One of the more surprising moments from this week’s podcast episode—which features two of the smartest educational leaders I know—had nothing to do with curriculum, AI, test scores, or the future of learning.
It was milk.
As they explained it, public schools have inherited decades of policies, regulations, and industry partnerships tied to the dairy industry. Which means debates about milk, chocolate milk, and lunch programs can consume enormous amounts of attention.
Meanwhile, bigger questions just sit there waiting. You know…unimportant questions like:
What should students actually learn?
What skills matter now?
What assumptions no longer fit reality?
I completely understand your instinct reading this might be to laugh at “Big Dairy,” shrug your shoulders, and conclude that institutions are inherently broken. Mine was. You can actually hear me kind of do that in the interview.
But I think you and I are mistaking the symptom for the story.
As my friend, writer David Dark, often says, “We become what we normalize.”
Myths are always trying to protect something. The milk debate isn’t really about milk at all. It’s about a system continuing to protect priorities that once made sense but now don’t.
That’s not really an education problem. It’s a leadership problem. It’s a brand problem. It’s a culture problem.
Every culture carries forward stories from an earlier chapter.
Some deserve to survive. Others don’t. The challenge is knowing the difference.
In my experience, the most expensive mistakes usually come from either changing too quickly without protecting what matters or protecting something long after it stopped serving the people it was meant to help.
Either way, they create the same outcome: two stories…the one leadership thinks they’re creating. And the one people are actually experiencing.
The work is to recognize that gap before it starts to become expensive.