Making Edtech Interoperable with Erin Mote of InnovateEDU

Alexander Sarlin  0:04  
Welcome to Ed Tech insiders. In this podcast we talk to educators and educational technology investors, thought leaders, founders and operators about the most interesting and exciting trends in the field. I'm your host Alex Sarlin, an educational technology veteran with over a decade of work and leading edtech companies. Erin Mote is the executive director and co-founder of InnovateEDU, a nonprofit that brings together leaders in education and technology to design and develop breakthrough models and tools to help ensure that all students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college and the careers of their choosing. Erin is also the co-founder of the Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School, and has served in an advisory capacity to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Obama administration's Global Development Innovation policy, and the State Department's tech camp program. Erin Mote, welcome to EdTech Insiders.

Erin Mote  1:08  
Thanks, Alex.

So Erin, you bring immense cross sector experience to education as both the Enterprise Architect for technology product, and a community builder, creating alliances in special ed and data modernization and talent development. Tell us about your journey so far, and what drives your work at InnovateEDU?

Well, I think education is an ecosystem and our world is full of systems. And that's one place where my background in Enterprise Architecture helps me often think about pretty complex collective action problems as actually elements of the same system, and deeply interconnected. And so when I think about the work that we're doing at InnovateEDU, I really see it as kind of part of the same common arc, but working and pulling different levers at the same time. So on product development, it's really important, I think, to demonstrate that technology can deepen human connections, create transparency; in data and accountability, can think about the ways that we actually strengthen relationships between students, and their understanding of who they are as individuals, teachers, and and how students receive that feedback, but also content curriculum, so on and so forth. I'm a big fan of personalization of learning. That's the origin of the school, I found it in Brooklyn at Brooklyn Lab Charter Schools. It's the origin of our first product cortex at InnovateEDU. And frankly, that idea that when you give students access to data, you help them be an agents of their own learning, you help them be engineers of their experience, you help them develop and understand their own competencies and dispositions. And while it's really important to get those building blocks down, or reading, writing, that social studies, art, music, science. It's also really important, and I know this as a mom, to help them understand who they are as human beings in our ecosystem, in their communities, and in their school community, in their place based community like Brooklyn, or who they want to be as global citizens. And so those are the things that really animate our work at InnovateEDU, this radical focus on disrupting systems, the ability to bring uncommon alliances together, like Project Unicorn or The Pathways Alliance, or BIRD-E,, this idea that folks can find the 80% common in their work and rally around that. And that's also something that comes from technology. So you probably use, Alex, Lyft, or Uber, and so as an enterprise architect, here's what I know, I don't think I'm giving away the farm here, the back end of those tools are largely the same. They use the same set of tools from Google Maps to Braintree for payments to even the way they organize folks in the queue and give reviews. But what's different is the way somebody experiences Uber or Lyft. Maybe you're a huge fan of the pink sign and you love maybe the way that that feels, or you're somebody who's taking a client to a dinner or a lunch. And so you want the corporate professionalism of Uber. What has happened is that like the innovation, there is really on the 20% of those two tools. And the 80% common is on the back end. And that's something that underpins the work we're doing in alliances helping people find the 80% common. What's the things we can actually agree on in education? That is a big piece of what Landing Zone is; how do we build enterprise class architecture in the cloud that dramatically lowers the cost of that type of data infrastructure so that every district in the country can have access to it. And then in Cortex, how do we think about actually using teacher feedback and tools to help other teachers navigate content choice and what works for students, so on and so forth?

Alexander Sarlin  5:22  
Yeah, you're mentioning a lot of these really fascinating projects, and I want to unpack them, one by one. I think I love the focus on transparency on data interoperability on, you know, really using data to make school culture work and = empower students. So let's go all the way back. You're a founder of the Brooklyn Laboratory Charter school, as you mentioned, which has a lot of really interesting characteristics and extended learning day, extended learning week and year, college preparatory academics, high expectations, give our listeners an overview of the Brooklyn Lab Charter School, and how you balance academic rigor with a sort of joyous caring environment.

Erin Mote  6:04  
Yeah, so if you would have asked me when I was 20 years old, would I ever found a charter school with my husband? The answer would be for sure, no. And actually, when we found in Brooklyn Lab, we weren't even married. So that's another story for a whole other podcast, I think, Alex, but at Brooklyn lab, I really wanted to build a school that I would send my own kids to. And Robert and Claire, who are seven and four now weren't even like an inkling in my eye when we were founding the school. But we had some fundamental beliefs, and principles about what we wanted to be and what we wanted to be in our own community in downtown Brooklyn. We wanted to be a school that any student could go to. So there's no selection criteria to get into Brooklyn Lab, either at the middle school or the high school, we deliberately went after students who are not traditionally well-served by other educational institutions. So a little bit about our population at Brooklyn lab, about 20% of our students, we call them scholars are homeless, or in temporary housing. About a third of our scholars are students with disabilities. About 20% of our students have been juvenile justice involved in the criminal justice system in New York City. And most of our students, in fact, have not necessarily had the best experience with school. And in fact, not only students, but families really have this trust broken between the educational system, and them as individuals. And so at, you know, at Brooklyn Lab, when we were getting started, we looked at the market. And again, just for listeners, remember, this is about 2013-2014. So try to go in the Wayback Machine. And there wasn't really anything on the market around personalization, there weren't platforms that were thinking about delivering content to students in pretty hyper personalized ways, being able to segment your class, you know, up to 30 times like for every individual student get an individual content, surfacing that data for students so that they could understand how they were doing on any given day. and then actually creating a use kind of a delightful experience for users. So a lot of the work that we've done on cortex over the years has been around like, how do we increase user delight in learning? Then how do we actually think about like, how can we make this delightful and personalized not just in the content that's delivered, but in like, the visuals that students receive and the ability to customize their profile and do things like that? And so I built cortex, we shipped it, final product 2am, on the first day of school, kids got there at seven, I don't even think I slept that night. I think I literally just like, was so anxious about the first day of school, would kids show up? Would parents show up? Would they be in uniform? Would we be able to like pull this off in a building that was belong to a Cathedral Church that we had spent the summer renovating and making it into a school and building a staff culture and doing it in a really small office, August PD because the rest of the building was under construction, hooking up the internet myself, which meant going into like the bowels of a basement in downtown Brooklyn and a over 200 year old building, which you can imagine the creatures that I found out there, but I was nervous. And I didn't know. I didn't know if what we were doing was gonna work. And last year we graduated our first graduating class of 12th graders, 100% of whom got into four year colleges and universities and over 93% of who chose to go this fall. And the ones who didn't, you know, have $60,000 tech jobs from working for doing an upper line code boot camp that we help pay for. And we can talk about that another time, sort of the value proposition of post secondary pathways right now and how to navigate that. But I know when our graduates left Brooklyn Lab, last year, they had a relationship to their own identity, to their own data into their own learning, that was hyper personalized, because you know, we drive understanding of who they are and where they are, no matter how hard that news is, from the first year that they enter the building. And when we get kids at sixth grade, you know, oftentimes, our scholars are below grade level, some of them are on grade level in one subject, others are not, some are reading at a kindergarten grade level, or actually can't be measured by the NW EMF assessment. And then we sit down with their parents, their grandmas, their coaches, their cousins, everybody around the table, and the student, and what you say this is your data. And oftentimes, that's a conversation about you're going to work as hard as you've ever worked in your life over the next two years. But we are going to be there right alongside of you, and you're going to be able to check in on your progress every single day, you're gonna never not know where you stand, you're never gonna have to have your mom go to a parent teacher conference or your cousin go to a parent teacher conference. And that's the first time they're learning that you're not maybe doing so well. A Brooklyn Lab, that idea that autonomy, and student identity and agency can do a lot for learning, learning science and brain development. And really getting students to take charge of their own education is the cornerstone of sort of the work we do in Cortex and the work we do at Brooklyn lab.

Alexander Sarlin  11:50  
So you're mentioned in Cortex, which is as you do you named it an LMS. And student information system and learning management system that you originally built for the context of the Brooklyn Lab Charter school involves personalization, I just want to ask sort of in a broad way, because you know, you had to create your own technology to get the kind of learning outcomes and learning culture you wanted. What do you see generally as sort of the role of educational tech, maybe 10 years later, you know, 8 to 10 years later now, in creating schools with that type of high standards that are really achieving incredible things for students.

Erin Mote  12:27  
I think Ed Tech has come a long way I don't think all of it has. But I do think there's some great examples on the market that prioritize the things that are really, really important when you're building tools. First is interoperability. There's not a single edtech tool in this country that's used by itself, not within the context of other tools, especially post pandemic, whether that's your student information system, or your Learning Management System, or Newsela. All of those tools are used in the context of a learning ecosystem. And so interoperability has to be one of those key characteristics. And I do see a lot of movement towards that. The second is accessibility and inclusivity. So this idea that the tools that we have, are both accessible to learners, meaning that they can actually access the tool and the content, which is different from inclusivity. Right, inclusive design is, is it culturally relevant? Does it resonate with kids? Are they is it delightful? Those are the places where I see ed tech, having made some major steps forward. But I don't think we're all the way there yet. I think we have a lot of tools in our market right now that have never spent, the designers, the builders, the product team has never spent a single day with their end user, has never been in a classroom and watched the teacher interact with their tool and seeing the frustrations that that teacher might have. Because something that might take three clicks, right? Actually could take one if you just watched the workflow of a teacher. And so at InnovateEDU when we build products, we actually do it, I think in a pretty unique way around agile centered design and user centered design, where we have these Inception meetings and this sort of formula for how we come up with what's on our product roadmap. So if you just imagine a pie chart right now, in your mind, 25% of what we focus on, on our product roadmap is always tech debt. And if you don't think you have tech debt, you do. Don't ignore it, you got to fix it. And so you just know that you're just gonna have to do that chore. And nobody likes it, even me. You just know that you have to sort of do that chore like you make your bed or you do the dishes or you have to do your laundry. So you have clean socks, you have to have 25% of our roadmap addressing tech debt issues. The other 25% is you know, things that the engineering team has this core priorities to evolve the product. That could be features, visualizations, that type of thing. The other 25% Is the work, I think at InnovateEDU that makes us really, really special, which is I affectionately call it InnovateEDU's batshit crazy ideas. But these are things that like we're really thinking about that are probably not yet prevalent in the market, but we think could push the market. So things that have fallen into that category are being able to take a single task and align it to Common Core Standards plus my way standards, which are about executive functioning, or Wayfinding. And a teacher actually being able to evaluate the core competency of a student around academic standards, side by side with something that I think we all know, durable skills are really, really important. But right now, we're not really sure how to measure them. And then there's 25%, that is entirely driven by our users. So we bring users together, sometimes virtually, and they actually get to set 25% of our product roadmap priorities. And they have to do it, you know, they have a limited amount of time to do it. So there's, you know, thumb wars, and all sorts of posted jockeying, and lots of ways that we do this. But it's really driven from the user experience. And that type of whether you want to call it student centered, or customer centered design, is what makes, you know, our products, really well loved and adopted. And when I look at, like the reason that we won EdTech Digest Best District Data solution for Landing Zone, for example, it's the customer feedback, it's 100% retention of customers year over year, it's the fact that our customers feel like we're, we're part of their data team, when they're in the district with Landing Zone. Same thing happens with Cortex and the words we've been nominated for. And I just think those are the things that as we're thinking about what edtech should be, it should be in service of students. And it should be about strengthening human connection, and about strengthening the relationship between teacher and student, educator and students, social worker, and student, principal and student, parent and student, teacher and student. And so teacher and family, I think we think about our users in in really different ways than most people.

Alexander Sarlin  17:19  
The Emerge Education group out of Europe has this interesting phrase, we say that when building ed tech, you have to understand the symbiotic relationships between all the different players in the education ecosystem. And when I hear you talk about that it feels right on that, you know, being inside the school, actually seeing your product be used and seeing how it affects many different people lead to a very user centered product philosophy. Hearing you speak, you have such a unique background. I mean, having been an Enterprise Architect, you obviously speak the language of product, you're talking about, you know, tech debt and product and roadmapping. But you also speak the language of education. And it's really interesting how you sort of put this together into these different projects. We've talked a little bit about Cortex, but I wanted to ask you about Project Unicorn. It's a really interesting initiative. So you know, our recent learning platform report found that the average teacher uses about 86 educational technologies, and your organization has noticed that a district accesses 1300 ed tech applications a month. That is an incredible number. So knowing that kind of massive ed tech ecosystem, tell us about the origins of Project Unicorn and how it can help.

Erin Mote  18:32  
Yeah, so Project Unicorn actually started with a group of educators, data analysts and folks who work in schools. So I run a national community of practice with another a number of other folks called the Dedalus group. And we get together and we nerd out for a couple days. And we think about big, hairy audacious problems. And then we name our projects after mythical characters. We have like, you know, we had Project Unicorn, which is now spun out we've had projects Scylla, which is the moth from Godzilla. And so I could go on and on Project Narwhal, the narwhal is not a mythical character, though, we feel like it sort of looks like one. So what was happening in our space? So this is again, where this idea that like, I actually believe that interoperability is a business problem. It's not a technical one. Why? Because interoperability has really been solved and other social sectors and other places in our ecosystems and the fact that I didn't maybe professionally cut my teeth in education, and that I had a career in national security and other systems before I came to education, I think sometimes gives me this outsider view that just says, under what conditions would this be possible? And I don't really accept the phrase, Well, that's because we've already always done it that way. I actually think that that is the death now of innovation. And if that's if you're saying that to someone, whether you're in a tech group or whether you're in a mom to a kid or whether you're a principal in a school, when somebody asks you that question and saying, like, let me instead of saying like, why are you asking me that question? You know, you actually have to think outside the box. And so at Project Unicorn, we were sitting around the table in downtown Brooklyn with a group of folks. And we were actually filling out a spreadsheet of all the tools that each of these different school systems use and how they get their data in and how they get their data out. And if they pay for it. And literally, I was watching two analysts sit side by side, one from a pretty large network of schools, charter network of schools, in the Northeast, the other from a small district in the Midwest. And they were sitting next to each other. And they were actually typing on the same line in the spreadsheet. And I was like, leaning over their shoulder. And so one of them looked to the other one and said, Hey, sorry, dude, I'll make a row. So made a row below and they start typing and the information is pretty identical, right? How they got their data out. And then they get to this column, which is cost. One of those organizations enters a six figure number for their standards aligned data, the other enters zero. And at that moment, if that's not a moment that you are confronted about around inequity in our system, then like, you miss the moment, right? That like, interoperability is not a technical problem. It's a business problem. And part of it is educating the demand side about what they need to ask for and what it looks like, and how to sort of ask for their data in a way that they can actually use it. And the supply side educating ed tech vendors about why build for interoperability? And when you build for it, what does it enable? And what does it do you and how does it drive, better product adoption and customer retention? And frankly, like a higher cost of acquisition if you are interoperable and can interoperate with a larger product. Portfolio, your value goes up when you're being acquired. And so that's how Project Unicorn was born. That was 2016. I had to fight a little bit for the name because bugs were like, we should call it Project Groundswell. I was like no one will like Project Groundswell. And so Project UPicorn was born. And now over 200 vendors have signed the Project Unicorn pledge. Over 700 districts have signed the pledge. And we I think, have generated pretty substantial movement. When we first started Project Unicorn, 2% of districts said that they included interoperability requirements in their procurements. Last year school system data survey and student the sector report, that number is now 51%. We have a lot more work to get done. I'm not satisfied with 51%. And frankly, like I think there's a lot more work to get done and interoperability in general around sector knowledge building and how to evolve. But we are making good progress. And that's because we brought together a coalition of 16 organizations who have had relentless focus on this, have actually brought privacy and security into the conversation alongside interoperability, have truth told with districts and vendors about how do we make this work for each, have you done some of what I call like the marriage counseling, worked directly with districts to help write RFP language, or provide model RFPs. So there and do work around gathering their requirements, when they're asking a vendor to do something, they actually really need it. And it's actually anchored in a use case. And we've also had something around Project Unicorn that is really, really special. And that's the sustained support of a foundation in the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, who has for now five years, six, said, This is a movement. And we need to make this investment in equity, we need to make it so that any district in the country has access to their data in a secure interoperable way. And that vision of Janet  Mountain, Michael Dell, and numerous other folks at the foundation, Lyria Zeh, Troy Wheeler, in saying this is a priority, and we're going to invest in it and we're not gonna go away. We're gonna be here for the long term because we know the system needs to shift. Momentum needs to keep going. And that's a really unique thing. They have, in a way been a camel for us, not a unicorn. They've been a steady supporter of the work, a steady supporter of the coalition, and that is frankly priceless to the work.

Alexander Sarlin  24:50  
You've written in the past about how data interoperability is often invisible and can feel a little bit sort of unsexy. It's like the plumbing or the electricity that work on the back end behind the scenes, but it's incredibly important in making schools and students succeed. And you've just been talking about that. Give us the elevator pitch for when you go to a district or a vendor, what is the core value of interoperability?

Erin Mote  25:16  
So I actually start with a question, what problem do you need me to solve today? Because almost every problem, whether it's staff retention, or certification, labor shortages, parent challenges, parent communication challenges, students not being enrolled, or being chronically absent, even issues around civil rights and disabilities, and disproportionate discipline for students with disabilities, or students who identify with a particular racial, ethnic, or gender identity. These are all big problems of school districts. These are all problems that data interoperability can help you solve, because it can actually make the data transparent and visible. And so I actually start with the question, what's the biggest problem right now for you? And maybe sometimes it's that the superintendent needs to report to the board. Sometimes that's the biggest problem for the superintendent that day, that moment. But it really is about this, like radical user centered approach to understanding what works. And for vendors. You know, I think that I talked to them the way I talked to any sort of product developer, you know, it's a little bit easier for me, I think, because I speak their language and can be a champion and that translator, but I really talk about the things that enables growing your market share, growing your value of your product, being able to actually do more development faster, because you can interoperate different types of tools, even like being able to drive single sign on as a way for folks to get entry into your district. A lot of districts are making decisions right now, around Single Sign On that say, if you don't interoperate with this platform, or this type of authentication, or this ecosystem, you just, you can't even get in the front door. And so market share, helping make it more private and secure, helping them grow, their ability and their market cap value. Those are the arguments I make to a CEO to a product developer. And frankly, to engineers, it's a little bit of a different argument. It's about like, addressing things like tech debt, or being able to move some of their architecture to cloud based solutions, and enhanced security and protocols that that can provide for you. And actually all three cloud providers, we're about to come out with a co authored resource from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which is amazing to have that type of collaboration between all three major cloud providers. They have amazing tools, each of them that they often offer at no to low cost for ed tech vendors that just makes business sites to use cloud based services and to prioritize interoperability because they will actually save you a lot of money. And a lot of the types of things that your customers are going to ask you about right now: cybersecurity, privacy. configurability.

Alexander Sarlin  28:16  
Fantastic. You mentioned your state of the sector report. And I was just looking through it. It's a really interesting report, we will put a link to it in the show notes for this episode. But one of the things that stuck out to me was it said that, you know, two thirds of the organizations surveyed, didn't yet have a master or strategic plan to improve data privacy or interoperability, which are obviously two core issues when it comes to student data, given what you're saying about you know, Microsoft, Amazon and Google coming together about Project Unicorn having so much traction. How do you see that number? Is that high or low? What would your vision be about what organizations should have in terms of a master plan?

Erin Mote  28:57  
Yeah, I think that there is a lot of work still to be done, I'm gonna go back to that original statement, there's a ton of work that still needs to be done. And the work that needs to be done, again, isn't really technical work. There's a little bit of technical work, but it's really about building human capacity and building capacity in districts and in states to be able to modernize their data infrastructure. And doing that type of planning, right is actually really common in corporate systems and structures. It's where most enterprise architects find their happy home is in those systems and structures. And it's because they think of themselves as an enterprise level buyer or enterprise level system. I'm not sure that most school districts think about themselves as an enterprise level buyer or enterprise level system. And I actually think that's a huge mistake, because it undercuts their buying power doesn't help them think through things like data governance and data validation and the interoperability of tools and systems, the effectiveness of tools. falls within their system. And so a lot of the work that I do what I actually still, I still love to take technical calls and the project unicorn ecosystem, I have some great folks on my team who also take those calls. But I still love to get my hands dirty and give some technical advice and, and give some of that deep technical assistance that we do at Project Unicorn, whether that's for states and helping them on their plans or whether that's reviewing procurements or working with districts as they're thinking about these first steps in the district ready playbook with digital promise. Having a plan and bringing together cross sector teams is really, really important. It's actually one of the first steps in the playbook. And so when a district is ready to start that part of their data modernization and data interoperability journey, maybe maybe beyond like single sign on as their first entry point, when they want to sort of go that next step. We're right there with them, to help them through that journey, to map those steps, to help them understand it's not just technical, you got to bring your curriculum folks together, you got to bring your parent advocates, you got to bring the folks who are doing compliance data. Because with great interoperability in an enterprise grade system, your ability to be efficient, productive, transparent, is boundless.

Alexander Sarlin  31:22  
It's a really compelling vision. And you know, hearing you speak about this, it just strikes me again and again, that is one of the core value propositions I think of your organization is this coalition building, you've said you've said such yourself, but I mean, you're hearing it in action, you know, the ability to bring huge tech companies and all of the different stakeholders within a school districts data structure and product people and engineers and everybody to the same table to solve a problem of this complexity is very rare. So it's really exciting to hear that I wanted to ask you about Landing Zone, you've mentioned it a couple of times. So Landing Zone offers software via community license that enables enterprise data infrastructure for K 12 districts. And you mentioned that you have you know, 100% retention rate tell our listeners about Landing Zone and and what it does and why people love it so much.

Erin Mote  32:15  
Yeah, well, you should ask my customers why they love it so much. But I'll tell you what they tell me. So Landing Zone is a cloud based infrastructure product that allows a district to set up their own EdFi operational data store. So we set up the, we set up all this architecture, in the Landing Zone team. So a district comes to us, they want to bring all the data that matters to them together in one place. That's the value proposition of Landing Zone. We get in there, we inventory their systems generally, we start with EdFi and probably a learning management system or a set of core component products that but as customers have grown with us, we've grown, the types of tools that we integrate from behavior management tools to college and career counseling tools to curriculum tools to NWA map assessments, Interim Assessments, so on and so forth. So we go in there in a district's own Google Cloud. So it's their infrastructure. They control the permissions, they control that architecture, we build an edify operational data store, we build a series of Big Query tables, we bring data through a variety of different mechanisms, some of that data lands directly in the operational data store, if that's if it's well aligned to the standard, some of the data that folks want to bring in doesn't land in the operational data store for a number of reasons, right, the standard hasn't developed to that place yet. Or it's not the right sort of use case for that data. And then there's a visualization layer. So you have that core architecture, the ODS data pumps into those big query tables, then you can query those tables to create integrated visualizations of tools. So you can bring behavior data side by side with identity data. So you can instantly ask yourself, are my suspending students with disabilities at a higher rate than I'm suspending my gen ed population? Are my suspending my English language learners at a higher rate than I'm suspending my gen ed population? Do I have one school in my district to suspending a lot of students, so they they tend to have a specific profile, you're able to ask fundamental questions about your values and civil rights. But you can also say, how many kids went to school today and see attendance dashboarding and that type of thing. During COVID-19 we did a lot of work around attendance and usage and engagement and really new models. And so our team builds some sample visualizations in Google Data Studio. Folks can use those templates and copy them over and so they're successful on day one of using the Landing Zone product, but oftentimes, schools actually and districts customize those dashboards for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's just changing the colors to be their school colors. Oftentimes it's personalizing the dashboards a little bit more. And then you know, those dashboards go all the way down to a student report card or student learner profile, all the way up to a district level summary for a board, around key compliance, data metrics, so on and so forth. And that ability to toggle again, from district to school, to teacher to student is incredibly powerful, because the data is next to real time. And you can actually make decisions about your instruction for the next day, you can make a plan with other teachers in the grade level around how a student is doing across subjects, you can do the work of understanding if a student is actually not connected, because they haven't been online in 10 days. And so you can ask the question, the first question, which is, how can I get you connected to be learning. So Landing Zone is a product that has had a really, really great community built around it, we actually have our community members and data analysts often present to each other about cool, innovative work that they're doing, they jam out on dashboards and positive behavior progress reports and things like that they share with each other. And then we have district data coaching. So we've deliberately made the choice at InnovateEDU that our implementation doesn't stop when we sell you the product, our implementation goes all the way through. And that means we're building the capacity of the humans in the district who are doing this work. And there's no greater compliment for me that when a superintendent or a data analyst says, Oh, the Landing Zone team, that's my team, because they know that we know them, and we have that relationship, and we understand what their challenges and problems are. And we're relentlessly invested in their capacity. And this idea that like we are a coach, who's running alongside somebody who's helping them get better, who's developing them professionally, who's thinking about the hard things, and sometimes those aren't data, hard things, right? I just had a conversation with someone in a district, who was elevated to me by one of our coaches, about delivering some really hard news to their superintendent, and they were nervous, they were nervous about doing it, is the first time they were going to deliver some pretty terrible winter assessment data. And they just wanted to be able to walk in there and deliver it truthfully, but also not make it feel like an attack. And they just needed to practice. And they just needed a little bit of coaching. And that mentorship that coaching that personalization, that's the hallmark of who we are and InnovateEDU.

I think that is a really strong argument to be made for some of the things you can do when data is really interoperable. And when it actually you can put different data sources next to each other that I'm sure many of our listeners are sort of drooling at the idea of of dashboards that can bring together data from such different parts of the system into actionable opportunities, when you say they can, you know, plan for instruction for the next day, using really, really complex, you know, data sources in a simple visualization. It's, it's pretty compelling. And it sounds like, you know, a through line of the conversation as well has been, you said before, what's the pitch, you ask them what they need. And I'm hearing that again, and again, that as these, these are very complex problems to solve. And a lot of people are in a sort of, in a little bit of a silo or separated from one another. So bringing people together, offering the ability to run alongside them, whether it's, you know, a student, or a family in an individual school or a district, trying to do something, you know, new, it feels like a third line of what the organization does. I want to ask about one of your really recent projects, which is very, very interesting. It's called BIRD-E,, which stands for the blueprint for inclusive research and development in education. I'm just gonna read a quick description of it, and then you can unpack it for me, but it's really interesting. So BIRD-E, is an open source universal framework designed to generate actionable high quality research that edtech providers, policymakers, researchers, education leaders, and other K-12 stakeholders can easily access or access, understand and apply in the classroom. So it's really about bridging the gap between research and practice, which is a huge gap in education. Tell us about the origin of the BIRD-E, project and what success would look like. I'd love to hear more about it.

Yeah. BIRD-E, is the result of 70 organizations coming together over the last three years around this 80% common vision that we must make research more accessible to protect practitioners. We must find a way so that research can be directed by practitioners and be responsive to practitioner need. And we've had extraordinary partners in this work from IES to Learn Platform to Airdeck, to just a who's who, around education in the practitioner community, in the research community, and on our steering committee and in the Ed Tech community. Everybody sees this as a problem. But it's really hard to think about, like, how do we actually begin to think about the building blocks the infrastructure that would allow us to shift and change the current dynamics that we have. And there's a lot of other dynamics in research and in education, again, like a whole other podcast, right? Because we did some pretty fascinating natural language processing work to actually understand what the research gaps are with the University of Virginia and who does the research. And it shouldn't be a surprise for us that, who does the research influences what the research is, but there are really big gaps. So for example, there's not a single study right now, in the What Works Clearinghouse at IES, around students with disabilities, and social and emotional learning. Students with disabilities in our country are one in five young people. So we're just saying like, for social emotional learning, we don't have to understand the evidence base for 20% of kids in this country. That's absolutely not true. We need to do more. And we need to do it with urgency. And so this is again, where my enterprise architecture hat rears its ugly head, as I love good infrastructure. You know, I often talk about the importance of pipes, the importance of plumbing, the importance of understanding, how do you organize information, to allow for discoverability, generalizability, and action. And so we were really inspired by another sector. With BIRD-E, we were really inspired by healthcare, and a framework that is developed in healthcare called the PICO framework, which helps folks ask really well articulated research questions around patient intervention, comparison, and outcome. We were also really inspired by the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK, who is frankly lightyears ahead of us in helping action research information for teachers by giving them really simple dashboarding around cost, what the intervention will generate in number of months of growth? And what's the strength of the evidence base, and literally, as a teacher, I can look at the attendance interventions, and understand if I invest in postcards, or text messages, or teacher time, what's the strongest intervention for my given population? We don't have that here in the United States, and we're not connected to the most relevant problems of practice in the research infrastructure. And so I think that's a transparency problem. I think that's a data interoperability problem. I think that's a meta analytic data schema problem. So BIRD-E is a meta analytic data schema and a way to ask well researched, well designed research questions. And so let me use an analogue here, because I think it's helpful to think about, Well, where else in the world does this exist? And how does it help us navigate complex systems? So I want you to think of something that's been in the news lately called Swift. It's the language of banking systems. And Wwift enables us to do a whole lot of things, right. It allows us to use our ATM card. It allows us to have Visa, MasterCard work, it allows us to do international bank transfers. It allows us to sanction countries and international crises. Swift is an incredibly powerful tool, because it's a common language that underpins the system. And that's exactly what BIRD-E is. It's a common open source, universal framework and language that we hope will underpin a modern reimagined r&d ecosystem. So let me talk about how this is actually happening in real life right now. So one of our partners learning platform has been part of the work from the very beginning, has taken something called the Universal Evidence Report. And they are trying to make a 1040 ez, for products and for schools to and for researchers to report data about what that study says or what their product says, so that it can actually provide a clear market signal to folks who are making decisions about products or interventions about what works for who when and how. They built that entire 1040 ez, right that Turbo Tax form, if you will, the thing that allows us to do our taxes, which is enabled by Swift, to BIRD-E, so they've instrumented that entire form, and their entire data schema aligned to BIRD-E. And so what that is that allowing us to do in the future? Imagine being able to tag a study and then a teacher being able to type in some keywords and find the most relevant studies for their context, the most relevant evidence base in research. And then over time as we get bigger and bigger and bigger, and this meta analytic schema permeates like it has in so many other places, pharmaceutical drugs, all throughout the healthcare system, and actually allows us to make better decisions that are more locally based, more personalized, more relevant about the types of interventions we should use, that are evidence based and evidence backed. And I believe in the long term, this is a big bet, on innovating to you that infrastructure, the pipes, the roads, are the things that will actually drive us to common language common starting place, and the ability to get over this chasm.

Alexander Sarlin  45:45  
You know, well, we'll put a link to the BIRD-E framework in the show notes. But just looking at it, it really does mirror some of the things you're saying about the healthcare outcomes you have, you know, population. So you can sort by any population, you have certain kinds of outcomes, a huge variety of social emotional learning outcomes, intervention identifiers, different types of behavior, there's so many different ways to cut this type of research, and the ability to sort of search the way you're, you're saying that they already can in the UK, where they can say, I want to know about this particular population to get this type of goal. And with this type of time period, it is incredibly powerful. And now I think it's a matter of spreading the word and getting people

Erin Mote  46:29  
Adoption, adoption adoption, that's what we're really focused on right now. And folks can tune into a webinar in May. But also, there'll be a lot of other programming over the next couple of months that's really about driving that adoption. And I just want to say how important it was to have this coalition of folks who was willing to run at the problem. And that includes the K-12 standards bodies who are engaged in this work. That includes major ed tech companies, that includes research, practice partnerships, and big research intermediaries like Mathematica and AR, folks are radically committed to meeting this moment. And I love the work we do at InnovateEDU that builds that connective tissue to bring people together around those collective action problems, mobilize and, and just become agents of change. And that's the thing we need in education. That's the thing systems need if we want to solve collective action problems, if we want to iterate on the system, if we want to have a paradigm shift in education, about the way we think about students and personalization, or data and action, or research and practice, we need allies. And we need organizations, I think, like InnovateEDU, who are willing to say some of these things are public goods, public utilities, we're going to build them, we're going to develop them, they're going to be open source. And then we're going to say like you can commercialize it, you can integrate this into a public entity, you can do so much with this work. But unless we work together within this system to change the system, then we're never going to make the progress that as a mom, I want for Robert and Claire, and that I want for all my scholars at Brooklyn Lab and frankly, that I want for every kid in this country.

Alexander Sarlin  46:29  
That's a really inspiring vision. I have one one final question for you. If we have time, which is you know, you have extensive experience working with the federal government, you've worked with the White House's ignite initiative with the Global Development Innovation policy, the State Department's tech camp program, and you know, the founding member of the USAID AID Global Broadband Alliance. And when I hear you talk about these building these huge coalition's really sort of creating a structure where everybody can move forward together. I'm really curious what you see as the sort of core role of the federal government in supporting initiatives like BIRD-E and educational technology in the US, and if you see inspiration in other countries, governments, federal governments, national governments, about how they can make this type of work, you know, accelerate it and make it work more effectively.

Erin Mote  49:08  
So I have a couple things I will say here first, I think Secretary Cardona is doing incredible work and articulating what the priorities of Digital Learning Environments need to be. He said three things that they need to be accessible, inclusive and interoperable. Having his leadership to say that those are the features of what our digital learning environments need to be, is incredibly important, because it will structure the way challenges are developed within the department. But it should also structure things like the way we think about the role of education, technology and learning. And the way we actually think about the capacity building that might we might need to be doing with students with teachers and families in order to navigate digital learning environments. The work that IES has done with us alongside BIRD-E, they actually launched it with us at Ara in San Diego. Mark Schneider spent a lot of time talking about these essential elements to innovate in the system, their partnership has, frankly been extraordinary and humble. And I really wanted to recognize that that degree of humbleness when we came to them, for example, with here are some of the research gaps that exist. None of the folks that I asked pushed back and said, like, No, no, we got this, what they said is, tell us more, help us understand what role we can play, help us understand how we need to evolve to meet this moment. And I think that that I that humble public service attitude, that idea that like, what can I learn from the EdTech? Community? What can I do to meet the moment? How do I think about students and teachers? How do I do business differently? It's pretty amazing that we have that right now in the leadership at IES, and then the leadership of the department. And then I'm incredibly invigorated by the Office of Ed Tech at the US Department of Education right now. And the work that they're turning towards in developing a national ed tech plan, thinking about how AI and education come together, taking on digital equity, front and center and digital inclusion, talking about running out the problem. You know, they're not shying away from the things that are really, really hard cybersecurity for school districts and virtuals. They're really running at the problem. And and I really admire the leadership of OET. And [?] and Kristina Ishmael at the Office of Ed Tech, who are really, really doing the work and doing it with students and teachers at the center. I also think we woefully under invest in education, research and development in this country. We are point 6 billion is what we invest in education, r&d, just NIH, in medical research, just on edge, invest $40 billion a year. We don't even invest a billion, like how can we learn? How can we move education from just education to a learning system? How can we do better? How can we learn from our mistakes? How can we understand what works for whom, when and how if we don't actually invest in research and development and education? If there's one thing that we can do as a country that addresses our global competitiveness, our position in the world? Are we preparing young people, for the jobs that we don't even know the names of tomorrow, today, tomorrow? Are we thinking about their mental health and the supports that they need? We got to invest in r&d and education, we have to make a commitment as a country. And the federal government is in a unique position to do that, frankly. And I think we all need to be advocating for that on a bipartisan basis. That if you believe that our future is our young people, I guess what it is, if you believe that we must remain competitive in a global economy, where we're competing not just with countries, but with different types of ecosystems to be the most innovative to develop the new tools that continue to lead the world to solve big, hairy, audacious problems, like climate change, digital equity, banking and connectivity, then we need to invest in r&d and education, that number needs to be at least a billion dollars. I was like a billion dollars this year. And then I want to like five in five years, but we need like 1/40 of the budget, because I believe that education, in a non paternalistic, or condescending way is life trajectory changing. It is literally in some cases, life saving for our young people. And so if we're willing to invest $40 million in health care at NIH on just medical research, right, just a fraction of that in our future. For me, that's a smart investment.

Alexander Sarlin  53:50  
So if you're listening from the federal government, we want to double at least we want to move to a billion dollars of education, r&d, and maybe you want to tie some of that funding to the BIRD-E framework. If you're an edtech. vendor, listen, you know, consider the project unicorn pledge and thinking about interoperability as a core principle. Erin Mote, this has been a fascinating conversation, we do try to end every interview with two short questions, which is, what is the most exciting trend that you see in the ad tech landscape right now, right now, May 2022, that our listeners should keep an eye on and you can't say interoperability because we even though it's a it's a great trend, what other trends do you see?

Erin Mote  54:33  
Yeah, I see folks thinking about access to their tools in low bandwidth environments or in non traditional school environments a lot. I see them thinking about our most disenfranchised learners who might not have, you know, a gigabit connection at home. I see a lot of folks thinking about that when they're thinking about their tools. For me, that's really exciting because that's how wanting someone who might not be the person you think of using technology at first blush at the center of your design. And I think if we talk a lot about this, when I talk about educating our learners and the work we do there, it's really important that we shovel the ramp, not shovel the stairs, because if we designed for all, then we're actually equity focused and inclusive. If we just shovel the stairs, then there's always going to be some kids who are left behind. So shovel the ramp.

Alexander Sarlin  55:33  
I love that. What is one book or you can also mention a newsletter or blog or twitter feed that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into the topics we discussed today. And we discussed a lot of topics today, what is a recommended resource from you?

Erin Mote  55:50  
Yeah, I'm actually going to choose a resource that might not feel sort of traditional for folks. But I love the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, which is a book actually about how to make your ideas sticky, and how to create movement and momentum. My reading list has other things like the Structure of Scientific Revolution, or Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, but I won't make folks read that if you read Made to Stick you'll understand a lot about how to execute behavior change. Think about that in the implementation of your edtech tool in a district, but also about how to build coalitions find the 80% common and actually generate large scale change.

Alexander Sarlin  56:34  
Incredible so we will put a link to those resources that will include both the Chip and Dan Heath Made to Stick and Thomas Kuhns Structure of Scientific Revolution. And Viktor Frankl Man's Search for Meaning some of my favorite books as well in the show notes from this episode. Aaron Bode, thank you so much. We've it's been illuminating and really inspiring.

Erin Mote  56:56  
Thanks, Alex, have a great day.

Alexander Sarlin  56:58  
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