Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. In this episode, we're going to highlight another one of the great podcasts here at HBS: Managing the Future of Work, hosted by professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller.

Fuller's guest in this episode is Mallory Dwinal-Palisch (MBA 2015), Chancellor of Reach University and CEO and cofounder of teacher staffing firm Craft Education System. Reach offers accredited, teacher apprenticeship-based degrees, and was founded in part to help address the teacher shortage—which the National Education Association estimates to total some 300,000 vacancies.

In this excerpt, Dwinal-Palisch discusses the problem set that the American education system is facing—and how she and Reach are tackling those challenges.

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Joe Fuller: You're a day-to-day observer of the K–12 system in the United States and the teaching profession. How would you describe the state of the teaching profession today?

Mallory Dwinal-Palisch: We're in a race to the bottom. And what I mean by that is, there are 4 million teaching positions in the United States, and we've seen an inversion of … Before the 1950s, the majority of graduates who became teachers were in the top quartile of their college classes. And today, we're seeing that the majority are in the bottom half and sometimes even in the bottom quartile of their graduating classes. And there's a whole history around labor-market forces that have to do that, that are driving that. But the net result is, we've created quicksand for ourselves, where we don't have enough quality people entering the classroom. And so then we try to legislate the floor. We try to prescribe what needs to happen in someone's classroom, we try to standardize the work those individuals do. And the net result is that people who have optionality, which tend to be our highest performers, tend to leave the classroom. And so then our average sinks down, because you have the top leaving. And so then we legislate harder. And then, what is the new top band leaves, because they have optionality. And so we do have this quicksand that we're sucking ourselves down into, for very seemingly logical reasons, that creates a system failure and continues to suck down the labor market.

JF: So when you describe it that way, help me understand how Reach interdicts that vicious cycle.

MDP: Yes. So first, having enough teachers in the right places with the right preparation. So making sure that there are—not just, aggregate, enough teachers in the United States—but that in every community, these school districts have the number of people they need and a pipeline that, if someone isn't working out, they're not beholden to that individual because they're a warm body. The second layer is, then, making sure they're quality. And this is where, again, it comes back to our theory of the case around being taught by exceptional teachers and being taught in a practitioner structure, so that when you enter the workforce, you look a lot more like a fifth-year teacher than a first-year teacher. Our third layer that I think has the most systems-level potential is this data play. So the data that has to get collected around apprenticeship degrees is very granular. It's longitudinal, it breaks down by student, by geography. Pretty much any way you could cut it, it has good data. And for the longest time, we've been asking state leaders to make policies, decisions, around teacher staffing, incentive pay, all of these other things without any real good data, maybe at all. And to the degree that we have it, in ways that are so aggregated that it's kind of meaningless. It is these normed averages that don't mean a whole lot. What we're hoping to do is to take the data that's being collected for teaching apprenticeships—not just for us, but for any teaching apprenticeship—and use that to build out real-time data analytics for states, so that they can see, "If we've identified we still have these gaps in the labor market, what interventions should we put in place?" And then to monitor in real-time the efficacy. Are we actually seeing changes in who's entering? Are we seeing changes in the quality of who's entering and in the outcomes they're getting for students? So those are the three tranches we think about—of total supply and distribution, quality of the educator, and then data analytics for more proactive planning down the road.

JF: There's been a lot of discussion about the efficacy of online learning and remote learning, Zoom teaching. And you're delivering Reach to your students—not to their students, but to your students—on a remote platform, all online, getting these master teachers to deliver content to them to enhance their skills, give them the basis to perform like experienced teachers from the show. What have you learned about online learning? What works? Where we need to improve things? Can it become a solution that we use for disseminating best practices in the way you are at Reach?

MDP: I love arguing with my fellow deans of education about this type of work, because my argument is always remote from where? Online relative to what? And it's true, they are remote from us as a campus. But in a traditional program, they're remote from the workplace where they're going to be working. And we're flipping it and saying, "We'll be remote, so that your job becomes your university campus." And our thesis here is that the employer has skin in the game. This is their future workforce—and not in an ethereal, aggregate sense. This individual, who I have one of my mentor teachers mentoring today, is going to be one of my classroom teachers tomorrow. And so they are incentivized to have very real feedback with these individuals, in real time, under the supervision of one of their mentor teachers. And that is a tradeoff we're willing to make. We will be remote from you so that you are close to your employer so that you are getting the skills they know you will need in their setting today and tomorrow. And I think that's something that's applicable well outside of K–12. What we hear from employers in every sector is that higher ed doesn't actually know what skills we need. And even if we tell them today, that won't be the skills we need in six months. And in six months, they'll just be getting this approved in the first place. And so I think the push toward embedding learning in the workplace—and not just in theory, not just as a 10-week learning practicum, but actually having this be an employer-driven training experience that we are supplementing and supporting and then providing the backing and accreditation around—is something that doesn't just work in K–12, it works in any industry that requires a skilled workforce.

JF: That's a really interesting way to describe it, because certainly our research confirms that there's a certain Waiting for Godot element between employers and educators. And employers keep saying, "You're not providing what I need." And the educators keep saying, "You're not telling me what you need. And by the way, a lot of what you need, I'm not equipped to do, anyhow, certainly not without a lot of support from you, which isn't forthcoming." Where does that leave the role, particularly of K–12, particularly high school? And what are the problems that we need to be clear-eyed about trying to address with preparing people who are not going to go through the standard American dream script of from high school directly to four-year degree completion, directly onto career or further education?

MDP: I think we need to figure out division of roles and articulation of those roles between institutions of higher ed and high schools and the employer. And the good news is we already have an answer. I think that the German Berufe academy system, the Swiss apprenticeship model, already provides us a guidepost to move toward. But I do think we have to look at how do we take their outcomes and make them work inside of our statutory systems, inside of our cultural norms, et cetera. And one of the biggest things that comes to mind, to your question of what's the biggest barrier there, it's disentangling the types of knowledge that have to get conveyed to a learner. Institutions of higher education and high schools are very good at teaching, I would say, thematic concepts: foundations of arithmetic, critical thinking, and reading. Employers are very good at teaching discrete skills that you need for this particular role. You want a workforce that has both. So getting clear on when we say we're both going to be responsible for teaching, well, who's teaching what, I think, would be the first place we'd need to start, and we can look to the example of what's already being done in Europe.

JF: That's interesting. I mean, a lot of literature also focuses, of course, on the broad domain of social skills sometimes, called "soft skills"—things like the capacity to work in teams, the capacity to deal with people unfamiliar to you, spontaneous, written and oral communication. Are those teachable, do you think? And do we put enough emphasis—in everything from the design of curriculum to lesson plans to teaching those skills that so many employers complain are lacking in the applicants that come into their recruiting processes?

MDP: I believe that anything can be learned, but the way we go about it, I think is completely backwards. And it comes back again to this thesis around real-world experience. A class on critical thinking. A class on professionalism in the workplace. That's not how anybody learns how to do these things. And so the sooner we can get students into those real-world settings—not having a lesson plan that's taught on here's how you write an email, make them write an email, and then make sure you have the real-time feedback loop.

JF: In some ways, it sounds as if you're almost extending the Reach University theory of change, theory of intervention, and trying to expand that to incorporate other employers—private-sector employers, other public-sector employers—to create work-based learning experiences that produce mismatches and help people understand what's actually going to be required.

MDP: Yes. We will never theorize our way to a coordinated labor market. And so asking high schools or universities to guess what an employer needs—and then to create a theoretical curriculum and then assume that that will be a way of conferring the skills needed that will perfectly match with what's required—will never happen. We need to find ways to integrate these two systems in a way that doesn't get in the way of the employer and the business they have to run every day.

JF: Well, talking about learning and transferring learning, you mentioned that the federal government has been encouraging states to develop their own apprenticeship problems. I assume, given Reach University's visibility in the space, you're hearing from people trying to set up those programs in jurisdictions where you're not active. What are the top two or three things you tell them?

MDP: We think there are three things that groups have to get right. So the first is, the state has to develop a policy that is good for the employer. In this case, that's school districts allowing them to access the funds to cover any costs that they're incurring around mentors in the workplace, any of their subsequent supportive hours that they're required, flexibility on the credentials that someone might have. Piece two is helping universities. We provide considerable technical assistance—helping universities re-understand their role, to we are here to be the partner to the employer. But at the end of the day, the employer is the one who decides what a good finished product is, not us. And so thinking through how do we design a degree that has them getting that experience, that has us getting that feedback. And then the third bucket for us with a system, anytime we're working with a state, is data. Whether it's through us and the data system we've built over at Craft, our data layer that I mentioned before, or if it's building their own in-house systems, we're agnostic. But what does matter is, you have to have some longitudinal data system for tracking which of your interventions are working and what the return of investment is on those interventions if you're going to be serious about actually using this to definitively end labor shortages in this market.

Skydeck is the Harvard Business School alumni podcast, featuring interviews and insights from across the world of business. It’s produced by the External Relations Department at HBS. Our audio engineer is Craig McDonald.

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