Trending in Education

edTech

Eugene Kashuk
EdTech
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From Ukraine to EdTech | Brighterly’s Journey with Founder Eugene Kashuk

When AI can tutor anyone, anytime, why are parents still choosing human tutors?

Live from ⁠EdTech Week 2026⁠ at Teachers College’s ⁠Digital Futures Institute⁠, Mike Palmer sits down with Eugene Kashuk, founder of ⁠Brighterly⁠ and the show’s first guest from Ukraine. Eugene is a serial entrepreneur with a go-to-market and operations background. Over five years he has grown Brighterly into a direct-to-consumer platform with one-on-one live tutoring in math and reading for grades 1–9. It now serves more than 20,000 American families, with over 1,200 tutors and a team of more than 250 people around the world.

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Nick Ladany
EdTech
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Disrupting Higher Ed with SFBU President Nick Ladany

What would you build if someone handed you a university with almost no students and told you to start over?

We kick off our EdTech Week 2026 series live from Teachers College’s ⁠Digital Futures Institute⁠ with Dr. Nick Ladany, President of ⁠San Francisco Bay University (SFBU)⁠. Nick is a first-gen college student and a counseling psychologist by training. He worked his way from professor to dean across Maryland, Temple, Lehigh, Loyola Marymount, Santa Clara, and the University of San Diego, then served as president of Oglethorpe University. In 2023 he arrived at SFBU, a 40-year-old institution with a large unrestricted fund and a mandate to build a university from scratch.

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Karl Rectanus
EdTech
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Revolutionizing Literacy through Outcomes with Karl Rectanus CEO of Really Great Reading

What if schools stopped paying for books, licenses, and PD days, and started paying for kids learning to read?

Back on the show for round two, ⁠Really Great Reading⁠ CEO Karl Rectanus joins Mike Palmer live from ⁠EdTech Week 2026⁠ at Teachers College’s ⁠Digital Futures Institute⁠. Karl started out as a teacher and charter school CFO, taught overseas, and then founded LearnPlatform, whose rapid-cycle evaluation work helped shape the four levels of evidence in the Every Student Succeeds Act. After Instructure acquired LearnPlatform, Karl led K-12 and platform strategy there before taking the helm at Really Great Reading, a 20-year-old OG of the science of reading.

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Dan Goldstein
EdTech
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The Future of AI-Powered Assessment at Learnosity with Dan Goldstein

What if the most important edtech company in your classroom is one you’ve never heard of?

Live from ⁠EdTech Week 2026⁠ at Teachers College’s ⁠Digital Futures Institute⁠, Mike Palmer sits down with Dan Goldstein of ⁠Learnosity⁠, the assessment engine that powers some of the biggest names in education from behind the scenes. Dan’s path ran through College Board’s SpringBoard curriculum, where he led implementation across Texas and New Mexico, and district-facing sales at Cengage, before he joined Learnosity in 2019, just as the “beforetimes” ended.

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Sal Khan
AI
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Sal Khan on AI Tutors, Durable Skills, and the Khan TED Institute | Trending in Ed w Mike Palmer

What happens when the original edtech pioneer gets an early look at GPT-4? Host Mike Palmer welcomes Sal Khan, founder and CEO of ⁠Khan Academy⁠, for a conversation spanning two decades of edtech. Sal traces his path from hedge fund analyst tutoring his cousin Nadia over Yahoo Messenger to YouTube videos his cousins liked better than him in person, to a nonprofit serving learners in 50+ languages. He explains why he leaves his mistakes in, and why that human quality will be hard for AI to replace.

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Chase Rigby, CEO of Tassel
Higher Education
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Scaling a Commencement Platform with Chase Rigby, CEO of Tassel

Commencement season is here, and while we all love the tradition, let’s be honest: a lot of graduation ceremonies are still operationally stuck in the 18th century. This week, Chase Rigby, CEO of ⁠Tassel⁠, joins Mike Palmer to talk about what it actually takes to modernize the final milestone of the student lifecycle. Chase shares his path from teaching seventh-grade math and science with Teach For America to working as a product manager at Google, before ultimately using a search fund model to acquire Marching Order and evolve it into Tassel.

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Anu Vaid, founder of ⁠ParentSquare⁠.
K12 Education
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Parent Communication in the Age of AI with Anu Vaid, CoFounder of Parentsquare

How do we bridge the communication gap between schools and families in an increasingly fragmented digital world? In this episode of ⁠Trending in Education⁠, Mike Palmer is joined by Anu Vaid, the founder of ⁠ParentSquare⁠, to explore the evolution of school-home partnerships over the last 15 years. Anu shares her journey as a computer engineer and immigrant parent who was overwhelmed by the disjointed tools of the K-12 system, from papers stuffed in backpacks to disparate robocalls and long emails.

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Tara Chklovski
EdTech
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Inspiring Young AI and Tech Entrepreneurs with Tara Chklovski, Founder and CEO Technovation

In this episode of ⁠Trending in Education⁠, host Mike Palmer welcomes Tara Chklovski, the founder and CEO of ⁠Technovation⁠, a global nonprofit that has been at the intersection of AI and education since 2016. Tara shares her journey from growing up in India to pursuing a PhD in aerospace engineering and eventually launching a mobile entrepreneurship program just two years after the iPhone debuted.

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Jon Deane
K12 Education
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Providing a Balanced Scorecard for GreatSchools Across the US with Jon Deane

On this episode of ⁠Trending in Education⁠, host Mike Palmer sits down with Jon Deane, CEO of ⁠GreatSchools⁠, for a deeply informed conversation about the choices—and complexities—facing modern parents. GreatSchools’ mission is simple: to help every parent cut through the noise and truly understand their children’s educational options. As a parent to a 6-year-old, Mike knows firsthand that the pressure to choose the right path is real, and it often doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

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Cecilia Marshall
AI
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Empowering Advancement – AI and Its Impact on Social Mobility

What if AI could level the playing field in higher education? This episode of Trending in Education explores that very question with Cecilia Marshall, Chief Advancement Officer at ⁠Ed Advancement⁠. Host Mike Palmer and Marshall delve into the complex and compelling potential of AI, focusing on its impact on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other institutions serving under-resourced students.

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