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Rose Else-Mitchell’s journey from Australia to the U.S. is a great reminder that a love of literacy usually gets planted by real people — the teachers, mentors, and students who show you what’s possible. Else-Mitchell traces how that passion took root and how the Science of Reading movement has grown from there, and she makes a point that I think is the whole ballgame: the research only matters if we can turn it into practical strategies that teachers can actually pick up and use with confidence in their own classrooms.

From there, we dug into how schools and districts should actually evaluate curriculum and instructional tools, and Else-Mitchell drew a distinction that every leader in this space needs tattooed on their forehead: efficacy versus effectiveness. Picking a great program is just step one. What actually moves the needle for kids is everything that comes after: thoughtful implementation, real professional learning, coaching, feedback loops, and staying in a constant cycle of checking whether the practice is actually working.

We also talked about something that doesn’t get enough airtime: older students who are still struggling to read. Else-Mitchell was clear and firm here that we educators have to hold onto the belief that every single student can learn to read, and then back that belief up with real, targeted support. We wrapped with a look ahead at how reading in digital versus print environments might reshape literacy instruction, and what that means for how teachers keep learning and how we keep innovating in this field. It’s exactly the kind of forward-looking thinking that keeps me excited about where education is headed.

🎙️ This Tuesday’s Learning Can’t Wait Episode

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Vinay Ganti’s path into education is honestly one of my favorite kinds of stories: he trained in law and business at NYU, and it was a chance to teach and dig into digital learning that flipped a switch for him. That early spark carried him through leadership roles at 2U and later ETS, and what comes through in this conversation is how consistent his “why” has stayed: he’s driven by education’s power to open doors and change lives at scale. That’s the same thing that gets me out of bed every day, so this episode felt harmonic in many ways.

We got into the real stuff next: teacher shortages, retention, leadership effectiveness, and just how much more complex it’s become to serve every kind of learner in one classroom. Ganti made a point I want every district leader to hear: teacher pay matters, but it’s not the whole story. Teachers stay when they feel supported, when their leaders are actually good at leading, when there’s a real path to grow, and when the job respects what today’s workforce expects. He also pushed on something Fullmind lives and breathes: education has a lot to learn from how other industries solve staffing and support problems, and we shouldn’t be afraid to borrow smart ideas from outside our own walls.

We closed on the stuff that gets me fired up: innovation, technology, and collaboration as the real levers for change. Schools all over the country are already inventing creative fixes for their local challenges, and the opportunity in front of all of us in edtech is figuring out how to take what’s working in one classroom and make it work in a thousand more. Ganti’s advice for new educators was simple and true: teaching is a craft, not a switch you flip on day one. Find mentors, lean on your peers, and stay hungry to keep learning.

🧠 What I am Thinking

As summer comes to a close up in New York State, I feel compelled to share my approach to parenting school-aged children and why it is the furthest thing from natural.

I am inclined to be a helicopter parent. Doing so feels right in every sense of the word. It’s how I was parented. It’s what my heart and body WANT to do. And I have to work hard to prevent myself from doing it. I’ve read the blogs, books, and research, and I know children need to spread their wings, make mistakes, and learn without my hovering.

For my anxious child? This is painful. But we’ve been doing the work. We’ve learned about our limbic system and fight or flight, and about helping our bodies understand an actual fire versus simply a misguided fire alarm. Forgetting your instrument? False fire alarm. Falling off your bike and bleeding profusely? Actual fire.

One of my favorite stories from my own learning in this arena comes from my second year co-teaching. My beloved co-teaching partner and I were observing kids during free play when suddenly, one of the five-year-olds pushed his hand through the chair and got it stuck. He screamed, and I stood up. She quietly placed her hand on my chest and told me to sit down and observe what he did next: “He got himself stuck, and he’ll get himself unstuck.” And unstuck himself, he did. That moment is seared in my brain.

And yet, I’ll admit I have chased the bus down with a forgotten instrument. This year, I know I have to work harder to let them spread their wings, especially that fifth grader who’s one year away from the loosening of the reins in middle school. I’ll keep working on myself.

🚢 Where I am Heading

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Save your spot on the Hudson 🌇

Fullmind is kicking off EdTech Week on the water. Join us for the EdTech Sunset Boat Cruise:

• What: Open bar, great food, a DJ, and ~150 superintendents and district leaders enjoying a night off together

• When: Tuesday, October 13 | 5:30–8:30 PM ET

• Where: The Baylander, a historic Navy vessel docked on the Hudson

District and school leaders: you’re our guest. Come relax with people who get exactly what your year looks like.

EdTech vendors: a limited number of sponsor spots are open. Spend real, unhurried time with the people actually running schools and districts. Register here to be on board.

Space is capped, so reply or reach out to [hayley@fullmindlearning] to grab your seat.

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Retired education executive and debut author, Wendell Sumter, traces his remarkable path from the dirt roads of Hopkins, South Carolina to 36 years as a nationally recognized education leader on today’s episode of Learning Can’t Wait. No one ever told Sumter to begin a career in education, but the quiet modeling of his teacher aunt paved the way to an incredible career.

The road wasn’t easy. Wendell shared two moments that could have derailed him entirely: a high school teacher who told him, in front of the whole class, that he was “not college material,” and a placement mistake that landed him in a special education classroom he didn’t belong in, caught only because a cousin spoke up on his behalf. These two life-altering moments had Sumter carrying his wounds into adulthood but they also defined how he wanted to teach and lead.

Wendell Sumter’s core belief that great leadership starts with people, not policies emerged throughout our conversation as she shared stories behind his book Dirt Road Destiny, including his “win-them-over” framework and the tale of a skeptical parent who became one of his school’s fiercest advocates. He shows how listening without defensiveness and leading with empathy can transform an entire school community. His reminder that “leadership isn’t about winning arguments, it’s about winning hearts” is a lesson every educator, and every leader, should carry with them.

🚢 Where I am Heading

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Save your spot on the Hudson 🌇

Fullmind is kicking off EdTech Week on the water. Join us for the EdTech Sunset Boat Cruise:

• What: Open bar, great food, a DJ, and ~150 superintendents and district leaders enjoying a night off together

• When: Tuesday, October 13 | 5:30–8:30 PM ET

• Where: The Baylander, a historic Navy vessel docked on the Hudson

District and school leaders: you’re our guest. Come relax with people who get exactly what your year looks like.

EdTech vendors: a limited number of sponsor spots are open. Spend real, unhurried time with the people actually running schools and districts. Register here to be on board.

Space is capped, so reply or reach out to [hayley@fullmindlearning] to grab your seat.

🙏 Help Us Get to Austin

Help a girl out! Please vote to bring these two incredible presentations to SXSW Edu this March.

Panel 1: Vote here!

Panel 2: Vote here!

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This episode of Learning Can’t Wait tackles one of the most urgent issues in education today: chronic absenteeism, and why it’s fundamentally a relationship problem, not a compliance problem. I sit down with Alex Meis, VP of Attendance Strategy at ParentSquare, and Dr. Annie Iacono, Director of Student Services and Special Education at Nuview Union School District, for a conversation that moves seamlessly between big-picture policy and boots-on-the-ground reality. Both guests share the “twisty-turny” career paths that led them here, from AmeriCorps work in the South Bronx to running attendance strategy for one of the nation’s largest school communication platforms, and it’s clear from minute one that this conversation is personal, not just professional.

Dr. Iacono takes listeners inside Nuview, a rural district facing brutal odds: no local healthcare, unreliable mail delivery, a 10% unhoused student population, and kids missing school simply because they don’t have shoes. When mailed truancy letters got zero response, Nuview shifted to ParentSquare’s Attendance Plus, swapping “you were not in school today” for “I missed you in school today” — and the results speak for themselves: district-wide attendance jumped from 92.7% to 94.9%, representing a couple hundred real kids getting back into the classroom with regularity. Along the way, they built QR codes, dedicated attendance lines, and direct-messaging tools that turned a broken communication system into one families actually use.

California’s new SB691 and AB461 laws are now writing this exact relationship-first approach into policy, moving districts away from punitive letters and toward mandated attendance teams that treat the whole family with compassion. Whether you’re running a rural district with a couple thousand students or leading a policy conversation in Sacramento, this episode offers both the “why” and the practical “how,” right down to Alex’s advice for time-strapped leaders: start with just one student, one positive message, one relationship at a time. It’s an honest, hopeful, and deeply human conversation that will change how you think about the empty seats in your classrooms.

📚 What I’m Reading

I cannot stop thinking about Ron Avi Astor’s reversal of his earlier research on the impact (or lack thereof) of anti-bullying and social-emotional learning efforts on reducing gun violence in schools. While these initiatives aren’t without benefit, the hypothesis that prevention would reduce school-based shootings was incorrect.

Every day, nearly 130 people in America are killed with guns. Firearms are the leading killer of children in America. And the mindset we’ve been using to improve these statistics and save lives was wrong.

Astor and other researchers’ realization today, based on this data, is that the media is the greatest unlock to reducing violence. According to them, shooters want national attention, and to reduce that motivation, “rather than focusing on prevention inside schools… journalists and social media companies should adopt guidelines that reduce attention on perpetrators, delay publication of manifestos and videos, and focus more coverage on victims.”

It’s devastating that proactive wellness measures don’t have the impact we want. I’m glad to see there’s a new hypothesis worth testing, but my opinion is that the best way to reduce school violence is to ban assault weapons and improve gun control laws. The data is clear on this, both in our country and elsewhere, and to ignore it is like putting our heads in the sand.

If you’re curious, read it here.

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🚢 Where I am Heading

Save your spot on the Hudson 🌇

Fullmind is kicking off EdTech Week on the water. Join us for the EdTech Sunset Boat Cruise:

• What: Open bar, great food, a DJ, and ~150 superintendents and district leaders enjoying a night off together

• When: Tuesday, October 13 | 5:30–8:30 PM ET

• Where: The Baylander, a historic Navy vessel docked on the Hudson

District and school leaders: you’re our guest. Come relax with people who get exactly what your year looks like.

EdTech vendors: a limited number of sponsor spots are open. Spend real, unhurried time with the people actually running schools and districts. Register here to be on board.

Space is capped, so reply or reach out to [hayley@fullmindlearning] to grab your seat.

🙏 Help Us Get to Austin

Help a girl out! Please vote to bring these two incredible presentations to SXSW Edu this March.

Panel 1: Vote here!

Panel 2: Vote here!

Listen here

Sri Madhusudan Sai grew up surrounded by poverty in India and turned that experience into a global mission to make sure no child’s education is ever limited by what their family can afford. Inspired by Satya Sai Baba’s values-based teaching model, he built something remarkable: fully funded schools, universities, and hospitals where students get tuition, housing, meals, and support at zero cost. Today that vision reaches thousands of students across multiple countries, proving that access to great education is a right.

Sai’s model of residential schools builds character, leadership, service, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness right alongside math and reading. Teachers live alongside their students, becoming mentors for life. And rather than outsourcing that culture, the organization trains its own educators so the values-driven approach stays consistent from school to school.

Sai also connects dots that too often get treated separately: health, nutrition, and learning. He shares stories of kids who got free medical care first — and went on to become students in his schools, proof that you have to meet basic needs before a child can thrive in a classroom. He closes with a message every educator should carry with them: real education starts with love, and every single child deserves to feel supported, valued, and capable of reaching their full potential.

🧠 What I’m Thinking

Tomorrow marks one year of publishing this newsletter. Here’s what writing it weekly — okay, biweekly, meaning twice a week, not twice a month — taught me about myself:

1. I have a lot of thoughts and opinions. If you know me, that’s no surprise.

2. I prefer voice-to-text over typing. I’ve learned that I process out loud, and speaking is the most fluid form of my communication — more than typing ever will be.

3. Writing twice a week is tough alongside sharing thoughts elsewhere, like the podcast and LinkedIn. What helps most is reading enough and talking to enough people that I always have something worth forming an opinion on.

4. So much of my life is shaped by my passion for education and my own kids. If you’ve stuck around more than a month, you’ve probably already noticed.

5. People actually read this, not just my mom! If you’re one of them, thanks for being here.

Happy one-year anniversary, Hayley’s Newsletter. Here’s to many more.

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This week on Learning Can’t Wait, Dr. Brenda Lewis, Superintendent of Fridley Public Schools, opened up about what it means to lead a district as both superintendent and mom, and why Fridley’s incredibly diverse community, immigrant families, multilingual learners, and students facing real economic hardship sit at the center of everything she does.

Then the conversation goes somewhere few superintendents are willing to go: the day federal immigration enforcement showed up in her community. Dr. Lewis walks us through how the ICE Metro Surge sent fear rippling through Fridley families, what it did to attendance, and how her team scrambled to keep kids fed, transported, and safely in school. As Dr. Lewis states, the line in the sand was never about politics; it was about protecting every student’s constitutional right to learn, no matter what was happening outside the schoolhouse doors.

This is a story about what it takes to lead through crisis and come out stronger. Dr. Lewis shares how Fridley is healing, rebuilding trust, and a leadership playbook Dr. Lewis leans on: radical transparency, a rock-solid board partnership, and staying anchored to your values when everything around you is in flux. If you lead a school, sit on a board, or just want to see what courage in public education actually looks like, this is the episode to hear.

🧠 What I’m Thinking

For years, I’ve watched a quiet crisis unfold in special education, and I’ve had to say “we can’t help with that” more times than I’m comfortable admitting.

A district partner calls. They have 100 students who need speech services. They’re remote, and they have zero applicants for the speech-language pathologist role they posted. The school year starts in three weeks. They are not panicking yet, but they are close. And I’ve had to tell them: we do a lot of things, but we can’t help with that particular problem. Not yet.

If you thought the teacher shortage was bad, the related service provider shortage is double that.

Speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, school psychologists, mental health counselors, these are the professionals who serve students with IEPs, students with disabilities, students who have a legal right to these services under federal law. There are simply not enough of them. And the students who need them most, students in under-resourced districts, rural communities, communities that have historically been the furthest from educational justice, are the ones feeling that gap the hardest.

Districts aren’t just dealing with vacancies. They’re dealing with waitlists. They’re dealing with compensatory hours they owe students from the previous year because services were interrupted. They’re dealing with compliance risk every single day a student goes without services they’re legally entitled to.

Related service providers — SLPs, OTs, PTs, school psychologists, etc. — are not just educators. They are medical professionals. That means wherever they practice, including on a virtual platform, has to be HIPAA compliant. HIPAA is a federal law governing protected health information, and the standard it sets is meaningfully higher than the FERPA compliance we’ve always maintained as an education platform. Getting there required intentional, significant investment in our infrastructure.

So we did it.

Starting this school year, Fullmind will connect districts with qualified, credentialed related service providers — speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, school psychologists, and mental health counselors — delivering services virtually on our HIPAA-compliant platform.

This means a district can fill a vacancy. Bridge while they hire. Expand their capacity when caseloads spike. Ensure compensatory services are delivered. Or simply have an insurance policy for the inevitable sick days and late hires that leave students without coverage.

Every single district in America, every one of our existing partners, and every district we haven’t yet had the chance to serve, has students with disabilities who receive or should be receiving related services.

Fullmind is no longer just a solution for your unfilled teaching positions or your credit recovery needs. We are now a solution for your SLP vacancy. For your OT waitlist. For the 30 students who missed speech sessions last year and are owed compensatory hours before fall.

We’re coming to you as a partner who has fought to be able to offer this because we believe every student deserves access to every support they’re entitled to, regardless of whether their district can find and retain the right person on their own.

Resource gaps should not determine which students get what they deserve.

Fullmind is a virtual education partner serving K-12 districts nationwide. Our HIPAA-compliant related services platform launches next month, in August 2026. To learn more about how Fullmind can support your students with disabilities, click here or email info@fullmindlearning.com.

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A few years back, one in three students in Jacksonville, Florida wasn’t graduating on time. Today, more than 90% are. This is what happens when a community stops treating “some kids won’t make it” as an acceptable outcome.

That turnaround is the subject of this week’s episode of Learning Can’t Wait with special guest Rachael Tutwiler Fortune, President of the Jacksonville Public Education Fund. Rachael’s own story starts the conversation: a young mother whose life changed direction because a handful of people refused to give up on her potential. That experience is the lens through which she now runs one of the most effective education reform efforts in the country.

Fortune doesn’t think the goal is just getting kids “workforce ready.” She talks about raising strong learners who can read, think, and question. Confident creators who can turn an idea into something real. Caring citizens who know how to work with people who don’t see the world the way they do. As AI reshapes what jobs even look like, she argues the human stuff- empathy, communication, creativity, the ability to lead a room- is going to matter more, not less.

The work of getting schools, families, employers, and community groups aligned around the same goals is not easy. Fortune shares real examples of parents stepping into leadership roles in their kids’ schools. Her core belief is simple: every single parent wants their kid to succeed. The job of a school system is to build enough trust and belonging that families feel like partners instead of bystanders_, while still holding the bar high for every student.

Rachael Fortune is living proof of what happens when someone bets on a kid early.

🚂 What I’m Headed

Today, I’m learning more deeply with Ulster BOCES.

Join me.

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Dr. Denise Reading grew up watching talent go to waste. Not because people in her rural hometown lacked ability but because they lacked access. That gap between talent and opportunity became her life’s work, and in this episode, she breaks down exactly how she’s closing it.

Most people don’t need to be told what career to want. Future Plans thrives on helping people actualize their truest potential when they need help seeing what they’re already good at and connecting it to something real. Her five-step process — assessment, coaching, discovery, preparation, and placement — puts the person first, not a pre-set path. And her numbers back it up: she says 70% of success comes down to people understanding their own value, not being pushed into a box that doesn’t fit.

The conversation gets even better when Dr. Reading talks about rural America specifically. Resources are scarce, but community is strong — and she shares stories of towns literally building their own opportunity from scratch: new businesses, workforce centers, entire ecosystems of support. It’s proof that when communities get the right tools, they can break cycles that have held them back for generations.

Talent is everywhere. Opportunity just needs to catch up. This episode shows what it actually takes to close that gap.

🚂 What I’m Headed

Last year, I stumbled onto a conference that felt DIFFERENT. Small. Intimate. Hands-on. Rooted in how we actually want our kids to learn and grow.

So when the Deeper Learning Ulster BOCES conference organizer asked if I knew someone wonderful to speak about the deep work in schools, I didn’t skip a beat: Luis Eladio Torres. My first principal.

This year, I’m heading back to support the work and to hear him take the stage as one of the Ignite Speakers.

Join me.

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Every season of Learning Can’t Wait pushes me to think bigger, listen harder, and walk away more energized about what’s possible in education. Season 11 did all of that and then some.

We covered an incredible range of voices and ideas this season — from nonprofit leadership to EdTech innovation, from rural classrooms to big-city school systems, from teacher wellbeing to investor strategy, and students were always at the center where they belong.

John Branham and Steve Colon kicked us off with a clear-eyed look at what it takes to lead with purpose in the nonprofit world. Fleur Johnson reminded us that the educator workforce crisis isn’t just an HR problem — it’s a systems problem, and she’s building solutions from the EdTech side. Julia Bialeski made the case (loudly, and I’m right there with her) that happy teachers make happy students. Chris Bennett challenged us to think about the architecture of engagement. Mark Covell reframed everything when he said all education is career education.

Shane Purdy brought both rigor and humanity to school leadership. Brandon Cardet-Hernandez returned with one of my favorite themes of the season: rigor is the greatest champion for equity, with a sharp focus on multilingual learners. Christopher Hull showed us what it looks like to use data in service of kids, not just in service of dashboards. Francis Messano brought the investor lens and made the case that the right capital, deployed by the right people, can genuinely change outcomes for students.

Alicia Meyers showed up as teacher, author, and inspirer all at once. The Codifying Coherence episode with Dr. Liz Chu, Celeste Terry, and Jason Kamras was one of those rare conversations where you could feel the alignment coming right through the mic. John White made the case for quality curriculum with the clarity of someone who’s been at every level of the system. Dr. Deborah Kenny gave us a vision of the well-educated child that went so far beyond test scores — it was about the whole child, and it was beautiful.

I got to join Dr. Melissa Sadorf on the Rural Scoop to talk about what rurality actually looks and feels like in education because that experience deserves way more than a footnote. Perry Rosenstein took us inside what it takes to build tools teachers actually trust (spoiler: it starts with listening to teachers). Dr. David Lawrence showed us that big-city school systems can be hotbeds of innovation when you have the right leadership. And Dr. Kip Glazer closed out the season with a reminder that technology serves people and we are more than the machine. Always.

Thank you to every guest who brought their expertise, their passion, and their truth to Season 11 — and to everyone who tuned in and made this season one for the books. Season 12 is coming. Stay tuned.

Please share your feedback, guest recommendations, and ideas at our Season 11 survey found here.

If you like what you see here, please consider sharing this newlsetter with colleagues, friends, and family.

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Dr. Kip Glazer is a Silicon Valley principal, author, and immigrant whose career has been shaped by curiosity, resilience, and a willingness to reinvent herself. Those experiences inform her refreshingly honest perspective on one of the most pressing questions facing education today: What does effective leadership look like in a world changing faster than schools can adapt?

Her answer is strikingly simple. It isn’t about having the perfect AI strategy. It isn’t about choosing the right platform or chasing the latest technology trend. It’s about embracing uncertainty and modeling that openness for others. The most important leadership skill, she argues, is the willingness to say, “I don’t know—let’s figure it out together.”

For Dr. Glazer, three qualities matter above all else: curiosity, innovation, and rigor. Leaders who stop learning become obstacles to growth. Leaders who learn alongside their teachers and students create cultures where experimentation, adaptation, and continuous improvement become possible.

That philosophy extends far beyond technology. While many conversations about the future of education focus on tools, Dr. Glazer focuses on the human capacities that technology cannot replace. She envisions schools where students are not passive recipients of information but active participants in their own learning, teaching one another, leading meaningful projects, solving authentic problems, and exploring career pathways through real-world experiences.

Her vision borrows from both Montessori and Career and Technical Education principles: less worksheet, more internship; less lecture, more collaboration; less compliance, more ownership. Students learn across grade levels, build practical skills, and develop the confidence that comes from doing meaningful work.

In a moment when educators are racing to understand AI’s impact on learning, Dr. Glazer offers a timely reminder: human connection is not a complement to innovation. It’s the foundation of it. The future of education will not be defined by the technologies we adopt, but by our ability to cultivate curiosity, relationships, and purpose in the people who use them.

📚 What I’m Reading

There is finally a glimmer of hope. As Chad Aldeman reports in the latest NAEP scores, it’s the first time in over a decade that students are showing increases in reading and math proficiency, with meaningful gains among disaggregated groups of Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. While these results were confined to nine-year-olds and middle schoolers did not show the same type of growth, I am incredibly hopeful.

Aldeman poses the question: how do we expand these results? Well, here’s my informed, strong opinion.

1. Double down on explicit phonics instruction at every level. This isn’t just an elementary school directive. Explicit phonics instruction belongs in middle school and, where needed, in high school, too. We don’t get to move on just because a student aged out of third grade.

2. Expand early childhood opportunities and pay the people who show up for our youngest learners. Increase access to early childhood programs in districts across the country and raise teacher pay to attract talented educators into those settings. Neuroplasticity is at its peak in the early years; the opportunity to build a strong foundation has never been greater, and we have to meet that moment with qualified, well-compensated professionals.

3. Ensure there is a certified teacher in every single classroom. I’ll own my Fullmind-fueled bias here, but I don’t think the research leaves much room for debate (Dr. Yel Kirksey, 2024). The impact on students who spend two or more years with a substitute instead of a certified educator is well-documented and deeply consequential. Every child deserves a real teacher.

4. Before you ban the tech, fix the curriculum. Instead of sweeping technology bans, meaningfully evaluate what your curriculum actually looks like. That’s where this conversation starts and ends. Curriculum should be rigorous, with ample opportunity for scaffolding, critical thinking, and extension that goes well beyond a worksheet. Technology should supplement learning, extending content, not babysitting users. And when tech is in the mix, data should be driving future instructional decisions.

5. Bring kids into their own data. Help students understand their strengths and how to use those strengths to tackle their areas of growth. Have them monitor their own progress. Celebrate the small wins. Learning should be visible to every child and every family — a mountain you’re climbing together, with each step clearly marked. And yes, that last part is a little cheesy. It also works, across every grade level.

6. Get kids to fall in love with reading. Put great books in their hands — books they love, books they can’t put down. Yes, that includes graphic novels. Yes, they can listen while they read. Voluminous reading beats makes every other intervention on the table possible. Full stop.

The data is hopeful, and I am full of hope.

If you’re curious, read it here.

🧠 What I’m Thinking

I'm thinking a lot about the collective effervescence happening in New York right now after the Knicks clinched the NBA Finals.

Read more and follow me for more musings here on LinkedIn.

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Dr. David Lawrence started his career in banking before finding his calling in the classroom; he climbed to superintendent through mentorship, curiosity, and a willingness to grow. His signature style? Getting out of the office and into the schools. By regularly walking campuses, popping into classrooms, and tackling challenges in real time, Dr. Lawrence makes sure his decisions are grounded in what’s actually happening for students and teachers and not just what looks good on a report.

Under his leadership, Dayton Public Schools ditched the dusty, sit-on-a-shelf strategic plan in favor of something far more dynamic: a living “academic action plan” that evolves with student outcomes. The living document is routinely revisited and amended rather than sitting stagnant on a shelf. The result helps the team to feel action-oriented.

Student disengagement is one of the top three crises facing the United States right now, and it’s one Dr. Lawrence is closely focused on fixing. He’s on a mission to make school a place students actually want to be, expanding career and technical pathways, restoring meaningful field trips, and connecting learning to what students genuinely care about. Because when the classroom feels relevant to real life, attendance improves, attitudes change, and students start to see themselves in their own futures. DPS is working hard to bring about this change under Dr. Lawrence’s leadership.

🧠 What I’m Thinking

One of the most common communication breakdowns in growing organizations (schools and businesses alike) is ambiguity about who is responsible for sharing information and with whom. Teams assume someone else has communicated a decision, stakeholders believe they should have been informed, and critical context gets lost as information moves between groups.

When I was working in a school, a policy was introduced requiring that materials, notifications, and classwork all be sent home on Tuesdays. That way, parents, many of whom juggle significant responsibilities outside of school, could anticipate receiving resources once a week, without feeling pressure to check in daily or worry about falling behind. As a teacher, it was quite an adjustment, but now, as a parent, I completely understand why this practice makes so much sense.

For every major initiative, decision, or change, establish clear communication ownership. Who is responsible for communicating updates? Who needs to be informed? What level of detail does each audience require? When these responsibilities are explicit, communication becomes a repeatable process rather than an afterthought.

This does not require heavy bureaucracy over complex workflows and processes. The goal is simply to ensure that important information has an owner and that no stakeholder group falls through the cracks. As organizations scale, successful communication depends less on everyone knowing everything and more on everyone knowing who is responsible for keeping the right people informed.

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Perry Rosenstein knows tech. Through years of tutoring and substitute teaching, he saw up close what teachers are up against every day: too many students, too little time, and systems that haven’t kept pace with what’s actually possible. When a narrow school board loss redirected his path, Perry leaned into his superpower: building technology that solves real problems. The result? Write On, a tool purpose-built to help teachers do what they already do best, just with better support behind them.

The problem Perry zeroes in on is one every educator feels but rarely has the bandwidth to fix: writing gets better when someone’s right there with you, pushing your thinking, asking the next question. But with 30 kids in a room, that kind of one-on-one coaching is nearly impossible to scale. Write On tackles that head-on with AI-driven feedback that guides students through their thinking without doing the thinking for them, scaffolding done right, the kind that mirrors what great teachers do instinctively. Perry is clear that technology should amplify student effort, not shortcut it. In a world that’s more polarized and complex by the day, the ability to think critically, write clearly, and communicate across difference is essential. Mission-driven innovation grounded in classroom reality and measurable student outcomes is a bar worth clearing.

🧠 What I’m Thinking

The summer slide is stealing 40% of what we teach.

The first time I heard that statistic, I nearly fell out of my chair.

Forty percent. That’s how much acquired learning students furthest from educational justice can lose over a single summer. Think about that for a second. We give kids 180 days of instruction, and by the time September rolls around, up to 72 of those days have effectively evaporated. Not because students aren’t capable but because summer, that long, unstructured stretch between June and September, has a way of quietly undoing everything we built.

Come fall, reteaching becomes the default. Instead of moving forward, we’re back-filling. Instead of acceleration, we’re recovery. For students whose NAEP scores are already a cause for concern, this is a compounding factor widening academic gaps that become harder to close with every passing year. Research confirms it: unequal summer learning opportunities during elementary school alone account for roughly two-thirds of the ninth-grade achievement gap between lower- and higher-income students. That gap didn’t open up in a classroom. It opened up in June, July, and August.

When I worked in Harlem, I thought about summer learning loss constantly. I watched students come back in September and saw the regression in real time. So I got to work. I designed a comprehensive summer learning loss prevention program for a five-school district that, nearly ten years later, is still running.

The strategies that formed the backbone of that program are described below:

1. Get high-interest books into every child’s hands.

Motivation is the whole game in summer. There’s no bell, no teacher, no structure compelling a kid to pick up a book — so the book itself has to do that work. In our program, by hook or by crook — Donors Choose campaigns, private grants, good old-fashioned fundraising — every student went home with a stack of books matched to their reading level and their interests. Sports. Graphic novels. Fantasy. True crime for the older kids. Whatever it took. Research backs this up: reading books is the only activity consistently linked to preventing summer reading loss, and access to books is a significant predictor of how much reading actually happens.

2. A library card and a library they actually know.

Books are expensive, and a single stack only goes so far. So we made sure every student had a library card_, and more importantly, that they’d actually been inside their local branch, knew where it was, and felt comfortable there. We made it a school trip. We introduced them to the librarians. We turned the library from an abstract resource into a familiar place. Because access without familiarity is still a barrier.

3. A curated guide to free activities.

I worked in Harlem, and New York City is a genuine treasure trove of free summer programming: museums, public pools, outdoor concerts, galleries, parks, community events. But families don’t always know what’s available or how to access it. Part of our work was making sure every family left the school year with a real, usable guide to free enrichment in their borough. Structured time matters. Enrichment matters. Not every hometown has the options available to New York City residents but touch base with your local librarian, and they’re bound to have suggestions and discounted tickets/passes to local activities.

4. Structured learning time with real instruction whenever possible.

Here’s what the research is unambiguous about: the programs that produce real academic gains are the ones with real teachers delivering real instruction. A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found that high-quality tutoring increased student achievement by an additional three to fifteen months of learning. The Wallace Foundation’s landmark National Summer Learning Project found that students who attended a structured five-to-six-week program for at least twenty days outperformed their peers in both math and ELA in the fall and in the following spring, too. The variable that mattered most is teacher quality and subject-matter expertise. Grade-level experience. Not apps. Not packets. A skilled educator who knows the content and knows the kid.

The good news: it doesn’t have to be in-person. Research confirms that live virtual instruction from trained educators produces the same gains as in-person teaching, making it possible to reach students in under-resourced communities, rural districts, and anywhere a qualified teacher is hard to find.

The program also included in-person and remote touchpoints throughout the summer, which is definitely an increased ask and responsibility for educators within the community, but it paid dividends for kids who knew there was always someone in their corner, which made all the difference.

Summer planning is work. But you know what’s more work than summer planning? Spending 3-4 months catching kids up each fall. The choice is ours.

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Dr. Deborah Kenny believes schools should ignite curiosity, build character, and give every student a real sense of purpose. In her book The Well-Educated Child, she distills decades of work, including building Harlem Village Academies, into three powerful principles: quality thinking, student agency, and ethical purpose. It’s a timely reminder that test scores and compliance metrics, while familiar, don’t come close to capturing what students truly need and deserve.

Dr. Kenny is constantly driving towards the building of intrinsic motivation — especially through reading. By trusting teachers as intellectual leaders and giving them space to collaborate and innovate, her schools cultivated students who read dozens of books a year, not because they had to, but because they genuinely loved it. That kind of deep, sustained engagement isn’t something you can shortcut, and it’s exactly the type of outcome that happens when systems are designed to unlock both teacher and student potential.

Looking ahead, Dr. Kenny is pushing the field to redefine achievement altogether. She wants students who can think independently, navigate misinformation, and show up in the world with resilience and purpose. Through the Deeper Learning Institute and curriculum models like Montessori and IB, she’s showing what’s possible when vision and practice actually align.

Interviewing Dr. Kenny, my former colleague (aka boss, but she hates that term) illustrated how the past ten years have been transformative in Harlem Village Academy’s trajectory, and why the work of reimagining what school can be is far from finished.

📚 What I’m Reading

I love sleep. I love walking. And now that I have two active boys and two very energetic dogs, sleep is a luxury, and walking is basically my religion.

So when I stumbled on new research out of Penn State, covered recently in Inc., I couldn’t resist sharing it. Not because anyone needs convincing that walking is good for you. We know that. But the nerd in me needed to know how.

Turns out, every time you walk, your abs are helping your brain. That gentle contraction of your ab muscles squeezes veins in your abdomen, nudging a small pressure wave up toward your brain, enough to make it shift slightly within your skull. Researchers are comparing it to a hydraulic pump, or even squeezing a dirty sponge under running water. That motion, over and over, may actually help your brain flush out waste. Like a cleaning cycle, mid-day, triggered just by moving your body.

Sleep handles the brain maintenance overnight. Movement covers the daytime shift.

I’ll take this where I take everything: straight to students. Because if this research is nudging me to get up more during the day, it should nudge all of us to think harder about what we’re asking kids to do with their bodies.

My son’s biggest complaint after his first week of kindergarten was that he sat at a desk all day. Five years later, nothing has changed. He gets a 15-minute recess, a 15-minute lunch, and one walk to a special. The rest of his day? Chair.

This weekend, I heard about a private school in Massachusetts where students alternate between academic and physical activities throughout the entire day. One after the other, all day long. I don’t know about you, but that sounds less like a dream and more like exactly what the science is telling us to do.

If you’re curious, read it here.

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John White’s path from classroom teacher to state superintendent is a masterclass in what it looks like to lead with conviction. Crisis, in this case Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact on his home state of Louisiana, has a way of exposing what was already broken, and John saw clearly that education was both the wound and the medicine. He came to believe that the work of improving schools is inseparable from the broader fight for civil rights, and he built a career around proving it.

Louisiana’s steady climb in student achievement over the past decade didn’t happen by accident. John points to high-quality, research-backed curriculum as the backbone of that progress, paired with consistent expectations and accountability systems that didn’t flinch under pressure. His argument is practical and important: even the best teachers need coherent structures around them to do their best work, especially in under-resourced communities or places where staffing is a constant challenge. That combination of strong materials and strong systems is what made gains durable, even through a pandemic.

White has a quality I really appreciate in leadership: conviction that drives high expectations and a willingness to push back. He isn’t anti-innovation, but he is deeply skeptical of anything that smooths away the difficulty of real learning. He calls it friction, and he means it as a compliment. The productive struggle, the back-and-forth of a good discussion, the moment a student works through something hard with a teacher present: that’s where learning actually lives. He closed the conversation the way good leaders often do, by redirecting the spotlight toward the people and conditions that make a school worth attending in the first place.

📚 What I’m Reading

I read a piece recently that made a genuinely hopeful claim: Republicans and Democrats actually agree on what makes a great teacher. On 7 out of 10 characteristics, both parties agreed….

But if we agree that a great teacher is someone who cares about their students, then caring has to mean something. It has to mean showing up for every kid, not just the easy ones. It has to mean fighting for the multilingual learner who is navigating school in a language that isn’t their first. It has to mean protecting the student with an IEP who deserves the same shot at rigorous instruction as everyone else. It has to mean creating a school environment where kids feel safe enough to actually learn.

So when I see programs for multilingual learners being defunded, when I see special education resources on the chopping block, when I see ICE agents in school buildings, I have to ask: Does the “caring teacher” we all agreed on care about those kids, too?

Because caring is not a selective virtue, you do not get to say you want teachers who put kids first and then build policy that tells certain kids they matter less. Immigration status, home language, and learning differences: none of those should determine whether a child gets access to a great education.

If you’re curious, read more here.

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Today's Learning Can't Wait guest, Dr. Dana Ainsworth, has lived the very experiences she now dedicates her career to understanding. From a childhood marked by instability and school expulsions to becoming a teacher, researcher, and founder, Dana’s path is anything but ordinary. She created Tomorrow House after spotting a glaring gap between what the research says about trauma and what schools are actually equipped to do about it. Tomorrow House offers science-backed, classroom-ready tools that don’t require a PhD to use.

Dr. Ainsworth and I agree on all the important things, including that behavior is not a discipline problem, but rather it’s a regulation problem. She breaks down how nervous system science (yes, we’re talking polyvagal theory, made totally digestible) helps educators read behavior as communication rather than defiance. The strategies she shares are low-lift, high-impact, and designed to produce immediate relief for students and teachers alike.

We also spent time dissecting zero-tolerance policies, mental health funding gaps, and what AI is (and isn’t) doing for our kids. Dr. Ainsworth has strong, thoughtful takes on all of it, including a timely warning about what happens when we let technology rob students of productive struggle.

🧠 What I’m Thinking

I’m heading to my college reunion this weekend, and I’ve been in deep reflection mode about my own post-secondary experience.

Here’s what I actually remember:

I remember Psych 101 in a packed auditorium, a professor at the front, all of us just... taking notes. I remember my favorite cognitive neuroscience class: brutally challenging, but the kind of challenging that lit something up in me. It made me obsessed with the human brain and how it develops in early childhood. I remember failing my first science test, something that had never happened before, and realizing that everything I knew about studying was wrong.

But most of all, I remember the people. The walks to class. Hanging outside buildings between lectures. The extracurriculars. I always joked that I majored in extracurriculars, and honestly, that’s not far off. I ran a peer tutoring program. I served as Pan-Hellenic President and used that platform to advance women’s issues, including pushing for self-defense courses on campus at a time when crime rates were climbing. I was in my element connecting, organizing, and leading. I didn’t know it then, but I was figuring out exactly who I was and what I loved.

So when someone asked me recently whether I think my kids will go to college one day, I paused. I used to answer that without hesitation. Now I waver, and I think it’s because of that part of college. The messy, human, unscheduled part. The quad. The clubs. The stuff that wasn’t on my transcript. As we reimagine the face of education, I genuinely wonder what happens to all of that. I don’t have a clean answer. It’s something I keep marinating on.

But this weekend? I’m just really looking forward to getting back to that quad.

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In schools, it’s not just the curriculum that matters but the systems built around them: coaching, monitoring, and professional learning that help teachers use those tools well. In Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University’s “All Systems Go” Report, districts with significant growth detail the how behind the data.

In this episode, Superintendent of Richmond, Jason Kamras, Superintendent of District 18 in NYC, Celeste Terry, and Dr. Elizabeth Chu, Executive Director of CPRL, share the moments that shaped them and the beliefs that drive them: that every child deserves access to a great teacher, that systems can change, and that the work is deeply, stubbornly worth doing. The throughline isn’t just picking the right curriculum. It’s building the kind of system where educators can actually use high-quality tools well, together.

Kamras and Terry bring the on-the-ground truth. They talk about starting small, listening hard, and staying humble, piloting with willing educators, adjusting based on real feedback from teachers and families, and treating the people in classrooms as the professionals they are. When leaders give teachers research-backed curricula and the support to use them, something remarkable happens: educators get to focus on kids. This episode is a masterclass in what it looks like when leaders stay close to the work, close to the community, and refuse to let perfect be the enemy of progress.

📚 What I’m Reading

I had a 504 plan in college. I have lupus, and one of the most critical factors in managing this disease is sleep. My 504 gave me a single room for all four years so I could actually rest and take care of my body. People raised eyebrows. Some didn’t get it. But that accommodation was not a perk. Junior year, my lupus took a turn as I suffered Stage 3 renal failure through an intense monthly chemotherapy regimen. Sleep was vital. I am here because the system worked for me, but most critically? My parents knew how to work it.

A study tracking millions of students over a decade found wealthy families are nearly twice as likely to get 504 plans for their kids, while IEPs are far more common among students from low-income families. Researchers are still working to understand exactly why, and they are calling for more investigation.

My initial take? Families with resources tend to have more positive relationships with schools and the people in them. They know how to navigate the system. They have time, bandwidth, and access to outside evaluations that often cost thousands of dollars out of pocket. And because 504 plans require families to drive the process rather than schools, those with fewer resources often get left behind.

This is not about who deserves support. Every kid does. It is about who knows how to ask for it and who has the tools to get it.

Access matters deeply to me. A child’s educational experience should not be determined by their family’s income or their parents’ familiarity with school bureaucracy.

If you’re curious, read it here.

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🚌 Where I’ll Be in August

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Alicia Meyers always knew she wanted to be a teacher. After studying early childhood and urban education, she built her career with KIPP and DC Public Schools, where she has spent the last decade teaching preschool through second grade. During the COVID pandemic, she discovered a new creative outlet in children’s books, eventually channeling her personal experience with Tourette Syndrome into storytelling that fills a real gap in children’s literature around neurodiversity.

Her newest picture book, Tic-errific Me!, is a narrative nonfiction story that celebrates Tourette Syndrome and helps young readers understand that tics are simply one part of who a person is. Meyers frames neurodiversity as a broad, beautiful concept rooted in recognizing how differently brains and bodies work, and she pushes for more accurate, celebratory representation of conditions like Tourette’s in both books and classrooms. Meyer’s message: differences deserve to be understood and celebrated, not stigmatized.

Meyers and I dove into her classroom practice, particularly around early literacy and the science of reading. She makes a compelling case for balance, pairing phonics and decoding instruction with real books, storytelling, and genuine joy in reading. From her second-grade classroom, she knows firsthand that confidence and comprehension have to grow right alongside decoding skills. She closes the episode with grounded advice for new teachers: build relationships first, stay flexible, keep learning, and lean into the beautifully messy reality of real classrooms.

Click here to pre-order Tic-errific Me!

🧠 What I’m Thinking

If you don’t know Mark Rober, let me fix that right now. This former NASA engineer turned YouTube phenomenon has built a following of 75 million subscribers by doing something deceptively simple: making science irresistible. His videos are funny, meticulously edited, and packed with real scientific thinking, not just cool results, but the messy, iterative process of getting there. As Dr. Becky put it, he teaches kids the power of persistence and what it really means to learn from failure. As a mom of two curious kids, I can personally confirm: his content is exceptional. It’s one of only a handful of YouTube shows on our ‘approved for viewing’ list, and its consumption is ALWAYS followed by building, tinkering, and trying. Win, win, win.

Just a few weeks ago, Crunch Labs launched a classroom version of its wildly popular content, an online STEM curriculum built for grades 3 through 8. Rober says it meets and exceeds state science standards, but the headline for teachers is this: it’s completely free. It’s engaging by design, and if it delivers even half the magic of his YouTube channel, it’s worth exploring. Fair warning, it’s still growing, so think of it as a fantastic supplemental resource for now rather than a full curriculum replacement.

I’d love to know what you think of the content, Mark Rober, or just about anything else below.

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🚌 Where I’ll Be in August

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Frances Messano’s story starts the way so many of the best ones do: with parents who came to this country with an unshakeable belief that their kids could have more. Growing up in Coney Island, Messano watched peers who were just as smart, just as capable, hit walls that had nothing to do with ability. Access was the variable. Opportunity was the lottery. And for Frances, a program called Prep for Prep was the ticket that changed everything, opening the door to Harvard and eventually a career in finance. But the further she got from Coney Island, the more that question followed her: why does getting a great education still feel like a matter of luck?

That question lingered on Messano’s mind and eventually led her to New Schools Venture Fund. She now leads the organization that bets early on the people and ideas trying to fix exactly that. New Schools is a venture philanthropy, which means they are not just writing checks. They are investing in early-stage education innovators across three core areas: schools, tools, and people. That includes new public school models, evidence-based math and literacy solutions, and serious work around reimagining what it means to be a teacher in 2025, because burnout, isolation, and inequitable talent distribution are not just HR problems. They are student outcome problems.

Messanp was refreshingly honest about 2025: funding is tighter, policy is shifting fast, and the uncertainty is real. But rather than pull back, New Schools leaned in, sitting with portfolio leaders, listening deeply, and asking what they actually need. One of my favorite moments in our conversation was when she reminded us that as hard as this moment feels for those of us in the ecosystem, it is harder for the people in the classroom. And that is exactly where our attention should live.

Frances Messano wants to help build things that last and that ensure that a great education is available to every child. I’m certainly watching.

📚 What I’m Reading

I saw the most beautiful Medium piece written by a teacher, Ms. B. In it, she describes a particularly hard day in the classroom (we’ve all been there, Ms. B) and how it unravelled her. After feeling all the feels, what she came back to was what helped her process and move forward. But rather than summarize the analogy that stopped in my tracks, I’m dropping that section below to maximize the number of you, dear readers, who get to enjoy it.

“I’ll leave you with an analogy my therapist gave me that brought me peace:

Teaching or any social work is like throwing seeds.

We can be intentional.

We can throw seeds farther than they were thrown for us, opening more doors.

But at the end of the day, we can’t control where seeds fall. The wind, rain, sun, and ground conditions that they face.

We’ll never fully know what they need to grow or why they start growing and don’t grow further.

We may never know what develops in the humans we work with or what happens when we’re no longer with them.

That doesn’t mean we stop throwing seeds or hoping that they grow. We don’t stop loving and believing a better world is at our fingertips.”

This image so moves me, and I am returning to all the seeds I have thrown in the soil throughout my career. If I close my eyes, I can feel those deep emotions of hope, frustration, concern, and most notably love. I don’t know how they all landed or how they all grew. But I am so glad I threw them.

If you’re curious, read it here.

🚌 Where I’ll Be in August

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Chris Hull can trace a straight line from the teachers who shaped him to the work he’s doing right now. He opens up about going from a shy seventh grader to an eleven-year classroom veteran, and you can hear how much those mentors still live in the way he leads his team at Otus and parents his four kids. Schools are navigating some genuinely uncharted territory right now, and this conversation is a good reminder that the people building solutions for educators are often the ones who never really left the classroom.

Chris’s desire to build came from a frustration every teacher knows. You’re sitting in a collaborative meeting, time is ticking, and nobody actually has the full picture on a kid, just fragments, anecdotes, whoever has the best memory that day. He and his co-founder built Otus to fix exactly that. A longitudinal student profile, academics, attendance, behavior, all of it, so educators stop hunting for data and start using it.

We also got real about where schools are right now. Pandemic recovery is slow, funding is tight, and we’re still leaning too hard on assessments that can’t carry that weight alone. The through-line of the whole episode, honestly, is something I believe deeply: you can’t automate curiosity. Relationships, relevance, and practice is still the work that matters.

🧠 What I’m Thinking

My sons like to go down the street and play basketball with the neighbors. And on more than one occasion, people have actually stopped their cars to say something — to the boys, to me — about how great it is to see kids outside. Every single time, it’s some version of the same thing: we just don’t see this anymore.

And I’d be lying if I told you it was easy to just let them down the block, sight unseen. If you’ve read Anxious Generation, you know there’s real thought that goes into what “safe” even looks like anymore. What helps is that they’re a mixed-age group kids who look out for one another and can actually support each other out there.

It takes real effort. But this helicopter Mom is leaning on the research heavily. The American Medical Association has concluded that children are smarter, better able to get along with others, healthier, and happier when they have regular opportunities for free and unstructured outdoor play. A 2025 position statement found that active outdoor play supports executive functioning, emotional regulation, and stress relief and can even mediate the negative effects of screen time on kids’ development. The American Academy of Pediatrics adds that stress and depression are lower for children who spend time in nature, and that kids show reduced symptoms of ADHD with regular outdoor time.

We’re not giving up screens over here, that’s not the goal and honestly, it’s not realistic. But I do think we owe it to our kids to make sure screens aren’t the whole story.

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The right teacher can change everything. For Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, that moment came in an ESL classroom where a teacher named Mrs. Warren saw his potential and refused to let language be a barrier. She gave him access to the greatest gift of all: The Babysitter’s Club. By annotating texts, chunking content, and meeting him exactly where he was, she gave him access to grade-level learning without ever lowering the bar. In this episode, Cardet-Hernandez takes us back to those early years as a multilingual learner, the acceleration, the struggle, the gaps, and explains how that one experience sparked a lifelong commitment to making sure every student gets that same shot.

Fast forward to today, and Brandon is turning that mission into a movement. As the founder of Medley Learning, he’s using AI to do what Mrs. Warren did manually: delivering differentiated scaffolds that meet students at their proficiency level and fade as their skills grow. But don’t mistake this for a “make it easier” story. Brandon is crystal clear: multilingual learners don’t need dumbed-down content, they need smarter access to the same rigorous curriculum as their peers. Medley frees teachers to focus on what they do best, building relationships and driving deeper learning, while the tech handles the heavy lift of differentiation.

The conversation did not shy away from the reality of what’s happening in classrooms right now… widening achievement gaps, staffing shortages, inconsistent language supports, and the very real emotional weight students carry amid ongoing immigration uncertainty. His message to educators is both a challenge and a rallying cry: hold the line on high expectations, lean into intentional supports, and never use technology as an excuse to reduce rigor. He envisions a future where bilingualism is celebrated as the superpower it truly is and where every multilingual learner has a qualified, caring teacher in their corner. Sound familiar? It’s exactly what great education has always been about.

🧠 What I’m Thinking

The Edtech backlash is real, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water, ok?

The headlines are practically writing themselves lately. The New York Times opinion section just ran a guest piece called “You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education.” Education Week published “The Ed Tech Backlash Is Here: What It Means for Schools.” And four days ago, the BBC reported that Swedish schools are actively cutting back on digital learning: classrooms swapping laptops for books, pens, and paper.

Are we sensing a theme?

At ASU + GSV, I asked a room full of ed tech leaders how they’re experiencing and responding to this backlash, and I want to be clear, this backlash is not just about AI, even though many people seem to think it is. The results were varied, to say the least. In fact, very few of the rooms I was in during ASU+GSV spent meaningful time engaging with it at all. As Auditi Chakravarty, Season 10 guest of the Learning Can’t Wait podcast, shared on LinkedIn just yesterday, that disconnect will continue to widen. In the days since the Summit, Chakravarty reflected that the vibe there felt at odds with what’s actually happening in communities across the country, where the growing pushback against screens, AI, and ed tech broadly is accelerating fast.

It deserves more than a passing mention in a conference hallway.

I feel like we’re in a moment where people want to throw the baby out with the bath water. And I get it, I really do. I feel the over-reliance on tech in my own house, watching my own kids navigate their school days. There is no question in my mind that we have over-indexed on technology in ways that are starting to threaten deep, meaningful learning in classrooms.

But the answer is not to strip it all away and pretend that digital tools have no place in education. The answer is to get a lot more intentional about how and when we use them.

We have to be clear, really clear, about the difference between core and supplemental. Must-have versus nice-to-have. Because those are not the same conversation, and conflating them is where we keep getting into trouble.

The problems that started this backlash are real, but they’re not an indictment of technology itself. They’re an indictment of deployment without intention. When a district hands every student a device without a pedagogy strategy to back it up, we shouldn’t be surprised when screens become a distraction instead of a tool. When AI is positioned as a replacement for a teacher rather than a support for one, we shouldn’t be shocked when parents and communities push back.

What Fullmind has always believed, and what this moment is proving out, is that the most powerful thing in a student’s educational experience is still a qualified, caring, live human teacher. Technology should serve that relationship, not replace it . Our model is built on exactly that premise: real educators, teaching in real time, filling the gaps that geography and staffing shortages create. Not a platform. Not an algorithm. A person.

The ed tech backlash is a signal worth listening to. It’s telling us that communities are hungry for authenticity, for connection, for learning that feels human. Let’s not let the noise of the moment push us toward overcorrection. Let’s let it push us toward better decisions about what we put in front of students, why we put it there, and who’s on the other side of the screen when it matters most.

📹 What I’m Watching

Clearly, I love storytelling.

And this story? It’s absolutely worth telling.

Elmira City School District didn’t let teacher shortages disrupt learning. They ensured certified instruction, preserved rigor, and kept students engaged across every classroom with Fullmind. I’m so proud to do this work.

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In this episode of Learning Can’t Wait, we get a closer look at school leadership in Georgia with Assistant Superintendent Shane Purdy. Purdy brings a deeply personal lens to leadership shaped by a childhood of frequent moves as a minister’s kid, where athletics and adaptability became his foundation. He began his career as an AP English teacher and coach before growing into a range of district roles spanning academics, HR, operations, and accountability. What drives him across every position is the “lightbulb moment,” that instant when a learner realizes they’re capable of more than they thought possible.

As a principal, Shane built a school culture where every student had a place. He created individual learning plans for each student, launched daily advisement periods with teacher scripts to ensure meaningful adult-student connections, and introduced a rotating weekly club day where students chose enrichment experiences, and teachers brought their own passions into the mix, creating relationships that stretched well beyond the traditional classroom.

📚 What I’m Reading

Dan Meyer’s piece “RIP Khanmigo and EdTech Industry” had me at hello, especially given the conversations I’ve been having with EdTech founders and education leaders on the Learning Can’t Wait podcast this past week at ASU + GSV. It feels like the reality of the classroom is finally catching up with the Silicon Valley hype machine.

The Hype Cycle Is Hitting a Plateau

The initial enthusiasm for AI chatbots solving all of education’s problems is facing a reality check. Alex Kotran from the AI Education Project predicted that the vast majority of startups trying to throw foundation models like ChatGPT at educational problems will fail. He said hallucination rates alone make many of them unacceptable in a classroom setting. What we’re left with is a lot of what Matt Miller from OKO Labs calls “AI wrappers”: tools that look flashy but don’t actually move the needle on learning.

Pedagogy Has to Come Before the Product

A core reason tools like Khanmigo struggle to fundamentally transform education is that they bypass deep pedagogical integration. As Vriti Saraf founder of Ed3 DAO pointed out, too many AI tools bank on the “instant gratification” of low-hanging fruit rather than building habits that actually improve instruction. And Doug McCurry put it well: we have to beware of “innovation for innovation’s sake.” At the heart of schools is teaching and learning, and any tool we bring in must directly support that, not distract from it.

The Human Element Is Non-Negotiable

The idea that a personalized AI tutor will solve education’s problems misses what makes school actually work. The tools that succeed will give educators superpowers, scaling their reach and reducing administrative burden, not try to route around them.

As Matthew Winters from the Utah State Board of Education put it, we need to keep “humans in the loop,” relying on human expertise to guide and filter AI rather than letting the technology operate invisibly. The future of EdTech isn’t about AI replacing the instructional core. It’s about thoughtfully supporting the people who make learning happen.

If you’re curious, read it here.