales.

Newton: What?

Horn: My brother and my father have, and they can still recite it however many years later. But you know, like maybe this is an objective, right? And we're going to assume it takes people different pathways and different paces to do it. And that's not just, okay, it's encouraged. 'Cause it's actually more... Like equity is often mistaken as I'm going to give you the exact same learning. That's a mistake. You actually need a different pathway to relate it to your experience, to make it understandable, to fill in gaps and background knowledge that maybe you have. I need clearly something very different 'cause I'm starting from ground zero, as we just discovered on this one. And so, we need to acknowledge that because, and then it continues to compound, right? Because you get an illusion in another professor's lecture. On the Canterbury tales, I don't.

Newton: Right.

Horn: And in our current system, we treat that as a deficiency on my part.

Newton: Right.

Horn: And to your point, not to make it about me as a white person, the point is black and brown students disproportionately because of the history that you have just cited, those gaps are bigger. And we need to be very intentional about it. I would also argue the second thing we need to be much more intentional about is, what really are the core skills in knowledge that you need to be successful in today's day and age? Are they the same from community to community? Which ones are and which ones aren't? And can we have fewer of the requirements to give more breathing room to those in the communities to figure out the right path to chart? And I think the other addendum to that is, and also to create a more coherent curriculum across the Science and Social Studies and English, and arguably the mathematics as well. Although maybe that's a little bit more up and down but so that, like what I'm doing in Science, relates to what I'm learning in Social Studies, and that I can actually start to draw threads together. You know, maybe I cover marginally less of a deep dive on the middle ages. Like I know it exists, right? But I go a little bit less deep on it. As long as I get the currents of history, and then I can go on deep in one particular piece, and like, do cause and effect and how does it relate to today's day and age? And why is it important to understand this and yada yada, right? Like maybe that's what we really want to achieve. We don't have those conversations though, as a society about what really is the core knowledge and skills you need to do to be a functionally literate and civically minded adult in today's country? And what are the skills that we can allow communities to choose different knowledge pathways to demonstrate and achieve this?

Newton: So I have two questions for that. The first one is this. So McKinsey has written several articles about the future of work and automation, right? So technology is going to come over, come in and displace all of us. They're going to for us, you know, we're not going to be able to do anything. Robots will do everything. But in reality, I mean, I do see that. So where do you live? You live in Massachusetts-

Horn: Yep.

Newton: Up north? So like here in the south, we're not as progressive as some of these things out west, Silicon Valley, maybe even not up north. But we are pretty, pretty, pretty progressive.

Horn: North Carolina is pretty good, yeah.

Newton: 'Cause we have a lot of colleges and institutions here. But Sam's Club, so we have a Sam's Club, it's about two or three miles from our house. And when I renewed my membership a couple of years ago, it said, download the Sam's Club app. So, of course I downloaded it on my phone, and I've been in seven heavens ever since. 'Cause when I go to Sam's, I never see a person so I was not stuck in a line, I'm not waiting on whatever it is that they're doing. But what that immediately brought to mind was that person who was my checkout person, when I was going through that line is going to eventually be completely displaced. Because-

Horn: Yep.

Newton: How they've got cameras watching me so they know I can't steal. They're going to check my QR code before I leave, so they know I bought what I said I bought. So now the store does not need as many people. And I'm doing a presentation later on this year hopefully, you never know, on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Most people say, "Charlie in the Chocolate Factory?" I said there was one small piece in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that everybody should get. So when the father was let go by the factory because someone was stealing all the steals the recipes for the chocolate and all the things that they did, he fired everybody and put machines in place. So, you know, the factory was run by machines. And the way the movie ends is the father comes back and has to fix the computer, the machine that replaced him, right? So, this is to me, how what McKinsey wrote, and what you are talking about kinda merge to each other, right? So there was no indication in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that the father had any kind of higher learning, you know? He just knew how to do what it was he did, worked in a factory as you described earlier. But then, when the machine would break, who's going to go fix it? So when we look at education and what they keep talking about, the future of work and disrupting automation. What does this mean in terms of what do we have to do to get all people? Not just, not white people but black and brown and anybody else on the same level to participate fully in that change.

Horn: Yeah, I think that's, I mean, that's literally the however many trillion dollar question right now, hanging over us, right? And I think what we need to do, I mean, this is what we're focused on in Guild Education now that I have that hat on as well, right? Is how to up-skill people, given the fact that jobs that can be automated are being automated. That's happening, right? And I would argue the pandemic is going to accelerate it. Because we have tons of layoffs and a lot of those jobs ain't coming back.

Newton: Right. A lot of economic loss.

Horn: Huge economic loss. And I mean, you think about the black community in particular against that, right? Like, the black community was at its best unemployment. And now, I think it's worst in, what, two or three generations, right now. And so, in a lot of those jobs, as we just said, the ones that got laid off, they're not coming back because they're going to be automated. And I think the real magic is as you started to say is in actually complementarity, right? So, understanding the digital, understanding the machines, and being able to apply the human next to it. So, you build an artificial intelligence algorithm having an ethicist alongside of it is actually incredibly important, right? Having a human being to check it as an audit, right? And then being able to communicate about what it has done and what it hasn't done, really important. And so I think what we'll see, a lot of people are arguing right now that the the net sum of jobs is going to be negative. My own sense is it's going to look more like the industrial revolution, which is to say that there'll be a negative in the short run, but in the longer run we'll actually create more value added jobs that's more intrinsically rewarding work for individuals. The challenge right now is in this, 5 to 20 year period. We don't know how long it'll last of transitioning people into that. And that's where the real pain and I would argue a lot of the unrest right now over the last five to 10 years is like, the seeds of that have been in that tension. And so, from my perspective, like this is where education is so important because we need to create a more flexible learning system that is more affordable and more accessible, and is judged based on how you propel and grow individuals, as opposed to labeling and sorting them. And if we can do that, then I think you create actually, a lot of different rungs to opportunity for individuals, regardless of background. And that's like the really exciting part about it is if we can construct that. And I think entities like Guild that start to put employer dollars to work as one source of this. But I also think income share agreements and new innovation that says, "Hey, your education's free at this," you know, short term program to get some coding skills, for example. And you'll pay us back a small percentage of your income. It's not like debt, because if you don't make anything, you don't know if anything, right? So, really aligning the programs with the outcomes, and putting some skin in the game. I think that could be tremendous and really rethinking our education system instead of a set of linear stages. Really a set of multifaceted pathways that you keep, you move into and out of throughout your life. And changing the social stigma and conversation around that and the culture around that, it's going to be the last piece. 'Cause right now, I think it's almost like, "Wait, you're going back for education when you're age 45? Like what's wrong with you?" Whereas it needs to be seen as, "No, this is like what we all do." Because like world's changing, how we interact with technologies changing. We always need to stay a step ahead of it. And that's actually, that's just part of your job, as a human being now.

Newton:  I think that, that was said beautifully. I think the interesting piece about that though is, you know, so we're in unrest with this virus, and we also in unrest with what's happening with social injustice. And bringing the point that you made of our COVID , you see, I would add even further, most of these big Fortune 500 companies and really successful companies, are really sitting here rethinking technology right now in their boardrooms. You know, so how much money did they lose because their staff could not go in and support their business? If they would have had a robot, if they would've had some sort of automation, it wouldn't have mattered when this pandemic came and wiped out all these jobs and it took away and caused the economic crash, we're in right now. I think if they would have had, if they would have been really thinking about this, now, we've been further ahead. And, you know, in a little bit of the same way and what you do, my thought is, it's always diversifying IT. So Google facial recognition software in 2015, disastrous, right?

Horn: Yep

Newton: And I would bet every dime I own for the rest of my life, they didn't do that intentionally. That was not, I mean, no-

Horn: No, I don't think people set out to do bad stuff. I mean, there are some bad apples, right? But they don't set out to do it.

Newton: Right, but this is because-

Horn:  But it's the result of, right?

Newton: Right, so if you have all white men coding, it's not going to even cross your mind to think about darker skin or whatever the characteristic is though.

Horn: Totally.

Newton: Right, so that's what Google's fault power was. But in reality, we're going to have way more of these, right? So you have all these algorithms that says, if I live in zip code one, two, three, four, five, six, my area is a high crime rate, you know. We have a high level of poverty. Everything for me in that zip code is going to be hard. You know, so am I going to be able to get alone? Am I going to be able to move out? You know? Where I think education really needs to intersect is really, what you said earlier. So we need to think of our education not just from the point of pouring information in and I don't remember who said that, but somebody says that we're emptying vessels in your school report. I don't think that's true, I think what we just refine the tools that the person has and we amplify those tools, right? So we give them skills that allow them to improve upon it. So if you are a great graphic artist, if you can draw anything, you should be able to get the same job as a guy or girl who went and got a four-year degree in graphic artist, if you have the skill. But if we don't consider that, then we are pretty much going to stay where we are for black and brown people. Really-

Horn: No, I didn't answer, I think that's right. And I know I have to go in a minute and I apologize, it's a short conversation for us, But I want to say, I think, we need to move from seeing education as zero some to a positive some. And what you just said is exactly right, which is allowing it, instead of to be stage gates, to sort people out. Instead of, shifted to helping identify and build passions and what your skills uniquely situate you for, and then, cultivating and developing that. Like that would be, and allowing individuals the choice then, right? Like I'm good at X and I'm good at Y, I get to choose.

Newton: Right.

Horn: That's a great place to give people power.

Newton: Right, absolutely. I'm so grateful you had time for me today, and I hope we can do this again sometime, later on. You know, you give-

Horn: I would love to, I would love to. It's always a happy day when I see your name in my inbox. So, thank you.

Newton: Absolutely so, but I think what you bring to the table, we really need to discuss, and these chats are really meant for the everyday man. It's not meant for CNN or wherever. It's just for people to kinda have talking points that they can start addressing issues in their home. And I think education is one of those places that's absolutely crucial. And I think your work and your efforts in this place really needs to be heard, and heard and heard and heard, until there is change. So thank you so much, I'm very grateful.

Horn: Thank you. You know I appreciate it.

Newton: And once this video converts, I'll send you a link and you can let me know if I can upload it.

Horn: Awesome, thank you, you absolutely can. Thank you.

Newton: Thank you so much.

Horn: Be well, bye.

Newton: Bye.