How to Create Systemic Change for Equitable Opportunities in Education with Erin Mote

Transcript

Curt Merlau [00:00:02]:
Why is data so often used as a “gotcha,” especially in education? As a former teacher, administrator, and now consultant, it's a question that I ask myself all the time, which is why we're here. I'm Doctor Curt and this is my takeover of Data-Driven Leadership.

In this four-episode miniseries, I'll be joined by several industry experts who have made it their mission to hunt, seek, and destroy the systemic barriers to learning. Through IT and data, we'll share how IT and data can not only meet unmet needs, but can actually accelerate opportunities when done the right way. In my role, I work with many state education leaders across the country, which in turn exposes me to a wide variety of new and exciting strategies. I look forward to bringing you these amazing leaders to share those strategies with you. Let's bring people, policy, and technology together so that data can be our greatest ally.

Curt Merlau [00:01:00]:
We have a very special guest on today's episode. I am really pleased to bring you a conversation I had with Erin Mote. She is the CEO and founder of InnovateEDU, where she leads the nonprofit's technology product development and works on data interoperability and its urban fellowship for new educators. She and her husband are also co-founders of the Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School. Erin is a fascinating person. She has spent a large part of her career in national security and international development, also working with expanding technology in the U.S. and abroad in developing countries, across broadband technology and data. She's someone that you could probably talk to for hours. She is always up to something exciting.

Curt Merlau [00:01:51]:
I'd encourage you to follow her on LinkedIn, check out all of the amazing things that she is working on. The conversation I have with her really summarizes a lot of themes that we've been talking about through this miniseries. I also want to mention that most recently, Erin was named District Administration Magazine's most influential and impactful leader and innovator in the K-12 Education Top 100. So definitely check out this episode and follow up with Erin and catch up on all that she's working on.

Curt Merlau [00:02:26]:
Enjoy. Welcome to Data-Driven Leadership, the education miniseries. I am your host, Doctor Curt, and I am joined by my colleague Mike Baur, who is co-hosting with me today. Erin, welcome. Thanks for joining us today.

Erin Mote [00:02:43]:
Hi, thanks for having me. I'm so pleased to join you.

Curt Merlau [00:02:46]:
Oh, Mike and I are thrilled, and I invited Mike to the conversation. I know that the two of you have crossed paths professionally for some time being in this space, and so we look forward to having a great conversation. I hope one of many. And Erin, before we get too far down the line. I would love for you to just summarize for us your work today in the education space to give our audience an appreciation for where you find yourself in your work.

Erin Mote [00:03:17]:
Great. Well, InnovateEDU is a house of brands, not a branded house. And that's because in education we catalyze large-scale sector change through uncommon alliances. And so you probably know our brand if you don't know InnovateEDU.
So whether it's an alliance that Mike was integral with eight years ago in Project Unicorn, which catalyzes movement and data interoperability in K-12 education and really has grown a community of hundreds of vendors and close to 1000 districts who are all working to modernize their data ecosystems, to the Pathways alliance, which is focused on quality educator pathways into the profession, particularly thinking through how do we create structures for scale of teacher apprenticeships, teacher residency programs that emphasize quality and diversity into the profession, or the National Partnership for Student Success, which is the Biden-Harris administration's signature initiative around student success, focused on adding 250,000 more caring adults to America's classrooms as part of pandemic recovery and frankly, a large-scale strategy to ensure student success in our classrooms.
Or, the EdSAFE AI alliance, which has, over the last couple of years, really driven policy cohesion in AI and education through the SAFE framework, and leads a lot of work at the global national, sub national, district state level around AI policy in particular. And how do we think about safety, accountability, fairness, transparency and the effective use of AI in education? And so the unifying factor there is we pull policy levers, technology levers and capacity levers in order to bring people together to really drive at a common vision for what systems change looks like in education.

Curt Merlau [00:05:21]:
I love it right there. I mean, can we extend the podcast for three more hours? I don't know if folks can listen that long, but absolutely fascinating. And Erin, you didn't start off in education, is that right? Tell us a little bit about your background and how that switch happened.

Erin Mote [00:05:36]:
Yeah, I went to school like many of us, but after graduating college at—Go Blue—from the University of Michigan, I went to work at Arizona State University. And then from there I went into national security. For more than a decade, working the vast majority of my time overseas, focused on innovation and broadband connectivity, and so had the ability to wire refugee grants like Darfur and Dadaab, or watch a country be born in South Sudan, or think about how we bring social infrastructure in places like Afghanistan during conflict.
And so part of that work, though, this is how I sort of got the bug was thinking about using something really esoteric called Universal Service Funds. If you look on your cell phone bill, you'll see a little thing that says Universal Service Funds. And we used that mechanism in the global south to actually build wide scale mobile and broadband connectivity. And so when E-Rate got modernized, if you can go all the way in the way-back machine to about 2010, in the Obama administration, I helped think through what could be the model using cell phone taxes in order to drive E-Rate modernization. And from there, I had just a real wake up call that from my apartment in Washington, DC, that I could get on the metro and go five stops and be at a school in Anacostia that was still on dial up and had far worse connections and access to the digital ecosystem and digital infrastructure than Juba, South Sudan.

Erin Mote [00:07:31]:
And so that really felt like my calling in to education and a calling in to think about what are the things that I can do to really think through how we drive access, connectivity and opportunity for young people in this country.

Curt Merlau [00:07:49]:
That is amazing. And for those of you may not be as familiar, the E-Rate program is the FCC's program that makes telecommunications and information services more affordable for schools and for libraries, and instrumental in getting our schools and our students connected. Of course, with COVID it highlighted a gap we still have and enforced, yet more innovation and focus on accessibility and digital literacy. And just such important work. So foundational and more work to continue, though. Appreciate your heart for the work. We shared a commonality in Savage Inequalities, a book which I read that turned me on to education, in a book that's really foundational for you and your organization.

Erin Mote [00:08:35]:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's mandatory reading for anyone in education, because I think it makes the argument that we have to think about education not just as a schooling system, but as a learning system. And that opportunity has to be extended to all young people, regardless of the zip code that they live in, not just in East St. Louis, one of the cities that Jonathan Kozol describes in Savage Inequalities, but also in rural West Virginia. I think incumbent in our education system today is how do we use technology as a means to bridge opportunity, to accelerate access? And how do we think about technology as a means to open up opportunities for young people, not just in education, but in workforce and post-secondary connections? And so, I believe in the possibility of data and education technology while also making sure that we're clear about what the peril could be as well. So, how do we balance that promise in peril?

Curt Merlau [00:09:43]:
That's right. That's right. And teach students along the way as we're figuring it out, right? And have them a part of that. Well, you know, as I said, I brought in Mike. He's our senior director for strategy and development at Resultant within our education practice. And y'all's paths have crossed in this work.

Curt Merlau [00:10:02]:
And so, you know, Mike is new to Resultant. And we're thrilled to have Mike on board, having come from AWS and prior to that, and instrumental through the Dell Foundation and promoting interoperability through the Ed-Fi alliance as we know it now. Mike, do you mind? Just give us a little story of how you all met and how this came to be.

Mike Baur [00:10:22]:
This is great. This is great. I'm going to give my version of this story and then Erin will probably correct me and give me the actual version of this story. So circa, I was a relatively new program officer following kind of the directive of the data-driven education portfolio at the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. This is circa 2014. And you have to understand that a year prior, Bill Gates himself stood up at South by Southwest EDU and proclaimed to the world that the future of education is here. And it's called InBloom. And everyone was going, what is InBloom? Ooh.

Mike Baur [00:11:01]:
And what it was is frankly, a technological ecosystem that was in the cloud, which again, cloud in 2013 is fairly new, still questionable and unproven around security. And lots of major contracts hadn't been formed yet with say, the National Security Agency and the DoD and others. So early days for cloud, but yet here InBloom comes as an interoperable cloud ecosystem for vendors to be able to provide real-time assessment results, student information services, information enrollment management, and really next-level security. And frankly, we looked at the code and it was an incredible amount of diligence. It was a behemoth in regards to the infrastructure security availability, but unfortunately, in the world of public opinion, it was brought down within twelve months, given the lack of appropriate. And there have been autopsy reports written about InBloom at this point. So if you can actually put yourself in where Erin, who is forming a for-profit organization, a nonprofit organization, and a charter school network in Brooklyn, New York, she's doing all three of these things, you know, shortly after she just got married in the personal realm, right?

Curt Merlau [00:12:18]:
And maybe sleeping, maybe not, we don't know.

Mike Baur [00:12:20]:
So, so she's depending on InBloom, like for her charter school network, and she's going, InBloom looks like it's going downhill very quickly. And sure enough, a year to the day, they closed the doors on InBloom from when that announcement had been made by the Gates Foundation. And so Erin immediately turned inward, my understanding, and looked good. Well, what was the guts? Being a technologist, as she just now said, what were the guts of InBloom like, what was the data standard? What was the data model that it was built on? And she found out very quickly that it was this new version of a data standard called Ed-Fi. And so Ed-Fi 1.0 was what she found is she said, well, she said, I'm not gonna swear here, but she said some things, like, we're going to build our own SIS, and we're gonna build our own assessment platform, and we're gonna build our own learning management system for this charter school, and we're gonna use the data standard that the Dell Foundation has just now put a lot of money around and bootstrap. So that led us to each other in South by Southwest EDU 2014. And we got an elevator in the Hilton, and we started talking about the possibilities of, you know, using, you know, building a platform. That platform was later called Cortex for Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School.

Mike Baur [00:13:35]:
And Erin, I mean, that was the inception point of our relationship, and then it grew and grew and grew, and then we.

Mike Baur [00:13:42]:
I mean, I don't want to take credit for an entire term being created, but the word interoperability in 2014 was a very scary, unexplored word. And it was like trying to say, we need to take that word alone and figure out how to get that into the procurement machine of demanding supply and demand for interoperable, secure, safe data that goes from SISs to external applications. And without the nasty human API, we would call it, of CSV files and broken architectures.

Curt Merlau [00:14:18]:
Closed systems.

Mike Baur [00:14:19]:
Exactly.

Curt Merlau [00:14:21]:
You guys are literally. You lived the history of this book, assessing the educational data movement. You all led it. That's so awesome, because for those who are maybe not as familiar with the InBloom close out in 2014, and instead of a large scale, open-source platform where there's multistate collaboration, the trend since then in data-driven technologies has been towards closed, proprietary systems. Piecemeal, layer upon layer. Data is locked up, data is siloed. And I think it's so important that we dissect it and that we talk about it and that we learn from it and understand people, process, technology, policy. How did this technology?

Curt Merlau [00:15:06]:
How do we get this right that next time, Erin, you devote a lot of time and attention and talks about public infrastructure?

Erin Mote [00:15:22]:
Yeah, I mean, I'll just say to cap Mike's story off earlier this year, from the East Room of the White House, Joe Biden stood up and talked about the need for wide-scale interoperability, cybersecurity in our K-12 ecosystem. And so from a Hilton elevator to the East Room of the White House. Now, interoperability is a word that people talk about and recognize as something that they need to demand in their data systems. And I think part of that work is about helping people overcome the thing that, frankly, I think took InBloom down. It wasn't an architecture and it wasn't the technology and it wasn't the data standard. It's how we talk about the use of data, how we talk about our role as stewards of data, particularly stewards of minor data, and how we talk about the way we need to build infrastructure so that the best practices in interoperability, cybersecurity and privacy can come forward and so, and be used. And I think we haven't made those investments in education data at large compared to maybe some of the other sectors your listeners are familiar with, like healthcare data, probably folks who might only know healthcare are like, what do you mean? You don't have educational record interoperability? We've had healthcare record interoperability. The federal government funds it.

Erin Mote [00:16:54]:
They've built the data standard. They're the largest proponent of it with Medicare and Medicaid. How do we not have that for our young people? But I think that's a really good question, because I think about the young person whose parents are serving in the U.S. Military right now, and they're stationed in Georgia, and they get the call that next year they're going to be stationed in South Carolina. Both of those states have pretty robust student longitudinal data systems that hold student data. But right now, talk about a silo. Those states can't share that data. And so even when we know that a young person is going to move every two years, we still are basing so much of our data infrastructure off a 1978 law called FERPA that thinks we're going to take a paper file and walk it across state lines or go to our next school. And as a parent of a child who is a student but also has an IEP and a 504 plan, because those are two tools for students with disabilities that talk about my son's disabilities and how we support him and give him access.

Erin Mote [00:18:05]:
And frankly, technology has been magical to my son, who has dysgraphia, which is a disability-related to handwriting. And so his ability to do text-to-speech and to unlock his brilliance is something I talk about a lot as, like, the possibility of tech. The fact that if Robert were to change schools, just like that young person in Georgia whose dad or mom is in the military and is going to need to move schools to be in service to our country, literally, we can't move the data about our young people so that they're safe, known, and loved. And so that is missing in our system right now. So much of the work we do at InnovateEDU is asked the question, under what conditions would it be possible to build a data infrastructure that's a public utility in this country, or a set of principles that are public utilities that could help us actually realize the possibility of technology and data in the service of education?

Curt Merlau [00:19:05]:
I have. I don't know what else to say after that. I mean, perfectly said. Perfectly said and articulated. And you're right, even if you are not in education, an educator, we all have either experienced what you just described, or know someone who's experienced that. Something so simple as switching schools, and the fact that on day one, sometimes on day 30, we still have going.

Erin Mote [00:19:28]:
Like six months in, about. We have no idea, like, six months in. We're still figuring out that young person needs this set of accommodations, or is brilliant in math, or was in a gifted and talented program, or loves Legos. Like, the fact that we can't know the whole child, and it's 2024 is mind-boggling.

Mike Baur [00:19:53]:
That's what I'm about to say. The juxtaposition of what we can do and how I get reminders on social media of where I was ten years ago and pictures and data from all of that, and I can see this picture, this portrayed. It's social media, and that's just the social aspect, right? And it's like, how much more important is the educational data? Like, why is that not as accessible, known, you know, actionable? Like, it should be the exact level. So the juxtaposition of what we would say is the entertainment aspect of our lives versus, like, the academics, like, how do we not have the exact same availability, real-time capabilities, and to be able to see this historical progression of data for our children, how much more important is it?

Curt Merlau [00:20:45]:
We just talked about one dimension of using data. I mean, as a practitioner, as an educator, just as a physician, you need to understand the situation. You need x-rays, you need CT scans, you need lab tests, you need your own professional training, and the art of the practice coming together to diagnose, treat, and care for the patient. Or in education context, the student and institutions of education amass such large amounts of data. And we're not using it to fuel real-time decisions and make informed decision-making. And unfortunately, education and data have had a rocky relationship, I think I could say, to where data has been used as a “gotcha,” as a tool to drive compliance. But we're seeing a pendulum swing, and we at Resultant are dedicated to be a part of that shift, that mindset shift, but also in democratizing data and making it accessible. It really just lights up potential and opportunity and uncovers trends that a teacher may not been able to have seen before, given all of the responsibilities that they have.

Erin Mote [00:21:57]:
Or it highlights something about that teacher that like, let's just say the thing is bias. So I think about this. I'm going to say the hard stuff here because that's what I do. You know, we worked with a district who did a data interoperability project that used a data interoperability set of tools to surface without teacher recommendation. Those young people who would be eligible for AP classes, those young people who might be eligible for more intensive project-based learning classes, the type of classes that if you take an AP class in high school, your chance of getting into an elite school and being successful in college goes up by a factor of six. And so often access to those classes is driven by the relationship you have with the teacher or maybe the set of interactions that you have with an educator. And it's not necessarily always about the quality of your work or your ability to do that work. So what happens when we use data to hold up a mirror to our own bias and say, actually it's not just these three kids that you have on a small post it note on your desk who would be capable and eligible for this higher level of work.

Erin Mote [00:23:14]:
It's these twelve. And expand the aperture of opportunity for our young people. And I think that if we are to turn this Titanic around a little bit to overcome the siloing in our system, it's going to take an uncommon alliance of industry, nonprofits, and the public sector to do this work together. And that's why so much of the policy that we advocate for is about understanding that you have to build uncommon alliances to drive large-scale sector change. So in AI, for example, right now, if you look at some of the data that came out last week from our partners at Stanford, HAI, they'll tell you all the capacity in AI right now is an industry. It used to be that some PhD graduates went to government, some went back into research, and some went into industry. They're all going into industry right now.

Erin Mote [00:24:09]:
And so if that's where the capacity and knowledge and expertise lies right now when it comes to AI and AI technologies, which aren’t rival technologies, they're not Bitcoin and they're not, you know, Web3. This isn't a rival technology. This is the same thing, like the Internet. So, we have to be ready in our school systems to understand how to equip our educators, our families, communities and students with these tools. We're gonna have to partner with industry here. We're gonna have to leverage that capacity and expertise. We're gonna need to do the same thing in data because we are so far behind as a sector. I hate to break it.

Curt Merlau [00:24:49]:
No, and I love you speaking the truth here. And a lot of your work in and outside of InnovateEDU has been around setting this table through the EdSAFE AI alliance, through Project Unicorn. That was one of the first things Mike made us do, by the way, is sign up for Project Unicorn. Unicorn probably have the badge on our website now. We have that badge on our website, so follows his orders there. But talk to us a little bit about how those organizations work and how they are setting that table for that public and private partnership, because I think that's really critical for leaders in every industry to hear.

Erin Mote [00:25:28]:
Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about EdSAFE AI and the work that we've been doing at EdSAFE AI. And in EdSAFE AI, that alliance was formed more than three years ago. So I will just say, like, it's also not just about generative AI, which I get is like the consumer breakthrough that all of us are having to sort of deal with. But there's a lot of other types of AI in technology, synthesis AI or surveillance AI. And so a group of us who work at the intersection of education and technology recognized a couple years ago this was coming, and our sector was really ill-prepared for it from a policy perspective, from a technology perspective, and frankly, from a practice perspective. And so we believe that you first have to build knowledge, not fear. And so how do you bring people together who can bring that expertise, that guidance, that knowledge, and really do some of that fundamental knowledge building? How do you then think about coherence when you're talking about policy work? So much of EdSAFE's agenda, policy agenda, is focused on coherence.

Erin Mote [00:26:36]:
Coherence in using the SAFE framework, coherence and starting with safety first, coherence in the global policy sort of arena, so that the U.S. is participating in other forums and also learning from other governments and institutions. I think it's a pretty significant thing to see someone like the African Union with all 55 member states voting in one block. That's never happened before. They have enormous power. So imagine what's going to happen with south-to-north development there, where that's when innovations developed in the global south come into the west or into the global north.
And so I'm super excited and interested to look at how we can bring that coherence together. And then a big thing we're advocating for specifically around AI and education is public utilities. And that's the ability for folks, whether they're in the research community, in the district or state community, or in industry, to have a set of utilities that's access to large scale, nationally representative data sets with privacy-protecting technologies, or the ability to have national red teaming, or the ability to have consortiums who can look at data integrity, look at whether or not an algorithm has bias in it, and to also educate our districts and states about how they can share their data responsibly to train these models so the models themselves are more representative.

Erin Mote [00:28:03]:
And also we can eliminate bias, because right now in education, so many of the tools that are being built can only train their models on their own data, and that is really problematic.

Curt Merlau [00:28:16]:
And there is bias in that data, right? Yes. Humans were part. Yeah, we had. I wholeheartedly agree. And we've begun to sketch out a data equity framework. We have to ask ourselves questions. We have to ask, where is this coming from? What's the source? How is the data? Because that unintentional bias can be perpetuated and spread like wildfire if we're not careful. So.

Curt Merlau [00:28:40]:
Sorry, I wanted to jump in.

Erin Mote [00:28:41]:
No, totally. Exactly. I'd love to hear that. That's why industry has to be at the table, right? Because if we're gonna drive safety, accountability, fairness, and transparency, and then ask if this is an effective use case for AI and education, we need industry asking those questions. We need policymakers to ask those questions, and we need practitioners to ask those questions. So we're trying to build a table that really brings together industry and major nonprofits in the education space, including both major national unions, are sitting at that table, which is unprecedented, along with the civil rights community, the disability community, technology actors like cosin and Digital Promise. And so what does it look like if we actually row together and using movement science like a Jonathan Kozol or a Thomas Kuhn, how do we think about if we row together? What's the change that we affect? And I know it's possible, because, again, look at data interoperability in our space. Who would have thought we would have created a movement called Project Unicorn around data interoperability? No one.

Erin Mote [00:29:48]:
So I'm just going to come up with another mythical character for AI, and then that'll be the name of our new movement.

Curt Merlau [00:29:58]:
I love it. Well, we'll be sure to put links to both of those organizations, those movements in the episode here. But just imagine for a second to use that. Chronic absenteeism is such a hot topic right now. What would it look like if we put that problem on that table where there are these groups together, and we're rowing the same direction? We can make some major strides with chronic absenteeism or third-grade literacy, whatever it might be. It gives you goosebumps to think about the potential. But there's still work to be done, right?

Erin Mote [00:30:32]:
Yeah. I mean, I think chronic absenteeism is actually a data problem. So it's a human problem and a change management problem, but it's also, do we have data to ask ourselves questions like, why is that child always late on a Thursday morning? And maybe the answer is they're walking their sibling to school. Or maybe the answer is like, if they're in high school during the pandemic, I'm just going to say that this is happening so nobody is surprised when I say this nationally, on stages, they're working a job. Like, they were doing remote school, they became a breadwinner in their family and in some communities, they can't give up that income right now. And so, how do we actually peel back the onion on chronic absenteeism? Use data to ask meaningful questions and connect with our young people, to deepen the human connection in our schools and between our schools and between learning.

Erin Mote [00:31:31]:
And frankly, the last thing I'll say is we need to do some work to make learning meaningful for young people. Right now, I think young people are telling us they're not coming to school because school isn't meaningful for them. If that's not a giant wake up call, yeah, they're disengaged. So we got to do something different.

Curt Merlau [00:31:51]:
I used to lead alternative high schools.

Erin Mote [00:31:52]:
But you know this.

Curt Merlau [00:31:53]:
Yeah, I agree. I would lead alternative high schools. So many bright kids, they just became disengaged. And when you find ways to engage them, so much lights up. In our state, we have a disengagement issue, a problem, right, where we have enough students to fill the football stadium every year of students who are disengaged youth. What are we doing? We have to rethink about delivery engagement. We can use it. We can use data technology.

Curt Merlau [00:32:28]:
To do that, we just have to be ready to do the hard things. And we can do hard things. We just need to put our hand to the plow and move in the same direction.

Mike Baur [00:32:37]:
Yeah. And some aspect of this is like, common sense. I mean, Erin, one of the stages you were speaking on just last week happened to be at the AI revolution pre-conference in San Diego. And I heard you speak. I heard others speak, and it was to watch. One of the announcements was, Mister Beast is going to be partnering with East Carolina University on short-form content learning content. And I'm going, this is exactly what we mean by meet the youth where they're at and meet them in the context and modality that they're used to consuming content, because now they will be engaged. And that's just one of the newer modalities.

Mike Baur [00:33:15]:
What's next? What's in five years? What's in ten years? And we can't just.

Curt Merlau [00:33:18]:
If you're not familiar with Mister Beast, like, I was like, mister what? Mister Beast. Big YouTuber known as MrBeast. Right. Personality. I just. I'm nearing 40, I guess, and that showed. But that's.

Mike Baur [00:33:36]:
And my kids are teenagers, Kurt, so it's like, that's what they watch nonstop. Oh, my gosh.

Curt Merlau [00:33:41]:
That's so cool. And so, Erin, you know, you are a pioneer in this space. You are a change maker, an innovator. I don't think it was by accident that the first lady mentioned interoperability in the White House. I think you had something to do with that. Just might, is my guess. But summarize for us what data-driven leadership means to you. How do you think about that phrase?

Erin Mote [00:34:11]:
Everyone can be a data-driven leader. I think if you're a student, can you look at your own data and say, what's missing? Or what story doesn't this tell about me? If you're a parent, are you asking for data about your young person? Are you asking your school to deliver a more comprehensive picture of your child so that you can actually engage with them around what they know and what they don't and what's happening? If you're a school administrator or a district leader, frankly, we have to modernize our data ecosystems. You have to make these investments, and you can do it in a way that protects the safety and security of data, and you can meet your obligation of being a steward of this data. And finally, I think as a sector, we need to understand, what do we want to achieve in education? I think we need to evolve education to go from schooling to learning, actually being a system that's a learning system that looks at data and the hard questions about whether or not we're meeting young people, where they are, whether or not we're meeting young people with opportunity. And so data-driven leadership is, are you willing to be curious? Are you willing to ask questions? Are you willing to say the hard things? If you could do that, you can be a data-driven leader no matter what season.

Curt Merlau [00:35:36]:
I love it. We have to be listening. We have to be learning, being curious, all those things. Wonderful, wonderful points to leave on. Erin, thank you so much. We will continue to follow your work closely and as an IT and data consulting from the private sector space, we are at that table. We want to build that table with you. And so thank you so much for making the way possible.

Curt Merlau [00:36:02]:
And Mike, thanks for joining us today, too.

Erin Mote [00:36:04]:
Well, thanks for being a unicorn. We appreciate the unicorn.

Curt Merlau [00:36:07]:
We're proud.

Erin Mote [00:36:09]:
We love team unicorns.

Curt Merlau [00:36:12]:
All right, excellent. Thank you again for joining us on this episode of the education miniseries. I'm Doctor Curt, your host. Be sure to follow Data-Driven Leadership on your preferred podcast platform. And don't forget to rate and review sharing how these discussions on education data are making a positive impact on your organization. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will continue our exploration with more education experts and data leaders.