The secret to better schools isn't always more money, smaller classes, or better curriculum. It's often better teachers. The problem is the American education system is almost perfectly designed to prevent that from happening.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Rick Hanushek, senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, to dig into what the evidence says about how schools work, why they often don't, and what AI is about to do to all of it.

Topics covered:

• Why the core value of education isn't knowledge but adaptability, and why that makes it more important as labor markets shift faster
• Why cognitive skills measured by tests predict long-run economic growth better than years of schooling
• Teacher quality as the only input that reliably moves student outcomes, and why the US pay system is built to ignore it ...