Claims

Set a goal every third grader reads at grade level

If the state set a clear goal that every third grader should be reading at grade level and aligned budget and staffing behind it—making the Department of Education and county education departments accountable for it—California would change how it operates and move much closer to that goal.

Teachers union non-interference blocks accountability

California's education problems partly stem from a highly effective teachers union whose principle of non-interference resists the state mandating how teachers teach or holding them accountable for outcomes; it took too long and too big a fight to pass the belatedly signed 'science of reading' bill establishing evidence-based phonics as the standard, and even that is not an actual mandate to use particular curriculum.

Mississippi outperforms California on reading

Mississippi, which spends significantly less per pupil than California, gets over 90% of its third graders reading at grade level, while California is at just 49% on grade level for reading—evidence that outcomes are not simply a function of spending.

Higher education teaches deconstruction over action

The progressive left's failure at basic governance—enforcing laws, cleaning public spaces, teaching children to read, issuing permits quickly—comes partly from the educations received in institutions of higher learning, where so much time is spent deconstructing everything and understanding the full history of government's failures that people lose the ability to just act and solve basic problems, distracted and scared by all the ways things can go wrong.

A consensus in the learning research literature is that AI tutors should not simply tell people what to do, because that isn't how we learn; instead, presenting contrasting options ('take A and this would happen, or B and this would happen') gives learners information to reason about, which is far more instructive than a directive answer.

MOOCs (massive open online courseware) largely failed because they were simulated classrooms—'everything you hated about a classroom and worse'—lacking the social engagement and immersion that make education effective; adults learn transitions much better experientially than by returning to classrooms.

A central open research question is whether AI tools built to support experts merely yield better results or also help people acquire judgment faster—judgment being the slowly-developed, experiential part of expertise (in law, medicine, carpentry, actuarial work) that makes professionals valuable beyond book knowledge.

Learning Swift and SwiftUI basics — roughly a 30-day investment — will let you use AI coding tools far more effectively and save time in the long run if you intend to build apps for a while.

Younger generations increasingly recognize the tight linkages between environmental degradation/climate change and social inequalities and injustices at global and local levels, which is why degrowth and ecological economics are becoming more prominent fields of study.

AI skills can be understood through the electricity analogy with three tiers: people who simply use AI safely (like flicking a switch), people who build things using AI in their own domain (like hospitality or airlines), and people who build the technology itself (requiring deep computer science, neural networks, and deep learning knowledge).

Most people—including policymakers, regulators, and government bodies who must make decisions—are not educated enough about AI, and even industry insiders feel they fall behind every few weeks because innovation is moving so fast; this knowledge gap will slow the policy process much as complex medical fields rely on a few experts to inform decision-makers.

AI enables a shift from mass education to custom education where instruction adapts to each learner's ability and pace, freeing students from the lockstep model in which a whole class moves at the same speed toward a common exam.

The single most important AI skill to cultivate—especially in children—is curiosity: educate yourself about available tools, play with the free ones daily, and treat learning as a game (e.g., learn one new AI capability each day and teach the family).

The best way to learn about AI is non-linear and AI-itself-mediated: use tools like Google's 'Learn About', converse with AI tutors (OpenAI, Perplexity, Gemini), use deep research options, and use NotebookLM to constrain answers to chosen source documents and generate audio podcasts, while still relying on a human 'tribe' of curators for the best-quality content.

Essentially all students use AI to help with assessments (self-reports of ~15% are implausibly low), and much of this use is ideation, coaching, and thinking support that augments rather than eliminates cognitive work.

Teachers spend roughly 80% of their time delivering the same feedback they gave the previous year and only 20% on genuinely elevated or new content; custom AI bots can flip this ratio to 20/80, freeing teaching teams to do more elevated, connective work and enabling far more one-on-one student time (over 25 hours with 100% of 80 students).

The speaker graduated from the University of Chicago with a master's in finance with honors 30 years ago, considering it one of the best business schools in the world at the time.

Dalio is skeptical that giving the 60% of Americans with sub-sixth-grade literacy AI 'polymaths in their pocket' will automatically make them educated and productive, based on his son's edtech experience distributing internet-connected devices in poor third-world areas where the expected leveling of education and wealth gaps surprisingly did not happen - because outcomes depend heavily on parenting and guidance, not just access to technology.

Financial models give a false certainty that practitioners and educators cannot give up, leading economics education from schools to postgraduate level to fail to embrace the real world—as when University of Manchester economics students and their teachers could not explain the global financial crisis because it 'wasn't on the syllabus.'

Using AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) for writing or interview prep dumbs you down because you only work with data already out there, causing you to miss truly novel ideas; the process of writing itself—the struggle and growth—has intrinsic value beyond producing output.

Scientific publishing is a sophisticated Ponzi scheme / misdirection game: researchers beg for government funding, do the science, fight reviewers, and then pay journals huge fees (2,000–11,000) to publish, all to inflate CVs and secure renewal — a business primarily benefiting publishing companies.

The Chinese school year is about 245 days—one of the longest in the world—compared to roughly 180 days in the US and 190 in the UK, meaning Chinese schools have on average 55-60 more days plus extra outside tuition, which historically left little room for tourism during off-seasons.

College is a misallocation of time, capital and energy: the median all-in US cost including opportunity cost is about $300,000 (equal to median household net worth) merely to be able to pay rent, while a structured 16-quarter 'preparation' of real-world skills better channels an 18-year-old's peak energy and openness to novelty.

US college-freshman surveys since 1965 show a generational value shift: in the mid-1960s ~30%+ of students enrolled in arts/humanities and prioritized improving the world, but by the late 1980s 27% were in business/finance with 'being better off financially' the top reason for college—reflecting the boomer 'me generation' ethos—now partly reversing among younger students.

McFaul grew up in Butte, Montana, got into debate class to earn an easy A, which led to his interest in the Soviet Union, and got into Stanford partly through geographic diversity admissions despite SAT scores 150 points below average.

All of the mental models covered in this video come from Shane Parrish's book 'The Great Mental Models,' and he has three more like it plus another book on clear thinking.

Giving a public service away free (public schools, and by extension other government-provided goods) causes people not to treat it as valuable in the way they would if they had to earn money to pay for it, which Roberts argues is part of the problem with the public school system.

Equity lawsuits, intended to equalize spending across districts, often backfired on advocates: in many states courts upheld existing funding, and where they didn't, some states equalized by taking money from high-spending districts and giving it to low-spending ones (leveling down) rather than raising overall spending as advocates wanted.

Hanushek's policy prescription is a short list: (1) build strong accountability systems that measure student performance and attribute schools' value-added; (2) provide direct incentives—including competition and choice so parents help decide which schools are rewarded; and (3) restructure school funding to reward performance—providing extra resources for higher-need students for equity, but otherwise sending money toward high value-added and not toward failure, reversing the current tendency to give failing districts more resources.

The statement 'if money is spent well we will get higher achievement' is tautologically true, but the actual education system doesn't direct money toward productive, achievement-raising uses, so on average more money does not produce more achievement; advocates often cite a scientific study showing a program worked, but schools given extra funding frequently don't adopt that program or implement it poorly.

Accountability and choice must be combined because each fails alone: an accountability system without choice gets eroded by the public schools eliminating information, while a choice system without good information prevents people from sorting into the best schools—so meaningful reform requires both better information and more choice together.

The proportion of students attending private schools has declined, largely due to the continuing collapse of US Catholic schools (from about 8% to roughly 4%), while other religious schools grew and non-sectarian private schools held steady at about 2%; meanwhile homeschooling has risen to roughly 1.5% of students, though data on homeschoolers and their learning is poor.

Charter schools—publicly funded public schools freed from many regulations (including union teacher requirements) in exchange for charting their own program and depending on attracting enough students—represent a 'semi-market' innovation; some are terrible and some excellent, but unlike regular public schools they face at least some market signal, since bad ones struggle to keep students.

Over roughly 40 years, school finance has shifted dramatically in both who funds schools and who makes the decisions, with courts—starting from Serrano v. Priest in California in the late 1960s—becoming central players by interpreting vague state constitutional education clauses to mandate funding changes.

In Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York (~2002), the courts initially ordered $5.8 billion in additional spending on top of $13-14 billion—nearly a 50% increase mandated on the legislature—implying about $19,000 per student in New York City versus a national average under $8,000, even though NYC already spent above average and had students performing well.

In New Jersey's Abbott v. Burke litigation, 28 'special need' districts were allowed to spend as much as the highest-spending district—reaching roughly $19,000 per student versus under $10,000 elsewhere—and after 35 years of court involvement, despite preschool, smaller classes, summer and after-school programs, there is essentially no evidence of rising student achievement attributable to funding (only a single 2007 4th-grade reading uptick).

In the Kansas City desegregation case, a federal judge tried to attract white students back by making the schools so attractive that it told the district to 'dream your biggest dream and the state will pay for it,' making Kansas City the highest-spending large district in the nation in the 1990s—yet the money went into lavish facilities (Olympic pools, a zoo) rather than better teachers, and produced no gains in student achievement.

Wyoming, after a 1996 court case funded by natural gas revenue, became one of the top five spending states per pupil, yet on the National Assessment of Educational Progress it retrogressed relative to the rest of the nation over the period of the lawsuit—students did relatively worse despite dramatic funding increases.

In 40+ years of school finance lawsuits, plaintiffs have never presented evidence that a state with a favorable money ruling subsequently achieved achievement gains; the case rests entirely on the unexamined assumption that 'everybody knows more money will help schools,' and courts have not demanded evidence that funding leads to improvement.

Cross-state studies using national tests show no evidence that simply putting more money into the current system leads to higher outcomes—the effect is essentially zero—though Hanushek carefully distinguishes that this does not mean money never matters; money can and does matter in certain instances, but the public-policy problem is ensuring it happens systematically rather than occasionally.

Hanushek positions himself as sympathetic to the plaintiffs' premise—that US student achievement is low relative to other nations and achievement gaps are too large—while interpreting the judges' motivation as a belief that the legislature isn't doing enough and that, since they cannot directly mandate test outcomes, they fall back on ordering more spending under the consumer intuition that paying more yields more or higher quality.

In Texas charter-school research, parents pulled their children out of bad charter schools at significantly higher rates than out of regular public schools or good charters—good charters retained students while poor ones had high exit and turnover—providing evidence that parents can make good decisions in education markets, though the market didn't shut bad schools down immediately because new students kept arriving.

KIPP academies—charter schools targeting disadvantaged students with a structured nationwide program emphasizing both socialization and achievement outcomes—appear to be doing much better than alternative public schools, though they remain only a handful (around 150 schools).

Roberts speculates that the relatively unregimented, 'happy-go-lucky' American school system, while weaker on test scores than highly drilled countries (e.g., East Asia), may have an unintended advantage of leaving students' minds open to non-traditional thinking, helping explain why American students grow up to found great companies and create great products.

Roberts notes that there are many school districts where the public schools are phenomenal and do a great job, so not everything in public education is bad.

Many important things people understand in life were not learned in school, and formal schooling remains a 'black box' that is poorly understood even if some parts (like cognitive skills) are better understood.

Despite tripled spending, US student test scores in reading, math, and science have been essentially flat from 1970 to today, even though the exact reforms experts called for—smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers, more teachers with master's degrees—were implemented.

Whether someone is a good teacher is virtually uncorrelated with whether they hold a master's degree or have more experience, except for the first year or two when a brief break-in period matters; after that there is no general increase in teaching performance with experience.

A merit-pay system would be a disaster if principals themselves were not also subject to performance rewards, because teachers fear that evaluations would otherwise be based on politics and personal relationships rather than student performance; thus principals must have incentive systems tied to overall school performance and the freedom to make decisions.

Collective bargaining has produced a 'single salary schedule' that pays teachers solely on a matrix of experience and graduate education, ignoring specialty (e.g., scarce math teachers) and quality, and has also led unions to bargain over classroom time, class size, and senior teachers' first choice of placement regardless of principal preference.