Catching Up: Job Cliff, Enrollment Drop, and the Hidden Crisis No One Is Talking About?

In this episode of Catching Up, Nate McClennen and Mason Pashia tackle three of the most urgent tensions in modern education. They explore a landmark Penn study revealing that while AI can streamline lesson planning, it may inadvertently erode student intrinsic motivation and engagement. The hosts also dive into the “truancy triangle”—a framework for understanding chronic absenteeism that balances policy and wraparound support with the often-overlooked necessity of designing learning experiences that students genuinely find relevant and worth attending.

The conversation extends to the broader future of work, contrasting the fears of an “AI job apocalypse” with the reality of an impending demographic job cliff in sectors like healthcare, skilled trades, and education. Balancing these heavy topics, the episode highlights the power of real-world learning, featuring New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program—which leverages World Cup excitement to connect students to paid, hands-on projects—and a “good guy” neighborhood microgrant initiative designed to strengthen community ties. Join Nate and Mason for an honest, layered conversation on how school leaders can cut through the noise to design schools that foster belonging and meaningful outcomes.

Transcript

Nate: I’ve been traveling for the last couple weeks, a little bit of vacation, but then was in, was in, Virginia for the Virginia Learns Innovation Network, out at the Future of Learning Council in Michigan, with some colleagues, Rebecca and Victoria.

And I, am just re- thinking about the power of networks and the power of intermediaries, in this work when schools and districts, they’re often isolated. And when you start connecting into these larger networks, it’s really powerful. So in Michigan last th-this– late– earlier this week, we spent three days working with ISDs, which we’ve talked about in the program before, on the pod before.

And, it is– it’s, it’s good work where they’re starting to see themselves as not just those that implement known solutions, but also those that are helping districts innovate with R&D work. And I think that’s a really important shift that I think we need to pay attention to as more and more people are talking about R&D, as you and I have been Slacking about

Mason: Yeah, absolutely. No, it’s, it’s super cool work, so keep up the good work.

And you get to, you get to travel along, all across the country for it, so very

Nate: Yeah, no, exactly. And there’s, there’s, intermediaries all over the place that are doing this work, and our hope as we know, a- as you know, as we’ve been talking about is how do we accelerate it? How do we connect it? How do we impact more students so that they get, lead to better outcomes, and then ultimately lead to thriving, right?

And so the work is there, and I think it needs to continue to accelerate by empowering and engaging local and regional, partners. So all right. Well,

what, have for us for the opening? caught your eye over the last couple weeks?

Mason: All right, so I know you’ve, you’ve been a longtime soccer fan, strategist, player, coach, so you know the World Cup was obviously going to mean something to you. I’ve been a little bit, later to the game, but Seattle did host, and it was a total ball to participate in all the World Cup festivities this year. And so this one article from Chalkbeat caught my eye. Have you heard of the Summer Youth Employment Program in

Nate: No.

Mason: before?

Nate: Nope. But I read about what you, when you shared that. It was pretty amazing

Mason: Yeah, so there’s this incredible program in New York, called the Summer Youth Employment Program, which offers about 100,000 paid jobs per year to the city’s 14 to 24-year-olds over the summer. And this can look anything from a stipend to those that are, like, under 16, to more of, like, an actual minimum wage, salary or payment, which is more like $17 ’cause they’re in New York City, which is great. And this year, Mayor Mamdani decided to take the, the World Cup explosion in stride and basically give all these students these real-world projects where they are doing work with AI and with the local sports teams, like, New York City Football Club, to really develop new ideas of how would you get a bunch of people to stadiums, sustainably, and what would a sustainable stadium look like, and how could you build apps to better map where available fields are in the area if you wanna go play a game with your friends. so it’s a really cool way to just take this moment of, city excitement, and just recruit a lot of young people to contribute to it, which I know both of us love. So su- super cool program.

Nate: Yeah, and I love, I, you know, some of the notes that I thought were interesting. So n- a couple things that were interesting about this is, A, it was about soccer, so that’s interesting, and soccer continues to grow in the United States. And so y- you know, I don’t think I’ve sent you my mullet haircut yet, but that was like our, one of our first two episodes.

But, I think maybe there’ll be some anniversary, you know, when we get to, episode 20 or something like that we can put it, put it and share it out. a couple things here. One is that they, there was 200,000 applicants for 100,000, jobs in the summer youth employment program.

So it goes to show, again, I’m always wondering about the other 100,000 that didn’t get those jobs. Where did, where did they end up? what kind of work did they end up? And did that set them back or accelerate them? So that’s one thing that made me, sort of th- think a little bit about this program and writ large in the United States.

And then the other piece was just the outcomes. I’m always interested in outcomes, right? Like, what actually is changing? And, the program says that school attendance and, sort of chances of getting caught up in the criminal justice systems go down when they are participating in this program.

So there’s these other benefits that I think are really awesome. this broader piece here about having students do real-world experiences where they get paid for it helps them in many ways, right? And so I think that’s important.

Mason: Yeah, and I mean, there’s an interdisciplinary component of this that I just in- implicitly love as well, right? Like, you’re taking this excitement about a sport, which is inherently a sort– a thing you can do your whole life, but is not something that has a lot of professional, legs for most people. It’s rare to be a professional soccer player. And

Nate: Right

Mason: it’s connecting so many things in architecture and engineering and all these other, sectors to soccer for these kids to be like, “Oh, I could, I could see myself doing this as long as it’s in service of this thing that I love.”

which I really love as just a, as a rallying cry.

So very cool project. we’ll put a link in the show notes if you wanna read more and get some cool quotes from the kids.

Nate: Yeah, no, thanks for sharing that. Yeah, just in, and sort of connected to that, I think, th- there is– you and I have talked a bunch about th- this idea of there’s two ideas and tension right now. So there’s this idea of AI and how AI will change employment, and how does K-12 have to react in a world where AI is just the ocean we swim in?

I think which both you and I believe is going to happen. I don’t think AI is gonna go away anytime soon. it’s gonna become like the internet. It’s gonna become a utility that’s out there that’s used, for both bad and good, and it’s gonna permeate K-12 education. And so it’s not only what happens in the education sector, but how do we, how do we work within the education sector to set up young people well for this future?

So there’s this idea that AI is going to reduce the number of jobs out there. And then I, linked into our, into our notes here this idea that we also have this really strong impending demographic change where there’s this job cliff and, so there’s less and less people available for the more and more jobs that are out there.

And I think it’s really interesting is that the article that I– came out from Hechinger Report, and just that some positions like healthcare, semiconductor, trades, education, there is going to be a massive deficit over the next twenty years of employers or of employees or available employees, even as AI eats up maybe more jobs around consulting and finance and business and things like that.

So because of this demographic drop of employable people, more and more baby bo- boomers retiring, there’s gonna be a job scarce– a job scarcity due to AI and then job abundance due to these gaps. And so I think part of the advisory we need to do in K-12 is have people be acutely aware of their local, regional, and national demands in what fields, so that you’re going into a field that’s not gonna be taken by AI, and you’re going into a field, say medical or health- healthcare, that’s actually gonna be more in demand in the future.

And I think that’s an important tension that people aren’t talking about. mostly they’re talking about AI taking jobs

Mason: Yeah, no, a- and that story actually really mirrors the next one, so I’m just gonna kinda jump into this, which is all about, public school enrollment, something we’ve talked a lot about on this show. but Bellwether just put out a really great report that basically tells the story of enrollment in 10 stats, which I think is, like, a really nice way to succinctly pred- present the kind of paradoxical nature of this thing, right?

Like, you have, in one- on one hand, we’ve never had more money slushing around in the public education system because we’ve just, like, th- we’ve hired a ton of staff. We’ve got all this money coming through, and at the same time, we have this big enrollment, drop in public systems, th- ever since, really, the pandemic, but they’ve been accelerated by a couple of other things. And so what these charts start to paint a picture of is we have things like immigration, like for example, a lot of people leaving California. We have things like, ESAs and choice options making it so that students are maybe taking m- more, more interest in private options or alternative options. You have, population decline, which you were just talking about, which is obviously going to affect all of this. And so it, I think it just, it really does a good job of complicating this picture, which, like, the headline everywhere I ref- right now is around ESAs taking students out of public systems or these, s- some of these voucher-type programs. And while that may be true in some instances and we need to be, perceptive and careful in how we talk about this stuff and encourage this stuff, it just really is not the full picture. So, there’s just… I’d recommend taking a look at this so you can see kinda where in the country these things are happening.

It’s not

exactly where you’d expect. the enrollment drops are in a lot of the states that don’t have these AS- ESA programs. just interesting and similar to what you were just talking about. Like, the headline and the truth are very… Th- they may be, correlated, but they’re not always causal, and they, are j- just something to hold in tension sometimes.

Nate: Right, and they’re not universal. So when we work– Well, the headline of The Economist, when I get, when I got back after traveling was something about the AI apocalypse coming, right? Just this, like, job… They called it the job apocalypse or something. Like, AI is going to take all the jobs, et cetera, et cetera.

And there’s caveats, et cetera, but I think we need to balance this with what are the jobs that are actually gonna be in more abundance, and how do we make sure we’re training around that? What are the jobs that AI won’t be able to replicate well, how are we training around that? And how are individuals thinking about AI as an adjunct or an agent to the work that they’re doing to help create new types of jobs?

But the bottom line is we have these big picture factors. We have a demographic change. That’s gonna affect school, public school enrollment, or all school enrollment. We have then these competitive forces, which you just alluded to, which is gonna absolutely affect public school enrollment. And this goes back to the to- topic that you and I talk about all the time, is how are, how is the public sector actually getting better at marketing and telling their story and thinking clearly about engagement outcomes, et cetera?

I’m gonna talk a little bit more about that when we get into attendance and truancy discussion later. yeah, fifty-thousand-foot view matters and headlines only tell part of the story. And so hopefully in this pod we try to unpack that a little bit and give people different perspectives.

Mason: Totally.

Nate: all right.

I’m, I’m gonna stay on the, in our, in our short updates here, just the s- the AI effects o-on, in this particular case, on teaching. And there was a really interesting study, done by, Dr. Sangu and, Dr. Lear, and Dr. Duckworth, so Angela Duckworth, who many of you know, out of the, all out of the University of Pennsylvania.

And, these three individuals conducted a randomized field experiment, it was in Turkey, around middle and high school students to test the effects of giving generative AI support tool to create lessons, materials, syllabi and exercises. So one group of teachers had AI to create these materials. The other group of teachers did not have AI to have these materials.

And, the results were super interesting, is that those that were given the AI tool to help generate these materials, the student motivation, decreased, and the– So reduced student intrinsic motivation, and students rated the AI influence courses as less enjoyable, less interesting, and less important.

So fascinating when you think about, we know more and more teachers, because time is a consi- a scarcity, we know more and more teachers are using AI tools, just like all of us are using AI tools. But this is one of the first pieces of evidence that’s come out to say, “Hmm, students may not like this as much.”

And it kind of reminds me of the conversations we’ve had around the convergence that all blogs will so- start sounding the same because AI agents are building them, right? So I’m sort of curious your reaction to that, and probably not surprising, but, any thoughts on that?

Mason: I mean, I think it’s not, I think it’s not surprising. I think it ill- it illuminates the fact that a tool doesn’t necessarily change learning, right? Like, you can’t really make… A- a- if you have a disengaging, like lesson or something like that, it’s really hard to just use a tool to say, “Now it’s engaging.” And so, like this really does speak to learning design, I think. And just the English major literature lover in me is really fatigued by the AI writing, and I think Claude at one point was like, “Oh, this sounds more human,” and now I find it the most insufferable to read, and I’m like, “Just remove any semblance of personality or style.

I just want like a sterile report from you.” I’ve never hated an adverb more in my entire life than at this moment, and I really, a- actually, honestly, genuinely, ugh. so I totally get it. I think that this is, it’s a, it’s a useful study because we’ve been hearing anecdotally that students are wary of AI from a privacy perspective, but also now I think we see that from an engagement perspective it’s just like, I’d

Nate: And, it probably goes back to this idea of cognitive offloading, right? All of us as humans are gonna be subject to cognitive offloading as AI starts to become more and more prevalent. It- I don’t think any of us can avoid it unless you decide not to use an AI agent or tool at all. The vast majority of people will use them because I think it makes lives easier.

I think the key will be is if you create something, and we were talking about this internally at Getting Smart, right? We’re creating all sorts of tools that are generating and using AI, et cetera, in trying to im- improve our internal processes, but also improve, services and ideas and tools for our partners.

And I think it is easy to use them, and we have to be really wary about saying everything is a first draft. Whatever’s created by AI in partnership with us, we now need to take and make incredible. And I would add to that if we are using tools to make our– or using AI tools to make our job easier or buy back more time, how are we putting more time into building relationships with students, holding students to higher expectations, creating more engaging experiences, right?

So we should, we should, if we buy back time because AI allows us to create faster, we need to put that into making teaching more engaging, more challenging, more rigorous, and more relationship based. So I think we’re gonna start to see a lot of data on this coming out. We have to be really, advocates for replacing with better and better teaching and instruction

Mason: And I think time spent, of, how productive you were or how good the idea is that you came up with, like that is a, that is, you have a stake in the game that matters for some of these things like motivation and engagement. And I find that myself. Like if I use AI to help me write a blog or something, I don’t care nearly about it as much as if it’s something that I’m just like, “I’m just gonna like s- chisel away at this for a couple weeks until I can like make a point out of it.” And so I… And I don’t, I really don’t know how you that ownership back in with this tool that makes so much of that friction go away.

But I think it’s gonna be something that a lot of the educators, that we know and love are grappling with for

Nate: Yeah. Yeah.

I, I, and I, ‘ca- because the temptation is massive, right? To cognitively offload, and we’re real- we talked about this over and over again. It is really in our sort of evolutionary history to make things easier, and this is an incredible tool to make things easier. So, all right. A lot of, lot of different short takes this morning.

let’s, let’s do a couple deep dives. why don’t you start us off, Mason?

Mason: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about the format of this show, and I think that our short takes at the top basically, like, create the weather for the rest of this. It’s like

this is what’s

kind

Nate: Right

Mason: in the world. Here’s like, like four dings that we’ve seen, and then these deep dives are like, and this is where, these are some really deep things at the center of that.

Nate: Yeah.

Mason: this one is building on conversations we’ve had in the past, but it’s rare when you have two publications come out at the same time that are, like, directly conversant with each other and, th- they– one kind of proves the point of the other one in an interesting way. So I think it’s worth highlighting. last week we talked, or last time we recorded this, not a week ago, sorry everyone, what we talked about how there is this homogenization of college admissions essays. We were citing some Rebecca Winthrop re-reporting and some other folks who have conducted these really big studies. a couple reports came out recently about AI assessment, so this is really the non the ge- not the generative part, but the other side where it’s being used to evaluate. we’ve been running a bunch of blogs over the last six months from Eric Tucker, at the study group, which has been really about this, about how you can use AI for assessment in a positive way. And, these two are– these two studies that recently came out I think illuminate how challenging that is.

So one of them is from AERDF, and that one really is like a case study, that is we tried to use AI to review critical thinking as a skill,

and here’s what we found. And then the other one is a, is a little bit of a higher level, but it’s from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning in collaboration with ETS. It’s really all about, the potential opportunities and challenges of using AI to grade performance. So I just wanted to highlight a few things from these reports and kind of get your take because as we’ve just discussed and discussed many times,

th-th-this is, this is really hard. So, i-in the study about th-the critical thinking, there was one instance where a student was, talking about why the Electoral College is unfair, and the AI’s response was essentially saying that, their, that their language around using it was unfair, even though that the student had, tons of citations.

So it was basically saying like, “You’re not really giving a neutral, objective view on this.” And the student was like, “That’s not the point. The point is that like, it’s bad. Like, it is a bad thing.” And so the, i-it sort of misses the forest for the trees a little bit on that one. of the, one of the big interesting takeaways of this is that they used a smaller model, in using some of these evaluations against some of the more foundational models.

So in this instance, they used a more specifically trained Llama model, against a GPT-5, and it performed much better. And so I think this has been an internal d- tension that I’ve been feeling is that time and time again, we see foundational models beat out these more boutique models, as they just– I think we saw this earliest with like the Bloomberg economic model, right?

Like they made a very specific, forecasting economic model and then like the next foundational model that came out beat it at everything that it was trained to do. And that’s not what we’re seeing here. So I think as far as assessment goes, it actually pays to have a smaller model, which means often that it’s cheaper, it’s more private, it’s more specific, which I think is good news. But something else we saw in this is that like And I think every educator knows this, but when people were reviewing these papers, on- the humans only agreed 60 to 80% of the time on what is good critical thinking, or was this defense of the electoral college good? And so it’s just really hard to take skills and use performance assessment, to measure how well someone knows something, which I think calls into question much larger conversations around assessment, which I think w- w- we talk a lot about. the finding from the Stanford paper, so I’m, I’m kinda dancing between the two of them, but you sh- And the Stanford paper is in conversation with other AERDF stuff, so you should just

Mason: of them. We’ll put them in the show notes. But the Stanford’s final, is really we have to stop doing this one test, one grade work, right?

Like, we have to move more toward actual growth, more toward kind of incremental documentation, which we’ve talked a lot about with regard to how you capture an internship and/or experience. while that’s so great as in theory, is both hard and it’s moving against the grain of certain things like privacy, right?

Like suddenly if the more aperture, the wider the aperture of what, seeing what a kid can do and how, when they’re doing it, the more tense you get as a, as a parent and as a learner that people are watching you all the time. so I think that’s just like, that’s this messy water that we swim in.

It’s hard to do the skills assessment. AI is wrong a lot about it, and so are humans. And I think that’s kind of like, it more just disproved our methods of assessment, I think, than the tool. But it is

Nate: Right

Mason: an interesting study. So that was a long rant and ramble. But I’m curious, Nate, if I, if I’m a school leader and I come to you and I’m like, “Gosh, our assessment is just like, it’s either messy or like we need to figure out how to solve this to make it better for all learners,” what do you say to me

Nate: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a great question, and I appreciate the sort of the overview. I guess I have a couple thoughts. So I am– One of my thoughts is around where we predict AI engines will be the most useful in assessment, right? So these articles are around thinking about assessment of durable skills or transferable skills and the use of AI in that area.

And if we think about outcomes writ large, I guess I always bucket these, this is not sort of formal research, this is my own brain, is bucket outcomes as three different things. So one is a set of knowledge outcomes, right? You have to know something to be able to do something. set of skills outcomes, which are discrete skills.

you have these big, broad, durable skills, which things like collaboration, critical thinking, et cetera, which are the most difficult to assess and likely the reason that they haven’t been assessed in the past. It’s much more easy– it’s much easier to assess sort of basic knowledge and skills.

And so I feel that AI tools will be really helpful in assessing basic knowledge and skills, and we’ve seen that with all sorts of ed tech coming out trying to assess those pieces. I feel like, tech- technological skills, so things that you might find, in CTE programs are very much gonna be product-based.

Can you wire something correctly? Can you, plumb something correctly? Can you build something? And that’s probably not gonna be an effective use of AI, at least in the short term. Maybe for practice iterations, but if we move to this area that these articles talked about in the idea of durable or transferable skills, I guess I’m wondering is, with…

Is the use of AI just presenting and creating all sorts of experiences for students to jump into, and the assessment is still human? if AI is helping give feedback, can we do it in many iterations and much faster around collaboration or, say, critical thinking? And ultimately, is it a human that allows the assessment to happen?

Or the alternative is we’re actually never gonna get really good at it saying, “Yes, you are absolutely have met this benchmark in critical thinking or collaboration or communication.” We’re just looking for growth, and the only way we’re gonna see growth is we give st- students experience over and over again.

And so using AI as a, as a final determinant of whether or not someone is or is not good at communication or meets the criteria may not be as important as using AI tools to generate better learning experiences, to generate opportunities for students to practice more and more. So I guess I’m focused as a school leader more on what does that learning experience look like, and can I do ten X the number of experiences so students get more practice?

So wherever they start from, they’re growing, rather than using it as an ultimate assessment tool, which I know a bunch of, orgs are trying to think about right now, so.

Mason: Yeah, I think, I think that’s a smart, a smart response. I mean, it even– Not only could it create more experiences, but technically I think it would be better at im- imbuing an experience with critical thinking, right? Like,

to necessitate the need for critical thinking, and so maybe again, it comes in on that front end rather than on the back end. I am curious, once– I know we’ve talked about this before with credentials, but like, once we’re able to get being captured in like a relatively high-fidelity way, I do

Nate: Yeah

Mason: in aggregate it will be able to make a pretty good confidence bet, right? Like, if you, if you submit 20 assignments, maybe three of them are tests, and then at the end it’s like this person has d- is 86% able to demonstrate critical thinking in these four contexts based on this. Like, my guess is the number, it would get a little bit more precise and a little bit better, or a little bit more useful as a signal. But in all these discrete one-off instances, it feels like, just, you’re kinda going out on a limb,

and

Nate: it’s just one point in time, right? So,

Mason: Yeah

Nate: back to your, to your security question, which you asked in privacy issues is I think that if someone put a recorder on me, if you and I both wore necklaces with AI little pendants on it, and they watched all of our interactions all the time, w- they would ha- it would be able to give a pretty good understanding of my critical thinking skills, and it could also read my writing and just it had all access to everything that I produced on a day-to-day basis, verbally and written and et cetera.

it probably would give a pretty good overall set of feedback about how do you grow and how good are you at collaborating and listening time and questioning time, and all these things that we know that are important when we’re in, say, communication. what I wonder is, and you alluded to this, right, is like wh- where will privacy s- put up a barrier for this, right?

We know that the more monitoring, the better we’ll be able to give feedback, but the more monitoring, the less privacy. And so I think in the world of education, we’re gonna have to start thinking about that. What is our limit here? What does that look like to get the best available data to help a learner grow, but also not violate privacy that you’re always being monitored and assessed?

Mason: I wonder where these skills don’t show up, right? Like in conversation with your jobs cliff conversation earlier. Like

Nate: Right

Mason: it, how many of the sectors that actually have the most kind of runaway abundance and availability i- in terms of openings are actually using these durable skills as the language of hiring? Like d- if you’re a plumber, is critical thinking actually super important to getting the job? Problem-solving is, and like collaboration’s probably better than not, but like really it’s do you know how to be a plumber and do you show up on time? And those things are much

Nate: Yeah.

Mason: to measure. so I, very interesting stuff.

And if anybody listening wants 24/7 catching up, just send us one of those AI pendants and, Na- Na- Nate and I will wear it.

Nate: There was that promotion, I think, maybe a year ago, I think we riffed on it about, it was called the Friend. I think it was called Friend was the product. I haven’t heard much since, so maybe it’s still going. Maybe they got… You know, they participated in the educa- or the AI investment boom and have a lot of money and they’re just spending it.

But that was the idea. And I actually do think that more and more we will have, and probably it’s gonna be through an earbud process, is that we will have a constant companion. I just think that we’re headed in that direction, and that constant companion also could provide us feedback that we’re just talking about.

I’m not sure that’s a good thing, Mason. I’m not sure that a constant companion is a good thing, right? I think that there is times for stumbling and fumbling and not being constantly evaluated, being alone without someone, right? So but I do think, I hate to use the word inevitable, but I am, I’m more and more bullish that’s the way we’re headed as we see more and more evidence that, that humans are talking to their bots more and more for all sorts of things.

And there’s no doubt that… It’ll be the ocean we swim in, right? And there’s no doubt that’ll penetrate education as well, and like people wearing Oura Rings I think is a sign to be monitored all the time. yeah. Very interesting. Anyway, we could go on

Nate: the, yeah, and I think the biggest thing is that w- I think both of us are still bullish that it would be better if more humans had stronger skills in these durable or transferable skills. I think the world would be a better place. The second conclusion from this deep dive is that I think both of us are bullish on we need to give young people more experiences to practice this, both in their classrooms, in their schools, as they get older in their communities.

And as you and I think about how do we credential valuable experiences, we’re thinking a lot about that project, and we’ve done phase one, and we’re thinking about starting phase two on that to pilot it, is that the second piece is how do we just op- g- get better opportunities for young people to do more engaging work that helps them develop these skills?

and I think that may be more important than finally assessing are you, an A+ on collaboration or are you a A+ on critical thinking

Mason: Agreed

Nate: So, all right. So thinking about engaging, yeah, the engaging e-experiences, I wanna dive in a little bit into absenteeism, and this has been on our… It’s been on our, on our docket for the last couple times, and I finally said, “We need to talk about this.”

And so chronic absenteeism is a problem. I think many schools struggle with it, and, there’s all sorts of research that goes into it. neither one of us are experts on that research. Listeners can go and find it, and you can find all sorts of ideas about how to decrease chronic absenteeism and, and increase attendance.

I thought it was interesting, the 74-74 million over the last couple months has had a couple different articles on, one, a school or district in Virginia, and another, the state of Iowa in general, and both are on efforts to address chronic absenteeism because it’s a really a significant problem getting students into schools.

So I wanna walk through them as a summary just for our listeners who probably won’t have time to read the articles, and then, and then talk a little bit about my thoughts on those and get your thoughts. So Iowa as a state recognized this as a challenge, and their reaction was a couple things.

One is they did policy reforms. So this was all about data coding and parental notifications and referral esc-escalations and device restrictions, so policy reforms to address truancy issues. early warning systems and data tracking, so this is about, h-how do you track who’s absent? It’s actually, data in large, especially larger districts, is really hard to aggregate and keep control of.

It’s because of all sorts of competing, systems. And so we have tru… policy reforms, data tracking, and then targeted support and district intervention. So what are the root causes? And this is really important work, so what’s happening outside of school that’s preventing a student from going to school?

And then they, implemented case management and positive incentives and things like that, right? So all good. So we have data tracking policy and then really thinking outside the school. And the efforts actually help. So the chronic absenteeism rate in ’23, ’24 fell from 21.6 to just under 16% over, the last two years, from ’23, ’24 to ’24, ’25 in a single year.

So those things helped. What I wonder about is w-what happened in the actual classrooms, and was that part of the policy change? And if you look at the, the Virginia School District, and this is the Petersburg School District, Petersburg County in Virginia. So same thing, real-time attendance tracking, school level incentives, free childcare, addressing healthcare issues, and dedicated support staff.

So it’s Communities in Schools. Communities in Schools has gotten huge. It’s wraparound support, really important work. But neither one of these articles, which was what I wanted to talk about, talked about what does classroom experience look like? Because fundamentally to me is data tracking’s one thing, policy’s one thing.

You have to address the out of school issues. That’s why Communities in Schools is so critical, I think. And you have to say, how can you create extraordinary learning experiences in schools? And I was interested to see that neither one of those articles mentioned anything about change in pedagogy, change in practices.

What are we gonna do to create more engaging, better, stronger outcomes, or stronger learning experiences for students so that they wanna come to school rather than they have to come to school? So I, again, we’re not experts in this world, but to me, we spend a l- we are experts in thinking about learning design, and I guess I’m bullish to say students will go to places if they find that those places are engaging, interesting, relevant, and helpful for their future, and they feel like they belong.

And you’ve removed the outside barriers to them getting to school, whether it’s transportation or family or food or whatever the case may be. So I am thinking about how do we make sure that we think about engaging learning experiences as a truancy reducing effort. What are your thoughts?

Mason: I think it’s, think it is also surprising that they didn’t talk about this at all. Like, I understand why you would focus on these more infrastructural pieces. They seem a little bit more, not easy, but like cut and dry in terms of we can make this str- strategy, adopt this platform, et cetera. I mean, we talked about it when we opened this episode, that, summer youth employment program in New York City has– They’ve done studies on it, and it increases school attendance, and that is almost the exact opposite of this, right?

Like, that is a summer program of just high-powered learning experiences that are real world and relevant, and there’s none of this other stuff that’s a factor of it. But it had positive gains in terms of attendance. And so I think, like, it’s probably not a silver bullet. Both of these are critically important, especially something like a Communities in Schools for making this work. But I think we– The data exists, and it may not be in the places we expect, that, increasing real world relevance brings people to school. I think we’ve talked about this before, and I’m not, knowledgeable enough in this area to have an opinion, but like, m- I think the definition of attendance is also probably something.

Like, to become chronic, chronically absent is probably worth putting under some sort of microscope. especially as you’re looking at, like, if a student is working instead of coming to school for a variety of reasons, how can we make that count in some sort of credit, right? Like, how can we make that… Or make it so that they don’t have to work.

Like, there’s all these other conversations that’s like, just because it’s inside the school day does not mean learning is not happening. How do we also think about counting that? And I know that’s like a very hard problem to solve and much bigger than this. But, I would, I would just say that as a plus one to relevant learning is it doesn’t have to happen inside the classroom, and where is this just an arbitrary boundary that we’ve created?

Nate: All right. I’m gonna present to you for first release, no one has ever heard this and our listeners are gonna hear it, is the truancy triangle, right? So the truancy triangle, in order to reduce truancy, we need to think about three different things. So the first is around policy, data, rules, regs.

There’s even some evidence around, okay, a student comes in late and they’re counted as truant if they miss first period, but then they’re there for the rest of the day, right? So simple things like that, and I say simple meaning they’re very concrete. You can change policy, you can change rules and regs, you can look at your data, you can bui- build better data systems.

So that’s the first part of the triangle. Second part of the triangle is these communities and schools concepts. What’s all the wraparound work that has to be done to remove the barriers from students attending school? And then the third leg of this triangle, the third side of the triangle, the triangle corner, is around engaging learning experiences.

And I think in this truancy triangle, we’re spending an awful lot of time on that top around data policy and, accountability and logistics. We’re spending a lot of time with communities and schools, so what does it look like outside of school? We’re not spending enough time thinking that engaging learning experiences are a way to reduce truancy.

So there you go. There’s the truancy triangle and, I, we would love feedback on that. Mason, what do you think of the model that I just presented?

Mason: I think it’s great. Way to, way to sum up what we just said in a, in a visual, in an audio visual format.

Very good

Nate: if I could draw on my screen, like we need a thing that allows me to draw, ’cause I… It would be helpful with my hand to be able to do that.

Mason: We can do it in post maybe. May- maybe we’re getting good enough to do that in post.

Mason: no, I think that’s smart. I think that’s important. And I know, I know that this topic has been, it’s been top of mind for quite some time, especially since the pandemic. I think everything really ramped up then in terms of both how people were tracking and just, like, the numbers were, of course, really hard to, reconcile after an e- a, an event like that. But the, it doesn’t– Without concentrated effort, it does not seem to be getting better, right? Like, it i- it is, it is something to, You have to intentionally address it, and I think the truancy triangle gives you those ways to do it, ’cause it’s not just gonna fix itself in the same way that your school losing enrollment probably won’t just fix itself with the trends that we’re seeing, so.

Nate: Right. Right. Exactly. And part of this work, of course, outside of the top of the triangle, but certainly wraparound supports and certainly engaging learning experiences and instruction, those two things actually should attract students to a school because they’ll feel like they’re supported outside of school and their basic needs are met, and at the same time, they’ll go to a place that feels relevant, purposeful, and engaging, and a place where they feel like they belong.

So those two pieces should help address this declining enrollment issue when public school students are either not there ’cause of demographics or not there because of choosing another option. So…

Nate: And there’s good research, just I put a drop into the notes, but, there is great research around how, engagement strategies like problem-based instruction and project-based learning have a positive impact on student engagement and attendance.

It’s there. It was– The– My point was it just wasn’t noted. I want it to be noted in these, in these articles that, hey, there’s another thing that we should be always paying attention to. And it doesn’t mean that people aren’t doing it. I just want it to be included in the conversation more often

Mason: Yeah, it reminds me of my early digital marketing days. This analogy may just not be useful to anyone other than me, but we, there’s a, there’s a strategy in digital marketing where you pay for ads, right? So you pay to be in front of people, and that is the way that, you can guarantee the most quick term success.

It’s really good for, con- talking to people and telling them that what you’re doing is working, and that’s great. And that kind of feels like a lot of what is being highlighted in these articles, is these very direct, like, we’re attributing money to this thing and this is how it’s doing it. And then there’s SEO, which is the organic, which takes eight months for your website to show up organically at the top of a page in Google, and that’s a lot of doing like strategy work and changing things incrementally and everything.

And that is, the best when you can get it, but it’s also very unsexy and takes a long time. And so that’s feels

Mason: what we’re talking about here, is like changing instruction feels like you’re changing something that is, much more difficult, involves much more people, and is like just a system change that’s really tricky.

And the other one feels a little more, not like a Band-Aid, but like something you can money at and kind of make it go away a little bit

Nate: Right. Right, right, Yeah. Good analogy. Good analogy.

Nate: you have a school shout-out, I think. Right, I’m very excited for this school shout-out. So every once in a while, you look into a crystal ball and it tells you the future, and then you say it somewhere, and then it happens.

Mason: And so long ago, we did a podcast where I was talking about, how Hollywood has failed schools, right? Like, they’re always doing the same image of schools. It’s lockers,

Yep,

Mason: football team, it’s whatever. And I was like, “They should just do something where it’s like a group of kids gets together in, like, an Only Murders in the Building style, and they just have a project-based learning assignment, and they just, like, solve a murder.”

It can be fully fictional. It doesn’t matter. It’s just like school can be hands-on and real world. And I’m here to tell you, Nate, that past podcast guest, Elizabethton High School in rural Tennessee, they had a project years ago where somebody gave students this old, this old case to basically just look at in their journalism program, just as, like, just something to look at.

And as they were doing it, the kids started finding clues, and they actually solved a murder that had been unsolved for decades through this course. And they were able to, like… Basically, they made it all happen in the real world. They solved it. They, like, did the legal proceedings. It was amazing. was a podcast about it, and then, think it came out this year, but on Amazon Prime, they turned it into a full Prime TV show called Murder 101, which is, of course, fictional. it’s actors telling this story, but

Nate: yeah

Mason: just a really great… I think that it is actually an example of the thing that I wanted to see in the world, which is school being a place where people do actual work that matters and celebrating, getting celebrated for that.

so I’m very excited. check out our past pod with Dustin Hensley. It’s not directly about this project, but I think it shows you a little bit of the spirit of the school. And then, definitely watch out, watch the show because who doesn’t love a murder mystery?

Nate: Remember, thanks for sharing. I was excited to see that as well. I mean, it may be that this is the beginning. I always think about point, what’s, what’s the initial sort of early cause here, and it may be the beginning of the anti-Ferris Bueller effect in Hollywood.

Mason: Yeah

Nate: so if there’s anyone in Hollywood that’s listening to this podcast, which I’m sure there are hundreds and hundreds listening to us,

Mason: yeah, of

Nate: please connect with us and we can help support you on saying, “Hey, schools, when they’re displayed in Hollywood and in movies can look different.”

And there’s so many real world examples of this happening. We just need to change the paradigm of what it could look like, and that may really impact this demand side that you and I have preached on for years

Mason: Agree. Or we just do a director’s cut of Ferris Bueller and give him a credential for attending a parade, and then suddenly we recognize outside learning and we can, we can turn anything into an educational movie.

Nate: Let’s, Let’s, actually, we should, we should do a, redo of Ferris Bueller. So when he takes the thermometer and puts it by the , the, the lamp to make the heat go up, I mean, there’s some really interesting durable skills there around problem-solving and,

Mason: For sure

Nate: So we could, we could redub Ferris Bueller and just say, what are all the credentials that he has earned during that day when he takes a day off?

Mason: We, I love it. We can ask Llama to do the analysis and

Nate: Okay.

Mason: durable skills demonstrated.

Nate: All right, we’re gonna do that for our next podcast, so that’ll be incentive for people to listen to the next one. That’ll be our opener is, what did we learn when we analyzed Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for durable skills?

Mason: skills. Incredible. Very good. All right

Nate: let’s, let’s finish off with a human expression. I- I’ll start us off and then you can finish us.

So just thinking, about electric vehicles, and there was an article, from Good News Network and about buses in Colorado in one district, and they had bought a bunch of electric buses. And there’s more and more technology going into these electric buses, serving as also battery storage during the evenings when they’re plugged in.

Battery storage for the grid, which is a main issue with photovoltaic work, et cetera. Where do you put all this power when it’s being generated but there’s nowhere, to store it? So I love the idea of vehicles in general. This is an interesting place where there are obviously millions of school buses in the United States and as a fleet maybe transitions more to EV because it’s more cost-effective, how can it also support the community or at least the school district in terms of offering up battery storage during the evenings when they’re not in use?

So just, I like advances like this. It’s really just a dual use for something that I had not thought about, but it’s gonna happen more and more where our, if we have an EV vehicle, it’s actually gonna serve as a charger for our house or a battery for our house as well. So

Mason: Yeah. And I remember stories during the pandemic coming out about buses being, like, the broadband provider as

Nate: Yeah.

Mason: like,

Nate: Yep

Mason: think that there’s a lot of ways that we can just it all on the bus, get, and, I… And where Starlink fails us, I guess we’ll have, we’ll have buses.

Nate: Yeah, that’s true. At least we’ll have buses.

Mason: Yeah, right. okay. Well, mine, hat tip to Julia Freeland Fisher on this one who, if you have never read, her awesome Substack, you should definitely check them out. But she linked to this group called, Neighborhood Microgrants. the group’s called With Neighbors, but their initiative is called Neighborhood Microgrants.

And this just made me smile. I’ve, there, I’ve been going to a lot of events. It’s summer in Seattle. Everyone is hosting something. And basically what this is is it’s a program to help you set up a local microgrant program for your community. So I’ve been thinking about this as like the good guy HOA.

It’s like a, it’s like a, an

Yeah

Mason: you don’t, that you don’t like wag a finger at. And essentially what it is it’s a, it’s a small pool of money for granting to someone who wants to host a neighborhood gathering. So whether that’s a block party or a backyard party or whatever. And ba- basically what they’ve found by doing this work across the country is that people are more inclined to host a way to get together if they have a little bit of

Nate: Hmm.

Mason: support, and also if they have the accountability of holding someone else’s money. And so if somebody’s like, “I think I wanna host something,” and they’re like, “Here’s $300,” you’re like, “Oh, Nate put some money in this pot.” Like, it’d be pretty lame to just not use it. And so it just increases everybody getting together and, it’s, it, in some ways it’s so sad that we have to incentivize getting together.

Mason: it’s hard. It’s hard to make the plans. It’s hard to do the logistics. Everyone has a busy life. A neighbor is a sort of interesting construct. You’re like you’re responsible for each other of a- and like

Mason: So I, I love it. I’ll put a link in the show notes to check it out and you can figure out through their toolkit how you can host your own, neighborhood I think we need more infrastructure for gathering at a time as a lot of the infrastructure being developed is n- not doing that.

Nate: Love it. Love it. Infrastructure to connect humans, right? Superpower is connection. Some infrastructure to support that will be important as more and more individuals are sucked into their devices in the digital world. So Mason, awesome to catch up today. A lot of great talking and a lot of, a lot of great thoughts.

And, for those listening, hope you have… if you have thoughts, send us, send the thoughts this, our way, especially if you have comments on Ferris Bueller and, what kind of credentials he would’ve earned during his day, and we’ll put it into our next pod. So

Mason: Nate. Good to see you.

Links:

• NYC Summer Youth Employment Program
• Hechinger Report: Job Shortage
• Bellwether: Declining Enrollment in 10 Figures
• The 74 Million: America’s Trillion-Dollar School System
• Generative AI Can Harm Teaching
• Alp Sungu Profile
• Benjamin Lira Profile
• Angela Duckworth Profile
• Stanford Accelerator for Learning: Responsible Student Assessments
• AERDF: AI and Critical Thinking
• The 74 Million: Iowa’s Chronic Absenteeism
• The 74 Million: Petersburg, VA Schools
• Purdue University: Problem-Based Instruction
• Lucas Education Research: Project-Based Learning
• Murder 101 on Prime Video
• Good News Network: Electric Buses in Colorado
• Neighborhood Microgrants Toolkit
• Connective Tissue Substack