The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Schools Are Teaching Kids the Wrong Things — with Ted Dintersmith
02 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you so much for having me. Go to Hostinger.com slash ThePropG20 to bring your ideas online for under $3 a month. Use promo code ThePropG20 for an extra 20% off. Episode 390. 39 is the country code for calling Italy from abroad. In 1990, Home Alone was released in theaters. You know, there's nothing more joyous than the sound of a baby laughing.
Chapter 2: What is the main argument about American schools in this episode?
Unless, of course, it's 3 a.m. You're home alone. And you don't have children. Welcome to the 390th episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with Ted Dintersmith, an education advocate and author focused on how schools can better prepare students for the future of work.
So we're obviously fascinated with education, specifically higher education, for several reasons. One, it changed my life. It's important. I think it's a really decent exercise if you feel blessed to try and reverse engineer your blessings to the things that aren't your fault. And that is we have a tendency to reverse engineer to all the wonderful attributes that made us successful.
It's my grid, it's my character, it's my relationships, all that stuff. And we have a tendency to overlook the things that aren't your fault. And for me, as I've gotten older, I spent a lot more time thinking about the things that aren't my fault
And then trying to reinvest in those things such that a bunch of other people can be accidentally prosperous and then credit their character for their success. But anyways, first and foremost, the thing that I reverse engineer to is the irrational passion for my well-being. My mother, who lived and died a secretary, raised me on her own.
I think I'm a confident person, and I think she gave me that anchor every day in implicit and explicit ways, verbal and nonverbal, making me believe that I had value. And then, two, it was the generosity and vision of California taxpayers and the regents of the University of California, respectively, who—
built this amazing system, this incredible gift, I would argue the crown jewel of the greatest state in the Union, California, and that is the University of California, where when I applied, there was a 74% admissions rate.
And basically, if you got Bs in high school and you wanted to go to college, you could go to the University of California in exchange for $1,200 in tuition a year, which is what I paid. So I think a lot about higher education and how we continue to bet on unremarkable kids. And I think that's the whole point of higher education.
And it shouldn't be an argument around the argument around who gets in, which has been a vicious argument for 30, 40 years around affirmative action is a false flag. It's a distraction. It's not about who gets in.
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Chapter 3: Why is the traditional education model considered outdated?
It should be about how many. Let in more gay kids, more trans kids, more black kids, more white Republicans from red states, just let in more kids and all this bullshit's going to go away. You know who doesn't have huge fights over DEI and affirmative action? Junior colleges. Because if you show up and you're willing to pay, you get in.
And so they don't have this enormous amount of anxiety and dissent at the university level. Because again, we have decided to create a false argument around who gets in as opposed to how How many? I believe in affirmative action. However, I think a key transformation in education needs to be that we embrace or re-embrace affirmative action, but it should be based on color. What color? Money.
In sum, any additional help you get should be a function of you coming from, say, the lowest quintile or the lowest two quintiles. If you're in the upper quintile, you do not need any help. Trevor knows kids. Tyler Perry's kids do not eat help getting into college. Letting in the daughter of a private equity Taiwanese billionaire is not diversity.
But if we had a drug that we could give to people that would make them less likely to kill themselves, kill other people, less likely to be obese, less likely to engage in self-harm, less likely to get divorced, more likely to run for office, more likely to make double the amount of income they would make if they didn't take that pill, would we hoard that drug? And that's what we're doing.
We're hoarding the drug Because once we're cured, once our cancer has gone away, once we no longer have the measles, we've decided, isn't it cool to not have measles? So I'd rather more people have measles because it makes me stand out being a graduate of Dartmouth or Cornell or the University of California, Berkeley. In some, it's bullshit and it needs to stop.
So anyways, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Ted Dintersmith. Ted, where does this podcast find you?
I am in Charleston, South Carolina.
Let's bust right into it. Yeah. So you have a Stanford PhD in engineering. You were a top-ranked venture capitalist in the late 90s, and you've spent the last 15 years immersed in the world of education. Give us the state of play or how you would describe American education right now.
Yeah, people will say it's not working. It actually is working really well. It's just with an obsolete model, you know, and so we still adhere to the model that goes back to 1893. And so that model was designed to equip, you know, young kids with road skills and intentionally erode their creativity and curiosity and audacity and agency.
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Chapter 4: How should math education evolve to be more relevant?
You know, if you're creative, if you're entrepreneurial, if you're bold, you know, if you're a proactive problem solver or opportunity creator, that's what we need. And I admire schools. I write about schools that where a teacher will do that or even a school will do that. But it goes against a model that says we're going to define success with these high stakes math and reading scores.
So I was a bit surprised that you would say that it's been working. I mean, everything I hear about education, and it might be, I always feel like experts and papers have a vested interest in catastrophizing a bit because it just makes it sound more compelling and more of a call to action. But Nearly half of American high school seniors are testing at below basic levels in math and reading.
Historic lows across all of K through 12. 12th grade reading scores today are 10 points lower than in 1992. and not a single state improved in eighth grade math from 2019 to 2024. How do you interpret these numbers? What's behind this decline?
Yeah, and what's being tested and how do we interpret the decline, right? Let's talk about that. But to the first point, I feel like it worked really well from 1893 to about 60 years ago. So there was a glorious period where America's more or less sore, not for everybody, but as a nation, those were glory years.
You know, today, you go back to, you know, a Nation at Risk report, 1983, sounded alarm bells about our education system. That sparked more test prep, more drills, more worksheets, No Child Left Behind in 2002, even more drills and worksheets, you know, Race to the Top, Take It Up Another Level. It's been the all-consuming goal of our schools.
Get better math and reading scores, and as you say, they've been flat to down. And so why is that happening? I think it's happening because teachers are demoralized, kids are bored, and we've dumbed it down so that the reading is, you know, take on some boring passage and train for a multiple-choice question about signs of author bias. So you look at the data on high school kids.
I mean, most high school kids hate to read. It's like, how are you gonna get great reading scores with kids feeling like reading is about the same as cleaning the toilet or something? And then with math, and I wrote this book, Aftermath, to go right at the issue, everything about the world of math has changed in the last 50 years.
And what I go back to, in high school I was the last wave of kids using the slide rule. I go back to when people in the workplace needed to do things like factor polynomials by hand. Well, now that's all subsumed by computers. And we still do that in school. We not only still do it, it's mandatory. It's multiple years of kids' time in school. It's super high stakes.
It largely serves to rank and sort kids and punish millions. And it's all towards skills that computers do well. excellently tied to math that adults just don't use. And I could rip through most of what's covered in high school.
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Chapter 5: What factors contribute to the growing gender gap in K-12 education?
And in looking at the data, they've kind of flatlined against the standard of the test. They've increased in state rankings because many states have actually declined. And I think they're probably doing, you know, I visited every state on a trip I took, but that was 10 years ago. I suspect two things.
I suspect they figured out some things like, you know, the science of reading before other schools figured that out. But also, like, if you make one thing you're all in focus, if you get all sorts of pats on the back for a reading score boost for fourth graders, then that's what you're going to do.
And if you just direct all in focus on those two measures, you know, you would hope you'd get some improvement. And they've gotten some. But I actually think—and this sparked me to write the book— is, you know, I feel like there's a general sense of futility in the way people deal with these scores.
You know, because it's a cardinal scale that comes from the National Center of Education Statistics, and the scale runs from 0 to 500. And so we'll see swings of like three or four points on a scale of 0 to 500, and we impute the most significant consequence to that.
And when I interviewed the people who designed those tests, you know, it's like you realize, I think a lot of the people in these positions of authority and power are pretty math confused themselves. And I think the people who report on it don't know how to make sense of it. And then you'll see, and this is something most people are familiar with, you see kind of a cheap data visualization trick.
So if you have a four-point swing on a scale of 0 to 500, show it on a compressed scale of 10-point range or 20-point range, you can make three points look catastrophic or miraculous if you show three points on a 10-point range instead of a 0 to 500-point range. So I pay attention to the scores. I feel like our testing, if we used it thoughtfully and diagnostically, would yield some information.
But that's what we chase. And that's how we measure the success of a school or a district or a state or even a kid. And my issue with that is, look at what's happened. You know, like nationally, those scores have been flat for years. It's hard to find teachers wanting to enter the profession, so we've made that profession a real torture chamber. And kids are bored.
And when you look at what we would really love, I mean, don't we want kids who come out of high school just loving to read? Picking up a book, like your book, and saying, like, I can't put it down. Yet when you ask these kids, whether it's on a sample study basis or anecdotally when I travel over the country, They say, no, I don't really like reading.
A lot of kids in high school don't read a book cover to cover.
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Chapter 6: How can we better support students with diverse learning styles?
You know, like these math ideas, like how you estimate something or what an algorithm is or what does it mean to optimize or how do you think about decisions in a creative and logical way, I mean, they're not graduate school topics. These are things that get young kids excited about math, and yet schools don't get to it.
And the reason they don't get to it is those are complex, nuanced things that beg for creativity. that don't lend themselves to multiple choice, one right answer standardized exams. And so I think it's fair to say it's one of my criticisms is that the story of American education is we teach what's easy to test, not what's important to learn.
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Chapter 7: What role does parental involvement play in education outcomes?
And when I went, it was about a third, a third, a third, a third white, a third black, a third Latino. And now it's about 90 plus percent Latino. Basically anyone with any money seems to have abandoned the public school system in certain parts of the country.
And my understanding is it's more than just economics and funding that Democrats have thrown or have been accused of throwing a lot of money at the problem. And the problem continues to get worse. And then a lot of the data I've seen is that it's more about parental involvement than it is or engagement in the school than it is about resources.
Can you talk a little bit about the socioeconomic impact as it relates to public schools and the public-private dynamic over the last several decades?
Yeah. You know, I visit a lot of schools. As I mentioned, in 2015 and 16, I went to every state and visited 200 schools. And that ended up in my book, What School Could Be. An example that sort of makes the broader point is in Mississippi, I visit one school, Lanier High in Jackson. The building should be condemned. I mean, the ceiling is falling apart. The playground has broken glass all over.
And then you go like 12 miles away to Ridgefield, and it's like three football, you know, a major football stadium, two practice facilities.
A lazy river.
Yeah. And so I do think that, you know, while we put a lot of focus on Brown versus Board as a major Supreme Court decision, you know, maybe more important was Rodriguez versus San Antonio, where we basically said local property taxes can be the main driver for school funding. And so the kids that need the least get the most. The kids that get the most are the ones that are least needy.
And then the parents do weigh in. And so it sort of reinforces. And so you look at the overall flow. And it's very hard to see how kids in more challenging circumstances might look at this as a fair shake. Now, the thing I find, right, is that one of the things that I think amplifies the differences is that we have made school so darn boring.
You gotta do this just because you're assigned to do it. And when that's the case, the rich families get tutors and they bribe their kid with an iPhone and they've got schools that have really compelling teachers that do it. And it's very difficult for the kids in poor circumstances to keep up.
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Chapter 8: How can AI be integrated into the education system effectively?
Nobody's willing to say, but they tell me 75% female. So we may go after race or ethnicity or something, but that gender difference is enormous. But I'd also say that boys have different ways to react. And some just peel out and they are in a world of hurt going forward. But others just say, screw it, right? They go rogue. And they don't take school that seriously. And they sort of dodge things.
the meat grinder of school that erases that creativity and that entrepreneurial, you know, initiative. And so you look at, girls do way better in school. Girls ought to be three-quarters of our college, you know, student bodies. But then you look at the world of entrepreneurship, and I think that's For a lot of reasons, I don't want to oversimplify it, but it is heavily male-dominated.
And most of the guys that do really well, and I backed a lot, and you'd be a perfect example, kind of just chucked it in school. They just said, like, I'm not into this, right? And I've got enough self-confidence to feel like I can come through, but I don't like being told I've got to do something I don't see a point to. And how many of them, you know, that's the irony, right?
So many of the people that dropped out of school are the same ones that want more kids to, you know, to take calculus in high school. It's like, wait a minute, like you sort of went rogue. I think that actually proved to your advantage. You know, like, why don't we... Begin to think about what conditions led you to run with your entrepreneurial nature. How can we foster and develop that in kids?
Because, you know, it's there in every kid. It's not a girl or a boy thing. You know, you hang around with five-year-olds, they are like bursting with, you know, curiosity and creativity and they'll do almost anything. They don't mind failing and failing and failing. It's just the more we say, buckle down and do what school tells you to do, the more we
drive out of kids' certain characteristics and reinforce others. And as I say, that model made all sorts of sense in 1950. And I think we're in very difficult times now. And I think differentially, because of that latency in the development of brains among boys and girls, there's a differential impact that does a lot of damage, I think in both cases, right?
I think we're losing a lot of great female entrepreneurs because of this. And I think we're losing a lot of boys through the system that they just don't finish, you know, and it's just like, and it's heartbreaking.
What's interesting is your view is a little bit different than the public discourse I'm hearing. There's a lot of talk about going back to the basics. Look at Mississippi and Louisiana, let's return to the basics. And what you're saying is there needs to be an evolution, not a devolution, not a return to the basics, but we need to kind of unlock the beast. And I say the beast in a positive way.
We need to unlock the creative animal. How do you do that? How do you, especially at scale, recognize that not everyone is gonna go to Stanford and get a master's in engineering? Two-thirds of our kids are not gonna end up with traditional liberal arts college degrees. There's a path for the kid going to college, right?
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