John Kennedy, a director at the Corsi-Rosenthal Foundation, is tackling an overlooked crisis in American education: air quality.
With the ingenious use of a simple $60 box fan, he's on a mission to revolutionize the health and learning environments of students nationwide.
It's mind-boggling how much low-hanging fruit there is here. The difference that clean air makes to health and brain capacity is enormous, and it's a surprisingly cheap problem to fix. In fact, as you'll hear about halfway through our conversation, I was so convinced by John and the Corsi-Rosenthal team's solution that I committed to offering him a $100k Fellowship on the spot.
But our discussion went far beyond air quality. John shared fascinating insights into the future of education—how we can reorganize it from the ground up to produce happy, healthy, and high-agency adults ready for the challenges of the 21st century.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Links
Edited Highlights
The Hidden Crisis in Our Schools
“There's a study done in the early two thousands […] the median Texas elementary school had a particle CO2 of 1400 parts per million, which by some rough math is enough to reduce cognitive capacity by like 35%. So you can think of all of the ventilation challenges that we face, all of the filtration challenges as just making our kids dumber, making us dumber. If you've been in a conference room for an hour and the door opens, and I'll use the phrase breath of fresh air here, and it feels like you're a whole new person, you're thinking so much sharper. It's because you are. Poorly ventilated spaces slow down our brains, inhibit our creativity, reduce our focus and attention, and there's just so many educational social outcomes left on the table by accepting the poor state of systems the way that we are.”
Where Are All the Teachers?
“We are in an environment that is really hostile to teachers right now. Two-thirds of teachers who leave their jobs leave the system entirely. And when a district tries to open a new position, on average, they fill .55 positions for every position they open. So we are replacing just barely half of the open teacher vacancies we have, that disproportionately hurt the neediest populations. And more importantly, it's great to hear that the generation under you is becoming teachers. Because this switch happened in 2016, but for the first time in decades since this was measured, the net favorability of parents on their children becoming teachers was negative. So in other words, since 2016, parents have not wanted their kids to be teachers on that. So we are short a lot of teachers.”
School is an Adult Factory
“School districts are an adult factory. You put in a 5-year-old and a fully trained 18-year-old comes out and that's an enormous challenge that requires a lot of investment, that requires a lot of community help, it takes a village.”
Books Mentioned
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America; by George Packer
Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today, my guest is somebody whose work is really fascinating to me. His name is John Kennedy. He's a founder of EdTech companies, the chair of Clean AirK12.com, and a director at Corsi-Rosenthal Foundation and an AI leader at Panorama Education. John, welcome.
John Kennedy:
Thank you, Jim. It's great to be here. I appreciate it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
We were talking before we started and it astounds me that we haven't really done much looking at the quality of air and how it affects students. You're focusing on K-12, and I'm just going to let you start out here because I was blown away, not only by the fact that we were doing so little, but also the results of the putting in the air filter systems from Corsi-Rosenthal. Just tell us about that because that alone blew my mind.
John Kennedy:
Absolutely. We treat every input to our bodies except for air. We are very deliberate about the food we eat. We have extensive civic programs, government programs to address the water quality, but nobody gets to choose the air they breathe. And it is a frontier of public health and educational productivity, educational outcomes that has really been under-invested in.
John Kennedy:
It is something that we all became more aware of in 2020 when indoor air was the vehicle for COVID transmission. But whether it's other common cold, flu, etc. The quality of our indoor air has tremendous effects on our bodies and our minds and our society at large. This is a very solvable problem. Many of our buildings are very old, unfortunately, but you can improve the quality of your room that you're in for a very small amount of money. I have with me a Corsi-Rosenthal box, and I'm a director of the Corsi-Rosenthal Foundation.
John Kennedy:
Corsi-Rosenthal box is, as you can see, a box fan taped to four air filters. This is not particularly pretty. Our trade-off is that it's very effective. It outperforms things that you can buy for a few hundred dollars on Amazon. It's been significantly tested by the EPA and adopted all over the world, but it costs $60. And the way it works is you plug it in, the box fan runs, creates a negative pressure differential, sucks the air in through the filters and spews it out through the top. You leave it running for an hour, and the EPA has tested that it removes 99.4% of aerosols that cause and spread diseases. Asthma alone drives 10 million missed school days per year. And the pollutants that cause that can be removed by these filters as well. So the Corsi- Rosenthal Foundation advocates the spread of Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, which are these very simple ways to improve indoor air quality. There's other similar paths. There's bigger structural root cause interventions that you can take, but we think that this is one of the highest ROI things that we can do to improve K-12, improve society at large.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
When I first was reading your research and chatting with you before, when we first met, I really am astounded that a $60 air-purifying box can have those kinds of impacts. You had a great line about we didn't boil water like 2000 years ago, and now we know when you don't boil water, you expose yourself to all sorts of pathogens, all sorts of problems, and yet we're doing nothing about the air. I know you are, and I obviously support this, but my big question is why has nobody looked at this? I mean, with the billions and billions and billions that are spent both at the state and federal level on K-12 education, was it just overlooked?
John Kennedy:
It's a great question. It has been... I don't know if it's been over, it's certainly been overlooked. The first problem is that air quality does not have, I'll say the sour taste, that bad food or poor water quality might. Carbon monoxide is invisible. Carbon dioxide is invisible. The median Texas elementary school, there's a study done in the early two thousands, and I'll say that conditions have probably gotten worse since then, not better because the buildings have gotten older, investment has reduced, but the median Texas elementary school had a particle CO2 of 1400 parts per million, which by some rough math is enough to reduce cognitive capacity by like 35%.
John Kennedy:
So you can think of all of the ventilation challenges that we face, all of the filtration challenges as just making our kids dumber, making us dumber. If you've been in a conference room for an hour and the door opens, and I'll use the phrase breath of fresh air here, and it feels like you're a whole new person, you're thinking so much sharper. It's because you are.
John Kennedy:
Poorly ventilated spaces slow down our brains, inhibit our creativity, reduce our focus and attention, and there's just so many educational social outcomes left on the table by accepting the poor state of systems the way that we are. We have given grants... Not we, but us as a society, as a government. We have given grants to support new, one-time, one-off things to prevent COVID in schools, for example, or modify HVAC systems, but the root cause is really expensive to solve. The GAO, the Government Accountability Office of the federal government did a study in 2020 that found that 41% of school districts need to replace at least half of their HVAC units.
John Kennedy:
So there's this enormous surface area of the country that is just, to just use K-12 as an example, is forced to go to school in a poorly ventilated room that's going to mitigate their educational outcomes. There is a natural study in Los Angeles. So there's a gas leak in 2015 in the Los Angeles area, and as part of the settlement, the offending party was forced to install new air filters in all the schools surrounding the leak. The test scores and the student achievement outcomes went up dramatically, like math and English scores went up point two standard deviations, which is roughly in the range of sending a kid to KIPP, the top charter network, reducing the class size by a third. It's Tennessee study that transformed educational reform in the late nineties, early two thousands.
John Kennedy:
And I mean, I've worked in K-12 for my entire life since I was 16. Student for a while. Most K-12 problems are really hard to solve because they come down to really ingrained systems. They come down to structural community issues. They come down to things that are really hard and expensive to solve. We love the Corsi-Rosenthal Box. What fires me up about this work is that it's $60 per classroom per year to make this difference. It's so cheap, it's so transformative.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I want to get to all of the many, many ills that I hope you and others like you are going to be able to solve in K-12. But before then, I had a personal experience which made me really intuitively understand the importance of the air quality and my family and I were lucky enough to be in Nepal and we took a helicopter up to see Everest. One of the things that you have to sign, this is sort of funny, we were had to sign releases before we were able to get on the helicopter. And I'm reading it and you're going through it and, well, wait a minute, the helicopter can drop us off anywhere if it gets an emergency call? How does that work? But then the one at the bottom was, "By signing this, I acknowledge that I most likely will die."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so I start laughing and pointing it out to my wife and saying, "Oh, well obviously this was a translation issue." And our Australian helicopter pilot came up and he goes, "No, mate, they really mean it." And so as it happened, he got an emergency call. He had to go save somebody who was climbing Everest who had badly broken their leg. Luckily where he put us down was a restaurant at 18, 000 feet or something like that. And they had oxygen, but they didn't have enough. And so my son-in-law and I didn't use the oxygen, my wife and my daughter did, and I had the experience that you're talking about, but writ large, literally I could feel my mind shutting down. And as I'm talking to my son-in-law, I'm like, "This is Flowers for Algernon, man. I am getting dumber by the second."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And that feeling, I'd never experienced anything like that. Literally your cognitive, the degrading of your cognitive abilities was in real time, fascinating to me. But I'm like, this is really bizarre. And then so he came back, he got us and he did kind of a fast descent, and literally we all felt the oxygen hitting our systems and it was the coolest thing ever because all of that confusion, the feeling like you had a head full of wool, all of that went away.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So after that experience, I talked about it quite a bit with people who were mountain climbers and everything, but to experience it, that's why I was so very interested when I met you and I'm like, wow. Obviously when you're 18,000 feet and waiting for a helicopter to come back and get you, you understand that's a unique circumstance, but you don't think about the fact that we have this problem today in our American schools.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So now to the plethora of problems plaguing K-12 in the United States, you've picked a... I admire you because you've picked a really, really difficult place to make a difference, right? Because as you mentioned, all sorts of different school districts, they have different rules, they have different objectives, et cetera. How do you scale a project like this? Do you do proof of concept? Do you put them in the worst schools? Do you put them in average schools? I'd just like your game plan for where the impact would be seen the most.
John Kennedy:
Absolutely. The K-12 market I think is really misunderstood because most people have a very direct experience with the K-12 system as consumers and customers of one district or property tax payers in one district or parents of one district. We have very few repeat players in K-12, folks that see a variety of districts, and there's a variety of challenges. So in the market, there's a few ways to define a school district or a local education agency. There's roughly 14,000 of them in the country. Several of them predate the United States. There's some in Long Island that go back to the 17th century. It is the classic example of the 10th Amendment. It's the thing that is not enumerated in the Constitution so it is left to the states to figure out. So we do not have one overarching K-12 system in the country.
John Kennedy:
There's a new political change happening and discourse around eliminating the Department of Education. Without commenting on the motives or the faith behind those people, I will say the Department of Education is a relatively low influence on the quality of their school district in the country. The federal government only really got involved in K-12 with the Brown V. Board enforcement and decision. And the main investment of the Department of Education has been in civil rights enforcement, but also they do really important work that I want to be very specific about in supporting what are sometimes called wraparound services, which are the social services that a school district performs to make sure that, for example, if you are a Title 1 student and you are eligible for free and reduced lunch, that when you're not in school, you can have food. That is something that school districts can often be on the vehicles of the front lines. And we have put a lot, as a country, we've kicked a lot of cans or we passed a lot of bags to somebody further along the food chain, and that can often enter the school district.
John Kennedy:
So there's 14,000 school districts in the country, recording this from New York City. New York City Department of Education has one out of every 50 of those students. It is by far the largest school system in the country. Go down, further down the market, there's another 25% of a student body nationally in the next 200 schools. Then there's at the bottom, 20% of students go to a school district that is fewer than 300 students. I talked to a district in Montana a couple months ago that has 350 students outside of Kalispell, I believe, and they are in the top decile of Montana districts. There's a district in Montana that has six students.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Wow.
John Kennedy:
So when you think of how to scale a problem, in this market you're not dealing with one market, you're dealing with 50 markets. You are dealing with states like Montana, you're dealing with states like Hawaii that are just one system, then you're dealing with states like New York, for example, where we have the biggest district, we have over a thousand really small districts, and then we have intermediary leaders in New York, for example. They're called the BOCES, where these smaller districts can share services and get financially reimbursed for things that they purchase through BOCES. So it's Byzantine at times. It's complicated and it does not receive a fraction of the funding that other socially important systems like healthcare, for example, have.
John Kennedy:
In K-12 software, the elephant in the room company is PowerSchool. PowerSchool was the first cloud-based student information system in the late 1990s. It was acquired by Apple in 2001 for around 73 million in Apple stock, which now is worth around $28 billion, which is, by rough math, I think five times the amount that Bain Capital just paid to take PowerSchool private. So this is a market that is very, very fragmented. PowerSchool was backed by two really big private equity firms, they made 15 acquisitions. They went public, and when they got taken private last year, their market, and this is what I'm getting to their market capitalization, was in the mid 10 figures, their annual revenue was 650 or so million.
John Kennedy:
So the biggest company in the space is 650 million in annual revenue. I think by comparison, Google makes 16 billion in income every quarter. These are not big markets. So when you scale something in K-12, school districts, a school district has two functions that are separate but bundled together, daycare and instruction. There's a duty that you drop your kid off to school and the school is going to take care of them. And so there's great companies that have been built in K-12 on the maintenance side.
John Kennedy:
I know of a company that all they do is attendance, dismissal management for K-12, that process of picking kids up in carpool, that's a vertical [inaudible 00:32:23]. But then on the instructional side, when most people think of ed tech, they think of something that's going to help kids learn better. When we think of the promise of AI, one of the enormous frontiers is creating these personalized learning environments to simulate one-on-one tutoring. When we go back thousands of years, what's the most durable form of history? Most durable form of education? It's one-on-one tutoring. It's Alexander the Great being tutored by Aristotle, right? Maybe you're better on this than I.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Aristotle was his tutor.
John Kennedy:
Yeah. So now if you go into a classroom, it is a teacher teaching to 30 kids or so. The teacher is been a lifer at that school perhaps, the teacher is perhaps part of a union that has lobbyists and the students are not, the teacher is presenting to 30 kids who are going through it at their own pace, the teacher's trying to keep pace with them all at the same time. And it's very, at once very personal, very fragmented, and we have some fantastic teachers in this country, but it's a really rough time to be a teacher right now.
John Kennedy:
And that's who, when we're going to spread Clean Air K12, that's who our primary audience is right now. So when you go to cleanairk12.com, if you are a teacher, you can apply to receive a Corsi-Rosenthal Box, and we will probably give it to you, where you can go and we will send you a box fan and air filters to install in your classroom, and you can put it together as a STEM project, give kids agency over how to improve their own indoor environment. So you as a teacher, the kids can learn better. If you are a parent, if you are a grandparent, we would love to be able to support your kid's classroom. We just have to make sure that the teacher is involved and the principal knows about it and stuff like that.
John Kennedy:
But teachers and schools, they are not doing that for the money, they're doing it for the love of what they do. And they as a result tend to think of themselves as practitioners where for example, they do not adopt products, they adopt practices. So they do not adopt a name brand or they're not adopting Gemini or ChatGPT. They're adopting AI and they're doing something with AI. And when you're creating a new solution in K-12 and broadcasting it and evangelizing it, there's a really strong loop that you have to tap into of creating a success story, enabling that partner to broadcast that success story to an audience of their peers, creating more interest, turning that into more success stories and turning that into more interest.
John Kennedy:
So this product marketing sales implementation loop is what drives successful K-12 companies. There's also obviously a lot of other ways you can grow that involve getting state funding or being the solution of choice by state. There's enterprise, really strong enterprise motions in K-12, but for us, we are trying to drive bottom-up adoption first where we can create a volume of success stories where teachers can adopt these boxes, have kids build them, and have kids take agency over their improved class and use that to drive more interest. We're trying to speak at a lot of conferences this year and ultimately work with districts and higher-level systems to go top-down because unlike, for example, a student information system or another big expensive data system, unlike a charter school, unlike any other sort of big intervention or change you want to make in K-12, this is four air filters, a box fan, you plug it in and it works.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and as you were explaining, I wondered would it make sense to try to first convert the teachers' unions who would then disseminate that down to the individual teachers? Because if I'm understanding you correctly, any teacher in K-12 could request one of these boxes, and as you said, you'd likely give it to them. How would you be prepared? Let's say you gave a speech at the annual Convention of Teachers Unions and everyone was like, "Holy shit, that's amazing. For 60, we got to let all of our teachers know." Could you satisfy if suddenly a bunch of K-12 teachers were requesting the box? Is that a scalable solution?
John Kennedy:
Yeah, we've been deliberate so far to make sure that we don't overextend ourselves. We are a non-profit, we're 501(c)(3), but we've been backed by 3M, and we're very grateful for 3M. They've donated filters, they're top of the line, 20 inch square, 1 inch thick double-plated filters, which are really, really strong. That's not what I've showed. I've showed a mini-Corsi-Rosenthal Box, but to also say who Corsi-Rosenthal are, they are the two founders of this box design. They have open-sourced the box design, and we estimate that a quarter million of them have been built around the world. But Rich Corsi is the Dean of engineering at UC Davis, formerly at UT Austin, is a renowned air quality and air chemist expert and speaker on these issues. And Jim Rosenthal is the founder and CEO of Tex-Air Filters, which is one of the leading air filter manufacturers and suppliers in the State of Texas.
John Kennedy:
So we have both a really strong academic and research credibility wing of the board, and then we also have practitioners like Jim and volunteers and indoor air quality advocates who have promoted this work. So we are really lucky to have a really strong board, but we are looking to build our capacity. And so if we have right now been deliberate and intentional about who we try to work with to get these off the ground earlier, obviously if you're part of an organization that can fund this in other ways as philanthropy, we do prioritize need and try to work with those first. But we are looking to grow our capacity. We are looking to raise money to scale up more of this work.
John Kennedy:
In 2024, you can see the annual report on our website or at cleanairk12.com. We did not spend money as a nonprofit on anything other than these box materials and sending them out. So we have been in this state of developing a model, driving adoption, demonstrating that this works and can scale, and now we are looking to begin building more systemic capacity around that so we can hire a full-time executive director, for example.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So I live in the New York City metro area. I know you're in New York. What would it cost? Let's say somebody, a philanthropist said, "I want to put these boxes in every classroom in New York." First off, would New York let that happen? Which is a bizarre question to ask, but given my friend Philip Howard has written extensively on this, the rules that govern New York City teachers are thicker than a phone book. And for you youngsters, a phone book used to have, they were very thick and had everyone's phone number listed in them, on what they can and can't do? Philip's view is that we've let the rules replace the human on the scene, right? The teacher. And I've heard horror stories from him about teachers where a kid has had something horrible happen to them emotionally, the teacher is not allowed to hug that because of some event that happened years ago, et cetera. But my question is what would it cost to put one of these boxes in every New York City public K-12 classroom?
John Kennedy:
It would cost a small fraction of the total budget. I would estimate that it would cost probably around $10 million. And I believe the New York City DOE total budget is $40 billion. I'll give you an example. If you're in Connecticut, perhaps, you are eligible for a grant. The State of Connecticut gave a grant to the School of Public Health at UConn under their Clean Air Equity Response program. And the University of Connecticut has a indoor air quality initiative. The leader of that is a friend of our foundation, Marina Creed. She did incredible work in shepherding this through, and they have an $11.5 million pocket of state money that they can give out to any classroom in a public school in Connecticut that wants one of these. And I think that's a really fantastic model. We are looking to set those up. We are in a discussion with two universities across the country.
John Kennedy:
Right now, these are big flagship state universities to set these up at their school of public health. And I'll also give credit, you mentioned the unions. The unions were really influential in getting this on board in Connecticut. And that collaboration of every stakeholder looking to push their issues forward and protect their constituents can find something in this. Whether your issue is public health, test scores, academic achievement, environmental justice, chronic absenteeism is a major issue in K-12 right now. Over, I think 15% of our nation's student body is chronically absent, meaning that they're missing 10% or more of their school days. So whatever your driver for caring about public schools are, there's something to like about the Corsi-Rosenthal Box. There's something to like about improving indoor air quality. We advocate for the Corsi-Rosenthal Box because we think it's the cheapest, most effective path there.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Again, I'm just a bit mystified here because this, when you mentioned the cost versus the budget of the school district, this is a rounding error and it just seems to me like this is a no-brainer. Why is there... First off, let me not assume, is there resistance from anywhere within the K-12 community against doing this? And if there is, why in the hell is that the case? And then the other question I have is a more practical one. Let's say I said to you, because we give fellowships and grants, let's say that I said to you, "We're going to give you $100,000 to make a huge impact on people understanding how absolutely critical this is and how the price that you pay versus the outcomes." I mean, this is the return. If you were a VC looking at the returns of this, you would be like, "I'm in."
John Kennedy:
Absolutely. To the first point, nobody's resistant to breathing cleaner air. It's a resource that we all share. It's something that it's not like teachers get better air in the break room than students do in the classroom. Everybody benefits from breathing better air, and everybody is on board with this. For the Corsi-Rosenthal Box specifically, we prioritize cost and effectiveness over, for example, size and noise. So I mean, it is a box fan. I'd say the resistance that we've gotten so far is like, "Oh, I don't want to turn this on," but it's cost. We had a educator in a Texas district reach out to us. We worked with our principal to advocate a campus-wide program. We were going to put a Corsi-Rosenthal Box in every classroom through a teacher who's going to build them and distribute them.
John Kennedy:
And the district shut it down because they didn't want one class... they didn't want one campus to have bigger... sorry, have better air than the others. They didn't want to just segment this to one part of their district. And so if we got $100,000 grant, I might go back to them and say, "Well, guess what? Your district can have air filters, improved air filtration in every classroom. We can take care of that." Right now, our foundation has been extremely deliberate about who we support because we do not have the funding to continue to scale our work. If we were able to take several orders of magnitude more than what we've gotten so far, I mean, we've gotten great support from Flu Lab, from Clean Air Kits, from the Lookout Foundation, but we think that there's an enormous frontier ahead that we can pursue.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I'm going to put you on the spot here. What is the worst district for the quality of the air for the students, number one? Number two, how far would $100,000 grant get you in using that as a focal point for people to see, here's before, here's after? And obviously this would be a multi-year endeavor, because you'd need enough data to prove the efficacy of what you're talking about. I know that you have that already. Prior to recording with you, I looked up the results of some of the boxes, and they're really extraordinary. 20% reduction in absenteeism. You mentioned test scores. It would take almost the rest of the podcast to list all of the benefits. So if you had $100,000, and I said, I want you to put these as a test case in the worst air quality public schools in the country, where is that? And would you do it?
John Kennedy:
Well, today in January when we're recording this, it's in Los Angeles.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Of course.
John Kennedy:
We haven't talked about wildfire smoke, but people have adopted Corsi-Rosenthal boxes. They are tested by the EPA to be effective against wildfire smoke.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Wow. Okay. So how much-
John Kennedy:
I can give you an answer in a vacuum though.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Okay.
John Kennedy:
I would maybe pick Galena Park in Texas, which is a district almost entirely on the east side of Houston in the very industrial area. So you think of that significant effect of going from 18,000 feet in Nepal, being oxygen-deprived going down. If you grow up, if your parents buy a house in a cancer cluster and you're zoned to a school in the shadow of an oil refinery, that is going to dramatically change your learning environment, your air quality, and as such, your ability to focus in a class
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And how much would that $100,000 be able to cover in that particular district?
John Kennedy:
That would cover the whole district easily.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right. I'll tell you what. I wasn't planning on this, but I will commit to you on podcast. I'll give you $100,000 to do exactly that.
John Kennedy:
That is fantastic, Jim. I have worked with Clean Air Park in the past, and I'll reach out to them. And you are making podcast history here, but we would want to give them multiple years worth of Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, which is a mechanism we already do. We can reach out to our board, and bring in capacity for air quality monitoring, and do our best to make this as rigorous as possible, given that grant. That is really, really exciting and generous of you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Again, it's one of these problems that there is a solution. The solution works, and it really frustrates me to listen to the fact that this isn't already in every school district in our K-12 public school system. It's absurd to me. So the other thing that I would urge you to do is to try to find as many matching grants from this $100,000, because this is crazy. It's literally crazy to me that you are sitting there with a $60 solution, and that there are kids in the shadow of oil. Listen, my grandfather made his entire fortune in oil. He proceeded to give away most of it throughout his life. I'm not preaching against oil here. I'm just saying, that's a bad situation. Let's see what happens. I'm delighted that we can get a project going with you, because I definitely think that this is very worthwhile.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And again, the return on investment here is just staggering to me. So we'll do the details after you look into them, saying absolutely, yes. But I commit right now, you've got your $100,000 to do that school district. I want to change topics though, because you're also an entrepreneur in the profit side of K-12. I want to talk a little bit about that, but I want to challenge you but and say blank slate. You are looking at a blank sheet of paper and I tell you, John, I want you to use first principles to design an excellent K-12 educational system for the 21st century. It's not going to look very much like the one we have, but tell me, what does it look like?
John Kennedy:
So we think of the two components of that, and you're really putting me on the spot here, as this is awesome. As daycare, you're putting me on the spot for this, and you're putting me on the spot to propose a $100,000 grant. This is certainly not your out of the box podcast. I'll bifurcate the daycare and instructional piece. I think that, let's start with the place. We've talked about air quality. This is ideally a campus that has a variety of natural features, where students can learn and engage with the outdoors, where they are not confined to the dimensions of the classroom for what they can learn. This is a place where it's a walkable environment. This is a place ideally in a neighborhood where students can engage with their families, that families can come. So many problems in K-12 come down to busing and getting kids on... Obviously there's a racial history to when you think of busing, but just the logistics of getting kids from point A to point B is complicated.
John Kennedy:
And I would focus on the quality of the student's day, and the quality of their air, the quality of their food, the quality of their instructional environment. And then going into the instructional environment, teachers that can empower students with as much agency as possible every day. Students who are held accountable. Accountability is important. Nobody likes accountability, but we need scorecards. But students deserve to feel comfortable in these accountability standards. Educators deserve to feel comfortable and empowered, to know how their students are doing, and to feel like they can do their best to support students with personalized education. We haven't talked about AI in K-12 much yet, but the promise of AI is that it gets us back, as I said, to that one-on-one tutoring model. And every student has a unique interaction, a unique relationship with their curriculum. Every student has a unique relationship with their educator. Constructionally, we would look to design a school around that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, we are investors in Synthesis school, which is mostly math, but it's entirely AI tutoring. And the results over there are, again, ridiculously good. And it's interesting to me, and I am a proponent of aggressively using AI to transform education, not just for kids by the way, but for all of us, because the research is overwhelmingly positive to this notion of one-on-one tutoring. And what people who haven't looked deeply into AI might not understand, is that the AI can learn from its interactions with the individual student. I'm a big believer that we are from the era that our old schools were designed for, with mass production. So I'm sure most of our schooling was designed to satisfy the industrialists who needed people to be able to sit in a room for eight hours and take instruction on what to do, making them good factory workers, et cetera.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
We don't live in that world anymore. We live in a world where mass customization is now possible at every level, and AI tutors are just one of those levels. This does not replace teachers. People get worried about, "Oh, my God. It's going to replace the..." Not at all. In fact, the teacher will be able to do their job, in my opinion... Now, obviously I'm biased here because I'm investing in these AI tutor companies, so let's get that on the table too. But they're not meant to replace the teacher. They're meant to augment the teacher, allow the teacher to do higher value work with the student. You speak about agency, you speak about scorecards. All of that becomes, I think, doable if you've got a system, a new system, this first principal system where teachers are not only embracing the ability to use one-on-one tutoring through an AI program, but they're also interacting with the students in a completely different way than they had to in the past, where they could really make a difference.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
This is near and dear to my heart, because early education has been one of my family's interests for a long, long time. Mainly my sister, Molly, who does Montessori, but now my daughter and son-in-law are going to be teachers in one, my son-in-law K-12. My daughter is looking for a high school. So there are so many better ways to do things. And then when I first met you, I'm like, "Wait, wait. Why aren't these boxes in every school right now?" And then the next part, which we're talking about now, which is, then this is a much harder thing to conquer, because of the entrenched interests and systems that we already have in place. Again, since I'm going to be grilling you with hard questions here, and I had you just design a new K-12, I'm going to ask you this, how to overcome the inertia or opposition to innovation. Because one of the things that I see from outside is, there does seem to be a lot of opposition from especially teachers unions towards innovation, towards these things, because, and I think quite rightly, there's a fear there, we're going to be replaced, or we'll get paid less or whatever. I don't think that's the case, but help me understand how you might overcome, if there was an organized opposition. Now I'm not talking about the air part. I'm talking about the AI tutor aspect.
John Kennedy:
Yeah. Nobody is in charge of the opposition here, and I think every interest group exists for a reason. Teachers unions are quite effective at advocating teachers, because teachers are not paid well at all. Let's look at the labor market for teachers. We are in an environment that is really hostile to teachers right now. Two-thirds of teachers who leave their jobs leave the system entirely. And when a district tries to open a new position, on average, they fill .55 positions for every position they open. So we are replacing just barely half of the open teacher vacancies we have, that disproportionately hurt the neediest populations. And more importantly, it's great to hear that the generation under you is becoming teachers. Because this switch happened in 2016, but for the first time in decades since this was measured, the net favorability of parents on their children becoming teachers was negative.
John Kennedy:
So in other words, since 2016, parents have not wanted their kids to be teachers on that. So we are short a lot of teachers. They certainly are not paid very well. There've been very high profile strikes and movements to get teacher salaries up, and the pipeline of teachers is not where it should be. There are a lot of issues here. And I think the one driver of this, I have a view. The default state of any organization is calcification. Without change, you just stay the same and grow more set in your ways. The things that mitigate this are competition and growth. When somebody else is competing against you, that's a far more effective catalyst typically for your own improvement than just in a vacuum. There's the Michael Jordans and the Kobe Bryants, the merciless competitors out there. Most of us, myself included, need a little push to get something going.
John Kennedy:
You've set the bar very high where now, all right, we've got to figure out how to spend $100,000 on Corsi-Rosenthal boxes wisely, and have a really, really good output at the end. That is a bar that I was not going to set for myself before. And now, how lucky am I? But then also growth. I think that dynamics, the hostility is nature of a zero-sum or negative sum game. And in many big school districts, enrollment is decreasing, which means that funding goes out the door with it. And if you're looking at the root cause of maybe why our buildings in K-12 haven't been invested as much, it's because, this is from our former board chairman, but 82% of the costs of a school district are fixed. So as you lose students, the rule of thumb is that a student gets $10,000 in state funding to attend. The district gets $10,000 per student. So if rural areas that can be adjusted more, if the student's taking, for example, career and technical education classes, district can receive more funding for them. But when those students leave big urban school districts, the funding goes out the door with them and the pie gets smaller for everybody. You see these dynamics on the much friendlier side. You remove this hostility when you're in a district that's growing, that has to build new schools, that has to try new things for the first time. A lot of our urban schools right now are closing schools, and having to make really hard choices about the future of their schools. Chicago is a really notable example of a district that is choosing to layer on more and more debt, that is refusing to close schools. And that's just a really tough situation for everybody involved. So how do we avoid these? We play positive sum games. We look for the growth, and this is so much easier said than done, but these are suburban districts that are seeing really strong growth. These are places where there's new funding coming in. K-12 and the quality of our nation's schools has not been as nearly as vocal as pronounced of a political discussion as it has been in decades past.
John Kennedy:
This was a major Democrat issue. Republicans, George W. Bush oversaw enormous amount of educational investments. It's been a bipartisan concern with different views, but a lot of discussion about how we can make our schools better, that I feel like in the last couple of election cycles, I have not heard nearly as much about it. And it speaks more broadly to the continued fragmentation of America, where the systems and institutions that we all used to go to together are now dissolving in the same way or fragmenting. George Packer has a great book, The Unwinding, which is a good way to describe it. I went to University of North Carolina, proud Tar Heel. My grandmother says I'm a seventh generation Tar Heel. I don't know if that's true, but if she says it is, it absolutely is. And the University of North Carolina is one of the best public schools in the country. I have a really close friend who, one of their best friends from school turned down Penn to pursue a program that he got into at UNC.
John Kennedy:
It's the oldest public school in the country. Chapel Hill's a beautiful place. I've lived there on and off, went to school there. I still have place there. And what makes it such an attractive place is a variety of factors. One, it gets to choose the students it lets in. There's only around 200 universities. And most people think that there's all these selective schools, that all these colleges are selective. That's not the case in all. The median college would love for you to spend your money there, and for you to go. There's only 200 schools really that reject more students than they accept. University of North Carolina is in that category. They're great, for many reasons, basketball program, ending Coach K's career and beating Duke multiple times in 2022 is high up there. I have to plug that. But we get to choose who we let in. We get to be intentional about the community that we build, and we have significant investment from all pockets of the state and a variety of stakeholders. And a lot of what I just said is not true for most public school districts across the country.
John Kennedy:
So I think in general, North Carolina is a state that has the second-highest rate of domestic migration in the country. The public university is a key economic driver, and has been. 70 years ago, North Carolina was in the bottom deck isle of States and quality of life. Now it's in the top deck isle, and a huge driver of that, besides air conditioning, is the University of North Carolina and the other systems around it. So I think transitioning from finding places where we can play positive sum games, much easier said than done, but that's how you remove hostility and that structural antagonism from it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
What about the charter school system? I've seen several documentaries on it. I've read many books about it. And it does seem that there is a lot of hostility from the teachers in public schools to charter schools. Do you think that that's a wedge issue? For example, dropping the boxes into charter schools first? I'm literally spit balling here. I want your opinion.
John Kennedy:
Charter schools, first, do they work? Does going to a median charter provide a better educational experience than going to the median public school? The science is very mixed on that. And one, it's very hard to measure. And I'll say zooming all the way out, the most consistent finding in educational research is that your life is going to be changed by your parents and those closest around you more than the school. If you look at the number of hours a child spends in a given school year, they only spend around 9% of their time in class. So charter schools, do they work on net? The science is mixed.
John Kennedy:
There's some exceptional charter schools that are absolutely some of the best schools in the country. There are also regulatory environments that allow things to happen in charter schools that are antagonistic common sense. There was a famous Florida example of an entrepreneur who took a lot of state money to open up a charter school and trying to think, "Well, how can I best increase the throughput of this building? Well, naturally I can use it from when kids aren't in school." So there was a combination charter school and nightclub.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Okay.
John Kennedy:
So it depends, and this is another example where we don't have one overarching system. We don't have one overarching body result. We have 50 different statewide charter school systems. And the antagonism comes from the fact that, as I said, when the students leave a public school to go to a charter school, the money goes with them. So if a hundred students roughly leave a big school district to go to the local new charter, the district loses $1 million in funding, and they still have to keep those same buildings up. They still have to make those same commitments to their staff and to their teachers, and it gets hard for them.
John Kennedy:
So I think that's where the antagonism comes from. I think charters have done exceptional work in creating new models and new discussions. And you can see here in New York for example, there's ways to mold charter innovation with traditional public school structures. In New York, there's a group called the Urban Assembly, which has a contract where they manage career programs, career focused schools for New York City DOE. The students are part of New York City DOE, they receive New York City DOE education, they're public school students, but the charters manage programs inside. And so there is, I think, no dogmatic charter approach. It demonstrates how complicated these institutions can be and comes down to the same community and local issues that drive K-12 in the first place.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Are there issues or processes and paths that private schools are using that would be easy and affordable? So let's take the money out because private schools obviously, depending on what kind of private school it is, often have a lot more money than a public school. But are there things that are going on in private schools that could be easily and affordably ported over to public schools?
John Kennedy:
I don't think so. I think private schools by nature are able to select the students they let in. Public schools are not. Think of any business that had no control over their supply, a restaurant that couldn't pick their produce. That's the difference between public and private schools. Private schools get to attract a population that does not by nature want to go to a public school. And the thing that I worry most about our K-12 system is the continued flight out of public schools and the bifurcation of our student body into those who can leave and do leave and those that can't leave, the students that are disproportionately much more expensive to educate, the students that have special needs, that need special accommodations for whom it is just not practical or viable or available for them to go to a private school. And there's efforts in states to offer school vouchers and subsidize this.
John Kennedy:
Private schools by nature are just like they are built to have more control and more resources over how they run their school. I can't think of many ... Because the key word you said was affordable, innovations at private schools. And I was very lucky to go to a private school myself and I had a great education, but I don't think that there's things that public schools can look at private schools as doing ... There's certainly instructional models that have been pioneered, there's things that by private schools being laboratories for new ideas that they can do well, but structurally I'm a little skeptical.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Okay, so let's change gears and put your hat as an entrepreneur on. What excites you right now that you're seeing in the for-profit sector that is ed tech or educational K-12 related? What are the things that you're seeing that in addition to the clean air, which seems to be kind of like table stakes, but what are you seeing there that could be really exciting for the public sector?
John Kennedy:
You're going to be shocked. It's AI. My professional background is I started a company when I was in high school automating a back office process for school counselors. We ran that for six years and got acquired by Panorama Education in early 2023 and Panorama supports a quarter of the nation's student body roughly. We have strong district relationships in New York City. For example, if you've been in a cab and see the school survey ad where they're trying to get you to fill out a school survey, we run that. It's the nation's largest non-census survey in the country. We have a tremendous amount of data which we are implementing with our kind of responsible LLM implementation. So we've been able to implement an LLM inside of that same technology environment that has all that data and folks are coming up with incredible use cases for it. And it matters because there's two frontiers of AI that I think are going to be enormously impactful to K-12. The first is, as we said, the personalized learning environment, the promise that you can truly create a dynamic responsive learning environment where students ... You may have as a district invested in a big curriculum and AI is the vehicle to help you map that to a specific student and their needs and do that really, really easily.
John Kennedy:
And the second part is educators' time spent, educator productivity because teachers, you would think that a teacher is trying to spend their time personalizing their education for a student, personalizing their instruction. They just don't have the time to do that. So roughly a teacher only spends around half their time in their day actually working with students. The other time they spend in preparation for their class, administration, professional development. And the promise of AI being able to take things that educators do that are really well-suited to LLMs, like lesson plan generation or text leveling or taking something that ... My district gave me this curriculum that we've invested in that we're excited about, that's got a lot of promise. But ultimately when the rubber meets the road and it gets delivered to a student, there's work in just packaging that the right way that AI can be really, really good at.
John Kennedy:
So for example, coming up with a custom quiz for Jim based on what we know his needs are, that's something that AI can do really quickly [inaudible 01:14:53] material amount of time for an individual to do and they can do it programmatically. So solutions are coming out and I think at Panorama I'm leading our work on Solara, which I think is the most exciting out of all of these, but I'm very biased in that, where we can work with districts specifically to customize their own AI limitations and do this at scale. So I think the promise ultimately of AI, we mentioned those teacher retention statistics and the challenges that districts and our systems are having as a whole in attracting people to become teachers and retaining teachers. We can remove an enormous amount of toil that teachers face in just doing their job by adopting LLMs around them.
John Kennedy:
And I think that is our off ramp when we talk about zero-sum games. Without AI, it's like hire more teachers and spend more money and get that money from somewhere and where is that money going to come from? AI offers an off ramp to these really challenging zero-sum problems in K-12s and I think it is absolutely the future. And there's great companies that are building solutions in these space, there's companies that are building entire schools around these concepts. At Panorama, we really believe in school districts and are excited to be able to partner with as many of them as we are.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Again, I'm really going to put you through your paces here. Let's look 20 years hence. If the public school districts implemented several of the ideas that we have been talking about on the podcast, what does that look like? What does that look like when my grandchildren's kids are going to a public school?
John Kennedy:
It looks like they have a much more differentiated path and day than they do right now. It looks like the investments that their districts make in, I've mentioned curriculum for example, are things that every individual student will take a different path related to their different interests and different challenges for. At Panorama, for example, we have a ton of data about student well-being, about student life skills. These are things that you can quantify about how well students are feeling and how they're prepared for the world after. And we haven't, not we as in Panorama, we're doing it now. As a system, we have not mapped student journeys to that because we haven't had the capacity to do that. If we look at AI as an infinite army of teaching assistants, your grandchildren will have fully unique instructional environments. Every day, they will be offered something that's exciting to learn in the most engaging way that they can learn it, in the way that's best suited for their skills.
John Kennedy:
I think another really interesting development that I mentioned briefly is career and technical education where the preparation of what's called college and career readiness and that space in K-12 has shifted dramatically away from making sure kids are graduating high school and going to college to thinking more critically about their path and preparing them for a more and more holistic real world. And so I grew up in Houston. Houston ISD was the first district that we worked with at my company. And Houston ISD has a school at Hobby Airport that produces trained pilots and flight mechanics and the integration of these career programs into school curriculum, pretty much every state across the country offers some sort of increased funding for this work and districts can give their students real world experiences in ways that are very, very different from the career just like the shop class 20 years ago.
John Kennedy:
So that's a frontier where I think our districts are doing a really good job of preparing students very practically for opportunities that are available to them immediately after graduation because that's another thing that we haven't talked about. School districts are an adult factory. You put in a 5-year-old and a fully trained 18-year-old comes out and that's an enormous challenge that requires a lot of investment, that requires a lot of community help, it takes a village. And that's something that districts are responding really well to that challenge of when a kid graduates, what are they ready for?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I think looking at reframing it and looking at it, what you just said I think is a great way to look at it. You're creating adults and one of the reasons I'm so interested in this space is because how do you prioritize almost anything above creating the next generation of adults who are going to lead society and have jobs in society and be society? If we are doing a really poor job of that, guess what happens? Pretty soon society starts to crumble and look like Idiocracy was the school district as opposed to anything else. So I think to me, this is just such an obvious important topic and so I'm delighted that there are young people like you who are pushing this ball up a hill. Do you sometimes feel like Sisyphus where you just pushing that boulder and it rolls back down? Or are you excited about what you're seeing?
John Kennedy:
I'm lucky that I get to be on the front lines of districts adopting AI and that has been in mind, I'm 25, I've not had a very long career, but this is my 10th year now as a software developer and technology entrepreneur working in K-12. And the excitement around AI, the momentum, this is the fastest adoption curve in human history and to be able to be on the front lines of it certainly makes me feel like that boulder is getting further up the hill every day.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Very, very cool stuff, John. All right, you will come back to me then with the plan for putting these air filters into that entire school district. I will be absolutely fascinated to watch the results stream in because the results that you've achieved already kind of speak for themselves as far as I can tell. So I think that's exciting. What are you most excited about over the shorter term in terms of 12 to 24 months in your own work or what you're seeing others do? What are you like, "Wow, this is really cool?"
John Kennedy:
The world opening up to the realization that I have had, that you have had, that you can very easily improve the quality of your own indoor air. I mean, I'm talking my book here, but I am most excited about this because this is a frontier that has a lot of political consensus behind it, a lot of different stakeholders are interested in this from different angles. And I think that our grandchildren are going to look at us really silly for not taking this more seriously so far. Not boiling our air.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right. Well, as you can tell, I'm very impressed by you and your efforts. I'm delighted to see something like ... Again, it does make my mind go a little wonky that this isn't already in every school district and I understand the constraints, I understand all of that. But it'll be great to get this bigger experiment going and watch you reinvent K through 12, you and your companies and other young people because I think that's the other thing that we need to focus on. We need young minds in here who are not willing to just descend into stasis. And that's what I like about this project. I mean, how difficult is it to put a $60 air purifier into a room? But it's these small steps that can lead to great changes in the future. As you say, oh my God, can you believe that they put kids in that kind of environment?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I always look for things to root for as opposed to against. It's really easy to find things to root against in my opinion, but this is something that is really easy to root for. So congratulations on everything you're doing. We will of course check back in.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Now if you've listened to the podcast, you know that our final question is we're going to wave a magic wand and we're going to make you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp. But what you can do is we're going to give you a magical microphone and you're going to speak two things into it and you're going to incept the entire 8 billion population of the world. The next morning, whenever their next morning is, they're going to wake up and they're going to say, "I've just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all the other times I'm actually going to act on both of these ideas." What are you going to incept in the world?
John Kennedy:
The first one is a very old idea. I'm going to treat others the way that I want to be treated and today I'm going to wake up and treat others the way I want to be treated and honor that. And two, I'm going to help others breathe the cleanest air they can.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I love both of them, John. Listen, thank you so much. I understand that this is your first rodeo in the podcast circuit. I suspect that you will be on a lot more podcasts coming. I think this is a very clear issue that it's really difficult to be opposed to.
John Kennedy:
Well Jim, you have set a remarkable bar and I'm excited to present something back to your team about how we can really create the first significant study of how these work at a district level implementation. So we have a great future ahead. Thank you for your generosity and thank you for having me on.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Terrific, John. Thanks so much.
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