Ted Dintersmith
Career-wise, I spent way too long in school. I then entered the technology business area. I worked seven years with a chip startup, and then 20–25 years in venture capital backing tech entrepreneurs — very early stage, you know, one or two people. I had kids relatively later in my life, so I was in my mid-40s when we had first a son and a daughter, and I really didn't think I'd ever spend any time on education-related issues. Zero time. OK. I just assumed it worked pretty well when I went to school; it probably had gotten a lot better. And as my kids went through school, I think around middle school — when we get serious about learning — I said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” I mean, everything they’re being pushed to do is actually, I think, damaging, and the things they wanna do, they’re being discouraged from doing. I thought at first it was maybe a school, started meeting people, visiting schools, and realized it’s an education system model. Yeah. And so I left a very enjoyable, high-paying venture capital career for a very challenging focus on trying to support innovation in schools.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Beautiful. It’s music to my ears, and I get there are so many ways in which it must feel like hitting your head against a brick wall.

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah. I think, like a lot of things, if you knew at the outset how hard it would be, you might not have done it. Cuz I thought, gee, back then — you know, I started on this maybe 13, 14 years ago, let’s say 13 years ago — I thought it’s pretty evident, right? As technology gets better and better at certain things, it changes the skills young adults need for career, citizenship, and a happy life. They need to adapt. I didn’t see that happening, so let’s make the case. Schools will pay attention, parents will pay attention, educators — it’s obvious. Yeah. It just seems patently obvious, and I would give myself a bit of credit because back then I started to say, “If school priorities don’t change urgently and profoundly, I’m not convinced civil society will hold together.” And I can tell you, in 2011 or 2012, people thought I was nuts — like that guy on the street corner with the “End of Days” sign. I think today most people would agree it’s fraying, and the root cause is education. I don’t know that many people appreciate that, but the root cause is education priorities totally misaligned with what adults need in the world today.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. Well, there are so many different directions we could go with this conversation. The other thing that jumps at me — besides that our priorities are misaligned — is that inability for the system to keep up with the adaptations that are happening in time. And if there’s ever a clear indication of that, it’s that when everything kind of stopped and recalibrated during the pandemic, nothing really changed in the school system.

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah. It was this huge opportunity for change, right? People have said schools can’t change, and then in March of 2020, everything changed in a matter of days. Parents saw how hard it was to keep kids on task with material they found immensely boring. And when you watched what was happening, you’d kind of scratch your head and say, “Why are they using that?” or “Why are they studying that? Cuz they’re never gonna use it.” I think it sort of got co-opted in one direction. So instead of coming out of COVID with people saying, “Let’s really rethink deeply what we should do in schools,” I point some of the responsibility onto the shoulders of the National Center for Education Statistics. They delayed the nation’s report card scores for a year cuz they couldn’t give them in spring of 2021, since most schools were shut down. They did that a year later, spring of 2022, and released the scores in the fall. Miguel Cardona released those scores and said they were appalling and unacceptable, and every journalist — I mean, story after story after story — we were barraged with catastrophic, disastrous, colossal losses of learning, on and on and on.

Ted Dintersmith
And I think people panicked. Yeah. I’ve got a book coming out, and I go right at that, because the people who created those numbers, the people who designed those tests, the journalists who write about those numbers — they aren’t math literate. If you actually look at the declines, right, the biggest decline on the National Center for Education Statistics zero-to-500 cardinal point scale was eighth-grade math, which dropped 1.6% — on math most adults never use — on tests given after two years of disruption, kids in and outta school, many traumatized, on one more random test the kids have no stake in. It’s like, really? 1.6% seems like a fairly modest shift on scores that, by the way, have been flat for years. They bounce around in these tiny bands. But basically, I think it underscored first the math illiteracy of the people writing and talking and administering these exams, but also the fact that we’ve thrown everything overboard in schools chasing higher scores and gotten nowhere. It’s like we’ve made no progress on the wrong goals.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So, say that again.

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah, right.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So we’ve made no progress on the wrong goal.

Ted Dintersmith
I’d ask your listeners — the next 10 stories they read about education will immediately use math and reading scores as a proxy for quality of education. “This state is better because the scores are higher.” “This school is worse because the scores aren’t as high.” On and on and on. It’s just a convenient go-to proxy for how we measure and evaluate the quality of education — for a student, for a school, for a district, for a state. Here’s the issue, right? These tests are administered in bulk — millions. I mean, our K-12 kids take over a hundred of these tests during their K-12 years. They’re administered at such scale they have to be designed to be scored by a computer. Anything that can be scored by a computer can be done by a computer. So in a very real sense, we are having our kids chase low-level tasks that machine intelligence already does perfectly. It’s a race they’ll never win, nor should they even be engaging in that race.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So what I’m hearing is that using scores — I love that term, “as a proxy for quality education” — it’s convenient, but it’s actually not accurate.

Ted Dintersmith
I just encourage people — and I always say this when I talk to journalists — “Have you looked at the practice questions?” That’s rare. People don’t bother to do the homework to look at the practice questions. The math is math that adults just don’t use. We bury kids in a sea of arc secants, piecewise linear functions, and ratios of complex polynomials, on and on and on — when adults don’t use it. And in the rare event someone does, your phone does it perfectly. That doesn’t make much sense.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
OK. So let’s pull back, right? The context here is what the school system is doing to prepare our kids for adulthood, for the future, and for the workforce of the future is not — to your lens — meeting the needs of what we need these kids to be learning. Is that a fair assessment, or rephrase it?

Ted Dintersmith
I’d say a fair assessment. I’d go one step further: I think it’s impairing their prospects.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
OK.

Ted Dintersmith
And that’s what I saw with my own kids. I just said, “Wait, if we buckle down and do what the demands of schools say we should do,” I think — and the more I talked to people, the more this was borne out — these young adults will lose their creativity, their curiosity, and their audacity while they grind away to get good at what the phone in their pocket does perfectly. Some people may know I worked for several years with, and we formed a nonprofit together with, Sir Ken Robinson. And if people haven’t listened to or watched his TED Talk, I would beg them to watch.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. It’s beautiful.

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah. Do Schools Kill Creativity? To this day, it’s the most-watched TED Talk of all time. Ken and I were working together — we were about to launch a nonprofit in March of 2020 at South by Southwest EDU — but that got canceled. Then, tragically, Ken was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and passed away five months later, which was a huge loss for the world cuz he was a wonderful person. But when you think about what will let us thrive as humans going forward — when machines do so much perfectly — it’s going to be our creativity, our curiosity, our audacity, our leadership ability, our agency.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Our ability to think critically.

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah, on multiple levels. And that’s bulldozed away as we chase higher scores on low-level things that machines do perfectly. It’s not just not preparing them — I think it’s jeopardizing their prospects. And we’ve seen that play out. We’ve seen it play out over four decades, but initially it was sort of a slowly unfolding wave of automation that replaced or marginalized physical labor jobs. That happened, and it happened to millions of people in thousands of communities. Well, now we’re gonna see that in a turbocharged way for white-collar jobs, and the most vulnerable will be the jobs that fresh college grads used to roll into.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, I’m experiencing that personally with a young adult — my youngest kid who just got outta college a couple years ago — and watching his friends trying to find employment has been scary, really, and challenging. Let’s take a quick break, and then we’ll be right back.

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Welcome back, everybody. My guest is Ted Dintersmith, and we are talking about preparing kids for a future we can’t predict through the lens of education. One of my favorite lines that I share with parents all the time is, “Make sure you don’t let school get in the way of your kids’ education.” So I’m curious — with our audience listening to this, parents and professionals supporting complex kids — where do you wanna go in the second half of this conversation? I’m gonna give you a bully pulpit and say, what do you wanna talk about here?

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah. Well, let’s talk briefly about AI. I think that’s on everybody’s mind, and my advice to people is: either get really good at using it or get out of its way — or both. We have a film coming out called Multiple Choice that shows a school district taking that on as its mission. And I think the thing I’d say to parents — and you talk to tons of parents, and I give talks and deal with a lot of parents — is this: it’s interesting. Over and over again, parents will tell me, “All I really want is for my child to be happy.” But then you observe what they’re doing, and it’s completely counter to that, right? So I think parents need to step back and say, “Do I want to push my kid to have a slightly better college application, or do I want my kid to have agency and purpose — to be a happy kid going deep and far on what they’re interested in — and guide them along the way to develop one or more hireable skills that go with that?”

Ted Dintersmith
Because I think the reality is already here today. So this isn’t a prediction — this is a reality today — that employers would rather hire someone who knows how to use AI than someone who’s a magna cum laude graduate of an Ivy League school. You could put your kid through torture to take a very random shot at getting into an exclusive college, or you could say, “Hey, let’s back off from that and let kids use AI to create and invent, because it’s powerful for that.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So I think I understand the concept of using AI to create and invent, right? And in fact, again, I’ll go back to my experience because I have a 24-year-old young adult who, in college, began to figure out how to use AI to help him study — not to change what he was delivering, but to actually study a huge amount of material. And then he went to his professor and told the professor what he was doing. So he wasn’t trying to cheat; he wasn’t trying to pass somebody else’s work. He was actually using it to help him learn. And I believe that’s an example of what you mean by using AI to help create and invent. Is that fair?

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah, I think it’s — well, first, it’s the ultimate curiosity machine. I’ve got a very dear friend who was one of the first patent holders on the electronic shopping cart, so a pretty digitally proficient person. He had a long drive — he called me the next day and said, “I had a seven-hour drive, and it was a seven-hour uninterrupted conversation with ChatGPT.” Because if you’re good at asking questions, and pushing, and going further, it’s an incredible thought partner for that. So that’s not cheating — that’s just having somebody who doesn’t get bored or tired or charge you to answer. People will say — and I think this is always so curious — “Well, it makes mistakes,” as though humans don’t. If I get something from one AI engine that I care a lot about, I’ll cut and paste it and put it in a second AI engine and say, “Find the holes in this. Where is it wrong? Where has it made assertions that can’t be supported with credible sources? And what sources should I be looking at that would present a counterpoint of view?” Then I take that one and put it back in the first. And if you do that a couple times, you are really quite capable of fact-checking anything — if you put the effort in, you know, if you put the effort in.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So I think I understand the value of getting good at it. Say a little bit more about what you mean by “get out of its way.”

Ted Dintersmith
Well, the film we have coming out — or that will be out by the time your listeners hear this — is called Multiple Choice, and I was just mesmerized. I did a film 10 or 11 years ago called Most Likely to Succeed, which — thanks to the director, not me — was fantastic. It premiered at Sundance and 25 major film festivals. I turned down Netflix, and we’ve done over 10,000 community screenings with that film. My goal was to use a powerful, well-done documentary to bring communities together in thoughtful discussion. But it’s a lot of effort — and not cheap. To do a documentary justice, the budget to make the film is quite high, cuz nobody wants to see a mediocre documentary. And then the budget to actually support outreach and impact is large. So I was like, one’s enough — one is enough.

And then I visited this public school district in Winchester, Virginia, and after a day there, I just said, “This story needs to reach America.” What they do is extraordinary. The superintendent said, “I’m tired of career and technical education — career-based learning — being stigmatized, looked down on, with the kids who do that being viewed as ‘those kids.’” So he took an old elementary school, went to the local business community, asked, “What skills do you need to hire?” and pulled in the funding to create what he called The Innovation Center.

Traditional and new-economy skills coexist there — welding, carpentry, electrician work, healthcare, cybersecurity, digital media, AI. But here’s what got me so motivated to do it: it’s not an option, it’s the norm. Kids, during those four high school years, will spend about a third of their time in The Innovation Center exploring one career, then exploring a second career, finding the lane that works for them, and working with other kids whose strengths and talents aren’t the same.

You might have a kid who devours AP courses, and he’s now next to a kid who’s unbelievable at woodworking — and they realize, “Hey, you’re good at one thing, and I’m good at a different thing.” That’s a very healthy dynamic, and these kids can’t wait to be in school. Graduation rates are sky-high. The kids who don’t wanna go to college enter their careers with a running start and are getting great jobs. The kids who do wanna go to college — and this is the key thing — the kids who are applying to college because it’s required, not optional, don’t get dinged by admissions officers. The way it works — and I hate to say this — is that if you were a kid who wanted to go to a selective college and chose to take welding instead of AP Chemistry, most admissions officers would say, “Well, they didn’t challenge themselves academically,” which is a crock. But that’s the way it works. Here, it’s like, “Well, they had to,” and then they write these unbelievable essays about what they learned. When they go to college, they have a more informed perspective on what they wanna major in.

They get more out of it, they have lucrative summer jobs, and they’re more grounded in the real world before they spend $100,000 to $300,000 and four years getting a degree. So it works well for the career-bound and equally well for the college-bound. I just felt like this is so important. In some ways, the other story here is that it brings the community together, and it’s a clear message to the community that we respect all paths.

It’s not, “Let’s have every kid chase that college placement, and if you can’t make it in academics, we’ll send you off to this.” No — these are all respected, important careers that contribute to the fabric of a community, and that community is energized with a real boost to its economic growth. I think in these very difficult times for our country, this is a model that would help us bring America to its senses — one community at a time. So we’re doing another community screening campaign. We will do 10,000 community screenings with this film. We are going all out on that.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Well, and then, after this conversation, let’s have a conversation about how we can bring this to our community. Cuz in the past I’ve tried to bring some of these movies to our community virtually, and I’ve been denied that because it’s a virtual community. But let’s pin that for a later conversation.

Ted Dintersmith
I have to say that we’ve done screenings on Zoom with a live chat flow.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
You would not believe how interesting.

Ted Dintersmith
It’s great to watch people’s reactions, and sometimes we’ll get the director on the chat flow or one of the students.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Right. We believe it — this is my world, you know? Anyway, here’s the question I wanna ask. Cuz I so appreciate — I know we need to begin to wrap this conversation — but I so appreciate what you’re talking about and the messages you’re bringing about the value of helping people find their gift and play to their strengths, which is so important.

So before we wrap the conversation, I know your expertise isn’t in the realm of kids with differences in neurodiversity, but what do you wanna say to the parents and professionals listening who are supporting kids who may learn differently, process information differently, or struggle with emotional regulation or executive function differently? In our community, we’re supporting kids who have some differences in learning, behavior, emotional, or social development.

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah, I don’t wanna get too far into something I’m not an expert in. I know something about it, and I have a sense of what I don’t know as much about. And I know and respect the experts who deal with a whole range of learning differences.

What I deeply believe is that every kid has their gifts — they all can find their lane. And I think one of the obligations we have as parents, guardians, and educators is to keep the machine of school from crushing a kid’s self-confidence. Because that happens, right?

You know, I’ve got this book Aftermath: The Math We All Need to Understand. Believe it or not, it’s a book about math that has almost no equations, formulas, or symbols in it. It’s about the really interesting ideas of math and how they affect our lives. But I concluded by talking about the punitive way we use math timed tests — kids sprinting and drilling so they can answer low-level questions without mistakes. Horribly and tragically, most people will say, “I’m not a math person.”

Most people feel scarred by that math — and honestly, it’s math that adults don’t use, that your phone does perfectly. And so, to me, our collective responsibility — and the more we’re all in on this — is saying, “Let’s find the way this kid can succeed,” and shield them from feeling deficient over all the other things that may not be relevant.

I love this saying — it’s from an organizational behaviorist named Peter Drucker, and I love what he said. I don’t have this quite right, but he said, “Most organizations and people think the way to improve is to identify what they do poorly and try to fix it. The way we do well in life is figure out what we do well and do more of it.”

Wouldn’t that be an incredible education model? Help each kid find what they love and what they’re good at, and then help them blossom with that talent, or those gifts, or those passions.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I love this. This is so in line with what we teach parents of kids with neurodiversity. The language we use to describe what you just described is the performance paradigm. We’re looking for kids to perform, and if we find an area of deficit, well, let’s just hammer them on that deficit to get it up to average — instead of what you’re speaking to, which is, let’s identify what their gifts are and really elevate their gifts. Let them compensate for the areas that may not be as strong in other ways, because when you play to their gifts, you create a sense of curiosity, creativity, innovation, and confidence.

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah. In a world of AI, where humans stand out, it’s when they’re great at one thing — ideally more than one thing. But if you’re great at something, AI can help you with the other things around that, right? I think understanding how to leverage that so that your strength or strengths carry you through — that’s quite powerful. And I wish I could say that’s the mode of operation in schools, but it isn’t.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And the people who are listening to this podcast are the ones advocating for their kids differently — who are paying attention to “What is it my kids need? What is it that these kids need?” So I really appreciate your message, cuz I think you’re speaking to a population who will get it quickly and begin to think differently and use it differently. So thank you for that. Excellent.

Ted Dintersmith
Yeah. No, I love it — what everybody’s doing, the passion and commitment. I mean, we owe so much to our kids, and it’s incumbent upon us to think hard about how we can help them best move forward in life. Cuz it’s not easy being a kid these days.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
No. No. So before we wrap up the conversation, I wanna let people know how they can find out more about you. Everybody, you can go to teddintersmith.com. It’s gonna be in the show notes, but that’s teddintersmith.com. Ted Dintersmith.
The film that’s gonna be available is called Aftermath — is that the new—

Ted Dintersmith
No, the film is Multiple Choice — Multiple Choice. And I’d love people to bring it to their community and screen it cuz that’s the way we want people to use it. And then the book is Aftermath, and I promise you, since so many people think they hate math and can’t imagine liking a book about math, give it a try. Because I think it does for math what Freakonomics did for economics — it’s about the ideas that are interesting and how they reach you in life.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I can’t wait to share this. My daughter, who is now a 28-year-old med student, when she was in second grade, her very first Gmail address was “I really love math.” So I can’t wait to share it with her. Excellent.

So everybody, you can also find him at whatschoolcouldbe.org, and that’s where you can find all the information about his past books and films. So teddintersmith.com and whatschoolcouldbe.org are the best resources to access more. And it’s all gonna be in the show notes for you.

Ted Dintersmith
I’m easy to find.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Before we wrap the conversation, is there something else you wanna share — either that you haven’t mentioned or that you have mentioned and want to highlight — to close your end of the conversation today with our audience?

Ted Dintersmith
Well, the reason I’m so passionate about this is I think if we make good choices, civil society will hold together. And if we make bad choices, bad things follow. But I have a favorite quote — it’s a John Dewey quote, and I’ll read it to you: “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

So I think these days — I don’t know about other people — but I find it to be a very troubling time. And I think the root cause is generations of adults who’ve been put through a meat grinder of school that didn’t prepare them for the world as it is today. I think our obligation, but also our opportunity, is to rethink things and to help this next generation have the skills and mindsets so that they can soar — so they can get us back off our feet, off the floor, wherever the heck we are. Maybe we’re 10 stories down in the sub-basement, but I think that’s exciting.

It certainly keeps me motivated to know that we’re fighting — your community, you, we’re all fighting — for better futures for kids. They’re counting on us, and I think we need to come through.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, and it’s not too late. I think that’s the other thing I wanna add. As distressing as it can be — and so many of us are dealing with issues related to our kids these days — I’m talking to parents every week, and as distressing as it can be, change always happens in these small, little nuanced ways. There’s so much that we can do to empower our kids, enliven our kids, and enroll them in the future.

We are not raising them in the world we were raised in. And what I hear you inviting parents to do — and the professionals supporting us as well — is to really begin to be conscious of the world we’re raising them in, and to do that thoughtfully and intentionally using the resources available to us.

Ted Dintersmith
Absolutely beautiful.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Ted, thank you. Thanks for what you’re doing. I am inspired, and I am always looking for someone to keep me inspired and keep me hopeful — cuz hope is where it’s at.

Ted Dintersmith
Hope is where it’s at. And thank you — thanks for all the work you’re doing. It’s just a fantastic podcast series and community, so thanks for pulling it all together.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I appreciate that. Love what we do. Much like you, part of me wants to say, “OK, I’m starting to get to that age where I’m done.” And then the other part says, “But I love this. I love being able to have these conversations. I love the impact that we’re able to have on families.”

Ted Dintersmith
There is unfinished business, that’s for sure.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That is for sure. All right, thank you, my friend. To those of you listening, take a moment — check in with yourself, tune into yourself. What are you thinking about? What are you aware of? What are your insights? What are you taking away from this conversation that you may not have been aware of half an hour ago? Maybe there’s some little action you wanna take — maybe some conversation you wanna have — as you bring this forward with you into your week. And as always, thanks for what you’re doing for yourself and for your kids, for being here, having these conversations, thinking about how to show up as consciously as you can for these amazing young people. They’re going to be amazing adults, and you’re on the path to help ’em get there. So thanks for being here, and we’ll see you next time. Take care, everyone.