Two of the nation's largest school districts pulled back on AI in the same week. Why do schools keep reaching for bans instead of plans?

On September 2, Los Angeles Unified and New York City both announced they were pulling back hard on generative AI, just as the school year opened. Phones have already been pushed out of classrooms across the country, and AI now sits in the same crosshairs. In the Season Two premiere, I look at why school leaders keep reaching for the panic button and what our long cultural habit of doomsday thinking about technology can tell us about this moment.

For a second opinion, I'm joined by Amber Berry, Vice President of AI and Strategy for the Middle States Association and co-founder of RAIL (Responsible AI and Learning), which has worked with over 100 schools in 30 countries. Amber makes the case that doing nothing may be one of the worst choices a school can make, and she offers a more generous read on the LA and New York decisions than the headlines did. We close with vital signs on the doubling of virtual school enrollment and MIT's new report on AI in teaching and learning. A Louisville middle school also earns a mention for agenda books that renamed Kentucky "Venecky."

Hit play. The doctor is in.

When money and deals for name, image, and likeness start making the picture more complicated, how do you measure the worth of a school’s athletic mission?

For about a hundred years, the most valuable asset in American high school sports was one nobody was allowed to pay. A quarterback with a highlight reel and six figures worth of social media followers showed up on exactly zero balance sheets. Then, starting with a 2021 Supreme Court decision and the California law that followed it, the market went looking for him. This episode is about what happens when a college-sized industry lands on a high school's desk and the school isn't staffed to run it.

I sit down with Nick Myles, athletic director and boys basketball coach at St. Frances Academy in Baltimore, MD, and Coach Messay Hailemarium, head coach of the football program that won the national championship this past season. St. Frances is the oldest continuously operating Black Catholic school in the country, and its athletic alumni now include the NBA's Bub Carrington, the WNBA's Angel Reese, and NFL players Blake Corum, Chris Braswell, and Gary Brightwell, among others. As of last year, 45 states plus DC let high schoolers sign name, image, and likeness deals, and more than eight million students played high school sports nationwide in this new environment.

We talk about what it's like coaching kids who now sign contracts with tax implications and exclusivity clauses, why an agent showed up at the table for an incoming eighth grader, and the rule these two coaches use to keep their culture intact no matter what dollar figure follows a given kid into the building. It's a conversation about representation, financial literacy, and what a school owes a student whose earning potential may peak before he finishes his diploma.

Hit play. The doctor is in.

"Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!"

Almost every independent and parochial school runs on a financial model it chose to imitate from wealthy universities: an endowment, an annual fund, a capital campaign. In this episode I diagnose where that model came from, why it fits a research university and strains a small tuition-funded school, and what a healthier one looks like.

I trace the two bloodlines that ended up in the same place: the endowed prep academies born as junior colleges, and the Catholic schools built on the collection plate and the near-free labor of teaching sisters. The origins run from John Harvard’s 1638 bequest to Yale’s 1890 annual fund, and through the NAIS survey where more than 90% of heads named financial sustainability as what keeps them up at night.

Then several moves already in use at schools that decided to stop performing: indexed tuition, auxiliary revenue that can outpace the cost curve, online learning, and shared back-office services across institutions. Plus one question worth taking to whoever keeps your books before the next budget meeting.

Hit play. The doctor is in.