The Report Card with Nat Malkus

At the end of this past November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and, since then, there has been a lot of discussion of what AI will mean for education. Will AI render teachers irrelevant? Should AI be banned in the classroom? Will homework ever be the same again?

Often, though, discussions of these questions can feel very abstract and distant, as if AI in education is some problem off in the future. Today’s guest, however, argues that it is anything but.

Ethan Mollick argues that teachers should already be using AI to better their teaching, that we should already be using AI to accelerate student learning, and that we should already be thinking about the threat AI poses to traditional forms of schoolwork such as the essay and the problem set.

Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He writes about AI on his Substack, One Useful Thing, and on Twitter. Over the past year, he has co-written three papers with Lilach Mollick on AI in education: Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts; Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts; and New Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments.

Show Notes

One Useful Thing

The Homework Apocalypse

Democratizing the Future of Education

Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts

Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts

New Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider about their new book, Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To). Nat, Ethan, and Jack discuss grades, tests, and transcripts; whether grades do a good job of motivating student learning; how our current grading system came into existence; grading abroad; short-haul and long-haul messages; AP exams; the difficulty of narrative grading; whether transcripts should be updated for the digital age; making grades overwritable; the GED; how teachers can improve their grading practices; and more.

Ethan Hutt is Associate Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jack Schneider is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Show Notes:

Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To)

The big problem(s) with grades

Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme

A History of Achievement Testing in the United States, Or: Explaining the Persistence of Inadequacy

A Thin Line Between Love and Hate: Educational Assessment in the United States

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Melissa Kearney about her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Nat and Melissa discuss the decline in marriage among non-college-educated parents, why having two parents in the home matters for student outcomes, the stock of marriageable men, whether studying family structure is taboo, what the fracking boom can teach us about the decline in marriage, how marriage became decoupled from raising children, universal basic income for parents, why Asian Americans seem immune from the broader decline in marriage, intergenerational households, the difficulty of parenting, the importance of culture, and more.

Melissa Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and the Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.

Show Notes:

The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About

The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession

Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Non-Marital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom

The Economics of Non-Marital Childbearing and The “Marriage Premium for Children”

Investigating Recent Trends in the U.S. Teen Birth Rate

Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV's 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing

Note: This episode originally aired in September 2022.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Doug Lemov about how cellphones and social media harm the academic and social development of students and make schools less inclusive.

Nat and Doug also discuss online learning, school choice, the difficulty of creating schools with a coherent operating philosophy, the state of public schooling, The Scarlet Letter, the pandemic's effects on students, teacher professional development, the relationship between parenting and schooling, the idea that schooling sometimes has to be hard for students, and the role that schools play in shaping students' habits of attention.

Doug Lemov is the author of Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging and Teach Like a Champion.

Show Notes:

Take Away Their Cellphones

Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging

Teach Like A Champion 3.0

Teach Like A Champion

iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

It Was a Mistake to Let Kids Onto Social Media Sites. Here’s What to Do Now.

On July 12th, the California State Board of Education adopted a new math framework that will affect the way math is taught for the nearly 6 million students in California’s public schools and has the potential to influence the way math is taught at the national level.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with two of the framework’s critics, Jelani Nelson and Tom Loveless, about the framework, its intellectual origins, what they think it gets wrong, whether it is equitable, and what it will mean for California's students.

Jelani Nelson is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley.

Tom Loveless is an education researcher and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Show Notes:

California Math Framework

California Adopts Controversial New Math Framework. Here’s What’s in It

California’s New Math Framework Doesn’t Add Up

Analysis and Critique of California Math Frameworks Revisions (CMF)

UC Berkeley, Stanford Professors Face Controversy, Debate State Math Curriculum

California Students Are Struggling in Math. Will Reforms Make the Problem Worse?

The Divider: Jo Boaler of Stanford Is Leading the Math-Instruction Revolution. Critics Say Her Claims Don’t Always Add Up.