What Future Are We Preparing People For?
What Future Are We Preparing People For?
Randy Ziegenfuss: Having a job is a sliver of being a thriving human being, but it becomes the sole reason why we have schools. And that is a conversation that is more important now than ever in the age of AI, where we're all worried about it taking away our humanity. So let's have that conversation about what it means to be a human being.
Why Education Is Really a Conversation About Change
CJ Casciotta: Welcome to Reculture. My name is CJ Casciotta. This is a podcast about better messages. Messages that don't just tell us what to react to. There are a lot of those right now. But messages that actually help us understand the moment we are in. Ones that don't just grab our attention, but then point us somewhere afterward. Because whether we are navigating a brand, a team, a family, or even just the world right now, we are all living inside stories.
And the most important story we can navigate is the story we're becoming.
All right, if you are leading something, you are navigating change. You cannot escape change. The world changes. Technology changes. Customer expectations change. The people you serve and work with and even love, they all change. And here, I think, is every navigator's challenge, or at least this has been true for me. It's knowing what should change and what shouldn't. What do you preserve versus leave behind? What do you pivot on versus stick to your guns on? What version of reality do you decide to carry into the future?
I've spent a lot of this podcast talking about the things people follow and latch onto during moments of change: adventure, myths, artifacts, a distinct voice. So for this episode, I'm going to play a conversation for you that I had recently on, wait for it, education.
CJ, what are you doing? I thought you were talking about change.
Hear me out, okay? Education is where a culture decides what gets carried forward. Education answers: What should the next generation know? What skills actually matter? What values should endure? What assumptions no longer fit reality? Those aren't just educational questions. Those are leadership questions. Those are cultural questions. And increasingly, they're the questions every organization is being forced to answer.
So that's why I wanted to share this conversation with Nick Melvoin from the Los Angeles Unified School Board and Randy Ziegenfuss, a longtime educator and superintendent, from our Reculture Live event in Los Angeles. On the surface, it's a conversation about schools here in the U.S. But underneath it, it's an exploration of what happens when the world changes and the people responsible for carrying something forward have to decide which story is going to survive.
We have two really brilliant people with us today, Dr. Randy Ziegenfuss and Nick Melvoin. I want you guys to give just a really brief snapshot of your positions and your background, and then we'll get into it.
Redesigning a System Built for a Different World
Randy Ziegenfuss: Sure. Randy Ziegenfuss is my name, and I am from Pennsylvania. I spent my entire life in Pennsylvania and was in public education for the first part of my career. I spent a full thirty-five years there and retired in the middle of COVID. Now I'm working in higher education.
I actually started as a music teacher, then got into administration and retired as a public school superintendent. I work in the education department at a university in Pennsylvania. One of my main interests and curiosities along the way has been, how do we redesign the education system? I work primarily with doctoral students who are interested in being changemakers, not only in the K-12 system, but also in the higher education system and corporate learning spaces as well.
What Broken Systems Taught a School Board Leader
Nick Melvoin: Hi there. I'm Nick Melvoin, but my surname was originally Malwurm. It's German, and it means flour maggot. Jews in the old country had to buy our names, and we didn't have a lot of money, so we got flour maggot. I always wish my great-grandfather were still alive because I always wanted to ask him, "What else was available?" I know we were poor, but still.
I say that because when my great-grandfather came to this country escaping persecution in Europe at the turn of the last century, he was a kindergartner on the Lower East Side of New York in a public school. On his first day of school, the teacher said, "What's your name?" And he said, "Charles Malwurm." The teacher misheard and wrote down Charles Melvoin. He got home with that piece of paper, and his parents said, "Well, I guess Melvoin is our name now, because that's what the teacher said."
I tell that story because my family knew then what so many of us still know now, which is that the way to succeed in this country is through our public education system and public systems more broadly. And I think we can probably agree that most of those systems are broken.
That is what catalyzed me into the world of education. Right after college, I graduated in 2008 and started teaching in L.A. Unified in Watts at the corner of 104th and Compton, at a school that was incredibly under-resourced. Only four percent of eighth graders could do algebra and were being failed on to ninth grade. The assistant principal the year before I got there was arrested for raping a student, and the year prior had brandished a gun at a parent and wasn't fired. He was just moved from one school to another.
That really catalyzed an interest in broader systems change. I ended up, long story short, suing the school district on behalf of my students, which then, when I got elected to the school board years later, made for a great first day of work when everyone was like, "We remember you. You sued us."
But it had catalyzed this interest in advocacy more broadly. So I ended up going to law school based on that experience, working briefly in the Obama White House, and then came back to L.A. and got elected to the LA Unified School Board in 2017. I've been serving for the last eight years, trying to understand how to reshape education and, as some folks I'm sure in this audience can attest, in public education, also just trying to keep the lights on.
I'm constantly finding that pressure, which is the great tension between theory and practice, in a district where 85% of kids are living in poverty and 90% are kids of color. My days, at least like today, have mostly been dealing with ICE raids and not thinking through AI and the future of education.
When Education and Reality Start Drifting Apart
CJ Casciotta: This is a super fun conversation because both of you come from public education, but from very different backgrounds and very different parts of the country. Allentown, Pennsylvania, working-class and middle-class families. And you are in Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the biggest school districts in the country.
So I want to start with the same question and ask you both: When was the moment or time when you started seeing what you thought education should be and where it is start to drift apart?
Agency, Creativity, and the Purpose of School
Randy Ziegenfuss: My passion, my interests, my gifts, and my assets were in the area of the arts and music. I didn't know it at the time, but I felt like that was a place where I had a lot of agency and I could be myself. My curiosity and creativity were recognized. I was good at that, and I was going to be a music teacher.
So I went to college, became a music teacher, and taught music for twelve years. My classroom felt like a respite for many students. It was a place where their curiosity, their creativity, and their agency were allowed to be released before they went back into the assembly line of school.
As you can tell, agency is at my core. When I became a superintendent, I felt like, and this is not something I'm terribly proud of, I had the authority to be able to organize and say what the conversation was going to be. Agency was a core piece. Walking around schools and seeing, "We're robbing kids of agency," I thought, "This is a thing that's missing here."
I think agency is a self-awareness of the gifts and assets you bring to the world. And I think that's really one of the purposes of school, that we should create spaces where people can understand their gifts and assets. Then you are given the space to release those things, share them, and contribute.
As a superintendent, I felt this dissonance between, "I'm leading the system, but it's not what it could be, and I have these values inside of me. What do I do?" So I started to look out and learn how people lead these systems. Then I was able to do various small things and start to think about how we reorganize schools. So that was the journey. Not really a moment, but a journey.
CJ Casciotta: Thank you. Nick, how about you?
Why Systems Fail People, Not the Other Way Around
Nick Melvoin: I think for me it was more of a moment. Those first few days teaching, I had just graduated from Harvard. I was coming to South L.A. to be like, "I'm going to fix this." I had these notions, right? I was expecting kids who weren't motivated, but I was going to motivate them. Parents who were disengaged. Teachers who were bad.
I was so quickly disabused of all those notions. I met unbelievable kids with so much raw material. I met parents who were working three or four jobs to support their kids and were so motivated, but weren't coming to back-to-school night because it was at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday and they worked. I met teachers, some of whom had gone to that school themselves, who were working incredibly hard and were brilliant in an under-resourced school.
It hit me over the course of those first few days that, one, I was naive and wrong, and two, the system is not set up for these schools and these students and these teachers to succeed.
That was also 2008, 2009. By February, the economy had fallen out. The district had to cut half of its budget and laid off thousands of teachers. But because of the way the system is structured, sixty-seven percent of the faculty in my school was laid off, whereas on the west side of Los Angeles, where I had grown up, maybe one teacher was laid off. Maybe.
So to me, it was that click of, "This is about the system. This isn't about individual agents or actors. This is about a system that is not set up for success for kids or the adults who work on behalf of those kids."
The Conversation We're Not Having About Education
CJ Casciotta: For the past at least ten years, it seems like when we talk about education, at least nationally, everything really focuses on culture war stuff. At the same time, it's like, okay, how do we prepare kids in the age of AI? Let's talk about staying competitive with China. What does teaching look like?
I'm surprised that, at least from my own perspective, that conversation feels really absent. So what conversation do you think we're missing when it comes to education, and why does it seem so hard to have that conversation?
Nick Melvoin: I mean, this is teeing me up to give you this answer, but I think in some ways we're missing this conversation. The reason, to be candid, is because there's not a special interest group that is vested in this conversation.
I would say it a little differently than you. I would say ten years ago, the conversation in this country around education was mostly around charter schools, education reform, and unions. Because there were vested interests in those, you had folks with something to lose or an angle.
Then the culture wars, that wasn't too surprising to me, because if you go back a hundred years to the Scopes trial, we were talking about whether you can teach evolution. Schools are where you are inculcating the future. So the idea that folks on both sides would want schools to be either pro-LGBTQ or anti-LGBTQ, because they know that schools are so formative, is less surprising.
I think the challenge is that, besides rooms like this one and most kids who are sitting bored staring at the ceiling, there's nobody who benefits from us having this conversation. There are a lot of special interests who lose out.
When you think about the school district, as Randy knows too, there are different lobbies and interests we have to deal with, from the dairy lobby, which requires that we serve milk in schools or we don't get federal funding for any school food.
Randy Ziegenfuss: And we throw it away.
CJ Casciotta: But that chocolate milk was really good growing up.
Nick Melvoin: You joke, CJ, but the number of debates that the school district in L.A. has had about chocolate milk and not chocolate milk, because yes, they drink it if you have it, but then they throw it away.
We actually have to have milk. It is illegal. It is against federal law for a school district to disparage dairy. I swear to you. A high school senior in L.A. Unified was advocating in her high school a few years ago about the benefits of water. Her administrator had to follow federal law by saying, "You can't do that." We got sued, as we should have, and we were able to settle it.
But the reason we settled, as opposed to the student winning, is because it's actually a federal statute under the USDA that we cannot disparage milk. I say that as one example of many for why we're not having these conversations.
CJ Casciotta: What about you? What are we missing?
The Culture Wars vs. The Purpose of Education
Randy Ziegenfuss: That's one of those weird parts of the system too. It sends these signals that compel us to behave in ways that are totally weird.
I think the culture war conversation is a distraction from a messier conversation we need to be having, and I think that's around the purpose of education.
What Does It Mean to Be a Thriving Human Being?
One of the things I always struggled with when I was in the system was the constant signals about college and career, and how we are basically a machine producing workers for this capitalistic system that we work in. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we shouldn't help students find careers and things like that, but it becomes the sole reason why we have schools. That's the message I think the system has been sending us.
The messier conversation is, yes, having a job is a sliver of being a thriving human being. And that's the conversation we need to have. What does it mean to be a thriving human being?
That is a conversation that is more important now than ever in the age of AI, where we're all worried about it taking away our humanity. So let's have that conversation about what it means to be a human being. How do we help students find those gifts and assets? What are those uniquely human things that you are good at and could contribute?
That's a whole redesign of the system. That's a messy conversation because you've got all these factions. I think the culture war thing is really just a distraction because we don't want to have that conversation right now.
Why Schools Struggle to Measure What Matters Most
Nick Melvoin: I would just add to what Randy is saying. I completely agree. I also think it's not only that it's a messier conversation. It's that schools and districts are so focused now on metrics and outcomes, and there's no way to measure thriving human beings.
You can measure college-going rate. Here we have A-G readiness. You can measure math scores, test scores, attendance. You can even measure social-emotional scores. There are CASEL and other frameworks. You can look at portfolios. You can't measure "thriving human."
So districts just say, "Well, if we don't measure it, we're not getting tested on it. We're not going to focus on it."
Randy Ziegenfuss: And that's a signal the system tells us. As a school and a school district, you need to be focused on the quantitative and those kinds of measures. How do we change that? That's part of the redesign.
CJ Casciotta: How do we change that? How do you break apart a centuries-old system now and redesign it slowly?
I don't even know. You know what's crazy about this? And this is not a good look for an interviewer, but I don't even know the first question to ask. I think that's kind of where we collectively are as a nation. What comes first?
I mean, we understand that milk is the culprit here, so let's start there.
What AI Is Revealing About Education
Nick Melvoin: Big dairy.
I'll tell you, CJ. There's an interesting model, and I know everyone's looking at AI. There's Alpha School, which is in Texas, and it's run by a tech and, I think, quiet tech billionaire. The idea is you have an AI tutor for two hours a day, and then you're self-directed and it's project-based.
Without getting into the merits of that, what I really like is that their one objective, their outcome, is that they ask students, "Would you rather be on vacation or at school?" Until one hundred percent of the students say, "At school. I like it here," they don't consider themselves successful.
It's interesting. It's a little elusive in the sense that even I was a nerd in school and loved it, and I still think I would want to go on vacation every once in a while. But it's a mindset shift. If students are not saying, "I want to be here because I'm enjoying it and this is what I want to spend my time doing," they don't think they're successful. It's a really interesting paradigm to think through.
The One Thing Education May Need to Give Up
CJ Casciotta: I'll try to frame it this way. Is there one thing that we could start to give up? What would we have to give up in the public education system to see this come to life, or at least to create the building blocks?
Control, Agency, and Institutional Change
Randy Ziegenfuss: We're in a system where all the signals are about control. If you look at the hierarchy, it's all about control. Federal governments, state governments, school boards, teachers. And who's at the bottom of the chain? The students. They're the ones who are expected to adapt to whatever else we as adults want.
So I think one of the big mindset shifts, as Nick mentioned, is we need to give up this idea that we need to control everything. If we go back to the core of agency, agency is not about control. It's about allowing other people to have control over their own curiosities.
Is it chaos? No, it's not going to be chaos. There are definitely guardrails and parameters around which we work, but you're honoring somebody's agency and giving them the space to figure out what they are good at, what their contribution is, and you're not controlling that.
Why Complex Systems Resist Transformation
Nick Melvoin: I don't think this conversation is just theoretical. Sometimes I bring, as a prop to these talks, the California Education Code, which is this thick.
Without getting into the merits of charter schools, which are irrelevant here because L.A. has more than anywhere in the country, charter schools are exempt from about ninety-five percent of this book. One of the things I've been saying now, after being on the board eight years, to the state legislature and the governor is, "Give us the same freedom."
If only five percent of that book, the core safety and structure, is working for a lot of these schools, why are you requiring the rest of us to follow the rest of it? Not only the milk thing, but everything else.
I think it's a lot of finger-pointing because we have a system of government where you have the governor, who controls the educational budget, the legislature, which controls the education code, a state-appointed board of education, an elected state superintendent of education, and then a thousand school districts.
In L.A. County alone, there are 81 school districts. L.A. Unified is the biggest by far. We're the second-largest district in the country. But Santa Monica is its own school district. Beverly Hills is its own school district. So there's just so much.
I really do think you throw out the book and get back to that relinquishing of control and seeing what might work.
Randy Ziegenfuss: I also think an important thing to understand about control is that the people in the system who have the power went through the system, were successful in the system, and are all about preserving that power. They're all about preserving the system. They've got the control. They're not going to give it up. They don't want to give it up.
But they're going to have to if we want to redesign school. So the big question is, how do we create the space for those people in power to see the benefits of giving up control, or at least some control? I think control is one of the levers.
How Parents Can Create Change Right Now
CJ Casciotta: That's my question. For people listening who are parents, who are citizens, not necessarily educators, is there a concrete way?
We've seen, especially when it comes to cultural issues, people show up to school board meetings and get things changed, for better or for worse, depending on what it is. What can we do on a concrete level to start seeing that design shift a bit?
The Questions That Reinforce the System
Randy Ziegenfuss: For me, language is really important. If I'm a parent and I have a student, the language and the conversations I have with that student are really important.
Think about it. If you're a parent out there, what are the questions and conversations you have with your student? Are you saying things like, "Did you get an A today?" "Did you do all your work?" Questions like that reinforce the system we currently have.
If you want to change it, ask things like, "What were you curious about today?" "Who did you work with today?" "What kinds of conversations did you have today?"
Those kinds of questions release agency and curiosity and start to reshape what students and children are hearing and how they act and behave in the system. Every time we ask, "Did you get an A?" or "What grade did you get?" we are voting for the current system.
Why Local Leadership Matters More Than Most People Think
Nick Melvoin: I think that's such a great individual answer. We're coming at this from different vantage points, and mine is more systemic.
Obviously, I have a bias here, but I'm sure, without putting people on the spot, if I asked this group of folks, you could talk pretty fluently about federal politics and what's going on with the Trump administration, and even this California gubernatorial race. But if I said, "Who's your school board member? Who's your city council member?" everyone kind of looks at each other.
And yet, when it comes to the legislature, where I'm talking about this education code, state funding, all these controls, the state accountability system, it's all the state legislature, your state assembly member, and your state senator. Most people probably aren't aware of who that person is.
So my answer is, I encourage folks to show up to their local school board meetings and to get to know their local legislature, and start to demand some of that. I do think that if we had more of a fever pitch around changing the education code or going after big milk, we could start to change things.
And actually, speaking of cell phones, that's another thing that I did with parents. Last year, we banned cell phones in LAUSD, which came from a lot of groundswell and parent support. So there are opportunities to make these big changes.
CJ Casciotta: Nick's cell phone number is...
We have time for one question. Yes, sir.
Technology, Agency, and the Digital Divide
Audience Member: Regarding LAUSD, a few years ago, the superintendent did a radical thing by giving all the students their own personal laptops. That ran into some problems with theft. A lot of them got lost, broken, or stolen. But the concept itself seems to me that it created agency with each student to be in the world of their choosing through their computer.
What did you think of that experiment? Is that something maybe worth trying again?
Nick Melvoin: I'll say two things and then have Randy have the closing word here. One, that was a perfect example that happens a lot in public policy of a great idea with poor execution.
It was like, "Let's close the digital divide," and then just drop iPads that didn't have the right software on them. There was an FBI investigation. I had a different take. When a lot of the kids were breaking into them or hacking them, instead of getting disciplined, I would have said, "Let's bring them to computer science and teach all these kids."
That had set the district back. COVID actually accelerated it for a lot of districts. We are a district where now every student has a device. I'm actually now thinking about the deleterious effects of that. The pendulum has swung.
The cell phone ban was my first step. I'm thinking a lot about, especially in the grades before third grade, actually getting rid of devices and getting kids to play and be tactile and explore.
But I do think at the middle and high school level, using those tools and not putting your head in the sand is important. This is a conversation we're having a lot as a school district. So much of our day-to-day is now on the internet and now with AI. Even those who don't think they're using AI are using AI. If you Google search, it's AI.
The question is how to get students there, how to search, and also how to supplement. That's one of the things I think school districts haven't learned enough lessons from COVID on. Sometimes it's too black and white, or the pendulum swings.
But small schools and rural school districts where you can't take AP Japanese can Zoom in and take it with us. Or figuring out the flipped classroom model, which comes out of Khan Academy and Sal Khan, which is how to better utilize the teacher's time. It's not always just standing and lecturing.
I thought I was a really good teacher, but there are people out there who can teach To Kill a Mockingbird far better than I could lecture. My skill set would be helping those students with their writing and comprehension. So I think there's a lot of promise in that flipped classroom model.
CJ Casciotta: Randy, you live in this world. You think all the time about how to take these big ideas and bridge the gap between idea and execution. I'd love for you to close us out.
What AI Reveals About Learning and Human Agency
Randy Ziegenfuss: Focusing on the issue of technology again, having been in that space when one-to-one was coming into play in the 2010s, we did a terrible job of it because we took this system and thought it was a technical solution. We thought we could just buy computers and put them over the same system. We didn't change anything about the way we taught, and it was kind of a disaster.
It escalated productivity. It allowed us to do things faster, but it didn't really change the way teaching and learning happened.
I see AI the same way too. We just want to tack it on. And what we're finding is, my God, it changes agency. Now kids are cheating.
But it requires us to change what we believe about teaching and learning. It pushes us back to that idea of agency. AI and technology really do amplify agency. Until we figure that out and do the really tough mindset work, we're going to be banging our heads against those computers and all the AI, wondering why it just doesn't work.
Closing Thoughts
CJ Casciotta: Thanks so much for listening. If these conversations resonate with you, you can explore more episodes, writing, and ideas at notes.reculture.tv. And if you'd like to learn more about Reculture, our sense-making studio focused on brand, culture, and media advisory, our home is reculture.tv.
