Here are some thoughts from SXSW EDU 2025. I attended SXSW for the first time. I focused on sessions discussing assessment, accountability, and reimagining high school. The ubiquity of sessions on AI, however, could not be avoided. And everyone wants to be an innovator.
There was much talk of the need to do a better job of engaging students and to have school function in a way that doesn’t bore them. High school in particular needs to function in way that addresses real world concerns and prepares students for the workforce and the ability to undertake the innovative tech jobs companies need to fill. Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre are opening high schools! This strand combined with a search for ways to develop, recognize, and measure “soft” or “durable” skills like collaboration, self-regulation, or persistence that is independent from the traditional content knowledge that has traditionally been the focus of school. The Carnegie/ETS collaboration, Skills for the Future, is a leader engaging in this work. There were also suggestions that AI could give students meaningful feedback on assessments and be of assistance to teachers in meeting the needs of students requiring differentiations in instruction. The Khan Academy promoted its Khanmigo tool as a helpful tutor. It could even function as a writing coach giving students feedback on writing basics like supporting arguments with evidence. Hmm.
Most of the sessions took it as a given that the age of bubble filling standardized tests is an anachronism. Unfortunately, this premise is contradicted by the reality of College Board dominance of high school education through AP courses and tests that mostly prize content memorization and the stubbornness of standardized tests for college admissions, principally at some leading Ivy Plus institutions. Large scale assessments and interim assessments used for accountability purposes pressure the hands of districts to maintain traditional forms of schooling that have lead to the disenchantment and boredom of young people that was a SXSWEDU mantra.
If innovators are serious about wanting to change pedagogy, curriculum and assessment at real scale, they must fight to change and put in its proper box the test-based accountability edifice that dominates American education. College admission also needs to be addressed. If colleges value scores rather than authentic demonstrations of student skills and knowledge, high schools will continue to crank out multiple-AP test taking, SAT prepping, formula and place and date memorizing graduates and a large swath of disaffected aimless youth.
The high school redesign sessions failed to recognize that there are legions of innovative schools across America that have been pushing back against the still dominant Nation at Risk/NCLB narrative. Members of the Coalition of Essential Schools in the 1980s and 90s, schools in the Big Picture network, member schools of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, and High Tech High are just some of the high schools that abandoned traditional memorization, testing, “factory model” education in favor of inquiry and project-based, student-driven education using authentic real-world assessments.
Organizations like XQ and Iovine-Young would do well to understand and build on the work and experience navigating public education systems of these established institutions.
As for assessing durable skills, good teachers effectively do that every day. Class grades are often made of evidence of persistence, collaborative abilities in group work, and other behavioral skills. Our need to independently quantify and report such skills may be mistakenly driven by the same ranking and sorting considerations as traditional test scores, although evidence of how students develop these skills over time is certainly useful for educators and schools. Figuring out how to incentivize that skill development in education is a worthwhile exercise.
The key element that I did not see addressed at the conference or at any of the above-referenced sessions was how to develop the tasks and programs that would teach these important skills. Changing graduation requirements and using the tools of graduate portraits to get school systems to think differently is important. But building professional educator capacity to teach in a student-centered way while maintaining a level of intellectual coherence and rigor, and developing the nitty-gritty of curriculum and usable authentic assessment is where the rubber hits the road. If SXSW really purports to be an education conference, then those on the ground systemic efforts by educators, schools, and districts need to be highlighted. That work cannot and should not be done by AI. Even the AI developers recognize their products’ purpose is to be used by humans (mostly for the kind of mundane tasks that suck away teacher time), not replace them. Or so we hope.