Frontier education practices helping @EndurableEd alumni change the world. Ex-finance, @Uber ops and @SFUSD board member. Dad of 2. @HarvardClubMIA VP
Miami, FL
Joined March 2008
- Tweets7.1K
- Following4.5K
- Followers3.1K
- Likes16.9K
Pinned Tweet
Our understanding of education is wrong. The dictionary definition is wrong, and also tautological.
True education is about learning to predict or shape the future.
Educator compensation structures are holding the industry back.
How can we expect the industry to improve if the people who staff it are paid the same regardless of performance or outcomes?
Top talent needs to be rewarded a share of the value they create. Unlocking this cohort will help with education innovation and acceleration.
Public schools have a growing math problem:
1) Lower population growth
2) Rising costs, particularly expenses unrelated to educating current students (pensions, admin, health)
3) Demand shifts due to innovation, social/tech change, and rising expectations.
Parents with means and more talented students will stop using local public schools as a default, accelerating the downward cycle.
The longer we wait, the more legacy costs will eat into budgets needed to train students for the future.
There will continue to be pockets of excellence, typically in wealthy neighborhoods and in magnet (selective) schools.
But the prognosis is not great considering no one is taking ownership of the issue at scale and entrenched special interests will resist change.
I host a monthly book club and attendance is growing.
"Students expressed the urge to be forced to tackle classics they otherwise wouldn’t read, the need to combat frayed attention spans and the desire for an antidote to The Machine.
“A lot of what we get out of this class is the human experience,” said a government and neuroscience major “The only way to get anything out of this class is to not use AI.”
"At the core of the humanities is, of course, humanity...."
wsj.com/lifestyle/harvard-cl…
On the one hand I'm pro-homeschool but on the other hand you have parents like ex-Yahoo CEO who cannot generate 3 bullet points about their kids.
One way to reduce political texts is to vote early. Some campaigns specifically track registered voters who haven't voted.
AI can make adults better while handicapping kids:
Adults with life experience and hard-earned skills using AI is a very different scenario from kids without much life experience still in the skill development phase.
The real world is still the best training ground for kids to build real skills and life experience.
Jason Wong retweeted
Children averaging 5,000 to more than 12,000 steps per day day had fewer mental health symptoms than those taking less than 5,000.
Mental health symptoms were progressively lower across higher step counts with no apparent plateau, even at 12,000+ steps per day.
Brain scans also linked higher step counts to greater thickness in two specific regions of the cortex, the brain’s outer layer.
Daily movement deserves much more attention as a potential way to support kids’ mental health. That's especially clear when you consider that modern-day digital and urban environments provide little opportunity for movement throughout the day.
Scientific proof of probably the #1 mentality we try to instill in our students: believing struggle is natural and an important part of growth and development.
To me, this study is an extension of a book we ask all of our students to read, "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.
Capitalism and struggle can be polar opposites. Customers don't want to pay for struggle, and most times they shouldn't. But education is different.
To focus on genuine development, students and parents have to embrace the right kind of struggle.
This is a great business point but also has huge, underappreciated implications for educators and parents.
EVERYONE is focused on the product: test scores, college admissions, certificates... what I call the "tip of the iceberg."
But before those outcomes comes the infrastructure: habits, mentalities, processes, collaborators/mentors, willingness to change.
What parents, teachers and students choose to focus on matters. Are you focusing on a paper product, or the infrastructure underneath?
Tim Cook's take on why competitors can't copy Apple is sharper than most people realize.
They start by copying the product. Then they realize the product isn't the hard part.
Cook said it directly: people who try to copy Apple first try to copy what they can see. The hardware. The design. The packaging. And they can get close on all of it.
But the thing that made the product — the organizational culture, the decision-making, the obsessive prioritization — that's invisible from the outside. You can't find it in a teardown.
This is why Apple's moat has held for decades while better-funded competitors kept losing. Samsung had more SKUs. Google had more engineers. Amazon had more distribution. None of it translated into the same output because none of it replicated the same input.
The lesson for founders is uncomfortable: if your competitive advantage is visible in your product, it's already copyable. The real moat is the culture that makes the product — and that takes decades to build, not quarters.
Reverse-engineering the iPhone is an engineering problem. Reverse-engineering how Apple decides what to build is a different problem entirely.
At @EndurableEd we focus on each student's "infrastructure."
For the past 9 admissions cycles our "Tier 1" students have historically achieved HYPSM (+Caltech) at an unbelieveable 80% rate, while our company average HYPSM admit rate is 30% among a cohort that is predominantly international -- the most difficult cohort to work with.
The experience working with the most talented students in the world trying to achieve some of the most restrictive and competitive admissions in the world, gives our team an edge in college admissions but even more meaningfully, in education.
I frequently note top student talent is underserved in public schools.
But here's an example where top teacher talent, especially when low tenure, is also underutilized.
Our (A rated) school had to cut our best young science teacher due to budget constraints.
She got sent to the lowest ranked high school and is quitting the profession after just 2 weeks.
Every student spends the entire class on their phones. Any attempt to manage phone use is met with "F you". Our district has banned phones but at low performing schools, anything goes.😞
Just as there's a science tech tree, there's a social tech tree.
Monogamous marriage, which enables the extended family and provisions resources across generations, constitutes deep cultural technology. We evolved and developed this technology over generations as our culture grew in complexity.
Marriage is not the default state or institution of our species. It represents the advancement of multiple seemingly unrelated concepts: honor, contract law, fidelity, inheritance, romantic love, etc. We had to develop marriage to climb out of the muck of prehistory.
The reason it has declined in certain populations or social classes lies in two things that are corrosive to durable institutions: the overemphasis on the individual and the inability to plan beyond the present moment.