What actually sticks with students twenty years after high school?

Andrew Frishman, co-executive director of Big Picture Learning and host of the new podcast The Advisory, joins Mason Pashia to talk about reconnecting with the Met High School Class of 2006. He is joined by Natasha Luigui, a Met alum, and Daniela Moraes, a current Met student in Providence, Rhode Island. They talk about advisory, exhibitions, internships, and why test scores aren't the whole picture of student outcomes.

Andrew's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewfrishman/ Big Picture Learning: https://www.bigpicture.org/ The Met High School: https://www.themethighschool.org/

For the blog Resources, you can also link Getting Smart's own Met school page: https://www.gettingsmart.com/school/metropolitan-regional-career-and-technical-center-met/

Can AI make math class more social? Britte Haugan Cheng (MenloEDU) and Ann Edwards (WestEd) of the AIMS Collaboratory join Nate McClennen to talk about how developers, researchers, teachers, and students build math edtech together, why implementation is harder than it looks, and what a network can share with the rest of the field.

Links AIMS Collaboratory: https://www.aimscollaboratory.org/ Inventory of Public Goods: https://www.aimscollaboratory.org/resources AIMS EduData: https://digitalpromise.org/initiative/advancing-innovative-math-solutions-aims-home/ BUILD: https://build.org/about/ NCTM: https://www.nctm.org/

Can AI help students connect with people instead of replacing them? What does a real PISA question look like? And why is microschool research so hard to trust?

Nate McClennen and Mason Pashia catch up on a new Christensen Institute report on building AI that connects students to people, plus a closer look at PISA, including Mason's attempt at a sample question. They also get into a new bipartisan push for an education R&D agency, what Arizona's ESA spending shows, why student motivation matters even more with AI in the picture, and a new public boarding school in Alabama. Stay for the song at the end.

Links mentioned

NEED Act reintroduction: https://www.bennet.senate.gov/2026/09/17/bennet-van-hollen-tillis-reintroduce-bipartisan-bill-to-boost-innovation-in-education/ Arizona ESA FY2026 Q3 report: https://www.azed.gov/sites/default/files/2026/06/ESA%20FY26%20Q3%20Executive%20_%20%20Legislative%20Report.pdf Prosocial Possibilities (Christensen Institute): https://www.christenseninstitute.org/publication/prosocial-possibilities/ MySky: https://newpublic.substack.com/p/meet-the-algorithm-you-can-actually Schools Have a Motivation Problem (The 74): https://www.the74million.org/article/schools-have-a-motivation-problem-ai-is-making-it-impossible-to-ignore/ The Disengaged Teen episode: https://www.gettingsmart.com/podcast/jenny-anderson-and-rebecca-winthrop-on-the-disengaged-teen/ Alabama School of Healthcare Sciences: https://alabamanewscenter.com/2025/10/20/alabama-school-of-healthcare-sciences-brings-transformative-approach-to-high-school-education/ The Hogeweyk: https://www.bethecareconcept.com/en/hogeweyk-dementia-village-hogeweyk-netherlands/

Letter grades get a lot of the blame when schools try to change how they assess learning. Two of the editors of a new book on competency-based education explain what they've seen up close.

Nate McClennen and Rebecca Midles talk with Bill Zima (Director of Implementation, Marzano Academies) and Michelle McCann (Professional Development Associate, Marzano Resources). Bill and Michelle are two of the four editors of Competency-Based Practices: Factors for Successful Implementation, and Nate and Rebecca co-wrote a chapter in it. They talk about what competency-based education means, why it's so hard to implement well, and where letter grades fit in. Each guest also shares one sentence of advice for any school or district leader thinking about making the move.

Resources

Competency-Based Practices: Factors for Successful Implementation: https://www.amazon.com/Competency-Based-Practices-Successful-Implementation-competency-based/dp/1965768024 Marzano Resources: https://www.marzanoresources.com/books-videos.html FullScale: https://www.fullscalelearning.org/

Live from the Uncharted Learning Summit in Chicago, Victoria Andrews and Shawnee Caruthers reflect on a community built around one big idea: entrepreneurship is for everyone.

Through conversations with alumni, teachers, district leaders, and volunteers, they explore how Uncharted Learning's programs help students discover who they are, not just what they can build. You'll hear from a member of the very first cohort, a teacher who resigned and then got her passion for teaching back, a director whose former middle schooler is now a CEO and policy advocate, and a community champion who makes it all possible for teachers. Victoria and Shawnee also dig into the joy of pitch night, the lessons in rejection, and why word of mouth from students is the strongest endorsement a program can get.

Featured voices: Mika Chang, Connor Boundy, Alan Carranza, Paula Chilton, Ida Pascal, Megan Gordon, Triana Williams, Susan Hohlman, Jason Roemer, and Jackson Greenstone

Links

• Hear all 14 full interviews from the summit: https://www.gettingsmart.com/podcast/live-at-the-uncharted-learning-summit-why-entrepreneurship-is-for-everyone/
• Bring Uncharted Learning to your school or community: https://www.unchartedlearning.org/contact

A K-8 district isn't supposed to have a high school. Bostonia Global built one anyway, and rethought what high school could look like in the process.

In this episode, Rebecca Midles talks with Nerel Winter (CEO of Bostonia Global), Johanna Simko (Principal of Bostonia Global High School), and David Rios (a Bostonia Global alumnus) about designing an in-district dependent charter high school from scratch, one built around competency-based learning, a K-12 "world of work" curriculum, and an advisory model where every adult in the building is also a mentor.

They talk through what it actually took to hire and train teachers for a school unlike anything else in their district, how they built a transcript that speaks to both universities and employers, and what David's own path, from a bilingual K-5 program to a UC Riverside campus, looks like from the inside.

A school in Singapore just spent over $600 million reimagining what a classroom should be, and it's not what you'd expect.

Mike Posthumus, learning design principal at Fielding International, walks through how Singapore American School rebuilt its campus around a real learning model instead of the traditional "cells and bells" classroom design, and why that distinction changes everything about how kids actually learn. He also shares how a much smaller, budget-friendly version of the same idea transformed a public school district in Cranston.

The job of "principal" has quietly become impossible, one person expected to coach every teacher, be the expert in every subject, set the vision, and be present in the community, all at once.

In this episode, host Nate McClennen talks with Dr. Lindsay Whorton, president of the Holdsworth Center and author of "A New School Leadership Architecture," about why the traditional principal role has become unsustainable, and what school systems can do instead. Lindsay has worked with 89 school districts across Texas, growing the Holdsworth Center from just 7 districts since 2017, and lays out a four-level leadership framework built to redistribute the workload without losing accountability.

They get into why 80% of principals still believe they're solely responsible for coaching every teacher in their building, despite an unrealistic span of control, what a real case study of this framework looks like in practice, and how school leaders can start figuring out what only they can actually do.

Guest Links

Lindsay's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-whorton-9685aa26/ The Holdsworth Center: https://holdsworthcenter.org/

Will AI upend education as we know it, or just get absorbed into the systems we already have?

In this episode, host Nate McClennen talks with Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, about where AI is actually headed in schools, in the workforce, and in daily life. Sal shares his real thesis on the so-called "AI jobs apocalypse" and what he thinks the next five years actually look like.

They talk through durable skills, what they really are, why they're hard to measure, and how Sal's new Khan-TED Institute is trying to change that. Sal also shares how his own thinking on AI and learning has evolved, and what he tells his own kids about navigating all of this right now.

Guest Links

Sal's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khanacademy/ Sal's X (Twitter): https://x.com/salkhanacademy Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/ Schoolhouse.World: https://schoolhouse.world/

Digital badges and credentials promise to finally show what a learner actually knows. Dr. Kelly Page says that promise has a dark side nobody's talking about.

In this episode, host Mason Pashia talks with Dr. Kelly Page, a social design ethnographer and author of "When Credentials Cause Harm: Unpacking the Risks of Verifiable Learning and Work Records." Kelly has spent years documenting how well-intentioned credentialing systems can end up excluding, surveilling, or flattening the very people they're supposed to empower.

They get into who actually controls a learner's record, why some of the most marginalized communities are also the most wary of the video documentation these systems rely on, and why more data isn't the same as the right data. Kelly makes the case for a future built on self-sovereign data, where students and workers, not districts or vendors, own and control their own records, and shares practical advice for school leaders on what to ask before adopting any new credentialing technology.

Guest Links

Kelly's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drkellypage/

Live What You Love (LWYL Studio): lwylstudio.com

When Credentials Cause Harm (book): https://www.amazon.com/When-Credentials-Cause-Harm-Verifiable/dp/1969861029

In this episode of Catching Up, Nate McClennen and Mason Pashia get into what happens after a $2.5 billion settlement lands, and whether "fund real life" is actually a better answer than another wave of mental health apps. They also talk through a study showing AI models recommend completely different schools depending on which one you ask, and why that's a bigger deal than it sounds.

From there, the conversation turns to a real tension in AI and education right now: efficiency versus efficacy. Nate makes the case that the real opportunity isn't faster lesson planning, it's building AI tools around what learning science already tells us works, things like spaced practice, real-time feedback, and targeted instruction. He also breaks down a simple way to think about how school systems actually learn, separating implementation, innovation, and continuous improvement, and why mixing them up is often where districts get stuck.

Mason brings a deep dive on moving past tokenistic student surveys toward real intergenerational co-design, with some genuinely striking examples, a student-drafted AI policy bill that passed 82 to 16, and the Kentucky Student Voice Team's constitutional lawsuit against their own state.

They wrap up with something a little lighter: a living room full of guitars at a family wedding, and a pottery shop in Illinois that's run entirely on the honor system, two small reminders of what real human connection still looks like.

• If Social Media Companies Owe Billions, Let's Fund What Kids Need

• Taylor Lorenz in the Guardian

• PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

• https://whiteboardadvisors.docsend.com/view/aka3amitbucqs8f7

• Kentucky Student Voice Team (KSVT)

• Youth Power Fund