Michelle Culver: Why school has to be designed around relationships

How can we reinvent public education for the AI era? With Robin Lake

Robin Lake has been studying public education from the systems level for more than thirty years. Her diagnosis is sharper than most: we built a school system for an average student who doesn't exist, and we keep placing kids in special education because general classrooms have run out of tools to support them. This conversation works through what CRPE has been finding in its AI research — the widening gap between suburban and rural/urban districts on AI literacy, why most early-adopter schools are still "tinkering," and the "wicked opportunities" the field is underplaying — and then turns into something rarer: a live demo, with Robin in the role of designer, building a tool she wishes had existed when her own twice-exceptional son was in school. It's also the most honest conversation we've had on the show about what schools should actually be asking of ed tech, versus what ed tech keeps trying to sell them. Robin Lake directs the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and writes the Think Forward Substack. crpe.org aiEDU: The AI Education Project * aiEDU.org [https://www.aiedu.org/] * linkedin.com/company/aiedu/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/aiedu/]

We're Funding the Wrong Side of AI in Education — with Bree & Babak

In 2017, before ChatGPT existed, a 180,000-student district in Georgia decided to build the first AI-ready high school in the country. Babak Mostaghimi was one of the people who built it. Bree Dusseault, at Center on Reinventing Public Education/The Strategic Education Research Partnership, was one of the people who later studied what made it possible — and what stops most other systems from following. This conversation, recorded at CRPE's Think Forward Fellowship, lives at the intersection of those two views. Bree's research keeps surfacing the same five conditions: leadership longevity, a community-rooted vision, deliberate talent flows, integration across departments — and one resource almost no one is funding, which is time for adults to think. Babak's lived answer, after eight years inside the work, is the sharper version of the same idea: center the people and the problems they're trying to solve, not the tool of the moment.  What follows is less about which AI tools to pilot and more about the architecture underneath — a "grammar of learning" rather than a grammar of schooling, parents who've played with the tools before they form opinions about them, and a kindergarten teacher whose target is 2035, not next September. aiEDU: The AI Education Project * aiEDU.org [https://www.aiedu.org/] * linkedin.com/company/aiedu/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/aiedu/]

What Is STEM Education Actually For? — with Dr. Patrice Johnson of Project Scientist

"It's not that girls aren't good at STEM. It's the confidence around 'can I do STEM?'" That's Dr. Patrice Johnson, and her quiet challenge to the dominant frame of STEM education — that the gap is technical when it's actually cultural — is the throughline of this conversation. She runs Project Scientist, a national nonprofit that puts girls into hands-on STEM and runs the Elevated Institute — a teacher-training arm built around the principles that make their own programs work: joy as a pedagogical constant, confidence (not skill) as the real STEM gap, women mentors for every cohort. We also get into her own story (city council in her Michigan hometown at 22), what overwhelmed schools actually need from outside partners, and what Back to the Future and Iron Heart do to children's mental image of who gets to be a scientist. Dr. Patrice Johnson is CEO of Project Scientist. projectscientist.org. aiEDU: The AI Education Project * aiEDU.org [https://www.aiedu.org/] * linkedin.com/company/aiedu/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/aiedu/]

Matt Sigelman: AI Raises the Bar – It Doesn't Lower It

Matt Sigelman has spent two decades building the most granular picture anyone has of how the labor market actually works – first at Lightcast, now at the Burning Glass Institute. So when he says schools are asking the wrong question about AI, it's worth slowing down. The new research he's just released with aiEDU translates how AI is reshaping work into concrete implications for what schools should teach. Among the findings: AI raises the cognitive bar for students rather than lowering it. Writing matters more in the AI era, not less. And "AI literacy" is the latest in a long line of skill-of-the-moment dodges that lets schools avoid harder curricular questions.  Matt joins our host, aiEDU CEO and Co-Founder Alex Kotran, for a discussion on teacher autonomy, what a 17-year-old who'd never used AI taught everyone at a recent vibe coding workshop, and why – even now – schools' obligation to teach what's "beautiful and true" doesn't go away. Burning Glass Institute * https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/ aiEDU: The AI Education Project * aiEDU.org [https://www.aiedu.org/] * linkedin.com/company/aiedu/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/aiedu/]

Michelle Culver: Why school has to be designed around relationships

What if the most important thing school can teach kids in the AI era isn't how to use the technology — but how to stay in relationship with each other? That's the question Michelle Culver, founder of The Rithm Project and a former senior leader at Teach for America, has spent the last two years trying to answer. We dig into what happens when the loneliness epidemic collides with generative AI, why AI companions are already a $28 billion industry growing 20x faster than ed tech, and why redesigning school around human connection may be the most urgent education challenge of the next decade. Michelle also gets personal — sharing what it felt like to sit her husband down and tell him she wanted to have "an affair" with an AI bot, and what that experiment taught her about how quickly these tools can start to feel real. Content warning: This episode includes discussion of sensitive topics, including self-harm.   The Rithm Project * https://Rithmproject.org [https://rhythmproject.org] * linkedin.com/in/michelleculver/ aiEDU: The AI Education Project * aiEDU.org [https://www.aiedu.org/] * linkedin.com/company/aiedu/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/aiedu/]