aiEDU Studios

What's a better investment: a data center full of chips that expire in two years, or the people whose learning compounds across a lifetime? Chong-Hao Fu thinks the field has the answer backwards. Chong-Hao is CEO of Leading Educators, the national nonprofit behind some of the strongest evidence we have on what actually moves the needle for kids; including being the first professional learning...

Everyone wants a checklist for AI in schools. Carole Basile thinks that's  the wrong instinct — because the real problem isn't the technology, it's the 19th-century structure we're dropping it into. Dr. Carole Basile is Dean of ASU's Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, where she's spent nearly a decade rebuilding the education workforce aroun...

Andy Rotherham has spent 25 years advising the education sector — co-founding Bellwether, serving in the Clinton administration and on the Virginia Board of Education, and writing Eduwonk . He's also clear about something that's become unfashionable to say plainly: he's a skeptic of how AI will be used in schools, even as he takes the technology dead seriously. That distinction runs...

Sarah Morgenthau runs the "I Have A Dream" Foundation; Michael Barrett has helped govern it from the Board while serving as a trustee at the University of Pennsylvania. Between them they make a grounded case: the technology is changing fast, but the thing that actually improves a kid's life hasn't changed at all: a long-term relationship with someone who keeps showing up. Acros...

Wim Sweldens has watched technology remake itself for forty years — Bell Labs, mobile networks, and now Kiswe, the interactive live-streaming company he co-founded. The last time he felt anything like this moment was 1991, when a colleague told him "everything that's not on the internet doesn't exist." His answer to this one is AIQ: a way of measuring not how smart AI is, but h...

Two decades of working on school improvement — at High Tech High, at Chicago Public Schools, at the Gates Foundation, and now through her own consulting practice — have left Jennifer Husbands with a fairly direct view of why AI adoption in schools is going the way it's going. The technology isn't the problem. The problem is that the US invests less in teacher learning time than almost an...

Robin Lake has been studying public education from the systems level for more than thirty years. Her diagnosis is sharper than most: we built a school system for an average student who doesn't exist, and we keep placing kids in special education because general classrooms have run out of tools to support them. This conversation works through what CRPE has been finding in its AI research — the...

In 2017, before ChatGPT existed, a 180,000-student district in Georgia decided to build the first AI-ready high school in the country. Babak Mostaghimi was one of the people who built it. Bree Dusseault, at Center on Reinventing Public Education/The Strategic Education Research Partnership, was one of the people who later studied what made it possible — and what stops most other systems from follo...

"It's not that girls aren't good at STEM. It's the confidence around ' can I do STEM?' " That's Dr. Patrice Johnson, and her quiet challenge to the dominant frame of STEM education — that the gap is technical when it's actually cultural — is the throughline of this conversation. She runs Project Scientist, a national nonprofit that puts girls into hands...

Matt Sigelman has spent two decades building the most granular picture anyone has of how the labor market actually works – first at Lightcast, now at the Burning Glass Institute. So when he says schools are asking the wrong question about AI, it's worth slowing down. The new research he's just released with aiEDU translates how AI is reshaping work into concrete implications for what sch...

What if the most important thing school can teach kids in the AI era isn't how to use the technology — but how to stay in relationship with each other? That's the question Michelle Culver, founder of The Rithm Project and a former senior leader at Teach for America, has spent the last two years trying to answer. We dig into what happens when the loneliness epidemic collides with generati...

What if the biggest problem in education isn't technology — it's that we've reduced school to reading scores and graduation rates and stripped away everything that actually makes learning meaningful? Kaya Henderson took the lowest-performing metropolitan  school district in the country and made it the fastest-improving — not by drilling harder, but by bringing back art, music, field...

What does the rise of AI mean for schools, startups, and the skills students actually need? Tony Wan – Head of Platform at Reach Capital and former co-founder of EdSurge – has spent over a decade watching education technology evolve. Now he's watching AI reshape the landscape faster than anything before it. We get into why "taste" – the kind you can only build through practice and p...

What if AI literacy belonged alongside reading and math as a foundational skill – not tucked inside a computer science elective? That's the case Erin Mote, CEO of InnovateEDU, has been making for years. In this conversation, she gets specific about what it's going to take to actually get there. We dig into the disappearing entry-level job, why middle school may be more important than peo...

Do the benefits of generative AI in education outweigh the harms?  We sat down with Copley High School debate team members Anna and Charlotte, two sharp juniors who placed 5th at Ohio’s state finals, to hear how they built winning cases, adapted under pressure, and what they’re actually seeing in classrooms right now.  From earlier cancer detection to drug repurposing for rare diseases, they expla...

What if AI didn’t kill coding but made learning it more meaningful?  We sat down with Pat Yongpradit (former Chief Academic Officer at Code.org ) to unpack why computer science still matters, how AI is reshaping classroom practices, and what real AI literacy looks like for students and teachers.  We also zoomed out to note that coding is only one piece of computer science, which also spans data sc...

Imagine a classroom where 5th graders present their research to younger students, take questions, and proudly defend their findings — and where AI is a quiet helper, not the centerpiece.  That’s Celeste Riley ’s dual-language classroom in Memphis! It's a space built on trust, cultural relevance, and clear expectations that make learning feel urgent, relevant, and real.  On this week's ep...

Ready for honest career guidance instead of stage-ready talking points?   We sit down with CareerVillage.org founder Jared Chung to unpack how AI is reshaping career prep, why human advice still matters, and what parents, teachers, and students can do to navigate uncertainty with confidence.  We dig into the questions that families often whisper after conferences: Which jobs are safe? Should my ki...

Imagine telling a chatbot to “onboard this vendor,” and it finishes the job across multiple systems in under a minute.  On this episode, we sit down with Automation Anywhere co-founder Neeti Mehta Shukla to unpack how this shift frees people from repetitive tasks and lets them focus on more meaningful work that uses their human judgment, care, and creativity. We trace the journey from early RPA (...

If you’ve ever wondered whether AI has 'broken' school, this conversation with Stanford associate professor Victor Lee cuts through the noise and gets to the heart of the issue. We start by mapping out three lenses every learner needs: The user who applies tools well. The developer who grasps core concepts like models and training data. The critic who sees bias, persuasion, and societal...

The hardest part of AI in education isn’t picking a tool. It’s deciding what kind of learning we want to protect, elevate, and scale. On this episode of aiEDU Studios, we dive straight into that question with Sunanna Chand, executive director of The Reinvention Lab at Teach For America . Sunanna has a clear stance on edtech: focus on talent over technology. Instead of imagining rows of students pl...

Teaching at Rikers Island isn’t a typical origin story for a future school district leader. And yet, it demonstrates that education works best as human development, not a test-prep machine .  Former Chicago Public Schools CEO J.C. Brizard joins aiEDU Studios to talk about modern-day school systems and what to keep, what to scrap, and how to move faster than technology that's reshaping our job...

Teens don’t treat AI like magic. They treat it like a wrench — something that's useful, but only as good as the person using it.  On this episode, we sat down with students who’ve put AI tools to work in surprising ways. Between all their experiences, we saw a grounded view of AI as a study aid, a creative partner, and sometimes a risky shortcut that demands stronger digital literacy.  Jeremy...

Are you worried your teen is spending more time with a chatbot than with real friends?  On this episode, we spoke with child/adolescent psychiatrists Dr. Jeremy Chapman and Dr. Ashvin Sood to learn how AI shows up in teens’ social lives and schoolwork, and how parents can respond with clarity instead of panic. Together we map out a simple framework: curiosity first, judgment last, and functionalit...

AI can sound human, but it isn’t — and that difference changes how we teach, parent, and prepare kids for a future shaped by AI.  On this episode, we dive into AI readiness: the blend of skills, ethics, and technical insight that young people need to question, adapt, and lead in an AI-powered world. We sit down with Philip Colligan of the Raspberry Pi Foundation to unpack layered AI literacy, incl...