Programming note: The Education Gadfly Show is taking a short end-of-summer break next week. We’ll be back with a new episode after Labor Day on Wednesday, September 9.
Checker Finn, president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to talk about the future of Head Start and why he thinks the troubled federal preschool program needs rebuilding, not destroying. They discuss the Trump administration’s approach to Head Start, the program’s longstanding weaknesses, and what meaningful reform could look like.
Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new two-year experiment with Khan Academy’s AI tutor, Khanmigo. The study finds modest gains in math achievement, but students rarely engaged deeply with the AI tutor, raising questions about whether the improvement came from the AI itself or simply from structured practice on Khan Academy.
Recommended content:
- The Trump team gives Head Start the DOGE treatment —Chester E. Finn, Jr., Thomas B. Fordham Institute
- Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut —Chester E. Finn, Jr., Hoover Press (2009)
- Head Start Program Performance Standards —U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families
- Transformative for the motivated and mere meh for the unmotivated: How AI will and won’t affect learners —Sean Geraghty and Mike Goldstein, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
- One Click Away: AI Tutoring with Khanmigo in a Two-Year School Experiment —Philip Oreopoulos and Nina Low, EdWorkingPapers (2026)
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our show? We would love to hear them. Send them to [email protected]
Transcript
This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Introduction
Mike Petrilli [00:00]
Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.
I’m your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
This week, we’re joined by Checker Finn, president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to discuss the Trump administration’s proposed changes to Head Start, why Checker thinks the program badly needs reform, but why shifting control to the states may not be the answer.
Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new two-year experiment with Khan Academy’s Khanmigo that finds modest gains in math achievement while raising questions about whether students are engaging deeply enough with AI tutoring to realize its potential.
All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.
Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org.
Now, please welcome back to the show our special guest for this week, the original Education Gadfly, Checker Finn.
Checker Finn
Hey!
Mike Petrilli
Wow, that was enthusiastic. I love it.
You all should know, if you don’t, Checker is president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the author, over a decade ago, of a book on universal preschool, which gives us an excuse to talk to you about Head Start.
Checker, welcome back to the show.
Checker Finn
Thank you very much. Yeah, I’ve been a Head Start critic for, it’s beginning to feel like, sixty-four years. And what the Trump people are doing with it isn’t going to make it any better. So I’m grumpy about it again.
Mike Petrilli
All right. Well, and I guess you were probably there in its creation, so you can speak about it. But before we do that, we’ve got to welcome David.
David Griffith, my co-host, welcome to you as well.
David Griffith
Hey, Mike. Hey, Checker. I’m also grumpy.
Mike Petrilli
He is grumpy. But David, you know, big, big preschool fanatic, I’d almost say, here on the show.
David Griffith
I embrace that. I embrace that title. Thank you.
Mike Petrilli
And not only because taxpayers are paying for his children to go to free preschool all day in the District of Columbia, which has got to be one of the best deals ever.
David Griffith
It’s a great deal. It’s one of those things, Mike, where sometimes it’s helpful to be on one end of the spectrum, right? Because you’re kind of peering into the future a little bit. And D.C. has two years of preschool for basically everyone, right? Which raises some questions like, you know, shouldn’t they be learning something?
Mike Petrilli
There we go. Well, we’re going to talk about that. Let’s talk all about the big changes to Head Start on Ed Reform Update.
Ed Reform Update: What is happening with Head Start?
Mike Petrilli [03:06]
All right. So, Checker, let’s start with the basics for folks who have been on summer vacation and not following the story. What is it that the Trump administration has proposed to do with Head Start?
Checker Finn
Well, keep in mind that Head Start dates back to 1964. It was part of the War on Poverty. It is a Lyndon Johnson legacy program, like many other things.
It was set up to be a so-called child development program for very low-income children, to help them prepare for life with dental appointments and medical appointments and learning to put on their snowsuits and all sorts of things that low-income young children need help in learning.
It was never intended to be a school readiness education preschool program that was meant to help kids get ready for reading, writing, and arithmetic. It never was that. There starts the problem. There also starts my own criticism of the program over the years.
Sixty-odd years later, Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation proposed that the Trump administration eliminate the Head Start program. It’s about a $12 billion program, serves about 720,000 children a year.
There was no way on this planet that Congress was going to eliminate the Head Start program. It’s got this iconic motherhood aspect to it. It’s poor kids. In many cases, poor Black and brown kids. It’s got a whole lot of people working for it. There are a whole lot of jobs involved.
It was not going to be eliminated any more than the Department of Education was going to be eliminated by Congress.
The administration has instead proposed, somewhat similar to the Department of Ed, almost an outsourcing of the work of Head Start.
Instead of a highly regulated, centralized federal program, Head Start is supposed to now have all of its regulations basically scrapped and turned over to the states to run, if they want to, a Head Start program of whatever sort they like, without any of the Head Start program so-called quality standards attached to it.
The quality standards are the problem also. I mean, there are 120 pages of them. They’re far too many. They’re far too detailed. Head Start has needed a deregulation. It’s been in regulation for a very long time. It’s rigid and set in its ways and completely divorced from what’s been going on in states and communities, like the D.C. program David described, because back in the 1960s, those programs didn’t exist. So Congress created a federal program.
Well, it’s still just a federal program. It doesn’t even say hello to the state and local programs that have cropped up all over the place in the years since.
A federal program or a state program?
Mike Petrilli [06:02]
Yeah. So hold on just a second, then, because for folks that don’t follow the preschool space closely, the thing that was always unusual about Head Start is it goes directly from the federal government to local Head Start centers, right? Basically no role at all for the states.
And so are the Trump people saying they’re going to somehow now start routing the money through the states? Is that part of the idea?
Checker Finn
Yes. They’re not calling it a block grant, but they’re still going to give out grants to centers, but there are no rules by which the centers operate other than rules that the states might make for them.
Mike Petrilli
Okay.
Checker Finn
So it’s not a block grant, though the critics suspect that it’s going to one day turn into that, into just a state block grant program, which of course they claim is then easy to eliminate because it’s no longer a program. It’s just a funding stream.
But right now, it’s meant to be a bunch of deregulated centers instead of hyper-regulated centers, is what they have in mind. Which, deregulation, fine. Yes, it needs deregulation.
But it does not turn Head Start into a preschool program, into a learning program, which is what it’s needed all along at a time when half the kids in America are entering kindergarten unready for kindergarten.
Every state that assesses kindergarten readiness on the part of five-year-olds comes in with data like 48 percent, 52 percent of the kids entering kindergarten in this state are not prepared to succeed in kindergarten.
They’re not David’s children. They’re the children who are entering kindergarten who cannot yet identify big and little or left and right or round and square and cannot do all the things you need in order to even begin to start reading or doing math.
So what Head Start should be, especially for the poor kids that it’s targeted at, is a school readiness program. And that’s not what the Trump people are up to.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, it’s interesting, Checker. I have to admit that listening to you describe it, I actually find myself saying, I don’t know, it kind of sounds kind of reasonable what they’re doing.
Only because, I mean, as you say, it’s been misguided for all these years. Nobody’s ever been able to change that, though you did write a piece recently saying that back in 2007, Bush 43 and Ted Kennedy were able to add some quality standards around the learning piece. So that’s good.
But I don’t know. It seems like we just expect that many states would then have to pick up the ball and say, okay, let’s focus then on quality on pre-K. That’s probably going to happen in red states.
I see all these people in blue states totally freaking out. I don’t know why. I’m like, well, can’t they just add back the regulations they like if that’s what they want to do? This doesn’t sound like gutting the program like I’ve been reading about in the press.
Checker Finn
It’s gutting it as a federal program and turning it into a state program.
And I don’t think that that’s the kind of national effort to get poor kids ready for school that I think the country needs.
Here, I guess maybe I’m an old-fashioned New Dealer. I think that this might require a national push to get kids ready for school. I don’t think the states are going to do that, except for David’s kids.
Mike Petrilli
I’m so confused. Checker’s making the New Deal case. I don’t know, David, do you want to play Milton Friedman here or something? What’s your take on this?
Who should be accountable for preschool quality?
David Griffith [10:10]
I don’t really, but I think it’s just such a revealing conversation because we’re searching for a level of government that will take accountability for results seriously.
It does almost feel like a role reversal sometimes because I don’t know. We’re all kind of despairing about the federal government, right? I mean, it’s a time when certainly many liberals are despairing or reevaluating their relationship to the federal government, which they’ve traditionally seen as the source of solutions and the way to get all these backwards states to get their act together is you just pass a national law.
And I don’t know. I mean, if you watch our current federal government, there are reasons to question that, right? But on the other hand, if you toss it back to the states, I can’t disagree with Checker, right? It doesn’t seem like the states are any more inclined to take the notion of accountability for results seriously.
And let’s just acknowledge it’s challenging in pre-K, right?
I guess I see it as kind of a broader cultural problem here, which is, it’s not obvious to me that Head Start has lots of problems, but it’s not obvious to me that they’re that different from the problems we have with scaling pre-K in general, right, with quality.
I mean, it feels to me like the broader problem is that nobody wants to hold pre-K accountable for what Checker’s calling for, which is for getting real results.
I don’t know, Checker. I mean, do you disagree with me? Is there something that’s actually uniquely bad about Head Start, or is it just part of this broader, I guess, lack of ambition when it comes to these years?
Checker Finn
I think deep in the marrow of so-called early childhood educators is a lack of interest in the education part of early childhood education. They really do emerge from a kind of psychology. It’s a technology of child development that does not pay much attention to the cognitive stuff that is school readiness, at least not as a very high priority.
I mean, Head Start does all these lovely things. Over the years, it’s been famous for ensuring that kids got their teeth checked by a dentist, that they learn to wash their face and hands and things like this. All perfectly good things for little two-year-olds, three-year-olds, four-year-olds to do.
Not against it, but there’s been a real mismatch. We’ve seen this in Fordham work, too, as we’ve begun to look at the sort of disconnect between preschool and kindergarten and the early grades, that they don’t have corresponding standards. They don’t have corresponding sequences of professional development for teachers.
There’s a whole bunch of things that just don’t match up, and I don’t think they’re going to.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, it’s interesting to me. It sounds like, you know, you hear a lot in K-12 about community schools. This is something that especially the unions are big fans of, this idea of let’s have a dentist in this public school building or a health clinic, or at least referrals and a lot of other supports.
It’s like, basically, we’ve been doing this in Head Start all along. I don’t know enough about it to know whether that stuff is making a difference or not.
But this notion that nobody, David, wants to hold preschools accountable for learning. I don’t know. I guess I thought that in the preschool world that there’d been some progress. I mean, in Ohio, our home state at Fordham, they’ve got this five-star rating for the preschool programs. I can’t tell you if it’s perfect, but I think it’s making some effort to look at quality, including this academic readiness stuff.
My sense is a bunch of other places have something like that, too. And so it’s not like policymakers have completely ignored this, right?
So I don’t know. I guess it’s all about downstream.
Checker, let me ask you this. Is this a fait accompli? Like this is going to happen? They’re going to get rid of the regulations for sure, and then we’re going to just have to see sort of how the states respond? How does Congress respond? What happens depending on who wins the next presidential election, just like with the Department of Education unraveling?
Is that where we’re at, or is this still in play? Could this actually get stopped?
Checker Finn [14:29]
I think it’s a fait accompli unless there turns out to be some legal wrinkle that the critics can find where the administration is not following regulatory procedure properly, that kind of thing, and sue them for breach of some statute.
But I think that there’s no interest that I’m aware of, either in Congress or certainly in the executive branch, to really turn this into a significant education program. They’re just trying to get it out of the way. And this is their way of doing it, like sending bits and pieces of the Education Department to other departments.
Just out of sight, out of mind is, I believe, the mentality here. We wish we could get away with it, but instead we’ll just put it in a closet.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, I know. And you can imagine that certainly the Democrats will then put forward some bills to undo this, right? But they won’t get past a filibuster or they’d get vetoed.
And a whole lot of things, as we know, hinge on upcoming elections. But in terms of what is likely to happen while this administration is in charge, I think this is probably a fait accompli.
David?
David Griffith
Yeah, I just want to respond to what you said earlier, Mike, which is I do think that there has been a gradual cultural shift. I do think that more people view these years as preschool, which is to say kind of part of school, maybe.
I just think I’m impatient. I mean, Checker, we haven’t talked about it, but there are these sort of academic aspirational standards embedded in Head Start. As far as I can tell, it all traces to one study from like twenty years ago that said, well, kids should learn about seventeen or eighteen letters by the time they’re done with preschool.
I’m not aware of anybody who takes education seriously who thinks that five-year-olds cannot learn nineteen letters. It’s just this insane lack of ambition. And it is trending in the right direction, but we need to press the accelerator and get real here.
Middle-class kids, they know their alphabet by the start of pre-K. And there’s no reason that poor kids can’t either.
So we just need to have a national sort of reckoning about what we’re doing with these years. And we need to get serious.
Mike Petrilli
I would be in favor of taking a few letters out of the alphabet, personally, that I think are just unnecessary. Like, you know, do we need Q? Is J doing a lot of good? I don’t know.
David Griffith
I will say I let Q slide, you know, because it doesn’t come up a lot. But yeah, let’s be real here.
Checker Finn
There’s a famous, famous line in the Mozart movie where they say, what’s wrong with the composition? And the answer is, too many notes in the piece. Take out some notes.
Mike Petrilli
Right. All right. Well, this is good, Checker. I appreciate you letting us know about it. I’m not saying it’s good that this changed, but this is helpful for us and our listeners and viewers to know what is going on with Head Start. It gives us some context.
It will be interesting to see, with the Department of Education unraveling efforts, you see that really it’s only Congress that can respond. With this one, if it gets further down the line, it’ll be interesting to see how states respond, maybe red versus blue. This is something that ed reformers are going to have to start paying attention to.
We shall watch.
All right. Great. Thanks so much, Checker. That’s all the time we got for that discussion.
Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite, Amber’s Research Minute.
Research Minute: Does AI tutoring improve math achievement?
Mike Petrilli [18:10]
Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern
Thank you, Mike.
Mike Petrilli
I believe a big chunk of the country is now in back-to-school mode. As the school start date, I think, slowly moves its way up from south to north. And it has now arrived here in the Washington metro area.
I know my 10th grader, Leandro, is officially back in school.
Amber Northern
Yep. Awesome. As are my nephews and nieces. So we are underway.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah. D.C. started, David. Y’all back in there too?
David Griffith
My first grader is back. My pre-K kid is starting on Thursday.
Mike Petrilli
Very good.
Okay, it is exciting. I feel like there’s been so much discussion this summer about the tech backlash and all of that, and yet school hasn’t been in. So I guess we’ll see how this goes.
At my son’s high school, Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, Montgomery County, supposedly is going to follow this new state law that has a bell-to-bell ban on phones, on Apple Watches, on personal devices.
I bet that it collapses by Friday is my guess, but we’ll see.
Amber Northern
We’ll see. So they’ve got to take their watches off too. This is interesting.
Mike Petrilli
I mean, that’s what they say. That’s what they say.
Amber Northern
Oh, okay.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, I know. What about an Oura Ring? I haven’t seen that. I know. Right? Man, and the new Google glasses they’ve got. I mean, where is it going to end? What can our kids wear?
David Griffith
You know, guys, there are a lot of policies out there, like, for example, speed limits or jaywalking laws, that are not strictly followed that I am still glad are there. Right? Basic messages.
Mike Petrilli
Don’t be a jerk about it.
David Griffith
Right. Right.
Mike Petrilli
Well, I don’t know, where I live in Maryland, they’ve got speed cameras up the wazoo. So that’s next. See, we just put cameras in the classroom, guys.
Amber Northern
I can see it. Kid’s got a watch on.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re getting there.
David Griffith
Ever closer, Mike. Ever closer.
Mike Petrilli
Yep.
All right. Well, Amber, what you got for us on the research front today?
Amber Northern [20:23]
Well, we are kind of in that same neighborhood.
We’re going to look at a new RCT, love these, and ask a question: whether AI tutoring actually improves math achievement for struggling kids. And then they want to know, okay, if it does, then what might be driving those gains?
The authors kind of excitedly say it’s the largest and longest experimental evaluation of an AI tutoring program to date. However, as we get into it, we realize they kind of walk that back a little bit because it’s actually very programmatic. So it shouldn’t be seen as AI tutoring versus no AI tutoring because there’s a lot of other programmatic stuff going on in the control condition. So I’ll talk about that in a second.
Anyway, it’s a two-year, customized, randomized trial across eighteen Tennessee middle schools. They’re randomizing the classroom to either Khan Academy with an AI tutor embedded, Khanmigo, which is one of the more popular ones and one of the first ones out the gate, I think, that schools started adopting, or what they call business-as-usual remediation math instruction.
Of course, we want to know what that is.
But first, just a little bit about Khanmigo. I think most of our listeners are aware it’s designed to help kids conversationally, again, not giving them the answer, but sort of leading them to water. That’s the big thing.
But on this treatment condition, we’re told that also, and this is the other programmatic piece, those kids also get their existing MAP scores used to place them in a specific point on this Khan Academy, Khanmigo learning trajectory.
Which is kind of another piece of the puzzle, again, that sort of clouds the waters a little bit.
The business-as-usual is a mix of teacher-led practice, other math software without AI tutoring. So it’s not no technology. They can actually use computer-assisted learning, but it doesn’t have the platform of the AI tutoring trying to talk to them and so on and so forth.
And then they actually looked into the control classrooms, and a lot of them were using Waggle, which was new to me. But Waggle is an adaptive practice program. Again, it’s from their district curriculum provider, and it doesn’t have the AI component to it.
All right.
The participants were all mandated to attend the district’s existing daily remedial math sessions. This was 25 to 40 minutes in small groups that all below-grade-level students had to attend. So not optional, it’s mandated. And every day, 20 to 40 minutes.
And then they looked at it for two years, and they had about 6,900 student-by-term records. So in other words, if a kid appeared in two terms, that was two records.
All right, what happened?
On achievement, the program produced modest but real gains. That’s how I’m going to say that.
Assignment to Khan Academy and Khanmigo increased math scores by roughly 1.3 national percentile ranks per term. What does that mean? It’s about 0.06 to 0.08 standard deviations annually.
So modest but real gains.
Effects were larger in year two than year one, partly because kids were spending more time in year two practicing on Khanmigo and Khan Academy.
The treated students averaged, again, about thirty minutes. So, again, what they were supposed to, at least at the minimum, thirty minutes.
And then they basically said that the participation-adjusted effect for Khan Academy was 0.14 standard deviations. And then they looked into the costs a little bit and said, you know, fifteen bucks annually was how much it cost. And they thought, eh, that’s meaningful return for low cost compared to human tutoring, which could obviously run thousands of dollars more per student.
And I think they estimated the effects for the human tutoring was 0.2 to 0.4 standard deviations.
All right. And this is the interesting wrinkle after all of that.
The AI tutor itself was pretty much ignored.
So when they started looking into it, about 96 percent of the kids sent only one message to Khanmigo, and the median student only messaged it on about one third of practice days and in only 70 percent of the sessions where they actually made a mistake.
So they’re saying of nearly all the student messages sent to this AI tutor, 40 percent were just a bare numerical answer, like three, five, eight, whatever. It wasn’t actually engaging in a conversation with this AI tutor.
They said 24 percent were just clicks on a prewritten help button, like “help me with this,” click.
Only 14 percent involved any genuine questions to the AI tutor, like in-depth questions you might expect them to engage in.
And the interface was changed to Khanmigo by default, but you used to have to push a button to, I guess, have Khanmigo talk to you. Then they just turned it on, and engagement still didn’t improve.
And so the authors conclude that the observed achievement gains come less from Khanmigo’s conversational tutoring than from Khan Academy’s structured adaptive practice.
So again, students are working through sequenced math problems. They receive feedback and they keep progressing in the areas where they’re struggling. But that’s because of the way Khan Academy is structured.
And then they want to say, okay, what’s going on? And then they try to figure that out. But I mean, it’s free, it’s mandatory, it’s teacher supported. And they basically don’t have a good answer.
They just say that sometimes kids are just trying to quickly get through an assignment. Maybe they don’t want to ask for help. But anyway, again, it’s a design challenge, I think, for AI tutoring going forward. Less so much an AI tutor versus no AI tutor. So we can actually try to get kids to use it when they need it.
Mike Petrilli
Interesting. David, you go first this time. What do you think?
David Griffith [26:48]
Well, it makes me wonder, Mike, if we put a track and a weight room in my neighborhood, would all of my neighbors just suddenly become marathoners and bodybuilders? Would we all be in incredible shape because we have this adaptive tool?
You know, you can run two laps. Well, hey, it adjusts, and now you can run three laps, right? The sky’s the limit, right? I mean, it’s almost like there’s a motivation issue.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah. Not just access. Imagine that.
David Griffith
Yeah, it’s hard to believe, but it sounds like sixth graders don’t actually want to tutor themselves in math. Who knew?
I don’t know. I’ll drop the sarcastic act. But I guess I’m a little frightened by the notion that we have this tool that is everywhere, and it’s low cost, and it requires zero investment on the part of adults. It’s almost effortless, right? What could go wrong?
Let’s just go fix underachieving sixth graders’ math problems. We’ll just leave them in front of a screen. I don’t know. It’s seductive, and it’s almost certainly wrong.
And I just think that we need to be realistic here. Motivation is everything.
It’s not that hard with the internet to be really well-informed, and yet most people aren’t. And yeah, you can teach yourself a lot. I tried to teach myself computer science the last time I was unemployed. I know almost no computer science.
The issue is not how flexible or amazing the tool is. It’s other stuff.
Mike Petrilli
No, look, I mean, you can make the same argument from 100 years ago about libraries, right?
I mean, look, we put libraries in every community, and now everybody is going to be reading this wonderful stuff. And it turns out some people do read it. And it’s wonderful that we have libraries. I’m glad we do.
And it’s always been great for especially those precocious, high-achieving kids who will go to the library and spend all summer with their nose in a book.
Now those precocious, high-achieving kids can go on Khan Academy and help get ready for the SAT, or they can go on YouTube and watch a lot of amazing content to learn about the world, as my kids have done, and that’s great.
But yes, there are a lot of people out there who may not be so motivated around learning. And guess what? We adults know that it’s good for them to do it anyways, especially teenagers who may not be able to make that cost-benefit analysis in their head about why I’m going to do this perhaps boring and hard thing today to have a payoff tomorrow.
So, yes, hooray human beings that still need it.
But I am serious. It is good that we have these tools. These tools are going to make a big difference for some kids, high achievers in America, high achievers around the world.
I mean, some kid in Mongolia or, who knows? This is an amazing thing to unlock the world’s knowledge and to be able to do some of this super cool stuff, just like we’re all learning what AI can do for all of us. And some of it’s pretty awesome, right?
But yeah, this is not going to solve our fundamental problem, which is that learning is hard, and it’s going to take motivation. And that is particularly the case for kids who are already behind and may feel bad about themselves because they’re having trouble in school, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
David Griffith
Yeah, I’m just particularly disturbed by the posited connection between non-human tutoring and low-income kids or, not low-income, kids who are behind, right? Kids who are struggling. That’s the opposite of what those kids need, in my opinion. They need more human intervention.
It’s completely backwards to me.
So, I don’t know. Conduct a few more experiments. But in the meantime, let’s be cautious.
Amber Northern
I think, too, it made me wonder whether they were giving any instruction in how to write a prompt instead of, like, just give me the answer. You know what I mean?
Because obviously, if it’s not set up to give you the answer, then it should teach you what types of questions you can ask it to help you effectively.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah. And I wonder if it does that. I mean, certainly, as I play around with Claude, it’s offering some helpful suggestions at the end where it says, would you like me to do this next thing for you?
Amber Northern
That’s right. That’s right.
Mike Petrilli
And I find myself saying, yes, actually, that would be lovely.
David Griffith
Let’s say the quiet part out loud, Mike.
Mike Petrilli
What?
David Griffith
Yeah, but it has to see their work.
Amber Northern
It’s true. You have to show their work for then Claude to be able to say, okay, let’s talk about this part here where you kind of got off track or whatever.
I know the AI developer, I’m sure, thought of this. But I’m just trying to figure out, why would kids not ask it? It’s right there.
Mike Petrilli
Oh, man. Well, hey, at least kudos for a randomized assignment study on this stuff. Right? And it would be great if more tech companies and providers and curriculum providers did this sort of thing. So we should give credit for that.
Amber Northern
Yes, absolutely.
Mike Petrilli
All right, gang. Well, let’s leave it there.
That is all the time we’ve got for this week. So until next week.
David Griffith
I’m David Griffith.
Mike Petrilli
And I’m Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.
The Education Gadfly Show is a production of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, located in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit us online at FordhamInstitute.org.
