Dan Gonzalez | District C - Transcript
Jermy Singer: I’m Jeremy Singer, president of College Board, and this is the Education Equation. I’ve spent my career grappling with what truly drives student success. On this podcast, I’ll talk with people who are researching, building, and scaling solutions that matter. Every episode will go beyond the hype and focus on data and evidence to see what’s actually working.
Stop guessing, and let’s figure out what works.
Today’s guest is a friend and former colleague, Dan Gonzalez, the co-founder and co-CEO of District C, a national nonprofit dedicated to preparing students for the modern workforce. Dan’s career blends engineering, education, and corporate leadership.
He began his career as a classroom teacher teaching physics. From there, he moved to the corporate world with a test prep company, Manhattan Prep. [00:01:00] He rose through the ranks to become president of Manhattan Prep, right after its acquisition by Kaplan, which is where we met. And then in 2016, Dan and his wife, Anne Jones, launched District C to tackle a critical gap between academic learning and real-world collaborative skills that students need.
Their solution is Teamship, a reimagined internship where students solve actual problems for real businesses, preparing the next generation of diverse talent for the modern workforce. Welcome to the pod, Dan.
Dan Gonzalez: Jeremy! Good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Jeremy Singer: So, listen. You’ve had a broad set of career experiences, from an engineering degree to teaching to music and corporate leadership.
I’ve heard you say you found passion in music but purpose in test prep. Can you explain that distinction?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. Found some purpose in maybe the unlikeliest of places. I’ll take you back to March 2012. I was just a couple of months into leading Manhattan Prep, [00:02:00] and we got hacked.
We had some Russian hackers bust into our system. They stole 40,000 student records. Credit. Like everything: credit cards, passwords, security codes …
schools. I mean, educators need support. They want support. They want to feel like they’re a part of a community. [00:06:00]
I think a big thing for us at District C is building a community of educators who get trained by us to be Teamship coaches. That’s something we really try to stress and really elevate in the work.
Jeremy Singer: Resonates for me. Teaching can be so isolating and lonely in some ways.
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah.
Jeremy Singer: And I think great organizations do a lot to try to scaffold and give frameworks and support to teachers. It’s like the individual sport versus the team sport, maybe, how you’re really on your own.
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, absolutely.
Jeremy Singer: Going back to test prep, I want to recognize that there are, you know, critiques of test prep as a whole.
It’s often derided as further widening the achievement gap. I clearly felt some guilt because first thing I did after I left Kaplan to join College Board was I did a partnership with Sal Khan and Khan Academy, where we offered free test prep to everyone, world-class resources. One of many attempts we do to try to level the playing field, you know. How did you think about that when you were in that space?
Because clearly a lot of Manhattan Prep, the majority [00:07:00] of Manhattan Prep clients, were probably fairly wealthy and resourced.
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. By the way, I remember reading the headline for that announcement and just being kind of mind blown by the…. I mean for those that are listening that don’t have tons of experience with test prep, this was a seismic announcement.
Congrats on that. Really, really cool. I was just reading some of the data on that. It’s only proven to be really effective it seems in terms of helping lots of students increase their scores on the test.
I started in test prep from really the ground up.
I was a test prep tutor for many years. At one period I was tutoring 30 hours a week … I had 30 students on my portfolio. Yeah, it was a ton. And I think what I learned … These were predominantly students whose families had money. They maybe had money themselves.
What I think I learned through that is that people with money are battling demons themselves. They, you know, maybe it’s the GMAT student. I remember the first GMAT student I coached. [00:08:00] She had been told her whole life that she was terrible at math, and she was trying to get past that.
And I hope I was able to support her a little bit through that. High school students with just enormous pressure from their parents and expectations from their schools and their communities. So yeah. I think it does perpetuate some of the inequity that we all know about.
But a lot of these students… I felt a little bit of mission-calling for them as well, just trying to help them through the demons that they were battling, but then you get to a point where you see an opportunity to do something that might impact more students at scale.
For us, that was District C. Yeah. For you it was the Khan relationship. And, you know, it feels great to be able to do that.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, we’ll come to all that. I should say … Look. Some of the best colleagues, some of the smartest mission-driven people I’ve worked with were at Kaplan, just to be clear.
I really enjoyed my experience there. I should also put a …This is about data. You know, the free resources and test materials that we did with Sal and Khan Academy have had some impact. [00:09:00] What we’ve struggled, though, to solve is the fact that most students need some sort of adult support, whether it’s a coach or a tutor or a cheerleader.
And that’s hard to scale. The technology you could scale for free, but you can’t scale tutors in the same way. We’ve tried a lot of things, but for future discussion, I’d also be remiss if I didn't say that one of the founders of Manhattan Prep was Andrew Yang, and he was a longtime colleague of yours.
He has his own nonprofit. He’s been busy, running for president and New York City mayor. Share with listeners: What’s something you learned working with Andrew that informs your leadership approach?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. I got to work with Andrew for many years and for him for many years. I would say the thing that stood out to me and still does about him …. This probably comes as no surprise: He’s a big thinker and a vision caster.
Jeremy Singer: Right.
Dan Gonzalez: One of the things I think he was really good at that I experienced as one of his employees and a team member for many years: [00:10:00] He’s really good at getting really talented people to buy into his vision. Then I think the most important part … He’s great at making sure that those people know how important they are to this vision, to this mission.
I felt that every day … he does it in really, really small kind of everyday ways. Having the chance to shadow him for about a year as I was getting ready to take over for him, I got to talk with him about that stuff and see that stuff in action. But that’s his mode.
He’s great at casting a vision. He’s great at communicating that vision, and then he mobilizes people to get on board. I think that’s why he’s achieved so much success in the political world and running for office. Yeah, it was pretty cool to watch.
Jeremy Singer: My boss David Coleman is similarly a very big thinker and great at articulating the vision and getting support.
You know, I worked with him in the nineties at McKinsey, and we would go to a client. [00:11:00] Big corporate client, and the partner had worked with that corporate client for like 30 years, but we would put David forward, he was one year into McKinsey, to lead the conversation because he was just so good.
I can relate to that. Let’s move to the main course. You co-founded District C with your wife, Anne. What was the problem you were solving? Why did you make that move in 2016?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, it was really about this gap between the things that we were seeing in the professional workplace around things that employers were valuing in their employees, namely the ability to work with other people to do really hard things and leverage the strengths of others to solve hard problems.
As you know from professionals in the workplace, we were seeing teammates, those who thrive, were really good at those things like mobilizing others and tackling novel problems, breaking down complexity, and testing solutions, etc. And, you know, reflecting back on both of our experiences in teaching and in education, I think we felt there weren’t a lot of opportunities for students to practice those skills and develop those mindsets. [00:12:00]
And so, we decided to build an education experience called Teamship that would help students in a safe way, in a low-stakes way, develop those kinds of experiences.
That’s what we did. We kicked it off in early 2017, built it together for six years or so. Anne has since stepped away and has started another business. But yeah, we’re keeping on. It’s still rolling, so we’re excited about that.
Jeremy Singer: So just give a sense of the program.
Describe how Teamship works.
Dan Gonzalez: As you mentioned earlier, Teamship is … You can think of it as a reimagined internship where teams of three or four students work together to solve a real problem for a real business in the community. Through that process, they get coached by an educator who has been trained and certified by District C.
The experience follows a bit of a design sprint arc. We’re preparing students by giving them the tools [00:13:00] they need to optimize their collaborative work and to optimize their problem-solving. And it culminates at the end with an opportunity for teams of students to propose their solutions back to their business partner in a live, showcase setting.
Jeremy Singer: Great. And so these are typically seniors in high school? Or all grades?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. These are typically high school students. We’ve gone as young as seventh grade. Higher ed students also participate, but the vast majority, I’d say 95%, are 9 to 12.
Jeremy Singer: Got it. Got it. Wow. And it’s very localized I assume?
It’s with local businesses or local companies near the school?
Dan Gonzalez: That really depends on what our school and school district partners want for their program. Most of the time they prefer to have businesses in their backyards, but you know, there are a lot of cases where we’re bringing in business partners from around the country who zoom into meetings with students.
Some schools prefer to get their students exposure to professionals and businesses outside of the community.
Jeremy Singer: That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. So, my understanding is there’s three critical constituencies involved in the Teamship model.
There’s the students themselves. There’s the employer that's providing the professional reaction, and then there’s the coach. I want to dig into each a little bit. So let me start with a challenge. Every year I get an email from some consulting club, either at a college or business school, saying, “Jeremy Singer, we would love to send a team, volunteer a team for [00:14:00] six months to help do consulting at College Board. Blah, blah, blah.
I’m very diligent. I always take that email and forward it to our head of strategy and to some other people, depending on what the group is. I say, “Hey, we could have this team of motivated, smart college or business school students to do work. Universally every time I get, “Sorry. We’re not interested” internally from my colleagues. They say that the amount of work to make that project a success outweighs [00:15:00] the value we would get.
So, I can’t imagine as you said earlier, those students would have more sets of skills to bring to professionals. So, help us understand the value proposition to employer. And I know you’ve had employers that have re-opted. They’ve done it, and they come back. What do they say? Why do they come back?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. One of the things we worked really hard on at the beginning was building a model for business engagement that would make it really hard for them to say no. And I think one of the keys to that is the amount of time that they commit. The time commitment is five hours total over …
Jeremy Singer: Smart.
Dan Gonzalez: … generally over four to six weeks.
And two, making it clear that you, business partner, are not responsible for mentorship of the students you will attend. And this is key to pitching this.
“There are three discreet opportunities for you to meet with the student teams that are going to be working on your problem. They last for X number of minutes.
“Here’s what to expect in each of them. You don’t have to do [00:16:00]any preparation. The student teams are going to be running those meetings. Your job is to work with us to build a problem that is going to work, and we handhold them through that process. We actually write the problem scope for them, and then we team them up to attend these three meetings with the prep materials they need to show up and kind of represent their problems.”
Yeah, so it makes it really easy for them to plug in.
Jeremy Singer: Right. Really smart. So if we think of a return on investment for an employer, you made the investment incredibly light. In essence, you’ve said, “Hey, you’re not going to be the coach. We’ve got to coach. We said, ‘It’s only five hours.’
“And even when you come to meetings, we’re going to scaffold it. So, you just jump in.”
So that's really a great way. You’ve made the investment very light. Give us an example of a project that students do.
Dan Gonzalez: They typically fall into three categories, and this is part of making these kinds of things accessible for high school students.
One is operations/process improvement, [00:17:00] two is marketing or growth, and three is human capital or culture problems. When we are working with a business partner who’s new to the process, we’re generally coaching them to think about their problems in those three areas, and we ask them to think about the stuff that’s keeping them up at night.
So, for students, what motivates and engages them is something that is real for the business, that’s a real pain point, and then having an opportunity to contribute to that business's thinking is really motivating.
I'll give you one example. There’s a CEO of a company called OpiAID in Wilmington, North Carolina.
This is a tech startup. They use data science to optimize care for opioid addicted patients. He came to a team of Teamship students. Then he said, “Look. This space is really popular. I’ve got competitors popping up all over the place. I spend half my time trying to track what my competitors are doing. It’s distracting from my other work.
“This is a real pain point for me. It’s keeping me up at night. [00:18:00] I really want you to think outside the box.”
This team of students works for four weeks. They come back to him at the end, and they say, “Hey, we’ve got a plan. We’re going to walk you through this plan, and this plan is going to turn your competitors into your customers.”
So that’s a really high-level summary of that particular problem. But a lot of times these companies are blown away by what the students can create. And if you set a high bar for students, they will inevitably meet it. So it’s really cool to see those interactions.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. It sounds great. Let me shift to the coach side of this. The coach is central to your model, as you’ve explained already. I’ve heard you talk about how teachers are trained in one method and aren’t always the same. I know it’s a generalization as coaches talk about the distinction and then what you do because I assume most of the coaches are teachers that you’re transforming into this role.
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. Most of the coaches are teachers who are adopting Teamship for their students in their schools. That’s a really important part of the kind of the equity model. [00:19:00]
Students with social capital and family connections tend to get these kinds of opportunities. We’re really trying to build something that can be embedded at scale, in schools. And so of course, training teachers is critical. The thing that is really important for this is helping teachers understand what their role is.
It’s not standing up in front, delivering content. If I’m not standing in front talking about the stuff that I know, what do I do when students are working in their teams? Students working in teams is core to the model. We want to give them the autonomy and the agency to do their work.
Then what is my role as the teacher/coach? That’s what our training really focuses on. District C Coaching Institute is what it’s called. It’s a 35- to 40-hour experience. And what we’re doing is we’re giving teachers the tools and philosophies they need to play a critical role in that team-based, problem-solving process.
That transition is not always easy, but it’s fun. It’s challenging. I think teachers figure out and they recognize that [00:20:00] the things they're learning in the Coaching Institute they’re able to adopt not only in coaching Teamship, but in other parts of their teaching work as well.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, yeah. They bring it back to the classroom, I’m sure.
Yeah. So, if we spend time looking at a lot of successful educational initiatives and organizations, so much of the success is often driven by a few individuals. And when they try to scale it broadly, it’s really hard to replicate. So, if, imagine, you have a great, dynamic instructional leader, an incredibly skilled teacher, and you have a lot of success in an instance, but then you try to scale to, you know, from 10 schools to a hundred or whatever, and it breaks on its own.
When you think about scaling District C, where is the challenge? Is it getting enough coaches, enough employers? Where’s the … just getting district buy-in? Where is the challenge, the biggest challenge in your view, and how do you plan to address it?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, the biggest obstacle to scale that I’m feeling right now as we’re trying to go out to more school districts, is getting school [00:21:00] districts and teachers to say, ”Yes, we’re going to adopt this thing.”
Even in some cases where they have funding through a grant or some other source, there are just so many priorities and so many other things that are going on for school leaders, for district leaders, for teachers. The thing that I think we’ve realized is, if we were writing new algebra curriculum, it’s really easy to go to a district leader and say, “Hey, we’ve got this better algebra curriculum.”
They know exactly where to put it. It goes in the algebra class for Teamship. There’s no existing vessel for that. In our sales conversations, we’re always working collaboratively with district leaders to figure out with them: “Based on what you’re doing and your programming and your goals, where we can angle this in?”
And the hard part is when push comes to shove and other things become priorities. If it doesn’t have its own place, it’s easy to be the first thing that gets set aside. I think that the biggest problem we have to solve is to create the space [00:22:00] for this kind of work.
Jeremy Singer: What you raise is very important, and I’ve seen a lot of really brilliant or great ideas never take flight. Because of the classroom itself. If you ask most teachers, they’re already stretched to the limits to deliver all that they have to deliver.
So very few teachers are saying, “Hey, give me something because I have 15 minutes of dead time every day, and I need something to do. That’s almost never the case. They're trying to race through all the things that they already have to cover. You have to either fit into the classroom or fit into the school.
Dan Gonzalez: Good point.
Jeremy Singer: Right. And if it’s something that isn’t already part programmatically of the school experience, it’s very hard to get that. And I think it’s really smart to do that. I think probably good news for you is this concept: We’re not producing graduates of high school or college today that are as ready for the workforce as they need to be, particularly today’s workforce.
So high schools and systems are grappling with that, which only means there’s going to be more things [00:23:00] where District C could fit in.
I’ve heard you say, and I’m going to use your basketball analogy. It took very long at the NBA for people to figure out that a three-point shot is worth more than a two-point shot in really moving in that direction. You know, I’m a big, Steph Curry fan, so I’m a big fan of it.
But tell us more about the myth of what education is doing or has been doing versus what is needed for success in the play. And you mentioned some of it, the collaboration skills and teamwork, before. But what else is with within that?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, this goes back to the why of District C and Teamship from the beginning.
The basketball analogy is, you know, if you are a two-point player in this age of basketball, you’re not going to have much success. Even if you’re a tall player, women’s game, men’s game, college game, you need to be able to shoot the three. So, unfortunately our education system continues to prepare two-point players for what has become a three-point economy.
What Teamship tries to do is help students develop the three-point skills [00:24:00] they need, especially in an age where the labor market is going to be upended by AI in some form or fashion. So, we think about what are the things that students need to be great at, they need to be great humans.
And at its core, that means knowing how to mobilize others, coordinate with others around common purpose and common problems. I think if that is your sweet spot, if you are good at those things, you’re going to find a place in the modern economy. Those are going to be skills that are valued by every employer, across every sector, across every job.
That’s what we’re trying to prepare our students for. We’re trying to give them the three-point skills they need to compete in this economy.
Jeremy Singer: Yep. Well said. So, I want to turn toward evidence. Clearly, one way you can measure your impact is just the volume of students you've reached, the number of schools you’ve partnered with.
Give me the rough, latest numbers of students that have been part of Teamship in schools.
Dan Gonzalez: We're about to hit our 10,000th student. [00:25:00] We’ll probably get there this year. Almost 700 business partners have engaged; 400 coaches have been trained and certified. So those are the rough numbers.
Jeremy Singer: That's great. So beyond just those numbers, which are value in themselves, you’re trying to teach these skills you’ve talked about. We could call them some subset of durable skills or essential skills. These are hard to measure. So how do you think about … how much can you move the needle with these students?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, that’s such a good question. We do some tracking of self-reported student data and what we find is on a five-point scale of after Teamship compared with prior to Teamship, students are self-reporting a more than one-point increase in their confidence when it comes to teamwork and problem-solving.
I think that's a great start. It’s self-report, so you know, it is what it is. The least satisfying answer I can give you is this: If you know what you're looking for and you watch for it, [00:26:00] you can see the gains happening. That of course is not an approach for scaling assessment of development of these skills, but I think we feel confident that improvement is happening, ideally long term.
What I would love to see is longitudinal studies that demonstrate that students who have had rigorous Teamship experiences are demonstrating higher levels of well-being, better career outcomes, higher salaries, that kind of thing …
Jeremy Singer: Sure thing.
Dan Gonzalez: …But it’ll take a while to get there. I think in terms of assessing this, you first have to know, of course, what it is you're looking for, what it looks like when it’s happening, and then what is the context in which students can demonstrate that they're doing the things that you want them to be doing and thinking.
I feel like Teamship allows for all three of those things. I think the challenge is how you do that for 50,000 students a year or a hundred thousand, or whatever the number is. That’s a big open question. I’m curious on your take on it too, given the work you all do. [00:27:00]
Jeremy Singer: These skills are important. Let’s start with that and then naming that and telling a student that these are things that will help you. And just them thinking about it intentionally, which has value in itself. Then, even the self-reported confidence is something because now they’ve internalized some of that and they’re thoughtful about it and they’ve had experience applying it.
And hopefully their learning won’t stop after Teamship. They’re going to continue, hopefully, building those skills and be more intentional about it. Yeah, we are looking, and these are very hard. Some of these noncognitive or durable or softer skills are very hard to measure.
I think one you got into is sometimes people try to do it through observations. You were nodding too. We’re hopeful that with AI you could start to measure these more effectively, through simulations that students could do. You could see how well they do it, and you can run a simulation much less expensively using AI.
You could imagine we’re playing around with a [00:28:00] Socratic method of asking questions and getting the answers. The AI bot keeps getting more sophisticated. So, there are avenues into that. I still think it’s early, but we will talk as we do that about whether any of those work. But with that, let’s shift to AI briefly. So, are you guys using AI as part of District C in any way?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. By the way, I love hearing the stuff you all are looking into. We have a team ChatGPT account. We have regular meetings where we update each other on the team about things that we’re trying or things that we’re noticing about developments in the models, etc. We don’t have any strict policies or rules. We just have a culture of encouragement around, you know, “Hey, look for ways ..”
Jeremy Singer: This is for staff.
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. This is for staff. Our adoption so far has been for internal operations.
Jeremy Singer: Have you thought about it for the students that are working on Teamship with the coaches?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. We have done a little bit of PD sessions with coaches on, say, “Alright, so how can AI be a tool for team-based problem-solving?” [00:29:00] We’ve just started to dip our toes into those waters. I think there’s a lot of untapped potential there. One of the things that we really believe is that if you are solving a complex problem, that complex problem probably has some human element to it. Humans are driven by emotion, and so AI is not going to be great, at least not yet, at tapping into those innate human needs and emotions to inform some solution.
Jeremy Singer: Right, right.
Dan Gonzalez: But AI can be a tool to help you brainstorm, to help you analyze data, etc.
We need to do a little bit more on that front. So far it’s been mostly just internal operation.
Jeremy Singer: I'll challenge you on that last point. I saw some crazy stat of the number of people who are using Gen AI for therapies. People are using it for emotion, but, more seriously, I do think … I’m trying to connect two pieces of what you said earlier. You have a very rigorous professional development for your coaches. It sounds great as do their learning skills. [00:30:00] But it’s still 30 hours or whatever, three, five hours, so it’s still a very hard thing to do. Those who’ve coached, learn. You get better. You do reps.
There is potentially the ability to use an AI agent to be the scaffolding for a coach. I’ll give you an analogy of how we use it for our customer support team. We have an ability for AI to be processing in the background of what the individual person is texting or IMing or, or saying, on a call.
It can process so much faster than we can as humans. It’s giving possible answers or possible diagnoses of these things. It could do so much more sophisticated work. Its ability to mine a massive amount of data instantly and say something. Salesforce actually has a product called Whisper, which is whispering to the agent about what could be the issue.
I think there could be a great opportunity there, and I hope you have a chance to use it as you go. So, I want to shift. I always ask my guests four rapid-fire questions. [00:31:00] I’ve not prepared you, there’s no right or wrong answer.
Number one: What’s one education buzzword you wish we could retire?
Dan Gonzalez: I’ll give you a phrase. Finish your homework.
Jeremy Singer: Bad childhood memories or something?
Dan Gonzalez: I think we focus too much on developing in students a completion mindset instead of an exploration and a contribution mindset.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. Second question: What’s your favorite book on education?
Dan Gonzalez: I read a couple of decades ago Savage Inequalities. I don’t know if you've read that.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That was before you went to Manhattan Prep or after?
Dan Gonzalez: That was before.
Jeremy Singer: Oh, wow. Three: Name one thing that makes you bullish on the future for learners.
Dan Gonzalez: I would say, having spent hundreds of hours working with young people through Teamship over the last number of years, this generation. They are unique. They really have each other’s backs.
[00:32:00] They’re empathetic in a way that is super impressive. Every time I work with a young team of students, individuals, I’m heartened about the future. Really, really phenomenal.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. I often tell people you got to get back to the classroom with students because it gives you so much motivation.
Last one: What is one class you wish all students had to take?
Dan Gonzalez: Ah, this isn’t a class, but if I could wave a wand and require something for all students, it would be: Spend at least six months working in food service.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah.
Dan Gonzalez: Develop the service mentality. Chaotic environment. Dealing with all kinds of people. I think that would be it.
Jeremy Singer: Skills. It’s also an outlook. I waited tables. I was a dishwasher. You learn a lot more empathy, you know, for that. I’ll tell you the one … I canvassed for a nonprofit, and that was the hardest one. Because going up randomly to the doors to knock and ask for money is super hard.
[00:33:00] I became a local favorite when I lived out in the suburbs where people would come because they knew I was a sucker. I would give a lot of money because I knew how hard it is. But it does teach skills, long-lasting skills.
Dan Gonzalez: Of course, it goes without saying, a Teamship course first and foremost followed by …
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, yeah. You, you. I gave you a softball, and you swung a miss. But alright, let’s go three years from now. What change in education would make you most proud, and where does District C fit in that story?
Dan Gonzalez: It goes back to something I said earlier. I think in three years what I would love to see is a place for programming like Teamship, whether it’s Teamship or something similar, like having a discrete place where this fits in the school day for students.
If we can solve that challenge, which I think is solvable, in three years, I think that that changes the dynamic and changes the game for lots of students.
Jeremy Singer: Great. Well, I want to thank you, Dan. One, for being on the podcast. Two, for starting District C and all the work you do. I think you’re onto a really important challenge in today’s society of getting students [00:33:00] ready for the workforce.
So, thank you for that, and I appreciate all the time. I hope to see you soon.
Dan Gonzalez: Thanks, Jeremy. So appreciate being on.
Jeremy Singer: Thanks for tuning in today. Join the conversation by following the Education Equation wherever you listen to podcasts.
Jeremy Singer: … Our listeners worst nightmare, by the way.
Dan Gonzalez: … Yeah, yeah, totally. And mind you, this is before the days when this was like … You get to notice every month these days that this is happening, but ….
So, for us, it felt really existential. We were really worried about our brand and reputation. And I remember we had gone through this process of building the communication plan. We were about to send the email out to 40,000 students, and we were all gathered, the whole full-time team, all hands on deck, in this room.
In the moments before we were about to release this email, and tensions were high. Emotions were at their peak. And I remember thinking, Wow. This is a group of people that really cares about this work. And I guarantee you no one in that room [00:03:00] grew up dreaming of being in, making a career in, test prep.
But what struck me was it wasn't about passion or not for test prep. It was this common purpose toward protecting something we’d built together. Doing right by our customers. Feeling accountable for each other and how we do our work. And I think that was for me, a moment where I realized, Wow. This is where I’m most alive in my professional life.
Being with people who believe in setting the same level of quality and going after it and really building something together. I thought a lot about that, and I think, yeah, that’s how I think about a purpose-driven profession.
Jeremy Singer: And it’s a crisis that led to forging of that unified purpose and rallying together as a team.
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, absolutely.
Jeremy Singer: The people I end up closest with and who I feel are the strongest colleagues are people with whom I’ve been in a battle together. [00:04:00]
When covid hit, for us, one of the questions was: Advanced Placement was two-thirds through the year. Do we just cancel it? etc., etc. The more resourced schools had a mechanism to deliver the courses even remotely, but the less resourced schools really didn’t.
We ended up deciding in very short order to build taped videos of teachers talking about each of the lessons, each part of the framework for every AP course. This is thousands of videos, and we did it in a matter of about six weeks and put them out for free to try to allow for all students to still have that experience even when the school shut down.
And I remember that this is something the way College Board typically moves would take five years to do if we knew normal. But we did it in a matter of weeks, and we really forged bonds. So, I get your point, and I think that’s very true.
Let me shift. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs. As you know, we know a lot of entrepreneurs, and so many started, in the classroom as a teacher.
Help our listeners understand your physics teacher. [00:05:00] What insights there… what lessons do you bring to your career, going forward?
Dan Gonzalez: Yeah. In short, teaching’s really hard. I mean, it’s really hard, and it takes … I had my second year … I had a really phenomenal mentor who took me under his wing and showed me the ropes a bit.
I got to observe him a bunch. It’s just … It’s often a field in which people feel like they don’t have a ton of support. I talked to a teacher just a couple months ago who said, “I go into my classroom. I shut the door. No one else in the building has any idea what I’m doing. I’m just on this island.”
And so, I think for me, that kind of mentorship opportunity and just getting the support that I needed at that time in my career has shaped the way that I think about how you deliver educational programs through