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With students returning to the classroom, the toll the pandemic has taken on our education system has only become more apparent. Students have fallen behind academically and teachers are overstretched. But the pandemic has also upended many long standing assumptions about education and created room to experiment with new approaches. A recent Echelon Insights poll for the National Parents Union found 53 percent of parents believe we should not be returning to normal, but use the moment to rethink how we educate students.   On this episode of "Tech Enabled," https://www.aei.org/profile/john-bailey/ (John Bailey) is joined by https://twitter.com/salkhanacademy?lang=en (Salman Khan), founder and CEO of https://www.khanacademy.org/ (Khan Academy), and https://www.asuprepdigital.org/team_members/amy-mcgrath/ (Amy McGrath), COO at Arizona State University (ASU) Prep. They recently announced a partnership to launch the https://asuprep.asu.edu/khan-world-school/ (Khan World School at ASU Prep), an online, global high school for students who have demonstrated strong academic potential but want to take their education to the next level. Focusing on mastery, community, and collaboration, the Khan World School is at the forefront of rethinking the traditional education model. On this episode, we discuss how first principles thinking was applied to reinvent school and how they addressed some of the challenges experienced with previous versions of remote learning.

One of the most significant challenges facing Americans is misinformation and the systems by which it spreads and is amplified. Amid the debate around censorship and deplatforming has emerged a new approach - human-curated ratings and detailed "nutrition labels" to help empower people with gauging the trustworthiness of websites and news services. On this episode of “TechEnabled,” https://www.aei.org/profile/john-bailey/ (John Bailey) is joined by  two of America’s most respected journalists and authors https://www.newsguardtech.com/about/team/gordon-crovitz/ (Gordon Crovitz) and https://www.newsguardtech.com/about/team/steven-brill/ (Steven Brill) who co-founded https://www.newsguardtech.com/ (NewsGuard), a company which has developed a series of tools and services to help users find credible news and information online, while alerting them to untrustworthy sources they may see in their Facebook or Twitter feeds or in search results .In this episode, they discuss the nature of misinformation, how it spreads, and how more transparency and better information can help counter it.

One of the greatest challenges of modern-day policymaking rests not in the development of new policies, but rather in their implementation.  Some of the boldest policy ambitions of the last decade have been derailed due to the failure to understand how to deliver services through digital channels. This is why it is increasingly important for policymakers to have technology experts at the table when designing and executing new policy programs.  On this episode of “TechEnabled,” https://www.aei.org/profile/john-bailey/ (John Bailey) is joined by https://www.jenniferanastasoff.com/ (Jennifer Anastasoff), founder and executive director of the https://techtalentproject.org/ (Tech Talent Project) — a nonprofit dedicated to increasing the ability of the US government to bring in experienced technical leaders. With a background in both the public and private sectors, Anastasoff discusses why understanding technology is important in implementing government policies and how the Tech Talent Project is helping bring technology expertise into government service.    

National trends are important. Local trends are more important. An interactive mapping service from PolicyMap helps leaders to quickly visualize and understand the trends within their communities. The data can reveal racial and economic disparities, identify areas lacking essential services, and help with planning where to deploy various resources and supports. What’s staggering about PolicyMap is the amount of available data: 50,000 indicators. Understanding these and other trends is critical to shaping policy, particularly with strengthening local economies and communities.

One of the most significant technology trends over the last decade is the shift of services and computing power to the cloud. COVID-19 accelerated these efforts as companies stood up remote work operations, business operations moved online, and government agencies scrambled to deliver services through digital channels. The underlying technology that supports these shifts and so much of what we experience online every day comes from a VMware. We’re joined this week by the COO Sanjay Poonen where we discuss some of the insights they’ve learned over the last year, including the surge of telemedicine and how VMware helped Moderna with developing a lifesaving COVID vaccine. We also discuss cybersecurity and VMware’s pledge to close the workforce gender gap by 2030.

Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”  The Governance Lab is helping organizations better define complex problems.  We are joined this week by Beth Simone Noveck who directs the Governance Lab and serves as New Jersey's first Chief Innovation Officer to understand better ways of defining and solving the problems facing our communities.

One of the greatest challenges with COVID is forecasting where communities are in the transmission curve.   Most of our models look backwards, not ahead.  It was like knowing where a hurricane had been, but not having a forecast of where it was going.   Carnegie Mellon University researchers are trying to change that.  The Delphi group at CMU is at the forefront of epidemiological forecasting using real-time information on symptoms, doctor visits, medical tests and searches on Google and Facebook. It provides a county-by-county sense of COVID is surging today and where it may be tomorrow.

In this week’s episode of Tech Enabled, we’re joined by Jessica Robinson Co-founder Michigan Mobility Institute, Detroit Mobility Lab, and partner at Assembly Ventures who helps us understand the technologies enabling mobility - how we move people, goods, and services from one place to another. From self-driving taxis to the data from transit apps, government officials are experimenting with new approaches to mobility.  

One of the central questions facing policymakers and community leaders is how to best understand and improve economic mobility.  Opportunity Insights was founded by economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Nathaniel Hendren.  Their team of economists from Harvard and Brown University are working together to analyze new data and create new platforms to help community leaders make more informed decisions. The institute’s research on economic mobility harnesses the power of big data to document both the decline of the American Dream in some neighborhoods and potential solutions to revive it. They also are providing real time insights into the economic recovery coming out of COVID.

The changing nature of work is providing both the fastest job growth and income gains to those with higher levels of skills and education. It’s vital then for governors, mayors, and education leaders to have better, real time data about their labor markets, including the skills most in demand. This has become even more important as leaders work to help workers who became unemployed during COVID-19 find a path back to employment. EMSI provides data and tools for government agencies and education institutions to ensure their training programs match the labor demands in their regions. 

Small businesses are the lifeblood of the American economy. COVID-19 has been devastating for many small businesses who weathered through state closures, faced the uneasy task of reopening, only to face additional closures in some states. We’re exploring the insights we can glean from platforms like Thumbtack, an online marketplace that helps local professionals and customers find each other.  But Thumbtack also has something else to offer state and local leaders. Their platform provides a real-time view into small business activity across the country which can be helpful in shaping policies and informing decisions. 

Government websites were quickly overwhelmed during COVID and agencies have struggled to meet the surging demand for services. The US Digital Response is a nonpartisan group with more than 5,000 volunteers that are supporting state and local government during the COVID-19 crisis. They increase the capacity of government teams to rapidly update web services and also develop open-source tools that can help scale to other government agencies. We are joined in this episode by US Digital Responses’ CEO, Raylene Yung.

In March, Governors enacted a sweeping set of actions to increase social distancing to help slow the spread of COVID-19.  The open question was whether people would heed these measures.  The answer came from SafeGraph which has a dataset of foot traffic for 5 million businesses and organizations including 5,500 retail chains and 3 million small businesses.  Safegraph is providing free access of some of their datasets to help researchers, non-profits, and governments respond to COVID-19 and support their economic recoveries.  So far, more than 1,000 organizations including the CDC are already in the Safegraph data consortium.   We are joined this week by Ryan Fox Squire, a Senior Data Strategist at Safegraph who discusses how Safegraph is helping leaders with navigating the difficult decisions they face with enacting and now relaxing social distancing measures.