A cross-divisional body for the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence, and the ninety days that decide whether it holds.
I wrote my dissertation on what it takes for a school system to move past the factory model. The finding was not about technology. It was that leadership has to build the conditions before the practice can change. Everything below follows from that.
Community-based accountability. I design with the people who will use what I build, and I report back to them on what worked. The team is my rubric, not the dashboard.
Problem-based learning. The best learning starts from a real problem the learner already cares about, not from a list of features.
Human-centered design. Design starts with the human, not the content. Who is the learner, and what must they be able to do afterwards?
Ed.D., USC Rossier · Three times Teacher of the Year, once in Abu Dhabi and twice in Morongo · Microsoft Innovative Educator 2018-2024
The full record →This is the Shared Vision Framework from my doctoral study of a superintendent moving a district past the factory model. Moral purpose sits at the center because it was the only thing that held when the initiative got hard. Select a quadrant to see what it means for the task force.
I would run the task force itself this way: as a continuous improvement cycle, and as a project-based inquiry of our own. We are asking educators to work in a new way. We should model the method we are asking them to adopt.
Adoption is done with people, not to them. The method I bring from corporate learning design is the one I would run the task force on: understand what people need, design with them, get them engaged, then synthesize what we learned into the next cycle. The messy middle is the project.
Urgency, a guiding coalition, a vision, communication, removing obstacles, short-term wins, consolidating, anchoring. The sequence discipline. It appears as Figure 3 in the study.
Focusing direction, cultivating collaborative cultures, deepening learning, securing accountability. The relationship discipline. Figure 4 in the study, and the reason the loop has a center.
Bridging is SDCOE's own word for why this body is cross-divisional. Dr. Cortés's framework is how I practice it: cross difference on purpose, in both directions, with the people on the far side as co-builders. I co-present this work with him.
Learn more: the bridge-building course →How long a task an AI agent finishes unaided has been doubling on a steady curve. What changed is how fast the doubling comes around.
METR, Time Horizon 1.1, January 2026. 228 tasks, doubling measured at 50 percent success.
Which means anything we name today will be revised before a committee finishes reviewing it. So the question leaders keep asking me, what do we teach, is the wrong one. The question that does not expire is how do we work now.
Mindset, time, capability, and permission to redesign the work. This is where learning actually happens.
Peripherals, consumables, subscriptions, licenses, and the hardware refresh cycle. A device is not a one-time purchase.
Broadband, hotspots, one-to-one devices. Largely closed through the pandemic response.
Targeted Universalism, already named in SDCOE's Strategic Plan, is the instrument. One universal goal for the county, pursued through different strategies, because Borrego Springs and Del Mar are not standing on the same level.
Whether a student is shown how to interrogate an output, or handed a locked-down device, is decided long before any policy is written.
Pick a role. Then move through the levels. The gap stops being abstract once you see what it means for a person who actually works here.
Readiness, not model performance, is the bottleneck.
Microsoft Copilot study, 2025 · Berkeley Haas DGRI, 2025 · WEF Future of Jobs, 2025 · OpenAI Enterprise AI Report, 2025 · RAND, 2025
Not in an awareness session, and not in the server room. At the desk where somebody does the task differently on a Tuesday.
Below is Module 2 of the CAAASA AI Academy, which I designed and built: What AI Actually Is (and What It Isn't). Five interactive lessons and a knowledge check. Not a screenshot. Run it.
A free, module-based companion course to my 2026 peer-reviewed literature review, built for educators and leaders. Enroll, work through the modules, and earn a certificate. The whole argument on this page, as a course you can take.
A literature review. Journal of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, 10(1), 2026. What it takes for a leader to move a system past the factory model, and why the answer was never the technology.
The AI capability curriculum this whole argument comes from, including the 201 and 301 material almost no organization builds. Awareness, application, orchestration, architecture.
Supporting material: the 90 days in full · the evidence base · the dissertation · the white paper
Scroll, and the table assembles. Then select a seat.
Twelve to fifteen members. A two-year charter with staggered terms, so it survives a change of leadership. It advises. Purchasing decisions stay with the divisions and processes that own them, better informed. It does not police.
Classified staff, teachers, families and labor partners, asked before anything is decided. Discovery is the design.
The phase names are SDCOE's own, borrowed from the LCAP Development Series on purpose. Underneath each one runs the human-centered design method I have used in every setting since Abu Dhabi: discover, prototype, iterate, scale. Procurement follows the evidence. It does not lead it.
This window sits inside the 2026-27 LCAP development cycle, so districts can write AI access, AI literacy, and professional learning into three-year plans with funding attached. Miss it and the next clean opportunity is three years out.
Knowing about AI is not the goal, and neither is literacy. The goal is administrators, board members, teachers, and students who build with it, including the management systems they run their own work on. Then we find the people already innovating differently, seed their work, and promote what works across the county.
Superintendents, cabinet, site administrators, board members, and instructional coaches.
What these systems are and are not, in one briefing a board can use tonight.
Policy, privacy, procurement questions, and the 201 and 301 capability map for their own roles.
Leaders redesign one workflow they own, from board briefings to LCAP drafting, with the guardrails they helped write.
Identify the district or site already innovating differently, fund the pilot, publish the result, and promote it countywide.
Classroom teachers, classified staff, instructional coaches, and the students themselves.
Awareness in the language of the classroom, delivered where teachers already meet.
Role-based application on real tasks: feedback, differentiation, family communication, planning.
Teachers and students design the classroom systems they run on, and students leave as producers, not only consumers.
A showcase and an exemplar library so the teacher three districts over can borrow it on Monday.
One per division, then one per region of the county, with classified staff in the room.
In English and Spanish, through the parent structures that already exist, at times families can attend.
At the Linda Vista Innovation Center, with students presenting what they made to the people who wrote the policy.
Employers describing what changed in their work in the last eighteen months, feeding pathway design.
Districts present what they built, what it cost, and what did not work. The exemplar library grows from here.
The year-one plan, in language that goes to the County Board without translation, with the labor partners already on record.
How OpenAI uses OpenAI to drive its own adoption. Scotty Huhn and Conor Dragomanovich at SCULPT 2025. The pattern is the one I would bring to the county: find the internal builders, give them room and support, then put their work in front of everyone else. Seed growth where people are already innovating differently, and promote what works.
Every semester we spend deciding is a semester a student spends on the wrong side of the third level of the divide.
Tiger Leap laid digital public infrastructure in 1996. AI Leap was announced February 2025 and went live that September, seven months later. Teachers were trained before students got access. Deployed on ChatGPT Edu, tailored with University of Tartu researchers to behave as a Socratic tutor. No outcome data yet: a conditions story, not a results story.
Unbroken five-year ICT masterplan cycles since 1997. A national learning platform in every school from 2018, a device in every secondary student's hands by 2021, and 100 hours of professional development entitlement per teacher per year. AI slotted into a channel that already existed.
Earliest and best funded, at roughly 740 million dollars for teacher training over 2024-26. Still failed. Adoption was mandated onto teachers rather than built with them, and 80 percent of teachers reported being negative on it. In August 2025 the National Assembly removed AI digital textbooks' legal status, ending guaranteed funding and mandatory use. Adoption fell to about 19 percent. An initiative that cannot survive a change of leadership is not an initiative. It is a term of office.
Elements of AI reached hundreds of thousands of adults voluntarily, and about 40 percent of enrollees were women. It also hit roughly 0.055 percent of the EU population against a 1 percent target. Voluntary access is not a delivery system.
Behind on delivery: roughly 13,000 districts, no national platform, no national teacher-development architecture. Ahead on substance: American work wrote the curriculum framework other systems borrowed, and 60 percent of US teachers adopted AI without any mandate, with weekly users reporting about six hours a week saved. No ministry produced that by decree.
This is the first moment in a century when we have both the tools and the reason to change it. I would rather this county spend its first ninety days deciding how we work before it decides what to buy.
Our students should leave us as producers of this technology, not only consumers of it.
The process, redrawn for the task force. Understanding user needs, designing for their needs, and getting them engaged sit between strategy and assessment on one side and program design and implementation on the other. The center is the discipline: synthesizing insights into actions before the next cycle begins. The methods behind it are IDEO's, open to anyone at designkit.org, and I hold the IDEO Human-Centered Design certificate through Acumen Academy.