aiEDU Studios

Sarah Morgenthau runs the "I Have A Dream" Foundation; Michael Barrett has helped govern it from the Board while serving as a trustee at the University of Pennsylvania. Between them they make a grounded case: the technology is changing fast, but the thing that actually improves a kid's life hasn't changed at all: a long-term relationship with someone who keeps showing up.

Across the conversation they get specific about what that loo...

Wim Sweldens has watched technology remake itself for forty years — Bell Labs, mobile networks, and now Kiswe, the interactive live-streaming company he co-founded. The last time he felt anything like this moment was 1991, when a colleague told him "everything that's not on the internet doesn't exist." His answer to this one is AIQ: a way of measuring not how smart AI is, but how well humans navigate its jagged edge — t...

Two decades of working on school improvement — at High Tech High, at Chicago Public Schools, at the Gates Foundation, and now through her own consulting practice — have left Jennifer Husbands with a fairly direct view of why AI adoption in schools is going the way it's going. The technology isn't the problem. The problem is that the US invests less in teacher learning time than almost any peer system, and you cannot ask...

Robin Lake has been studying public education from the systems level for more than thirty years. Her diagnosis is sharper than most: we built a school system for an average student who doesn't exist, and we keep placing kids in special education because general classrooms have run out of tools to support them.

This conversation works through what CRPE has been finding in its AI research — the widening gap between suburban and ...

In 2017, before ChatGPT existed, a 180,000-student district in Georgia decided to build the first AI-ready high school in the country. Babak Mostaghimi was one of the people who built it. Bree Dusseault, at Center on Reinventing Public Education/The Strategic Education Research Partnership, was one of the people who later studied what made it possible — and what stops most other systems from following.

This conversation, recor...

"It's not that girls aren't good at STEM. It's the confidence around 'can I do STEM?'" That's Dr. Patrice Johnson, and her quiet challenge to the dominant frame of STEM education — that the gap is technical when it's actually cultural — is the throughline of this conversation.

She runs Project Scientist, a national nonprofit that puts girls into hands-on STEM and runs the Elevated Institute — a teacher-training arm...

Matt Sigelman has spent two decades building the most granular picture anyone has of how the labor market actually works – first at Lightcast, now at the Burning Glass Institute. So when he says schools are asking the wrong question about AI, it's worth slowing down.

The new research he's just released with aiEDU translates how AI is reshaping work into concrete implications for what schools should teach. Among the findings: A...

What if the most important thing school can teach kids in the AI era isn't how to use the technology — but how to stay in relationship with each other? That's the question Michelle Culver, founder of The Rithm Project and a former senior leader at Teach for America, has spent the last two years trying to answer.

We dig into what happens when the loneliness epidemic collides with generative AI, why AI companions are already a $...

What if the biggest problem in education isn't technology — it's that we've reduced school to reading scores and graduation rates and stripped away everything that actually makes learning meaningful?

Kaya Henderson took the lowest-performing metropolitan  school district in the country and made it the fastest-improving — not by drilling harder, but by bringing back art, music, field trips, and a curriculum built aro...

What does the rise of AI mean for schools, startups, and the skills students actually need? Tony Wan – Head of Platform at Reach Capital and former co-founder of EdSurge – has spent over a decade watching education technology evolve. Now he's watching AI reshape the landscape faster than anything before it.

We get into why "taste" – the kind you can only build through practice and productive struggle – may be...

What if AI literacy belonged alongside reading and math as a foundational skill – not tucked inside a computer science elective? That's the case Erin Mote, CEO of InnovateEDU, has been making for years. In this conversation, she gets specific about what it's going to take to actually get there.

We dig into the disappearing entry-level job, why middle school may be more important than people think, and what it looks like to rei...

Do the benefits of generative AI in education outweigh the harms? 

We sat down with Copley High School debate team members Anna and Charlotte, two sharp juniors who placed 5th at Ohio’s state finals, to hear how they built winning cases, adapted under pressure, and what they’re actually seeing in classrooms right now. 

From earlier cancer detection to drug repurposing for rare diseases, they explain how ...

What if AI didn’t kill coding but made learning it more meaningful? 

We sat down with Pat Yongpradit (former Chief Academic Officer at Code.org) to unpack why computer science still matters, how AI is reshaping classroom practices, and what real AI literacy looks like for students and teachers. 

We also zoomed out to note that coding is only one piece of computer science, which also spans data science, cyberse...

Imagine a classroom where 5th graders present their research to younger students, take questions, and proudly defend their findings — and where AI is a quiet helper, not the centerpiece. 

That’s Celeste Riley’s dual-language classroom in Memphis! It's a space built on trust, cultural relevance, and clear expectations that make learning feel urgent, relevant, and real. 

On this week's episode of aiE...

Ready for honest career guidance instead of stage-ready talking points? 

We sit down with CareerVillage.org founder Jared Chung to unpack how AI is reshaping career prep, why human advice still matters, and what parents, teachers, and students can do to navigate uncertainty with confidence. 

We dig into the questions that families often whisper after conferences: Which jobs are safe? Should my kid study law, compute...

Imagine telling a chatbot to “onboard this vendor,” and it finishes the job across multiple systems in under a minute. 

On this episode, we sit down with Automation Anywhere co-founder Neeti Mehta Shukla to unpack how this shift frees people from repetitive tasks and lets them focus on more meaningful work that uses their human judgment, care, and creativity.

We trace the journey from early RPA (robotic proce...

If you’ve ever wondered whether AI has 'broken' school, this conversation with Stanford associate professor Victor Lee cuts through the noise and gets to the heart of the issue.

We start by mapping out three lenses every learner needs:

1. The user who applies tools well.
2. The developer who grasps core concepts like models and training data.
3. The critic who sees bias, persuasion, and societal impact.

That trifecta becomes a pra...

The hardest part of AI in education isn’t picking a tool. It’s deciding what kind of learning we want to protect, elevate, and scale.

On this episode of aiEDU Studios, we dive straight into that question with Sunanna Chand, executive director of The Reinvention Lab at Teach For America.

Sunanna has a clear stance on edtech: focus on talent over technology. Instead of imagining rows of students plugged into personalized da...

Teaching at Rikers Island isn’t a typical origin story for a future school district leader. And yet, it demonstrates that education works best as human development, not a test-prep machine. 

Former Chicago Public Schools CEO J.C. Brizard joins aiEDU Studios to talk about modern-day school systems and what to keep, what to scrap, and how to move faster than technology that's reshaping our jobs and lives. 

We got candid...