The following transcript has been edited for readability. Timestamps have been removed and minor transcription errors corrected. Speaker comments and context have been preserved.

Opening Remarks

Rich Portelance

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the EdGate Powers Podcast. I am your host, Rich Portelance. With me today is Dr. Chip Kimball–he is the general manager of EdGate. We're excited because in the fourth quarter, we always talk about the state of standards, and this year we're talking about specifically “CTE Rising: How Skills, Credentials, and Career Readiness are Reshaping the Education Standards Landscape.” So, there are some important questions in there; CTE (career and technical education) is an important topic today, and one of the main questions we're going to try to answer, at least from EdGate's perspective, is that standards are expanding and becoming more complex. Are you using the right tools and proven systems to manage the complexity? 

So, also, just as a setup on December 10th, we're going to be having an executive forum. It's going to be live on Facebook and on YouTube this year. This time, we have some great guests. We have Jane Swift from Education at Work, Daylene Long from Catapult X, and Rita Ferrandino from Arc Capital Development joining us on that executive forum. So, please sign up. There is a link below in the comments, and you can be part of an exciting conversation. But without further ado, Dr. Kimball, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Dr. Chip Kimball

Great. Thank you, Rich. It's great to be with you, and thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this platform. As you know, I'm currently the general manager at EdGate. I have a long history in education as an educator, as a teacher, a technology director, an area superintendent, and a superintendent both internationally and domestically. Large systems, such as Lake Washington School District in Western Washington, as well as Singapore and Prague. 

And I've followed, of course, the work of curriculum, and standards, and leadership around those instructional practices throughout all of my career, and led many efforts in that area, and have this interesting overlay of technology and how technology can support learning, and in some cases, can be detrimental to learning. And all of this kind of builds the interesting work that I'm doing right now with EdGate as we think about standards and the use of standards inside of curriculum and for  our customers, as well as their reach into schools and school districts.

Discussion

Rich Portelance

Well, thank you for that introduction, and you're right, there certainly is a lot there, Chip, in terms of, you know, what's happening with technology today in education. There's a lot of discussion about the effectiveness of it. So, I want to start off. You've spent a lot of your career leading school systems. Looking back on that experience, Chip, how do you see the mission of K-12 education evolving, particularly as schools face increasing pressure to prepare students for life beyond graduation?

Dr. Chip Kimball

You know, it's really an interesting study when you look all the way back. So, you know, my earliest memory would be A Nation at Risk in the early 1980s, when the alarm bell was rung by the federal government around this groundbreaking study about how we were not adequately preparing students for the future, and that the future was going to “eat our lunch,” if you will. And that really launched this effort. It launched progressive education, it launched the standards movement, it launched the common guaranteed viable curriculum (GVC), which many, many districts of course used. And then at the same time was the introduction of technology. And what– at the very essence of all of this, all of this work over the last nearly 50 years has been about how do we ensure quality of the educational experience for students? How do we ensure that there's some level of consistency amongst what students are learning, and how do we know? And the end for that is how do we make sure that they are prepared for a future which is moving rapidly? It's constantly changing. So what are those– what are those skills and aptitudes that students need, so that regardless of whether it happens to be a disruption by the Internet, or happens to be a disruption by AI, or happens to be a disruption by something else, whether it's a buildup of a certain industry that requires a certain level of skill in order to do whatever it is, how do we best prepare students for that? That's been the essence of the work. 

And what's super interesting about the work of standards is that I think about this in the form of a human body. So, if you think about the human body and the skeleton of the body, you know, people have different sizes of skeletons, and– but muscles attach in a very particular way. So if we think about standards as the skeleton of the body, and then the correlations of those standards to curriculum being the way that a muscle might attach to the humerus or to the femur, it's very similar in how education works. And what we've learned over time is that if you understand the core of what students should know and be able to do through the form of standards, and then give latitude for teachers to figure out how to best deliver that, that is the essence of good education.

Rich Portelance

Well, I like that analogy, and that's, you know, it puts a good picture to, you know, what we're trying to do, Chip. You know, as you talk about the evolution, what has been your experience in terms of the effectiveness of technology early on in education? You know, because you've been– you talked about the last 50 years, you've been really involved in education probably for 35 to 40 of those. How have you seen the effectiveness wane or increase over time? 

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah. So, you know, I was involved in the early days of technology implementation. My very first years as a teacher, it was one of the things that I really cut my teeth on. And, you know, technology can be an outstanding enabler; it can be an outstanding optimizer, and it can be an outstanding way of individualizing and personalizing content in the experience for a student when done well and when implemented well. It's the “when done well and when implemented well,” of course, which is the key. And also, there are things that we've learned about learning that technology can be detrimental to.

Learning at its very core is a social enterprise. In other words, you know, kids learn best not when they are just reading a book or engaging in something on a screen, but they actually learn best when they're engaging with one another. When they're asking questions and answers, they're trying to understand the deeper meaning of a piece of content. And while increasingly, technology is more capable of doing those things, it isn't– it is not a human interaction by and large, of course, AI notwithstanding, which is a whole other series that we could talk about. But as we've learned about that, we– the most effective classrooms that I've seen are those where technology is used to assist and to help facilitate that work that kids are doing in groups, and on projects, and around a body of content rather than it replacing the delivery of that content or the engagement with that content. 

Rich Portelance

And going back to your comment on education standards, do you believe that technology can help to ensure the delivery of those standards in an effective manner?

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah, absolutely. As a matter of fact, one of– what you often think about is what is technology really good at, and what is it less good at? The connection of standards to a curriculum, to an experience, etc., is a perfect example of what technology is actually really good at because there's not a lot of nuance with it, right? It's complicated for sure, and it's a big task that is a complicated task, and it relieves the teacher, or the school system, or even the publisher of having to manage that very complicated task with lots of volume. Technology is wonderful in that if you give it the right instructions, you give it the right task, and you guide its way, and it'll do that for you in a beautiful way.

Rich Portelance

So, I'm going to keep pulling that thread just a little bit because now we're talking about the emergence of CTE. It's been around for a long time, but it's really coming into its own today. We know that education standards are… I don't want to say finite, because there's probably six or seven million out there depending on the state and what they're trying to do, but CTE standards are much more ubiquitous. Many people have them, many, you know, depending on the job, the state, and the need, there's a CTE standard for it. How do you see that marrying up with– based on the description that you just gave that technology is good at making these integrations, how can that deliver more effective CTE standards into the classroom today? Because that seems to be something that's really important.

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah, there is absolutely a lot of momentum around CTE right now. And it's interesting, I actually sit on a board of a university, and we've been talking about higher ed and the shifts, the fundamental ground disruptions that are happening in higher education. And that's part of the picture as to why CTE is emerging. CTE is emerging because it used to be that a fine liberal arts education from a high– an institution of higher ed was adequate to get you a job, and now it simply gets you an interview. It used to be that there were high levels of confidence among parents that a college degree would serve their students well. As a matter of fact, the latest data that I saw around that was that 15 years ago, there was a 75% confidence level on the part of parents around a higher education degree. Now, that confidence level is 37%. And it's expensive, and it's increasingly expensive, hence the $2 trillion student debt crisis that is currently facing students in the United States. These factors, combined with the shifts in employment and what is required in employment, all of these lead to the rise of CTE, hence “CTE Rising,” right? It's a very interesting time. 

Now, one of the interesting challenges with CTE is that I talked about a common guaranteed viable curriculum, and this has been in the nomenclature of K-12 education for a very long time in the core subjects. Less so for the arts in some cases, and most certainly in the CTE fields. So, if– and again, the purpose of that is to make sure that students don't have gaps in what they are learning between teachers, school systems, between industries, etc. And so, the need for standards is quite pervasive. So then the question is, well, then how have CTE fields been doing what they've been doing? They've done it predominantly through the certification process that happens at the end. 

So, if you're a plumber, if you're an electrician, if– in many cases in computer software, there's a certification process that guarantees what students should know and be able to do. What doesn't exist is those standards– consistent standards. There are standards, let me be clear about that. There are standards, but they aren't consistently agreed-upon standards as there are in math, science, and language arts. And so, there's this need to pull these standards together, and again, now this is a big volume game, right? Because there are literally hundreds of thousands of standards. So what do you rely upon to do this? You rely upon well-crafted technology in order to find the themes and the consistencies so that you can build good curriculum, and then, hence, assessment, and then, hence, certification, so that this large body of students that are now going to be choosing CTE fields rather than a traditional liberal arts college education have the best shot at developing those skills and aptitudes, and therefore becoming employable.

Rich Portelance

So, based on what you're just describing, you believe that there is the opportunity to blend the CTE standards in with our traditional curriculum to a degree so that teachers can understand it, and we can start to deliver some of the value that CTE has earlier in the educational process?

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah, absolutely. Because again, if we think about these skills to be successful in the CTE fields, it does go beyond just the “technical”–I say technical in air quotes–” technical” skill. It is some of these larger issues around communication, around how you work on a team, etc., and also these very technical CTE skills. And so, what's important is that if a state is going to invest heavily in half a dozen CTE fields–which is why we have, by the way, the CTE clusters, right? It begins to categorize fields in a meaningful way so that states, and ultimately school districts and schools, can begin planning towards those in a meaningful way. Because what kids want and what parents want is they want a pathway to success. “What do I need to know and be able to do in order to go down this direction and be successful?” And in the case of CTE fields, you need to be more specific and more explicit about that, and you need to blend it with these other competencies that kids actually need to know and be able to do. 

And again, I would liken the CTE standards work to the way it probably was 20 to 25 years ago in the core areas of curriculum. In those days, they were all over the map, and you got people who came together and started having agreements around what was in and what was not. Hence, the word “power standards” came out. What are the most important standards? There should be power standards for CTE. By and large, I don't think there are. There are a lot of them and they exist, they just aren't coordinated, and aligned, and done in a way such that with– when, not if–when CTE goes to scale, where rather than it being an afterthought where a handful of kids are involved in CTE, but maybe as many as half of your students are now pursuing CTE-oriented fields, that there's some coordination to make sure that there's no gaps in their learning.

Rich Portelance

So, we're pretty clear that there's a massive demand for CTE talent, and that the workforce is shifting. You talked about how the parents and the students are looking toward those clear outcomes and, you know, “how do I?” success metrics. “How do I get to some place?” What has changed in regards to the educators and district leaders and their thought process regarding CTE? Have they adjusted yet?

Dr. Chip Kimball

They're– like most things, they're trying to figure it out, right? Education, as a general theme, is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. So educators don't say, "Oh, we think it's going to look like this and therefore invent." What we do typically is respond to what's happening in industry. So, higher education is beginning to see some huge disruptions, and CTE is beginning to see enormous needs. If you look at the number of people in the trades, for example, that are going to be retiring and leaving the industry over the next 10 years, the numbers are staggering. So, we are seeing education systems beginning to respond to that by building programs, building facilities, and, by the way, higher education is doing the same thing. So increasingly, the community college, for example, that is really proficient in this work is seeing enormous new enrollment, while traditional four-year universities are seeing dips in enrollment across the board in the United States. So what are they doing? Well, they're starting to build programs that are certification-oriented, like occupational therapy, and like physical therapy, and like nursing, and apprenticeships in everything from plumbing to electricians, and including the fields such as, you know, AI engineering, I'm calling it. These are all fields that are– So, in the K-12 space, kids are anxious about getting more experiences sooner and more hands-on in addition to what they are doing in their core subjects. Schools and school districts in the K-12 space are needing to respond to this in a meaningful way. And it could be through an integrated project-based approach like many of our schools have, or it could be in a more traditional subject-based approach. But in all cases, you're seeing people talk about it, they're thinking about it, they're developing programs around it, and they're investing resources in it. 

Rich Portelance

Well, it's really good to hear and obviously incredibly important since the demand is there. One of the recurring themes in our CTE Rising conversations is the importance of connecting academic learning with practical transferable skills. From your perspective, what needs to happen at the district and classroom levels to make those connections meaningful?

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah. So, you know, part of the cycle of learning is assessment, right? We describe what we want kids to know, but then we have to ask the question, how do we know? And so, good assessment practices are assessing students not just on a body of knowledge that they may be able to be facile with, but also on sets of skills that they may be able to be performing against. So that's where, you know, performance-based assessments come into play. And those performance-based assessments are perfect for the integration of core content and something in the CTE space. It's harder, I mean, there's just no question about it. It is a harder body of work to do, and it's what's required in schools today, is how do we know that kids are actually integrating these discrete skills into something that is meaningful that they can apply to a task, or apply to a project, or apply to a housing project, or whatever it is that they happen to be interested in.

Rich Portelance

So if you're just joining, I'm speaking with Dr. Chip Kimball, general manager of EdGate, and we're talking about CTE Rising. And just a reminder to people to please click the link below so you can sign up for the upcoming executive forum, which will take place on December 10th. We have some exciting guests. And I usually do podcast interviews just with the guests that are going to join us for our executive forum webinar, but this particular topic has been so engaging that I've been asking other people to come aboard and do extensive podcast interviews, like with Dr. Kimball, because there's just so much to discuss. Also, check out–I did an interview with Don Fraser, Jr. who was formerly with the Education Design Lab. We had an extensive conversation around the skills that are needed for tomorrow's workforce, and how we're engaging young people to train them and teach them those skills. 

And just to get back, Dr. Kimball, I really appreciate the perspective that you're giving of, you know, connecting the schools, understanding that the teachers and the educators are really working at this. They're not there, but it's an ongoing, evolving process, as it has been for the past 50 years, of how do we integrate these things. But there seems to be an urgency today that there hasn't been. Can you talk about that a little bit, and why that's there, and how do we kind of turn the gas up a little bit to become more effective in what we're teaching kids and get these skills embedded into the classroom?

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah, there is an urgency to it. Excuse me. And it's, you know, if we look at the endgame, which is how do we ensure that kids are employable, right? Employability is probably the most important thing that we have. And we, you know, we see a lot of things about kids following their passion and things they're interested in, and all of that is very important. But at the end of the day, they do need to have a job–most parents would argue for that. And the employability picture is changing very rapidly. You know, and one of the difficulties inside of school systems is that school systems are notoriously slow–slow to adapt and slow to change–and there's a good reason for that, by the way. Children, you know, the education of students, regardless of their age, is as much an art as it is science. And so, it's complicated. So you need to build routines, you need to build curriculum, and you need to build expectations and assessments. And often, you will say that if you're implementing a new curriculum, even if it's an area you're quite familiar with, a new math curriculum, a new (reading language arts) RLA curriculum, whatever, that it typically takes three years for a teacher to implement it to the point where they're facile with it. Well, we've got data that is changing the employment landscape that is on a six-month cycle. You don't have three to five years to change. And as a result of that, we need to figure out what the hacks are. What is a hack so that we can be more agile as an educational system that will give kids more of the things that they need so that, at the end of the day, at either post-high school or post-college, that they are most likely to be employable? 

The work that we do is a hack. It is a way to get standards and ultimately curriculum in the hands of teachers that has high levels of assurance that it is aligned, approved, used by others– by the people, it is aggregated curriculum, etc. in a very quick and facile way, and that when a state or a district changes standards, that we can adapt that extraordinarily quickly. You don't have time to have– I'm going to be a little facetious here–You don't have time to have 10,000 meetings on, you know, standard 61A as to whether or not it's the right standard or not. What you need is that you need a way to hack that so that you have some level of confidence that any changes are going to be adopted very rapidly, and that's what we do.

Rich Portelance

So, you know, as the schools place greater emphasis on these career readiness and durable skills and pathways, I'm kind of curious, you know, because you broached the topic of EdGate and what the external space is doing, and sometimes these, you know, they work at different cadences, right? Or RPMs, you know, the external world, the entrepreneurs, and the publishing companies might be working at a higher cadence than the educators. And you talked about how they kind of move at a slower pace, you know, but there has to be some sync in there at some point in time to make these things work effectively. What do you think that the publishing enterprise is doing today, and how should they be thinking about the evolution of their product or content to meet the needs of the educators?

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah, that's really interesting because, you know, the publishing industry, right, wins the game when they have the most effective content, or in the case of software, platforms and content that can be adaptable to the largest number of customers that they can serve, right? It's a volume game. That's how they do well. And so, what's been the consequence of that? The consequence of that has been an enormous volume of, you know, a biology textbook for 15-year-olds who learn biology for 50 minutes a day that is 900 pages long. Again, I'm being a little bit provocative here, but you get the point. And instead, increasingly, what publishers are needing to do is figure out how they customize the content for their individual customers. And they can do that because they have the standards, they have curriculum that they can apply those standards to, they can build the correlations, and they can deliver actually a subset to a customer that doesn't cost them any more money because these correlations and the individualization of the content is delivered in a way that has very little overhead. You don't have to rewrite the whole book, as an example. 

The question that publishers are contemplating and that school districts are contemplating is, well, “What about AI? Can't I just throw in a prompt into AI and it's gonna give that to me? And by the way, it's gonna give it to me for free.” And I would say, not so fast. AI, there may be an instance in the future, and it might be a year, it might be a decade, it might be 40 years, where that may indeed be the case. But today's AI, which is really the wild, wild west of machine learning, is not sophisticated enough to do that. It still needs eyes and touch, it needs very sophisticated prompting, it needs very thoughtful technology behind it in order to produce results where you're not error-prone. “Well, you know, so what's the problem with a few errors?” Well, this is student learning. All of a sudden, if you're providing an error-prone set of standards, correlations, curriculum, and outcomes for kids, then you end up having a teacher teaching those because they're relying upon those–they have confidence in those. They're no longer doing a thousand meetings. And all of a sudden, you're teaching the kids the wrong stuff that the industry doesn't need. 

So, at EdGate, one of the things that we do, we've actually been working with machine learning on the backend for the better part of five years. So, we have very sophisticated tools that do error checks, we are looking across systems, and we have, you know, I would say arguably the deepest and most sophisticated database of standards and correlations that's been built over the past 30 years than anybody in the industry. And the reason this is important is that if publishers want to get to their sweet spot, which is customized, individualized curricular resources for district schools and teachers, then the backbone, the skeleton that we talked about earlier in the conversation, is absolutely required. What you can't do is build a pile of muscle without a skeleton, and we're the skeleton.

Rich Portelance

And I– again, thank you for bringing that analogy back, because it helps to visualize exactly what EdGate is. You know, often, people hear the name, and they kind of understand EdGate, but I don't think they really understand, you know, the core element of what EdGate supplies to the industry. And you talked a little bit about, you know, how some people are trying to cheat using AI, and if you get it wrong, you create a chasm, and a chasm is never a binary thing. It never goes parallel forever–it expands, right? And so, if you have that chasm that you've created where it's wrong on one side or the other, it's only going to get worse over time. And we don't have the opportunity to do that in today's educational landscape. So, I guess marrying up how EdGate is working and what you're doing with the publishers and the educators, how does that all work effectively in your mind? 

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah, so, you know, what we work towards inside of EdGate is making sure that our standards work, and then the correlation of those standards to any kind of content one way or another is guaranteed, right? So, we talked about a common, guaranteed, and viable curriculum, which is ultimately what teachers desire inside the context of the core curriculum. Well, where does that guarantee come from? That guarantee comes from people like us, where we are checking, double-checking, triple-checking the standards and the viability of those standards against what has been adopted by a state, what has been adopted by a district, and has had educators’ eyes and brains on it. So, internally, we are not– we're not a tech company that is building technology–we are an education company with educators who are experts in their field. So we have experts in science, we have experts in language arts, we have experts in CTE, we have experts in the field who are examining these standards, examining the correlations, and providing a stamp of guarantee so that a publisher can say, “We know without any reservation that these standards and correlations to the curriculum are rock solid. And therefore, we can, with confidence, deliver and certify to our customers and the district states, whomever, that the standards and the correlations to those standards are solid. Now, a publisher could– a large publisher could indeed do it themselves. They could hire a hundred educators to come in who are content experts. They could try and train their own AI to do the work, and they have the AI do the work, and then they have the educators do the double checks, and they could do that. It's just going to cost them way more money. It's long, it's hard, it's expensive, and we have been doing this for a while. So we figured out how to “hack” this, if you will, how to optimize this so that it is as easy as possible for a publisher to do these correlations, which then provides them the opportunity to give guarantees to their customers, again, whether it's a state, or a district, or whomever. So that's the cycle of life, if you will. 

And, you know, you don't think about a skeletal issue until something's broken or it hurts. And that's a– and you don't even think about your skeleton. So, if you're out there working out, you think about your muscles, and you think about your muscle pain, and you maybe think about how much hydration you've had. You don't typically think about, “How is my humerus doing?” until it's not working anymore. And then when it doesn't work, nothing works. And that's how we think about the work that we do.

Rich Portelance

So, I want to poke at this a little bit because education standards are based on concepts and building those into the curriculum, whereas CTE standards are really based on skills. How does that cross over? How do you guys become experts at CTE when you've been doing education standards all these years? You know, can you really make that transition and make it work?

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah. So, you know, ultimately, don't all concepts turn into skills? When we think about the educational process, we think about what students should know and be able to do. Knowing is conceptual, and being able to do it is skills. So, we think about– if we think about writing or science, how do the concepts of science… how do we think about those core concepts, and then how do they apply to a context, right? It’s very similar in CTE. You actually need to think about concepts, right? You need to think– if you're, say– I'm going to use a vocational example. If you think about welding, you need to think about how metals work with one another. You need to think about why this particular metal melts at a certain temperature, and what happens when I'm arc welding versus when I'm welding with acetylene. And all of those are important. And now, that is the skill that I have, and it's so that I can actually weld. There's a standard, right, that the weld should look a certain way, it should be able to be done in a certain amount of time, it should be done with a certain level of facility, and you can measure that, which means there's a standard, a concept, and a skill that all roll together. Even if it is a skill like welding, as opposed to something in the sciences or in writing.

Rich Portelance

Well, thank you for that. That's– I think incredibly helpful in understanding how EdGate, you know, can really supercharge this environment. When we look ahead, Chip, 3 to 5 years from now, where do you see the greatest opportunity for curriculum publishers and edtech companies to innovate?

Dr. Chip Kimball

Well, I started with the personalization and individualization of what publishers provide, and so I think that's probably the starting place. And how can they provide that custom content, and probably custom assessments as well, so that you can demonstrate what kids know and are able to do. I suspect that we're going to see increasingly more challenges around the traditional educational experience for students. And that's where the publishers can jump in and say, "Hey, we've got a resource for you–we've got an idea for you.” 

And the other thing that's interesting trendwise inside the educational landscape is that the needs of kids are changing. So if you look at the identifiable, specific needs, whether it's ADHD or whether it's dyslexia, or dyspraxia, or any of these conditions, this is becoming the reality for so many school systems. If publishers can say, “Oh, and not only do I have this individualized curricular experience that I can deliver to your kids based upon this profile that you've provided for me, but I can also provide an adaptive curriculum that will accommodate a student who has a particular condition, whatever that condition is. 

So, I think there's a great opportunity for publishers. They need to think about volume differently. So I would envision that they think about it in the form of, rather than– again, I'm using a very old example. I'm not selling a textbook anymore. What I'm doing is I'm selling a license to a whole host of curriculum that I assure you can be individualized to the individual student, and you're simply buying a license from me as a publisher. That's super interesting.

Rich Portelance

And how do companies and organizations like EdGate help bring more relevant, effective solutions to the market like the one you just– the example you just gave? 

Dr. Chip Kimball

Well, so, you know, again, this is about trust. This is about educators trusting the publishers that they are actually going to be providing us rich content and rich experiences for students that we can rely upon, have been vetted in some way, shape, or form, and they align to standards that have been adopted and approved by states and districts. And so, this is about trust of educators to the publishers, and trust of the publishers to us so that there is a circle of trust, if you will. 

And, you know, publishers are demonized in the industry. You know, speaking on the customer side of it, they're demonized. They're seen as, you know, greedy, greedy institutions that are trying to push textbooks. Again, I'm being provocative. If we can build an environment so that publishers can increasingly be solving specific problems that their customers have, which is around the individualization of content, the needs of kids, and the flexibility of moving in an agile way, rather than relying upon a typical seven-year textbook adoption process that most districts have. But rather, “We're again selling you a license. You can rely upon it. We're going to be agile. We're going to be updating our content consistently. And it's built upon standards and correlations that this little company called EdGate has, and holds, and protects, and updates. Then there's a cycle of trust that's created between EdGate and the publisher, and the customer, that ultimately will improve educational outcomes for kids, we hope.

Rich Portelance

I like that description and, you know, your experience, Chip, I'm going to just repeat because, you know, if people are just coming in or they forgot you, you've been a superintendent in some, you know, affluential school districts overseas–you've seen this from both sides of the fence. And so, you know, when you look at it, having a partner like EdGate who can bridge that gap to build some familiarity and trust is quite essential. Is that a fair statement?

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah, it is a fair statement. You know, for a lot of years many of the computer manufacturers went by the Intel moniker, which is “Intel Inside,” right? And we see ourselves as very similar, right?  Dell is selling the computer, but they're saying “Intel Inside” because Intel was a reputable chipmaker that you knew was going to be the best in the industry; you knew it would work. You may have a whole other series of problems. It might be with a component or it might be with the OS, but you knew that the Intel chip was amazing. We're saying something similar. Whether you're buying something from a publisher, or whether it's a software platform, or you're doing something direct where you're self-publishing inside of a school district, we're saying “EdGate Inside.” EdGate has the core of what you need in terms of educational standards, correlations, and the opportunity to make sure that what kids know and are able to do is consistent with the agreed-upon standards both in the industry and across states, and across the country so that we're getting the best possible outcomes for kids.

Rich Portelance

So, if you were going to give edtech companies or curriculum publishers one message that would help them become more valuable partners to school districts, what would it be?

Dr. Chip Kimball

I think it would be… I can't do it in one–I usually do it in threes, so forgive me. I would say number one would be being agile and understanding that your job is to try and solve problems that districts have today and are seeing in the future. Remember, this is a pipeline problem. They're trying to build a program today for an eighth grader that's sitting in their seat who doesn't, you know, who's a little awkward, and as eighth graders are, and doesn't have any idea what they're thinking when talking about careers because what they're really thinking about is video games and girls, right? Or boys. And so, I think it's about being agile and helping districts think about these problems of building capabilities for the future, that’s number one. Number two, I would say that being partners in development with districts. And third, I would say, is creating real value. You know, districts, schools, and states are really pressed financially.  I think this is going to be the case for the next decade, probably. Needs are increasing, demand is increasing, and costs are high. So, doing it at a value, with a value proposition, where somebody can say, “This is so valuable that I'm going to pay for this. I'm going to pay for this. It is worth it to me.” I think those are some of the pieces of advice I'd provide.

Closing Thoughts

Rich Portelance

So, this has been a terrific conversation, and we're going to wrap up here in a sec, but, you know, if we follow the thread and the narrative, CTE Rising is the theme for this campaign. And, you know, we're talking about how skills, credentials, and career readiness are reshaping the education standards landscape. And Chip, you painted a picture of EdGate as the skeleton, you know–being a group that can bind and pull the muscles together along with the brain and help these things function seamlessly. We have a– we have a dynamic that's occurring where the employer landscape is moving quicker than the education market can keep up with it. And so, you know, there's this push and pull. You know, just as a kind of last thought summary, is there anything I missed? Because I, you know, it's clear to me based on this conversation that there's a real opportunity for ed publishers and edtech providers to be very valuable partners to the education industry. There's opportunity for education to step up their game and to meet the demand, but, you know, like we talked about before, sometimes these things move at a different pace. What am I missing? How can we get to the end point here? And where do you see the real value moving forward?

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah. So, a couple of things that I like to mention: there is a difference between CTE standards and core standards. Because they're disparate, and because the industry has not really focused on them. They focused on certification criteria but not necessarily standards–they are all over the place. You know, we've done a U.S. nationwide assessment, we think there are about 900,000 standards out there. We are– within the context of our system, we're preparing right now today to have those standards ready to launch by the first part of January, and we're gonna have them all done, all of them. So, this is both a complicated task and a huge volume. So, I want– the one message I want to say is that this is more complicated than regular core standards, and we've got this. 

The second thing that I would probably share is that it is easy to be tempted by AI. And right now, AI is an untrained, wild animal. And you can do that. You just have to be willing to take the time, invest the money, and have the people and resources to do it. And I don't think the industry, nor do I think publishers, have the time, because what their customers are asking for is agility to pivot right now. We don't have three or five years to figure this out, and we have spent the last three to five years figuring this out on the AI side of things. So, those are the two things I would say. It's big, it's complicated, and it's convoluted, so don't underestimate the complexity. And number two is don't be tempted to think that AI is going to solve this problem, because it's going to do something, but it's probably not going to solve the problem in the way that you want it to be solved.

Rich Portelance

So, if you're going to use a hack, EdGate’s the hack–not the AI.

Dr. Chip Kimball

EdGate’s the hack. We've been doing it a long time, we know how to do it, we are agile, and we can do it. We can do it really, really well.

Rich Portelance

Well, thank you, Dr. Chip Kimball. I appreciate you being on the podcast today. I'll let you have the last word if there's anything else. Otherwise, we'll sign off.

Dr. Chip Kimball

Yeah, I think the last word is to all the educators out there: thank you for your service to students. And to the publishers who are serving those educators: your work is important. What you do makes sure that kids have in their hands what they should know and be able to do, and I appreciate anybody who is serving the education of students.

Rich Portelance

And Chip, thank you for helping EdGate power education. Have a great day. 

Dr. Chip Kimball

Great. Thank you. Bye-bye.