Ted Dintersmith

What I do find, Scott, is that when you flip it and when you actually ask kids to take on open-ended challenges, amazing things happen.

Because by and large, the well-off micromanaged kids sort of like freeze up.

Like you're not making it clear what I've got to do to get an A or their parents will call.

Like lay out the steps.

I need to know what my kid's got to do to get an A.

And these kids in tougher circumstances just rise to the challenge.

And so I feel like of all the levers we could pull, if we shifted more of the focus in schools to things that kids believe are important and can articulate why, help them go deep and fast on that, help them develop skills in the process that help them accomplish something they're proud of,

you would do a lot more to close the achievement gap than we've done in, you know, 40 years of chasing data where the scores are flat and the achievement gap doesn't close.

Well, when I went to school, there wasn't a lot of angst over when you started reading.

I'm not even sure when I read.

It may have been second grade or third grade.

There's a study that I think was called the Pygmalion Effect Study that's worth noting here, which is that they did this and replicated it, so it's been verified, but they would take kids at random

And they go to teachers and say, you know, you've got this kid in your classroom.

And even though their past academic performance has been pretty ordinary, they actually have unbelievable talent.

And we think you're going to unleash it.

And then, boom, boom, boom, over the course of the year, that kid just soars.

Now, of course, those kids were picked at random.

But because there were different perceptions, different views built in, in terms of the adult perspective on the kid, that rippled through.

You know, young boys' brains develop at a slower pace, right?

And we do this testing from the very earliest ages.