Mike Goldstein joined me to talk about the evolving landscape of education savings accounts (ESAs) and the experiences of families utilizing them. Goldstein, who has been researching the reality for families on the ground in states like Florida and West Virginia, shares insights into how different types of families—those in reactive situations looking to escape traditional schooling and proactive families seeking enrichment opportunities—are navigating this space. The discussion highlights the challenges these families face, such as navigating systems with varying levels of friction and finding appropriate educational resources, and touches on the potential for future innovations in guidance and AI to assist parents in making more informed educational choices for their children.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn. And you are joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through that, today we've got one of my favorite folks in the world of education, if we can call it that, none other than Mike Goldstein. He's a repeat guest now on the podcast. Mike, as many of you may know, founder of MATCH Charter Schools back in the day, did some really interesting work overseas, helping stand up a network of schools in Africa. And we may get into all sorts of things, but in the last several years has really been, Mike, I'm going to say, tinkering with a lot of innovations on the ground around what schooling could look like. And in different realms of the equation of K12 into this thing we think of as college or launching into careers and so forth.

Like, you've been playing a lot in the design and innovation space and thinking about what's the reality on the ground. And then most recently, he's been a fellow at the Pioneer Institute here in Massachusetts. And you got to do a bunch of work, Mike, I guess looking at, let's put it this way, like educational choice, not just even school choice, by a lot of measures, it's growing quite a bit. Education Savings Accounts, universal in many states. Now we can talk about what that means or doesn't mean. You've been looking at, like, what's the reality on the ground for a family trying to figure out, hey, I have $8,000 in a bank account earmarked for education. Where do I spend it? What do I want to use it on? Am I homeschooling, microschooling, unbundling, all these terms we use in education wonk land.

What have you been learning on the ground? Maybe let's start there and we'll see where it takes us.

Mike Goldstein

Yeah, great to be here. Six miles south of you in Watertown, Mass. The weather's unbelievable down here.

Michael Horn

I'm just jealous.

Mike Goldstein

Yes. So listen, great to be here. And yeah, Jim at Pioneer said, hey, we're interested in, like, what are the stories underneath this very fast expanding education savings account. And so I was looking at states like Florida, you know, $8,000 per year per kid. West Virginia, $5,000 per year per kid. And as you know, and probably many of your listeners, your podcast listeners know, the typical family with an education savings account just takes that eight grand and gives it to their local private school. That's how they're using that money. So 90% of the families have a very conventional and easy to understand expenditure here.

It's like, all right, it's either paying my tuition or cross subsidizing my tuition. What's more interesting and wildly varied is if you are a homeschool family and you can take the eight grand or the five grand and spend it without any underlying private school tuition that you have to pay. Right. And so those were some of the stories that I was trying to capture for Pioneer, finding these people, talking to them, how do you blow the money? How's it going for your kid?

Michael Horn

So like these are almost the blank slate families, right? They're not enrolled already in a previous tuition driven school of some sort. It sounds right. Like they're sort of coming into this with a much more blue sky. What do we use this on? And perhaps intentionality of why they want to use it or what they're trying to escape from or whatever else. Is that fair?

Mike Goldstein

I'll give you, I'll share two kind of concrete stories that will resonate, I'm sure with you and your listeners. So you know Daniella in Arizona, Katie and Tiffany in West Virginia. These are classic aspirin, meaning we feel pain as moms. Our kids were enrolled in the public schools and it wasn't going well. I had this mama bear moment. I pulled them out. And so in that case, they're responding to I'm a homeschooler, not for a religious reason, but because I don't feel my kids needs were being met. And sometimes the critique is more social, like kids being bullied, doesn't have friends, doesn't like to go to school.

Sometimes the critique is more academic. My kids are struggling to learn stuff where I don't even think the school is serving even their median kid well. And so then they're like, I gotta figure out how to do this on my own. That's one type. So that was one part of the story. The other was what I would more say are vitamin parents, meaning their kids. So Mariana and Andrena are twins. They came to the US from Venezuela.

They're moms, they live near each other, they each have a few kids. Their kids were doing fine in public school in Florida. It's just that they're like, our kids are little. I think we could do better. Like what if we homeschool our kids and then we can use these education savings accounts much more for enrichment, you know, like, let's get them some bass guitar lessons. Like, my kid wants to do the rock climbing gym, and my other kid's really into soccer at an elite level. Like, we could send them to the academy with some of this cash. And so those are, like, the two types of stories that I think are likely to increase those choosing homeschool over time.

Because it's not like a moral or religious driver of homeschool attendance. It's much more of a vitamin or aspirin to a secular education experience.

Parental Decision-Making Shift

Michael Horn

So both of those are interesting. I think the first is probably more. I don't know, familiar is the right word, but what people might expect, right? Like, my kid's in trouble. This is going nowhere fast. I gotta get out, put an array of services around them. The second one sounds like maybe I'm gonna stereotype in a different way, but like a complacent, previously complacent family that all of a sudden says, hey, we could do something different here and get a lot more for our kids. Maybe let's tackle that one first and, like, tell us what that decision making looks like. What did you learn about how they're making choices? You just said they can spend money on soccer academies and bass guitar lessons.

I mean, those sound fun. I'd like public funding for that for me. What does that look like? What's the conversation at the dining room table like for them?

Mike Goldstein

So I think they were kind of. It's like two sisters evangelized a little by the third sister, this kind of like, hey, we can do this. And I think they're both professional. They're themselves well educated. And some of the vibe here, Michael, was, hey, I'm already, like, working from home, and my Saturdays and Sundays with my kids are pretty pleasant. These are kids with, like, pretty high executive function overall. If you kind of get them started, you know, they're age appropriate.

I mean, these were younger kids, but, like, you know, they get started with their book, and they can read for a while, and they get started with the math, and they can, you know, take a run at it or, you know, just kind of go to mom or dad with like, I need a little help here or there. So not sort of saying it's, like, easy per se,

Michael Horn

but it's not like an all hands on deck. I have to be babysitting my kid.

Mike Goldstein

Yes.

Michael Horn

Eight hours. Right. Totally pulling them tooth and nail through this.

Mike Goldstein

Right. And I think that Covid, of course, sort of woke people up a little bit. This what you were calling, like, a complacent family. It's like the kids are doing fine in school, we got no complaints. They're like reasonably happy to go to school and they have high grades on their report cards. They're liked, they have friends. But it's like, huh, this is like a big chunk of childhood that's pretty boring. It's like, why does this need to go from 8 to 2:30 when I feel like we're getting this roughly done from 9 to 11 am and sort of like they're actually learning a little more, you know, much more compressed time and therefore whether the kid is converting the afternoon just into like let's ride our bike and play outside with our friends, parents are

Michael Horn

Like that's good. Or let's kind of go deeper on more structured kind of enrichment type things. That's good too.

How do they make choices with the money? Right? Like I'm really interested in how social networks play a role in helping them inform. Are there tools though also in the ESA, you know, world that is helping inform them? Like how are they deciding and choosing where they're spending the dollars versus using their own expertise perhaps and so forth. What does that look like?

Mike Goldstein

It's an interesting kind of mess that varies a lot state by state. So this is, it's a pretty fraught area. So each state as you know, has a different software vendor who's running the back end of this education savings account. And I think that overall they're pretty good at the first job, which is make sure that you're not spending state monies on crazy things that are going to become front page of the paper type scheme scandal.

Michael Horn

Let me, let me pause you there for one second. Like what counts as crazy? Because I suspect some people are like, wow, bass guitar lessons. I get it, it's educational. But for some people, that's crazy. Some people, they're like, yeah, amen. Like where's the line on that?

Preventing Misuse of Public Funds

Mike Goldstein

Okay, so you're right and I'm going to try to organize it this way. Would, would everybody, including the most advocate oriented type purse. It is, you can't be spending it on buying laptop computers and then reselling them out of a van so that you know, your home is making money. You can't hire grandma for $8,000 and put her on the payroll. Like there's certain types of use that is much more, I think more like borderline fraud or actual fraud that we see in some other public, you know, like housing vouchers, other things. So job one is like the unquestionable 99 out of 100 people would agree this isn't okay. Then there's this next level of turf where you and I might, for the sake of discussion, have a healthy disagreement. So I might be more on the side of like, well, schools offer music, public schools offer music lessons, public schools do trips to D.C., public schools do a bunch of enrichment type things where they're using public monies to pay adults to do stuff to give lessons to kids. And I would say, why couldn't the homeschool, in my opinion homeschool family use that? Each state calibrates that tightness a little bit differently. Like how much enrichment versus not Mike G. might have a very wide latitude. If you can show it happens in any public school, you should have the right to do it as a homeschool parent would be sort of my rough rule of thumb. Other people are like, no, we want narrower scope of activities and there's a reasonable level of policy disagreement we could have there. So okay, so that's like the starting point.

But the next level is that these software providers and the state treasury department that runs this, have different skills in how much friction they're going to set up for the basic ability to buy and the basic ability to get reimbursed. And so in West Virginia, if you look at these homeschool moms that are on Facebook, nice people literally just trying to get like $300 reimbursement for a science kit they bought. It's a friggin nightmare, like page after page after page just every day. So I'm on these Facebook groups. And by the way, that's probably the number one source of information for these families is peer to peer on Facebook. I think that's probably the top platform. How are you doing this? Other mom chimes in 'here's what we did' in the comment section. So there's a lot of that and these states vary quite a bit in their ability to execute this.

That wouldn't drive a parent crazy. And you know, so unfortunately sometimes like the school choice people, I would say you should get a lot more, if you're an advocate of school choice and an advocate of these kinds of education savings accounts and homeschooling, you should probably flex a lot harder on making this friction a lot lower without losing like, without drifting into scandal world where you lose the productive friction.

Michael Horn

Sure, sure. No, that makes sense. Okay, so they're using Facebook. They are a variety means to find out the funding. What did you like, what was surprising to you? Or insights about their experience. Before we go to the first archetype that you, you laid out that you think other people are not getting about their stories about how they're navigating this world or sort of things that surprised you. Aha's that you had as you dug into these stories.

Mike Goldstein

So you mean for like the vitamin parents?

Michael Horn

Yeah, for the vitamin parents. Before we go to the trouble, get me out of trouble parents.

Enrichment vs. Academic Market Challenges

Mike Goldstein

I feel like the people that were more vitamin parents. It's the market for experiences for your kid, the general market, however you educate your kid, you and me, anybody in greater Boston, if you want to buy music lessons, got a lot of good choices. You want to buy certain sports type opportunities, you got a lot of good choices. I think that's a healthy, well developed market because it's so used by the private sector that it's not that hard to find good bass guitar lessons for your kid. And so I think you can navigate the enrichment side pretty well. And these parents are less likely to need the academic enrichment stuff, which I think is a harder market to navigate because here's why. Most of the tutoring, in my opinion, that's available, let's say, for math, is geared more for tiger parents whose kiddos are at the, you know, and as you know, as a provider in this space, like kids at the 80th percentile whose parents want them to be at the 90th percentile. The skill of those math providers in helping a kid who's at the 20th percentile is very low.

It's not their target customer. Whereas everybody has sort of the same, like, your kid's new to bass guitar. We start with that kid. You know, like, it all sort of starts at the same place. Whereas they're not starting with a kid who took guitar for four years, hasn't made any progress, is super frustrated, like you might have with a reading or math skill type thing. And so that's why I think the vitamin parents, they have a pretty good experience with these education savings accounts.

Michael Horn

Okay, so it sounds like you're foreshadowing that the story might be different with the help me get out of trouble parents, but maybe I shouldn't jump to that conclusion. Tell me what you learned.

Mike Goldstein

Yeah, so I do think one. I remember Tiffany in West Virginia was telling me, you know, they're getting information from a wide variety of sources and they're trying to sort it out solo in a way that strikes me as challenging. Like if you're new to the space like, you're not from K12 World. And Tiffany herself had been like a teacher, public school teacher, an administrator for many years. So she wasn't even new to the space. And she was like, well, one thing I learned about my kid pretty quick that I did not know, is his phonics are pretty bad. And, like, I kind of knew, but he was kind of coping. And then I heard, you know, the podcast Sold a Story, right? The huge sort of mothership activator of a lot of phonics stuff.

She's like, oh, my God, this is what's going on. I'm a little embarrassed as a professional educator to be saying this is going on in my own home with my kid. She then was able to find in West Virginia a pretty skilled old school phonics, I know what I'm doing lady. And so her kid has been responding pretty well, and she's using the education savings account to pay for that. So at the time we recorded, that was like a pretty good purchase. And I think she had substituted away from what had originally sounded like a really cool class online, like Chronicles of Narnia, lLet's go deep. It's like, wait a minute, I don't think that's what my boy needs right now.

And sort of made a good adjustment and made what sounded to me like a smart purchase. But if you look again at these Facebook threads, you see a lot of sort of desperate, these are invariably moms, it's like 95% of the communicators about homeschool are moms saying, kiddo has a problem. I tried X, it didn't work. Now what? And the thread is just a whole. It's like 20 different random ideas. There's nobody who's able to.

Navigating Education Savings Uncertainty

Mike Goldstein

It's not like, yeah, you have your pediatrician to take a whole bunch of different competing ideas and synthesize it in an expert way. What is not yet well developed in this market, it could appear, because Education Savings account, like, who knows? The guidance that's available is not particularly strong. And the mindset of the moms is mostly like, I'm supposed to be able to figure it out by myself in a way that you would never do with medicine or law. Like, in theory, you could represent yourself and you can like, oh, we got into a fender bender and now there's a letter and we're being sued. I guess I could read it all online and figure it out, but who would ever do that? You got to call the guy and be like, we're being sued, it's fender bender. I don't understand my insurance. What do I do? And then somebody sorts you out.

There's very little of that , remember, the ethic of homeschool that you've covered for so long is not that it's much more like we're the pioneers here. We figure it out and we ask each other. But really, you're asking people who themselves, as homeschool moms, they have like a sample size of like two or three kids. It's not like they have a hundred use cases. And they know what works well in what situation. They extrapolate from their own kid.

Michael Horn

Yeah. So I want to stay on that for a moment because I'm curious how you see the market evolving or what your prediction is around how the market will evolve or maybe should evolve. You can choose which one you want to do there. One of my hypotheses is that the back end systems actually need to start helping people navigate this more meaning not Yelp, but more prescriptive recommendation engines to help point you in the right direction if-this- then- that sort of things. And my instinct has been, yes, certain states have tried to legislate guidance into it, but I think more likely there's a market that gets borne out over time. If the volume actually gets high enough where you actually might pay for folks to help you navigate or even diagnose where you are, you may think both of those are really dumb. And so I want to know what you think.

Mike Goldstein

So I agree with you in the long term. And the question is how to build the bridge. So an interesting thing that came across in West Virginia, for example, they had just changed vendors from vendor A, which was doing fine, to vendor B in this kind of way, where the vendor B promise was to build what you said with AI, not only have they been totally unable to build that, they broke the whole basic reimbursement system. Right. In other words, if you look 12 months ago, you don't see the Facebook thread of West Virginia homeschoolers filled with like, how do I get my Hope Scholarship thing? So they sort of shot for the moon and came up super short and sort of broke the underlying almost functionality. I would say the following. Yes. In the long run.

And where you see, for example, AI work. Well, a good example is radiology readings. Right. We both know that. And it's like you had all these skilled, very well trained doctors for a while who created this base of expert knowledge. We've looked at 5 million x rays. We've pretty correctly diagnosed most of that, now the AI is going to vacuum all that pretty good content up, and now it can do that as well or better. Right? Now, nobody has done that.

Years of having the MD read the X ray and give expert opinion. So it's sort of like what the AI is trying to vacuum up is a whole bunch of random and hodgepodge moves like, oh, let's change curriculum. Like, you know what I mean? Like, there's, there's nothing. It's all noise. It's really, it's like, you know, so, you know, garbage in, garbage out situation. If you were the king of school choice and you wanted this in the long run, your intermediate step would be to manually inject and finance expertise into the system to help a lot of families build the loop. Like, how do I prove we're actually helping the families? Let's have competing groups.

Mike Goldstein

Look at satisfaction. Try to measure improvement, whatever those things are. You build that through the human thing. Before then you would say, okay, now I'm going to use the AI to replace the human, to make it more, you know, affordable, et cetera. We don't need it to always be that.

Michael Horn

Do you think then it'll be through mandates that mandate, that guidance function, or do you think it'll be its own organic market where people say it's actually worth spending, you know, 500, a thousand of dollars of the ESA for someone to help me navigate this world or come up with the bespoke package for my kid?

Mike Goldstein

I mean, I don't know, it's possible to me that in four years we'd be saying this is a broken market that nobody's been able to figure out because the barriers to entry are not high. But the barriers to like, providing good advice for 500 or $1,000 are high. Like, it's not a great, you know, unit level if you're going to really spend time with a family. And so usually when we see education services like that, it does go to, you know, like, you think about college admissions counseling, like, I don't know, either you go to the local high school counselor for nothing or you're paying, you know, $500 an hour for

Michael Horn

$ 8, 10, 12,000 by the time you're done with it.

Mike Goldstein

Yeah, totally, Right. So it would eclipse the whole amount of, so that's why there are places. And again, there's like false starts. So it's not like a open. Nobody's done anything. So for example, in Florida, there are already a whole bunch of people that are homeschool certifiers. So it's typically like a teacher and at the end of the year in Florida, you're supposed to send in some kind of proof that your kid learned something.

How do you do that? You pay 75 bucks to some nice teacher who set up shop as one of these certifiers. And, I don't know, they talk to your kid for 10 minutes and then they give you the letter. And so it's. That one is just meeting a weird function of the state. Right. Florida's getting no actual benefit from this, but they get to say, well, we certify that everybody does something reasonable. But what that means is there's all these latent people. So I asked one and I was like, I asked her, well, if somebody gave you a thousand bucks instead of 75, could you actually meaningfully evaluate the kid and then meaningfully help? She's like, oh, yeah, I would love to do that.

That's what I thought I would do. Nobody wants that. But so some of these are like, you know, it's like classic. How do you build a new category? You know, you watch Shark Tank. It's like, duh, you're trying to build a new category. That's a challenge because it creates a whole bunch of additional consumer education that might not be in the interest of financial interest of any one firm, because once you build the market, then everybody else can enter it. So it's more, I think it's more, it might be more of a philanthropy problem, possibly, than a market will solve it itself problem.

Michael Horn

Super interesting. Okay, let's switch gears on one to two other topics. One, I'm super curious. Like, we got folks like you, Kerry McDonald, others in Massachusetts who are really interested on these on the ground stories. In her case, she's often profiling the entrepreneurs behind the microschools here. You've gone to the families, right, Consuming all these different bespoke education solutions. We don't have any prospects in Massachusetts, of which I'm aware that move us in this direction. Maybe you'll tell me otherwise, like, you know, sort of what's driving this curiosity of pioneer others here in Massachusetts?

Education Choice: Red vs. Blue States

Michael Horn

And, and I don't know where the question leads, but I'm curious to hear you pontificate there. But I guess the other question is just to get political for a moment. It does seem like there's a red state strategy at the moment in this country of a lot of education choice and yes, a lot of progressive educators participating in those states. So it's not super political in the state, but the state right. Tends to have a political leaning. The blue state strategy at the moment, I'm not sure what it is in this country, but it's not this. So like, where does this go? Like we're going to have over 50% of students eligible for some form of universal choice pretty soon. Is it going to grow?

I don't know. I'd love to just hear you blank-spoken on this because I'm not quite sure what the question is, but it's something I'm curious about because I think it's interesting we're interested in it here.

Mike Goldstein

Yeah, I would say so. I agree with your basic read. I don't see, you know, a ton that's likely to happen in blue states, but at the margins, you know, there'll be some interesting stuff. Like I interviewed rather a guy in Denver, Colorado, sort of blue purple state without his embark microschool. But yeah, the path for a red state governor, table stakes is clearly now you have to have kind of a school choice strategy. And so if you're interested, like you and me, broadly speaking, I guess I'm like, oh, I happen to live in Massachusetts and I think there's a lot of kids, like my kids who go to the public school down the street are doing just fine. And in all the country there's a lot of kids in public schools who do just fine.

But there's a lot that are struggling. And unfortunately in our home state, nobody's going to do anything about that. In these other states they're going to try. Maybe they'll put some wins on the board. They'll probably put some losses on the board. I'm interested in that. So I sort of think like I happen to live in Massachusetts, but, you know, I can get to other places.

Michael Horn

Yeah. So let's understand this. Okay, last question as we wrap up. Big insights, things that people are missing, things that surprised you as you dug into these individual stories that you'd say people need to understand this. What would you list under that?

Mike Goldstein

Yeah. One of the things that you and I have talked about before is how do you measure learning? And should you try to measure learning for a homeschooler?

Michael Horn

Yeah. Or for bass guitar.

Measurement Challenges in Education

Mike Goldstein

For bass guitar. Right. For any of these, like public expenditures or an easy way to hold that at bay is like the measurement seems to have made things worse off in a number of ways sometimes. So we're both, you and I are measurement nerds. We love that. And yet we can acknowledge the other side of the argument that even if you could solve the technical issues around, for example, it'd be cool to know what is math and English achievement like if your kid went to public school in grades three and four so you got a sense of their annual progress and then happened to shift to homeschool for grades five and six, like, did the learning rate accelerate or decelerate? It'd be cool to know that. There's a bunch of technical issues with that that are probably solvable depending, asterisk, but who wants to know that? And it's sort of like since you and I are more interested in like, what's the kid side of this, what's the real life experience and how do we make that better. But a lot of the political decision making is much more tribal.

School Choice Debate Nuances

Mike Goldstein

So what you and I would expect is people that are in favor of school choice would be like, I'm not interested in that question unless I know it comes out on my side. And the blue tribe people would say the same thing in the other direction. And what Patrick Wolf, the scholar, you know, has sort of written even recently about school choice is, look, you know, it's pretty close. You're not going to see large gains in academics from this per se, if that's what you were hoping, like these breakthroughs where the kids make skyrocket in their literacy levels. But you're not going to see these big blow ups like perhaps school choice opponents would prefer to see because then it makes the case that we should just keep the system as it is. And so I think there's ways, interesting, challenging ways to go at that question. I'm sort of fascinated by that. I know you are too, but who would sort of organize that, fund that? What would be the purpose of it all? Kind of interesting questions here.

Michael Horn

Gotcha, gotcha. Super interesting. Mike, thanks for coming on and talking us through what you've been learning. And as you continue to go down this path and designing for these individuals, whatever you choose to do, come back on and keep us posted.

Mike Goldstein

Awesome. Great to be with you, Mike.

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Matt Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Wildflower Schools joins me to delve into the origin and growth of Wildflower Schools, a network of microschools rooted in the Montessori philosophy. The network now boasts 72 schools across the country. Kramer shares his insights on how to create environments that empower teachers as leaders so that their unique qualities and visions shine through. We also discussed the role of technology in enhancing educational practices; the significance of small, personalized educational settings; and how Matt thinks about fostering growth of the network while maintaining the space for individuality among students and teachers alike. I loved the discussion, for example, of one of the Wildflower schools located on the west coast of Puerto Rico that is housed in a local special education services program and has developed a version of Montessori that is focused on kids with neuro differences. As microschools continue to grow, I found this conversation fascinating as Wildflower blends the benefits of a national network with schools that are led locally and rooted in the community.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through how we get there today, one of my personal favorite people in and around the world of education, we have Matt Kramer. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Wildflower, which we will hear more about shortly. It's a Wildflower schools, or a series, network, if you will, of microschools that have been sprouting up like wildflowers dare I say. They have a Montessori philosophy at their heart. And I will stop talking and describing it there because Matt, welcome. It's so good to see you. You're gonna tell us a lot more in a moment.

Matt Kramer

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Michael Horn

Yeah, absolutely. So you’re in your 10th anniversary of the founding of Wildflower Schools.

Why don't you tell us your origin story for like, how it all came about and progressed to the point where you're now, you know, 72 schools, I think, around the country and continuing to grow pretty rapidly at this point.

Matt Kramer

Sure. Well, let's see. The first brief stop in the origin story is that I was a Montessori kid and, and I also have ADHD and couldn't sit still. And my first tour through pre Montessori schools didn't go very well. Spent a lot of time during recess in class making up for my inability to sit still. And luckily for me, we moved to a new city and my parents found a Montessori school for me. And you know, for the first time, school was largely a positive event.

I, you know, then fast forward when I was the president and CEO of Teach for America for a decade and helped bring a lot of people into the world of educational change. And as we did that, I saw a lot of just extraordinary people make the choice to go into all sorts of different settings across the country, in different cities, different charters and non charters. And at Teach for America, the thing that we would say to people on the way in is that this is a really challenging environment you're going to go into, and your job is to rise to the occasion to transcend the limitations of the situation, to be a leader. And the truth is, some people really were able to pull that off. Some people really weren't able to pull that off. But a lot of people in the middle were just ultimately worn down by the challenges and limitations of the situation. The, you know, their leadership sort of comes into a hard face off with the, with the system that's really designed to suppress leadership. And I had been thinking about this question of, well, what would it look like to have an environment in which actually leadership was supported, where like teachers actually could bring all of their capabilities.

And I was sort of toying with that question when I met this guy, Sep Kamvar, a professor at MIT who, coming at it from a different angle, he had been an entrepreneur, he'd sold the company to Google and he had risen up to the senior levels at Google, as head of personalization at Google, you know, back in the day. And he, you know, in that role, he had bought many, many companies for Google and brought in these entrepreneur teams and sort of had the same observation in that space that I had had in education. Like you bring in these extraordinary, they're clearly extraordinary, right? They've created their own companies and it's so good that Google wants to buy it. And then they get inside of Google and you just watch it crush the life out of them. And so he had this thought of, you know, he had a two year old at the time. He thought of, I'd love to create a school where the teacher's feeling, the teacher's experience and therefore what the teacher can project, is more like the entrepreneur and less like the person who just got bought by the behemoth. And he created the school in Cambridge and then, and then a few more that had this, that had this quality to them where every time you talk to a teacher, you know, the schools were tiny. They were like two teachers, 15, 20 kids, one room that's like the whole school.

And when you talk to the teacher and ask them, why are you here? What are you, you know, what brought you to this moment? They would tell an origin story that was like an entrepreneur was like somebody who had started a great charter that you might see. They had a great entrepreneurial, social entrepreneurial story about what brought them there and exactly what were they trying to do. And as I went from school to school, which is really like classroom to classroom, every single one of them had that same, like this is my thing, energy to it. And when I saw it, I was sort of hooked. I was like, ah, here we are. This is a way to bring together my personal views about child centered approaches to education and the lessons I had learned about the role that teachers can play in creating really extraordinary experiences if you create the right setting for them.

Michael Horn

So there's a number of places I want to go there. And I'll, I'll say, I think you and I probably started talking around 2015, 2016. I'm probably going to get my dates wrong. But, uh, it was early in the life of Wildflower, and then you were super generous. It was before the pandemic, I want to say, 2018 or thereabouts. And you spent like a whole day with me, taking me through, I think, three of your sites in Massachusetts, both to explain what y'all were doing at Wildflower, but also to help me understand Montessori education more deeply. So maybe let's start on that side. I want to spend most of the conversation on the Wildflower side.

But Montessori education itself, you just mentioned child-centered education. Everyone has different definitions of that. I think there are a lot of misimpressions around what Montessori education itself is and how it aligns with, you know, you sort of get these food fights in education, direct instruction versus inquiry-based, and you're like, actually it comes together really nicely as an and in Montessori. And so, like, how do you describe what Montessori education at its core is about and sort of its extensibility, if you will.

Montessori Education Philosophy

Matt Kramer

Yeah. So I think the big idea behind Montessori, you know, thanks to Maria Montessori, who, depending on who you ask, was either the first or the second female doctor in Italy 120 years ago or so, the sort of key idea is that people sort of come wired from the factory with the blueprints for their own life in them, and that our role as educators is to just sort of help them through the process of bringing that to life, bringing themselves to life, creating the person that they're going to be. And the way we can figure out what works is by watching kids, you know, And I think one of her observations was kids of loosely similar ages, you know, sort of three year wide, bands of kids, watch them as they, as they make choices about what they want to do when they're sort of given freedom and learn from that about what the development characteristics are of kids of an age. And so Montessori, so first sort of the big idea is like this responsiveness to the natural developmental patterns. And then what she did is she started with 3 to 6 year olds for local idiosyncratic reasons in Rome. She started with a group of three to six year olds and spent a lot of time watching them and developed this theory about what kids of that age are drawn into, what helps them develop and designed a curriculum around it. And I'll say a few of the features of that three to six year old curriculum, which is what Montessori is most famous for, but it goes from 0 to 18 now. But some of the features that 3 to 6 year old curriculum were first of all, the kids should have meaningful freedoms to move around, to make choices about what they work on, to make choices about who they work with, etc.

And the reason there is first, because of what she found, what her philosophy developed about the stuff that's already in the kid being such an important part of what we're trying to accomplish. And second, her empirical observation that choice is a very powerful lever for engagement. If people get to pick the things they do, they are interested in them intrinsically, even if it's the exact same thing somebody else picked. We don't like people telling us what to do. And in particular kids don't like adults telling them what to do. And so on the one hand, a pedagogy that is focused on using the power of kids' choice to engage them in things and all the subtle instincts that kids have about what is worth doing that might not otherwise come out, like I'm bored of this because I now know how to do it. That should be a signal about it's time to do something else, not a signal that we should like tell the kid to get in their seat and sit down and be quiet.

And then the second part of it is the idea that there are better and worse developmental experiences to choose. And she spent a lot of her time during the early development of Montessori empirically trying out, well, what if we tried to teach the kids one to one correspondence, the idea that the numbers line up with the number of beads and that you go from one to two, not one to three. She spent a lot of time thinking about ideas like that and trying out different ways of teaching them and slowly refining it in the set of materials that does all the different skill areas that you want kid to build on. And because they refined this for so long, they got a lot of subtlety into the system. As one example I give people in a Montessori classroom, all of the little drawers and trays have these little knobs on them that are about the size of an eraser for a pencil. And the reason why they're there and they're that exact size is what she found, is that kids actually have the ability to write by moving around letters like little Scrabble tiles before they have the ability to write on paper. And it's actually a muscle control problem that prevents them from writing on paper, not an ability to form words with letters. And that you can actually accelerate the development of the muscles for holding a pencil by having them keep squeezing things about the size of a pencil.

So it's just sort of like a second thing she just slid in there on the side. Because they spent like 30 years developing the materials. And so the frame of Montessori is like on the one hand, kid choice, on the other hand, this carefully developed set of materials that were developed by watching what made what sort of helped the kids learn stuff. And then a framework for teachers that says your job is not to be the main presenter to the class. Your job is to facilitate the connections between the kids and the learning environment and materials that are around them. And as you do that, we are going this is I think one of the funny things people don't know about Montessori, it's actually a scripted curriculum. The teachers go off to Montessori training programs and they literally memorize the introduction presentations for every one of these hundreds of lessons and materials.

And they sort of check out on them one by one. Like you present the lesson, reading the script out of your memory to an instructor who's like, okay, you're ready to do this particular one. And they go through that all. And the reason why, again back to Maria, is she realized if you didn't put the teachers on a script, they talked a lot longer. They spent a lot of time sort of like wandering around. And whereas if you gave them a script, you could keep it down to like a three sentence introduction. And what she found is the length of the introduction was really not like a long winding introduction was really not helpful for kids, like locking in on the thing and deciding to explore it.

Three sentences was about right. And so that's sort of Montessori. You know, as you get to the older level, kids, what kids needs evolves. And so 6 to 12 year old Montessori is following a slightly different theory of the environment and the case of what they do, but it's also in the case of like, well, what do 6 to 12 year olds need? What do they do naturally? And how do we create an environment that works for that and it just keeps on going up.

Michael Horn

Yeah, and I will say it, I mean it's known for the children house years, as you said. But like the LE and UE lower elementary, upper elementary experiences for us have been even more magical in many ways because it also builds right on itself through those materials and the connections that are made from abstract or, you know, what's concrete to abstractions and things of that nature. It's been pretty cool to see. And I think the way you described it is interesting also because it, it sort of, if people can get over that first objection wherever they're coming from on the world of priors, there's like an answer for it. Right. So if you believe too much choice is bad. Well, you know, scripts and constrained choices. Right.

Like, and really thought out curriculum materials is an answer for you. And it turns out every lesson has a direct instruction component. So we got that right. And then, you know, if you believe it's too regimented so forth like the incredible choice that is brought to bear in a daily and weekly basis and then the executive function skills that people are developing, these kids are developing is just extraordinary as you're going through it.

Montessori and Project-Based Learning

Matt Kramer

Yeah, I think one, you know, to look at the elementary years, I think one of the interesting things, you know, there's, I think there's a growing number of project based environments, especially at the, you know, at the preschool level. Maria Montessori's work has substantially influenced the rest of preschool over 125 years. And at the elementary level, you're starting to see more of that too as you see more choice driven situations. But generally it's project based is sort of mostly what we mean by choice or child centered at the elementary level. And what you see in Montessori, that's a little different. But actually personally, I think is sort of inspiring when you think about it, inspired when you think about it for a minute is Montessori treats all of the first through sixth grade as actually one big project. And they refer to it in a slightly culty way as cosmic education. And the goal, the project is for a child to understand the world around them and to find their path through it.

What, like, what are they going to what interests them? What's going to draw them towards being an adult, which is like on the other side of this journey. And so they, this starts out in elementary, in Montessori with these five things that are called the great lessons that are like dramatized stories that the teachers tell the kids. You know, one of them is about the formation of the universe and earth and planets. One of them is about the emergence of life. One of them is about the emergence of human beings. One of the story of communication and one of the story of math. And each of these are these involved detailed stories that sort of give them a sense of like, how does this huge thing, like when I look around the world and I see mountains and streams, how do I understand it? That's story number one.

Right. And so, and then the kids are drawn into picking things to do out of the things that are triggered by that. So, you know, the kid. I'm really interested in the piece about the solar system and why the planets don't spin away and the teacher will guide them into a research activity for that. And so the projects don't like get rotated. We don't have like a monthly project like, okay, now all the kids are going to do this. Like we have a six year project and then we just keep helping the kids connect to it again and again and again.

Michael Horn

That's a really good way of saying it. And it's not something. I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but it also helps handle, again, I think a lot of the objections you hear around project-based learning when it goes amok. Right. So. All right, let's move from Montessori at a moment. So you sort of chose that as the organizing philosophy, if you will, for the Wildflower Schools. But then you have like a fairly decentralized model of educator led created schools that are spawning themselves like wildflowers a little bit across the country.

So talk us through the organizational model and some of the decisions that you made there and how that reflects the network that you now have of 72 schools.

Personalized Education vs. Standardization

Matt Kramer

Yeah, well, I, I shared at the beginning that sort of philosophy which is like, how do you, how do you think about creating an environment in which the teachers total experiences, passions, beliefs about the world, which all of that is energy fodder for the creation of a great humane educational experience. You know, I think about, when I think about big schools, of course there's a lot of great big schools, but when I think about big schools, there is a premise problem, I think, which is that if you need to get 20 or 30 or 50 or whatever teachers to teach the same program, that program can't have very much to do with the individual teachers. Right. It sort of has to be made generic to be a curriculum. And you know, God forbid, when we're talking about a curriculum that is statewide or countrywide, then you really have to sand off all the edges.

Michael Horn

A lot of lowest common denominator there.

Matt Kramer

Right. And if you believe as I do that actually the stuff that makes a teacher unique is actually the most exciting stuff. Right. It's the thing like when you think about your favorite teacher in your life. Usually it's the idiosyncrasies about that person that are the memorable pieces. And so, for me, it's the entrepreneurial spirit of the teachers, the space in which that can come out that's sort of the essential idea. And in a lot of ways, it connects to the theory for kids. Right.

Like, the theory for kids is that there's something good in them and we create the right environment to help it develop and emerge. And, you know, back in the day, when Maria was doing her work, that that journey sort of ended at around 24 years old. You know, neuroplasticity for adults was not a thing 100 years ago. She sort of thought you were a fully formed adult, and then you were like that way for the rest of your life. But we now know that that is not the case. Right. We now actually have learned quite a bit about how people continue to develop. They continue to become things, become new things over the course of their life.

And teachers, in that sense, are actually a lot like kids. They're in a process of becoming, too. They have things that are inside of them that you can't reject and think you're going to turn them into something they're not. They also have the capacity to adapt. And so that really is like the idea in Wildflower is like, how do you create a Montessori for adults space where this is a prepared environment for people. Montessorians, who want to create schools that reflect everything they've learned and everything they believe and everything they are as full participants

So that's really the idea. And. And what we do, you know, in the process of starting schools are what we say to people is, on the one hand, this all the schools in the Wildflower network are going to be authentic Montessori schools. So your school that you're going to create is going to be that. And on the other hand, that does not say everything about what your school is going to be like. Montessori is sort of like one dimension of the total, total experience of being in the school. And so you see these other things that are the teachers, like life lessons, life experiences that show up. I'll just, you know, a few examples of them. You know, you and I were talking earlier about a school in Boston, Roxbury.

Yeah. Before we hit record. Yeah, Roxbury Roots. Yeah.

Matt Kramer

Yeah. And. And that is a. It's an absolutely beautiful school, and it is an authentic Montessori school. And you go in there, if you know what you're looking for, for Montessori, you're like, ah, this is Montessori done right. But also the school's founders had a vision of an Afrocentric culture in a Montessori school. And this just comes out in so many ways when you're in the program.

Intentional School Environments

Matt Kramer

From, you know, the, you know, somewhat trivial things about just like art and decoration to the vibe and the schedule and the food and the like, it all comes out and you just feel like you're in a space that is intentional, it's coherent. And so I would say cultural alignment is like one dimension that you see in schools, but there are a bunch of others. There's a school on the west coast of Puerto Rico that is actually housed in a local special education services program and has basically developed a version of Montessori that is focused on kids with neuro differences. And they, you know, and in their particular case, they take kids with a very wide variety of, sometimes very intense, different styles of learning. But because of the heritage of the teachers and the site, building a very one on one individualized program fits with the way they see the world. You know, another, another example is we have a school in Indiana called Montessori Field. And it's basically an outdoor school. It's like set into a nature preserve and they never go indoors.

And you know, and, and you look across network, there's 72 schools and there's dozens of themes and really 72 individual implementations using those themes that come up. And they just, they reflect the teacher answering the question of what is it that a school that includes all of me in it, what is it that a school like that could do that would be wonderful for children, wonderful for families, wonderful for community? Not like, what is the generic answer to that question then? How do I get myself to do the generic ideal, the platonic school concept. It's like the one with me in it. What's that one look like?

Michael Horn

Yeah, and there's a real color to your point. Right? It's not Montessori frozen in time either. Right. There's some evolution there. There's bringing you. It's. But it's still distinctly Montessoril every school that you go into are these.

So each of these are educator owned, is that correct? Or like what's the structure?

Matt Kramer

The schools themselves are non profits. Okay. And Wildflower, the whole is a nonprofit as well, but they're sort of tiny little nonprofits, like one or two rooms, 20 to 50 kids, two to four teachers, is sort of the typical size. Each one's a nonprofit, and the teachers are the co executive directors and the actual leaders with kids every day. And that's sort of one of the core implementation thoughts about, like, what does it look like to create environments in which the teachers can do this? It's, you know, we don't have a lot of rules. We put a lot of authority in the hands of the teachers.

But one of the rules is the people who make the decisions for the school and the people who spend all day with the kids have to be the same people.

Michael Horn

Okay.

Matt Kramer

And the reason why is we don't think. We think there's something massive that gets lost in translation when the expertise of a teacher has to get packaged up and turned into something for a principal to make use of, or the wisdom that a principal's acquired, making hard choices has to get, like, retranslated back to a teacher, and they have to understand and embrace that experience. We just think that translation is too complicated. You need it to happen inside the head of a single person so that the teacher can, you know, I think, you know, we've all spent a lot of time in schools. You know, like, for example, one of the, one of the big challenges in school is the fight over class sizes. And in every school I've ever been in, there are economic pressures that lead the principal to want a few more kids. And there's other factors that lead the teacher to want a few less kids.

And that tug of war is like a permanent feature of school life. And in Wildflower schools, it's not. And it's not because those two forces don't exist. The same forces exist, but the teacher's got both of them inside of them. And so they're thinking, what are the pros in the context of my program of having a few more kids in the classroom, what does that do for me and the kids? And what would I do with the money and how do I feel about all that, and what are the downsides of that? And let me weigh it all and decide what I think is best. And there's no communication problem. It's just like, you know, it's the parts of me. And they get to sort it out and figure out what to do.

Michael Horn

It's really cool because it's a personal trade off. Then let me ask you, so the core organization, if you will, the spine, the wildflower schools that you run, what's the role of that within the network? What's the relationship between these small microschool that have spawned out across the country. What role does each play?

Matt Kramer

So we think of ourselves sort of as a membership organization that the schools join and are part of. Our particular role. I guess there's probably a few things that we do for the network as a whole. One of them is we support the process of new people entering the community and starting schools. And so we have this thing, it's called the school startup journey. And it's basically, you know, again, it's like a Montessori prepared environment for adults. It's basically like a Montessori space for creating space, not physical space, but like space for creating a school. It's sort of structured. And, you know, we have.

We walk people through it. There's, you know, they don't have to do it in exactly the order that it's laid out. You can move the pieces around and do it the way that strikes you as right. But it's a structured way of figuring out what your school is going to be. And it has two points in it where you get advice from people who have already been through this, starting Wildflower schools, once, sort of at the end of your visioning work and again at the end of your planning work. And the teachers are, you know, they're sort of designing their program, and then they stop, they pull back, and they.

And they share with this panel of folks what they're up to. And the panel folks gives them advice. They don't have to take the advice, but they do, because these are wise people who've been through this. And, you know, unless it's somehow the panel doesn't appreciate something really important to the teacher, in which case they don't take the advice, but they incorporate what they feel they should, they revise their thinking, and they eventually turns into a school. That whole process, the tools, the support, the advice process that are. We support all that. We help them get access to financial resources and technical experience, et cetera.

You know, mostly we know things like how do you create a school in this community? And what are the rules? And all that stuff. And so we help them with all that. We help them by providing it once the school's up and running, we provide an ongoing suite of supports, tools to be helpful to them. And it's, on that one, I would say it's a fine line we're walking because there are things. None of this happens in a vacuum. And our American context teachers have largely heard the message that their work is not very important and that they should mostly follow the orders that they're given.

Empowering Teachers with Budget Management

Matt Kramer

And teachers come to us acculturated by that set of messages. And so one example of a thing that we sort of do in a way that I think sometimes strikes people as funny is if you ask the Wildflower teachers, do you want to have control over the finances of your school or would you prefer if Wildflower would actually run the back office for you? The wide majority of them would say, we'd prefer if Wildflower run the back office for us and we don't do it. And the reason why we don't do it is we have concluded that there are subtle lessons you learn from doing your, from managing your budget, about trade offs, about how much money you can invest in things, about which programmatic things should be considered reasonable to try out, and not reasonable, try out this subtle stuff you pick up about that from owning your own budget that you just cannot get another way. And so rather than create the back office that sort of everyone kind of wishes we would do, instead we create a bunch of tools that make it possible for people, most of whom have never run a small business, most of whom are not administrators by background,

Michael Horn

And won't necessarily want to, to your point.

Matt Kramer

Yeah, right, but, but who are going to need the lessons learned. And the, and the power that comes from understanding something essential is like what the money is for and how you use it. We create tools to make that possible. And then the last thing we do is we, I would say we sort of hold together the fabric of the network, right? In a decentralized environment, people are relying on other people to do certain things that align with the community's values and standards and the brand that we share, things like that. And so, you know, we basically create the environment to like make sure that that's true. We get people together, we gather them all in person so that they can learn from each other and things like that. So those are the sort of main roles that we provide. And you know, if we do a good job of it, we are both making it easier for them and also not, not changing the fundamental feeling that a teacher has.

You know, I use this as sort of my personal test of whether we're doing it right is if a teacher has a thought in the afternoon about something that could be done better and they go home and sleep on it, can they implement it in the morning? If the answer to that is no, if there's a staff meeting required or approvals required, we've done something wrong. Right? The cycle is supposed to be observe, learn something, sleep on it, implement the next morning. And as long as that stays true, stays the case, then we're doing what we're supposed to be doing in terms of the facilitation of the network.

Michael Horn

Very cool. I have like a million questions based on things that you've said that I want to ask, but I want to keep it to some reasonable time. So I'll do maybe a little bit of a lightning round and then maybe a couple other probing questions and then we'll wrap. But on so, you know, you're 10 years old, right. Talk to us about the state of Wildflower if you will. What's been the impact? Where's the growth? Yeah, let's start there.

Matt Kramer

We've got 72 schools now, up from one a decade ago. There are a growing number of them that are operating as like micro charters.

Michael Horn

Do not just micro, private, like microschools that are private?

Matt Kramer

Yes. The original ones were pre K and they sort of made themselves accessible to low income families. We serve a diverse group of families in all of our schools, made themselves available to families who couldn't afford to pay preschool tuition by the use of child care subsidy programs, which are different in every locality in America, but you know, follow some similar patterns. And then we created K through 12 schools or you know, first through third, third through fourth through sixth grade schools and those can't access child care subsidies. And so we needed a system that would allow those to be intentionally diverse too. And so we created an idea of how you could run tiny, tiny charters. And we now have five charters in Minnesota, New York, D.C. and a couple in Colorado.

We just got approved actually for our first charter in Ohio and we have eight other charters that are in development in other places in the country. And then this was less true 10 years ago, but it is increasingly true now. More and more states have ESAs or vouchers or some other school choice type program. And a lot of our schools at the elementary and secondary level use those programs. And so, you know, back to your question of like, where's the growth? I think that, I think there has been real energy. The pandemic was a factor in this, but post pandemic I think has continued to show the secular trend here. There's been real energy both from families of wanting to do something that is more customized and more adaptive to their own kid. And there's been more teachers who have sort of seen the, oh, this is really, it's hard to be myself in these big systems and I would like to try something where I can bring more of myself.

Empowering Passionate Teacher Leaders

Matt Kramer

And I think that pattern has been you know, that pattern is a secular one and we are seeing energy behind it. And, and the schools sort of pop up everywhere, geographically, I guess, is the last thing to say. You know, at one point we put energy into whether we would like grow in specific locations. And what we've learned over time is the secret sauce of this is the teacher leaders. And so when somebody comes to us and they have a vision for a school that they want to create that reflects their learnings about the world and a community that they've lived in, that they want to create it in, and they're like, they've got passion to do this. It doesn't matter where they are. We should help those people. And so that's where we see the growth.

Michael Horn

It's interesting because I think a lot of people tell the story through the parent, student demand side. But you're right, educators are demanding this as well. And it's been through this conversation. Right. The student journey and the educator journey come together in these schools. It seems one of the big hypotheses that you had when you started, and I'll try to get this right, was that the ed tech world had misfired by trying to create student facing tools, and that the most powerful place technology could actually be an aid was as a, basically a boost to teachers to better observe students and understand what they needed when they needed it and so forth. Did I get that summary right?

Matt Kramer

I'll add one edit to it.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Okay. Make the edit first.

Matt Kramer

Yeah. Which is, I think to me that the core thought for edtech is that the tech should follow the curriculum, the pedagogy. So if your idea is you're creating a tool that is basically a math facts drill tool, a child facing iPad app is a perfectly good way to replace the old paper and pencil drill tests that we did when I was a kid. Like, you know, even in Montessori classrooms, we had a stopwatch and a worksheet filled with little one digit addition problems and you see how many of them you could do in a minute. Right. An iPad's a great replacement for that pedagogical thought.

Michael Horn

Right.

Matt Kramer

But Montessori's pedagogical thought is about children's choice in an expanded environment. And when you put an iPad in front of them, it narrows the whole world down to that little experience. You can't have the expansive world of choice that way. And I think technology offers us things that we can do that reflect that more open, expansive, real way of engaging with the world, technology can help that too. But it's a different kind of technology.

Michael Horn

Well, so it's interesting, right, when you say that, because the argument I've made actually is Montessori has tons of technology. It's just not digital technology. And so your example, the iPad there makes a lot of sense. Right. It's actually one more tool in a suite of bead cabinets and all sorts of things. Right. That students can use to learn whatever, you know, they're struck by or what's on their plan or whatever at the moment.

So. But you were talking about building technology specifically to aid teachers, I think, in the observation work. What have you learned about that? Where is that work at the moment?

Matt Kramer

Yeah, I mean, it sort of emerged out of this thought at the beginning. Montessori teachers are trained to observe the children carefully and they have this whole note taking, observation system where they make note of what the kids are doing. And it's sort of the data that that leads to, the equivalent of lesson planning of Montessori is like, what do the kids do? How engaged are they in it? What things seem to draw them in and what things seem to pull them out? And like, you make notes on this. But if you talk, Montessorians all learn that process in Montessori training school. And then if you talk to the Montessorians and if they trust you, they will tell you that it is an overwhelming task to try to keep track of what all the kids are doing any fraction of the time. And so you have to make massive approximations of things. And the more you are making approximations of these things, the more it is an intuitive data set rather than observational data set.

Data-Driven Montessori Teaching Tech

Matt Kramer

The less Montessori is a data driven pedagogy. And the data drivenness, you know, that goes straight back to Maria. It's like core to the case. And so what we said is, well, what if we could teach computer vision to look for and make note of all the things that the Montessori teachers are supposed to be looking for? And so this was, you know, this was 10 years ago we set out to do this. A lot of the technology has matured substantially since then. But at the time we were, you know, basically saying, can you teach a computer to recognize when a kid sat down with a piece of work and how long they worked on it and how concentrated was that work, and then when did they put it away and those sorts of things and then produce it all for the teacher so they could have a robust data set on which to do again their Montessori equivalent of lesson planning. Of which things am I going to introduce to who, which day next week? And you know, who do I need to reconnect to something because they seem like they're bouncing off of the material as opposed to getting engaged in it. And so we built this, we built a prototype of it.

We piloted it in five of our schools. It's really quite amazing I think in that way it's a proof of concept for this different thought about technology of if you have a pedagogical model that involves the children having broad freedoms in the real world space, can you still use technology to capture something really important about it? And the answer to that is yes, you can. It has been very challenging to figure out how to fund or I'm going to use a dirty word here, commercialize this technology. I mean, it's nonprofit for us, but still the same sort of general phenomenon. And because there's a lot of R and D work in getting things like this to work, it involves like custom hardware, you know, in these pilots you have like these little ultra wideband sensors that are tucked into the tongues of the kids shoes to keep track of where they are and what they're interacting with. And so, you know, we did all this sort of thing and, and it's sort of complicated. You got to get over some threshold before it's useful enough that anyone wants to try it. Like they don't want to try, you know.

Matt Kramer

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you got to do that. But it's sort of not the normal way that ed tech develops for the most part. For the most part, the edtech models like create a, you know, minimum viable web front end that does something and show that the kids are interested in it and then you upgrade, upgrade, etc. You know, it's not a high R and D field in part because it's not a field with big home runs generally like the, the net, you know, there's no equivalent to like Uber in edtech. And so, so, you know, we just found it's really hard to figure out how to do it.

And so we recently actually paused the project. And you know, I actually, I'm a real believer in it. So I hope someday we find a way to breathe new energy into it because I really do think the future of educational classrooms at the preschool and lower elementary level does lead you down that path. It leads you to think like actually we don't want the kids 100% engaged in computers. Their brains are not ready for the abstraction from reality that that type of environment creates. But we do want to know what they're doing and we do want to be able to be data driven, responsive. Not just by, you know, giving them a test every now and then, and then, you know, presenting new material based on what they do and don't answer on the test. And I think that, I think the world is going to want responsive, smart classroom designs that enable that.

Matt Kramer

But I think we just are not quite there yet.

Michael Horn

No. Super interesting for those listening. If you want to help on this, this is a good way to get engaged. Shameless plug. But it's also interesting because I think a lot of the tech first first microschool networks that have also popped up over the last 10, 15 years, a lot of them have come back to the same observation about younger kids as well, that a more Montessori physical environment makes a lot of sense developmentally. And then as kids get older, more and more of the work or certainly sort of learning the core knowledge or skills can be done online and then right the, the abstraction becomes more possible as you age up. Let me ask, do you have time for two more questions if we keep geeking out? Okay, so this may be a strange question, but you're like 10 years of students served.

Matt Kramer

Yeah.

Michael Horn

How do you think about outcomes and what you've done for those students? Like how do you all think about that as a network and what, you know, as impact from the student side. And I say strange question just because like it's not a test that shows you this or things like that. But what do you all look at?

Matt Kramer

Well, it's a really good question. For most of Wildflowers history, the overwhelming majority of the kids we served were preschool and kindergarten age kids where there are some standardized tests out there. But I think they are particularly weak, especially for when we're talking about three year old kids where like the basic brain structures that we refer to as intelligence in older kids and adults, those are actually not settled in 3 year olds yet. Like they have not formed yet. You can't measure them until they exist. And so a lot of our history we actually use assessments in especially as the kids get older, both ones that other schools are used to. I mean especially for the kids above third grade they're taking state tests if they're in either a charter or a voucher state where they require tests.

But even in the, you know, kindergarten, first, second grades, we're using things like NWEA. But we also Use other measures like Minnesota Executive Function Scale as a test of, you know, basically kids ability to manage their own thoughts and choices. So we've tried a bunch of things. I would say my comment on assessments is I sadly think we're not there yet. I think the thing that we really want and I, somebody recently told me that there is a new thing that Stanford's been working on that actually might be really good in this one. What we want is a tool that can be used for an assessment of a kid's learning on early literacy and early math where when you get the results back, as a teacher, it tells you what you need to know to think about that kid's education. It's sort of the same standard that you would ask for if you thought about sending a kid for a special ed related review. Like we're going to have this kid evaluated for ADHD and you bring a professional in and they would observe, they would write a bunch of notes down, that observation, the output of that observation is the thing you want to try to figure out what to do next. That has to me that is the standard for assessments of academic things. It has to produce the guidance to the teacher about what comes next. And I don't think we meet that standard most of the time. I think the sampling methodologies lead you to be like, oh well, it's more accurate at the level of a whole class that it is at the level of an individual kid. The level of individual kid. It often tells you the things you feel like you already know. To me that's unacceptable.

And we can't, we're not going to get assessment data that we feel good about using in the Broadway set of ways you could use assessment data until we clear that threshold. So I would say for most of Wildflower's life when we're talking about the really young kids, we have not cleared that threshold. And so we've been mostly like on a journey to figure out how to do it rather than to be really excited about it. That said, you know, we do use NWEA results. We just saw the ones for our New York charter come in. They were really strong, you know, so they're fine, but they don't, they don't feel, it doesn't feel like a good measure what we do in the absence of that, and this is a controversial thing I would say what we do in the absence of that is we put a lot of faith in parents to understand whether things are good for their kids. And we ask them what they think of the kids' experience and we ask them whether they would recommend it to a friend.

And we put a lot of trust in their ability to say what is in their interest and in the interest of their kids. Because in the absence of having a more reliable, objective measure of things, we think they're the people who know best. And you know, we asked the net promoter question and the net promoter scores for Wildflower families are in the 80s. And I think that,

Michael Horn

And for those that don't know, that's really, really high.

Matt Kramer

But yeah, it's about as high as you can get in terms of their enthusiasm about the schools. And it reflects the fact that the school experience for kids is really bespoke. Right. Like kids do not have the same experience when they come to Wildflower. The beauty of a 20 kid school is the teachers can actually think with the parents, with the kid. What does this kid need for this to be the experience that will help them become who they're meant to be and deliver that. And turns out that's mostly what families want. They want an educational experience that reflects who their kid is and what they want.

And they want somebody who loves their kid and takes care of them. And in our environments we can do both those things.

Michael Horn

All right, last question. You're 10 years old now, still growing, you know, several school openings a year, as you said, starting to do more elementary school, as charter and ESA have become more and more viable, on top of the three through six age three through six that you were doing 10 years from now, where do you think you all will be?

Matt Kramer

Well, yeah, I think it's a great question. I don't know the answer to it. We've been growing at around 20% a year for the last few years. So last year we, you know, the school year right now, 13 new schools. We're thinking this coming fall, maybe 15 to 20 new schools. And you know, like a lot of sort of network type designs, it sort of grows in that like proportional way. And so, you know, if we can do our part, right, if we can do the part that's about making sure we have the resources available to make startup grants and startup loans to schools, making sure that the tools get better, making sure that we're continuing to put the invitation out into the world to educators that this is something that they could think about doing and being helpful, my anticipation is that we will just keep on growing at the sort of clip and you know, as you do compound 20 a year over a period of time, it starts to get to be a big number.

You know, when I think about, like, how many Wildflower schools could there be in America? Like, how many kids. Would it make sense to have an environment like this available? I mean, listen, kids need different stuff. I'm not proposing that we have a Wildflower school for every kid, But I would not be surprised if Maybe this is 20 years, not 10 years, but like, I would not be surprised if there were tens of thousands of schools like this, you know, and it may not eventually all be Wildflower. At the moment, there aren't a lot of networks of decentralized microschool concepts growing very quickly. There's sort of only a few of us. But I think there's something powerful in the idea of really small schools, especially for the younger age kids and, you know, some degree for the older age kids too, that, you know, was once the way of things in America. We let it go for reasons that I think, looking back on, it turned out not to be persuasive.

They were persuasive at the time, but. And I think I don't see any reason why things won't migrate back in that direction. So that's, that's what I think our job is, is to create a set of tools in an environment in which if the, if, if it is meant to be, that there will be tens of thousands of these, our job is to make it possible.

Michael Horn

He's Matt Kramer, CEO of Wildflower Schools. Check it out online. Wildflowerschools.org Congratulations on 10 years. Thank you personally for the time you and many of your team members have spent with me teaching me, but also for supporting my own family and just really appreciate it. And for all you tuning in, Check it out, learn more. And we'll be back next time on the Future of Education.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Tyler Thigpen wears a lot of hats. He’s the co-founder and head of The Forest School: An Acton Academy in south metro Atlanta; co-founder and head of the Institute for Self-Directed Learning; an instructor and academic director at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education; and the coauthor of a new book, The Playbook for Self Directed Learning, which provides strategies for transforming traditional schools into learner-centered environments. Tyler joined me to talk about innovative educational models that emphasize self-directed learning. We discussed everything from what is self-directed learning to the nature of his school and from the general philosophy underpinning Acton Academy more generally and his insights into how traditional, existing schools can take his advice to create more self-directed learners. We also talked about why high schoolers might be interested in microschools in this day and age—including why his kids have been. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on our conversation. Leave us a comment.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through how we get there today, I'm delighted that we have a very special guest. His name is Tyler Thigpen. He is known as the head of schools at the Forest School and Acton Academy in Fayetteville, Georgia. We'll hear more about that shortly.

He's also the co founder, executive director at the Self Directed or excuse me, Institute for Self Directed Learning. Going to hear more about that as well. He guest lectures occasionally at Harvard University. I see him in my neighborhood every once in a while. He's also the academic director at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. So you wear a lot of hats, Tyler, welcome.

Good to see you. Thanks for being here.

Tyler Thigpen

Thank you, Michael. Delighted to be here. Happy to have the conversation and yeah. Wearing hats as you. As you do. As well, as we do.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Well, as it is. Right. But you also are the author of, a coauthor I should say, of a brand new book, the Playbook for Self Directed Learning. A Leader's Guide to School Transformation and Student Agency. It's out from Routledge. It's on Amazon.

Check it out. We'll drop a link into the show notes and we're going to talk about that as well. I have one caveat. I've bought the book. I own it on my Kindle. I have not yet read it. I'm behind. So you're going to teach me a little bit as we go.

But where I want to start with you, actually Tyler, is with the Forest School and, and Acton Academy because I'll just say, like when I first heard about the Forest School and Acton Academy, I was like, this is the coolest mashup I have ever heard of in my entire life.

It's like outdoors, which I'm a strong believer in getting out into nature and then the personalization and aspects of owning your own learning that Acton Academy is known for. And for those that don't know, Acton Academy is a network loosely held, I guess, of microschools. Several hundred around the world at this point, use technology to help learners sort of follow the hero's journey as they progress through each year. But I want to hear it from you, like, what is this school all about? I have been dying to get down there. I have not seen it in person. I want to know how you blend technology and personalization of an Acton school and forest school, like that sounds magical and maybe mythical.

Tyler Thigpen

I love that. My answer may surprise you, actually. So what I really love about the forest schools around the world, and there are a subset of folks, families, caregivers, educators, you know, who've built and create these schools. You know, the love and engagement with the outdoors. A lot of, you know, very hands on, project based, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary stuff that, you know, kids are just engaged. I mean, a lot of forest schools, kids are outside, the vast majority, you know, of the time.

Michael Horn

Yeah, it's amazing to watch.

Tyler Thigpen

Incredible. The reason we, and we have, we share a lot of commonality with those schools. So, you know, being outside, in fact, our learners designed our school and they did an architecture quest like four or five years ago and it got built, we moved. We've been in a year and a month. It's incredible. And it includes massively large windows, which were very expensive. It includes a courtyard around which the school sits. This was all choices of the kids.

And they're spending a massive chunk of their time outside every day and learning in nature. And then we exist in a really interesting town where we have connectivity to walking trails and a forest. We're right next to the forest, but we're actually not a forest school. We founded in a town that was called Pinewood Forest and it was right next to the largest movie studios in the United States, Pinewood Studios. It's now called Trilith, the largest movie studio in the world. And by that point we had already had the name for school. So we didn't change our name to be Trilith, but we are in this really interesting place that is kind of a hub for creators, makers and storytellers. So the mythical component, the mysterious component, is definitely there because of being in the ecosystem of innovation and storytelling.

Interestingly, US Soccer just moved its headquarters five minutes down the road from us. So that's providing a really fascinating sports and competition component as well. But yeah, if you were to mesh up the storytelling, the love of outdoors, definitely the transdisciplinary projects and interdisciplinary, the choice, the hands on learning, that is very much our vibe and very much in line with the Acton Academy model where kids, the goal is that each person who enters our doors will find a calling that will change the world. And similar to forest schools, we have guides, you know, rather than teachers, and there's no homework. And we have studios instead of classrooms. And you can go at your own pace. And it's mixed ages. And so in that way it really is kind of mythical and magical.

Learner-Driven Environment

Tyler Thigpen

And honestly when folks visit us, Michael and I do hope you come. When folks visit, one of the most frequent comments we hear and I feel it on a day to day basis is they feel like I can breathe here. You know, it's not a sort of super rigid high environment. There's a lot of learning to live together, going on a lot of exploratory play, a lot of passion projects. And because it's self paced and mastery based, you know, it's very learner driven. So it's not top down where you, where the kids feel like they're on edge, just waiting on the, you know, the adults to tell them what to do. So it's a cool vibe. You know, nothing's perfect but it, but it's, it's really, it's really beautiful and it's a labor of love for me because my kids have been there.

I've got four kids, my oldest daughters aged out. My three boys are still there, one of them is a senior. So you know I get to hug their necks when I go on campus.

Michael Horn

So it goes all the way through high school. Give us the sort of the tale of the tape, you mentioned U.S. soccer is nearby so give us the stats if you will for the school. When, when was it founded, how many students, how many guides? You know, sort of the picture of what, of what we're talking about.

Tyler Thigpen

Yep. So the Forest School and Acton Academy founded in 2018 with 31 learners, today and that was grades roughly 2 through 8 and today we are 162 learners. We are at capacity that's pre K3 through grade 12. And so we've graduated a number of alumni know out into now the marketplace as well as colleges and universities. And it's diverse by design so we're trying to maximize economic, racial, age, gender, religion, school background and learning differences, diversity. We want to show that self directed learning works for all kids and staff. We have about 16 full time staff there and then we during COVID launched the Foreste school online which has kids from three out of four US time zones.

Kenya, Uganda, Costa Rica, China, Mexico. My head of schools in Thailand, that's about 50 learners and it's middle and high school and it's the most geographically diverse school I've ever been a part of. It is super cool to have the learners empathize with one another and the cultures and the different value systems and challenges and opportunities that they're all navigating so those are our two schools. And then like you said, we have the institute and that's sort of our version of scale, to be honest. You know, a lot of leaders in our space, when they think about scale, they think about more schools and more kids. But for us, we think about research, we think about leadership training, educator training, we think about sector change initiatives and consulting, you know, to really push against the ocean and help move the sector more towards, you know, learner student agency.

Michael Horn

Very cool. Okay, let me ask this question then. How did you choose to be an Acton school when you all started up? How was that choice made?

Tyler Thigpen

Yeah, we. It's interesting. My background is actually a traditional district. I taught at Georgia's largest public high school for a number of years and was a leader there. I co-founded a charter school that is nature focused. It was built off the idea of. Do you ever read Richard Lou's Last Child in the Woods?

Michael Horn

Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah.

Tyler Thigpen

Founded off that idea, you know, so, I mean, that really should have been called a forest school as well. But it's Chattahoochee Hill Charter school, a great K8 environment in South Atlanta that's still thriving today. And then I worked at a few independent schools, Mount Vernon in north Atlanta, and then the Forest School. But when we were collaborating, really, Michael the, with the leaders of a new development, you know, down here in the great state of Georgia, we still got a lot of space and some, you know, developments that are happening. And so we really build a trust building relationship with some leaders here. And they really wanted a school that would fit the neighborhood. And so I started just pro bono consulting with them to help them think through options, you know, district options, charter charter options, independent school options.

Choosing Educational Models for Kids

Tyler Thigpen

I just so happen to have children that I was looking for a high school for. And so the stars kind of aligned and we, you know, I was working at Transcend, a national nonprofit at the time and was familiar with a lot of different options and models, you know, public and private, to consider. And so I just brought all the models to the table with this group and, you know, they're not steeped in education. So they asked me what's my opinion. You know, the district option was great. We have a great relationship with the district here, but it's just going to take a long time. And they weren't really open to, you know, a new version of that in the ecosystem. Charter, you know, the charter constraints I'm very familiar with, we just didn't feel that we'd be able to be as innovative as we wanted to be.

And so we went with independent because of nimbleness and because we were going to have a public purpose and be a nonprofit. We thought that was a good speed and could be appropriately innovative for the kind of people we wanted to attract to the neighborhood. And we went with Acton. When I heard Jeff and Laura Sandifer, the founders, say on their video, we believe that every child is a genius and can change the world. I was like, I think that too. I wonder what their school model is like. And so I did a deep dive. And they're just lovely, people in the network are awesome people and a lot of parent entrepreneurs who have skin in the game with kids in their schools.

And, you know, early on, Jeff and Laura said, they said, you know, we feel like we figured out about 15% of this learning model and we feel like the founders and the network are going to figure out the other 85%. And I really took them seriously. And I was like, this is a place to, you know, join as well as play. And so I pitched that to the town developers and showed them some of the videos and talked about my vision for it and, and they, they cut a check, you know, for our founding funders.

Michael Horn

Amazing.

Tyler Thigpen

That first morning.

High School Microschool Challenges

Michael Horn

Amazing, amazing. A few different directions I want to go. But let me start with this: high school. Because when a lot of folks talk about the micro school movement, broadly speaking, high schools, where a lot of people sort of, I don't know if squeamish is the right word, but like, they get, they're not sure it's going to grow into that. Here you have a high school, you know, you're sending your kids through it, right? And, and I think the criticism, you know, it probably as well as I do, right. That bundle of other things, right, that creates the high school experience, is that something kids really want to forego for a smaller environment that's more bespoke, perhaps in, in all definitions of that word. How have you thought about that? What have you learned? What have you seen in terms of high school and micro school?

Tyler Thigpen

It's a great point, Michael. And obviously a ton of your work is connected to that handshake right between the high schools and the life's next steps. And high school is my bag of donuts. That's been the vast majority of my career. I worked, I'm actually an ordained minister. I worked with high schoolers as a full time minister for years before I moved into education. And then I taught at Georgia's largest public high school, served as high school principal. And so most of the bulk of my experience was with the high school model in general.

And so it was less fearful to me. A lot of the microschool founders that I'm familiar with, they just have less connectivity to it and there's so much to learn. It feels a little bit overwhelming. Not so for me. It felt very empowering for me. And I could see in the even very innovative high schools I had led that were teacher centric before, I saw some of the gaps and flaws and ways in which to kind of really change it out. So I felt bullish about that. In terms of what's being offered.

You're right. I mean, it's a trade off. And for some families, you know, it's not worth it to move into a smaller environment. You know, for some learners, it's not worth it. They want the friends, you know, they want Friday Night Lights. I mean, American football is a social institution in our nation, especially the south in Georgia, but we're actually part of a sports league where our learners can actually participate in American football with neighboring schools.

Michael Horn

That's cool.

Tyler Thigpen

We have a team. And because we're learner led, we say to kids when they have an idea, we're like, all right, if you want to start something, you got to get a critical mass of people to help do it with you. And then you've got to have a parent volunteer who can help. And that's how we got our boys basketball program started. Last night, we literally had our parent player end of season scrimmage. I'm happy to say that we won, the parents by three.

Michael Horn

You're hanging on. Yeah.

Tyler Thigpen

My son did block me like two or three times during the night, though, so I was humbled. And then, you know, our girls volleyball team got started that way. An environmental club gets started that way. Dungeons and Dragons club gets started that way. And frankly, I'm okay with those programs even dying over time because it is learner led. I mean, if the learners lose a will for it, you know, we'll.= move on. And then the other thing I've noticed in, you know, in independent schools and working with them, and not just independent, but, but also public schools, millennial parents these days, you know, tend to, instead of, you know, paying for a larger chunk of tuition so that the school has and offers all the services they want to be able to do with their funds, what they want to be able to do.

Michael Horn

More à la carte.

Tyler Thigpen

Yeah, à la carte. Right. So the fact that we have a core tuition that covers our operations and then they can, you know, bespoke choose what they want to do. They seem to like that model, you know, at least for now. So that's kind of how we're overcoming it, you know, but that's where we're at.

Michael Horn

Very cool. What, what is the tuition, out of curiosity, because that's always been a hallmark of Acton, is affordable also.

Tyler Thigpen

It is. Right now it's 12.9, $12,900 for the year, which if you look at, I mean, Atlanta has a very competitive independent school market that is very reasonable. And, and what's more than that is that more than covers the cost of our operations. Most independent schools, you know, in the United States, year after year, have increased the rates of tuition over and above the rate of inflation. And so it's priced a lot of families out. Yeah, we have sliding scale because we're economically diverse. We make use of our state's funding program, it's a tax credit program to be able to raise funds for lower income families to provide financial aid, financial, financial based, you know, scholarships for them. And that, that really works well for us.

And we don't have, Michael, an annual fund, which, you know, it was a learning moment for me when I moved into the independent school sector at one point. You know, it's just a common thing for a lot of private schools to have an annual fund and raise money over and above tuition. We don't have one and God willing, we never will. You know, that's my commitment. So.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because an annual fund can be quite exclusionary to some of those families that cannot afford right above and beyond. So it makes sense. Let me ask this question then. You lead the Institute for Self Directed Learning, your new book, the Playbook for Self Directed Learning. Self directed learning is a big part of the Acton model as well, building learners who are self directed over time.

How do you like, tell us about how that journey is? Do you know of, of helping learners take ownership over what they, you know, what and how they learn and so forth. And where's the autonomy and where are the guardrails and scaffolds perhaps?

Tyler Thigpen

Yeah, great question. So the way we define it is self directed learning is happening when learners are. It's not alone. It's not learners sort of off in a cave.

Michael Horn

Doing this is not autodidact by yourself. Okay.

Tyler Thigpen

Totally, totally. Which would be a Legit critique, know, self directed learning. But it's, it's when they're in the context of a community of peers, you know, trained educators and caring adults. But they have a ton of choice. They get to choose the process, the content, the skills, the learning pathways, you know, the outcomes of learning. And, and they're doing it in service of finding a calling, you know, that will change the world. And, and what we've been trying to do is study that pathway.

Phases of Self-Directed Learning

Tyler Thigpen

So we do have a, through our institute, we have a peer reviewed study that our head of research, Dr. Caleb Collier, he's got a PhD in self directed learning he put out that describes four phases of the pathway of a self directed learner. The first phase, you know, very familiar to all of us, just building the desire for learning, you know, making sure that kids feel like they belong, they are safe, they're having their core needs met and then they see relevance in their learning, you know, which is not to be taken, you know, for granted by any stretch. But that's just phase one. You know, phase two is when learners start to go into advanced player mode by instead of choosing to do something easy and, you know, just amusing, they will choose to do something challenging. So instead of, you know, watching Netflix on the phone or talking with their friends, they're going to choose to do a challenging task where they have to learn and they experience the learning pit, you know, know, and, you know, hitting that brick wall and feeling that frustration. That's phase two. We call it resourcefulness. The third phase we call initiative, which is where learners are now not just starting to, you know, solve problems, they're actually finding problems, you know, and they're seeking them out and they're making their plans, they're setting goals.

They've got a structured process for, you know, setting their goals. At our school, we use smart goals and whoop goals, you know, wish outcome, obstacle path, a great, a great protocol for goal setting. And that's, so that's initiative. But then that's not it either. Phase four, and this is, you know, ninja mode, this is, it's persist, right? It's where regardless of whatever struggle comes their way, they're going to be resilient, they're going to overcome it and nothing's going to stop them from learning, you know, and so we, we care a lot about that pathway. We talk about that pathway a lot. We invite learners to consider where they are on that pathway.

We invite parents and caregivers to consider where they believe they are on that pathway, and their children. And then we think through like what are the different guide moves, educator moves, mentor moves at each one of those phases, you know, but that's the end goal. And typically Michael, I mean, as you would imagine, like when we share that pathway with education leaders across the U.S. I mean, they very much resonate. Oh yeah, that's what we're trying to do. You know, regardless of the subject, they all want to get there.

Michael Horn

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I'm curious. My observation of a lot of the Acton’s that I've been in is it's a really neat blend of self direction on the knowledge or foundational knowledge, maybe put it through the technology and then in pursuit of these bigger goals and the projects and sort of the larger arc of the year. And it does a really good job of balancing like for each kid, some of the things that maybe people would worry about. Right. Of Michael's only going to study underwater basket weaving, which doesn't have a lot of, you know, outside applicability.

What have you learned about some of those questions in the institute? And then let's start there and then maybe we can transition in the book.

Tyler Thigpen

Well, we've learned about how to systematize that for sure. I think, you know, which for us and other Acton’s and I think other competency based schools who hold similar approaches, you know, it is making a very transparent process even at the beginning of each year to say, okay, what are the skills, knowledge and competencies that the learner is going to encounter and strive to master over the course of the year? You know, the way we do it is we present that to the parents, caregivers and learners at the beginning of the year and ask for their feedback. Say, is this right? You know, and then what do we want to add, subtract or change and then what are your goals in terms of pacing for finishing that? Right. And then, and then let them, let them go. And then as guides, we hold them, hold them to that. So we keep the onus on the learner. So it's not our time frame, it's not even our goals.

We're just the coaches. Yeah, yeah, facilitators. And then, you know, you'll have some parents who care a ton about not just the foundational skills, but even bulking that up even more and making sure that the foundational skills are super strong. And then you have the opposite end. You have some parents and caregivers and learners who are like, yeah, we don't really value that. As much. And. And then we want more exploratory components or we want more electives, you know, and the cool thing about having a guide instead of a teacher is you can facilitate that instead of, you know, direct instruction, it's.

It's managing the quality of learning through multiple channels. You know, I think in the young ages, they're still heavier on direct instruction. You know, we happen to have, for ages 3, 4, 5 and 6, they're in, It's a Montessori environment.

Michael Horn

Yep.

Tyler Thigpen

Which definitely includes, you know, some direct instruction, but some letting go over time. Our second, third grade is still pretty heavy direct instruction. I think we found that to be crucial. And then when it starts to get into grades four and above, we've learned that's when you can really wean learners off of that direct instruction. But what's so important is making sure our guides and staff know different facilitation protocols to help learners, you know, reflect and self assess, and then making sure the learners grow in their own ability to assess and self assess, you know, their own learning and then their peers learning as well without that's kind of a missing.

A missing piece for all this. And they can be just sort of adrift and not, you know, not know what they're learning, what they have learned, what they need to learn,

Michael Horn

Where they're doing it, et cetera. Yeah, exactly. Makes a ton of sense. And sort of the gradual release, if you will, through the ages so that they can have more agency and choice because they know more of what's out there, also makes us, you know, makes sense, I suppose. I'm curious. Last question before we transition the book, I promise. But I'm super curious to ask you this. When I hear people talk about direct instruction, I think a lot of the mental model they have is one teacher, 30 students.

I'm telling you the information. My observation to your point is, in a Montessori classroom, direct instruction is absolutely happening. But it's like one on one, one on three, one on four. Occasionally, you know, we do certain lessons right that involve everyone, but it's. It's like a much more varied direct instruction. Let me show you.

Now you try with me here. Now you do. Right. Sort of release. And that when your students get older, as you just described, they're still sort of getting direct instruction in the sense of, like, from computers or, you know, like. Right. Like, it's not like they're not learning content or engaging with a demonstration of how to do this thing that I think is important and I'm trying to learn.

And so it sort of gives lie, I think, to one of the weird dichotomies we've constructed in education. You can tell me I'm crazy and I'm wrong, but I'm just sort of curious your take on that framing.

Tyler Thigpen

I totally agree, Michael. I think it's a great observation to me when I think about where direct instruction can go wrong is when the teacher structures it such that the teacher really is the sage on the stage, you know, and that the answer, the content, the expertise, the assessment, whatever has to come from that individual, you know,

Michael Horn

and so it's all dependent on that person now.

Tyler Thigpen

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Rather than, you know, the teacher is facilitating, you know, facilitating the learning. And I was actually with a group of superintendents, principals in Ohio last week. We were talking about this and I just sort of off the cuff mentioned the fact that, like, what I've observed and what I have done myself. So I'm confessing here as a teacher, I mean, like, we can get addicted to, you know, the dopamine rush of explaining something to a kid and them getting it and us being.

Feeling good about ourselves, you know, and be like, yes, like, thank God my.

Michael Horn

Yeah, the magic moment is cool. I help facilitate that.

Empowering Learners Through Self-Differentiation

Tyler Thigpen

Yeah. My existence is worthwhile because I explained it to them, you know, rather than letting them, you know, productively struggle and wrestle with it and. And different. Helpfully differentiate ourselves. And I am using a term there from family systems theory, self differentiation, which I think can be really helpful here, where the teacher appreciates the fact that, like, the job of the learner is to learn and that cannot be forced, you know, and to help support and create the conditions, the inspiration, the incentives, you know, the structures, the milestones, the celebrations, all that. But ultimately it's a win not because the learner got it, because we explained it, but the learner got it because they came to it on their own, because you cannot take that away from them, you know. And, you know my parents.

I love my parents. I grew up with a lot of. A lot of. A lot of commands, you know, a lot of. A lot of direct instruction. And it came from an unbelievably great place. But it wasn't until I was outside of that environment, you know, as an adult, as a professional, where I started to appreciate the benefits and the power of coming to things on your own, discovering them on your own.

You know, people are so, in my opinion, I mean there's so we all have thoughts, you know, we all have feelings, we all have a will and plans that come from a beautiful, beautiful place. And so structuring the learning such that it really appreciates those things and creates space for them to be explored and developed. It's just the way direct instruction. If it's only that, you know, it doesn't provide for a lot of the plan making that a young person be doing. It doesn't plan, it doesn't allow for a lot of the like sense making and feelings working through the feelings, you know that, that I think learner centered schools are really latching onto.

Michael Horn

Very cool. Okay, let's turn to you the book now, the Playbook for Self Directed Learning: Leaders Guide to School Transformation and Student Agency. Why did you write the book? What are you hoping comes out of it? Yeah, and I should, I should mention it's not just you. Caleb is a co author who we mentioned. Amber Bryant, Brittney Toles. It's the four of you who have come together to do this work.

Tyler Thigpen

Yeah, and that's an important point, Michael. Those are dear friends, also parents of learners at the school. Two white men, two black women who we've been working together for the last seven years and we all bring our different backgrounds to this work and you know, love our community and together have sort of tried to with our team, broadly, you know, figure out what works, what doesn't work. And we have, we have pivoted so many times, you know, and so this is our attempt at sort of capturing, you know, some of that learning here. And, and so yeah, in terms of the book itself, you know, what would be, what would be helpful to riff on?

Implementing Educational Principles in Schools

Michael Horn

Well, so I know that each chapter sort of lays out strategies, right for how to put these principles in place in a school. I guess I would love to hear, you know, is this something that can really be done in an existing school or do they need to have Tabula Rasa to create something blank slate? Like how, how do you think about that? Because that strikes me as one of the biggest questions facing the country right now is do we actually believe this will come from the emergence of a vast diverse array of new schooling types or do we think we can actually move districts and existing schools to embrace the principles you're talking about?

Tyler Thigpen

Yep, I'd love to, I'll address that last point last I think the, are you familiar with the book Teach Like a Champion from Doug?

Michael Horn

Of course. Yeah. Doug Lemov.

Tyler Thigpen

Yeah, massive you know, for the listeners, a massive, you know, power, powerful book at a moment in history in education that, that a lot of really empowered and inspired a lot of educators and, and you, you know, I've read it and had used some of the techniques and really I use the word techniques because it was, that it was a book of techniques. It was like a playbook that you could tick it off. I'm going to do this. And it was to really manage a classroom to get learners focused on a discrete standard. And I do think the techniques did an effective job of that. I think we see our book as a companion to that for a different purpose. It's techniques for learner centeredness. It's what are the techniques adults can do to create responsibly, the space for the feelings, the plans and the thoughts for learners to take hold of their own learning.

So that's why we did it. And you're asking what we hope to do with the book now. Maybe all of us will have rose colored glasses. We do think it's possible. And so we speak in the book to both public and private school leaders and educators, you know, public school leaders who are, and educators who are dealing with the constraints of a standards based environment and private school leaders who are dealing with the expectations of parents and caregivers, you know, for you know, life's next steps. Some, you know, college prep environments. And then of course there's that both of those things exist sometimes in the other sphere as well. But you know, the process that we've explored and have discovered and continue to work with districts on is we have identified sort of principles that are true about learner led classrooms and learner led schools versus teacher led classrooms and teacher led schools.

Shifting to Learner-Led Education

Tyler Thigpen

And that, that's actually the different outline of our book. And we kind of, and their examples are like in a learner led school the learners are typically doing the choosing, whereas in a teacher led school the teachers typically are choosing things and there's a whole host of things they're choosing. Another example is in a learner led school, learners are doing the assessing for the most part or they're being assessed by experts or by peers. Whereas in a teacher led school the teachers really are the ones who are doing the assessing. And so it's, it, it's a different set of spectra on, on those, along those lines. But what we've done with districts, which is more of a, it's not a let's blow up the model and start something new. It's like, let's slowly work towards this is you've gotten with teachers in public school settings, in teacher centric settings, and we've taught the principals and we've inspired them to take a lesson that they're going to do next week, you know, and say, okay, now that you know these principles and here's the lesson that you have in front of you. What's one thing you can do to make it more learner led, you know, or what's two things you can do along these spectra? And which one did you choose and why? And then share that out and they share it.

And now go try it. And they'll go try it. And you know, usually it goes really well because learners are amazing. And you know, when they're given the choice and voice and agency, they will take it. And even when they make poor choices, if the natural consequences are in place, they'll learn from that. And so teachers come back and they'll share about that experience. And of course, if they're sharing about this experience in the context of other educators, then, you know, they're sort of stealing ideas shamelessly from one another, which is great. And then, you know, teachers.

And then it's rinse and repeat, do it again. And so teachers will take another lesson and just make that a little bit more learner led. And then as they do that over the course of a year or so, really we've done partnerships for multiple years at districts. They get better and they sort of as a default, they're building their muscles at making their classrooms or their departments even more learner led, even more learner centered, where kids have even more agency. And then at some point we'll stop them and we'll ask them, okay, what are the barriers? You know, like what. What are you encountering perceived or real that is stopping you from doing more? And of course, they're incredible at naming barriers. The teachers are. And when you have leadership that's on board, leaders will listen very, very carefully to those barriers.

And then they'll get together and they'll say, all right, what can we, you know, what barriers can we completely remove? Which ones can we tweak to make it easier? And then which ones can we just. We got to keep. But we can help them navigate around. And then the leaders and teachers have that conversation. And in our experience, when, when a district does that, the ball really can move, move forward, but it's playing a long game. You know, it's having a lot of courage. You know, it's having some skills in change management, for sure. And so a real deep belief in the trajectory.

So it's not, it's not for everybody because not everybody's there yet. But our book aims to be that thing that one can take off the shelf, open up and be like, okay, this week I'm gonna do this.

Michael Horn

And so super practical, super down to earth. Maybe as we wrap up, are there places, district schools, independent schools, but existing schools that you're like, excited about, that you'd say, you know, check out this place because they're doing this one thing that's really cool and you wouldn't believe it if I didn't tell you it existed.

Tyler Thigpen

Yeah, absolutely. So we worked for years with Pike County Public schools in Georgia, Rural district. Former superintendent Mike Duncan, who's state superintendent of the year, he was there for, you know, over a decade, which that's a part of it.

Michael Horn

You know, that's right. You need continuity. So we're all swimming toward this goal. Yeah, right.

Tyler Thigpen

You know, they, they took a stance around, you know, moving their educators towards the role of a guide in a public setting, you know, unapologetically, enthusiastically. I'm thinking about there's another school, I'm touting Georgia schools while I have the opportunity.

Michael Horn

No, go for it.

Tyler Thigpen

North of Atlanta, North Hall High School has this math department led by this guy called Jason, who has got a real switched on team there. And you know, one example of how they've made it learner lead is this one teacher at high school level math decided to, at the beginning of a unit, give all the kids in that classroom all the standards for that unit and give them all the resources that they would need, both human and material and online and say, all right, you've got six weeks. I'll be here if you need me. Go. And let them prove mastery in their own way. And sure enough, they did, you know, and now he's doing it over and over. But those are the kind of, I think, examples I'd highlight. But again, what's true about those is you've got leadership that's on board and, and stay and hanging around. You know, you've got courage because there's pushback always, you know, when change happens and, and you've just got folks who have rolled up their sleeves and are committed, you know, for the long haul.

Celebrating Self-Directed Learning Guide

Michael Horn

Well, and that is a worthwhile goal. We will leave it there. But Tyler, thanks so much for coming on. Congrats on the book, the Playbook for Self Directed Learning: A leader's guide to School Transformation and Student Agency. Something worth aspiring to. Appreciate the work you're doing on the ground online at the Institute and now with this book. Thanks so much.

Tyler Thigpen

Thank you, Michael. Great chatting with you. And all the best.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Patricia Levesque, CEO of ExcelinEd, and Ben DeGrow, Senior Policy Director of Education Choice at ExcelinEd, join me to delve into the evolving landscape of educational choice. Our discussion centered on the uptick in states implementing educational savings accounts (ESAs) and the various questions surrounding their implementation, specifically academic accountability, financial safeguards, and effective program management. Levesque and DeGrow discussed the need for a balance between broad policy frameworks and practical regulations. I keep learning a lot from these conversations around this fast-growing space of choice and personalization—and hope you all do as well.

Michael Horn

You are joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through this pressing set of issues today, I'm incredibly excited. We have people I've worked with for many years, looked up to for many years, who are going to lend a lot of insight on the topic of educational choice in particular, but they could talk about so much more. So first, Patricia Levesque, the CEO of ExcelinEd..

Patricia, great to see you. Thanks for joining.

Patricia Levesque

Thanks for having us.

Michael Horn

And then Ben DeGrow, the senior policy director of Education Choice at ExcelinEd., Ben, good to see you as well.

Ben DeGrow

Thanks. Great to be with you.

Michael Horn

I've been looking forward to this conversation since y'all reached out on the topic of educational choice and the contours of that conversation and the really interesting debates that are going on right now around implementation as so many states dive into this world in a much more meaningful way over the last several years. And before we get into those conversations, maybe let's just like zoom out, high level. Patricia, let's start with you. And then, Ben, jump in. Look, a lot of states are moving, you know, not just into school choice, educational choice. We see education savings accounts getting a lot of attention, a lot of movements toward universal choice at that.

There have been movements, I think, in Tennessee and Texas in recent weeks. There were setbacks at the polls in November. What's your current assessment if you just look high level of where we are in the world of education choice and this movement, broadly speaking, and perhaps maybe a little bit of forecasting, where you think we will be by the end of the year?

Patricia Levesque

Sure. I'll start by saying I think we are in a great position in educational choice and opportunity for families. The best that we've been in my 28 years working on this policy. Right. And Michael, me just start by saying the way you introduce this podcast, the mission of this podcast is like the mission of private school choice or educational choice. It's giving families the ability to find the best education fit for their child. So their child, because we believe kids are individuals, they're very unique, and not one system or one school is the right, best fit for every child. So empowering families with that opportunity is what we.

What we like to do with policy. And we're in the best position on that, in the country that we've been in as long as I can remember.

Michael Horn

Ben, what would you add in terms of where we are at this moment and maybe give us a sense of how many states have moved into different, you know, really embracing real choice at this point?

Ben DeGrow

Yeah, I think we're at a real major inflection point. I feel like every year we've been saying this is the year of school choice for several years and every year it just seems to be more true Than the year before.

And I mean at ExcelinEd we cover a whole gamut of choice in the public and private space. But we're just going to hone in on private education choice. We're not talking more than 30 states that are offering at least some students either a voucher scholarship or tax credit scholarship from USA and we're coming up on just over a dozen states that are offering all students, regardless of income, regardless of background, access to funds. Personally, we dive into the nuances of that. It can be, you know, how much funding is available, for how many students and so forth. But with states like Tennessee passing, in Texas, we're on the verge of having the majority of students, the United States eligible for private school choice, which is something we hardly could have imagined five years ago.

Michael Horn

All right, so with that as backdrop, lot of momentum in this direction each year sort of surpassing the previous one as you said,Ben, let's flip to implementation from the outside. I will say there are a surprising number of debates around how to put these various policies into place in the states. Let's maybe start with accountability. Patricia, you wrote what I think remains the most nuanced and thoughtful take about accountability. I use it all the time on the stump with this continuum between sort of district run public schools to public charters to full on educational choice options and how we think about accountability and transparency mechanisms in each. Just take us through your logic on that and how you think about the accountability conversation right now.

Academic Accountability vs. School Autonomy

Patricia Levesque

Sure. And let me put a finer point and say we're really talking about the academic accountability, right? Not fiscal or health, safety, general welfare, things like that. And so we get asked often, how can Excelined have a position where students in the public school system should have to take a state test and there should be accountability or grading of public schools. Yet in private school choice or education choice, we advocate a more flexible norm referenced assessment model. And the answer to that is that there is a continuum of accountability versus autonomy. And so if you think about the ends of the spectrum, you have at one end a home education parent using their own funds to teach their own child. Right. And we would say there should be a very, very light touch of the state in that interaction between that parent and that child.

From an academic accountability standpoint, the other end of the continuum you have the traditional public school system, which is the default system. It's the compulsory system. It's the system that is federal, state and local taxpayer funded. It is a system that has taxing authority and, and sovereign immunity protections. Right. It is the big muscular system that the state needs to ensure learning is going on. Right. That kids are learning how to read and do math because the state or another government entity is compelling you to place your child in that system and telling you which school to go to.

Florida Scholarship Program's Academic Balance

Patricia Levesque

Right. And so there's a vested interest in the state ensuring there's some academic accountability in the system. If you move along the spectrum to publicly funded private school choice, and I'd put that right about in the middle of the system, what is the right balance between academic accountability, transparency and autonomy of the school? And so I would point your listeners to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program. It is the program that has been in place the longest of all the statewide school, private school choice programs has served more than a million students and for 23 years only served low income students. So you have the largest, longest running program targeted for at risk kids that has had 13 years of solid academic outcomes. So by looking at norm referenced assessments, we can see that the students in that program are learning just as well or better than in many years their low income public school peers. We saw the Urban Institute do one of the longest, largest studies of 85,000 matched kids and saw incredible outcomes.

Post high school college going rates, college completion rates. So if the largest, longest running program has good outcomes, what does that program doing? How do we know if that program has the right balance? And I would say you look at parental participation, private school participation and outcomes which we just talked about. And if you look at the Tax Credit Scholarship program, it was always oversubscribed. There were always more parents every year that wanted to get into the program. And there was a very good balance of private school participation. So 80 plus percent of private schools in the state of Florida chose to participate in the program. That's very different than in very heavily regulated programs like the Louisiana Scholarship program where barely 30% of the private schools chose to participate. Right.

So you have strong parental participation, strong private school participation and good outcomes. Those to me give you three green check marks that that what that program is doing has a good balance. And that program is norm referenced assessment on the students you're participating with, the results reported back to the parent so they can see how their own child is doing and data reported back so the state can see how is the program doing as a whole. So we know that the taxpayer funds are being used well, and that's a really good balance.

Michael Horn

Ben, if you want to add anything there, I guess the one question I have is the reason norm reference instead of, say, criterion reference or something else? Because we really want to understand the counterfactual. Is that the reason for that? Because we want the comparison.

Testing Flexibility and Accountability Guardrails

Ben DeGrow

It definitely helps because while a lot of lawmakers want to see that direct comparison between their scholarship students and their state public school students, what a norm referenced test offers is the ability to compare with a national sample of students so we can have some credible measure. But it also allows schools to choose tests that more closely align with their curriculum. So they are actually offering, you know, genuine options and alternatives for students and inviting participation for these schools into these programs. So it is less of a deterrent than mandating the state test as the sole instrument. I would also add, when we think about accountability, the evolution from the traditional volunteer scholarship into the ESA has put an added emphasis also on the need for fiscal accountability. As we think about what kind of guardrails do you need to put in place as families have more flexibility to spend money on things beyond just private school tuition, but also an array of goods and services. And every state, as I set up an ESA program, has to think through these things. And part of the work we do in implementation and our ESA administrator network and areas like that is to help states which are already, the administrators are already very focused on making sure those guardrails are high is to help them balance that consideration with the need of families who are driving the creation of these programs, and that's probably an area we can delve into more.

Michael Horn

Well, I think that's a perfect launching point, right, because that's one of the big conversations. Maybe let's start like where these ESA programs even live and how you manage them and how you help families access the dollars and their set of choices. We see, you know, Step up for Students in Florida. We see Odyssey in other states some places the Department of Ed is trying to do this work directly. How do you all think about where these programs live and who manages them?

Ben DeGrow

It's one of the first and most important decisions to be made when crafting An ESA policy and one that gets easily overlooked, especially in the early days. State lawmakers, policymakers would think, well, we just obviously put this in the Department of Education, right, because it's an education program within our ESA administrator network, which encompasses about 20 states. And we bring these program managers in to share best practices, to share technical resources with one another, hear the same common issues and concerns that they're dealing with. We have representatives from Departments of Education, we have Departments of Treasury, we have agencies that oversee that some states do, the higher ed financing authorities. And we also have nonprofit organizations like you referenced, Step up for Students, Children's Scholarship Fund and most recently ACE Scholarships. We have over time come to see that these nonprofit agencies are probably the preferable option to run them because they're not only mission driven, they get involved in this because they believe in the power of opportunity and choice for kids and families. We also have the flexibility to adapt to the needs as these programs scale up. That includes personnel decisions about contracting out to review expenses or other things along those lines.

So flexibility, mission driven. We like to see nonprofits, but we'll work with all agencies and help them work on focusing on that student centered, customer driven approach.

Michael Horn

One of the other things that this then raises the window is right, what can you spend on how far afield, right, how wide you make the sets of choices? You talked about balancing the desires of parents with the state's concern. I imagine some of what Patricia was talking about in terms of what's the participation of various providers is also an interesting data point. And thinking about getting that balance right, what's your own take around how flexible and how much freedom you give families to spend on whatever they want, that connects to education? And then my assumption, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, is the further afield you get out from the topics that a norm reference test would measure, the less relevant those sort of external markers become. And it's more about the parent understanding. Did my child make the progress I had hoped for?

Ben DeGrow

I will say we again, we would always want to focus on making sure that we're trying as a lot of our ESA administrators that we work with, their goal is to try to get to yes and help serve parents needs and make sure that they are getting the services, the goods they need. Whether it's curriculum, whether it's tutoring, whether it's a therapy for a child with dyslexia or autism, transportation to an education program. Every state has a lot of the same allowable expenses, but every state's a little different in the nuance and what's allowable and what's not. And that starts in the statute and it comes down to the level, how it's interpreted at the agency that's administering. So lots of challenges. We would say do the best you can to get to yes, but I recognize that you need clarity for families. So if you're going to set up guardrails, and you should set up guardrails.

For example, if a child needs a laptop for educational purposes, how often should they be able to purchase a laptop? Do they really need one every year? And an agency could say, well, we'll allow one every three years, for example, to make sure that families are balancing that the vast majority of families are legitimately working to help get goods and services to their child that they need. And so really the agency has to police the boundaries of those, that small percentage of people who might want to misuse the system. But we want to make sure that all those guardrails are in place that focuses on helping families get to the yes.

Patricia Levesque

And Michael, I would add to that. I think Ben was focusing on, you know, those kind of discrete expenditures that are maybe some of them are on the periphery. I would like to point out too that what private schools are eligible is also, you know, an actual difference of opinion in some states, there are some recent states that decided, well, the way that we're going to ensure that it's a real, for real private school is the schools have to be accredited. And what that essentially does in many states is cut out half of the supply that exists in the state or even the opportunity for some of the newer types of models like micro schools to be able to participate. Whereas what you see in a state like Florida is that there is more of a checklist of. Here are the 10 things that we want to see to ensure that you are private school to participate.

Ensuring Accountability in Education Policies

Patricia Levesque

We want to see background checks on the instructional personnel and we want to see that you've gotten your fire inspection or your health inspection or your radon inspection. There's more of a list of health, safety, general welfare, financial, you know, accountability type of provisions. And we do a site inspection and then, yes, you're eligible to participate. When we work with states on policy design, before it even gets to the bill passed and you're implementing, we would encourage states to be broader in the types of entities or institutions that can participate. It'll bring a healthier marketplace into existence in your state and actually give families more opportunities and options and there's still again a balance. Right? I think you're going to hear us say that word often. How much do you open up the market? How much do you have to do you narrow the market? So there's quote accountability. I think there's a good healthy balance in all of these things.

Michael Horn

So let's actually stay with that, Patricia, because what you just raised in thinking about that balance, it suggests that maybe there's another principle as states are starting to look at this, which is, and I want to check myself here, but in the policy itself, start broad, don't over prescribe, but know that when you get into the regulation there's a good deal more work to be done. And that's where you know, figuring out where you're assigning the, you know, what, what entity is going to manage this, the guardrails you're going to put up, striking the balance. Is that how you would think about it? Is like start broad and then sort of hone in on, on the finer details as you get into the specifics of operationalizing. Or is there a better approach as states are looking at these various policies right now in your, in, in both of your view?

Patricia Levesque

I agree. Broad is better for the, especially the places and the institutions and the tutors and the therapists that you start broader so that you have a lot of opportunity out there for families. I think what we would also say is ESAs are not brand new creations anymore. Right. They've been around for a while. You have a program like the state of Florida where there's 500,000 students that have been awarded for next school year either a full ESA or what some people call micro grants. Right. It's just for transportation or just for reading tutoring or, or math tutoring.

But that's a lot of information and data over multiple years on what you know, different policy prescriptions make it easier for families to access as well as give whomever is the, you know, administering agency enough guidelines so that they know how to administer the program well and that goes to not only just what kind of schools, but what's the window for parents to apply? What is the order like it, I think states that prescribed specific time frames of this student gets eligible on this date before this next group. All of those add administrative challenges to getting a program off the ground or making it parent friendly. Right, family friendly each year as parents have to enroll or re-enroll their child.

Ben DeGrow

I would concur. I mean there's definitely always a temptation to write legislation that can become too prescriptive. But at the same time using that word balance, you do have to include some level of detail to identify the categories of things families can spend money on to demonstrate legislative intent. And once you get down to that next level, that's as Patricia was suggesting, the administrative challenges pop into place. For those of us who've worked in the field of policy for length of time, we always talk about how there's a gap between what's written on paper and what gets put into practice from the implementation. Now I don't see anywhere where that's more true than ESAs. We created programs that originally were designed to serve students with special needs or learning challenges. In Arizona and Florida, the earliest programs, really around the principle of giving families the ability to customize, recognizing that each child is unique and has individual needs.

And so trying to define exactly what families can spend money on in statute is impossible. And you do the best you can to kind of identify and categorize those things. But as you get down from statute into the program rules and then to the policy handbooks and then the actual day to day decisions as they review expenses and things, it has to be a way to find that individual child's means within clear, consistent, transparent guardrails. And that's. It's an ongoing challenge. But we're seeing states grow in this area and get, and get better at it over time.

Michael Horn

Yeah. And so I guess the principles don't sort of cut off the ability to tick and tack and get it right from the get go. Start with some models that are already out there that are pretty proven at this point. One of the pieces that's getting a lot of conversation right now is around the funding piece at the moment. There's, you know, it moves beyond special needs students to universal choice. There's been a lot of conversation about, well, it says universal choice, but a lot of these programs are not funded such that they could serve every single student in the state. Or there's a lot of double funding. Right.

Where we continue the funding flow to districts. We have a separate line item in effect around the ESAs that are getting created. How do you think, you know, a state getting into this should do it? Is there a right way to maybe baby step and then grow into this? Is that an evolution or is it get it right from the get go? How do you both think about the funding piece of this and how it should be set up?

Phased Approach to Education Funding

Ben DeGrow

There's no one perfect script or roadmap for states, but there are some good principles for states to consider as they're going down this path and, and lots of factors are going to help determine it. Even for those who want to make the opportunity available to as many students as possible as soon as possible, we recommend states, you know, step back and think about the fiscal impacts and the administrative challenges. So phasing in a program over multiple years is something several states have tried, and that usually just means phasing in the eligibility. So in year one, you are only including students up to a certain income level or students who previously attended a public school or otherwise limiting, you know, maybe the, the amount or the number of slots available. We don't want that to deter the ultimate goal, which is to create a system that's open to everyone and a system that creates a fair, equitable funding for students regardless of which path their families choose for them, even if it takes three or four years to get there. The other thing we're looking at more and more seriously is helping states think about. And some states are doing this to some degree, but most states have a lot of work to do is serving the students who bring like, low income challenges, learning challenges, and helping to fund them at a rate that's right,

Reflects that to make them more, you know, palatable, to have more options to, to access private schools. But also they may need more services along the lines of tutoring or just support navigating the system. So building that phase and plan, building an equitable system are two of the things we help states think about.

Patricia Levesque

And I would say over the long run, you need to contemplate where do you want to be 10 years from now? Right? Do you want to. I think Florida is one of the few states where the funding is built into the funding formula. So when the legislature meets, they're basically funding the public school and educational opportunities in one funding formula. And it's based on estimates of, you know, how many students are going to be in, in each of the different systems. And it's more of an automatic process where in many states it's a line item that has to be adjusted every single year that you're in a legislative session. And I think those, it's not that those are bad. I mean, I think it's wonderful that that's the way programs have been able to get off the ground. But if you really want to have a system where it's going to grow based on where parents decide and how the systems evolve, it probably needs to be more of an automatic type of formula that's Set up what Ben talked about in either system, in the public system and in your choice system, students that have higher needs, low income students or special needs students should generate more funding, whether they're going to a public school, a public charter, or taking a scholarship with them to a, to a private opportunity.

Those types of things are going to be really important to have built into your, your funding streams and how you think about having the program work.

Michael Horn

Yeah, it strikes me that it allows for scale, Right, organically as demand grows in either sector, I guess in either direction, but particularly in the choice one. It also occurs to me and Patricia, I'd love your take on this, that Florida, because of just the number of years of choice that you all have had. Like if I think back to how Florida Virtual School got started back in the 90s or early 2000s, if memory serves, it got written, I think into the state funding formula in like 03 or something like that. But it was still like a hold harmless double funding for like some number of years, I want to say. And so maybe that's like a baby step in Florida just because of the experience in years that has been able to really move to that full fledged model that you'd want to see ultimately. Thoughts on that?

Patricia Levesque

I do think started small and slow, you know, very, very small. Right. The first private school choice in the state of Florida, that was called the Opportunity Scholarship Program, only for students in failing schools. I think the first year had 42 students in it. Right. The first in Florida, special needs voucher. The first year only had two students in it because it was, you know, assigned to one county. But then the programs grew, the eligibility grew, or the region grew, or allowing a student to stay in the program if they met initial eligibility requirements.

All of those things allowed the program to grow slowly. And so what you see in Florida is a really mature ecosystem. I think for other states that are going from zero to universal in one or two years, they might have more hiccups like normal things like how do you make sure the private schools feel comfortable participating and receiving public funding? How do you communicate? How do parents find out about these programs? A lot of those things. There, there, there's going to be a lot of really heavy lifting quickly for implementation. And that's what makes, I think, the work that Ben does, having a network of mature ESA administrators and the very young new ones learning and sharing with each other. What are those best practices? What do you have in your handbook? How do you define what we sometimes refer to as gray area expenses. How do you treat them Arizona versus how do you treat them Florida? And it can really educate a new administrator as they're having to make some of these decisions quite quickly in order to get a new program off the ground.

Michael Horn

Ben, maybe just talk a little bit about that work and what it looks like on the ground. Right. And for those unfamiliar with what you're doing with those states and how they're supporting each other, just to give a view of, as Patricia just said, to rapidly, right, gGet these programs off the ground. When you know it passes in legislature and a couple months later you expect to have something up and going for families.

Ben DeGrow

Yeah, it's a venture that takes a lot of humility and cooperation because no state has really mastered this and completely figured this out. But as Patricia is suggesting, some states are more mature in the things they've learned and are able to share those lessons with others. So we work through something called the ESA Administrator Network, which ExcelinEd created back in 2020. And we're now up to 20 states participating in any, any state that's kind of overseeing a complex parent directed spending program. Whether it's a full fledged ESA where families can use their funds for private school tuition and or these other education expenses, or we have a handful of states that operate micro grants or supplemental ESAs that are smaller allotments where families can just spend on certain services. There's a lot to learn so we come together multiple times a year with the group and share our learnings and have them share formal learnings in these settings. And just a lot of conversation.

Resource Sharing for Program Implementation

Ben DeGrow

The feedback we get is all the conversations that they have with each other during the off program time is where they get a lot of value out of it. But we also try to keep in touch with them in multiple ways. And then we collect the technical resources and documents and things that it takes to get these programs off the ground. Whether it's contracts with vendors, RFPs to help secure the vendors, whether it's handbooks for parents and providers and marketing materials and half a dozen other things. We collect and share those resources with new states, especially as they're coming on board, and we try to give it to them in small doses to help them think about the next step. We also came up with an ESA implementation guide drawing on the wisdom of our some of our veteran states and leaders. And we use that as well kind of highlight the steps, all the steps you have to think about to get from we pass the legislation to now we can start a program and there's a lot to think about and a lot of lessons that we are continuously learning alongside them.

Patricia Levesque

I'll give you one specific example. I won't name the state. There's a state that had a brand new ESA and the administrator was really concerned and said we're going to need to delay the launch of the ESA because we did an open call for providers, vendors to get signed up and we, and we only had a handful of vendors signed up. We can't launch the program if we don't have vendors signed up pre approved in the system. And it was really helpful to have another state that had one year of implementation already under their belt to be able to say don't worry about getting vendors or providers pre approved. The parents will bring you the providers. Right? The parents, once they choose a school or a tutor or wherever they want, they'll make sure their provider gets into your system. So it was really reassuring to have that lived experience of that, you know, one year more mature administrator giving the new one kind of that reassurance. Don't worry about that. When you're, you're fine, you're fine.

Michael Horn

It's a great story and I love it also because it shows that, you know, we don't have to have all the answers from the top, the bottom. Right. The parents, the actual demand can, can bring us the supply if you will, over time as well. Last question, maybe as we wrap up here, there are several other areas I know we could geek out on and work through. The other one that I've heard come up in a few different ways recently is around financial safeguards and specifically like curtailing providers from unreasonably inflating their tuition. And on one side you have folks saying like, hey, and I literally just heard this anecdote about a provider in Florida actually being like, I'm raising my tuition by 7K or whatever, you know, the amount of the ESA because now I can, there's, there's public money. I'd be foolish to just leave that on the table.

And then some states that have said look, if we see a price hike like that, we're going to take action. You know, that's not okay. And others being like it should work out in the end because if you're talking about an esa, it's effectively a wallet. And so parents, you know, supply, demand can sort of take over over time. And maybe they do that in short term, but over time. Right, it should rebalance. How do you guys think about that conversation and where states ought to land, because it pertains directly to the ultimate thing around how do we get supply and really participating supply right in, in these marketplaces?

Inflation, Tuition, and Scholarships

Ben DeGrow

I'll take, I'll take the first crack at it. I think one of the lessons we take away is, well, first of all, there might always be isolated operators who will try to do that. If you look at the larger data trends, what we see in Florida, for example, is more correlation between rates of inflation and tuition than we do the advent of scholarship program or no scholarship program or universal access to scholarship programs. There's basically two effects that work and this is why we push states toward a more open, competitive model. There's, of course, the subsidy affect you talk about. As you give families more access to funds and they have more funds to put in the marketplace, it can encourage providers to raise the price. But there's also competitive effects that can offset that. So if we, if we set up a program like Florida or Arizona or Utah, New Hampshire, a lot, much of these states where families can use the funds not just on a narrow set of private schools, but a broad marketplace that includes private schools of different varieties, as well as micro schools and hybrid options and homeschooling and customized services.

The more competition you put into the market, the more it deters individual providers from trying to game the system. So there's never going to be a perfect solution. But an open approach like some of these states are doing is one way we see to really to address that problem.

Patricia Levesque

Yeah, I would agree with Ben and just say that we hear those anecdotal stories, right? There's one school here that's going to immediately raise tuition to eat up the full amount of the ESA. But the only state where we have a lot of data over many years is Florida. And so looked at 11 years worth of almost 2000 private schools and looked at their, their actual tuition increases based on the data, and we looked at the average increase each year and then looked at the prior 12 months of inflation data, and it's exactly what Ben said, is that private schools really, you can see their tuition increases are very much in line with inflation. The other thing that when we talked with private school operators in the state of Florida and asked about what's going on with tuition, this is what we're hearing from lawmakers. And they pointed out something else really interesting, which is in the state of Florida, at the same time lawmakers have been increasing educational opportunities through universal ESAs, they've also been purposefully putting billions of dollars into the public school system to create higher minimum teacher pay in the public school system. And so the private schools have been saying the only way we are, we're losing teachers to the public system because their salaries can be so much more, because taxpayers are funding, right, greater teacher salaries in the public system.

The only way we can be competitive and keep or recruit teachers is to increase tuition, because that's probably primarily how we fund teacher pay. So it's really interesting. A lot of the states that are doing ESAs for parents on one hand, are also doing increases in minimum or starting teacher pay, which distorts the market a little bit as well.

Michael Horn

It's interesting and it makes me think sort of in the higher ed world also, right. In terms of title4 federal financial aid, but those can only be spent on colleges and universities. It strikes me that the other thing that's unique about the space is it's not just a private school option, but I could be going to a micro school for two days, tutoring for two days, some menu of services, and sort of the fragmentation of that can actually really be, I would think, a downward price. And then as you said, Patricia, at the same time, sort of competing with, with the public marketplace choices for teachers in terms of where they're teaching. It's a very complicated landscape to almost overthink as a policymaker.

Right. And when you look at, even in that Florida data, even though you're looking at averages and average private school tuition increases each year, you can see also by what percent of private schools didn't raise tuition at all in a given year. Right. And so, and what is the base that their tuition is starting out from? So, a Catholic school that was only charging $3,500 a year. Right. It looks like a huge tuition increase for them to just do $1,000 increase, but it's still half of what the scholarship amount is or what the average is. I think it becomes really risky if policymakers want to put in artificial caps that could have such a different impact based on all the different range of providers and really can't take into account historical increases or what was the base that you even started from. All of those types of things will only depress the vibrancy or the ability to have a really vibrant market.

And we have to recognize that there is still a governor on all of this, and that's the parent. The parent knows how much their scholarship was awarded for. They know what the private school tuition was before the scholarships came into effect, and they're going to be pretty upset at the private school where they thought that they were only going to have, you know, the delta of what they were going to have to cover was only going to be $1,000. And now it's not. You know, there's parents actually are quite vocal on this stuff with policymakers and with their private schools because now they have the power, right, to be vocal on behalf of their child.

Michael Horn

A lot of checks and balances built in there. I think that's a good place to leave this conversation. It's been a whirlwind through a lot of issues that get a lot more complex that you all are working on on a daily basis. I know, but just really appreciate it. I think one thing I will also take away from this is not only is there not a one size fits all kid, if you will, there's not one size fits all suppliers. And so to have a one size fits all rule to treat them has some pretty big downsides. And same place on the academic accountability conversation, really understanding the context is very important as we think about putting policies in place. So, Patricia, Ben, really appreciate your time and the work you continue to do.

And for all you tuning in, we'll be back. Next time on the Future of Education.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

James Rhyu, CEO of Stride Inc., joined me for a thought-provoking conversation in their 25th-year of operations. Rhyu shared his journey from accountant to CEO of Stride, Inc. He emphasized the importance of viewing students as customers. We then delved into the potential of online learning to overcome stigmas and serve diverse student needs, including safety and flexibility for those struggling with their mental health. We also explored Stride's investments in technology and career skills, as well as personalization.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn. And you're joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through how we get there, I'm really delighted that we have James Rhyu, the CEO of Stride Inc. For those of you that don't know, you may remember Stride's former name, K12 Inc. Back in the day, when I got in this world and co-authored Disrupting Class, K12 was the big player on the block, if you will, helping to think about how digital learning could really open up opportunities for individuals that had not had it in the conventional school system. The company's continued to evolve quite a bit, rebranded as Stride, has a number of offerings. We're going to get into all of that and more because this is Stride's 25th birthday, if you will. 25th anniversary. So, James, thanks so much for joining me and having this conversation.

James Rhyu

Thanks for having me, Michael. Appreciate it.

Michael Horn

Yeah, you bet. So let's just start high level because I suspect people tuning in will know some of the history, but maybe not your history. And so tell us about your own path into becoming the CEO of Stride.

James Rhyu

Yeah, sure. At first, I would say this is the first time I've ever been CEO of a company. So I'm still sort of a rookie at the job, you know, learning as I go. You know, I mean, I started as an accountant, you know, tell people the only real profession I guess I'm really qualified for is accounting. I was, and I was probably average at best at that maybe. But, you know, so I sort of obviously said, then I came up through the finance, you know, end of the company. And I always like to tell people I was not a very good student. I was sort of a C student and, you know, so running an education company, I don't even know if it's a bad thing, but I take us maybe a slightly different lens to running the company.

Having been sort of not such a great student, I've never been an educator, which again, I don't say necessarily think is a bad thing, but it certainly puts a different lens on how to run the company. I think, you know, the education system in this country hasn't produced, I think, the outcomes societally that we want, probably. And so I think coming from a different angle or a different perspective, you know, has some benefits, I think, you know, so anyway, So I came to the company 13, 14 years ago and I came on the financial side. I was the CFO. I had come from previously that to that I was with a company called match.com. I think a lot of people have heard of Match and I was very fortunate to be there when we started this little app called Tinder and sort of helped sort of explode online dating. And I always say that it's somewhat relevant that experience because people maybe of my generation remember, but a lot of people don't remember it, online dating used to have a huge stigma to it.

Like it's now very commonplace and you know, you don't really have a lot of stigma associated with anymore, but it used to have a lot of stigma associated with it. And I think online learning or different modalities of learning, certainly different angles to take at education, they have some stigma associated with it. And I think the ability to overcome that stigma is one of the things that I think is important for Stride, certainly, in K12. And I think that you know, just like in online dating, it can produce amazing results for people if we can overcome some of that stigma. And so I was a CFO here for a number of years and there was some CEO transition. And you know, most, most companies go through like sort of succession planning. And about a year before, more than a year, almost, probably almost two years before I became CEO, the then CEO at the time, who's a mentor of mine, Nate, continues to be a mentor and friend of mine, he approached me on behalf of the board and said, would you consider being the CEO? And I actually said no for a fairly long time.

You know, like I said, I was an accountant. I was very grateful to have been the CFO. You know, a lot of accountants don't even get to reach that professional summit, I guess, and, and I just never thought of myself as a CEO. I really thought of myself as a finance professional. And it took some number of months before I sort of convinced myself to throw my hat in the ring for the job. And obviously I ended up getting the job. I think what the board saw at least, and you know, I'm now four years into the job, hopefully they continue to see is one is I have a real passion for the job. Meaning, you know, and I really consider this job a job where irrespective of the company, we have a set of current and potential future customers.

And our job, my job is to try to meet the needs of those current and future customers. And I think that will in enure great benefit for our shareholders and stakeholders. And so really that's sort of how I view my lens to the job is really sort of a customer focus. And I say that very specifically. And in this company, when I became CEO, I really, I'll say it sounds weird, but I introduced really the word, the term customer into this company. And I think, I think largely it should be introduced into the education vernacular more broadly because, and specifically In K through 12 education, you know, we think of them as students. That's fine. And by the way, you know, they are students, but they're also customers.

Rethinking Education as Customer Service

James Rhyu

And I think if we thought of them in that way, you know, the establishment of K through education has long thought, I think of their customers largely as an entitlement. And structurally there's a reason for that because you've got one school in a geographic area and that school really has dominion over the students in that area. And so you didn't really have to work for your customers in a way, right? They were an entitlement to you because you live in that area and historically you live in that area, you go to that school and that's still sort of pervades today for 90 plus percent of the population in the country. And so you can see why that framework established this entitlement sensibility, if you will. But in most other aspects of our lives, we want to be treated as customers. And the reason we want to be treated as customers is because when you're treated as a customer, there's this, there's a sort of two way dialogue, if you will, it's not always explicit, but you know, there's this push-pull of what's best for the customer. What does the customer want? What does the customer need? What outcomes does the customer want? Right. Like if you're running a restaurant and you're a dietitian running a restaurant, you may be like, okay, well I know what's best for the customer. You know, low calorie, high protein, you know, low fat, right.

Michael Horn

We're cutting out those sugars, we're going to get the right oils, et cetera, et cetera.

James Rhyu

Yeah, but if you listen to your customers, your customers might say, you know, actually the reason I eat out is because on a special occasion or whatever, I want to indulge maybe a little bit, or I want to try something that I can't make at home or that's different for me or whatever. And maybe health isn't the most important thing in that circumstance. And as the customer, you know, restaurants listen to that and obviously you have this wide variety of offerings and choice that enables what customers want and the outcomes that are important to them. And I think that's really important. If, you know, if you sort of put that lens on, on education, then you have some different perspectives, I think maybe than historically we've had. And even when you think about, you know, and I know you're probably going to maybe get into this further along, but you know, if you think about the outcomes that people want and you think about my restaurant example, I don't know, like a lot of the educators and people are going to say, oh, you know, but you know, eating is different than education. Of course it is. They're all different.

Every customer experience is different. But I would argue health is pretty important and education is pretty important. So, you know, we're talking about, I think, comparable outcomes, you know, healthy people and educated people, you know, and I think that if you think about that sort of analogy, sometimes what the customer wants isn't actually a healthy diet. And in our country, if we listen to our customers, unfortunately a lot of families aren't in the position where the most important thing to them is getting an A and going to Harvard. Sometimes the more important thing to them is survival, is actually the high school diploma which allows them entree into a job or a field that requires a high school diploma that helps them put food on the table for their family. So the outcome often that we think about is, oh, well, you know, you have to get good grades maybe. And of course that's important. And of course learning is important.

I say more importantly, learning is important and learning skills is important. And hopefully real world skills that you can apply later in life are important. But in some families' cases, I think we have to remember that the grade, and particularly high achieving grades, A's are not always the most important. And I think again, just taking that lens of like, what does the customer really want, what's important to the customer, how can we deliver for that customer is really important. And so go, sorry, I know I drifted a little bit, but going, yeah, this is helpful. Yeah, yeah, about how I got into the job. So, you know, like, whatever, I, you know, I almost begrudgingly accepted the job because I thought I could take a little bit of a different lens to what we're trying to do and expand how we think about our customers. And I think that sort of was important to me.

Michael Horn

Yeah, well, I want to lean into that angle because I think there's a few things there that you said that, that I just want to key off on one sort of, you labeled yourself. And I don't know if it's true or not, but as a C student. But it certainly gives you a window into the people that are not being well served by the traditional system, maybe being taken for granted. Maybe they are motivated by other things. Right. Engaged by other things.

From our research on what customers want and motivation and so forth, I don't think there's anyone who's unmotivated. They're just not motivated to buy what the system is offering.

James Rhyu

What family doesn't want their child to succeed, I mean, in whatever. However they define that.

Michael Horn

Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah.

James Rhyu

However they define it, they want their child to succeed.

Michael Horn

Yeah. And I think that's a big thing. And I guess let's follow that energy because as you know, like one of the big criticisms, I don't think you're hearing it as much at the moment, but certainly five, seven, eight years ago in the field of the virtual schooling in particular, that you all helped define that landscape was that large numbers of students weren't being served well. You could look at student outcomes on test scores and things of that nature and make certain assertions. And then people had different explanations for what's going on. Right. They ranged from, oh, you know, virtual schooling isn't good for folks to, oh, some of these companies maybe are not investing enough in teacher professional development or you know, the teaching experience to, uh, what else was there? You know, something, you know, things around the curriculum and stuff like that. Right.

And so I'm just sort of curious. You've made the point that individuals, when, you know, and families, when they come to a virtual school specifically, you know, their top priority might be help my kid get out of a bullying situation. Right. This is no good right now. And yes, we want them to learn, but we just need to get them back on course right now. How do you think about those as competing with, say, the learning outcomes that critics like to point to? And how do you think we ought to be measuring it?

Politics in Education: A Concern

James Rhyu

Unfortunately, I think sometimes we let politics creep too much into our education system, and I think it's really unfortunate political agendas, you know, when I hear people talk about the, the education system and the students in, in terms as if they're like the afterthought, you know, because there's this other agenda here that's more important. I think it's troublesome to me, I would say. And, and by the way, all those critiques that you mentioned, I'll also say I think many of them are fair. Like, I think also, like as a society and as a company, I don't think we should be. I don't want to lean into that sort of political dialogue where, okay, well, now I've got to figure out, I've got to frame the way to like say it in a way that make, you know, sort of like subverts what they've said or end runs what they've said. Like, the reality is we're certainly not perfect.

I think that there's a lot of things we can do better. A lot. I mean, the list of things we can do better is actually longer than the list of things I think we do well. Frankly, I think that again, the customers that choose our types of programs. You mentioned an element of a category. I think that's a much broader category, which is safety. Right. Bullying is an aspect of child safety that parents are worried about.

Gun violence is an aspect of it. There's a lot of aspects of child safety that, where virtual learning is for that family, that customer, that's the most appropriate choice. And I don't think that we should be dictating to those families what's the best choice for them in their particular circumstance. Now I also think that while the criticisms of this company have often been fair, I think that some of them are not completely accurate. And I also think that they're often being levied by the same system that I could easily say .

Michael Horn

Throw the aspersions at it as well.

Investing in Teacher Development

James Rhyu

You know, they have some of the same issues, I think, you know what I mean? So, you know, so I think sometimes it's a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black and, and that to me feels more political than it does so like figuring out what we can do for, for families. We've invested more in the past. I've been the CEO for four years. We invested more in the past four years and in any other four year period in the history of the company across whether it's, you know, our teacher professional development or, you know, new curriculum or new technologies or new platforms. And I think that a lot of what we try to do is also invest in things like the professional developments. Maybe teach professional development is one example where, you know, the, the in person model of, you know, the district professional development days where, you know, the kids get off and the teachers come in, you know, they have people come in and when I talk to teachers a Lot of them say that the subjects aren't often hitting the mark, the day isn't well utilized often. So what we've tried to do is actually invest in an online teaching platform that gives teachers some empowerment to maybe choose the types of professional development they want. You know, not everybody maybe has to do the same thing.

Michael Horn

So their own choice to break out of the one size fits all sort of way.

James Rhyu

They may know better where their areas of improvement are and what they need to sort of lean into and what they're struggling with in their classrooms or you know, whatever the situation may be. And so some of our investments are more towards those types of things than maybe, you know, trying to do it the traditional way. So again, some of the criticism may be fair, like, yeah, oh, they don't do it a certain way. That actually true. Maybe we're taking a different angle to it. And by the way, maybe that angle isn't even perfect yet. Maybe that angle, it has a lot of room for improvements still. But, I do think taking maybe a different lens to them, some of these things is important and I think those are a lot of things that we're trying to invest in.

Michael Horn

Gotcha. Let me ask you this because that's obviously the virtual school conversation, but over the last decade plus really you all have become a much larger company with larger suite of offerings from digital courses for students to career options or career connected learning options and things of that nature. Just like how do you all think of, you know, when you think of what Stride Inc. is today? We've obviously been geeking out in the virtual school portion, but how do you think about it and the portfolio or suite of things that you all offer?

James Rhyu

Yeah. So I think about it just in terms of what's the market we're really trying to address here. Right. And to me the market is the 55 million K12 school age kids in the country that may or may not want something different, by the way, I think many families are actually very satisfied with their situation. But I think that the way that the established system works has probably evolved less than most other sort of large scale categories, if you will, in the country. You know, whether, whether it's, you know, retail or entertainment or you know, whatever it is, it's evolved less. And so I think Stride is a company that really is what we're trying to do is see how can we improve the overall customer experience and outcomes that they want, those customers want across the landscape of 55 million students.

And that is everything from, you know, we're investing now in a, not just a curriculum, and we've been investing in curriculum for a long time, but the platform to deliver the curriculum that allows for just, you know, a little more easier, more intuitive experience. You know, if you can think about like a Netflix type of experience, you know, where, you know, it gives you recommendations based on what you know, what you like in, in an educational sense. More of like recommendations maybe on what you need, what your sort of next step is in, in there maybe a little bit working away from the traditional like chapter 1, 2, 3 of a textbook and more, you know, towards an engaging type of, of experience. I think it's a little more in line with what the customers experience in other parts of their lives as well. Where, I mean, of course, just like I guess everybody else in the world where, you know, we're, we're really thinking about how to invest in AI. I mean, you can't sort of, I think, say anything these days without at least mentioning it. I think our approach to it's a little bit different in the sense that AI, I don't think is actually the answer.

I think including elements of AI in an overall user experience solution is more the answer. You know, you've been in the industry probably around the industry a lot longer than I have actually. So you know, how long have we been talking about like personalized learning and, and how like really today after we can talk and by the way, you know, there's been, you know, tens of billions of dollars of investment in VC money that have gone into education company. How personalized is the actual learning today in schools?

Michael Horn

Not super personalized at all.

James Rhyu

I mean, if you, if you really walk into a classroom, right? I mean just walk into any random classroom and you hopefully you can't just walk into any random classroom.

Michael Horn

Yeah, but when I get to visit and so forth. Yeah, for sure.

James Rhyu

But if you just walk into a random classroom, I mean, I happen to, I live near a school and I have a dog and so I walk my dog actually around school and I, you know, I'm interested, I peer in, you know, there's windows, I peer in, I look. The personalized level of learning that is happening is not, I think, what we thought would happen 15 years ago. Right. And so. Well, how can you personalize learning? I mean, you can't put 30 teachers in a classroom. There's a teacher shortage. I mean, you were barely putting one teacher in every 30 person classroom, let alone, you know, putting 30 teachers in I mean, that would be the real way to personalize it. Right. If you, if you sort of think.

Michael Horn

About the tutor for every child. Yep.

James Rhyu

Right. You can't do that, though. So as much as I know some people really don't like the technology in the classroom and technology taking over education. If we're really going to personalize learning, I think, I do think we have to do it through technology. But I don't think it's just, oh, AI. You know, then everybody says AI. I don't think it's just AI. It's, you know, if, imagine if the student goes into the classroom and the first thing that they, you know, they turn on the computer and the first thing they see is some prompt, though, that says, oh, good morning, Michael.

James Rhyu

How are you feeling today? I mean, that, that little level of personalization, by the way. I mean, if you go, if you're, you know, if you live in a rich place and you know, you're really wealthy and you send your kids to private schools, the private schools, the first thing they do is the headmaster stands out. The school greets every kid, good morning, how are you doing today? Right. That's the first greeting those kids get. Right. And if we can make that part of the opening of every day of every student through technology. And by the way, Michael may say, you know what, I was up late studying for an exam or I was up late watching the super bowl or whatever they were doing. I'm a little tired.

Engagement Through Personalized Learning

James Rhyu

And if the interaction could be, oh, well, in that case, why don't we just take three minutes, watch this video and get up and stretch a little bit before we get into the lesson. That's personalized learning and it has nothing to do with education yet, by the way. Right. But I think that personalizes, and again, that's a more customer centric view of learning, I think, than what maybe the educational norm would suggest is about personalized learning. Right. Because we do know that a kid who's more engaged learns better. And by the way, a kid who can pay attention better is going to be more engaged. By the way, a kid who's tired needs to get, you know, some blood circulating to be able to do that.

So I don't see. There's nothing wrong with having that engagement through the computer. Get up, stretch your arms a little bit, get, you know, get your blood flowing a little bit. Now let's dive into the lesson. And when I say technology and thinking about your customers, it's more those kinds of experiences I think we can bring into the classrooms. And those are the kinds of things that I think Stride would like to invest in and help that experience for those customers improve.

Michael Horn

No, it makes a ton of sense. I mean you're preaching to the choir on a number of fronts as you, as you may know. But among them, as my wife likes to say, when she visited our kids current school and she saw a kid in the middle of a lesson pop up, go outside, run around, take three laps and then get back in. And she was like, what was that? And they were like guess he chose he needed a brain break. And she was like, we're going here. So, I totally dig that example. I'm curious because you all are servicing a lot of curriculum.

There's teacher professional development. You're helping in some cases change the structure of classrooms in traditional schools. You have the virtual school. You've also invested, I think in some career training platforms. You purchased Galvanize right before the pandemic if memory serves correctly, there's a whole bunch of chatter about how coding boot camps are no more or they, they crested and they fallen. I'd love to hear a little bit about the career connection of what you all are doing. And the reason I ask also is just to put my prior out there.

I think we have, in an effort to not lower expectations for kids, we have sucked out the connections to careers and the building of social capital for basically everyone to the detriment of helping people find reason to engage in many cases with the learning and explore and be prepared for the world. So I'm sort of curious how that has filtered in and where things are.

James Rhyu

Yeah. So years ago, before I was a CEO, we strategically saw an opportunity in the career space and specifically in the K through 12 more high school, obviously high school, middle school type for careers. Because you know, and if you think and just put sort of, I'll say career learning, the name we use aside or whatever. But like skills, you know, I think that's really the, really the thing that we're after here. Right. Is providing students the ability to acquire skills at younger ages that are useful in real practical ways post high school graduation. Right. That's, that's the real objective.

If you think about like what we're really trying to do right now in some, in some instances I think that can be a direct correlation of acquire a skill or set of skills leads to maybe a certificate, that certificate leads to a job. And therefore after high School either you don't want to, you're not well qualified for your financially can't afford college, you can go out and earn, you know, a standard of living that can support your family. Right. And I think that's really important, at least strategically for us is to, is to really lean into those skill development side of it. And I think on the flip side of it, I think some people are maybe critical that it's trying to maybe de-emphasize, you know, going to college or the college experience and things like that. And I don't think it has anything to do with that. I think it really has to do with whether a child decides to go to college or not.

Here's one thing we categorically know. Most kids who go to college don't use their college major in the job that they're in. Right. So either way they're going to have to obtain skills for some career that they're going to pursue. And I think the earlier they can acquire those skills, it's going to be better for their lifelong professional journey. And so whether they go to college or not, whether, you know, whether they go to a four year college or a two year college, whether they go right into the workforce and later go to college, there's so many permutations of this. But I think the base level, and by the way you're seeing now led by I think tech companies, but sort of more broadly across industries, companies that are really doing away with the four year college degree requirement and you know, really prioritizing skills and, and I think that that's a trend that's already started. I think it accelerated a little bit during the pandemic.

Enhancing Student Skill Acquisition

James Rhyu

I think it's going to continue to persist. And so our view is that we want to be able to offer those skill acquisition opportunities for students starting at younger grades. Virtually all of our programs now have that opportunity. What I'll go back to where we started with some of the critiques of us, which is I think what we haven't done, so those are available, I think what we haven't done a good enough job of is really ensuring that the holistic view or the holistic support necessary to really enable those students to embrace that we haven't done yet a good enough job of. And I think that's sort of where we'll make some future investments is, you know, they need better guidance and you know, traditional guidance counselors, they usually are focused on, okay, so what credits do you need? What college do you want to go to? And what credits do you need to go to that college? And you know, I think, and if that's what they want, we should provide that to them. But also, I think we should supplement that with, hey, also along the way, you know, if you're interested in cars or, you know, maybe you should take some things in mechanical engineering or whatever.

We know, whatever the thing is, you know, the boot camp specific stuff. We did buy a couple of companies in that space and they were bad acquisitions, unfortunately. I think the, like when we were looking at that space, there was virtually nobody in the entire industry that was making money, by the way. It was entire industry that was losing money. But they had a lot of sort of fanfare and popularity. And we happen to own and operate one or two of the only profitable companies in an industry tech elevator. And there's been some, I think, broader market shifts moving away from those programs. I think the other CEOs that I've spoken to that are participants in that space have all said, you know, volumes are down dramatically.

I think, you know, what they publicly say, maybe what they privately say are a little bit different. But I will tell you that our volumes are down dramatically. I don't necessarily see a recovery, I think because the, I mean, say AI again, but I mean, AI, I think, has at least in the psyche of a lot of people, suggested that maybe those types of jobs, and particularly at the lower levels are not going to be needed as much. And I think that's probably directionally right at some point. So, you know, so I think there's a shift in the marketplace and I think that we got that sort of bet wrong in where that was headed. So shame on us, I think.

But I think that broadly speaking, there's still tremendous opportunity in skilling kids, whether it's through the boot camps or not, or particularly in computer science or not. I think that's sort of the secondary importance. I think the primary importance is kids need to get skills. They need to get skills to give them job opportunities. And we, and I think our country needs to do a better job of focusing in on that. And I think we're going to continue to invest in that. I think it's really important. And I think parents, and if we get it going from a customer perspective, customers want that for their kids.

Educational Choice and Parental Priorities

Michael Horn

Yep. That's where I was going to wrap up is like, as you think about, you know, 25th anniversary Stride Inc, you all have a number of, you know, irons in the fire, if you will, different priorities you've named here. What are you hearing from parents? Right. As we, I think it's fair to say in many states we're shifting to more and more, not just school choice, but educational choice. I think the next few years we'll see a continuation of that for sure. Many of the parents I talk to, I agree, they're fine where they are. And many of them are saying, I'm not relinquishing this choice at this point, but what are their priorities that you're hearing at this point as we wrap up this conversation and how that may impact what Stride Inc. focuses on over the next however many years?

James Rhyu

Yeah, okay, so I, I'm hearing a lot of the same things you are, by the way. I think the research supports it. I think, I saw research recently said something like upwards of 70% of families have considered at least some alternative. But I also hear safety continues to be a big concern for parents. Again, that sort of broad category, whether it's bullying or gun violence, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Mental health is a big concern that I keep hearing from parents. I mean, our customers.

Michael Horn

Stay on that, stay on that for one second because, like, the mental health thing is being so pinned on technology right now. How does that interface for you guys? You're obviously not a smartphone app company, but I'm just sort of curious. Yeah. How do you think about that?

James Rhyu

I don't want to comment on the root cause of our mental health issues in this country because I'm, I actually just don't have the expertise to, and I don't have enough data to really, frankly, to synthesize, to really understand it well enough. But I do know that an increasing number of families that are in programs that we help manage state mental health as an issue with their child. An increasing number of the children themselves are stating mental health you know, and I say set up as a broad category.

Michael Horn

Sure, there can be any number of things underneath.

James Rhyu

Exactly.

Michael Horn

But the point is they're coming to you.

James Rhyu

It is an issue. And I think part of the reason that virtual learning is very attractive for families that have some of these issues is sort of some of the flexibility. Right. So if you have some mental health issues, maybe you can't deal with some of the structure, or maybe you can't deal with some of the social interaction, or maybe you can't deal with the rigidity. And so the flexibility that's offered through virtual learning, sometimes it just, it helps families deal with some of those issues. And, you know, whether they're because of technology or not. Again, I don't really want to delve into that. I think that the reality is unless the government steps in, which, you know, I'm not saying they should or shouldn't, but unless the government steps in and regulates the use of technology for children, which by the way, some countries are doing, the use of technology is only going to continue to increase unless the government steps in and regulates it. So while we may have differing opinions on whether it's a good or a bad thing and kids should be using technology or shouldn't be using technology, the reality of our customers is they are using technology and in increasing ways. And whether the result of that is some of these issues or not.

Michael Horn

You take them as they are,

James Rhyu

They're also using it to help with some of the solutions.

Michael Horn

Got it. Super interesting, James. Just a fascinating conversation. You guys are touching your hands in so many of the cutting edge things. But I think I'll take away from this the voice and intent and motivation of the customer and personalizing around that being two major thrusts as we as, as you all continue to go into this next chapter of growth for Stride Inc. Fair to say,

James Rhyu

Absolutely see you in 25 years. We'll do it again.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Andrew Clark, president of yes. every kid., joined me to discuss the current landscape of educational choice in the United States. The conversation delved into the rise of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), specifically their widespread adoption and impact on public schooling and education spending. Clark shared insights from his experiences as a lobbyist and argued for the popularity of universal ESAs and the importance of ensuring their successful implementation. The discussion also touched upon accountability within the schooling system, potential pitfalls, and the importance of empowering families to make educational choices.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn. And you're joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live a life of purpose as they define it. And to help us think through what that looks like and how we get there, I'm delighted that we have Andrew Clark. He's the president of yes. every kid. We'll learn more about that and their vision for how we advanced truly this learner-centered future in this conversation ahead. But first, Andrew, great to see you. Thanks for being here.

Andrew Clark

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Michael Horn

Yeah, no, you bet. So, like, before we dive in, right. And talk about the work you do, just like think it'll help folks to understand the journey you've taken into this conversation around educational choice, specifically working in education along with the work of what, yes. every kid. does, which of course, it's a 501c4 organization. You don't see those quite as often in education. We see a lot of C3s, so we'll dive into that in a moment. But your purpose really is unleashing the extraordinary potential of every kid by treating them with dignity, empowering them to make decisions for themselves and give voice to every parent, student and teacher who shares that goal. So love to hear your journey into that work and what that work itself looks like.

Andrew Clark

Yeah, of course. So, yeah, 501c4 is a lobbying organization and I am a lobbyist by nature. I'm not an education guy at all. And I like to say education came looking for me. I didn't go looking for it. But the way that that happened is I was working in Arizona, working on state budget issues, and at the time, ESAs were being hotly debated. So there was a small ESA program in the state, one of the very first that have ever passed, in fact, the first. And the debate over the expansion of that program had people thinking it was going to go to the ballot and be a big fight.

Andrew Clark

And so people were asking if we'd be willing to fund that initiative. And I just didn't know a lot about education. And so we started doing a lot of research to see if that was worth getting engaged on because the implications of education spending are significant on state budgets, as you know. And in doing that, what shocked me is when you put together what I'd consider, the more classically Democratic arguments about education and the more classical Republican arguments, the public essentially rejected both arguments pretty soundly.

Michael Horn

Say more.

Andrew Clark

Yeah. So, you know, the traditional argument from Democrats has essentially been public schools are grounded in the community. They just need more money. Right. And if I can just have more money, they'll be fine. And you know, public's great with investing in public education, but they don't think that's the end all be all and they don't think that things can go unchanged. Whereas the Republican argument was essentially like, hey, public schools are terrible and they just need a whole lot of competition. That competition is going to force excellence and test scores and that's what we want.

And the public is dubious on test scores and they don't like the kind of competitive nature of it. Like none of that really resonates either. And so put those two arguments up against each other, there really wasn't any constituency being like, yes, that's what I want.

Michael Horn

Super interesting.

Innovative Policy Strategies Needed

Andrew Clark

To me, that was eye opening going, how do you have a space in which the two competing ideas are both unpopular? As a lobbyist, that's a really weird phenomenon. It just made me say, hey, I think what's going on in this space actually doesn't make any sense. And there's an opening to do something much more innovative and novel that people will actually enjoy. And so that's kind of what led to ultimately starting to run some experiments on different types of policies that we could talk about. But I can give you two examples. One of the things I saw early on is if a program in education was universal versus being low income, it was way more popular with the public, like 35% more popular. And essentially no advocacy group was working on that to the degree that I would have expected. And so I was like, hey, why don't we start working on bills that are universal and just saying, if it's a low income bill, we're just going to reject it.

We're just going to be opposed to it, even though we support more freedom generally. And as you can imagine, for a lot of school choice advocates, that irritated the crap out of people. But I'm like, I'm going to reject your bills. That was novel at the time. And there's a couple other policy areas like that where I just over index to saying like, why don't we just do things that people like and that make good economic sense and good educational sense? And let's just bank on the fact that if people see benefit in it, they're going to vote for it, they're going to re-elect people that do that and that's going to have a more transformational effect than advocating for something people don't want. Which sounds intuitive, but it was relatively novel at the time. And that ultimately led to me working with some other people and together we all created yes. every kid. And that's what we do. We just lobby for laws like that and try to get them in place.

Michael Horn

Super interesting. And you do the work beyond Arizona now it's nationwide, right?

Andrew Clark

Absolutely. Yep. We work in about 36 states right now.

Michael Horn

Yeah. And I guess the reason it's counterintuitive, as I would think about it, is a lot of folks might say like, yeah, we agree, you know, universal may be the goal or yes, that's going to make it more popular, but we have a win right now. We can impact this population, let's go for it. And they accuse you, I guess, of being against incrementalism toward that goal or something like that.

Andrew Clark

That's certainly my reputation in the space. I would argue everything we're doing is incremental. It's just a question of where you're going to draw those lines and what you're going after. And I think education is particularly influenced by this rise of Taylorism, which is this philosophical backdrop to the industrial revolution that basically said people, people don't matter, processes are what matter and we can optimize processes and everything just becomes a top down exercise. I think the people that go into education carry that mentality or that culture into the space. And that's true whether you're on the programmatic side, you know, you're trying to actually put schools together, or if you're on the advocacy side, you think I'm going to do this thing because academics think it's wise or think tanks thinks it's wise. And I'm going to impose that. Whereas in most spaces that are bottom up, you go the other way.

You're like, what do people see benefits in? What are customers going to gravitate to? And you design around that bottom up feature that just there's just not a lot of people that have that ethos in education.

Michael Horn

Space, from a job speed on landscape through my work that I hear the logic there for sure. So one of the big things that you all have been working on and pushing, you mentioned it briefly, these ESAs, education savings accounts, this notion not just of school choice, but educational choice more broadly. It's something that my audience is certainly familiar with. We've talked a lot about it in the show, so. But I think, you know, 2025, we're having this interview, beginning of the year. Where are we nationally on ESAs? What's the state of choice? I think there's like 11 states maybe with universal choice. But is that right? Who are they? What does that even mean?

Andrew Clark

Yeah, I would say the world is transformed in my view anyways. So the original thesis for a lot of this is hey, we've got a very again Taylor top down education center today where the government says in law you as a family will put your kid in the public school or we will send you to jail. And then inside of that school we're going to dictate how the day goes for you. And it's all very carefully orchestrated. And what we said at the time when we started back in 2018, 2019 was we just need a way out, just an exit, a right of exit to go try something else. So if that system doesn't work for you, no problem, let's get out. And that was the, a lot of the premise for these original universal ESA accounts, which is now up to a dozen states.

Michael Horn

A dozen states. Okay.

School Choice Programs Surge Nationwide

Andrew Clark

Yeah. And I would say, you know, you've got about 40% of kids in America that have access to some kind of private school choice program. This is booming. It's not just happening in legislative, it's also having huge political impacts. Like the idea is very popular, it's 75, 80% popular. And so when opposition has come out and tried to take people out in Texas or Arizona or Iowa or Arkansas, what has happened is the people have advocated for school choice, have won and won by pretty wide margins and then that just encourages the next group to go after it. And so now it's kind of sweeping. I think it's not crazy to think you're going to have 18 or 20 states that have school choice programs by the end of this session and you could have 60, 65% of kids in the country having access to private schools through these programs.

Michael Horn

And so it's public dollars. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Clark

With subsidized dollars. Yeah, it's a pretty massive change in the country.

Michael Horn

And so if we hit 18 or more by the end of the year, I assume you're thinking like Texas, Tennessee, like states like that are the ones that tip next. I'd love to hear your crystal ball on that. But are we talking about educational savings accounts specifically in all these states universal, or are we talking about different forms of tax scholarships or vouchers? Like where are they landing in this choice landscape as we're seeing this sweep of legislation?

Andrew Clark

Yeah, so certainly Texas is going to be the point of contention for everybody just because they've got north of 5 million kids and the entire country has 55 million kids. So you're talking about a significant portion of the total student body population in the United States is grounded in Texas and it's one of the few states that's still growing. Almost everybody else is on the decline. So the fight for Texas will be significant. I think the macro trends you're talking about is most states are still going for ESAs, which in policy terms just means I'm going to take a subsidy, I'm going to put it in a government controlled account, I'm going to create a bunch of rules around that account and then a family can come in and dictate where the money gets spent out of that. So most states are still needing to do that. But you're starting to see this, what I would consider the next wave coming out, which is these personal tax credits, which is just basically saying if you don't take your kid and put them in a public school, if you decide to do something else, we're just going to give you your money back.

And so Oklahoma already has this in law. I think you'll see this in several other states emerging this cycle, maybe three or four of them, where they're just literally like any other, tax credit, child care tax credit, child tax credit, et cetera. They're just going to give you your money back and you'll have the freedom to spend that however you will. So I don't think it'll be nearly as much money as you see in an ESA. It might be 3 or $5,000 as opposed to 7 to $10,000 in an ESA, but it will have significantly more regulatory freedom.

Michael Horn

Interesting. So essentially we're saying you do not avail yourself of the public school. Sure, people without kids don't either, but this is a way of giving you some of that money back so you can make a different choice with your child. Is that essentially the theory?

Andrew Clark

That's exactly the logic, yep.

Michael Horn

Okay, so I want to come back to some of these strands in a little bit, but I want to know in particular, there were three states where at the ballot box it seemed like there were some pretty big defeats of choice in terms of referendums, namely Kentucky, Nebraska and Colorado. What happened in those three states, because my impression, I'll lay out my priors, was what yours is that like, yes, this is a red state phenomenon for the most part, but, but it seems incredibly bipartisan support for it within those States, people of all stripes seem to really like the Education Savings Accounts in particular. So like what happened in those three states, because of that referendum. A lot of the stuff you've talked about has been policy at the state house level.

Andrew Clark

Yeah. So I'd say strategically there's two big inflections in policy design choices that have huge impacts on the the way that the public perceives them. So one is this question of who is eligible, Is it going to be eligible for every kid in the state or is it just going to be eligible for some kids? If it's eligible for every kid, it is about 30 percentage points higher than if it's just some kids. And some kids could be low income kids, special needs kids, it could just be an overall cap, whatever. But the difference in political popularity is massive on that one line alone. And the second part of it is if it's just a private school choice option, people are way less inclined to be supportive of it as opposed to if it is agnostic to whatever works for the kid. So an ESA is designed to say, look, if you want to put your kid in public school part time and private school part time and tutoring a little bit, and we don't care, you pick whatever you want. That's a very popular idea.

People want all the options. They don't want to be pigeonholed into just private schools. That's not a very popular option. And so the mistake that I think a lot of these very well intentioned advocates have made is they think, man, if I just go put a $10 million program on the ballot, which is the Nebraska proposal, that's going to be fine because it's not going to scare anybody. And who would oppose $10 million? It's so small. But what happens is teachers unions aren't idiots, right? They're going to go after a small threat just as hard as they're going to go after a big threat. And if they go after a small threat that's not very popular, that small threat's going to die. And so if we could rewind the clock, I'd love to sit down with the advocates doing that and saying, hey folks, there's no reason to walk in with an idea that's 30% popular just because you think it's good.

Talk to the customer, the customer wants everybody to be eligible. $10 million isn't going to get that job done. Go bigger, actually be more ambitious. And what you'll find is when the public's with you, then you'll actually win at the ballot. So I think in all three states we go through it, but they all three made that mistake essentially in crafting policy that wasn't politically savvy.

Michael Horn

And so the big, just to reiterate what you just said, the big issues universal, not for some. And two, it sounds like a voucher that is like essentially a ticket to a private school and that is your only choice. That is not popular either. People want a more expansive set of I get to direct my kids' education and including public options that you know, ideally, and we heard this in Florida, they start innovating, right? The public options as they start to see different ways to structure education as well through these different funding mechanisms over time.

Andrew Clark

What the parents are upset about is they want control. It's not that they want a different tax status for the school. That is not right.

Michael Horn

If it's the private first, public is not what's driving this. I want control. Okay, all right, let's flip to implementation. That's a good gateway into this because you are not just advocating, as I understand it, for policy, you're also advocating around implementation as well and thinking about this. And there's a lot of debates about how ESAs are put into place specifically. The first one is maybe where it lives and how we manage it. Are we using, you know, a third party technology like Odyssey or something like that to help distribute funds step up for students? Is the Department of Education trying to stand up something? How do you think about the where it lives and how we manage it, how we disperse funds, et cetera questions?

Andrew Clark

Yeah, I think on the first step you're right that most advocacy groups come into legislation, they're like, I have a big idea. And they give the big idea to politicians. The politician puts the big idea into a law and the law just says here, here's the big idea. Give people money essentially, right? And then they give it to a department who's like what the hell are you talking about? What am I supposed to do with this? And at that point most of the advocacy groups are gone. What we try to do that is different is we want to stick around and say, hey, here's what the intent was, here's the thinking behind it and here's how you could actually apply that. And I think that's really important to carry that through line all the way down because the passing the bill is just the very baby steps. All the real work happens after that. And there's a moment for choosing in the aftermath there on what are these going to look like in practice? And I'll just give you maybe two mental models to think about what this could look like.

One way that this could play out is going to be like health insurance. So if you think about the way that health insurance works in health care, those companies, those third party companies are basically tasked to ration your healthcare. They're there to think through like what's the appropriate use of the healthcare system and how do I make it as cost efficient as I can and safe. So that's one option. I'll give you another design option which would be like Social Security where we're trying to eradicate senior poverty and we just send people a check and we say this is for you to take care of yourself, I wish you the best. Right? These are two very different approaches. They're both welfare programs, but very different policy designs and ESAs are going to run into that. Those kinds of choices.

ESA Decision: Customer or Third Party?

Andrew Clark

Are we going to make it more like a health insurance model or we're going to make it more like Social Security? So when we say we're trying to empower parents, both could empower parents. But one model, there's going to be a decision maker that's a third party. And then the other model, the decision maker is going to be the customer, the end user, which one are ESA's going to decide? And for us we have a very clear point of view which is the customer ought to make the decision. That doesn't mean there's no regulations. It's pretty reasonable that any public funds given are going to have some regulations. But there is a very binary choice between who the actual decision maker is. Is it going to be the government or a third party or is it going to be the customer? We think it ought to be the customer. Most people in the space think it ought to be the third party.

And I think that's a very bad idea. You just look at how popular health insurance companies are, right? I mean you just watch the poor CEO got shot and half the country cheered. I think that tells you just how unpopular that idea is. But I think that is a very real possibility of where education's headed to if we don't head this off.

Michael Horn

So let's play that out on a few things. I had never thought about that mental model with ESAs because I think of it as fundamentally a consumer powered choice, more akin to say a health savings account than a health insurance plan. But it's interesting when you frame it that way. So some of the downstream decisions of that, I guess in the health insurance model would be restrictions around what you can spend on, restrictions on pricing perhaps of the schools and things of that nature. Just sort of play that out. What are the implications where you see that taking hold based on what some people are advocating for and how you would do it instead?

Andrew Clark

Yeah, I think health savings accounts are probably like if I give you the two extreme wings there between Social Security and health insurance. Yeah, Health savings accounts are probably somewhere in the middle ground and maybe probably more tilted towards the customers. So I think they're a fine model. Right. If I go see a chiropractor, I can pay with my HSA and I don't have to get that pre approved. I might have to submit it afterwards and maybe the HSA company would reject it. There's some rules around it, but for the most part I can pay for pretty wide latitude of whatever I want to. That is different than like if I go see a doctor with my insurance company, they're going to call Blue Cross, Blue Shield or United or whoever and say, can this person get this treatment? And if the answer is no, they're going to say no.

Right. Like, doesn't matter what you and your doctor negotiate out, that insurance company is going to make the decision. And that's the way most of these ESA programs are working right now is I say, okay, I want to buy, you know, Bob's textbook. If the department hasn't pre approved that purchase and or Class Wallet or Step up hasn't pre approved that purchase, you're not going to be able to buy that book. I think that's the bad model and the one that we're running the risk of slipping into. We want to be much more in the HSA mold where it's like, hey, I can buy textbooks, that's what's approved. And then as a consumer, it doesn't really matter what textbook I buy, as long as it's a textbook, we're all okay with the fact that that's on the net, that's going to be a positive for society.

Michael Horn

So it's interesting you say that because I've seen accreditation pop up as a requirement in some of these programs, which I have to be super honest, has like shocked me on a number of levels. And maybe that's speaking toward that is like, okay, if it's accredited, we say that's pre approved and therefore you're good no matter what. If not accredited, we're going to have to have another conversation. Is that.

Andrew Clark

Absolutely. And this is where, you know, most people who advocate for ESAs and other kinds of freedom are really, really offended when they get attacked by critics who say, like, oh, this is going to raise prices and send in grifters and cronyism, I actually welcome the criticism, like, bring it on, because it keeps us clear on where the risks are and they're not wrong about the risks. So the risk is you get somebody who comes grifting along. Let's say you have a textbook company, they're going to say, man, only my textbook should be approved. Those guys, textbooks that's full of crazy garbly gook and kids will learn God knows what. So you got to make sure you only approve my books and not their books. Right? And that's. This is just classic government. You can only buy my therapies, not theirs.

You can only buy my tutoring service. You got to make sure that my employees are approved, not their employees. That's just what happens when you get a regulatory environment is you get regulatory capture. People want to make their business not providing customers some benefit. They want to make their money by getting the government to get rid of their competition. And so one of the reasons that you want to try to make sure you don't have that is think of the higher ed space that you've talked a lot about. Higher ed space does that exact problem. They say, like, you can't create an alternative.

You know, the folks at the University of Austin, people are all excited about that. That's unaccredited right now. You can't use your 529 or your Pell or any of that public subsidy money to go to that school. And why isn't it accredited? It's got some of the best professors in the country, maybe in the world, working there. Why isn't it? Because they've made it a 5 to 10 year process to get accredited. Well, what happens? That means no competition can come into the space. That means higher education goes sky high all the time and it never stops. There's no incentive to bring it down. The same thing will happen in K12 if we allow the same kind of regulatory barriers to exist.

If it's hard to come in and sell a textbook, well, then the existing textbook guys are just going to jack the prices up. It's going to be really hard to get in. So this is kind of why these debates matter so much, is if we want to get to a world that is low price, high quality, happy customers, you have to give people freedom to come in and enter the market and freedom to buy in the market really easily. And most of the advocates and lobbyists in the space they're being paid to try to capture the market for some regulatory space. And so both politicians and just normal people have to be outspoken, loud advocates for the ideas of freedom and markets or education is going to stifle and do what it's always done historically in this country, which is it's going to get captured by the special interest.

Michael Horn

Just to play that out. The counterargument I suppose would be, well, if we don't have lists, we're going to get, you know, hacks and frauds coming in and taking dollars. And I think I'm going to anticipate your argument back would be like, well, we have some of that anyway and it's going to be discovered a lot faster if individuals can make these choices than we're hoping that government somehow discovers it. Right. Because in some ways that's a feature, not a bug actually of more choice. Am I anticipating the debate correctly?

Andrew Clark

Yep, you got it. I mean, this is, you could think of it in Milton Friedman's vernacular. Right. When it's, when it's me spending someone else's money, I'm much more prone to spend it maliciously than if it's me spending my money. Right. And so depending on how you think about it, if it's you spending the government's money, your incentive is to spend as much of it as fast as you can. And, you could be relatively reckless. If you're spending your own money, you're going to guard it very carefully.

Most people, most families want what's best for their kids and they're going to make hard trade off decisions. I think that's one of my favorite things about your job to be done research. It's showing, it's illustrating the trade offs. Right. That's what we want people to do. Yeah. And that's again why you want the market dynamics to flow.

So yeah, public schools spend money on all sorts of crazy things. Margarita Rosa at Georgetown has essentially made a career out of the crazy things people have bought inside of public schools. You're not going to get rid of waste fodder abuse, but you can put in reasonable mechanisms without corrupting the market.

Flexible Spending with Educational Savings Accounts

Michael Horn

And so that's, I mean, in my mind that's been the, one of the biggest arguments for ESAs is it really is putting money in a wallet that is yours and you don't have to spend it all in one year. You can save it over time. And so that doesn't introduce, it doesn't just introduce the notion of choice. It also introduces the notion of value and trade offs as opposed to a voucher, which is like a ticket for one thing, regardless of economic value and, and doesn't have those trade offs and choices and fractionalization and value assessments that an individual might make. Let's go on, just to stay on this though, on what you can spend on. Do you think there should be categories of things or like how do you, you know, where do you draw the line or, or no line. Right. Because you know, I obviously we've seen the headlines, equine therapy and you're like, actually it's a really important thing for some families and kids, so probably a really good thing.

And by the way, you know, schools send their kids to field trips to Disney World and stuff like that. So like where is the line and where isn't the line in your view?

Andrew Clark

Yeah, and I, my personal view is the best case is like the child tax credit that we saw issued during COVID There were a list of uses for that. They were pretty broad and you know, the IRS reserved the right to come in and audit and make sure you spent the money on your child. Makes sense. Pretty reasonable. Didn't prohibit anybody from doing what they wanted to do for the most part. But it also made sure that if there was fraud that the government had a mechanism to come in and enforce it.

Michael Horn

Come back in and unfold it. Okay.

Andrew Clark

That's the best case scenario.

Michael Horn

Got it. Okay, so let me ask this question which is a lot of these ESAs, even the ones that are universal, meaning access to it is open, they're not fully funded, as in that there's a line item, as I understand it, that could cover every single person in the state and it is double funded in many cases in the sense that there's an account for the public schools and then there is also an ESA. That introduces an interesting sort of case of rationing or choices around who do you market this to first perhaps you can't foreclose people, but maybe you can if there's waiting lists, like how do you navigate that focus, access, set of questions in these environments? And maybe I just named the corollary up front, which is like at what point do we say, okay, the dual sort of funding structure was really important so we don't, you know, get their ire up front. But at some point like there it has to be replicative of, you know, what was there. How do you, how do you think about that?

Andrew Clark

No, I think, I think the original strategy we had of let's just give people an exit was a good one for its time. I think the problem is if you leave that old system in place, exactly what you're saying is happening. One, you would hope that the money, you know, that was 15 or $20,000 in the public school system would now be the 7,000 in the ESA. And we would say, great, the government has now saved $13,000 and it's a win win and everyone's happy. But what happens in reality, we've created a lot of dependency in the current system. They don't let go of a dime and then it becomes additive. So that's a problem for the government in terms of its overall spending, but it's also a problem for the market because what happens is you get New York City spending $40,000 a kid, what do they do? They just start spending money on every crazy thing you've ever imagined in human history, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. And people begin to expect that level of service even if it doesn't make sense.

So it's like, why does this school have a climbing wall? And why does it have a restaurant? Why does it have crazy things? I have the money and if I don't use it, I lose it, so I've got to keep spending it. Well then what happens is when an alternative comes up and says, hey, I'm gonna now give your kid a better education at a significantly lower cost, they're like, yeah, but where's the cool climbing wall? Right, right. And so now the expectation level for service gets higher. So the promise of like bringing the cost down, which then increase access for everybody, it starts to diminish because the service expectations are higher, which is a little, a little bit wonky. But it's to say that if we don't get the, the existing public school system transformed as well into a place where it has to care about what families want and be responsive to what families want, the promise of this idea to transform education, it's not going to deliver. And so I think the next big wave is we have to go back to public schools and say, hey, it's time for you to also come back to a system like esas where parents are going to decide, do I give you all $15,000 or do I peel a thousand of that off and go use it for a tutorial when you don't meet my needs? I think we need to, we must get the definition of public schools redefined from the public system owns and operates the dollars and the families comply to a system where the families own the dollars and the school meets their needs. And if we can do that, all sorts of good cascading effects will happen. And if we don't do that, I think we'll stall out again.

Michael Horn

Also interesting off that right. Is this notion of overserved and that is critical to disruptive innovation. And one of my arguments around why we can't disrupt schools at the present, you know, traditional system in the United States is there's no non consumption and there's very little sense of overserved. But it's my argument about why have ESAs have emerged, I actually think some of the most well off families that are like, you know, I don't need the 10, you know, English as second language instructors and the football team and the this and that. Like I just want this, this, this, this, this boom. Thank you very much. I'm great. And that's sort of where the disruption will really start I think if we're going to really see a revolution of how education, learning, schooling occurs in this country.

Andrew Clark

Yeah. And maybe if I just double click on that because you and I do the same research methodology which is this jobs to be done. And we asked the people who have left the public school system, why did you leave? And almost universally what they say is I just wanted basic life skills. Like I just want to be able to do math and read and just, you know, some fundamentals: wash their clothes, pay bills, like the easy stuff. And so what they go and search for in the market usually costs about $5,000 a year. So they're leaving a free service that costs $15,000 a year to go to a paid service for 5,000. But they're doing it because they want less, which is really remarkable to watch. So I'm with you.

I actually think we probably in a space where 65, 70% of the current offering in a public school, people don't actually want to buy. And if they were given the choice, they wouldn't buy. Which is a pretty fascinating intellectual thing to get to doodle through.

Michael Horn

No, I think that's exactly right. I mean look, it's the classic case why iPhone, new iPhone sales are slowing down and spreading out. People are like, I don't need the extra whatever gimmick. I'll hang on for another year to my phone. Right, exactly. So, let me go to this, which is accountability. I think it's implicit in a lot of what you said. But it seems to be another place where there's a lot of opinions on both sides of this.

And on the one hand you sort of say, actually the quote unquote accountability of no child left behind, etc. Etc. was more transparency, perhaps less accountability because not clear always what happened out of that. There were some punishments attached to it, but for the most part there were ways to ward them off. This is perhaps true accountability, goes the argument, because families say, you're not serving me, I can leave, I'm going to move to another option. And I have control over that. Whether it's mid year, mid month, end of the year, right? So much faster cycle times. The flip side of it says, sure, but these are public dollars and we want some sort of layer of are kids actually learning how to read? Are they actually learning how to do math? Things of that nature.

And so we want some minimum set of baseline assessments, maybe, perhaps they could be more growth based, but we want some sort of public mechanism still in place. How do you think about this question? What do you see happening?

Andrew Clark

So I think the way you framed it up I would vigorously agree with, which is we don't have accountability today in public schools, we have transparency at best. And we could go through a litany of examples. But Chicago, Baltimore, New York, you know what you see is enrollments dropping wildly, right? Like people are just straight up walking away from public schools and on these standardized test scores, you've got tons and tons of schools, just Google it. Chicago proficiency rates. You'll be like, wow, there's 30 schools where not one kid is proficient in English or reading or English and math. And then you'll be like, great, so what happened, you know, the next year nothing changes, right? Year after year the behavior stays the same, but as they lose kids, their pure pupil dollar amount goes up. So if anything, they're almost getting more money for, for not changing at all, for being resistant.

That is not accountability. That is again, at best, that's transparency. But it's not actually changing anything. So I'm with you. The idea that somebody could actually then say, like, if you're not helping me, I'm going to go somewhere where I can be helped and my money's going with me. That's actual accountability. That has teeth to it. So I think that if you value accountability, and I certainly do, that's the accountability you want.

The standardized test score isn't going to get you there. Now that said, I do think, look, reading is good, math is good, right? And if you're investing in this as a taxpayer, you want to have visibility into it. I think when you mandate testing on every single kid, it's not useful for parents, they don't want it, they're not asking for it, they wouldn't buy it. That's not a great way to do it. I think the way that we do it with NAEP, which is just this randomized group of voluntary participants, makes way more sense because then you get visibility into what's going on without anybody being forced and without teachers trying to optimize to the test. So I think that's the kind of thing we should do. And you could do it across a broad range of things, micro schools, private schools, whatever. It's voluntary.

You can get much more transparency, much more visibility into where kids are actually learning and where they're performing without anybody being forced into anything. So if I were the state, I would invest money into a NAEP style system, if not NAEP entirely itself, to try to get that visibility without coercing people.

Michael Horn

It'd be interesting. I hadn't thought about this before, but one of the challenges is, I understand it that NAEP faces is frankly budgetary, it's all from the federal government. But if the state were to say, hey, we're going to contribute X amount in because we want, you know, to leverage the sampling mechanism and this well regarded assessment that's already structured, but do it every single year, say, or you know, maybe that's a way to get the funding up to be able to do something like that. And then I imagine this is a question though, but I imagine your second statement would be like, and some parents probably do want assessments to know, hey, how's my kid doing against on this or that or whatever else. And so they could pay for, or they could choose schools that administer. And then I guess the question is what becomes public or not in those choices. I'm curious your take.

Andrew Clark

Yeah, as you know, the philanthropy community gets really obsessed on this idea of navigation where they're like, we're going to tell people what they want and we're going to tell them what good and bad is. And when you ask people like would you pay for any of the services that government or philanthropy suggests? And the answer is always no. So it's like, would you pay for this testing service the way that we do it today? The answer is almost, yeah, uniformly no. So what I would do is say, hey, in your ESA or voucher, tax credit, whatever you're designing, testing is one of the things you can pay for in whatever you want. And then you, as a family, you decide what's actually creating value. And that way, you know, if it's a Google review Or a Yelp review or it's a standardized test or it's whatever, I don't care. Right. You as an entrepreneur, come up with whatever feedback mechanism you think families will be like, yes, that's going to help me decide where to put my kid and why and whether they're succeeding.

Great, go out and sell that. Is that worth $20? Is that worth 200? Is that worth 2,000? Right. Let's find out what the value of that is. And that way we actually start getting real products and services that families value and use as opposed to the ones philanthropy or government's value that nobody finds value in and nobody uses and we just hemorrhage crazy amounts of money on for no particular reason other than making people irritated except for academics who love it.

Michael Horn

Well, it occurs to me as if certain places write in provisions and policy around navigation requiring a coach or something like that to help advise. Frankly, like the AI tools that are coming out right now that are going to know your situation are going to make that so cheap and easy and to say nothing of social trust and so forth, that if they're, if those policies are not written at an extremely sort of like outcome level as opposed to process level, they're going to be outdated within days, right.

Andrew Clark

Yeah. I think this is the overarching argument I'd make is Taylorism. I'll give it a lot of crap, but I actually think it was great. The industrial revolution was awesome. It made things super cheap. But it's made for machines and people are not machines. And so when you're dealing with the people business, let the machines do the machine thing. But if you're trying to say, what's the right coach for my kid? There's no process to tell you what the right coach is.

It's you sitting across the table from the coach having a conversation saying, is this person going to love my kid? Are they going to resonate with each other? Are they going to understand each other? Is this relationship of trust? There's nothing that you can do to replace that kind of just authentic relationship that goes back and forth. And s I think you're not going to design a law that says, hey, let's optimize for that. The only thing you're going to do is empower people and let them make their own decisions. And that's why, you know, freedom almost always beats some kind of top down control.

Michael Horn

And presumably someone could pay for that navigation or counseling or whatever else.

Andrew Clark

100%.

Michael Horn

Okay, last question as we wrap up here. This has been a pretty wide ranging question, or conversation rather on how these things should look in practice. I'm curious, are there other implementation questions on the ground that you think are not getting enough attention or are really sort of bubbling up right now that we haven't talked about that we ought to focus on as we wrap up this conversation?

Andrew Clark

Yeah, I would bucket the implementation thing kind of three waves. There's the how do you sign up for it? Which sounds really stupid, but there's a million debates on like, how do you sign up for these programs? And kind of who gets qualified and then which time period. We could nerd out on all of those. But this is one of the reasons why we advocate for universal, not just for because it's good policy and good politics, but because it's good implementation. So if it's a low income program, you have to go ask people, how much money do you make? Please submit all your form forms. And then somebody has to process. It takes forever. Whereas if it's universal, it's just, are you a person who lives in the state? Great, you're approved.

Streamlining Government Program Enrollment

Andrew Clark

Off we go. But there's a ton of fights on the how do you sign up for? So I think it should just be easy to sign up for. It should take seconds, right? Verifying your taxpayer should be stupid simple. The second one is easy to use, which is where I think we spent most of our time talking here, is like, how do you use these darn things once you're approved? And then the third part that is there is in an ideal world, people should love these programs. It's free money. Who doesn't love free money? Right? Like, I think there's all sorts of good arguments against free money, but if you're gonna do it, it should at least be enjoyable. The fact that we torture people is kind of crazy, but there's almost no feedback mechanism to see if anyone cares, because nobody cares about the family in government, which blows my mind. So one of the big arguments is, hey, you actually need to circle back with the family and say, was this experience enjoyable? Did it meet your needs? Right.

Jobs to be done? Was your job hired for? If yes, cool, we're probably doing something right. If no, where did we break it? Let's go back and fix it. And until we can get that kind of feedback loop going and get incentives aligned, it's going to be hard for these programs to work in practice.

Michael Horn

All right, I lied. I want to stay on that last one for a moment because one of my arguments to folks like Joe Connor and other entrepreneurs in the space, building systems to help with the disbursement of dollars is that as they move up market. Right. Part of the feature set that they probably will have to have is some of those feedback mechanisms, as well as, frankly, navigation supports, because they'll sort of become. I hate the Yelp analogy, but I'm going to use it for a moment, like sort of the Yelp, like, marketplace, if you will, for me, helping to figure out or find things that I might not even know about otherwise. That's my own opinion of how they might evolve naturally. I don't think there needs to be policy to do it. I just think it's part of the feature set.

But I'm curious, is that how you're thinking about this, or do you have other ideas in mind?

Andrew Clark

No, I think if a marketplace is allowed to thrive and it's out. What you see in these early days anyways, of school choice is people start by saying, I don't even know what my options are. I've always been told what to do. So they just default to essentially a private school, or what you'd think of as a bundled solution. It has all your products and services in one place. And then as they get more comfortable, they're like, I really want to do math over here and I'd like to do athletics over there. And they start to unbundle. They start to pull off services and go to different places and different vendors for them.

And so somebody who's been in a program for two, three, four years looks very different than somebody who's there the first time. But my expectation is just like, you know, when we transitioned from cable companies to Apple tv, it got annoying really fast. You're like, my God, I'm tired of having 32 subscriptions. I just have one again. Yeah. So what happens is you start to rebundle. And my guess is you're going to, you know, any.

Any good market has this process of bundling and unbundling, and that's what drives innovation at its core. But I expect you to see we've had 100 years of a tightly bundled system. Now we're just starting to have the first two or three years of unbundling. But the natural evolution of economics would tell you it's going to rebundle. So somebody's going to say, hey, you just tell me what your kid is like and I'm going to come back to you with suggestions. And you just, you pay me and I'll take care of transportation, I'll take care of everything. And you know, you might end up paying a premium for that service, but it might be really worthwhile.

And then somebody will get irritated and break that model and we'll just turn and turn and turn until, you know, the experience and education is the greatest thing that none of us have ever imagined, which is the way that that all again, all human experience goes.

Future of Customized Service Bundles

Michael Horn

We should wrap up there. But I will say I think it's a really good point and that rebundling will be around different spools, if you will, from the current one, which will be the real magic. And to your point, figuring out the right mix and sort of services and so forth and trade offs that individuals will make saying like, well, it's still not 100% but nothing in life is. It just reduced the friction of me having to make every single choice. It's a lot of work picking all the summer camps as parents we have to do. So if there's a couple bundles from which I can choose and the more it can be customized around, you know, this is my circumstances, my kid, all the better, right?

Andrew Clark

Absolutely. That's what we all want. We all want an EZ Bake Oven. That is also exactly the way we want it. Right?

Michael Horn

Well, with that is the final word. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a fun conversation. I've learned a lot and just appreciate the work you're doing.

Andrew Clark

Of course I appreciate the work you're doing. It's excellent.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ron Matus, the Director of Research and Special Projects at Step Up For Students, joined me to discuss the evolution of education choice in Florida. We talked specifically about the significant growth and impact of education savings accounts (ESAs) on the landscape. And Ron shared insights into the trend of unbundled, à la carte learning by highlighting its rapid adoption and the factors driving it. We also touched on the accountability debate surrounding ESAs and the innovative roles districts and programs like Florida Virtual School are playing.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. Delighted you are all joining us at the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through how we get there, I am delighted that Ron Matus, the Director of Research and Special Projects at Step up for Students, which was founded as a nonprofit org to administer scholarships for Florida school children to the school that most made sense for them. I'm delighted that Ron is joining us today. Ron, first, good to see you. You've been a longtime friend and follower on both sides of the equation in this space. So how are you?

Ron Matus:

Good to see you. I'm great. I am amazed and grateful and honored to be on your show. I feel like I'm in a dream. So thank you so much for inviting me on.

Michael Horn:

As always, you guys will learn as you listen that Ron is nothing but flattering and over with the praise of others. But why don't you start before we get into some of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you, which is getting a view of the landscape in Florida, specifically. But first, give us sort of an overview briefly of your own background, how you came to the world of education and, and perhaps how, you know, Step up for Students, how it intersects with that story and how Step up for Students has actually evolved over time into its current set of operations.

Ron Matus:

Sure, sure. Well, I guess the most boring part would be my story, but I am a longtime former newspaper reporter. That's what I did really my entire adult life until I joined Step up back in 2012. I was at the Tampa Bay Times, which is the biggest and most influential newspaper in Florida. And back when newspapers had a little more juice, I mean, they were pound for pound, one of the best newspapers in America. I was there for 10 years, and for eight years I was the state education reporter. And so there's a direct connection between what I learned as a reporter and what inspired me to move over to Step Up. You know, over that time, writing a lot about issues with public education, seeing how choice was making a difference, and I started covering education, during Governor Bush's second term, of course, he did a ton to accelerate choice in Florida. So I was there in the early days as choice was ramping up, and I came to see how absolutely vital it was to an education system that I thought made sense. And at some point back around 2012, I got a chance to move over to Step Up. One of my former colleagues, a really remarkable guy named John East, who was a longtime editorial page writer at the Times, had moved over to Step Up. And a few years down the road, he reached out and said, hey, if you want to actually make a difference, instead of writing about problems, you want to help solve them, you might want to consider Step up and best decision I ever made.

I'm not one of those reporters who left the profession because things were crumbling around me, and I had to go, you know, reinvent myself as a PR flack or something. I left because I realized that choice was going to be the new normal, and I had a chance to shape that a little bit, and I had a chance to watch it unfold from just an incredible perch, which is Step Up. So the second thing that you were asking about how Step Up has changed, I think Step Up has changed remarkably over the time that I've been here. And in some ways, that change is representative of the change as a whole in the public education system in Florida. So when I got to Step Up, there were, like, 20 or 25 employees. We have 20 times that now. We have more than.

Michael Horn:

For real.

Ron Matus:

For real. We have more than 400 employees now.

Michael Horn:

Wow.

Ron Matus:

When I got to Step Up, we were serving about 50,000 students on scholarship. Today you probably heard this big announcement from Governor DeSantis last week. We've now reached the 500,000 threshold in terms of scholarship students. So the number of students we're serving has increased tenfold. And then, as you know, because you pay such close attention to this stuff, we're not just serving students on school choice scholarships anymore, which was the way it was when I got here, which is relatively simple. And I want, you know, my colleagues do a lot of incredible work. So I don't want to say it was simple, but

Michael Horn:

Emphasis on relatively. Yeah

Ron Matus:

Yeah, compared to what it is now. You know, these scholarships are technically now all ESAs. And so the volume of transactions that we have to process, it's gone through the roof. And so we have been right there the whole time, as Florida has moved from a system of district schools to school choice, and now from a system of school choice to education choice. And, and that's where we are now. And that next phase of going from school choice to education choice is exciting and we're right in the middle of it.

Expanding Education Choice Discourse

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I think that phrase from school choice to education choice is a really good way to frame it, of course, because ESAs are not just, and one of my biggest pet peeves is when people call them vouchers, and I'm like, it's not just, it's, it's very different in a lot of, in a lot of respects. And I love how you introduced yourself the same way you introduced yourself to me over, you know, probably, I think it was right before you maybe you formally joined Step Up for Students is the first time we connected and you said, I'm just a journalist trying to figure this out. So here you are, having learned quite a bit and for, and figured out quite a bit. And I guess the intersection section where I want to go in is about a year ago, maybe a little over, I wrote a piece suggesting that as education choice grows, meaning not just school choice, but we should start to expect more unbundling of what we think of as schools. Right. Students aren't just going to go to one school.

They'll have tutors, they'll have a variety of options. But I didn't expect to see a great unbundling en masse. And, and I base that frankly on two things. One, our theories at the Christensen Institute around how innovations tend to start as very bundled over time before they modularize and unbundled. But I also based it, frankly, on data from Florida that you all had published about how individuals were in fact using ESAs. But then fast forward, and you all came out with this report, a taste of à la carte learning. And it seems that things on the ground are changing quite a bit. So in that report, what did you learn? What is the data showing in terms of how people are using education savings accounts and how perhaps the nature of choice and schooling and learning is evolving?

Ron Matus:

I think it's changing pretty rapidly. So when you say, you know, you expected there to be an unbundling, but not a great unbundling, I guess it depends on, you know, what your definition of great is.

Michael Horn:

Sure, I got some latitude in the headline writing. Right.

Ron Matus:

So, I mean, I think there's a lot going on and things have changed very quickly. Your analysis was absolutely correct in that the vast majority of money at this point is still being used for private school tuition, even though technically these are ESAs. The vast majority of families are still using the ESAs like the old school. And I say old school even though most of the country hasn't even gotten these yet.

Michael Horn:

But I was going to say you're well ahead of the curve there.

Ron Matus:

We are ahead of the curve. And so, but, but most families are using it like a voucher in that they're using it to access the private schools that they want. And for what it's worth, those private schools are also changing pretty dramatically. I mean, I think there are a lot of dynamic things going on in the private school choice space too, and I don't want to diminish that. At the same time though, even though most of the money is still being used for private school tuition, we do have growing numbers of families who are doing completely customized, personalized, à la carte unbundled learning. And it's not, it's happening pretty quickly, but it's happening maybe a little less quickly than people realize because the first ESA is 10 years old. I mean, we got our first ESA program 10 years ago that was for students with special needs. But very quickly, thousands of parents were using that ESA to pick and choose from multiple providers and programs.

Rise of Personalized Education Programs

Ron Matus:

They were the pioneers, the early adopters, you know, whatever you want to call it. And they really started showing the rest of us what was possible. So, there were pioneers and there have been for 10 years. And then you fast forward to 2023 when we got this new scholarship program called the Personalized Education Program Scholarship, which is an ESA for a broader group of families who are not enrolled in public school. They're essentially homeschool families, although there are some legal distinctions there. But Michael, we went from thousands of families doing à la carte learning to tens of thousands in a snap between those two programs, between, you know, the ESA for students with special needs and those in that program who are unbundling doing à la carte, and this new program at this point, we have probably about 80,000 families doing à la carte learning this fall. I would bet a decent amount of money that we would be in excess of 100,000 because the cap on the PEP program alone is 100,000 plus we are seeing more and more of those, the scholarships called the Family Empowerment Scholarship for families with unique abilities, students with unique abilities.

But that program has a bunch of à la carte families too. So between those two programs, we'll be beyond a hundred thousand this fall. So when you say great unbundling, I mean that's a pretty big number that's materialized in a short amount of time.

Michael Horn:

That's a huge number. I just put it in context in two ways. One, overall K12 student population in Florida. And then two, just so we have a percentage sense. And then when you say like they're à la carte, like, you know, what are their days or, or sort of spend look like what, you know, what's the range of categories you see that they're cobbling together?

Ron Matus:

So overall in Florida we have about 3.3 to 3.4 million kids. So, you know, 80,000 or a hundred thousand do an à la carte, that's still a relatively small number in that bigger mix. And I don't know what the ceiling is. You know, if I ever had a crystal ball, it was shattered into a gazillion pieces five years ago. Things have changed so rapidly. I never would have foreseen what we're experiencing now. So it's still a small percentage, but it's growing rapidly. And then in terms of what those families are doing, it's remarkable. I mean, they so quickly have figured out how to maximize the use of the ESAs to cobble together these programs from multiple providers. So to give you just, I mean, just one example, this one mom who I wrote about in conjunction with the à la carte paper, she's probably picking and choosing from a dozen different providers. So she's going to outschool for a writing tutor, she's going to two different micro schools to get à la carte classes. In one case for science and engineering classes, in the other case for art and drama classes. She's using the ESA to do lacrosse for her kids at a recreational league. She's using it for a chess club, Lego robotics competitive team. Oh my gosh. What else is she using it for? Oh, her kids are dyslexic, so she's got a dyslexia tutor which she accesses online because the tutor is in Iowa where they were originally. So she can continue to use the same tutor and then on and on. And then, then she supplements all of that with a variety of homeschool materials. So she's got like 20 different things that she's juggling to put together for her two boys. And that is not unusual in the least. There are families all over the place doing that.

ESAs and Special Ed

Michael Horn:

It occurs to me one, the lack of parochialism is admirable in the state that you would allow dollars to be spent for a tutor in Iowa. Right. I can imagine other states putting in education savings accounts and being like. But it has to be spent within, you know, so that strikes me. But a second thing strikes me about the special ed origins, which I, for some reason, had not put that together. The opportunity, I think, for ESAs, like, of course special ed families should be on the front lines of à la carte unbundled, because their needs are probably the clearest to those parents and the need to source it from lots of different places rather than assume a one size fits all, like they've been crushed under the weight of that for a long time.

But B, it also could bring some real exciting, like from a, you know, not just from a service delivery of getting the right services, but also from a cost perspective I would think, the current incentives in special education across the country are to like, ramp up dollars as evidence of serving. Here's actually a way to make it more efficient, I would think, because the parents are thinking about what's the right mix and value across. Across a budget, in effect, which I think is pretty exciting. The other thing that your report did, and again, the name of it, A Taste of à la Carte Learning, came out in June. You all talked about how this was also really happening in certain regions within Florida. I think South Florida was one of them that you fingered, if memory serves. What's the context? So, like, if part of this story is special ed, what's the context of South Florida? Why is it, why do you think it's perhaps happening there more?

Ron Matus:

Well, it's definitely like happening in a huge way down there. I mean, there are folks down there who have just created an alternative universe for education in a short amount of time. It's really remarkable to behold. Shiren Rattigan, who you just had on your show recently, who I just find to be completely inspiring, she's right in the middle of that. But there's like a hundred of hers down there doing these amazing things. I think there are several things happening that make sense as to why South Florida is a particular hotspot. So number one, you know, there's the density down there. There's a lot of people. I mean, there's 6 or 7 million people between three counties, you know, Miami Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. And, you know, when you have that many people, even a small percentage who want to do something different can be a lot. And I think that's what we're seeing down there. There's a small percentage who want to do something different than traditional education.

But they've got numbers because there's so many people down there. The second thing I think is it's incredibly diverse down there. I mean, Florida would be one of the most diverse states in the country, right and South Florida is even more diverse than the rest of Florida. So you just have this incredibly dynamic mix of people. Many folks down there would be first generation immigrants. So you have that, like, immigrant drive. I think you have very much a ton of people with an entrepreneurial mindset down there who want to do something different, who want to, you know, shape their own destinies.

And if they got the opportunity, they're going to do it. And then last but not least, and I hope I'm not, like, gonna sound disparaging here, I do think that these folks, particularly in Broward county, which is the heart of this, are particularly driven because of the situation with the school districts down there. It's kind of interesting that you have, side by side, one of the most dynamic school districts, a district that has made a name for itself embracing change and embracing choice. And then right next door, which is Miami Dade.

Michael Horn:

I was gonna say that must be Miami Dade.

Ron Matus:

Yeah, Miami Dade. Certainly under Alberto Carvalho, who's now the superintendent in Los Angeles, they did remarkable things, and that has continued under the new superintendent. But then right next door is Broward, which is, you know, kind of more like your traditional big city school district, fairly or not, it has, you know, a disproportionate share of negative headlines about board politics and, you know, financial issues with projects and cost overruns. And that's been kind of the Broward story for a long, long time. So there were many frustrated families down there. Not to say that it's still not serving a lot of families well, because I don't want to take that away from them, because they are. But I think there was more frustration down there because it's kind of a stereotypical big city district.

And then the last thing I'll say, and then I'll quit rambling. Parkland also happened down there in 2018, and I don't want to, I don't think we should diminish, like, the psychological impact that had on a ton of families. So between the frustration with, like, a typical big city district and then the horror of Parkland, people wanted something different. And it's not a surprise to me that the biggest growth, both in raw numbers and percentage in homeschooling in any big district in Florida was in Broward. And so it's also no surprise to me that parents there and educators there took the opportunities they got with ESAs and ran with it. And that's what you see happening.

Michael Horn:

Is your sense that the folks who have taken ESAs and gone into homeschooling are most of them in micro schools at this point. Like how micro schools are in the state of Florida?

Ron Matus:

You know, nobody has a good number, but it's easily hundreds.

Michael Horn:

Okay.

Ron Matus:

There is a group called, you know, the Florida Micro Schools, which has a couple hundred members and I don't think they've captured them all. I mean, Michael, they crop up all the time. I mean, it's amazing. But nobody has a good number on them. Some of them you can track because they are technically officially state registered private schools.

As you know, the definition is kind of fuzzy. So there's a bunch of schools that aren't registered private schools, but are still like these little micro environments, essentially micro schools, either hybrid home schools or kind of their own little homeschool setup. So nobody has a good number, but I would say easily hundreds.

Michael Horn:

Super interesting. Okay, so let me ask you this question, because you brought up the districts and where they are more effective, perhaps you see less folks looking outside the district and where they are perhaps less effective, you see some more pent up demand for other options. You know, you talked about the special education history in Florida also. The other history, of course, is the Florida Virtual School, which goes back almost, you know, 30 years ago, I think, at this point. And Florida Virtual School is interesting because it's literally à la carte online courses for the most part. And it was also sort of like in this interesting way, like a tool of districts to provide bespoke options. So I'm just sort of curious, like in your view, has that made school districts perhaps more able than maybe we'll see in other states to be able to respond and offer, you know, unbundled education options themselves or sort of be the quarterbacks, if you will, for these, for families, you know, taken a little bit here, taking a little bit there, you got the Tim Tebow law. Like you have sort of, it seems, ingredients that would make districts more nimble.

But I don't know if that's true.

Ron Matus:

I think it very much is true. And I'm so glad you brought up Florida Virtual School, because as amazing as they have been for 30 years, I don't think they've ever gotten fully the credit they deserve for being just the pioneers, of course choice. Right. Like you're right, they were, they're like the original à la carte provider.

Virtual Learning Expands in Districts

Ron Matus:

And they've been here in our backyard, and I think what they did was show people a model and they also kind of prime the pump because, you know, for, I don't know, at least a decade now, maybe 15 years now, it has been a graduation requirement that kids take at least one virtual school class. And so hundreds of thousands of families have had a little taste of à la carte learning because they've had to, like, take a single class from a different provider. So everybody's experienced that. I think what we're seeing now is families can still go to Florida Virtual School to access à la carte classes. But we're also seeing, and this is a super amazing development to keep track of going forward. We're also seeing districts now offering unbundling of their own, apart from virtual classes, and so there are six districts. I think that's correct,

There may be even more now. There are six districts that I know of who are now official providers in the system who can get paid with ESA funds. And they're doing that so families can access one or two or three classes, whatever they want to supplement the rest of the programming they're putting together for their kids. There are at least a half dozen other districts who are in the pipeline. So there are districts who are seeing the times have changed. Some families don't want our whole package deal. They just want some of the pieces,

Why don't we offer that to them? And so Florida Virtual School primed the pump for that. But we're seeing districts on their own offer in person, à la carte classes too. And that's a trend I expect to continue.

Michael Horn:

That's fascinating. I mean, I think it's really cool also, because it also gives lie to this sort of storyline that I think is lazy from people that say, oh, ESAs are just a way to undercut districts. No, like districts, come on in, innovate, compete, you know, do better things for students. You got evidence that maybe they're doing it?

Ron Matus:

Well, they're doing it. And it's also not unexpected to me anyways. And I want to give everybody credit who deserves credit. And I don't think this is an either or thing. It's not us versus them. And even though people don't recognize this enough, the fact is districts in Florida, most of them, not all of them, but most of them did respond to the first wave of choice. They did respond to school choice.

All those charters and all those private schools that, you know, parents were accessing with their vouchers or tax credit scholarships that did inspire districts to rev up their own choice options in a huge way. I don't know what the exact latest numbers are, but I would say they are either the biggest engines for school choice now in Florida or among them, because all those magnet schools and career academies and IB programs and everything else they created, made them leaders in choice, too. And so I am not entirely surprised that now that we're moving from school choice to education choice, and they see families wanting that, that they will find some way to adapt. And I think we should give them credit for the extent to which they are adapting to the new environment.

Florida Education: Innovation and Challenges

Michael Horn:

Super interesting. And of course, it's not just choice, right? With the innovation and choice and range of things you're seeing, you know, test scores, everything else have risen in Florida. It's one of the real bright spots in the nation. I want to end our conversation on maybe the downer, but maybe you'll give us the silver lining, which is you have this section in the report around remaining challenges. And so I'll quote it, you say, to ensure the sustained growth of à la carte providers, policymakers must continue working with parents, providers and other stakeholders to raise awareness about the possibilities, better define success and accountability, and thoughtfully strengthen processes for everything from determining eligibility to facilitating payments. Now, I don't have to tell you this touches a big nerve around accountability and it's a flashpoint. As you know, in this space there are some who say public funding, therefore we need, you know, publicly determined accountability for every choice a student or family might make, whether that's school or piano lesson or equine therapy, I suppose. And the other side says, well, families choosing is in fact the accountability, because if it's not working for them, they can go elsewhere.

So they're really empowered in this world of ESAs and education choice. Help me understand why you all highlighted this as a challenge in your own perspective or observations around this tension or looming question.

Ron Matus:

You know, I think we had to put it in there because it is an important question. It is a totally fair question, and, you know, nobody should dodge that. And I, and I don't think it's a downer. I think it's an opportunity for us to better explain one, that it's not either or, but two, that, you know, accountability isn't just regulations. Accountability is on a continuum that also includes, you know, consumer choice or parent choice and that end of the accountability spectrum, and this is something I've learned a lot about over the past 10 or 15 years, is pretty exacting. You know, parents make good decisions, they do drive quality.

And I think we need to help people understand that accountability isn't just regs. I think we have an opportunity to help people understand that there is evidence, including from our other scholarship programs, that when you have a light touch with the regulations and you put the bulk of the accountability on the parents to drive quality, you get good results. I mean, what we see with the other scholarship programs essentially are better outcomes at far less cost, with much higher customer satisfaction, even though those systems are far less regulated than the traditional systems. I suspect that will hold true with à la carte learning as well. One other thing to mention is that, you know, going back to the not being either or so there is a regulatory accountability piece on the PEP program as well, which is, you know, the à la carte program that's blowing up. Those students do have to take a norm reference test just like their counterparts who are using the old school school choice scholarships. So at some point, not too far in the future, we will have data from those students and that will tell us something. And you know, maybe it'll tell us that just like with the school choice scholarship kids, that light touch on the regs is working pretty well.

Maybe it'll tell us something different and we'll have to, you know, adjust. But somebody in their wisdom, I think, you know, and I know testing can be controversial, and I know plenty of families don't want to take any test, but I think that somebody in their wisdom decided we should at least have that piece so that we can check going forward whether this is getting, you know, the results and the outcomes that we want and taxpayers want and the state wants. So I'm rambling now, but we had to put that question in there. Accountability is a huge question. It's a fair question. And I think we have an opportunity to better explain it to people so that they see the setup that we've created so far makes sense.

Michael Horn:

So sorry, lightning last question on this one then, because I'm curious. You all Step up for Students is almost a portal that's processing ESA dollars and helping people get to the schools of choice or education programs of choice, whatever it might be. What role do you all play in sort of showcasing the data, whatever that means, whether it's test scores or consumer opinion or whatever else, to help, you know, people have more information. Are you all thinking about, almost Yelp like providing more of that information?

Ron Matus:

I think that is the hope that eventually our systems will be able to have that consumer posted information so that families can get some kind of. Now, I don't know where that's at and sure, I want to be careful here. I don't know exactly where that's at or what it's going to look like. But that has been something that's been talked about for a long time. You know, essentially having the parents themselves, the consumers, like we do with so many things nowadays, put their two cents in as to whether this provider or that school was a good deal. So I suspect that that is where we're headed.

Michael Horn:

Well, these are things that we'll have to stay abreast of and you'll have to come back at some point and tell us how it's evolved over time. But just really appreciate you all, you coming in and your team and I didn't realize 400 plus amazing growth, you know, the work that you all are doing on behalf of Florida students. Appreciate it, Ron.

Ron Matus:

Well, thank you so much. And a big shout out to, you know, all of my colleagues, all 400 of them, most of whom I have not met. I haven't met them, but they're incredible. And they're making this all happen. I mean, they're making it so families all over Florida can have exactly what they want for their kids. And it's a cool thing to be part of. So thank you so much for giving me a little bit of a spotlight and asking these great questions. I really appreciate it.

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In this latest episode, I got to join forces with my colleague Ann Somers Hogg, who leads health-care research at the Christensen Institute and hosts the podcast, Life-Centered Health Care. Our guest was Craig Sprinkle, CEO of MedCerts. We discuss how MedCerts trains health-care professionals, from how it delivers hands-on learning through remote instruction to the savings students have incurred and future innovations on the horizon.

Michael Horn:

Welcome, everyone. Michael Horn here. And I'm thrilled for today's episode of our podcast, which will be different from what we've done in the past. And that's because we're doing a joint podcast, if you will, so that this episode will actually air in two different places. There's, of course, my podcast, the Future of Education, where we're dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And then we're partnering today with Life-Centered Health Care, a podcast that my colleague at the Christensen Institute, Ann Somers Hogg, produces. And Life-Centered Health Care delves into what disrupting health care really means. Not the buzz phrase, but what does it really look like and how do we do it? And how do the innovation theories that we use at the Clayton Christensen Institute shed light on the evolution of the broader health-care ecosystem to inspire others seeking to transform health care? So first, a welcome to my co-host for today. She's a senior research fellow at the Christensen Institute, Ann Somers. So good to see you. Happy New Year.

Ann Somers Hogg:

Great to see you. Happy New Year. Thank you for having me today. I'm excited about this.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad we're teaming up together on this. And for those wondering why we're doing a joint podcast, I will say the reason is because those who fill the jobs in health care, of course, do so through forms of medical education. And that's a place in sore need of innovation itself as we think about that broader ecosystem. So with that, I'll introduce our guest for today who's going to shed light on all this. Craig Sprinkle, CEO of MedCerts since 2022, you're an InStride company. And of course, Craig joined MedCerts in 2018 in a combined role as the CFO and COO and has served as the CFO since 2020 before stepping into the CEO role. So, Craig, great to see you. Thank you for joining us.

Craig Sprinkle:

Yes, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. So thank you. Great to see both of you.

The MedCerts Origin Story

Michael Horn:

Yeah, you bet. So I want to start actually, you know, predating you at MedCerts, but what led to the launch of MedCerts, You know, what's the market need you all were fulfilling and the credentials that you're really helping fill in the health-care system. I will say, like, I had the chance to watch some of the formation of it, but I've never actually heard from someone at MedCerts how they view the opportunity and market need

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, absolutely, so as you said, it kind of predates me a little bit, but I'm happy to share that. First of all, we just celebrated our 15-year anniversary a year ago. MedCerts originally was founded and frankly still operates very similarly today, in a way that we saw a lack of quality online health-care training that existed 15 years ago that would quickly elevate students to be able to gain new skills, be job ready, and be ready to step into a job or a career. So we saw that gap, we saw an opportunity to ultimately fulfill that. At the same time. And what still carries forward today is that we're addressing a skills gap in the health care and IT industry. Employer needs are continuing to grow. They're looking for more out of job candidates and people that they want to fill vacancies that they have. And there's just a lack of available talent. So we saw a need not only in terms of delivery of that curriculum and delivery of that education, but also fulfilling a need on the employer side to really train towards skills that employers are looking for and making sure that those students are ultimately job ready when they come out of that training.

Ann Somers Hogg:

Yeah, you mentioned that there was a lack of quality online medical training. Could you tell us a little bit about how do you compare with other market offerings in terms of thinking about your business model? So what are the resources and processes that you have in place to educate your learners?

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know that we'll probably talk a little bit more about delivery models and things like that as we continue the conversation, but if you kind of rewind 15 years ago, you know, a lot of things that the experience that a student would have is mostly like in classroom instruction, there wasn't a lot of hands on experience being taught. There wasn't a lot of applicable skills being taught inside that classroom experience. And that was ultimately leading to a gap whenever a person would walk out of that training to ultimately be ready to step into a job. We saw that, and I don't think that it was perfect at the time 15 years ago, whenever we first started delivering this, but bringing more of those applicable skills into an application environment where the student is not only listening to instruction on screen, but they're also learning on how to apply those skills as they're learning and going through that training. So that's a little bit of the difference, if you will, between the delivery of something that we were doing at the time online versus more traditional in classroom instruction. Not as much hands-on experience and not as much interactivity, if you will, within the classroom itself.

Providing Hands-On Learning in an Online Environment

Ann Somers Hogg:

Got it, got it. Thanks for explaining that. And this is probably going to sound like a silly question, but I want to dive into it because if it's an online based education program. You mentioned the importance of the hands-on training and a lot of medical training involves that hands-on experience. So how do you provide these hands-on learning opportunities for students in that online environment?

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of our programs first and foremost involve a clinical requirement. So there is hands-on training required in order to even obtain the credential to begin with, in many of the programs that we train towards. The way that we accomplish that is a couple of different ways. One, we have a lot of partnerships with employers whereby they have agreed to allow our students to come on site, in their environment, work alongside someone else and ultimately obtain those skills. So they're not only taking what they've learned in classroom, if you will, through our didactic portion of our training, but also taking that into a live environment and applying it alongside someone that's already working in the job or the role that they're ultimately seeking to be a part of. So some of that is through those relationships that we have. We also work with a lot of local training facilities that ultimately host students to allow them to come into a simulated classroom environment, or, sorry, a work environment to where they can do the same thing, it's just not on site with a particular employer. So we do that in both ways. We do it through partnerships that we have with employers. Then we also do that through training sites that we have relationships with, whether that's regionally or locally based, to where our students can go into those facilities and ultimately complete those clinical requirements and hands-on requirements that they have. The third element of that is that we also have skill assessments built into our training itself online. So as the student goes out on site, they get some of that hands-on experience, they come back, if you will, into the virtual classroom. We have assessments that we will walk a student through to ultimately test their proficiency on how well they understood some of those things that they learned. And they're going through assessments on a regular basis and getting feedback on areas where they can and need to improve.

The Student Experience

Michael Horn:

It's super interesting to hear you sort of break that down, Craig, because what is coming across actually is that you weren't just innovating in the area of online education, but you were also innovating against the traditional model, as you described, to create a much more interactive experience, a more active learning experience it sounds like. Just talk us through what a typical student experience looks like over the course of their certification program. But also maybe Ann Somers, we can ask the question about business model in terms of program costs relative to other options in a moment but Craig, just focus on like the interactive learning experience itself and how that differs and how you facilitated that over the course of their certification.

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, sure, absolutely. And I guess I'll preface this by saying that obviously every student experience is a little bit different. But by and large, when a student first enrolls in their program, first and foremost they're looking for that alternative route in order to get a fast track into a career. That's sort of fundamental to what we do, is that we offer that affordable training. It's something that we can offer in a fast and rapid way for them, it's much more affordable at little to no debt to that individual at the end of the day. And it provides that faster path into a career that they're ultimately looking for. Remember, the end goal is not the training itself, it's the job or it's the career that they're trying to build towards that we're really trying to help them with. Generally speaking, our students, once they enroll in one of our programs, they're typically going through a three to six month process, depending on the program, whereby they're completing initially a didactic portion of the training. That's the virtual online piece of it, typically that's built around quizzes, virtual assessments, interactivity, there's gamification if you will in a lot of the training that we do, there's real time feedback that they're getting through avatars and things on screen that they are interacting with and then that's followed up in some cases depending, on the program of course, with a clinical component that we were just talking about where that student will then go out on site, complete a lot of the hands on training that's required associated with their program and learn a lot of that in person either through an employer or training facility that we were talking about. They're taking regular assessments along the way, so they're getting continuous feedback around areas that they're doing well in, areas that they need to improve upon. And there's one to one support that we're ultimately offering them as well. They have an advisor that's assigned to them from day one. That advisor follows them all the way through, providing support, providing encouragement. As you can imagine, in an online environment it's very self led, self paced, it's sometimes very individualized and there can be an element of loneliness that comes along with that. So having someone that they can connect with on a regular basis, we feel is critically important to that success of that student. Along the way as well, they get connected with a career coach. That career coach is also helping them begin to develop a resume, begin to go through skill development as it relates to having a successful interview, getting connected with employers. While we certainly don't guarantee employment at the end of a program, we help students as much as we can get connected with job opportunities and openings that may exist in the geographical area that they're a part of. So that gives you a little bit of a window into, I guess, more of the specifics of how we deliver the training, but also the support and the service that we give along the way as well.

Access and Affordability

Ann Somers Hogg:

Yes, that's really interesting, especially how you pointed to the connection to the advisor and how they're really helping them through the process, so that there is that feeling that people would probably be getting in the one on one or sorry, in the in person environment where they have that one on one connection with a teacher or an advisor. So one of the things you mentioned towards the beginning of the explanation about the typical student experience is it's an affordable training and it's a fast and rapid way to get a certification with little to no debt. So could you talk a little bit about how your program costs and maybe the options for student payment differ from traditional models? What sets you apart and makes it more affordable or makes people able to get through with little to no debt?

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think I mentioned a minute ago that typically our programs are structured to cover training that goes around either between three weeks up to about six months. From a pricing perspective, those programs range as low as $2,000 for a full certification program, all the way up to $6,000, but generally the average is around $4,000 at the end of the day. And whenever you kind of stack that up against, you know, a traditional undergrad program or even course hour costs at the four year college level, it's much more affordable and less expensive whenever you start to compare it on that level. At the same time, the speed at which someone can move through that training, first and foremost is self paced, which is a huge advantage to an adult learner who has a lot of distractions in their life at the end of the day, they do want to dedicate the time to getting the additional training, but they may not be able to sit and dedicate 8, 9, 10 hours a day to doing it. So we allow that flexibility in their scheduling to do that at their own pace. The funding and the ability of someone to be able to pay for their programs actually comes from a number of different places. Number one is that a lot of our students come through relationships that we have with employers. So there's typically a tuition reimbursement policy behind a student or other funding that's available through their employer, that from a student's perspective or that employee's perspective, it's basically no out of pocket cost for them at all. They're simply utilizing those benefits that they have through their employer. Some of the students that we ultimately interact with are also eligible for either state or federal level grant funding, depending on the program, depending on where they're taking advantage of that training, and they're able to tap into some of that funding as well. And then lastly, we also provide very affordable tuition assistance programs, payment plans, that allow a student to effectively take out a loan for their program. But it's a relatively low payment in the grand scheme of when you think about traditional student loans and the cost of tuition and things like that, it's a much more affordable monthly cost for them that they're paying for as they go through their training. And by the time they frankly complete their training, they have none of that debt left at that point in time. So they're walking out not only with a credential, but no further debt or payment obligation as it relates to the program that they just took advantage of.

Michael Horn:

Super interesting on a few fronts, Craig, I have a set of questions around outcomes and success. But before going there, just to double back on something that you just said as you were describing the loan, you know, when the few circumstances where people are taking out loans, it sounds like it's not federal student loans. So do you all not participate in the Title Four, you know, federal government, right, funding of higher ed?

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, that's correct. So we don't actually take advantage of any of the Title Four funding that's out there today. The loan programs that I'm referring to, those are programs that we've structured internally ourselves. So if you think about it for a second, we are ultimately underwriting, you know, the default risk, if you will, associated with a lot of those payment plans. But quite frankly, we find that the performance is very, very positive. Because at the end of the day, you do have students that enroll in these programs that are very motivated. They are looking for an opportunity to take the training and very quickly move into a job and a career in a very short time period. So we see the performance of those payment plans, frankly, being much better in a lot of cases than what you would see through some of the other funding sources that you mentioned. And that allows us to continue to just do more of that, you know, over time.

Evaluating Outcomes

Michael Horn:

Super interesting, because it strikes me that that does a few things, right? One, by not participating in Title Four, you all save cost in compliance, but you also get permission to do a lot more innovation in terms of program delivery, distribution, cost of acquisition of students, so forth. But secondly, I would imagine because you're doing the loan programming, your incentives are actually well aligned with your students because you are bearing the risk just as they are which is a central problem right now of the higher ed financing, right, is that the institution doesn't have any skin in the game on that. Let's talk about metrics of success and value and so forth. I know this a little bit because I was at Guild, I think when MedCerts became one of the providers for helping employees be able to move into health-care roles, depending on where they were with their employers. And a big thing for the Guild was we want to choose online programs that serve adults well. We want to choose programs that have good outcomes. How all do you measure outcomes? What are they, and how do they compare to traditional models?

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, first and foremost, I mentioned a minute ago that the end goal and the ultimate outcome that we're looking for is the student's placement into a job. And again, that can take different forms when you're talking about relationships that we have with employers, because some of those students and those learners are already existing employees of that particular employer, but they are looking for upskilling or reskilling opportunities so that they can move into that next role or move into the next step in their career ladder. So ultimately, that is the end goal that we're looking for. Beyond that, it's more the traditional outcomes that you would see, regardless of it being MedCerts or any other training provider or education institution, you know, number one is whether you call it a graduation rate or a completion rate, that is something that we look very closely at in terms of how the rate at which our students are completing successfully their training and their programs. I would say the next largest or equally most important one is ultimately the employment rate. And we look at that very regularly. We are surveying our students on a regular basis. We stay in contact with them post graduation after they've completed their certification training, to stay in contact with them to make sure that either A, they did get the job that they were looking for or B they are looking for something different and if we can be of assistance to them to help connect them with other employers and other opportunities, we definitely want to do that for them. I will tell you that comparatively, and I'm certainly biased whenever I say this is that I believe that our outcomes are ratably better than what you would see in more of the higher ed space. Our completion rates or graduation rates are well in excess of 70% across all of our programs. That's blended by the way, some are a little bit lower and certainly some are much higher. But that's the overall average. And the way that we ultimately look at it's not traditional placement at the end of the day, but we look at employment and our employment rates of all of our graduates again are upwards of 70% or higher. And again that to be fair, that's a blend at times of both in field and out of field. But the vast majority of the employment that we're typically reporting on and looking at is infield associated with that. So there's other outcomes certainly, but those are the biggest ones that we definitely look at.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, go ahead Ann Somers.

Ann Somers Hogg:

Oh, I was just gonna say when you're looking at employment rate, is that employment rate at completion of the program or is that at one year, six months? Is it at a certain time period?

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, it's actually over a time horizon. So it's at the point that they have completed their program and then 12 months following that time period. Because you have to remember again, depending on the program, there are clinical requirements that still have to be completed. That student still needs to sit for their certification exam. So it's really getting them in that employment opportunity in that time period immediately following graduation.

Ann Somers Hogg:

Great, thanks for explaining that.

What’s Next?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, it's super interesting. Just one more question before I turn it to Anne Somers for sort of a final question, if you will. But when you talk about those metrics, those are actually stunning metrics for on ground programs, for an online program, those are astronomical. As you know, when you're talking about excess of 70% graduation rate in particular. And obviously the ROI to the student is very clear because these certifications have very clear labor market value. So the return is very clear. I'm curious, I guess a two part question as we think about where MedCerts maybe goes from here. Apprenticeships are becoming a very hot topic in the education career space, particularly in health care, is one of those places being identified for them. I'm curious if you're doing anything there and then the second question is what are you doing with AI in terms of program delivery as well? Because that's obviously another hot area. So AI, apprenticeships, things that we ought to keep an eye on there.

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, absolutely. So let me address the first one first. So I would say in terms of a traditional apprenticeship, we are doing a little bit of that, but not significantly. What we do a lot of frankly, is more of like externship placement. So again, in terms of an employer and ultimately what they're looking for from our graduates, sometimes depending on the program of study, the vacancies that they have, they may not look to fill that vacancy right away, but they want that person to come out on site and almost do further on the job training with the employer in an externship type setting, and then that leads to a job for them at that point in time. Apprenticeships can get a little bit complicated, to be quite honest, about what it takes to manage that at the employer level. It's not that we shy away from that. It's just a little bit more difficult to execute. At the end of the day, we find that again, to change the word a little bit, you know, a traditional externship provides that faster and easier path to where it's a little bit of like test driving from the employer's perspective and test driving from the employee's perspective. And we find that that works out pretty well.

Michael Horn:

What about in terms of AI before I turn it over?

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, yeah. So I would say probably 12, 18 months ago, we really started in earnest to start to embed elements of AI into a lot of our training. The best examples that I can give you today is that we have a mental health support specialist program that we train towards today. And part of that training, a good core of the training, quite frankly, is on the screen interaction with a persona that an individual learner is interacting with. A patient that is already pre wired, if you will, with a certain personality and based on the nature of the conversation, obviously intelligent large language models, and we start to build up that intelligence in the interaction that starts to build that relationship and that conversation as the person navigates through, through that interview process with the patient. So that's just one example of that. I will also tell you that we're actually leveraging AI quite a bit from a product development perspective to just help expedite how quickly we can move through new product development and bring new offerings to market as well. So I don't want to diminish that fact, but we're, I mean, we're finding every way possible that we can leverage AI in the most positive way.

MedCerts’ Work With High Schoolers

Ann Somers Hogg:

Great. And as Michael mentioned, I'll try and close it out with an all encompassing question here. So is there anything about what makes MedCerts unique that we didn't ask you but you wish we had? And if so, what's the question and what's the answer?

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, I mean, I think we had some really good conversation by the way, so thank you for that and I really appreciate all the questions. I think the main thing that we maybe didn't talk about, that I'm particularly excited about, is that what are the additional things that we're really doing to have a material impact on the vacancy crisis in health care? And I would say one of the bigger things among many, quite frankly, that we're doing is really focusing on early talent development and early skill development. And what I mean by that is that we're accomplishing that by really reaching down into the high school population and working with K12 providers to really bring our training into like juniors and seniors in high school, so it becomes part of their path towards graduation. And we kind of look at it as like a triple benefit at the end of the day. And what I mean by that is in many cases a student will have the opportunity to walk out of high school with a high school diploma. They will have a nationally recognized certification, and in some cases they will also have credit for prior learning associated with that certification at the college level if they choose to go down that path. And if you think about that, that is a massive cost saver for that learner at the end of the day where they may get credit for upwards of a semester's worth of education at the college level, which saves them a tremendous amount of tuition costs downstream, not to mention the skills that they've already built before they ever came out of high school. So that's just one path, if you will. But for those that are maybe not going down the four year college path or the two year college path, they are ready through that certification to step into a job that ultimately an employer is looking at that skill set and saying they're ready to be hired at the end of the day. So that's an area that obviously I'm really excited about, you can tell by the tone of my voice at the end of the day. But it's really something that we've seen a really large movement towards in the last 12 to 15 months.

Ann Somers Hogg:

Absolutely. I'm so glad that you brought that up. A few of the interesting models that I think I've sent on to Michael and another one of our education researchers at the institute have really piqued my interest when I see that a large health system is partnering with local high schools in order to do what you were talking about, in order to help those juniors and seniors really have a career path as soon as they leave high school.

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, that's a great point. I think to your point, employers are also seeing that opportunity where they can ultimately tap into talent earlier as well and not necessarily be solely relying on a training provider, you know, to bring all of that talent to them. They can find that through that partnership with that local high school district. And then we simply become an element of allowing or enabling that training to get that student job ready.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. It seems to me also I like it for all the reasons you guys have said, but it's dual enrollment with a lot more teeth in it because it's a meaningful credential that's backed up by a certification. So it's not just sort of the high school said you learned it. You can actually show that they've learned it and it has value whether they go labor market or college. I think that's going to be much more meaningful as a set of credentials.

Craig Sprinkle:

Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Horn:

Perfect. Well, look, thank you, Craig, so much, obviously, for the work that you're doing, for joining us on both Life Centered Health Care and the Future of Education today. You get two for one out of this conversation with us. And for all you tuning in, thank you for joining us. Ann Somers, great to see you. We'll look forward to more conversations on both of our shows. Thank you so much.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We wouldn’t ask a piano student to attempt an advanced concerto before they had Mary Had a Little Lamb down pat.

So why do we do the equivalent in schools?

In this video I use a comparison to music instruction to illustrate why tying school curriculum to students’ ages rather than their skill level doesn’t work for anyone.

(music playing)

Oh, hey there. I was just brushing up on a piece that I have not played in a long while. It's Schubert's Fourth Impromptu, and it's a piece that I'd actually mastered a long time ago on the piano.

But now I'm trying to get it up to speed on a keyboard—and it's a very different experience. But you can imagine that if I was just starting piano—I'd never played before or maybe just a couple lessons and my piano teacher said—well, Michael, you're 44 years old and it's August. So that means our lesson plan says it's time for you to be learning Schubert's Fourth Impromptu. So let's get started.

That would be insane. Why?

Because I wouldn't have mastered any of the foundational building blocks to be able to play such a piece. More appropriate for me would be trying to learn something like this. Right?

So it would be literally crazy for someone to say, sorry, it's time to skip on to what the pacing guide or the lesson plan says you should be doing based on your age.

Now, to be fair, that maybe wouldn't be a classical piece of music.

Maybe they've taken some of my level into account.

But still, maybe it'd be something like this. (music playing)

Or maybe even this. (music playing)

But the point is that it's pretty obvious that I should be moving on to something more advanced only once I've really shown that I've actually mastered or at least become proficient in the current piece and the set of skills that I'm working on.

No piano teacher worth their salt would do otherwise.

Thanks for reading The Future of Education! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Yet here's the rub.

Our traditional schools, they do this all the time and every single day. And we—the public, parents, even educators—most of us don't even bat an eye. We accept that that's just how school works.

Even though we know that's not how learning works.

Even though, of course a kid who has not mastered double-digit addition is going to struggle if they move on to double-digit multiplication before they're ready. It's crazy.

And it's time that we had people—students, kids, all of us—learning at the right level for them, just above where they've achieved mastery, so they aren't bored and there's some struggle and effort required to really engage them, but also so that they aren't discouraged, as there's too much struggle and too much effort required.

So let's wake up and move to mastery based learning and embed success for each and every child—not what we currently have, which is failure for most.

The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There has been a national discourse around the wave of anti-semitism that has swept across higher education since the start of the Hamas-Israel war in 2023. But what has it looked like at the K–12 level—and what can that teach us about combating hate more generally? To tackle those questions, I sat down with Tyler Gregory, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the largest collective voice of Jews in the Bay Area of California. We discussed how anti-semitism has manifested in schools over the last two academic years, the challenge of balancing free speech with protection from discrimination, and how to better equip students and educators to combat hate.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. Since October 7th, 2023, in this country, we've seen an outpouring of hate and specifically anti-Semitism across schools. The story has been well-known and well-told in higher education and our colleges and universities. It's also occurred in our K-12 schools and districts, and we haven't covered that nearly as much on this particular podcast, and so I'm glad we’ll get to delve into that today.

But before we do so, I just want to address what some folks have asked: why are we covering this as a topic for the Future of Education? And I think the reason fundamentally is that hate, anti-Semitism, so forth, raises big questions about the discourse and behaviors in our schools in the future. It raises big questions around free speech in our schools. And to the point of the work here, it raises big questions around how we support each and every single individual in realizing their full human potential, regardless of their race, creed, beliefs, on and on. And so I'll also admit, as this has begun over the past, now, year and a half, this is personal as well for me as a Jew, but I think it raises larger questions.

And to help us think through them, I'm delighted that Tyler Gregory is joining us because Tyler, you actually know something about this much deeper than i do. You've been on the front lines of this as the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the largest collective voice of Bay Area Jews in California. Under your leadership, JCRC pushes for a just world where Jewish identity is embraced and all people can thrive. And I think it's important to note before you jump in, you all have mobilized multi-ethnic, multi-faith coalitions to fight back, not just against anti-semitism, but to show up for lots of groups who have felt marginalized or experienced discrimination—from Black communities, the Asian Pacific, Asian-American Pacific groups, obviously, anti-LGBTQ, sorry, I cannot talk today, anti-LGBTQ+ groups, and so on and on. And so this is an incredibly important set of topics, not just in the narrow prism of anti-semitism, but much more broadly, of course. So Tyler, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Tyler Gregory

It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Michael.

Anti-Semitism Prior to October 7th

Michael Horn

Yeah, you bet. And I'll do my best to talk a little bit better as we get going on, but you get to do most of the talking, fortunately. So I just want to have you give us the ground state of things. If we go back to October 6th, 2023, what was the state of anti-Semitism in California K through 12 schools specifically? There was a lot of conversation, I will say, around a proposed ethnic studies piece of the curriculum that some people felt had anti-Semitic efforts. So I'd love you to sort of give us what was the state of play prior to Hamas's attacks, and maybe how that's been similar or different from other states in the US that you've observed.

Tyler Gregory

So thanks so much, Michael. I would say that the October 7th attacks accelerated a trend that we had previously been seeing, which is an increasing amount of anti-semitism in K–12 schools, both environmental as well as in curriculum. You mentioned the ethnic studies course that is now going to be mandated in California schools and other states are following suit. We had a wake-up call almost five years ago when the proposed state model curriculum included anti-semitic rap lyrics that were references to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was our community's wake-up call. And this discipline historically has not included Jewish Americans, Jewish studies departments and higher ed have been separate from ethnic studies departments, Asian Pacific Islander, Latino, African-American, indigenous communities in ethnic studies. But they started writing about us in derogatory ways, and they decided that the Middle East would be a disciplinary area that should be included in ethnic studies. And so that experience was a wake-up call for us that we needed to play catch up and also figure out how we wanted to fit into the story of ethnic studies. And so that's been a hotspot for us, but so too has been casual anti-Semitism on the playground, in the classroom, and often more of dog whistles and overt forms of anti-semitism that maybe your or my parents, Michael, might have experienced as kids. And so we have a lot of work to do to help teachers and administrators recognize those dog whistles and how that leads to exclusion for Jewish students today. So then, I mean, that's obviously a disturbing state of affairs that had been escalating.

Responses to the Attacks

Michael Horn

I assume it goes into overdrive, sadly, starting October 7th, but just talk to us about what the last school year looked like before we get into this school year. Just, you know, in the schools themselves, I suspect you have stories of parents and students who've reached out to you and told you things. Give us a sense of the state of play, whether that's through stats or the stories, to really help us understand what was going on.

Tyler Gregory

Yeah, the challenges have evolved. So in the days after the horrific attacks, the main issues that we saw were from parents that felt the response from school districts to their communities were either inadequate, non-existent, had implicit biases, or there were other problems with the way they were communicating. And you talk about belonging on your show. This is really a moment for Jewish students, parents, families, teachers to feel like they belong as part of that district. And I think a lot of folks listening might not understand how these terrorist attacks impact Jews in America. This was the single deadliest day for the Jewish community since the end of World War II, since the end of the Holocaust. And that collective trauma, that generational trauma was felt across the Jewish world, whether we had direct connections to Israel or not. And so for a kid to show up on October 8th after that, whether they had a direct or indirect relationship to what happened, that was a traumatic event for all of us. And that was a time for them to be seen, felt, heard in the same way the response from school districts that we saw after the murder of George Floyd with Black Lives Matter, after a wave of Asian hate, particularly here in San Francisco where one out of three residents are Asian Pacific Islander, we saw the response from school districts to those acute moments for those communities. And we had the same expectation that school districts would hold our community in the same way. And sometimes there were insensitivities. Sometimes Muslim and Jewish students felt pitted against each other in these communications. And so that led to a lot of concern, if not disturbance, depending on the communication in terms of how administrators were communicating to their constituents about the issue.

Michael Horn

Did you see like in the classrooms themselves, teachers lash out in different ways and districts, how did they respond if that happened? Because I mean, right on higher ed campuses, I think a lot of people saw the protests, right? They saw the sit-ins and basically encampments in many cases. And then the administration saying, yeah, it violates a policy, but we're going to sort of look the other way. What was going on in K-12 school districts themselves, in the classrooms, on the playgrounds around this outside of the district initial response?

Tyler Gregory

So as you can imagine, things got more complicated as Israel responded to the attacks and went after Hamas and Gaza, which is an incredibly challenging condition to conduct a war. You go after terrorists that are hiding under civilian populations. Gaza is one of the most dense places in the world. And a debate, and I don't think this is the place to give my personal opinion on what's happening, but there is a robust debate and differences of opinion. And no matter what school district setting you're entering, you're going to have a multitude of opinions about what's taking place for the war. So once Israel's response started, it got much, much harder for administrators to figure out how to hold everybody, including places where you had Israeli and Palestinian families, both in that district. And you saw activism, much like on higher ed campuses, we saw Gaza walkouts in Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts. And most administrators were woefully unprepared on how to handle that, because you'd have a set of activists, students, and in some cases, teachers, which in our mind crosses the line, call for their fellow students to walk out. So what happens if you're a Jewish student that's sitting there and you're not participating? You feel vulnerable. You see that you are being judged by your peers. There is not a good way for the teacher to address the situation in the moment. I would say there are some bad actors and we can talk about that. But for the most part, what we're seeing is a lack of competency on how to hold Jewish and Muslim students through this traumatic time.

Holding Divergent Viewpoints

Michael Horn

So maybe actually, let's jump into that, because I'm super curious. It sounds like it's more of a story of we just don't know what to do to handle these challenges. Obviously, JCRC has been providing resources, I imagine, to help educate district leaders, school principals, et cetera, about what the proper response is. How have you all thought about how to hold these two divergent, two is actually probably the wrong word, right? Two Jews, three opinions. So it's probably multiple, multiple opinions and divergences in a community. How have you recommended people start to respond or lead their schools and districts given those conditions you just described?

Tyler Gregory

Well, one thing we quickly discovered is that in diversity, equity, inclusion programs or in diversity trainings, the Jewish American experience is lacking. And you could say the same thing about Muslim Americans. And so the first thing that we worked on was retooling our anti-Semitism and Jewish identity training to support administrators and teachers to make sure that they had the core competency to understand what a Jew is. And Michael, you know this as well as I do, Judaism is our religion. Jews are a people. We have peoplehood. But in many places, and this is not something to criticize if you're not fully versed in this. People conflate our religion with the rest of our identities, our culture, our nationhood, our relationship to Israel, or our secular nature. You can be an atheist Jew, right? And I think that our identities have been flattened in this Christian country such that teachers and administrators don't quite know how to put us in a box. And that's a very complicated thing to work through. So if you don't know who we are, how are you going to hear the dog whistles that weaponize various parts of our identity? And that's the way that we try to educate K-12 leaders, to make sure that they understand and can better listen for the ways in which our religious, cultural, political connection to Israel is weaponized in ways that echo forms of anti-Semitism that have existed long before the modern state of Israel, for example.

Including Jews in Ethnic Studies

Michael Horn

Yeah, it's super interesting as you get into that because Rabbi Wolpe, he's long made the point, right, that Jewish as a construct predates the Western constructs around race, religion, and so forth. It was sort of an amalgamation of a lot of these things, and you just described them. Even if you go to Israel now, you'll see secular atheist Jews, deeply religious Orthodox Jews, and everything in between, traditionalist and so forth, that doesn't even get into the divisions we think about popularly in this country around reform, conservative, and so forth. It's much, much deeper and multifaceted. So the trainings, it sounds like, is actually fundamental ground level education of just even understanding what is going on and what you're seeing in your context. I'm curious. That sounds like it would not provoke maybe the backlashes that some of the DEI trainings we know historically have done, but I'm sort of curious about the effectiveness maybe more to the point because we also know DEI trainings, but also frankly, Holocaust trainings have not been super effective often in protecting the populations that they're intended to. How do you all think about measuring that or protecting against it?

Tyler Gregory

What I would say is too often when we think about longitudinal students' experience with Jewish identity and anti-semitism, when they have an ancient world history course, they learn maybe there's a couple lines about ancient Israel and the Israeli kingdoms when we're talking about the Roman Empire, and then maybe we talk about the Jewish American experience the Holocaust, and there's certainly a Holocaust education component that is from 1933 to 1945. But Jewish history spans 3,000 years. And so that's why we think that Jewish identity should be a part of ethnic studies and that we do need to educate people about the multiple elements of our identities and talk about not only the bad things that happened to us, but to celebrate what we have contributed to this country. Jewish sports heroes, Jewish elected officials, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, people should understand how we celebrate being Americans as the Jewish community and the ways in which we've contributed to this country. And without ethnic studies, really, we're only talking about bad things that have happened throughout their history. And Michael, you know that most of our Jewish holidays are about overcoming the bad things that happen to us. And at the end of our holiday, whether it's our Passover Seder, we usually say, and let's eat, let's celebrate, l'chaim, right? But we can't just be in this victimhood mentality. We have to talk about who we are, what we believe in, talk about Jewish joy and what we mean to this country. And that's why I think whether we're newcomers or not to ethnic studies, there is a

meaningful place for us in this story about what it means to to be Jews in this country. And that's something that I don't think takes away. For those that don't want Jewish Americans to be a part of ethnic studies, we're not trying to take away any other experience from being a part of this. We just think that the Jewish kid in the classroom that's going through an ethnic studies course could equally benefit by being seen through this discipline in the same way that we touch on Holocaust studies or helping kids understand what anti-semitism is.

Michael Horn

Super interesting. It's a very similar answer to the one Dara Horn gave me when I asked a similar question. I'm just curious, and I'd love to dig one level deeper, as I did with her, actually, on this, which is how do you make sure, frankly, for ethnic studies in general, but also, you know, the Jewish component of it, it's not just one more thing on a long list of items that schools should do because there's limited time. Right. There's lots of competing interests trying to get their segment in. Why does this rise to the top in your view or in inclusion? Right. Or are there other ways to go about this maybe that get the principles across but create more freedom for, OK, what's the precise knowledge or specific standards we're going to study as we learn about principles of, frankly, not dipping into anti-semitism, but hate more broadly?

Tyler Gregory

I think you've got to tackle both layers, Michael. We, as a community, are often the canary in the coal mine of a health, of a democracy, of society, as the Jewish community. And so to help students understand that a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, when one community is targeted, it often leads to other communities being targeted. And if you look historically to Jewish communities around the world, 1920s Germany was a golden era for Jews in Germany in that democracy. I'm a gay Jew. There were gay clubs in Germany. And we saw how the Jewish community was a canary in the coal mine for what was happening in the steady march to fascism in that country. And so we don't think anti-Semitism is only a Jewish problem. But if you if you zoom out and you look globally, oftentimes we're a scapegoat that is a harbinger of things to come and a measurement of the health of the society that we're living in. And so we think that we can talk about this in a much broader lens where we're helping people understand historically what some of the consequences can be when the Jewish community is targeted. I also think there's not a one shot to this. I don't see a silver bullet. The more ways we can integrate our very small minority in the context of America, two to two point five percent, depending on the day, the better chance we have of reinforcing what our community means.

The Free Speech Question

Michael Horn

Super, super helpful and interesting. Let me ask you this, because one of the contours of debate that has come up in the higher ed context. Right. So we lay the education piece. People still have different viewpoints. How do we think about the line between free speech? You know, students expressing viewpoints about Israel or say, you know, maybe less savory ones around support for Hamas, even Tinker V. Des Moines, you know, stuff right. Supreme Court case of the ability to express your views freely. You don't lose those when you enter the school doors. But how do you think about that tenant, if you will, of the American experience? And when this crosses the line into blatant discrimination, bullying and stuff that is not OK, how do you think about that, I guess, in general?

Tyler Gregory

So for better or worse, anti-Semitic speech is free speech. I think when universities uphold free speech as their gold standard, we ask them, OK, if you're going to allow this kind of hate speech where Israel is the the scourge of the earth and responsible for all these ills that extend beyond what a tiny economy in the scope of global affairs could possibly achieve, we ask, where are you exercising free speech? If this is such an important value to you, why are you staying silent when Jews are not allowed to go to the library because they're being blocked? When are you staying silent when terrorism is being glorified by certain campus groups? We can respect their their value, but where we lose faith in their abilities is when they don't practice what they preach. And too many universities and since we're talking about K-12, unfortunately, too many districts are staying silent in the face of these discriminatory acts. And so that's where we would like to see education leaders step up right now.

Michael Horn

Do you think there's a different line from K-12 to higher ed in terms of how teachers, you know, you mentioned the ethnic studies curriculum, obviously, and getting Jews included in that curriculum and an understanding, frankly, of Judaism more broadly built into it. You know, in higher ed, there's this sort of sense of academic freedom, right? Professors, they create their own courses. I get to lecture as I as I view. Do you see that extending into curriculum in K-12 as well? Or is there a different way we ought to think about academic freedom, slightly different from free speech, but still, you know, related and these noxious viewpoints that you just talked about that perhaps we're not calling out as clearly as we might?

Tyler Gregory

It's a it's a tough question. And I think teachers have a right to bring their own lived experiences into the classroom so long as it does not target the experiences of other students. And unfortunately, we're seeing too much of that. We're seeing and this is a tough issue to talk through, but we're seeing Palestinian flags. If a teacher is a Palestinian American into the classroom and there's a Jewish student sitting there not knowing how to feel, are they going to be graded poorly? Are they are they safe being in that environment? And that gets really tricky because we don't want to deny a Palestinian their identity. But these symbols that for some people are personal are otherwise political. So I think we have a lot of work to do to figure out how to massage those issues. But we also don't want to deny the lived experience of teachers, which can be so rich for students to learn about. So I think it's a balancing act. And I wish I had a clearer answer for you.

The Road Ahead

Michael Horn

No, no, this is good. I mean, frankly, I think delving into the shades of gray is what's going to make us stronger over time. And as you said, you know, your mission has really been these trainings around the education to get awareness into the schools. I'm curious what you're starting to see the fruits of that. What does the school year look like? You said some of the anti-Semitism has morphed maybe over time. Where are we now? How are we doing? What else do we need to do as we think about charting a path forward for all students?

Tyler Gregory

Yeah, so we did a poll a few months ago of Bay Area Jews, a random sample public poll, and we found that only 28 percent of Bay Area Jews are satisfied with how K-12 schools are tackling anti-Semitism. We also found that one out of three Bay Area Jewish residents have personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism. And then we asked those folks, where did that happen? And about 30 percent of them said that that happened in a school setting. Second, only to social media. So we think that it's a prominent source of the challenge that our communities face. And we have a lot of work to do still. What we're seeing this year is more of the incidents that we're getting calls with are classic anti-Semitism rather than weaponization of the war. So classic anti-Semitic tropes about Jews having too much power or privilege. And I don't think that we're quite to the bottom as to why that is. But the level at which we're getting those calls is clearly inspired by what happened last year. And so in the same way, I don't want to get too political on here, but after the initial election of Donald Trump, we saw a Pandora's box open on the far right with anti-Semitism. October 7th seems to have led to a Pandora's box opening with far left anti-Semitism. They look and feel differently. There are different types of threats. But that permission seems to continue to exist. And our job is to make sure that those forms of hate stay on both extremes and not creep into the mainstream of our society. And unfortunately, it seems like public and private education is one of the most important battlefronts in which we're dealing with this problem.

Michael Horn

No, super helpful. Tyler, as we wrap up here, just any other thoughts that we should be thinking about work that you're doing that you want to spotlight or conversations that we ought to be keeping an eye on as we progress through the rest of the school year? One thing that we think is really important to lift up, but I will not give any illusion it's easy. It's important for students to see Muslim and Jewish leaders talking to one another. And I think districts see, OK, we've got to have our anti-Semitism module, we've got to have our Islamophobia module, we need to have an assembly dedicated to Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans or Palestinian Americans. That's great. But if there are divisions in a classroom or in a school or even among parents, what better way to get them to change the tone of the conversation and lower the temperature and tensions than to see Muslim and Jewish or Israeli and Palestinian leaders talking to one another with civil discourse? And that's a broader conversation just in the context of this civil discourse. But if they can see role models talking through differences about how despite the fact that the war is six thousand miles away, both of our communities are in pain and trauma and that actually we have a lot more in common culturally and as immigrant communities than we do our divides over what's happening there. Maybe we can start to build bridges and change the way that we're having this conversation. And so we work with a Muslim organization both to provide joint trainings and to model civil discourse. But there are a lot of amazing organizations both in Israel, Palestine and here that ard trying to bring Jews, Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians together. And to model that in front of students goes a very long way. And so that's something that I think we need much, much more of as this issue plays out. That's a very hopeful note to end on.

Michael Horn

Let me ask you a final question. How can people find out more about JCRC and follow your work?

Tyler Gregory

You can follow us JCRC.org and learn much more about our education trainings. We'd be delighted to work with you.

Michael Horn

Perfect. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us. And for all of you, we'll see you next time on the Future of Education.

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