Education in the Digital Age: How We Get There

By Nadav Zeimer and Zachary Stein

What skills are recession-proof? How should you prepare your high school student or an uncertain future?

• Learn why jobs are in decline and what will replace them
• Understand how digital media production will replace some standardized testing
• Gain insight into ho

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nadav Zeimer
• Release date: Apr 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578661414

Nadav Zeimer

Nadav Zeimer earned his B.A. in physics at Brandeis University, studied secondary science education at The City College of NY, and public affairs at Baruch College. Nadav worked as a software engineer and automation specialist in Silicon Valley prior to becoming an award-winning physics and robotics teacher and turnaround high school principal. Nadav's transition from software to education started when he launched his first nonprofit corporation in 2000, focused on hyper-local digital radio production, later known as podcasting. Mr. Zeimer brought podcasting into his science classroom and by 2009 was selected to lead a new school design team in NYC. His digital media focused approach turned a failing school on the verge of shutdown into a top-performing institution for low-income students. Nadav's passion project is to eliminate standardized testing and replace it with hand-on media production. Principal Zeimer's work has been featured in a range of media from a full-length documentary about his robotics students (the first all minority team to be nationally ranked) which was released at the TriBeCa Film Center, coverage in Popular Mechanics Magazine, The New York Times, Chalkbeat, WNYC / SchoolBook, and DNAinfo among many others. With the help of his wife, friends, and community-based partners, principal Zeimer secured millions of dollars to support hand-on STEAM and social justice programming, with a special focus on addressing the mindset of students involved in the foster care system. The Zeimers adopted their first child from Japan and currently serve as foster parents to a medically fragile child.

Book preview

Dedicated To

Our Teachers

Catalysts for countless futures

Gatekeepers of civic expectations

You unlock our economy with your feedback

I sat there on the couch after work to edit these pages,

or I would leave the house on weekends to do so.

You looked at me, quizzically.

Your comically twisted eyebrows trying to decide

what to make of my suspect behavior.

Tamesha Barnes

We dedicate this book to you because our failure to be

a resource for you represents the barriers that will prevent this

book from making a difference.

There has been distance between us as I wrote this book.

At first a physical distance (Japan to NY)

and now in terms of our very bond to one-another.

Your success,

what you go through to get there,

is the most important story we are following.

The implications, for us, are staggering.

Table of Contents

This book is organized from the broad to the narrow. We start at an elevation of 30,000 feet to view the world our students are graduating into. We dive down from there into the narrows of economic and historical context. Informed by a clear view of the digital economy and a detailed understanding of the platform-based business unit, we put it all together in the final section to define academic capital in detail. The in-depth exploration of economic principles is necessary to understand how a decentralized community of educators can become the gatekeepers of a cash investment in our future.

Preface | by Zachary Stein

Introduction | The Other One Percent

______________________

PART I | SCARCITY AND VALUE:

End of the Industrial Age, Birth of the Digital Age,

and Implications of Rapid Change

Chapter 1 | Abstraction Plus Crowd

Chapter 2 | Scarcity, Abundance

Chapter 3 | Physical Value, Moral Value

Chapter 4 | Inadvertent Equality

______________________

PART II | THE END OF JOBS:

Employment Implications of the Digital Age

Chapter 5 | Macro Blind Spots

Chapter 6 | Inverting the Corporation

Chapter 7 | Jobs? Overrated

Chapter 8 | Job Killers

Chapter 9 | The Rebirth of Work

______________________

PART III | DIGITAL PLATFORM ECONOMICS:

An Economic Organization that Threatens Corporations

Chapter 10 | Costs of Doing Business

Chapter 11 | Winners Take All

Chapter 12 | From Dow to DAO

______________________

PART IV | DRIVING PROSPERITY:

Digital Prosperity—Nuts and Bolts

Chapter 13 | Growth Engine Breakdown

Chapter 14 | The Dopamine-Opioid Economy

Chapter 15 | Fueling the Digital Engine

Chapter 16 | BIG Government

______________________

PART V | PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER:

Incentives to Rearrange Secondary Schooling

Chapter 17 | Digital Cash as Global Superpower

Chapter 18 | The Value of Choice

Chapter 19 | Discerning Signal from Noise

Chapter 20 | AJ’s Story

Chapter 21 | Digital Native Academic Credits

Chapter 22 | Stacking Skills

Chapter 23 | Anti-Bias? Anti-Fragile

Chapter 24 | Youth Media as Capital

Chapter 25 | In Summary: Think Different

WORKS CITED

SPECIAL THANKS

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Preface | by Zachary Stein

There is a vision in this book that will soon be seen by millions. This is not because it will be a bestselling book (although I hope it is!). Instead, the vision will be seen because it is one of the almost inevitable educational visions of our time, which is a time between worlds, a time when new and radical visions for education are coming into view.

Nadav, like myself, believes that the digital revolution has not yet yielded its true impact in the areas of human development and education. The untapped potentials of digital technologies are the seeds of vision. But it is not just technology alone. It is technology and economics: the birth of a new system of economics is co-emergent with the rethinking of education. This is an idea that Nadav and I share with countless others. This sense that a new kind of monetary and economic system is emerging provides more seeds of vision, planted already in innumerable minds. Alongside this awareness of the technical and economic factors, there is also a call for a return to education as a community asset where personally rich intergenerational transmission takes place outside of the traditional and bureaucratized modalities of modem schooling. This is a rebellion against the goal of turning student learning into a number that is used for decision making thousands of miles away. This notion of a revivification of teaching and learning off the official grid—and this setting up a new and better grid—is another element of the current historical moment, placing this book within a central stream of cultural change.

When reading this book, it is advised to read it backwards, starting with Part V. The Digital Native Academic (DNA) credit system is the pinnacle of the book’s insights, and so it rightly sits towards the end, after the groundwork has been laid. Spoiler alert: you can skip right to the concrete utopian theorizing. In Part V one can digest a vision of educational futures that gets beyond dystopian use of technologies to further standardized, regulated, and screen-captured children.

The Digital Age needs to be about more than what happens with screens; it is in fact about memory, a ledger of interactions and a modality of communication. Computers can be used in ways that make legacy systems of schooling obsolete, but this does not involve more streaming videos with talking heads from the centralized Khan Academies of the world. The digital revolution is a decentralized and radical reconstituting of where and how educational authority is positioned, the means by which educational capital is created and stored. Of course, the internet is good for finding information (sometimes), but it needs to be understood as more than a vast library and marketplace. In this book you can find a vision of what digital technology really means for education.

Part of the story about the Digital Age involves placing education at the heart of a new emerging economic system. Education is positioned to become a radically distributed form of capital that is created in the exchange between students and their teachers. What does it mean to say that learning and education are a form of capital? At the end of the day educational systems have always bestowed value unto people and their accomplishments, deeming who is worth what (on the labor market and elsewhere).

Education is where the society invests in the next generation, in the hope of seeing some kind of return on investment in the form of a lifetime of productive prosocial behavior. Human capital, it has been called, and it is more central to the economy than any other form of capital (a fact known by economists from Adam Smith, to Karl Marx, and Gary Becker). However, at this point, like much of the rest of the economy, schools are not producing value anymore; instead they are only appearing to do so.

Schools are cooking the books to make certain stocks of human capital seem worth a great deal, resulting in an artificially inflated perception of value. What is a high school or college diploma really worth? Is it worth the same thing anywhere in the country? What does it really mean that a student has scored well on the AP exams? Is this a good index of the value bestowed by schooling upon the student, i.e., is there more human capital within that student than some other. These kinds of questions get at the growing disconnect between what counts as valuable in schools and what counts as valuable in the Digital Age.

As this book makes clear: who controls the metrics controls the world. Standardized tests have been destroying schools and students in the name of learning and education. This has needed to stop for some time, but it was not until the Digital Age that the problems of large-scale urban schooling could be solved without mass standardization.

Nadav’s vision is one where learning can be accounted and registered on a blockchain ledger in ways that do not succumb to the dangers of standardized testing. Learning records and credits that are indexes of actual value can rebuild trust in the social mechanisms of intergenerational transmission and education: human capital can be created and understood in a fundamentally new way. And teaching, learning, and community can be preserved by digital technologies rather than destroyed by them (as is happening now with the screenification of everything). By outpacing testing technologies with a new generation of open source benchmarks and portfolio systems teachers and students can build out an alternative credit system on the blockchain, creating and storing real value.

A new economy requires a new kind of education. This has always been true, even as the current forms of schooling declare their inevitability and eternity. Digital forms of production and distribution are as different from analogue and electric forms as these are from the printing press and steam engine. Every jump in technology is a jump in educational vision, and we are just getting started when it comes to revisioning education in the Digital Age. This book is part of that revisioning. I think the DNA credit system described herein will be understood as part of the first wave of true digital innovations in education. There is no substitute for vision.

Introduction | The Other One Percent

I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Until the moment comes when we the American people are able to accept the fact that … we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other … Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens, it is a very grave moment for the West.

—James Baldwin

While I worked at Harlem Renaissance High School on 128th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City, my favorite lunch spot was a tiny vegan Caribbean juice bar on Madison Avenue called Jahlookova. I don’t drink juice, and I don’t use juice as a verb, but they had a great daily lunch menu comprising five different dishes served together for five dollars.

A gentleman who everyone calls Uncle stands outside of the restaurant during business hours. Uncle has a perpetually kind expression. He speaks in hushed tones. An understated sense of joy complements his Caribbean accent. On one of the first cold days in October 2015, I was eating lunch at the standing bar facing the windows. Uncle came in, leaned his back against the high, narrow eating surface, docking into one elbow on the table behind him. As we soaked in the fragrant, humid aromas coming from the adjacent kitchen—wheatgrass, Caribbean stew, fresh mango—he listened to my stories of the challenges my students face as they grow up in poverty.

After about twenty minutes, I finished eating and was eager to get back to the office to wrap up my workday. I usually got lunch after dismissal at 3:30 pm. We stepped outside together, crossing our arms on our chests in unison as the unfamiliar chill greeted us with the rustle of autumn leaves.

Outside, every third passerby said hello to Uncle. He replied with a nod of his head or a subtle hand gesture. As I turned to head back up Madison to 128th Street, he offered a final response to my stories. Following a slow drag of his expiring Newport cigarette, he looked up to meet my, I’ve got to head back to work gaze. His cigarette between four fingers lined up together and his thumb, head down, and nodding slightly as his eyes met mine: The only thing wrong in the USA is that we don’t value people so much.

After earning my degree in physics and working as a software engineer in Palo Alto, and then as a small business owner and consultant in San Francisco and New York City, my decision to work in public schools was a selfish one. I wanted to answer with pride when asked what I do for a living, not to mention the solid benefits and retirement plan. I also felt that I had important lessons to learn from inner-city young people, and I enjoy complex learning that surprises me and challenges my assumptions.

Too many schools stamp out students’ love of learning rather than kindle it. For this reason, I wanted to be a high school principal who, ideally, would have some say about how to run a school. I thought maybe I could build a public high school that didn’t suck.

Over the last seventeen years I have worked for the New York City Department of Education. Primarily in low-income schools. My drive to answer the question, How do we really prepare students for the future? took me on a journey through teaching physics and robotics, executive leadership training, the legal system, and a study of American history and monetary policy, culminating in the writing of this book and launching an open source project called DNA credits.

When I was a business owner, I learned from executive training that being a learner is considered key to effective leadership.i Later, as a consultant in the gig economy, I experienced how critical being a learner was to my business success. It surprised me to find education (being a learner) at the end of my journey into business. I couldn’t help but wonder if there might be a useful link between executive training and what was missing in our public schools.

My subsequent training to become an educator, eventually a high school principal, never really addressed what being a learner requires—at least not in the way it was taught in business leadership training programs. The nature of being a learner was, ironically, discouraged in the factory model of education, which rewards compliance over creativity and rigid curricula over curiosity—the antithesis of authentic learning. I nearly got fired for suggesting new ways of running a school, even though those same initiatives led to breakthrough student performance as measured by the Department of Education’s own evaluations.

The fields of learning and business leadership merge at the cutting edges. Even the jobs farthest from the knowledge economy, those who work on a factory line, are demanding that workers be active problem solvers. I vaguely remember when the Japanese car makers outperformed Detroit with their creative factories where all employees contribute their minds.ii Furthermore, for any business, attributes such as authenticity and innovation create brand loyalty for the same reasons that they engage a classroom of students. In fact, the emergent digital economy is built on human attention on the consumption side and innovation on the production side. In other words, the products of education are merging with the products of digital industry: to learn about business in a Digital Age is to learn about the nature of the effective education of human beings.

Education expands our base of knowledge. Digital technology stores and distributes that knowledge. It makes sense, then, that success in a digital economy has something to do with authentic learning: the production and distribution of human knowledge, of academic capital, so to speak.

Communities with the best education will come to dominate digital markets. That’s assuming we define best education as one that develops authentic curiosity and confidence in one’s ability to engage in what the military refers to as VUCA conditions: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

Not only must digital natives navigate an organic and complex world, but unless they can communicate offline experiences in an engaging digital format such as images, videos, tweets, or blog posts, their learning will not translate into any real-world advantage. As we will soon discover, the production of such digital content is the means of production of academic capital.

It’s no mistake that the richest men in the world are academic nerds, and a disproportionate number of them were educated in Montessori schools.iii I’m a product of Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf Schools, and I have on occasion talked of going Waldorf on their asses when I use creativity and cooperation to outperform competitors.

Industrially organized schooling was necessary for the Industrial Age, hence the rapid growth of public schools and the increase in literacy in prosperous nations. However, the Industrial Age is coming to an end, and with it the industrial form of education.

I thought about Uncle’s comment for days. It summarized so much of what I wanted my students to learn about life and the definition of the ambiguous and layered concept of quality of life. My students, many of whom are a product of the foster care system, understand that having parents has value beyond any amount of money, but they still can confuse the good life with having lots of money to buy flashy cars.

In my second year as a principal, we made a hip-hop music video for Black History Month based on Dr. King’s I Have A Dream speech. We each wrote and performed a verse based on the line I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream. I danced as best I could while rapping my hastily crafted verse:

This is Principal Z

Here to tell you what the dream is to me.

I wish it were just common sense

the American Dream—not Dollars and Cents

I don’t want to be that one percent

But in work and in play,

Loving life every day.

Dinners with the family

And a job that has meaning to me.

That’s the real one percent!

Yeah.

I still have a dream.

This was just after the Occupy Wall Street movement, and my wife and I joked that we were the real one-percenters: those who had a happy family life and a meaningful career, with value generated by our community relationships. The types of wealth that money alone cannot buy.

Granted, those in poverty have good reason to think more money leads to a better life. But as we enter the Digital Age, the obsession with having more stuff is being replaced by a new obsession to gain more followers and to have more experiences, and when those require the use of physical assets like a car or a bicycle, they prefer to share these rather than maintaining their own for private use. As a result, fundamental economic constructs like work and value are being reformulated in this new digital context that is not based on ownership of stuff.

This book is full of polarities: big corporations to small startups, individual to crowd, scarcity to abundance, local to global, and physical to digital. I will explore these tensions in economic terms because they are uniquely relevant to the rapid changes taking place in the economy our students will face upon graduation. While the economy is global in scale, my focus will remain in the United States with a likely bias toward urban settings.

The key ideas that drive this analysis are (1) the difference between capitalism and consumerism, (2) a critical distinction between having a job and doing work, and (3) the shift from a mechanical to a digital means of economic production, distribution, and consumption. The investigation of these distinctions leads to a final discussion of the role of education and the proposal for a bitcoin-based cash system which distributes newly minted currency as a basic income to top performing high school graduates.

Consider a future where we fail to educate tomorrow’s citizens in the mechanics of digital economics. Users would remain ignorant to the value of their data and the use of their attention. As a result, a new form of corporate dictatorship would continue to emerge. Global in scale, in control of all our money, our data, our media. Given the extent of regulatory capture by the wealthy, this could really get out of hand. As I write these words Facebook is launching their digital currency which would make Mark Zuckerberg the leader of an economy larger than any nation on the planet. He will have no term limits. He will face no election challenges. And he will have mass surveillance at his disposal to maintain control. His priority will remain to extract wealth from his users at any cost.iv

A new form of totalitarian rule is waiting in the wings of the nascent digital economy. To combat this mass-centralization of economic power, a decentralized, open source form of money is our best chance at putting power into the hands of the many. And high school education is our best vehicle for accelerating adoption of such digital native money.

Artificial Intelligence already knows more about our work habits than what we know ourselves. In the hands of the many this could be a great tool for society, in the hands of the few it could become quite sinister.

i David A. Garvin, Building a Learning Organization, Harvard Business Review, July 1993, accessed June 17, 2019, https://hbr.org/1993/07/building-a-learning-organization.

ii Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2014), Mobi e-book Chapter 4.

iii Caroline Moss, 7 Tech Innovators Who Became Wildly Successful After Going To Montessori School, Business Insider, March 04, 2014, , accessed August 14, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-innovators-who-went-to-montessori-school-2014-3.

iv ‘If You Have an Addiction, You’re Screwed’ – How Facebook and Social Casinos Target the Vulnerable. Reveal. August 14, 2019. Accessed August 14, 2019. https://www.revealnews.org/article/if-you-have-an-addiction-youre-screwed-how-facebook-and-social-casinos-target-the-vulnerable/.

PART I | SCARCITY AND VALUE:

End of the Industrial Age, Birth of the Digital Age,

and Implications of Rapid Change

Chapter 1 | Abstraction Plus Crowd

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

—Victor Hugo

Digital economies are built on a combination of abstraction and crowdsourcing. Without understanding this, we cannot understand the digital economy nor prepare our high school graduates to pursue freedom in a digital age.

A digital native taxi platform like Lyft owns no taxis: it is built on the abstraction of rides in cars represented as words and images on a mobile screen. Similarly, Airbnb monetizes the spare room in your home by making it visible to massive numbers of people using an online abstraction of the physical space being offered.

Financial markets have been using this combination of abstraction and crowdsourcing for some four hundred years in stock and commodity markets with slips of paper representing ownership of a company (stock), or a quantity of pork bellies to be delivered on a specific date (commodity). The price of these paper contracts was determined from the bottom up: from the crowd of buyers and sellers in the market rather than by a singular authority who decreed the prices from the top down. This allowed for speculation and derivative products, which are abstractions of abstractions like insurance policies to protect buyers from market volatility. We have become accustomed to increasing layers of abstraction to the point that information itself has become a commodity in the digital economy with substantial economic value.

The Value of Information

Language is the ultimate abstraction. For example, the word dog is a combination of shapes that make letters that form a word and bring to mind a particular kind of animal. Money is an equally remarkable abstraction. We provide work for someone else and receive a form of currency in exchange, which we trust to represent our labor, skill, and experience. Farmers deliver truckloads of a hard-earned harvest and happily accept a small paper check, which abstracts this bounty into a handwritten dollar amount.

With money comes greed: a drive to take advantage of this abstract store of value to acquire wealth without having to work. Greed has driven much innovation, as the search to make gold from other substances led to modern chemistry and to a surprising extent, medicine.i They never did figure out how to turn lead into gold, but they transformed society nonetheless.

After gold coin, the bank note was the second historic level of economic abstraction, representing a quantity of gold coin a customer had in storage at the bank, which represented value of his or her previous work that earned the stored gold. Faced with the Great Depression and with people wanting to redeem their dollars for gold, FDR closed the banks, took all the gold stored in them, and secured it in the Federal Reserve so that banks had no gold to issue. He then forced Americans to turn in their gold, and made the private ownership of gold illegal, which forced everyone to transact in US dollars.ii

In 1971, President Nixon did for the global marketplace what FDR did for domestic finance: he ended dollar convertibility to gold for foreign nations that held US dollars.iii The United States had long had the largest gold reserves in the world, and many nations held dollars instead of gold since the United States could honor their promise to exchange one for the other on demand. By 1968, the US gold reserves had dwindled, and budget deficits resulting from the Vietnam War made foreign holders nervous. When they sought to exchange their dollar reserves for gold in 1971, Nixon refused. By 1973 a new system based on floating exchange rates was in place. Nixon had taken the United States off the gold standard and in so doing he demanded that the global economy value printed paper as a fiat currency, one that is not redeemable for any equivalent physical resource: a purely abstract version of the paper bank note that was originally created to represent storage of a physical commodity. No longer.

Government confiscated gold from its citizens, swapped it for paper, and refused to honor the promise that paper money represented equivalent gold held in storage for international trade partners. Citizens and foreign banks didn’t seem to mind as long as the US government promised that these paper bills had market value. This increasing abstraction of labor to gold coin, then of gold coin to paper notes, and the establishment of the US dollar as a global reserve currency after 1971, iv was only possible because people had become so comfortable with abstraction.

Our trust in government’s promise that paper dollars are valuable has remained despite the fact that this promised value has dwindled year after year as more and more money has been printed by successive governments hungry for cash. Someone who saved $100 in a bank in 1971 would have an equivalent purchasing power of about $15 todayv (if you could buy 2,300 eggs with $100 in 1971,vi today you would only be able to buy 336 eggs with that same $100).

The bold action of issuing paper untethered from physical limitations, with private finance backed by public government, ushered in an age where abstract information was beginning to have value unto itself. Numbers printed on dollar bills gained a value of their own. No gold, no shares, no pork bellies—just indelible ink on fancy paper and a government promise. The road to an information revolution was paved as an unintended consequence of the budget deficits faced by FDR and Nixon. This is how greed drove innovation.

Today, many other types of information beyond numbers printed on government bills have real economic value such as the images and descriptions of products on eBay or Amazon, which are backed by eventual delivery of the abstracted product. Abstract information has gained value to the point that it has replaced gold and silver and even paper dollars as the underlying asset class of the digital economy. And this trend is accelerating with a variety of external factors such as fear of viruses that may be transmitted on cash and coins.

Today’s dollars are more often information stored on bank computers allowing us to tap a credit card to make payments without paper bills changing hands or being stored in a bank vault. As of the writing of this book, 65 percent of the top thirty currencies are purely digital representations of money on government sanctioned computers with physical cash and coin comprising only 35 percent of base money.vii We are so comfortable with the value of abstract information that we trust a bunch of electrons and photons zipping from the machine where we swipe our card to the bank computers. The transfer of value involves nothing more than changing information stored on computers. As a result, a bank today is little more than a digital ledger, securing high value account information rather than gold bars or paper bills. Digital encryption is now as important as armed guards.

This shift from the atoms of gold to those of ink on paper to the electrons of a computer database happened quietly, behind the scenes, without most of us paying too much attention. The revolution that began with the birth of bitcoin is not about money going digital—that already happened with credit cards—it is about decentralization and related network effects coming to money as centralized government money faces competition by an ownerless, shared alternative that may prove to be much more secure.

The birth of a digital economy was started by banks to reduce their operating costs and had subsequent unintended consequences which, in aggregate, give us the unique opportunities of the academic credit system that I advocate for in this book.

The Crowd and Democracy

I started this chapter with the assertion that abstraction and crowdsourcing were at the heart of emerging digital markets. While we have only discussed abstraction so far, the crowdsourcing half of this formula has begun to accelerate to increasing importance with the advent of mobile computing. The coming years will be characterized by humanity adding to their comfort with abstraction an increasing comfort with its crowdsourcing partner.

If we can take these new platform businesses one step farther and work out how to decentralize their ownership, that would be a significant advance in democratic ideals, globally. A network of contributors today can generate economic value with no corporate headquarters telling