Mason Pashia, Nate McClennen

Catching Up! | Shifting Enrollment, Dead Malls, and Community Hubs

Share

Key Points

  • The importance of redefining learning ecosystems to adapt to declining enrollments and evolving educational needs.

  • The necessity of enhancing media literacy education to prepare students for an AI-driven world.

Shownotes

Transcript
Guest Bio
Shorts Content
Links
Youtube Channel

In this episode of “Catching Up!”, hosts Mason and Nate dive into a discussion on the future of education, exploring how learning spaces, AI readiness, and global innovations are reshaping the landscape. From the creative redevelopment of community hubs in former malls to the pressing need for media literacy amidst a wave of information overload, this conversation covers a range of critical topics. They touch on the potential impacts of a new executive order on AI in education and the challenges facing early education systems. With insights from recent trips and conferences, including a poetic cultural journey through Ireland, this episode is packed with thoughtful reflections and forward-thinking ideas on how to best prepare students for an AI-driven world.

Join Mason and Nate as they catch up on these exciting developments and share their vision for fostering collaborative and innovative learning environments.

Editor’s Note

This podcast was recorded on Wednesday, April 23rd before the AI Executive Order was officially signed. It is for that reason that Nate and I discussed the draft version and not the official order.

You can view the official order at the link.

View Order

Outline

Introduction and Catching Up

Mason: Hey, Nate. It’s time to catch up.

Nate: How’s it going, Mason? Welcome back. I hope your trip to Ireland was awesome. I’m looking forward to hearing little snippets of that today. Today, we are talking about a bunch of different interesting things. We’re gonna talk about a quick recap of our media literacy presentation at ASU+GSV, the AI show. We’re gonna do a deep dive into enrollment drops and options for learning ecosystems that we’ve been writing about, and then we’re gonna jump into my favorite topic right now, which is how do we rethink assessments and think about a national formative assessment concept that’s being piloted by some states right now.

Mason: All super important. We do some human-centered learnings from Ireland. We also talk about a new AI executive order and some potential changes to early education policy as well. We also talk about something called a media ecologist and Super Blooms. So, stay tuned. It’s gonna be a great one. Born with fire. You are in my veins, my soul. Restless tide chasing whispers on the wind wear mysteries.

Nate: How’s it going? What’s up?

Mason: It’s going great. I am back, and I had limited jet lag on the return, so that’s like all you can ask for.

Discussion on Music and Education

Mason: And I have been thinking a lot about music. Ireland is alive with music, and we’ll talk a little bit about that at the end. But yesterday, I was on this podcast called The Better Learning Podcast, and they’re doing this thing right now where every episode they are looking at a movie that depicts school and then they’re just kind of like talking about that movie.

So they invited me on because I wrote a blog a while back about Hollywood and education. I chose School of Rock as my movie because it’s the best. And one of their questions was, could this movie exist today? Or how would technology make it different? And it was really interesting because in thinking about the movie, I think how it would be different today is a teacher would give every student the project to become an artist rather than have them become a band and play these unique roles. And I think technology has done this thing where everybody has this individual project and we don’t have this collaborative project.

So this week I’m thinking a lot more about how do you, bands aren’t popular right now, so that’s part of it. But like, how do you continue to use these kind of collaborative, wonderful group projects in a world where you have technology that’s saying every person for themselves. So School of Rock got me there.

Nate: Well, okay. I have a serious thing to say about this, but I wanna start with a not serious thing is that I, at first thought you were gonna say Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and then pivot to sort of the, I think it’s the Smoot-Hawley tariff line where he says, “Anyone, anyone, anyone.” And that actual clip has gone viral in the last four weeks because of the tariffs.

And I think more people understand the concept of tariffs than before because of a very boring clip from a pretty awesome movie. So that’s my not serious piece. My serious piece is that I, it does, we kind of keep coming back to this idea of individual versus community and common good versus individual pursuit.

And you brought it to the arts in this question is, is that how do we continue to perpetuate things where people of all ages are collaborating and working together towards a common goal? Because if we all become individualistic, there’s a problem in the long term, right? And we’ve evolved as communal species.

And so I appreciate your School of Rock example of, hmm. How do we make sure that in the age of AI where anyone can be an artist, there’s still collaboration going on?

Mason: Totally.

Nate: Yeah. Love it. Yeah.

Mason: What have you been seeing this week, Nate?

Mall Redevelopment and Community Hubs

Nate: A couple things that I just observed this week is I got an email and someone asked if I had heard of this mall redevelopment project in Oklahoma City, and it’s called the Crossroads Renewal Project.

And it’s in a former mall that had closed down, this Crossroads Mall, and it’s gonna be transforming this huge underutilized commercial space into a community hub with schools and businesses and some religious like churches, et cetera, et cetera. And it just, I kind of went down a short rabbit hole of what else do we know that’s happening in that area and what do we know about malls?

When I grew up, I went to the mall as a kid. I grew up outside of Boston, and we went to the Framingham Mall and hung out, and it was an awesome place for gathering. And that just doesn’t happen very much. Malls are closing at huge rates. But I do know that, you know, we know Crosstown School in Memphis is one that’s built into a mall.

It was the former Sears distribution center and now has this great Crosstown High School with a bunch of other businesses and arts and healthcare organizations and retail in it. And then we’ve also been talking to the folks at Runway Green in Brooklyn, New York, where they’re repurposing a pretty large old, it’s actually part of the National Park Service open space, but it was an industrial space there where they’re gonna bring in businesses and schools and green spaces all integrated together.

So it, it, it, we’re gonna talk a little bit more about learning ecosystems later and do a little bit of a deep dive about some of our writing here, but just that email sparked this idea that we’ve got a lot of malls, and I did a quick research project and 68% of Americans live within one hour of a dead mall.

Do you live within one hour of a dead mall?

Mason: I think it is a, like slightly flinching mall. It, it, it’s not quite dead, but it is certainly not a vibrant place.

Nate: So it’s death throes. All right. And then the other part of this survey, we’ll put it in the show notes, but was 50% of Americans say they miss going to the mall? I’m actually not one of those 50% because I, in my life now, I don’t necessarily need to go to a mall. Are you one of those 50%, Mason?

Mason: I am not one of those 50%. Yeah, not at all.

Nate: Okay. What would happen if, what would happen if the mall had a music studio and a space where you could go learn something and an outdoor garden or maybe an indoor garden and some stores, would you go?

Mason: Gosh, I’m so easy to predict. Yeah. Those, those would definitely bring me there. Totally. Well, and like last little pin on this, there’s a big conversation in urban planning about kind of the suburb sprawl for department stores and malls, where oftentimes the only way to replace whatever was in that before is to put a school or a church or a college in it, and they don’t pay taxes in the same way.

So it’s actually like a huge hit to communities when these places close because there’s just like not really a way to keep that funding coming in the same way. And they have this huge property that’s just taken up. So we definitely need to figure out what to do with these things and make it in a way that’s generative to the community that it serves.

Nate: What else do you see this week or the last couple weeks?

Super Bloom and Media Theorist

Mason: I’m listening to this book called Super Bloom by Nicholas Carr. He’s sort of like a contemporary media theorist person. He wrote a book called The Shallows of, like, 10, 15 years ago that I think was kind of a big deal. And it’s, it’s all about attention communication. It’s like my favorite topics. But he, he, he positioned the phrase media theorist as a media ecologist and he described it as communication tools fundamentally create new environments. They create new systems and they create a new sense of self for the people using them. And I just, I really liked that reframing of how we think about media systems.

I know you just read the Yuval Noah Harari book, and that is definitely more about information than communication specifically, but it is like, it’s something that I’m thinking about. I’m sure it’s gonna come up more and more today. But it just, the way we communicate fundamentally reshapes everything. And in a world of AI where this communication is happening in strange new ways, it’s just something to look out for.

Nate: So do you think that, is he arguing that communication shapes culture? I mean, I mean, how, how is it actually shaping us just as we are using it? I mean, is that what you’re, is that what you’re trying to get at here?

Mason: I think so. Yeah. Like it’s this idea that if you, the same way that Twitter made things really polarized because it was short form and out of context, whereas beforehand, like you had something more along the lines of books, which were a little more like in solitude. You were reflecting, you were engaging with this thing. That is a form of communication. They just, all communication tools change the way that we behave. And so I think that that is like a really important thing to think about as communication is gonna go through some really dramatic changes in the next two to five years.

Nate: Yeah, there’s real, we’re really intertwined. And how do we make sure that young people actually understand that and are not just sort of ignorant consumers, like, which all of us are sometimes ignorant consumers of things that are out there. Okay. Why is it called Super Bloom? Do you have a sense of why it’s called Super Bloom yet?

Mason: Yeah. It had to do with like a viral internet trend, basically. These people went and there was like a super bloom event where Instagram people were stepping on a bunch of flowers to get photos of flowers, and it erupted in this huge display online. So he’s kind of making this super bloom analogy throughout, but I think that was like the catalyzing event that…

Nate: Got it. Got it. Yeah, it’s, it’s the, the, the Ice Bucket Challenge is going around now for mental health and that has become a super bloom, not as, probably way more than the Smoot-Hawley Ferris Bueller’s Day Off super bloom that’s going on right now. But I think I’m gonna start using that language. When we talk about viral things, super bloom…

Mason: Yeah, it’s, it’s a really good word for it, and it’s a wonderful kind of mental image if you let your mind go. So.

Nate: All right. Speaking of Super Blooms here’s my last one on observations this week is, so I was at the ASU+GSV and AI Show Circus, which was amazing, and great people, great conversations, interesting technology companies, a lot of great district leaders. I felt like there’s a lot more this year.

Don’t know if that’s true. Maybe I just met a lot more that are doing really great work out there in the field. So, there’s a lot that went on there and I’m working on a blog post on it, but the Whorey runs Ed3 DAO, which does a lot of AI education work and emerging technology work for educators in the ED3 DAO organization. And so we did a presentation on media literacy, and it was sort of one of the only higher level presentations in turn. By higher level, I mean, so many of the presentations in the AI show were very discrete about classroom tools and things that are happening on the ground.

And we sort of took this big step back and talked about media literacy.

Media Literacy and Info Obesity

Nate: And I’m gonna give you my one-minute overview for our listeners just to say, and we’ll have a video up at some point, I think of the whole presentation. But here, here’s the data points: The News Literacy Project, a great nonprofit thinking about this work. Teens want more media literacy and there’s a low level of trusted news. National Association of Media Literacy Educators has done research saying that very few schools are teaching media literacy. Fake news is six times more viral. It’s kind of like the negative news issue with humans is like negative news propagates much faster than positive news.

It’s always been that way with newspapers and even stories before that. So we have fake news generating more time, six times more viral. There’s increasing generation of AI content and I think that’s just gonna grow and grow. We know we’re increasing more and more information, and so all these things are happening at the same time.

And our thesis in this presentation was, it’s leading to this info obesity epidemic, meaning there’s way too much information and we, you and I talked about this last time with this puzzle pieces analogy of no one can understand the entire puzzle. We’re all trying to fit pieces together and we’re inventing the spaces when we don’t have the puzzle piece there.

So in info obesity, too much information. And then the runner up word of the year last year was slop, which is this, what is, it’s just bad AI-created misleading misinformation that’s out there and increasing amounts. And so, so our thesis is media literacy is core to a highly functioning democracy, communities, social institutions, and we have to get better and better at this.

And actually as a country and in our education systems, we’re actually not doing a good job of this. And so, so we created our own little campaign called Drop the Slop. We have a placeholder website for it, and we’re gonna try to figure out how to create a movement momentum forward so that we’re all thinking about this way more as consumers of media.

Mason: I love that. Drop the Slop. Very catchy. It’s, it’s the next super bloom.

Nate: It is, we’re hoping that it’s the next super bloom. Andrey did a great thing. The air show had, or the AI show. We were only separated by cloth partitions between all the presentation rooms. And Sorey had the brilliant idea in the middle of the presentation that as we introduced, drop the slop as she just did a countdown and had everybody shout at the top of their lungs, drop the slop so that all the other presentations could hear at the same time.

So that was our, our seed for the super bloom. And so we’re gonna be working on that over the next month or two. And stay tuned. And maybe you can buy a t-shirt at some point. Says drop the slop.

Mason: That’s, that’s incredible. I think that that’s a really nice transition into some of our deep dives for today. So this is the section where we talk about things that you should be keeping an eye on, and if you’re not, we will be. So you can just come back in two weeks to hear more about it.

America’s Promise Alliance Research

Mason: So this one thing America’s Promise Alliance, a great organization that’s a big coalition of a bunch of orgs, recently put out some research that really just backed up what you said. So I kinda wanted to start there. Like, they say that only three in 10 young people think that AI will improve their lives, which is a wild statistic. This is a survey sample of about 1,500 young people but pretty widely spread out. And they talk about only four in 10 young people feel prepared for any kind of civic action.

So when you put those two things together, that’s like way below 50% and really ties into what you were talking about with this media literacy and this disinformation. It’s like people are nervous about these technologies. They don’t feel equipped to handle them, and then it just kind of gets into this place of fear and anxiety and probably perpetuating the issue even worse.

So, you’re right, we have a big, a big job to do as a country and as schools to help prepare people.

Nate: I’ve been thinking this about this word literacy in K-12. We are often thinking about as ELA and ELA gets reported out for everything. And that’s important. Kids need to know how to read, write, et cetera.

Maybe the triumvirate is tech literacy, media literacy, civic literacy. That then sits on top of your reading and writing, et cetera.

But there’s something about we’ve gotta broaden this definition to, to really hit on the issues that you said is that the no, people think, young people don’t believe that it’s gonna make things better. They, they don’t believe they’re, they’re, they’re not really prepared or engaged in civic to be able to participate civically.

So we need a new push. We, again, we’re gonna go back to our super bloom, is that we need a super bloom around modern literacies, perhaps,

Mason: for sure. Yeah, it feels like literacy is nothing more than the ability to engage with information. And like in all of those subdomains, like it is, it is a thing that just needs to get slightly redefined, such that it can encompass more of this new world that we live in. Without putting any weights on what’s the most important, like they’re all important.

But on this subject of AI just something to watch.

Shorts Content

Executive Order on AI and Education

Mason: There’s, there’s a draft that recently was published in the Washington Post about a executive order on AI and education. And there’s just some really interesting stuff outlined in there. And I, I wanted to get your, wanted to get your take on it, Nate. So this draft, it mentioned a couple key things. One of them is seeking public-private partnerships with industry and academia and nonprofit groups to teach students foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills. So hitting on what you were just talking about, but in the more narrow way.

Two is coming up with federal grant funding to provide to teachers for actually incentivizing teacher training and evaluation on these AI skills. Three would be this new presidential AI challenge, which is a competition for students and educators to demonstrate their AI skills. And then the last one is creating new registered apprenticeships in AI-related occupations.

So it was, it was a really interesting thing to look at because it’s got so much going on that we kind of talk about all the time. But I also think it could be slanted in such a way that it feels less good coming out. But I’m curious what you think about this.

Nate: Well, I love another, another executive order coming out. You never know.

Mason: I mean, never, you never know.

Nate: So let, let’s go through these piece by piece. So number one, draft order. It’s kind of funny. I mean, if, if this executive order comes out tomorrow, there, there are so many schools and districts that are already thinking about this and so many nonprofits and intermediaries that it’s kind of like checking a box.

So, so this idea that everybody should go do it, in an ever-shrinking federal government’s gonna help move that forward. I, I suspect that the ball’s all already rolling and anybody that was involved in the Department of Ed doing this work is probably no longer employed.

So I, I’m gonna, I’m gonna put an X through the first one. Eh? The next one. I really like the federal grant funding. If there’s federal grant funding available. Fantastic. We don’t know what department is coming through, but training teachers on how to use AI. You bet. I mean, I think being able to use it well, I think you put in our Slack channel this morning about

Tennessee adopted a platform statewide, and this is just gonna happen across the country. I think I replied back. Is, is that every state’s gonna have a free and open available platform that is gonna be used for teachers and they’re all gonna just start using it. So grants for, for, for, for doing that. I’m gonna give a check. Can I make a sound effect for that? It’s gonna be like ring or something like

Mason: Oh. I don’t know if I have a sound effect for that, but I can do a, I can placeholder drums.

Nate: Okay, that’s good. I’ll do the X one next time. So, pre-presidential AI challenge competition for students and educators to demonstrate their AI skills. I’m gonna kind of, eh, give that an X because I mean, sure. It’ll be fun. I actually, I’m just trying to imagine what that would look like. Is, is, is that you get to go use your AI in some way. That is maybe if it’s AI for purpose, I might move it back to a drum celebration. If it’s just demonstrating your AI skills, not sure. Last one. Super interested in this idea of registered apprenticeships. And I would say even more, not just registered apprenticeships, but internships, real-world experiences.

And, and I, I was thinking about, you’ve done a bunch of work on the new iteration of the CTE sectors with the, the tech overlay and the marketing and entrepreneurship. How it feels like that fits really nicely into that, in that technology part, is that almost every occupation’s gonna be hit or impacted by AI. So it’s really an, an overlay and, and how do we embed this deeply into the CTE world is gonna be really important. So I think I’ve got two ants and two

Mason: Oh,

Nate: Perfect. Excellent. We’ll get our timing better.

Mason: Timing’s there.

Nate: What, what’s your thought? Do you agree with my two n two ratings or not?

Mason: I think I do. I mean, the first one I feel like is a little bit of an administration trying to take credit for something underway, as you said. So like, while I agree that this is an important thing, it being included in here feels a little bit less like a catalyst for change and more just like a, a box as you said.

Presidential AI challenge I think is like, yeah, it could be interesting. I, we talk a lot about experiences like having valuable experiences and if there was some way to like credit this as a valuable experience for young people and have some sort of mentor system in there so it actually expands students’ networks as they’re working on this.

I would probably be more inclined to give it a checkbox. Right now it feels like it’s gonna be really strange to implement and there’s just no details about what it actually means. So I’m, I’m in support of your ranking of these for sure. But no, just keep an eye out who, you never know when these things are gonna happen or if they’re gonna happen, but there is some stirring and it’s kind of a, it’s an interesting one to keep an eye on for sure.

So,

Nate: And I just think it’s all, I mean, the use of AI in schools as an efficiency tool, which we’ve talked about, is going to happen in the next 12 to 24 months in almost every district in the country. It is going to emerge like a Google Classroom type tool where everybody has something, they’re using the innovative uses of AI to really shift how we do teaching and learning and move to sort of H three or third Horizon work or next horizon work.

I think that’s gonna be much more rare and figuring out how to incentivize that, I think is gonna be important. So.

Mason: Totally strongly agree. All right, Nate, what are you diving deep on?

Nate: All right.

Enrollment Issues in Public Schools

Nate: So I’m, I’m thinking a lot about this enrollment issue in the public sector. And the 74 million had a great article on, I thought, a great article on LA Unified Enrollment Drops. And, and they, just to give you a sense, our listeners a sense of numbers, because it, it’s pretty interesting is since the pandemic LA Unified has lost more than 70,000 students enrollment’s at 408,000 from a peak of almost 750,000 in 2002, right?

23 years a decline of 350,000 students, that’s a significant, significant drop. So, so, and that, what does that play out in the, in the school world does? The district has 456 zoned elementary schools and 56 have seen rosters fall by 70% or more. And so, so from a school leader perspective or district leader, this is a hard, hard situation.

The school board’s gonna struggle with it. No one likes school closures because they’re so directly connected to neighborhoods. So it made me think a little bit about two, two things. One is I wanna make sure we understand why. I think my, my basic understanding of it is we have these big demographic shifts happening across the country with falling birth rates, and that’s gonna hit us for the next 30 years.

Certain areas, and perhaps LA is one of these areas. Housing prices, cost of living has pushed people out, right? School choice is in some areas, whether it’s charters or ESAs, are playing some role. Pandemic, we know has pushed kids away, pushed young people away, and maybe more into work environments where they’re making money, they see more relevance.

And then certainly mental health, right? Like what keeps students away from schools? And so all these factors are really complicated. And so, but it did make me, we, we wrote about learning ecosystems last week as part of our larger framework is one of the most, you know, an important piece is that you can have a set of outcomes.

You have a clear community, why you have a learning model you have some signals to, to demonstrate to the world what a student knows and is able to do. But also like we need to rethink about what that learning ecosystem looks like. And you and I have pushed this open walled, how do we, how do we expand the definition of school?

So I wanted to just share a few different examples of how LA Unified could think about this, and I’m sure they’re thinking about it, but we’re gonna give our, I’m gonna give my 2 cents. If anyone’s listening from LA so one is co-location. So we talked a little bit about malls in the beginning, but, but there’s no, there’s no difference between, say, the mall location that has empty facilities and the school building that has empty facilities in terms of a facility that is useful for the community in some way.

So can we have this co-location of various businesses? Can, if the school is only 50% full, can you with appropriate security and safety, have half the school that has businesses co-located? And there’s some great examples of that. We know our friends down in Roscoe at Roscoe Unified in Texas Collegiate Education, they have a, they have a vet business right in their in, in the actual school building, which then.

They get discounted rent or whatever the case may be. But the, the vet business has to then provide internships for the students. So can we have co-location? The second thing I was thinking about was, can we make these into true community education centers? We know adults need to continue learning. We know in the AI generation, they need to really think about how are you re-skilling and upskilling.

And so there’s, there’s plenty of examples of this. We’ll throw two out from some of our friends that we’re aware of. Launchpad with the Kaon Valley School District. It’s located in a middle school and it’s in partnership with the San Diego Workforce Partnership, but it’s a student and parent resource center, so parents can get upskilled there.

So it’s really interesting district work and partnership with upskilling and using an existing facility. And then the, the last one I would say, so we have co-location, community education centers. Then homeschool partnerships. We know that, you know, there’s a couple million kids in the United States that are homeschooled and maybe with ESAs there’s gonna be even more students that are pulling out of the system.

How do the districts embrace that? We talked a little bit about fee for service before, and I think we need to continue to think about what can these facilities be and maybe a fee for service that have space. And so Da Vinci Connect in the LA area charter school network. They launched in an empty elementary school that serves a hub for homeschool families.

Snoqualmie school district up in Washington as a long running parent partnership program where homeschool students can come in during the school day to get some services, some classes, et cetera, in a more social setting. So, and I’m sure there’s hundreds of other examples, but I just think this, that when we see dropping demographic number, dropping numbers of students, thus facilities, I.

Consolidation enclosure certainly is gonna be the first choice for, for, for a lot of schools boards and, and superintendents because it’s just the, financially it might be the right choice, but I do think we need to look at these other options. So what, what are your thoughts on that?

Mason: I definitely agree. I mean, this ties in a lot with our last couple weeks of conversation around abundance and rethinking things through that lens rather than a scarcity lens. I think the, the thing I’ve always been a little bit shocked by is we have this problem similar to the malls where there’s businesses everywhere, like downtown Seattle, which is just, just outside my door, like tons of office space in their buildings that are vacant and like those are perfect places for microschools.

It’s like an interfacing with real-world learning all the time. It’s an interface with new mentors. We have this super strange problem where we have. Kind of a huge increase of vacancies, of communal spaces. And we have a desire for more communal spaces.

Exploring Expanded Learning Ecosystems

Mason: And it’s like, why? Why aren’t we just filling them? And so, there’s something there that I’m sure is beyond my comprehension level, probably plumbing. But like I, I’m not sure exactly why, but I think you’re onto something here for sure.

Nate: I think I’m gonna say that there’s a, there, there, and maybe we’ll keep writing about it. And we’re, we’re just, people have been thinking about expanded learning ecosystems for a long time, but I think there’s gonna be a little bit of a perfect storm going on of declining enrollment numbers.

They’re gonna leave a lot of open spaces and, and school closures are really difficult to pull off. For all sorts of good reasons. We wanna leave these community schools open. And yet financially they, they have to be viable as well. So, so we need to be really creative here and figure out some solutions.

So maybe there’s a, there, there, let’s put a placeholder in that and see what comes up from our listeners.

Mason: Well, and I think the one thing that maybe, maybe you mentioned but maybe didn’t is, is like the rise of potentially virtual schools. Like there’s, there’s a potential for just all of schooling to go online to the degree that then suddenly you need these in-person places. And if you’ve already started thinking about how to create the infrastructure for third spaces or these social gathering places, that becomes a much easier problem to solve than if that becomes the problem in seven years if the Metaverse ever happens for real.

And these people they’re at home in their Metaverse and they’re like, we need to get outside, but all the schools are closed. All the malls are closed. Where are they gonna go? I don’t know. It’s a problem we should solve now rather than be reactive in 10 years for sure.

Nate: Meta would be super happy if the Metaverse took off because their bet did not work. And,

uh, Metaverse, despite the name change. Hey, you’ve used third spaces a few times in this pod. Are you, are you hearing, is that a, a language that you’re hearing out in the universe in your world?

Mason: Yeah, it is. So I think third spaces are really this kind of coffee shop library, park mall concept where it’s like a place where you can go. It’s kind of, it’s between, the reason it’s called the third space is it’s between home and work. It’s like the third space. It’s how else do you go be in the world with people.

It’s a part of this larger, I guess term social infrastructure, for example, a library is a hub, and schools are a hub of physical infrastructure. Oftentimes in rural communities, they’re broadband centers, they’re centers for knowledge and information.

Bus routes often are based around those. And so, there’s this other layer of a social infrastructure and a third space is a key note in what that is. So it’s just a little more of a catchall, but it’s just easier to say we need more third spaces than we need more malls, libraries, schools, like whatever.

So, it’s just a little more of a catchall, but. I think it’s sticky. People have written about it. It

Nate: I, I like the idea of just thinking about what if, what if learning spaces were like coffee shops and you could just drop in and, and, and learn something and you could micro-credential that. And you go in, you spend an hour there and maybe you pay a small fee to do that, and you get some sort of upskill along the way.

And so you don’t have to go search out some specific program online. I mean, you could do that still, but to achieve this idea of individual growth, yet communal gathering, I think is, let, that through line’s pretty important I think for the health of our species. So.

Mason: I totally agree.

Nate: Yeah. Yeah.

The Future of National Assessments

Nate: Here, here’s the other thing I’m diving into is in thinking about, and this is a little bit of a through line from past pods that we did, is this idea of assessment.

And so a couple things from a new standpoint that we need to pay attention to is we, we know that through sort of the federal reduction size reduction in, in Department of Ed is that a lot of services are being cut and, and NAEP, which is the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which is the Nation’s report card.

And, and I wanna put a quick pause here to say that we’re one of the very few countries that does this as an not comprehensive meaning most countries give a national assessment. Everybody takes it. United States gives the NAEP, which is a sub sampling of the students in the United States.

And then every state is required to give some sort of standardized end of year test that is then satisfying a federal government requirement for high stakes testing and making sure that they understand where kids are on grade level. So that’s the context. So, so, it appears that the, National Assessment Governing Board has announced, that after 2026, NAEP will no longer be administered. And so. That’s really, really important. So, so when that happens, we no longer will have a way to look at state-by-state comparisons because every state will have its own assessment and they won’t be referenced to one another. So, so that to me is challenging.

I actually think we should have a national assessment. I’m gonna talk about what I think it should look like, but I think we, we need a national assessment to, to actually understand where we need to put resources the most. Right? And, and everybody’s different. If we have 50 different versions of it, which is kind of what we have now, exception, the, with the exception of the NAEP, we’re all gonna have a challenge and really understanding the data.

So I’m a, I’m a big proponent that we need to continue some sort of NAEP-type assessment. The, the, the solution, I’m not sure is very clear. I think right now you have state-administered assessments. You have locally-administered assessments. You have this NAEP that shows up every once in a while and then, and then all sorts of other things.

ACT, SAT. I’m really interested in what Montana has experimented with these three-year assessments where they essentially have said, instead of doing our end of year high stakes assessment as per required by feds, we’re gonna ask for a waiver, which they’ve done over the last couple years to do a three-year assessment, which just means formative assessment throughout the year.

So periodic formative assessment, that the results come back really quickly and can inform student learning and growth, but at the same time can still be used for normed grade level sort of performance evaluation. And I think to me, like that’s the solution. And what I’d like to see is a model like MAST up in the Montana.

To just be a national model.

That would reduce a lot of the testing pressure. It would take care of this NAEP issue that that disappears. Maybe because the feds I don’t think are gonna force this. Maybe the goal would be to have consortiums of states band together and do this and say, hey, there’s 10 states we’re gonna join together and do this on our own.

We’re all gonna administer to the same three-year assessment. So there you go. There’s my pitch to those who control assessment in various states is we’ve gotta do this well and we’ve gotta eliminate the burden of end of the year testing on schools, districts, and young people and teachers.

Mason: Yeah, I think that’s super important. And I, I think I learned from you last episode or two episodes ago about that delay in receiving test results, and that has made me mad ever since. So I like that this solution is a, is a suggestion against that

Nate: I don’t wanna make you mad, Mason. I think it’s important though.

Mason: It’s okay. It’s good to get mad sometimes.

Nate: Yeah. No, no. It, we should, we should be asking, every single parent should be asking the same question. And I do think that there’s a solution for this, and I, I, I do think it, it’s probably in state collaborations as the Fed reduces their role and we’ve got some good models.

Montana’s a good model for this right now. It’s not perfect, but boy, it’s looking for an innovative solution to better help young people. So

Mason: And that’s what we’re all about.

Nate: That’s what we’re all about. So. All right. That, that’s kind of my deep dive. What’s what, what’s your deep dive for this episode?

Challenges in Early Education

Mason: Yeah, so I’ve been taking it upon myself this year to learn more about early education. It’s just something I didn’t really know a ton about. I think it’s critically important and woefully underfunded and just a, a really important part of the education system. And it’s one of those things that the United States doesn’t really have a great solution for, and many other countries have a pretty good one, and it’s kind of like, how are we one of the most developed nations in the world without having this key thing?

So I, I just saw this piece the other day from Hecker reporting that it was talking about the kind of threats to Head Start, which I think many of our listeners are probably aware of. But then, it showed these other places where people are talking at the legislative level about the changes they would make to the system.

And I just, was it, it really caught me off guard. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it was not giving more money. It was really kind of twisting the rules to make sure that you can make it easier to get people in the classroom with students. So these are a couple of the things that I saw different states positing.

So one is trying to make it so states can set the rules for all the municipalities about who can teach pre-K. So that is something that right now is not the case currently municipalities and many places can say these are the rules for who can be in the classroom with the kids.

And this is gonna say, take it to the state level and set like kind of a blanket statement. That I think Indiana in particular is one state that was talking about doing this. Additionally they’re talking about reducing the working age to 16 for people who are being able to be like an early ed teacher and then a lawmaker in Kansas, even proposed 14 to be the age for the people to be with these kids, which is kind of crazy.

I was, I mean, me at 14 in a room of kids, I’m not sure that I would’ve been the, the dream preschool teacher. It’s great real-world learning for

Nate: Would’ve done, would’ve done School of Rock. Let’s be really clear.

Mason: I actually, I was doing School of Rock with kids to 14, so you are correct about that. There’s also, reductions in the amount of experience needed, which kind of just goes along with the working age, and then they’re also talking about reducing the rules on ratios to just not having rules on ratios.

So you could have 50 kids with one 14-year-old and just be like, that’s preschool. Enjoy. Which would be, yikes. So I, there, there’s, it’s so interesting to me that these are the levers they’re pulling to bypass actually giving funding to these programs. It’s just like, let’s make it so we can get a lot more kids in the room. Let’s make it so anyone can teach and probably we can pay them less. Like I’m just, I don’t know. But it just left me feeling a type of way and I was very interested in getting your take.

Nate: All right. There’s a lot here. Let me start with a story. So, when, when I was running a school there, there we had a pre-K and, what I learned about early childhood in Wyoming, at least where I’m at, is that the, the regulations for early childhood are significantly more for the regulations of K-12.

And here the specific example that we ran into was that we had in the elementary school small kitchens. There were dishwashers and we’re like, we’ll just get the same dishwasher for the early childhood. But in the early childhood centers, there’s rules. You have to have a certain high temperature dishwasher that is written into the state statute or whoever’s governing

Mason: I told you the obstacle was plumbing. I told you not.

Nate: And there’s something specific about like the, the, the food trap. And there, there, there are so many rules that our leaders of our early childhood program had to adhere to that the actual, the K-12. Did not have to adhere to. So that, that’s my story, is that I think it’s a, it’s an overregulated industry.

So I, so number one is like figure out how to reduce rules and regulations, like some of the suggestions you were making, but also figure out how to really be clear on outcomes. Because there’s some really bad early childhood education out in the world, I think, and, and that that’s not good for kids and maybe isn’t safe or, or clean or whatever the case may be.

So how do you measure quality outcomes? And that might be parent feedback. It might be self-reports or whatever the case may be, is somehow saying that, that this is a joyful learning environment for young people. And it’s not just, you know, a place where kid parents come and, and, and drop their kids because they have to go to work, which a lot of parents do.

So, so reduced rules and regulations, maybe increase the expectations for outcomes. I do think that there’s an opportunity that the age limit’s interesting because. I mean, many young people in this country babysit, right? That’s one of their first jobs. And it’s younger than age 14. And it’s a really good job because it actually teaches you responsibility for a human being.

And so I don’t think it’s a, like a, a huge leap to go to being a paraprofessional support in a, in a pre-K classroom or an early childhood classroom. I would never, ever subject one individual to 50 three and four year olds.

Mason: That was a hypothetical. They, they were not, no. States were saying

Nate: I know, I know, I know. But the, but the image was it made me shiver a little bit. And I really like young kids, but but I do think there’s possibilities of what if we, what if these early childhood centers were strongly partnered with local school districts? And we really thought about internships in pre-education tracks.

Because we know that we, we we’re, we’re trying to increase the number of educators in the world. And one of the great things to do is to, to go and take advantage of what’s either in your own district, own school, own own early childhood center. So, and the last thing I would say is just reaffirming what you said is that there is so much great evidence to say that early childhood matters, or it matters even more for, for young students who are coming from higher or lower SES socioeconomic status or other marginalized communities.

I mean, there, there’s so much evidence that, that says this is important and this can help. So whatever we can do to make sure there’s more access rather than less access, I guess I’m in support of as long as it’s quality

Mason: No, I agree. I mean, I think that part of the mo anecdotally, a lot of what I’ve heard from pre-early ed teachers is just that it’s, it’s a really unsustainable like role due to pay and due to so many things. Part of the, the kind of bafflement was looking at this and just being like, oh, they’re not fixing any of those challenges.

They’re just like changing who gets in the door. So it’s like the challenges persist and they’re just putting it on someone else, which I, I’m not surprised. But also it is something that we’re just gonna keep an eye on. I think this is a really important conversation and just like if what we’re concerned about is our nation thriving early ed is a really good place to put funding and resources, because that is, as you’ve said, just so evidence-backed in a way that many things are not.

Nate: Yeah, and just pitching, I mean the, the, the nervousness of Head Start around the country right now is real. And if the Feds cut all Head Start money, but then don’t block grant to states, to, to, to replace it that’s gonna cause a lot of long-term damage to young people who benefit and their families who benefit from these programs.

So my, my pitch to anyone who’s listening out there who has any role in this is, is we’ve gotta keep early childhood moving. Just like I think you’re saying it is, it’s so critical to the long-term viability and future of our country. So.

Mason: Totally agree.

Nate: No.

Mason: All right, with that, let’s get into our final segment where we talk about human expression.

Cultural Insights from Ireland

Nate: Talk about Ireland because we’ve been waiting podcast for you to tell me about Ireland.

Mason: Yeah. So, so last week I was in Ireland, went to Belfast, Dublin, and Galway, and we rented a car. So we did a lot of driving. Can attest the roads in America feel much safer to drive on than the roads in Ireland. They, they build those roads very narrowly and on both sides of your, to walls of grass. And you’re like, I didn’t even know grass could do that.

Nate: Driving on other side of the road too, correct? Or not

Mason: You’re driving on the other side of the road. Yep. And so there. They were a lot of fun, but also a little hazardous.

We saw a lot of incredible things. The Giants Causeway, if you’ve never seen a

Nate: Oh yeah, I saw your photos. It was amazing.

Mason: Spectacular, it looks like you built it in Minecraft. It’s like pixel blocks stacked, but it’s a rock formation on the coast. It was from a volcano

So a couple things that struck me when I was there. I heard this thing from somebody about how much poetry is in K-12 education in Ireland, and I was like, I love poetry. I was really struck by that. I was like, yeah, poetry should be in more places and taught in new and exciting ways. If when you go to Ireland, they wear poetry very proudly on their sleeve. There’s plaques everywhere they’ve created, or they are, they’re home to many of the best, like longtime poets. Between like WB Yeats, you’ve got CS Lewis from over there who’s kind of a poet. You’ve got Louis MacNeise, you have Seamus Heaney. You have a ton of really important poets. But within their, their leave certification test to graduate from high school, this is the only fact I was able to actually find on the required poetry component. You have to know eight poets intimately and then are tested on four of them. And so they really perpetuate this like kind of national pride of poetry. And to tie it back to the opening where I was talking about the way in which communication shapes culture, I really do think that when you are there, you can tell that poetry is a part of the culture when you’re talking with people.

The pace of speaking, the pace of life, the way that they phrase things. There’s like kind of this aura of mystery and everything they’re saying in a way that’s like really enticing. And they’re just incredibly great storytellers over in Ireland. So I, I was thinking a lot about how poetry has shaped that culture as a communication tool. And I love it. So more poetry all the time. And I know that we’re still working on getting you to be a huge poetry fan, but by the end of, by the, by the time that Catching Up comes to a close as a show we will get you there.

Nate: Okay. I, I am working on it and I do appreciate it and I, try to be a learner. You know, it’s interesting the, just this idea of how the, how media and something like poetry can drive a culture of a country. And I don’t have an answer right now,

Mason: Well. I, I have an inverse answer, which is my next point on Ireland. So when I was thi this is, this is a way that I think America is preventing culture from blooming here in the same way that it is in Ireland. So, if anybody’s been in European countries, you know

live music is a lovely thing. It kind of blossoms up, whether it be the the Covid era videos of like the people in Spain playing on their balcony and someone comes out and joins them or like dancing and the, the streets or all these fun things. It just feels looser. And in Ireland, we were sitting in a pub and in the, it was a Monday night and in the corner there was a booth that had a reserved 8:30 PM sign.

And I was like, okay, cool. So around 8:30, a guy shows up with the guitar around nine, another guy shows up with the guitar. They’re all, they’re just like crushing Guinness the whole time. Just kinda like chatting. And then they eventually take the guitars out and start playing. Nobody in the bar stops talking.

They’re all watching like football, their football. And just kind of cheering. But if you are within feet of this booth, you start to just hear these people playing beautiful music. And over the course of the night, more people just showed up and they all just joined around this circular booth and they just were playing.

They were fully unmiked. Nobody clapped. It was literally just like corner ambiance at this bar. And my, my buddy who I went with he is in the recording industry and we were just talking like, this would just never happen in America. They would find a way to charge for this. They would find a way to put it on a stage.

It would be some part of like a bill. And just the free kind of giving nature of that art expression to me is a really wonderful thing that I wish that we had more of here. So I think that that is also shaping their culture in some way.

Nate: You know, that’s, it’s just music as community rather than music as performance. Which goes back to maybe that needs to be part of our coffee shop slash learning center slash pub slash just music as community. I mean, these are the things that bring people together. So,

there’s a store here in town that has a guitar on the wall, and if you play a song on the guitar, you get 10% off your purchase.

Mason: It’s,

Nate: Is that the Americanized version of that?

Mason: That is the Americanized version. That is the, Free Art Capitalism Edition. And I, I’m totally here for that. That is absolutely better than the alternative, which is nothing

Nate: Right. Alright, I’m gonna close this off. Here’s my I’m not gonna, this is gonna be just expression, not just human expression, but

I, Driving in a bus to, to coach a soccer game elsewhere in Wyoming yesterday. And it’s spring in Wyoming, which means there’s still snow in the mountains, but the, the snow levels getting higher and higher.

And what that means here is that elk are starting to move back up into the hills. And so we, in the bus, we had to stop because there was a huge herd of elk that was moving in front of us. And then it went in a huge line up into the hills that were slowly losing their snow. And it, it re, I mean, I live in an area that’s surrounded by natural places that are operating on a a timeframe that is just independent of, of humans in so many ways.

And I think it was just a reminder. For me and perhaps our listeners of in the frenetic pace of the world right now, we are talking about knowledge and how do you keep up with it all? Is that there’s this whole other ecosystem out there that we’re part of that is just operating at its own pace and certainly has influences from humans, but it, it’s just operating in a, in a time and a set of needs and a a world that is a little bit slower a little bit probably broader in perspective in terms of it’s connected together.

But it was just a reminder to me to, to stop and look outside and pay attention even more than perhaps I do now. So that’s my quote.

Mason: Well, Nate, you stumbled into Poetry on Accident.

Nate: That’s right.

Mason: All right, it’s time to get into our guest that song moment, and I’m, I’m excited too. But before we jump into it, I wanna challenge our listeners. On Spotify and Apple Music or Apple Podcasts, if we can raise either of those platforms by 10 likes before the next time one of these goes live, I will write an original jingle at the beginning and Nate has to figure out what my prompt was for myself and we will play it live and it’ll be the the Mason song debut on the Getting Smart

Okay. I’m reframing this on the fly because I just made this up as we were talking.

You, you have to give me a prompt and then I will write the song next time. You can use me as like the

Nate: You’ll be, you’ll truly be the human AI. You’ll be the sona version of the human version of,

Mason: Yes, exactly. So, you gotta get one of those platforms up by 10 likes on our podcast and we can, we’ll make it happen. So, challenge to you listeners.

Nate: Awesome. Awesome. All right. So are you gonna play the music for us? The

Mason: We’re, we’re guessing the song.

You created it. Yeah. So for listeners, Nate, Nate created this song using AI and I have to guess what he put in.

What’s That Song?

Mason: All right, here we go. That,

Nate: Carve into my heart. You’ll never be the same. I mean, come

Mason: In, I mean, I like the line. I never learned to crawl bots do not have to crawl the same way we do.

Nate: Don’t have to at all.

Mason: No, that, that’s, it, it sounds like you were listening on, on the bus back when you were encountering the elk herd. You were ripping. I have the tiger, and Life is a Highway by Rascal Flats and they, it made this little amalgamation.

Nate: You know, that’s pretty good. I think there’s some modern yeah, I have tigers probably a little bit closer. So my prompt was Guns N’ Roses or any other 80s, 90s hairbands. So it, it, I think it kind of hit it pretty well.

My prompt was it had to be about learning. And so I, I’m appreciating our through line here that it has to be something about learning that we’ve done in the last couple songs. So I think we should continue that for until it gets dry.

Mason: It, it will never get dry. AI is endless, endless possibilities for what learning means. Incredible. All right. Well, Nate, it was a pleasure catching up as always. Have a great two weeks and we’ll talk again soon.

Nate: Yeah. Great. Catching up with you too, Mason, and we’ll talk in another couple weeks.

Mason: All right. See you later.

Mason Pashia

Mason Pashia is a Partner (Storytelling) at Getting Smart Collective. Through publications, blogs, podcasts, town halls, newsletters and more, he helps drive the perspective and focus of GettingSmart.com. He is an advocate for data and collective imagination and uses this combination to launch campaigns that amplify voices, organizations and missions. With over a decade in storytelling fields (including brand strategy, marketing and communications and the arts), Mason is always striving to inspire, as well as inform. He is an advocate for sustainability, futures thinking and poetry.

Nate McClennen

Nate McClennen is the Senior Partner of Strategy at Getting Smart. Previously, Nate served as Head of Innovation at the Teton Science Schools, a nationally-renowned leader in place-based education, and is a member of the Board of Directors for the Rural Schools Collaborative. He is also the co-author of the Power of Place.

Subscribe to Our Podcast

This podcast highlights developing trends in K-12 education, postsecondary and lifelong learning. Each week, Getting Smart team members interview students, leading authors, experts and practitioners in research, tech, entrepreneurship and leadership to bring listeners innovative and actionable strategies in education leadership.

Find us on:

apple spotify stitcher

Related Reading

0 Comments

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. All fields are required.