Joe Fuller: The post-Covid fallout for K–12 education in the U.S. has been bleak. The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows steep declines in math and reading scores, and racial and economic disparities have widened. The pandemic has also exacerbated a nationwide shortage of teachers, which is most acute in underserved districts. It’s clear that narrowing the achievement gap depends on widening the talent pipeline.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, Chancellor of Reach University and CEO and co-founder of teacher staffing firm Craft Education System. Reach offers a unique program of remote learning, augmented by on-the-job experiences for school employees that allows them to get promoted and become certified teachers. As an HBS graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and former Teach For America fellow, Mallory brings a wealth of experience to the task of expanding and diversifying the profession. We’ll talk about the state of K–12 teaching in the United States, and we’ll discuss the benefits of recruiting and training existing school employees to become teachers in underserved communities. We’ll also consider the model’s potential for other professions. Welcome to the podcast, Mallory.

Mallory Dwinal-Palisch: Thank you so much for having me.

Fuller: Well, it’s a particular pleasure for me to welcome you to a podcast, since you’re a former student of mine. Tell us about your background and how you developed this passion for helping prepare teachers to be both a success in the classroom and to achieve good income outcomes.

Dwinal-Palisch: So for me, the passion started on a personal note and then followed its way through my professional career. So personally, right as I was going into preschool, my parents lost everything in the Mississippi River floods and were bankrupted and homeless and had multiple young kids under the age of five and became really transient as my dad would go look for work. And so by the time I was in fifth grade, I’d been in at least seven different schools. And so between the academic gaps that I might have developed and then just the social gaps of, I’d never had a friend follow me for more than one academic year, I showed up a mess to middle school and was really lucky to land in a great public school system. They did a great job getting me on track. And then about two months into my freshman year of high school, my parents lost everything again when our house burned down. And so they had to rebuild twice before I left K–12. They really had to lean on our public school system to do that heavy lifting and to do that work. And I think is just a testament, both to my parents—and they’re incredible and the work they did for us—but also the school system. In high school, we ended up having three Rhodes Scholars in a six-year window, and I was the first of them. And the one thing we all had in common is we were all four-year veterans of this one teacher’s track and field program. And she had this remarkable input and effect on all of us. And so I think for me, I grew up with this realization of education and learning is complicated. You can’t pretend that what happens to a student at home doesn’t come into the school place, and our best shot for addressing those challenges are great teachers who do great work with kids. By the time I’d made it to business school, I had been a classroom teacher and had just had nothing but more experience to double down on that belief.

Fuller: Tell us about your time at Teach For America, which is an institution which many of our listeners will be familiar with. You had that experience before you came to Harvard Business School, then you went on to start your own charter school. So talk about how one led to the other.

Dwinal-Palisch: I did my PhD on teacher shortages—and particularly Teach For America’s impact on rural teacher shortages. And then after that, I went and became a teacher with Teach For America. I showed up to the classroom not only with a bachelor’s degree, but with a terminal degree in the field of education, and in theory had studied so much about theories of learning, about childhood development and acquisition of content, and showed up and was absolutely terrible at my job. And got some great support, got some phenomenal help along the way, including from Teach For America’s infrastructure, including from other teachers working in the school system I was a part of. And I left with this conviction that experience really matters. And so I went to business school with this idea of, how could we build a school system that would allow us to do more of that, where the labor structure inside of the school would create the space for us to build a talent pipeline that was getting that scaffolded experience, instead of just dropping new people in on the first day, asking them to run a class all on their own.

Fuller: After you graduated, you went on to start Oxford Day Academy, and now you’ve started your own university, Reach University. Tell us about that evolution.

Dwinal-Palisch: Yeah. So when we started Oxford Day Academy, our thesis was, at the same time that we have a teacher shortage, we also particularly have a shortage of teachers who come from the communities that they serve, and we have need for educators who are committed to being in those communities long term. And so the thesis was, what if you took adults who are already living and working in these communities and maybe even in schools—as classroom aids, as paraprofessionals—and created an opportunity for them to earn a college degree for the work they were doing, for the experience they were getting, that would then be supplemented with mentorship, with online courses, with all of these other supplemental experiences, and turned that into a true apprenticeship—but also a true degree—and create apprenticeship degrees. Our pathway in our original plan was to convince other universities to adopt this method, and that we would just be the lab school where they experimented. And we kept taking this around to universities and getting reasons why that could never happen. “Our accreditor won’t let us do this, this violates Carnegie units in that way”—all of these bureaucratic obstacles that would prevent that from happening. And so we went through the process of becoming our own university.

Fuller: Well, the current higher ed system is so limited by multiple different considerations—whether it’s the accreditation system or what qualifies for student loans or Pell Grants or even things like the Carnegie units, which you mentioned are a way to ascribe how many course credits someone should get for some element of study that is really very, very difficult to innovate outside the margins. So Reach University, it’s an online institution. So tell us, how’s it different from the online institutions—everything from the more celebrated ones like Western Governors or [Arizona State University] ASU online to some of the discredited for-profit models. Where do you fit in that ecosystem, and how is Reach designed to accomplish your purposes?

Dwinal-Palisch: We learn a lot from groups like WGU and from ASU online. To put where our differentiation is, we see ourselves as a stackable apprenticeship-based degree. At the end of your first year with us, students earn a 30-credit early childhood educator certificate, that then at the end of year two stacks into a 60-credit associate’s degree, that then at the end of four years stacks into a bachelor’s degree, into a master’s degree in teaching credential, and so on. That stackability piece we think is very important, because it allows students to earn more as they hit different milestones in their workplace. It also creates these one-way valves of, maybe I have to step away from school for a while, but if I’m stepping away with an associate’s degree … When we say “apprenticeship degrees,” we mean these are employer-driven experiences in which we turn an apprenticeship into an accredited degree. And there’s five defining features, which very briefly, the first is efficiency. So at least 50 percent of our credit hours toward the degree come from the job, itself. Number two is flexibility. Students don’t have to miss work, they don’t have to arrange childcare, and they don’t have to leave home. The way we make that happen is online Zoom classes that are held on nights and weekends. Number three is relevance. When students come to those classes, they’re not just discussing the theory of childhood development, for example, with a professor who’s had a PhD in child development but never taught. All of our instructors are, themselves, celebrated classroom teachers. About a quarter of our instructors are actually teachers of the year in the states where they teach. Number four is affordability. So our students are being paid for their work as classroom aids, as paraprofessionals. And then all of their tuition, if we are in a state where there isn’t a registered apprenticeship for teaching, we use just Department of Education funding to cover it, and our students pay $75 a month. In states that are now standing-up teaching apprenticeships, our students pay nothing. We actually are able to cover from Department of Education and Department of Labor funds all costs. So students go to college not only without debt, but they’re actually getting paid to do so. And then the fifth and final component is professional capital. And that comes to, again, working with the employer. So we don’t just let a student come enroll at Reach University; we work with a school district up front to determine two things: What are your teacher vacancies? Who are the people already in your building that could fill them? And then we upskill those individuals. So the employer knows they’ve got a pipeline of talent, and the student knows that when they finish this degree, there’s a job waiting for them in the community where they already live and in the building where they already work.

Fuller: Well, if one were to compile a list of the standard things that commonly prevent people from completing a degree program and getting on that path to a career that they aspire to, that will provide the basis for economic independence and household formation, you just clicked through all the registers: “I don’t have time to do this. I’m a working learner.” All this, of course, is contributed to the 30-plus million Americans that have some college credits but no degree, often with associated debt; you’re solving that problem. And I think, critically, also you’re addressing the mismatch problem, where you have people are already interested in this, perhaps working in the school system, and resident in these areas where there hasn’t been an ample local population of aspiring teachers to fill the need. It’s a really elegant design. Let me go back, though, to that “half the course credit can come from your working experience.” I think a lot of people have dabbled with this notion of experiential learning and how that would be articulated into Carnegie units. And we’ve got some very interesting movements like Opportunity@Work STARs program or Year Up, Grads of Life. But I think to a lot of people, that does sound a little bit suspicious. I mean, that I’m going to get credit for doing a job. How do you understand that learning has actually taken place such that it’s deserving of credit and making progress toward degree completion?

Dwinal-Palisch: It’s such an important question for us, not just because we have to check the box and make sure we keep our accreditation, but at the end of the day, if we’re filling the teacher shortage problem by staffing classrooms with more under-prepared teachers, we’re not fixing anything. And so it comes back to us for the Carnegie credit. We take this very seriously. And paradoxically, the Carnegie credit, which used to be the thing that felt like it was standing in the way of innovation, has actually become our vehicle for ensuring quality innovation here. A Carnegie credit has a really important basic structure here. Basically, for every one hour in a traditional university setting that I go to lecture, I’m supposed to spend two hours doing some kind of homework that makes me reflect on and get better at what we discussed in class. We have always assumed historically that that two-thirds—that 67 percent—needs to be problem sets, it needs to be essays. But it’s sort of a measurement problem. It’s because that was the best way we knew how to measure that academic preparation was happening, not because there was any evidence that it was the best form of academic preparation. We’re saying, instead of having you write a paper around, “In theory, if I were working with a child, here’s what I would do in child development classes,” make sure you actually go work with a child and say, “What did you do? And then let’s come back and let’s discuss.” And so we’ve built a data system that we call “Craft” that allows teachers to specifically assign activities that relate to the student learning outcomes of their course and to assign those as homework in combination with reading. We’re not saying you don’t need to ever read or write papers in college, but we’re saying let’s use that because that’s the skill we want you to develop. Of that 67 percent of time spent outside of the classroom in the Carnegie unit, let’s turn about 50 percent of that into actually going and applying it on the job and coming back and talking about it in tangible terms.

Fuller: So, Mallory, say more about where the faculty comes from and the people that are providing the type of expert input that allows you to cause people without these formal credentials to make this transition into being effective teachers. Who are they? Where do they come from? How do you engage them? Are they part-time workers? Are they just contributing their time in the service of advancing the system?

Dwinal-Palisch: Who they are: 100 percent of them are classroom educators. About half of them have been recognized in some way as a distinguished educator, and about a quarter of them are teachers of the year in their respective state. How we engage them: We’re actually very intentional about trying to create a new labor model here for teaching that looks much like the medical profession—clinical faculty working in a hospital training residents. And so one of the things that we think is really important is that type of practitioner, someone who doesn’t want to leave K–12, they want to be working in their workplace—in this case, inside of an elementary or middle or high school—and they want to then maybe be teaching a class for two hours a week. But mostly they want to be in the field doing this work. And so we like the idea of partnering with school districts, where it’s this third wave of, we’re now creating clinical faculty and individuals who are working for us and doing that as employees of their school district. And between those two, having two really important things happen that keep them in the labor market. So the first is that they’re getting paid more. They’re now getting paid basically a double salary, so that—we always talk about how teachers are underpaid—this is one way that we can allow for one plus one to equal three. The school can afford what’s on their budget. We can afford what’s on our budget. In many ways, it doesn’t feel like two full-time jobs, because it’s the same thing. I’m going in, and I’m working in my school every day, but now I’m getting paid a living wage that is actually competitive with the rest of the market. The other thing is, it’s giving a lot of these educators the chance to feel like they’re still continuing to grow in their craft without leaving the classroom. There’s significant evidence that, apart from wash out of the first five years of teaching, the second place we lose educators is at about the ten-year mark, because it feels like Groundhog Day. “I’m good at what I do. There’s nothing else for me to do until I retire.” Our thesis here is that we can actually drive retention of our best teachers in the classroom—at a place where we know we lose them in the labor market—by rethinking the faculty structure and making them clinical faculty, similar to what you would see at a medical school.

Fuller: Particularly important in a world where there’s a general labor shortage of people with strong social skills, with an aptitude for training and learning and teaching, that are going to be more and more desired in the private sector as the need to reskill and upskill workers, or to provide remedial interventions with newly employed workers who have come out of K–12 systems that didn’t equip them for work—a very natural place for the private sector to turn is to frankly inflict a tragedy of the commons and start tripping the best teachers out of the education system.

Dwinal-Palisch: That’s right. We assume that the competition of school faces for its teachers are other schools. That’s one source. But my school started in the Bay Area; a lot of times we were losing our educators to ed tech start-ups or to the Googles and the Amazons of the world who just needed really good communicators to serve as project managers, in-house trainers, et cetera. People value that skill set.

Fuller: Now, we talked earlier about how you met resistance when you went to universities to try to get them to change their curriculum in response to the learning you were doing at Oxford. Now you are actually working with districts, working with states. What were the barriers that had to be overcome there? And tell us about the scope of the program and how broadly it’s deployed. How many lives are being influenced, both in terms of students, people who’ve finished the program and become teachers, and students whose lives are being influenced?

Dwinal-Palisch: So a big part of our process was just going and understanding when we talked to accreditors, what would need to be true for us to square their compliance requirements with what we were hearing from districts who were trying to use Grow Your Own initiatives and residency models and were complaining that it’s costing too much money, it’s taking too long, people are getting a ton of theoretical coursework that is in no way relevant to what I actually need them to know how to do. And so that was the journey of just, first of all, figuring out what is the actual product, what actually keeps both parties happy and delivers on something that is quality in terms of outcomes for our learners. Today Reach has 1,000 students in about five states—I should say 1,000 apprentices, since they’re teaching K–12 students—1,000 apprentices across five states. If we honor our current commitments with state’s partners, we will grow to about 10,000 apprentices over the next four years or so. But much more important than the work we’re doing, there is a movement to stand up these teaching apprenticeships across the country. The Department of Labor and Department of Education at the federal level issued a joint call for all 50 states to stand up these apprenticeship methods in every single state. And states are answering it. We are seeing every day more states launch these types of programs. And so, while for us, we’re really excited of the small piece that we’re playing in this, what we’re much more excited about is the potential for this to actually become a movement that fundamentally changes the nature of our supply pipeline, not only in terms of more teachers and more diverse and better distributed teachers, but teachers who, their first day as an official teacher, look a lot more like a fourth or fifth year teacher and have the quality to persist long term in the classroom. And we think that this could end teacher shortages nationwide.

Fuller: Well, that’s a great vision. Do you have enough data yet to measure the success of the teachers who have finished the program? And tell us about what you’re seeing in that data.

Dwinal-Palisch: We think about it in three terms: inputs, outputs, outcomes. On the inputs side, we are seeing exciting results. So over half of our teacher candidates are teachers of color, 90 percent are low-income, first generation, or working parents, and 100 percent come from the communities they serve. Those indicators usually have a strong negative correlation with persistence in college. And despite that, our students persist through our programs at rates pretty much dead equal to white students from middle and affluent socioeconomic backgrounds in traditional programs. In terms of outputs, we include that in terms of Praxis pass rates, satisfaction scores from our district partners, and then persistence of contracts with our partners. Our students pass Praxis rates about twice the state average when you disaggregate it by some of those cohort demographics before. It rates closer to about 3X the average in their geographies. We have a Net Promoter Score of about 71, and 100 percent of districts who’ve started partnerships with Reach have continued them through this apprenticeship pathway. Outcomes: We have some early indicators, and then there’s data that we want and are trying to find a way to get our hands on. The one that we have is persistence. So at the graduate level, we do have five-year post-graduation data, and about 84 percent of our students are still in the classroom five years out from finishing our graduate program. About 91 percent are still working in a school. They might be an instructional leader, school leader, et cetera. We compare that to the average of people in their first five years—only about 40 percent of students wash out. Only about 60 percent persist. So we are seeing markedly higher persistence there. The data that we don’t have, that we are trying to find a way to get our hands on, is longitudinally tracking how our students do in terms of the value-add they create for their students by subject area, by geography, by program. And that has been hard to get hold of. So we’re working on figuring out those data-sharing agreements and how to track that longitudinally, but that’s still a question mark for us.

Fuller: Well, that’s certainly a Holy Grail for a lot of people who study this sector and are curious about what it’s going to take to get better results for more of the day-to-day kids as students and as they progress through the systems. Although that number you have—91 percent of your graduates still working in schools in some form versus the 60 percent five years out for people who enter the teaching profession—that’s a great illustration of the way you’re addressing the mismatch problem. Do you mind if we take a step up in abstraction?

Dwinal-Palisch: Sure.

Fuller: You’re a day-to-day observer of the K–12 system in the United States and the teaching profession. How would you describe the state of the teaching profession today?

Dwinal-Palisch: We’re in a race to the bottom. And what I mean by that is, there are 4 million teaching positions in the United States, and we’ve seen an inversion of … Before the 1950s, the majority of graduates who became teachers were in the top quartile of their college classes. And today, we’re seeing that the majority are in the bottom half and sometimes even in the bottom quartile of their graduating classes. And there’s a whole history around labor-market forces that have to do that, that are driving that. But the net result is, we’ve created quicksand for ourselves, where we don’t have enough quality people entering the classroom. And so then we try to legislate the floor. We try to prescribe what needs to happen in someone’s classroom, we try to standardize the work those individuals do. And the net result is that people who have optionality, which tend to be our highest performers, tend to leave the classroom. And so then our average sinks down, because you have the top leaving. And so then we legislate harder. And then, what is the new top band leaves, because they have optionality. And so we do have this quicksand that we’re sucking ourselves down into, for very seemingly logical reasons, that creates a system failure and continues to suck down the labor market.

Fuller: So when you describe it that way, help me understand how Reach interdicts that vicious cycle.

Dwinal-Palisch: Yes. So first, having enough teachers in the right places with the right preparation. So making sure that there are—not just, aggregate, enough teachers in the United States—but that in every community, these school districts have the number of people they need and a pipeline that, if someone isn’t working out, they’re not beholden to that individual because they’re a warm body. The second layer is, then, making sure they’re quality. And this is where, again, it comes back to our theory of the case around being taught by exceptional teachers and being taught in a practitioner structure, so that when you enter the workforce, you look a lot more like a fifth-year teacher than a first-year teacher. Our third layer that I think has the most systems-level potential is this data play. So the data that has to get collected around apprenticeship degrees is very granular. It’s longitudinal, it breaks down by student, by geography. Pretty much any way you could cut it, it has good data. And for the longest time, we’ve been asking state leaders to make policies, decisions, around teacher staffing, incentive pay, all of these other things without any real good data maybe at all. And to the degree that we have it, in ways that are so aggregated that it’s kind of meaningless. It is these normed averages that don’t mean a whole lot. What we’re hoping to do is to take the data that’s being collected for teaching apprenticeships—not just for us, but for any teaching apprenticeship—and use that to build out real-time data analytics for states, so that they can see, “If we’ve identified we still have these gaps in the labor market, what interventions should we put in place?” And then to monitor in real-time the efficacy. Are we actually seeing changes in who’s entering? Are we seeing changes in the quality of who’s entering and in the outcomes they’re getting for students? So those are the three tranches we think about—of total supply and distribution, quality of the educator, and then data analytics for more proactive planning down the road.

Fuller: There’s been a lot of discussion about the efficacy of online learning and remote learning, Zoom teaching. And you’re delivering Reach to your students—not to their students, but to your students—on a remote platform, all online, getting these master teachers to deliver content to them to enhance their skills, give them the basis to perform like experienced teachers from the show. What have you learned about online learning? What works? Where we need to improve things? Can it become a solution that we use for disseminating best practices in the way you are at Reach?

Dwinal-Palisch: I love arguing with my fellow deans of education about this type of work, because my argument is always remote from where? Online relative to what? And it’s true, they are remote from us as a campus. But in a traditional program, they’re remote from the workplace where they’re going to be working. And we’re flipping it and saying, “We’ll be remote, so that your job becomes your university campus.” And our thesis here is that the employer has skin in the game. This is their future workforce—and not in an ethereal aggregate sense. This individual, who I have one of my mentor teachers mentoring today, is going to be one of my classroom teachers tomorrow. And so they are incentivized to have very real feedback with these individuals, in real time, under the supervision of one of their mentor teachers. And that is a tradeoff we’re willing to make. We will be remote from you so that you are close to your employer so that you are getting the skills they know you will need in their setting today and tomorrow. And I think that’s something that’s applicable well outside of K–12. What we hear from employers in every sector is that higher ed doesn’t actually know what skills we need. And even if we tell them today, that won’t be the skills we need in six months. And in six months, they’ll just be getting this approved in the first place. And so I think the push toward embedding learning in the workplace—and not just in theory, not just as a 10-week learning practicum, but actually having this be an employer-driven training experience that we are supplementing and supporting and then providing the backing and accreditation around—is something that doesn’t just work in K–12, it works in any industry that requires a skilled workforce.

Fuller: That’s a really interesting way to describe it, because certainly our research confirms that there’s a certain Waiting for Godot element between employers and educators. And employers keep saying, “You’re not providing what I need.” And the educators keep saying, “You’re not telling me what you need. And by the way, a lot of what you need, I’m not equipped to do, anyhow, certainly not without a lot of support from you, which isn’t forthcoming.” Where does that leave the role, particularly of K–12, particularly high school? And what are the problems that we need to be clear-eyed about trying to address with preparing people who are not going to go through the standard American dream script of from high school directly to four-year degree completion, directly onto career or further education?

Dwinal-Palisch: I think we need to figure out division of roles and articulation of those roles between institutions of higher ed and high schools and the employer. And the good news is we already have an answer. I think that the German Berufe academy system, the Swiss apprenticeship model, already provides us a guidepost to move toward. But I do think we have to look at how do we take their outcomes and make them work inside of our statutory systems, inside of our cultural norms, et cetera. And one of the biggest things that comes to mind, to your question of what’s the biggest barrier there, it’s disentangling the types of knowledge that have to get conveyed to a learner. Institutions of higher education and high schools are very good at teaching, I would say, thematic concepts: foundations of arithmetic, critical thinking, and reading. Employers are very good at teaching discreet skills that you need for this particular role. You want a workforce that has both. So getting clear on when we say we’re both going to be responsible for teaching, well, who’s teaching what, I think, would be the first place we’d need to start, and we can look to the example of what’s already being done in Europe.

Fuller: That’s interesting. I mean, a lot of literature also focuses, of course, on the broad domain of social skills sometimes, called “soft skills”—things like the capacity to work in teams, the capacity to deal with people unfamiliar to you, spontaneous, written and oral communication. Are those teachable, do you think? And do we put enough emphasis—in everything from the design of curriculum to lesson plans to teaching those skills that so many employers complain are lacking in the applicants that come into their recruiting processes?

Dwinal-Palisch: I believe that anything can be learned, but the way we go about it, I think is completely backwards. And it comes back again to this thesis around real-world experience. A class on critical thinking. A class on professionalism in the workplace. That’s not how anybody learns how to do these things. And so the sooner we can get students into those real-world settings—not having a lesson plan that’s taught on here’s how you write an email, make them write an email, and then make sure you have the real-time feedback loop.

Fuller: So, in some ways, it sounds as if you’re almost extending the Reach University theory of change, theory of intervention, and trying to expand that to incorporate other employers—private-sector employers, other public-sector employers—to create work-based learning experiences that produce mismatches and help people understand what’s actually going to be required.

Dwinal-Palisch: Yes. We will never theorize our way to a coordinated labor market. And so asking high schools or universities to guess what an employer needs—and then to create a theoretical curriculum and then assume that that will be a way of conferring the skills needed that will perfectly match with what’s required—will never happen. We need to find ways to integrate these two systems in a way that doesn’t get in the way of the employer and the business they have to run every day.

Fuller: Well, talking about learning and transferring learning, you mentioned that the federal government has been encouraging states to develop their own apprenticeship problems. I assume, given Reach University’s visibility in the space, you’re hearing from people trying to set up those programs in jurisdictions where you’re not active. What are the top two or three things you tell them?

Dwinal-Palisch: We think there are three things that groups have to get right. So the first is, the state has to develop a policy that is good for the employer. In this case, that’s school districts allowing them to access the funds to cover any costs that they’re incurring around mentors in the workplace, any of their subsequent supportive hours that they’re required, flexibility on the credentials that someone might have. Piece two is helping universities. We provide considerable technical assistance—helping universities re-understand their role, to we are here to be the partner to the employer. But at the end of the day, the employer is the one who decides what a good finished product is, not us. And so thinking through how do we design a degree that has them getting that experience, that has us getting that feedback. And then the third bucket for us with a system, anytime we’re working with a state, is data. Whether it’s through us and the data system we’ve built over at Craft, our data layer that I mentioned before, or if it’s building their own in-house systems, we’re agnostic. But what does matter is, you have to have some longitudinal data system for tracking which of your interventions are working and what the return of investment is on those interventions if you’re going to be serious about actually using this to definitively end labor shortages in this market.

Fuller: So it sounds like the worm has turned a little bit, and now colleges and universities are actually reaching out to you for the input they were previously rejecting. Is the power of this federal program so much that it has actually caused incumbent four-year universities to rethink their posture?

Dwinal-Palisch: I think that, if the federal funding existed in a vacuum, we wouldn’t be seeing the demand we’re seeing. But when you combine that in parallel with the fact that there’s a general decline in enrollment and that particularly in schools of education, there’s been a precipitous decline in enrollment—somewhere between 35 to 50 percent decline over the last five years—we’re looking at one in five schools of education potentially closing in the next five years. And so that burning platform creates the existential questioning that groups are needing to do of, how do we get more students in here, and how do we get more funding for each student? And the combination of those two forces—of declining enrollment and newly available apprenticeship funds—I think that’s what’s driving the demand.

Fuller: Well, Mallory, where do you see Reach University going? Where else do you hope to have an impact in the system?

Dwinal-Palisch: So, we see impact in two ways, and none of them are necessarily Reach as our own direct-service provider going for global domination. We want to honor the partnership commitments we’ve made in the places we are, and that’s what we’ll do in terms of direct service. From there, we seek impact work on two vectors. One, the collective impact support and technical assistance support we were talking about before—around policy, institutional training, and data—our goal is that, whether we’re providing it or there’s a network that arises, contributing to the end of teacher shortages in all 50 states through teaching apprenticeships as the mechanism for achieving that. So the first area is supporting the production of about 300,000 additional teachers through apprenticeships above and beyond our current pipelines. But the second piece is, as I mentioned, I don’t think this is just how you produce good teachers. This is how you produce good nurses. This is how you produce good engineers. We have our eye on the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is already reporting right now about 11 million vacancies in skilled professions in the United States. And those are just that we know of. That’s not talking about latent demand, where it wasn’t listed as a vacancy because the employer just assumed they could never fill it. And so our second goal is 10 million apprenticeship degrees. We think that this could be the pathway somewhere in the next 15 years or so to ensuring that we not only have a workforce that can keep up with the demands of the American economy, but that we’re also creating real opportunities for Americans from any background to access the education they need to have a skilled profession and a comfortable life.

Fuller: Well, Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, it’s such a pleasure to have you back at Harvard Business School as a founding Chancellor of Reach University and co-founder and CEO of Oxford Teachers Academy and Craft Education System. It’s been really enlightening to hear about your theory of change here and all the great work that you’re doing to try to alleviate the teacher shortage and improve the quality of teaching in America.

Dwinal-Palisch: Well, thank you again for having us.

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