Roger Quarrels has spent most of his life thinking about what it means to prepare people for a world that keeps changing. As a teacher, principal, superintendent, chief deputy state superintendent, and now executive director of the J.A. and Katherine Albertson Foundation, he’s seen Idaho’s education system from nearly every angle. On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, he joined host Tommy Ahlquist to open a month-long conversation about education, and the first episode alone covers enough ground to keep you thinking for days.

The thread running through all of it: the fundamentals still matter, maybe more than ever, but what we build on top of them needs to change.

Learn to Learn First, Then Everything Else

Quarrels has a framework for how he thinks about education that cuts against the way most people talk about it. The early years, pre-K through about fourth or fifth grade, are about one thing above all else: learning how to learn. Reading, basic numeracy, curiosity, the ability to absorb and apply new information. Get those right, and a kid has the foundation to do almost anything. Miss them, and everything downstream gets harder.

What happens after that is where Quarrels thinks the system is most overdue for honest conversation. “For most kids,” he said, “sixth through twelfth grade is largely irrelevant.” That’s a provocative way to put it, but his point is specific: if a young person has genuinely learned how to learn, and has access to technology that can extend their curiosity in almost any direction, the rigid industrial-era structure of secondary education isn’t always serving them well. The system was built to produce workers for a particular kind of economy. That economy is changing faster than the system is.

What AI Actually Changes

Ahlquist came to the conversation fresh from a day in San Francisco, where he watched the vacancy that defined downtown just a couple of years ago fill back up, this time with AI companies and twenty-somethings from Stanford. The energy was unmistakable. The question he brought back: what does this mean for Idaho families, for kids in school right now, for communities trying to figure out how to prepare the next generation?

Quarrels is an optimist about AI, though a clear-eyed one. He’s been reading about it for nearly a decade, and his view is that the technology won’t eliminate the need for capable, curious, hardworking people. It will change what that looks like. Jobs that don’t exist yet will require skills that are hard to name now. Credentials that seemed essential a generation ago are already losing their value proposition. Student loan debt is now second only to mortgage debt in this country, and Quarrels thinks the math on a four-year degree is going to keep getting harder to defend for more and more students.

What won’t lose value, he argues, is the ability to think, adapt, and engage. “Be well read, pay attention, be aware, learn, surround yourself with really smart people. Walk through open doors you don’t know are on the other side. Work hard and be a kind human being while you’re doing it.” He was talking about what he tells his grandkids, but it landed as something close to a universal answer.

The Soft Skills That Aren’t Soft

Both Quarrels and Ahlquist pushed back on the term “soft skills” during the conversation, and it’s worth dwelling on why. The ability to look someone in the eye, hold a conversation, show up consistently, be genuinely present, ask good questions, these aren’t supplementary. In a world where AI handles more of the technical and analytical work, they may be the most differentiating things a person can develop.

Quarrels framed it from a hiring perspective. He’d just finished interviewing candidates for a senior role at the foundation that morning. Competency, he said, is table stakes. The resume tells you that. What he’s actually looking for is harder to quantify: psychological safety within a team, the willingness to say “I don’t know but I’m willing,” the ability to be in genuine contrast with colleagues without fracturing the culture. And intergenerational diversity, people with different amounts of lived experience who can coach each other rather than just agreeing.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a line he lives by, and the conversation kept returning to it. Ahlquist shared a story from his San Francisco trip about a restaurateur who’d come to the country at 17 with $800, built an empire of 17 restaurants, and still knew the names of dishwashers at every location. The reason the guy was succeeding wasn’t a secret. He’d built a culture, and he maintained it personally, every day, across every restaurant.

Idaho Education: Progress and Honest Gaps

On Idaho’s education system specifically, Quarrels is genuinely encouraged by the direction of travel, even as he’s honest about what remains hard. Access to school choice has expanded meaningfully. Career and technical education is growing. Superintendent Debbie Critchfield, who will appear later this month, is navigating the political and operational complexity of public education with real skill. The Albertson Foundation’s work with Idaho Education News, which it funds with no editorial control, has given the state a credible, independent source of reporting on where students actually stand.

But the gaps are real, particularly between urban and rural Idaho. The 115 school districts in the state are mostly rural, and what a student in Kuna or Meridian can access looks nothing like what’s available in Richfield or Dietrich. School board governance, which relies on locally elected lay citizens with no required training or credentials, works until it doesn’t, and Quarrels thinks the in-service education component has lagged behind the responsibility. The consolidation question, which would save money and reduce administrative redundancy, runs headlong into the reality that these small districts are often the economic and identity anchors of their communities. There’s no clean answer.

The bigger worry he named, and the one he thinks education has to respond to, is the erosion of the middle class and what that means for families trying to raise kids with purpose, stability, and a sense of what it means to contribute. The phone is addicting by design, parental bandwidth is stretched, and the assumption that schools will fill the gaps has never been more strained.

But Quarrels isn’t a pessimist. He thinks the pendulum is starting to swing, that more people are recognizing what’s been lost in the noise and reaching toward something more grounded. His advice to anyone listening: be fully present. With your kids, your team, your community. It’s harder than it sounds, and it matters more than almost anything else.