We revere Nobel laureates, celebrate tech titans, and lionize groundbreaking artists, often attributing their success to innate talent or sheer grit. But this focus on individual brilliance obscures a hidden force multiplier: the transformative power of exceptional teachers. While most intuitively recognize that educators can have a profound impact—a mythology captured in films like Stand and Deliver and Dead Poets Society—this belief rarely translates into tangible policy or cultural acclaim. The impacts, though deeply felt, seem too diffuse, too intertwined with countless other influences, to be meaningfully measured. Imagine, then, a “National Academy of Teaching”, its fellowships awarded not for seniority or popularity, but because we knew, with data-driven certainty, that these teachers were part of the causal chain that produced life-saving medicines, culture-changing novels, and courageous public leadership.

For years, we've relied on crude metrics like test scores to assess teacher effectiveness, a system that reduces complex human interactions to sharpened chisels. But as Raj Chetty's work teacher impacts on long-term life outcomes and other research on teacher impacts on incarceration rates have demonstrated, improving test scores is often unrelated to improving lives. We've been measuring the wrong things, and as a result, missing a critical piece of the puzzle.

That's the "mad science" mission driving one of my (perhaps too many) projects at The Human Trust. We're building a new model to measure teachers' real impact—not just on short-term academic performance but on their students' ultimate societal contributions, their "grand accomplishments," from Nobel Prizes and billion-dollar startups to profound works of art.

My model does this by creating a deep embedding of student characteristics and behaviors (a "student manifold"), a similar embedding of teachers (a "teacher manifold"), and a "life outcomes manifold" to represent diverse achievements. Importantly, the model also quantifies what I consider exogenous noise (though others might call it dumb luck and historical context). After all, much research shows that exceptional outcomes, in science, the arts, and life, often reflect the flip of a coin or the happenstance of timing as much as inherent skill. By measuring that, we can more accurately account for the factors that influence those outcomes

This isn't about replacing existing assessments, but augmenting them with a richer understanding of teacher impact. It's about recognizing that teachers do more than transmit knowledge; they ignite curiosity, foster resilience, instill ethical values, and inspire ambitious goals. These are the very meta-learning factors that drive positive life outcomes. If we can shift these conditions, we can shift the outcomes of all of us.

To truly value teachers, we need to honestly face the steep methodological and ethical challenges accounting for pre-existing advantages, modeling the myriad factors contributing to individual success, and guarding against reducing human potential to simplistic metrics. These challenges only have partial solutions, and I need to be honest with myself about the limits of this work. But as with all messy problems, messy solutions are all we have to improve lives.

I envision a world where we can celebrate the lives changed by an elite educator as readily as lives saved by elite doctors. Those who demonstrably unleash exceptional talent and guide students towards world-changing achievements deserve a place in culture as rich as the life changing artists.

Perhaps most importantly, we would begin to prioritize our children's best versions of themselves instead of test scores. And this recognition will improve those life outcomes.

And what if it were real—if we could provide causal evidence of those human contributions? Even before we have the power to model the precise relationships, focusing on the long-term impact of these critical professions on students will give us the ability to value what and who truly matter. At a time of global uncertainty, we must invest in a generation of humans prepared to flourish in an uncertain world…and in the educators who prepared them.

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Research Roundup

My Old School

This paper made the rounds recently, but its finding is worth highlighting: graduates of just 34 “Elite” US schools dominate the lists of Nobels and other grand accomplishments.

Not only are “a set of 34 “Elite” schools, the 8 Ivy League schools, and Harvard University in particular” dramatically overrepresented “across 30 different achievement groups totaling 26,198 people”, but “the general public tends to underestimate the size of this effect”.

The list of accomplishments range from Fortune 500 CEOs and the “Billion Dollar Startup Club” to National Book Award winners, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and US Senators (that last being the group of people who regularly shitpost about “elites” not being true Americans).

On some level none of this is surprising. (While I’m on the topic, congratulations on receiving the Mark Twain Prize, Conan O’Brien.)  But the degree to which this tiny slice of the World population dominates our lives forces the next question: would these people have had different outcomes without attending Harvard or is Ayn Rand right?

A broad reading of the research on life outcomes tells a very different story than “The Fountainhead". A relatively small group of people do possess an astonishing ability to affect the world (hell, 3 of my 4 schools are on the list) and we fail to recognize (1) this same potential in so many others and (2) how the contributions of innumerable others turns an isolated genius into a world altering force. They are both true.

While ostensibly about elite education, these findings actually reveal our profound inability to identify and develop human potential across the world. It's not that Harvard creates exceptional achievers; it's that our society is so remarkably bad at recognizing and nurturing potential everywhere else that we've effectively outsourced a critical societal function–identifying and cultivating future leaders–to a tiny handful of institutions.

This isn't a celebration of elite education; it's an indictment of a system that squanders vast amounts of human potential year after year.

Bridges & Markets

I envy those few for whom abstract mathematics is a passion. For me, math became meaningful when I began applying it to the brain. New research suggests that this applied understanding needs more respect in schools.

A study of 1400 children in Kolkata and Delhi working in markets found that they regularly used “complex arithmetic calculations” and were “proficient in solving hypothetical market maths problems and verbal maths problems that were anchored to concrete contexts.”

Despite this proficiency, those same kids were “unable to solve arithmetic problems of equal or lesser complexity when presented in the abstract format typically used in school”.

In contrast, matched students in neighboring schools “performed more accurately on simple abstract problems, but only 1% could correctly answer an applied market maths problem that [over ⅓] of working children solved”. They fell back on “highly inefficient written calculations, could not combine different operations and arrived at answers too slowly to be useful in real-life or in higher maths.”

Both populations of learners struggled to generalize their math knowledge outside the narrow context in which they were taught. I benefited from holistic learning interventions, not only taking math and computational neuroscience classes at the same time, but also applying these lessons on the fly in my undergraduate research thesis. Abstraction, application, and exploration all came together to launch my career.

Teach to a better test

What impact can a teacher have on a child’s life? It’s more than academic.

A unique dataset reveals that a student's chance of being arrested later in life dropped by almost 3 percentage points depending on their teachers. Fascinatingly, this teacher effect on incarceration was “orthogonal to their effects on academic achievement”.

(This reminds me of a Raj Chetty paper that found those teachers with the biggest positive effects on later life outcomes showed little or even slight negative effects on year-over-year standardized test scores.)

The analysis shows that “teachers who reduce suspensions and improve attendance substantially reduce future arrests”, but that doesn’t mean that shallow interventions like directly reducing suspensions will change lives. These improvements are almost certainly mediated though “the development of non-cognitive skills”.

One thought I have is, if the academic and “non-cognitive” effects are orthogonal then some rare teachers must achieve both. What are they doing that's so magical?

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SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

I’m usually not taken with the retelling of fables and myths, but some writing is so literally lyrical that I am carried away. The audi- novella, The River Has Roots, used all of its 4 hours to immerse me in an Ireland of fables. The music woven throughout the story, written and performed by the author and sung by the reader, make this a uniquely special audiobook experience.

Stage & Screen

• May 7, Chicago: Innovation, Collective Intelligence, and the Information-Exploration Paradox
• May 8, Porto: Talking about entrepreneurship at the SIM conference in Portugal
• May 14, London: it time for my semi-annual lecture at UCL.
• June 12, SF: Golden Angels
• June 9, Philadelphia: "How to Robot-Proof Your Kids" with Big Brothers, Big Sisters!
• June 18, Cannes: Cannes Lyons
• Late June, South Africa: Finally I can return. Are you in SA? Book me!
• October, UK: More med school education

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming