Trending In Ed with Mike Palmer

What happens when entry-level jobs level up, and whose job is it to close the gap? On this episode of Trending in Education, host Mike Palmer sits down with Lydia Logan, Vice President of Global Education and Workforce Development at IBM, to explore what Gen Z needs on day one of their first job and how higher ed and industry can get them there. Lydia draws on a career spanning the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Broad Foundation, and Verizon Innovative Learning Schools to unpack the "broken bottom rung" of the career ladder. She explains why the on-the-job training that used to follow a degree is now being pushed into college itself, and why employers increasingly want to see a portfolio of real work. Through IBM SkillsBuild, which is on track to skill 30 million people by 2030 and has already reached 22 million, IBM is partnering with faculty across disciplines so students in business, marketing, and healthcare become builders of AI, not just consumers of it. Mike and Lydia also dig into the divide between higher ed's caution and the private sector's rapid adoption of AI. Lydia shares how institutions are using red, yellow, and green frameworks for acceptable AI use, why literacy is the path to fluency, and how IBM's own culture of 40 hours of annual learning per employee shapes what it recommends to clients and campuses. We also discuss: - The AI Builders Challenge, including student projects that use IBM's AI tool Bob to make video captions accessible - How IBM brings enterprise use cases to campus operations, from funder reports to Penn State's campus navigation app - Why durable "transversal" skills matter more as the half-life of technical skills shrinks - Free certificates in AI, cybersecurity, and data analytics through state community college systems - Preparing students to work in hybrid teams of humans and AI agents - Why assessments that once took three years to build now need to be ready in six months Links: IBM SkillsBuild: https://skillsbuild.org IBM Institute for Business Value: https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value Lydia Logan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiamlogan/ If you like what you heard, subscribe, write us a review, and tell your friends. Visit us at trendingineducation.com for more. This is Trending in Education.

Should kids still learn to code when a one-sentence prompt can produce 4,000 lines of it? Philip Colligan’s answer is yes, and he thinks the question matters more now than it did three years ago. On this episode of Trending in Ed, Mike Palmer sits down with Philip Colligan, CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Philip joined as employee number seven in 2015, after a career in UK government and at Nesta, where his team was asking why schools weren’t teaching computer science. He sets the record straight on an origin story most people have backwards: the charity came first. A group of Cambridge engineers worried about falling computer science applications set out to build a cheap, credit-card-sized computer and hoped to sell maybe 20,000. They’ve sold more than 80 million, and the commercial company the foundation built listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2024. Mike shares how his seven-year-old reacted to a bare Raspberry Pi board handed down from the neighbors, which leads Philip into one of the conversation’s through-lines: technology shouldn’t feel like magic, and kids learn the most when they can see inside the box and build with it. On the techlash, Philip starts by saying parents are largely right. If the streets of Cambridge were as dangerous for kids as the internet, he argues, there would be police on every corner. But a curfew isn’t a long-term plan, and he sees blanket bans as too crude a tool. He then makes the case from the foundation’s position paper on why coding still matters: AI lowers the cost of building software, which should raise demand for people who understand it, and kids growing up around automated decisions in healthcare, hiring, and criminal justice need to know how those systems work so they can push back on them. The two also get into cognitive offloading versus what they agree would make a good title for a difficult second album, Cognitive Surrender. Philip previews a new research effort on how to teach with vibe coding, keeping the speed and creativity while putting back the friction where learning actually happens. We also discuss: Andrew Sliwinski’s line that friction in coding is “a feature, not a bug” for learning Small language models that run offline, on device, for places where cost or connectivity is a barrier A new UK qualification where 17- and 18-year-olds train their own AI models Papert, Piaget, Vygotsky, and why AI feedback can’t replace learning from other people Why Philip wants kids to understand that AI systems can’t care about them Dropping his son off at university, and why adults owe young people real reasons to be optimistic, not just a better story Everything the foundation offers is free for teachers, students, and parents. Links: Raspberry Pi Foundation: https://www.raspberrypi.org Why Kids Still Need to Learn to Code in the Age of AI (position paper): https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-kids-still-need-to-learn-to-code-in-the-age-of-ai/ Experience CS: https://experience-cs.org Experience AI: https://experience-ai.org Mentioned in this episode: Launching LEGO Education’s Hands-On AI and CS Product with Andrew Sliwinski: https://trendingineducation.com/2026/01/launching-lego-educations-hands-on-ai-and-cs-product/ Guest: Philip Colligan, CEO, Raspberry Pi Foundation If you like what you heard, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share the show with a friend.

Is edtech really just YouTube and i-Ready? Or has the backlash flattened a sprawling, layered industry into a couple of easy villains? Mike Palmer welcomes back Trending in Ed All-Star Tony Wan, Head of Platform at Reach Capital, an early-stage venture firm investing across learning, health, and work. Before Reach, Tony co-founded EdSurge and served as its managing editor, and before that he built a math game startup that he figures he could now one-shot with AI. The conversation opens with the edtech backlash. Tony takes the concerns about smartphones, social media, and screen time seriously and supports restricting personal device use in schools. But he argues that calls to ban edtech outright miss the difference between school operations tools, teacher productivity tools, and student-facing tools, along with how much daily compliance and reporting depends on them. Mike adds a parent's take on context: screen-free and voice-driven tech lands very differently than one more app on a phone. From there, they turn to writing in the age of AI. Mike's hot take is that most AI writing is mid: high floor, low ceiling. Tony, an editor at heart, misses the messy, illogical, very human drafts that let you get inside a writer's head, and he's tired of seeing friends' voices sanded down into AI-flattened prose. He also declares his intention to reclaim the em dash for Team Human. Tony then shares what Reach is seeing in the funding climate: a bifurcated venture market, a real AI premium for AI-native companies, little patience for AI washing, and why businesses built on human relationships, like training and placing healthcare workers and teachers, can tell a credible story about what AI won't replace. We also discuss: Reach's latest State of Fundraising report from Caoimhe Mac Reynolds and Jennifer Carolan, and the pushback founders should expect from investors Why "impact investing" means different things depending on who's in the room Rising ARR per employee, 10X engineers, and forward-deployed engineers at small AI-enabled startups Blackboard co-founder Matt Pittinsky's contrarian case that building a company is still more fun with humans in it EdSurge back in the headlines after Stephen Noonoo's post and Tony's appearance on The Grade, and what's been lost as the newsroom emptied out The value of a feisty, in-person newsroom and a credible forum for "little tech" founders, many of them former educators Tony closes with real concern for the state of edtech media and journalism, tempered by energy from the independent writers and newsletters who've reached out in recent weeks. Mike calls it a "probletunity." He's still workshopping it. Links: Reach Capital: https://www.reachcapital.com The Wire from Reach Capital: https://thewire.reachcapital.com Tony Wan's Substack, edtech after dark: https://tonywan.substack.com In Defense of Education Technology (Tony's interview with Alexander Russo): https://alexanderrusso.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-education-technology How ISTE Turned EdSurge Into Slop by Stephen Noonoo: https://alexanderrusso.substack.com/p/how-iste-turned-edsurge-into-slop If you like what you heard, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share the show with a friend. This is Trending in Education.

What if banning technology in schools is just like scratching a sunburn: it feels good now, and it comes back worse later? Mike Palmer sits down with Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD, the newly combined organization with ISTE now called the International Society for Transforming Education. Richard started out as a high school Spanish teacher and a teacher educator, then worked on education policy in the U.S. Senate, at the U.S. Department of Education, and at the state level before joining ISTE nearly a decade ago. He's also the author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World. Richard explains why ISTE (about 45 years old) and ASCD (about 85) came together. Conversations about technology and innovation have to be grounded in learning science and effective pedagogy, and the reverse is true too. The new name puts the focus on the outcome, transforming education, rather than on what each organization used to do. He also shares how the ISTELive and ASCD Annual conference in Orlando was built with role-based pathways that people are encouraged to step outside of, to break down the silos that make it hard to innovate. Recorded just after New York City announced a one-year moratorium on generative AI in its public schools, the conversation takes on the "techlash" directly. Richard argues the post-COVID wave of devices got ahead of how well educators were prepared, and that a digital worksheet is still a worksheet. Blanket bans are harmful too, though. Every graduating class that misses out walks into a world where digital and AI skills are expected. And approving a fixed list of products is no substitute for policy built on principles and quality standards. For parents, Richard makes the case for teaching a healthy "tech diet" instead of counting screen-time minutes. He compares it to how we teach kids to eat. He also argues for scaffolding access over time: start early with a first phone that has no data plan and just a few apps, then add more as kids earn trust. Going from nothing to everything all at once is no way to learn anything. We also discuss: - Using technology to make kids creators and problem solvers, not just consumers of content - ISTE's AI Innovator Challenge, where student teams use AI to tackle problems in their communities - The Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate and its six human skills, including learner, connector, and storyteller - The five Edtech Quality Indicators: safe, evidence-based, inclusive, usable, and interoperable - Digital citizenship as a set of clear "dos," not a list of don'ts His closing challenge: if a kid has to choose between going to school and going to Disney World and doesn't have to think hard about it, we have work to do. Links: ISTE+ASCD: https://iste.org Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate: https://iste-ascd.org/aiready Five Edtech Quality Indicators: https://iste.org/news/coalition-of-leading-education-organizations-introduces-five-quality-indicators-for-edtech-and-ai-products AI Innovator Challenge: https://iste-ascd.org/ai-innovator Digital for Good by Richard Culatta: https://iste.org/products/a1w1U0000040vwZQAQ/Digital-for-Good:-Raising-Kids-to-Thrive-in-an-Online-World Richard Culatta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Culatta If you like what you heard, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share the show with a friend. This is Trending in Education.

When AI can tutor anyone, anytime, why are parents still choosing human tutors? Live from EdTech Week 2026 at Teachers College's Digital Futures Institute, Mike Palmer sits down with Eugene Kashuk, founder of Brighterly and the show's first guest from Ukraine. Eugene is a serial entrepreneur with a go-to-market and operations background. Over five years he has grown Brighterly into a direct-to-consumer platform with one-on-one live tutoring in math and reading for grades 1–9. It now serves more than 20,000 American families, with over 1,200 tutors and a team of more than 250 people around the world. Eugene describes the two camps he's seeing at EdTech Week: the disruptors who think AI will remake everything, and the folks banning screens in schools. Brighterly sits in between. It's built around real human educators, and it uses AI as a supplement, including an AI reading practice tutor. Eugene explains how Brighterly vets and trains tutors through a three-week program and requires them to teach standardized, state-aligned curriculum. It also reviews session videos for feedback, assesses students on a regular cycle, and keeps pricing about 2.5x below the average US tutor so it reaches families who need it most. Eugene also gives a candid look at building a company from Kyiv as the war nears its fifth year, and at the resilience of his team. He then turns the tables with a question for Mike: Brighterly's own parent survey found that most kids are bringing home As and Bs, yet more than half of parents feel their children are falling behind. Mike shares his take on grade inflation, the power of tutoring, and why parents may be leaning toward trusted humans over AI right now. This is one of four conversations recorded at EdTech Week 2026. Thanks to StartEd and Alyssa Miller for making it happen. Guest: Eugene Kashuk, Founder, Brighterly Listen, subscribe, and explore more episodes at trendingineducation.com

What would you build if someone handed you a university with almost no students and told you to start over? We kick off our EdTech Week 2026 series live from Teachers College's Digital Futures Institute with Dr. Nick Ladany, President of San Francisco Bay University (SFBU). Nick is a first-gen college student and a counseling psychologist by training. He worked his way from professor to dean across Maryland, Temple, Lehigh, Loyola Marymount, Santa Clara, and the University of San Diego, then served as president of Oglethorpe University. In 2023 he arrived at SFBU, a 40-year-old institution with a large unrestricted fund and a mandate to build a university from scratch. Nick explains what SFBU did with that blank slate. It capped classes at 20, offers full wraparound services including unlimited mental health support, pays faculty top salaries to teach year-round, and trains every faculty member how to teach. It rebuilt general education around industry-validated durable skills: five identities, 15 competencies, and 45 behavioral indicators. Tuition averages about $10,000 a year, the bachelor's degree is 90 credits so students can finish in three years, and the target is an 80% four-year graduation rate. SFBU also has no athletics and no Greek life. From there, the conversation turns to AI as a co-teacher. Nick introduces Bailey the Bayhawk, SFBU's AI tutor, which is designed to lead students toward productive struggle instead of handing them answers. He also describes the AI faculty avatars at the heart of SFBU's $10,000 AI-enhanced MBA Pro+. In one course, students learn negotiation from an avatar of a real professor, then go head-to-head with an AI boss and get immediate feedback on their skills. That frees human faculty, many of them from industry, to do what they do best: mentor, build community, and coach careers. Nick doesn't hold back on what's broken in higher ed. He takes on the six-year graduation rate, the SAT, the Carnegie credit hour, athletics spending, faculty senates, and the trustees he says are "in collusion" with a broken financial model. Mike and Nick also dig into SFBU's neighborhood campuses, what community colleges promise and how they fall short, why "college isn't for everyone" can be its own form of exclusion, and how liberal arts thinking is the real disruptive mindset. It's a candid, punk rock look at what higher ed could be. This is the first of four conversations recorded at EdTech Week 2026. Thanks to StartEd and Alyssa Miller for making it happen. Guest: Dr. Nick Ladany, President, San Francisco Bay University Mentioned in this episode: Framing the Teacher Shortage as a Workforce Design Problem with Dr. James Lane Listen, subscribe, and explore more episodes at trendingineducation.com

What if the most important edtech company in your classroom is one you've never heard of? Live from EdTech Week 2026 at Teachers College's Digital Futures Institute, Mike Palmer sits down with Dan Goldstein of Learnosity, the assessment engine that powers some of the biggest names in education from behind the scenes. Dan's path ran through College Board's SpringBoard curriculum, where he led implementation across Texas and New Mexico, and district-facing sales at Cengage, before he joined Learnosity in 2019, just as the "beforetimes" ended. Dan explains how Learnosity works as a suite of white-label APIs covering three areas: authoring, assessment delivery, and analytics. He then gets into how AI is changing each one, from Authorate for content generation and translation, to Item Bank Health Check, which can revise thousands of items at once (goodbye, flip phone references). He also shares Learnosity's long-running goal of killing the multiple choice question, and how FeedbackAid's AI essay scoring and student-facing feedback drove big gains in course completion at Penn Foster. Mike and Dan also cover Learnosity's new Product Builder MCP, which turns static documentation into something developers can query straight from their AI tools, and the live customer demo that put it to the test. They talk about the techlash and Learnosity's new Paper API, which lets students take exams with pen and paper, outside the screen, while teachers still get the analytics. Along the way they touch on stealth assessment, tacit knowledge, solar calculators, and why culture still eats strategy for lunch. This is one of four conversations recorded at EdTech Week 2026. Thanks to StartEd and Alyssa Miller for making it happen. Guest: Dan Goldstein, Learnosity Listen, subscribe, and explore more episodes at trendingineducation.com

What if schools stopped paying for books, licenses, and PD days, and started paying for kids learning to read? Back on the show for round two, Really Great Reading CEO Karl Rectanus joins Mike Palmer live from EdTech Week 2026 at Teachers College's Digital Futures Institute. Karl started out as a teacher and charter school CFO, taught overseas, and then founded LearnPlatform, whose rapid-cycle evaluation work helped shape the four levels of evidence in the Every Student Succeeds Act. After Instructure acquired LearnPlatform, Karl led K-12 and platform strategy there before taking the helm at Really Great Reading, a 20-year-old OG of the science of reading. Karl describes what he calls the education outcomes movement. For decades, education policy has swung between accountability, standards, local control, and evidence. Now that the technology has caught up, he argues, we can go straight to the question underneath all of them: are students learning? Outcomes-based contracts started in tutoring, and Karl explains why Really Great Reading is bringing them to curriculum, tying payment to results across print, digital, professional learning, and coaching. That thinking drives RGR Nova, the literacy outcomes system Really Great Reading launched this fall with its district and state partners. Mike and Karl also get into what the Mississippi Marathon really shows (math and science scores rose too, because kids could read), why the science of reading is about much more than phonics, and Karl's three ingredients for teaching every child to read: learning science-aligned curriculum, a caring human, and a feedback loop. On AI, Karl argues that focusing on outcomes settles most of the arguments. He covers the partners behind the work, including MetaMetrics and Learnosity, why learning is still relationship-driven, and why literacy is the best defense against cognitive surrender. In his words: when literacy improves, everything else gets better. This is one of four conversations recorded at EdTech Week 2026. Thanks to StartEd and Alyssa Miller for making it happen. Guest: Karl Rectanus, CEO, Really Great Reading Catch Karl's first appearance: Talking Outcomes-Based Literacy with Really Great Reading CEO Karl Rectanus Listen, subscribe, and explore more episodes at trendingineducation.com

What would change if schools knew their students the way the best companies know their customers? Host Mike Palmer welcomes back Trending in Ed all-star AJ Gutierrez, CEO of Equal Opportunity Schools (EOS) and co-founder of Saga Education, for his first Bring a Friend episode. AJ's friend is Dr. Susan Enfield, Executive Director of the Center for Educational Leadership at the University of Washington. Susan began her career as a high school English, journalism, and multilingual learner teacher and served as a superintendent for nearly 13 years, including a decade leading Highline Public Schools just south of Seattle. AJ and Susan have co-authored an upcoming op-ed arguing that K-12 education should be as intentional about understanding students as other industries are about understanding their customers. Their shared rallying cry is "no invisible students," rooted in the Highline promise to know every student by name, strength, and need so they graduate prepared for the future they choose. They make the case that this isn't just an equity play. It's a fiscally smart way to get more from the people and programs schools already invest in. The three dig into several threads: > Customer obsession for K-12: Gathering the right information from students and getting it to the right adult at the right time to act on it. > Hidden talent: A Mathematica study found EOS partner schools identified an average of 52 more students per school for advanced coursework. > The power of a trusted adult: An analysis of 1.8 million students in the EOS database found that students who name a trusted adult are about 10 percentage points more likely to take advanced courses. > Rethinking chronic absenteeism: Why chronic disengagement is the real problem, and why a family trip to Samoa, a traveling athlete, and an unexplained absence call for very different responses. > Loving kids to failure: Susan on the cost of low expectations and pity, and the eighth grader who advocated his way into pre-calculus and went on to soar through every AP calculus course. > Technology that deepens human connection: How EOS and the Learning Collider are exploring which insights can help any adult become a trusted adult. Resources Mentioned: Equal Opportunity Schools: https://eoschools.org AJ Gutierrez in Fast Company on the Mathematica findings: https://www.fastcompany.com/91369396/underserved-students-interested-in-stem-are-often-overlooked Center for Educational Leadership, University of Washington: https://www.k-12leadership.org Saga Education: https://saga.org The Pedagogy of Confidence by Yvette Jackson: https://www.tcpress.com/the-pedagogy-of-confidence-9780807752234 Situated by Angela Duckworth: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Situated/Angela-Duckworth/9781668005941 🔔 Subscribe to Trending in Education for more conversations on the future of learning, work, and what's next. 📩 Connect with Mike Palmer on LinkedIn to bring this kind of conversation to your own podcast or media program:

What if the teacher shortage isn’t really a shortage of teachers? Host Mike Palmer welcomes Dr. James Lane, CEO of Unlimited Instruction (UI), formerly University Instructors. James started as a middle school band director and went on to be a principal, a superintendent in three Virginia districts, Virginia’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the leader of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. James argues that the teacher shortage is really a workforce design problem. The real problems are pay, a thin pipeline, poor retention and a confusing path to certification. UI tackles this through InstructEd Pathways, which grows paraprofessionals and alternatively certified candidates into fully certified teachers, and TutorEd, its high-dosage, in-person tutoring program. The two dig into several threads: Why AI should make teachers’ jobs easier, not replace them, and why UI is intentionally in-person Paraprofessionals as unsung heroes, and year-long coaching that works like “student teaching on steroids” for hard-to-fill special education roles Life after ESSER: don’t spend one-time funds on ongoing costs, and cut back on too many initiatives Leading with laser focus: Jim Collins’ hedgehog concept, a clear North Star, and using technology to find each student’s zone of proximal development Academic optimism: why teachers need to believe they matter, and how that belief may keep them in the classroom Resources Mentioned: Unlimited Instruction (UI) UI Teacher Shortage Solutions Leading with Laser Focus: The Seven Steps to School Success by Dr. James Lane Good to Great by Jim Collins 🔔 Subscribe to Trending in Education for more conversations on the future of learning, work, and what’s next. 📩 Connect with Mike Palmer on LinkedIn to bring this kind of conversation to your own podcast or media program.