Rethinking Education Systems: David Cook on Changing Educational Paradigms

David Cook

Lead Strategist, Learning Ecosystems Design Consulting

Quotes of the Podcast: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." — Alvin Toffler

Introduction of Guest BIO – 

With three decades working with schools, school systems, regional and state agencies and national education organizations David Cook, Principal Strategist at Learning Ecosystems Design, is an expert on what it takes to make change happen in education systems. David is a nationally respected voice in the transformation conversation. He retired in 2024 from the state agency level after 27 years at the Kentucky Department of Education, the last 15 as Director of Innovative Learning. During his tenure he has:

· Oversaw a statewide initiative to shift assessment, accountability and the credentialing of learning from a one size fits all state level approach, to one where communities design Local Accountability Models that measure the competencies found in a Portrait of a Learner/Graduate and provide a public facing dashboard for those local indicators. (2021-2024).  

·   Directed Kentucky's development of a competency-based education system including the initial efforts in developing a Portrait of a Learner

· Co-authored and implemented the first district level innovation zone program in the country, Kentucky's Districts of Innovation Program (2013). 

· Designed and implemented the longest continuously operating statewide remote learning system in the country, Kentucky's Non-Traditional Instruction Program (2011).

· Authored Kentucky's award-winning Education Recovery Program (2010).

· Has authored and co-authored numerous pieces of legislation and Kentucky Board of Education administrative regulation. 

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators.

• 30,000 Ft. View – Why so we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education?
• The Driving Test,
• The Need for A NEW Education System
• The AI Telescope
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision makers to know?”

Podcast/ website/ book shoutouts

What School Could Be - Dintersmith

The End of Average - Rose

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to Education Perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve, to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education. So, David Cook, we are so excited to have you here at Education Perspectives. David is the lead strategist for the Learning Ecosystems Design Consulting, and you have an incredible background with the state of Kentucky as being one of the major architects of the transformation that is happening here.

Liza Holland [00:00:49]:
So we're so excited to have you here today.

David Cook [00:00:51]:
Thanks, Liza. It's great to be here. I'm excited to, to talk with you today.

Liza Holland [00:00:56]:
Well, me too, because you are such an agent of change. You are definitely one of my people. So have to kick you off with the 30,000 foot question. Why do you think that we as a society invest in education?

David Cook [00:01:09]:
Because I think ultimately, Liza, we want to invest in our future. And we know that at some level, all of us know that we're mortal. And down the road, there's going to need to be somebody else that is doing everything the world needs to be done, and it's not us. So we. Investment in education. I've always loved that term. I can't remember the first time I ever heard somebody say it. But we're not just, you know, putting budgets together and trying to get instructional strategies into classrooms.

David Cook [00:01:44]:
We're investing in the future of our young people and the next generation of young people. And I think as. As a person who now has grandchildren, I see it again, right? I saw it with my kids, and now I see it again with their kids. So I'm just. I think that's it. I think that's why all people think education is important, particularly in this country, because they see the value.

Liza Holland [00:02:13]:
Great answer. I agree with you wholeheartedly. So you have been involved in education for a really long time. What drew you to education in the first place?

David Cook [00:02:21]:
Well, I think I'm going to give you two answers. My first answer is sort of tied to the first answer, which is, I just, I wanted to be part of that change, that investment. I didn't just want to sit back and go, yeah, it's great. Kids go to school, I went to school, everybody goes to school. But I wanted to actually participate in making that whole investment better. So that's kind of what led me to education. The other part is it's the family business, as they say. Both of my grandmothers were teachers.

David Cook [00:02:57]:
My one grandmother taught in A one room schoolhouse. I have uncles who are teachers. My mom was a career early childhood educator. My dad is a higher ed administrator. Was a higher ed administrator. So it's been around me a long time, which is interesting because I began my career and had a year of teaching and I was kind of not sure I wanted to do it. After that initial poyer into it and I took off and did some other stuff. My undergraduate degree allowed me to have business and business education as a part of it.

David Cook [00:03:35]:
So I did a whole bunch of different things just because I wasn't sure. But I kept having this feeling that I needed to get back to it. So eventually I did. Thanks to the department of Ed in Kentucky. And as you said, we've done some pretty cool things and did some pretty cool things during the time that I was there and since then, so.

Liza Holland [00:03:54]:
Well, that's exciting. And I love that the family business sort of piece.

David Cook [00:03:57]:
That's.

Liza Holland [00:03:58]:
That's marvelous. And it is, you know, you really get influenced by the people around you.

David Cook [00:04:02]:
Exactly, yeah.

Liza Holland [00:04:04]:
So now that you are out on your own, you've got some, some neat stuff going on. And I read one of your posts with your driver's test analogy and I thought that what a great metaphor that that is. And so tell us a little bit about driving test.

David Cook [00:04:20]:
Yeah, so the driving test, as you said, is. I've just thought of, I tried to think, I was trying to think of a way to talk about this idea that we can't just give kids academic content, we can't just deliver them content, have them take assessments that measure their mastery of that content. We are now in a place where we must help them to be able to apply that knowledge and use it and develop it, think about it and do all the things, all those skills that we talk about, whether you talk about them as essential skills or all those collaboration and critical thinking and problem solving and all those things, we've got to make that the centerpiece of what our education system does. So the driving test simply says you and I and 91% of the people in this country have a driver's license. Well, I don't think any of us were allowed to get a driver's license simply by taking the written test that starts off the process. Everybody who has a driver's license had to go out in a car and demonstrate their ability to drive. And that's the idea is you can't just assess kids on the rules of the road, so to speak. You have to have them use that knowledge and apply it in situations Whether those be performance tasks, projects, whatever that is.

David Cook [00:05:47]:
And somehow our system has to recognize that and acknowledge its importance. I still not sure how we do that, but that has to become a part of what we hold ourselves and young people accountable for, is success. Has to be about that, to me, not just about. Susie got 100 on the math test, or, you know, Juan got 50 on the reading test. We have to find out what's underlying that. And do the kids really know how to use that information? And do teachers in a kind of a parallel path know how to teach that way? Do they know how to facilitate learning as opposed to just teaching content?

Liza Holland [00:06:30]:
And in many cases, they don't.

David Cook [00:06:32]:
Right.

Liza Holland [00:06:33]:
I mean, it's. It's a flaw in our system all the way from kind of from top to bottom, because, boy, that content piece, now you've got it in your pocket and so.

David Cook [00:06:43]:
Right. Exactly. We're not, you know, one of the, you know, the many things I think about when I think about the flaws in our system. Right. You know, you know, we. We could have this long conversation about people who say our system's broken. Well, actually, no, it's not. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do.

David Cook [00:07:00]:
It's just not what we need, what we need our system to do anymore. And that going back that far, to think about the fact that we're in a place now where when we started this system in the late 19th century, it was the industrial age. We needed standardization. If you look back at those days and read history, education in this country was a hot mess. It was all over the place. People were teaching different things. They were. You didn't know.

David Cook [00:07:28]:
You went out in the prairies and you had a different way of teaching than you did in the cities. And it was all. And we needed standardization. We needed that. And we also needed it because people were the primary knowledge collectors and knowledge deliverers. They were. That's how we did things. We didn't have computers and we didn't have the Internet, and we didn't have even television or radio or telephone at the very early stages of it.

David Cook [00:07:55]:
And the other thing that I think we sometimes forget is we didn't need it to be very flexible, because change in 1894, when the system was created, happened over year. When you change something, it took a long time to change it. And today, as you and I are talking, somebody's designed something new, Somebody has created something new. So it's happening like, just like that. And so we have to have a system that is able to turn on A dime, as you, as you might say. But at the heart of it, it's our human value that we have to bring to the table. Right. Because what you just said, Liza, is I've got a thing in my pocket.

David Cook [00:08:38]:
I've got it talking to you through a device, all of which can access all of the information just like that. And then I have AI who can access it even faster than I can. And what are we going to, how are we going to build around that and help teachers and learners figure out the ways to adapt that allow them to still be the critical thinkers and still be the problem solvers? Just, you know, make, you know, I love that somebody said this recently to me, make AI do all the group work. Make AI do all the stuff that available on the Internet and then build around that. Start with the problem you're trying to solve and finish with the solution that came from you. But all the stuff in the middle came from the Internet and AI and all of that stuff. So.

Liza Holland [00:09:32]:
Well, and to me, the quality of our ability to think and assess and apply and filter information is what's going to keep it from being a generic AI answer to something that's really thoughtful and can, can move the dial. Right. And so that's that all those skills are exactly what you need to be able to do that and to, to ask good questions.

David Cook [00:09:58]:
Yeah, I, I, I wrote a piece, I wrote a piece just right around Christmas time. I was, I'm a big fan of ncis and I was watching an episode of NCIS and this, this season, and it was called Stolen Moments. And it didn't, right at the top of it, I was like, oh, this is going to be okay. But it was about AI and it was about an AI bot that was put into the NCIS team. And at the end of the episode, Jimmy, the doctor, the medical examiner, had this really great speech about, you know, AI is wonderful, but it can't read a room. It can't talk to the people who are, the people who are going to be affected by whatever you're trying to solve. It can't. Because there was a great scene in that episode where the, the agents were kind of stuck.

David Cook [00:10:52]:
They were locked into a place and they were in trouble. And somebody said, well, let the AI bot tell you what to do. And basically Torres or one of those agents said, but they're not here. I can't. They don't see what I see. They don't, they're not able to look at it from that perspective. And I think AI, like, you Just said, Liza, AI is going to give us, could give us amazing solutions to any problem. But at the end of the day, our humanness is what's going to make the best solution.

David Cook [00:11:26]:
Because we're going to look at it and say, you know what, they're not thinking about this. And unless we tell it to think about that, you know, it's not going to see that we have to give it whatever it wants to do. So.

Liza Holland [00:11:40]:
Absolutely. And I love that NCIS is actually kind of putting some of that out into the zeitgeist like that. I just. It's so smart. So we are definitely in need of a new education system. Right. It's what we've got going on right now is really not giving us the things that we are. The employers are giving us a long laundry list of what's wrong.

Liza Holland [00:12:04]:
So tell us about, from your view, what kind of new education systems should we be striving for?

David Cook [00:12:10]:
I think we've hit on some of it already. But when I think about the things that are wrong, I think about the fact that teacher prep is wrong, I think about the fact that our assessment systems are wrong for what we need, our accountability systems certainly are wrong for what we need. I think in Kentucky, we're on the edge, a really huge change to accountability, and I think that's going to be a huge shift. We're waiting this week to see if the legislature finally passes a bill that was introduced this time, and we can talk about a little bit more about that. And that's a result of all the work that my team and I did until I left and what they've continued to do. But I think we've got to begin to think about things in a deeper, a longer frame than what, you know, our system has been about. Teach kids, give them an assessment, move them on. Teach kids, give them an assessment, move them on.

David Cook [00:13:03]:
And there's no place, Liza, in the world. There's no industry in the world where that's how things work. That's what baffles me so much about it, is we have a system that doesn't replicate any way that work happens, whether it's factory work or, you know, research or anything, does it. None of it works the way our system is set up. So all of Those reasons, those 10 reasons that I've talked about recently are related to the elements of the system that are, were perfect. I'm saying they were almost dead on for when it started, for when we built that system. They were. Those were the things we needed to know about kids.

David Cook [00:13:48]:
Because we had basically four path career pathways. We had kids either going to college, which meant a professional program, they were going to technical school, they were going to work, or they were going to military. And even inside those four, there wasn't a lot of differences because if you went to business school in America in the late 19th century, they were pretty much all the same. But now our lives, our career. I love a phrase that came out of one of knowledge work forecasts that they do every couple of years a few years ago called the career mosaic. Because the other thing we think about is our system is designed thinking that the learner was going to do 30 years in the same job. They were going to go, they may switch companies, but they were going to do the same work. Not true anymore.

David Cook [00:14:37]:
They're going to take that very specific set of skills that that person possesses, they're going to do projects, they're going to work three or four years on this thing and then something else is going to come along and then something else. So this need for skill development or learning skill development or as I like to say, teaching kids how to learn, the learning how to learn part of the process becomes so much more important than. Because Liza, I could say, let's come back tomorrow and one of us will say, did you hear about content is constantly in flux. Yes, the basic stuff, numeracy, literacy skills, paramount. But once we get kids to where they can do those things, they have numeracy, literacy skills. We've got to really, really think differently about it. Because one of the things I think is wrong and everybody knows this is we got way too many kids disengaged. The other part that's wrong of our system, it's built on metrics from the 19th century.

David Cook [00:15:43]:
And our response to the metrics when we get the test back is we try to fix kids. We don't stop and go, oh wait, I really understand that. Liza is, this is her strength, these are her strengths, these are her talents. Let's figure out how to improve and make those even better so that she can be successful based on who she is. Not this very narrow. And so you've got disengagement of kids. There's data upon data on data that if you focus on people's strengths, you're going to receive higher engagement, you're going to receive higher productivity. The well being of that person, person is going to be better because that kid is going to walk into that school every day going, I want to be here because I'm learning things that are important to me.

David Cook [00:16:35]:
You can do all of that inside the standards that every state has set up. It's not about, I think the problem, the challenge, the big efficiency problem is how do you do that in an efficient way? How do you make sure that you're continuing to make sure kids know the stuff they need to know from a very, like I said, numeracy and literacy perspective. But you're putting that out. I guess what I'm really saying is I don't think we ask enough. I think our, our metric that create our accountability models in most states. Now, again, back to the driving test, are really just asking the question of do you know this? Not do you know what to do with it now that you know it? And that's what we've got to. I don't. We've got to figure that out.

David Cook [00:17:25]:
At the heart of our system problems are this old thinking, like, for lack of a better word, that's what they are. I get it. I have so many friends who are in the assessment world and they're in all of that stuff, and I. It's a big, big, big monstrous machine. And the challenge ultimately is how do you turn that ship? I'm going to shift over real quickly to the situation in Kentucky right now. Beautiful bill was written that basically was the end of the line result from all the work we've done over the last five to six years, starting with Jason Glass around this notion of local accountability that included in accountability has to be whatever it is that every community thinks is important beyond the stuff the state and the Fed want. And we built this great piece of legislation, flew through one side of the legislature, got to the other side and they started, as I used to say when I worked in policy, they started hanging Christmas ornaments on it. Yeah, they started, oh, wait, let's put this over there and let's, let's make this more restrictive and let's make this more.

David Cook [00:18:40]:
We need more information about this. And I think it's still, when it gets voted on this week, we'll still have some teeth. But as you imagine, the teeth get, you know, sawn down a little bit because people. I understand it's really hard. When you grew up in a system, your kids grew up in a system, you're now a policymaker. What's wrong with the system that we have and to a percentage of the population that's probably true. I don't. There are kids, but I doubt.

David Cook [00:19:11]:
Here's what I think is absolutely not true, that there are as many kids as people say who. Well, they do just Fine. In the system, they like to take. They like to take standardized tests and they like to. No, they don't.

Liza Holland [00:19:23]:
No.

David Cook [00:19:23]:
I'm sorry. You can't talk to 25 kids in a high school classroom and tell me that any or many of them, very few of them really want to sit in a row in a desk and listen to lecture and do assignments and take assessments. I just don't think that's the way we're made. And we don't do that.

Liza Holland [00:19:45]:
Yeah. There are so many students that succeed in spite of the system.

David Cook [00:19:49]:
Sure, Absolutely.

Liza Holland [00:19:50]:
You know, it's true. And you know, like we were talking about, we need to be building lifelong learners and the current system that we have is not promoting that, that student engagement and allowing them voice and choice to be able to start to direct their learning. I know it's going to be really hard for teachers, but they need to think of themselves as coaches and facilitators instead of, you know, that, that old sage on the stage thing.

David Cook [00:20:18]:
Yeah. Well, I, I have a great personal example real quick. Three grandchildren. They're all three of my, My one daughter, so they're brothers and sisters. I have a granddaughter and two grandsons. My granddaughter from the. She's going to be 14 this summer. Oh my gosh.

David Cook [00:20:34]:
Wow. But from the time she was in elementary school and they started testing her, her reading score was three grade levels above grade level every year. It kept, it's kept that way because my granddaughter would read the cereal box, the instructions on the whatever that came in the mail. She would read anything she loves to read. My grandson, who's 10, not a big reader, but if I put in front of him a book about a character that he loves or a game on Mario, like if I put in front of him, you know, Minecraft, a book that was based on Minecraft, you know, he would read it and gobble it up and da, da, da, da. He's been a grade level reader all this time. It's not fair to my grandson that our system has decided that in order to, for us to consider you a quality reader, you have to read what we tell you to read. Right.

David Cook [00:21:36]:
So. And I get that there's a lot of efficiency in having every kid read the same passages and. But I, it would be interesting to me to see my, my grandson's grade reading reports if everything he read was on grade level, but it was stuff he was interested in, and what difference would that make in his ability as a reader if he wanted to read what he was reading? So, I mean, again, that's about strengths, that's about talents, that's about focusing on assets with kids instead of deficits. Because our system is basically trying to fix the things that kids for whatever reason don't do well at. And maybe part of the reason they don't do well at it is because they're not engaged in whatever it is they're trying, you're trying to teach them. And if we spend a little more time on that, sometimes I think we have a, we have a organization problem with the adults in schools. Again, very traditionally we put teachers in classrooms with so many kids and, and then we have sort of a back end kind of process when they don't do well. We give them extra time, we give them tutoring, we give them.

David Cook [00:22:49]:
What if we did it maybe the other way around? Where in the day to day stuff, we didn't have as much teacher driven stuff as we had student directed learning. And when kids hit the walls, when kids hit the places that we're struggling with, then we brought people in. It requires, as you pointed out a minute ago, a whole different way of thinking about the teaching profession. And it requires a little less control. And I get you, and I know anybody who's ever been in a classroom knows that's something you almost have to have is some sense that you know where things are going. And that's a hard change and challenge to address. But it's got to be addressed because we're spinning our wheels around things that maybe frighteningly enough could make us irrelevant if we're not really thinking about what kids are going to need to be successful in any in life. Successful is probably not the right word.

David Cook [00:23:53]:
Prepared. I love when people say prepared, not ready. You know, college ready, career ready. Are they prepared for what they have to deal with tomorrow? When plant managers say I got to retool this factory and half the workers then aren't qualified because you didn't have the process right to teach them things they needed to know about learning new jobs. You hired them because they did the other job really well, but because they learned it, learned something about that anyway. It's a big, big, big ask. But if we don't do it and we don't do it soon, I worry. I mean that's what I today I just posted about.

David Cook [00:24:39]:
The problem is you think you have time, you want to argue with me about all the other stuff I've talked about all of the things that are wrong with the system or the driving test, fine. But we don't have time to have that argument we really don't. We have to all come together and say, what about learning about education, about the world is ours?

Liza Holland [00:25:04]:
You know, I really think that the thing to me is that there are some really amazing things that are happening in education. A good amount of those things you were leading in Kentucky. And so I look at all these kind of saplings out there on the edges of our system that are really the way that we need to go. And how can we not only strengthen and protect those, but start to make them a part of the system and ingratiate the entire system into this wonderful deeper learning and project based learning and all these things that really are working and are moving the dial, but they're in small little bits here and there. I'd love to have your thoughts on how can we take these maybe experiments that are working really, really well and infuse them into the system at large?

David Cook [00:25:57]:
Yeah. I think the challenge is those things are, as you pointed out, are sort of fighting outside the system. They're creating learning environments that are very different, that are not set up to then be assessed and held accountable under current structures. Right. So they're. One of the problems is that is that we've got to figure out. And this is where policy becomes such a huge part of all of this conversation. I don't think we need to start and make anybody get really go off the rails by saying we're going to change everything.

David Cook [00:26:33]:
The first really big great thing we can do state by state, is to come up with even more flexibility that allows these smaller systems, these smaller school ideas that you just described, to flourish and to be able to demonstrate the challenge. The thing we have to do is show that kids who come out of those systems are probably even better prepared for life than the kids who come out of the other system. I think we are seeing small changes across the system. Like you're starting to see higher ed. Think less about SAT scores, thinking more about who kids are when they come into the campus and what do they bring to the campus? Not just a grade point average and an SAT score. But yeah, this is what I did when I was in school. These are the things that I accomplished. These are the projects I worked on.

David Cook [00:27:35]:
I think we just have to somehow, Liza, we've got to figure out how to turn a mirror around on the world and say, this is how the world operates. This is Mr. Policy, Ms. Policymaker. This is how you operate in your world. Why would you have young people operate differently? Why would you have a system that is almost exclusively about meeting requirements, about you know, it's all about checking boxes, for lack of a better word phrase. And it can't be about that anymore. We've got to be able to say, yes, the kids who come out of this school over here, this new, different model, are getting a better learning experience than the ones who sit in a comprehensive high school for four years and check off that they've got their number of credits required to graduate.

David Cook [00:28:36]:
So. And that requires, at the system level, a lot of rethinking, requires changing how we fund schools. Instead of them being about attendance or membership, it's got to be about what graduation requirements look like. And we have seen some states begin to rethink that, to think differently about what we want to be. The graduation requirements. Requirements. Kentucky did that right before the pandemic. They split high school in half.

David Cook [00:29:03]:
And they said first two years standardized, everybody's going to take algebra and geometry and English. And second two years, you take classes that still meet the content requirement, but they're inside your own whatever pathway so that you're not having to take classes in the upper part of high school that don't really fit what you want to do. And you. So there's just a lot of different things that people. The portrait of a graduate, of course, has become huge. And a big part of what Kentucky has been doing is trying to figure out, number one, how you assess that, but also how does that fit into accountability. And that's what this law that we're waiting on was, is designed to do, is to say your local measures of accountability are a part of the process and they're going to have weight. And when you do that, no matter what you say, everybody knows this.

David Cook [00:29:59]:
When you do, when you tell teachers and principals and superintendents that it matters, that we're getting credit for it, you're

Liza Holland [00:30:07]:
going to be held accountable for this.

David Cook [00:30:09]:
That changes the world for those people.

Liza Holland [00:30:12]:
You get what you measure for, right? You do. And it's just human nature. And. Yeah, I totally agree with you.

David Cook [00:30:19]:
To simplify our whole conversation this morning, we've just got to figure out how to get that done, how to have everything that we think is important now be what we measure. Because we're still not doing that. We're still not measuring what we know we need to measure. And it's. I get it. We've got a humongous assessment system in this country. We've got, you know, we got companies spending millions of dollars on their tests. We've got.

David Cook [00:30:49]:
And the bottom line for me is all of that stuff is important. I just don't think it's what schools and school districts should be held accountable for. Yeah, it's what. It's kind of back to the driving test. That stuff needs to be taught and that stuff needs to be assessed. But why is that what we determine success on? That You've got good test scores.

Liza Holland [00:31:11]:
It takes both sides. Right? It takes the practical test as well as the, you know, the academic one.

David Cook [00:31:17]:
It's not about, we want to throw all that out and put something else in. It's. You've got to figure out a system where all of it is valued. And I don't know, maybe some people don't want to take that on. I don't know what the answer is or what they're. But I, I still, I, I wouldn't be sitting here with you if I didn't believe that the needle is moving very slowly. But we've got, we don't have time anymore. We don't have a lot of.

David Cook [00:31:45]:
We can't just continue to have wonderful meetings, conferences, summits, convenings, and say talk

Liza Holland [00:31:52]:
has to translate into action. Yep. No, you are so right.

David Cook [00:31:56]:
It's got to become something meaningful to people and enough people that say, you know what, you're right. This is, what we've got isn't working. I think there's a lot of people who don't say what's real. They don't say that it's not working because they have to live in the world that it is. They're either they work for an assessment company or they work for, you know, there's just a. There, it's, it's a big lift. And I think we just need more and more people commit to the lift, and it makes the Boulder a lot easier to push if more people commit to the lift. So.

Liza Holland [00:32:29]:
Well, I kind of put myself in that space between bridging education and business and industry, and, and I think that a lot of that's going to have to come from there. I just finished a project with Fayette County Public Schools with local HR managers talking about, okay, how do you assess these skill sets amongst your employees? And what could we do to infuse that into the, you know, into the school curriculum and whatnot and make it an additional measure. I think that, you know, the tighter we can tie education to that real world experience, the better we're going to be able to make that happen. If nothing else than, you know, that practical side. We can take things that teams are doing in business and industry now and give those to students. Let Them try it out.

David Cook [00:33:17]:
Right?

Liza Holland [00:33:18]:
Let them, you know, and one of my pet peeves is that we just, we don't ever allow students to fail so they become so incredibly risk averse. Isn't there you know a place in this part two of education that we're talking about that needs to be there? Right, okay, I did this, this part worked, this part didn't. What can I do better next time? It's just, that's not part of the system and it needs to be.

David Cook [00:33:40]:
Exactly. I remember probably 10 or 15 years ago we brought together 20 HR leads from Kentucky corporations and unfortunately we've got some biggies. We had a person from UPS there, we had a person from GE there, we had a person at the time from IBM, we had, you know, everybody that was a big. And we just simply sat down with them and said, what? What are we not getting? And they said very basically, I don't need you to teach people in school the job that I need them to do. I can do that, I can send them through training and they're ready for the job. What I can't handle much longer is a kid that comes to work for me and the second week they're there, something happens in their job and they don't know how to deal with it. They don't know how problem solved, they don't know how to think critically about a solution to the problem. All this other stuff is just, that's what I, you know, and, and one of them said, and I mentioned this earlier, you have a company that manages factories and a superintendent asks, am I giving you the kids you need? And the corporate person says, you are today.

David Cook [00:35:01]:
But if I have to change anything about this factory to where it's building something else or this thing that I work on is doing some other task, I don't think the people you're giving me are ready to do that task because they don't have adaptability skills. They don't have those kinds of skills that allow them to skip as learners into learning something new. That's what is missing. And that's what you were saying this too. That's what really, really, really is missing in all that we're doing is we're not valuing alongside their knowledge. Jason Glass said in a state board meeting several years ago when somebody was trying to understand what he was talking about with deeper learning and all this, he said, Pythagorean theorem, you got to know it if you're going to do any kind of deep mathematical stuff. But if you can't show me how to use it. It's not of any value to anybody.

David Cook [00:36:03]:
If you can just simply regurgitate the theorem and how it works, you can solve for it. But if you can't take that equation and put it into something that actually lives, then you've not done. You've not. The learning process hasn't completed. I always think it's really interesting. We say kids are learning because they have high math scores. He really looked at the definition of learning. It's a whole lot deeper than that.

David Cook [00:36:30]:
It's not just my ability to spit it out. I have to show you back to the driving test. I have to show you that I know how to drive.

Liza Holland [00:36:40]:
So, yeah, yes, yes, yes, and yes for sure. And, you know, I really think AI is going to create an incredible additional pace of change that students are going to have to be able to face and adapt to. And I think our educators are panicking. You know, a good portion of them is, oh, we just need to ban it. Well, no, you know, the world is going to proceed on. And I think we need to let go of this, you know, cheating type of a thing. I literally had a student tell me, you know, my teacher is. Says that using AI is cheating.

Liza Holland [00:37:17]:
And I'm like, first of all, cheating is really not a thing in the real world anyway, you know, and second of all, it's going to be a number one requirement for, you know, for job applicants in a really, you know, for a long time.

David Cook [00:37:31]:
I guarantee you we're going to find very soon job interview processes. You know, when I've interviewed applicants over the years for jobs at kde, you know, we always include a performance pass. Well, now we're going to have to start including, okay, here's the situation I need here. I'm going to give you the problem. You need to explain to me what you're going to do to get the information that you need to solve that problem. And then I need you to verbally speak to me what your solution is based on. It's like there's an analogy of AI as a telescope. The person still has to look into the telescope.

David Cook [00:38:17]:
The telescope is basically making things look closer and look deeper. That's what AI does. It makes things go faster. It makes things go deeper. But on the other end of the telescope, what's out there, I have to. And this is where teachers really come in. In my opinion. Teachers have to really guide what students are then seeing through that telescope and helping them to design solutions based on what they're seeing.

David Cook [00:38:50]:
So it's Just another way of thinking about, again, AI is there and they have a purpose. It has a purpose. It has a purpose to help us expand our ability to gain the knowledge that we need to gain faster, to do it deeper, to do all those things. But like we said earlier, at the end of the day, a human being needs to then be able, be prepared, be ready, whatever we want to use to take all of that information and come up with the right solution for that problem. And we're not teaching kids how to do that. We're not teaching adults how to teach that way to help facilitate learning that way. And back to the last piece. We don't have time to continue to say, oh, that's nice, that's wonderful.

David Cook [00:39:39]:
Yeah, we have this small number of schools who are really doing it the right way. But that's nice. I always, you know, people are, oh, there's another innovation. Guy thinks we, thinks we can actually turn the system around. And I'm like, we better, but we

Liza Holland [00:39:54]:
can and we must.

David Cook [00:39:57]:
That's. That's all I can say anymore. I don't care if you think everything that comes out of my mouth. It's. You don't have, you have to do something. Because we're, we're drowning as a system. We're drowning. We're.

David Cook [00:40:11]:
Kids are drowning. Kids are drowning. Adults are drowning because they're being asked to do everything in their school day eight to three, differently than they do everything outside of the school day. Kids access their devices to learn when they're out in their neighborhoods and at their local hangouts and all of that stuff, but we don't. We still think that the right thing to do is sit them in desks in rows and open a textbook. And all of that is going to make that learner, that child, ready, prepared for what they're going to run into when they leave the classroom.

Liza Holland [00:40:55]:
Yeah. Reminds me of my son coming home saying, you know, mom, I just spent 45 minutes in a class that I could have learned five minutes on YouTube. And I thought, whoa. Yeah, that was one of the trigger points for me to kind of dig deeper into education and what we need to change and all that kind of thing. Because that's a powerful statement.

David Cook [00:41:14]:
It is a powerful statement and it's true. And it is. We got policymakers who worry so much about attendance and they worry about kids have to be in the seat to learn, and they worry about how many hours of instruction. I hope everybody realizes that in a given school day, the amount of instructional time straight on teacher, three hours, maybe Four total in the whole day. Of all the stuff that teachers have to do and kids have to do, and half of it is because the kids are not engaged and their behavior problems because they're not engaged, all of that. But that's a very important thing for us to have certain amount of instructional time. You know, one of my biggest, I think, wins in all the work that Kentucky has done, it's not as high on the ladder as accountability, but we wrote a remote learning program in Kentucky a decade before the pandemic happened. Wow.

David Cook [00:42:14]:
I remember NTI when I wrote. I wrote it. And Dr. Holiday was a commissioner then, and he was so fed up with superintendents who came to the legislature late in the session and said, I've missed 40 days of instruction this year. And what did the legislature do? They chopped off the school year because they didn't want kids going to school until July, so they lost instructional days, and that was their solution. And Dr. Holiday said, Nope, not doing that anymore. Well, then it became, well, that's not really instruction because it doesn't happen in a classroom in front of a teacher, you know, blah, blah, blah.

David Cook [00:42:52]:
Well, then I don't even want to go into what Covid did to all of it, because NTI was never intended to do what. What Covid made it do. But we had it. When I got calls from all of my friends in other states right at the beginning of the pandemic, what do you do? I know you've got a program. Well, this is what we did. And now it's. Now it's so hard getting calls from my friends at KDE going, how do we get them back to what NTI was originally intended to do, which was to control learning loss, not to increase learning loss. It was, you know, here's a way.

David Cook [00:43:28]:
If you miss two weeks of school, like you do in Perry County, Kentucky, here's a way to make the learning loss less. Have school on a couple of those days in between all that snow where your kids can learn something. They're keeping. Teacher didn't have to come back in two weeks later and start over because they didn't. They didn't keep up with something. So. And now we got. I live in Shelby county, their superintendent here, and like a lot of others, you know, book their NTI days.

David Cook [00:44:00]:
Boom, boom, boom, boom. Right. Right at the beginning of the winter, right this. 10 days, 10 days of NTI, they thought they were doing their. I said, it's not really how it worked or how it's supposed to work. And now they're screaming at this department of Ed, we need more NTI days. Because we didn't, we used them all up early on and we're, we're going to have to go to school until I said, well, that's, we didn't, I guess we didn't do a good job of getting them away from the COVID mentality, which was a very different mentality. But the bottom line is, again, we have to be become more human centered in our approaches to everything about the system than this is about school.

David Cook [00:44:42]:
One of my favorite superintendents said to me one time when he was still a high school principal, he said, you know what? People think I'm in the school business, but I'm not in the school business. I'm in the people development business. And when I don't think that I'm in the people development business, that's when things go wrong. Because I'm trying to check a box to do the next thing that has to be done to make sure that kids get on buses to make sure that, you know, all the things I have to do in my day. But that's not why I'm here. I'm here so that these kids are ready for the next thing in their life. And I wish that would be mantra of every educator in every school is this is about developing humans, not about whatever test scores or whatever. All of that stuff are checkboxes and they're things that have to get done.

David Cook [00:45:36]:
But at the end of the day, can you look at every kid that walks across that high school graduation stage and gets a diploma and say they're ready for the next thing? I remember a board member, Danville Independent, said to me one time, I asked him, what does your diploma mean? His response, liza, I will never forget it. He said, well, it means they can't come back. That's all it means. Wow. They can't come back. That's what that. And he said, that's what. When he said that statement to me, he said, that's why I'm sitting here with you going, what do we need to do to make the high school experience more important to kids? Because now it's just a, you got your credits, you got your ACP score, you're going to go on, and you just can't come back to us.

Liza Holland [00:46:29]:
That can't be what it needs to be. And honestly, my last question of the podcast is always, what do you want decision makers to know? That's what they need to know, right? This needs to change. Holy moly.

David Cook [00:46:43]:
Here's what they need to know the first thing is you don't have time and you don't have time to continue to live in a task based education system, which is what we're in. We are in a task based education system which means everything we do is to complete a task. Whether that's state assessments, whether that's courses, credit, whether that's standards, all of that, that's what we're in. And we've got to be in a human centered world. You have to look at every kid and go, are they ready for something that doesn't exist yet? You know, everybody here, you hear that phrase about we're training them for jobs that don't exist. Forget that the world tomorrow isn't going to look like it looks today. It's not just about their career. They have to be able to communicate differently with other people.

David Cook [00:47:35]:
They have to. And all of it centers around the fact that as humans, we bring value to the conversation because we can relate to each other. And we need to make sure that kids are prepared to be that those relators, that they're prepared to be able to interact with whatever it is AI other people, whatever they're going to come across. And we're not preparing them for that. We're preparing them to take a test. That's what we're preparing them for, Liza. We're preparing them to take a test. And everything that we do, funding everything, is what's the result of that test.

David Cook [00:48:15]:
If you do well, great. If you don't well, then put those kids through more and more. I'm always laugh at, you know, hey, we added two hours of math instruction for all these kids who weren't getting math. So you're going to teach them two hours more a week of the same math instruction that didn't get it for them the first time to begin with.

Liza Holland [00:48:39]:
Talk about banging your head against a wall. Holy moly.

David Cook [00:48:42]:
Yeah, but ultimately, Liza, we don't have time. We've got to shift our humanness is what we have. That's our value to the system. And we better figure out how to think about that. Every young person that comes through the door of our schools or we're going to have a big problem. That's all I can say.

Liza Holland [00:49:05]:
Well, that is a great call to action and a wonderful way to wrap up our time here with, with education perspectives. And I just really want to thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.

David Cook [00:49:15]:
Thank you so much for having me, Liza. I really appreciate it and I, I look forward to all of us figuring this out and figuring out how to get to that system that we need.

Liza Holland [00:49:26]:
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which education perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.