“Falling Behind” Is Public School Propaganda - Graham Frey

Graham Fry, welcome to Dad Saves America. Great to be here. So, for consistent viewers, uh, people know that school and K through 12 is a big theme here. It's something I come back to over and over again. It's something that I care about a lot. Partly because I've walked the walk of putting my kids in a bunch of different schools, and partly because it's just one of the most important decisions we make as parents.

>> Agreed. Um, you are at the forefront, I would say, of the of innovation in K through 12. So why don't we just start with your background? Because I think this is a great opportunity to explore the lessons you've learned, sort of [laughter] at the tip of the spear of like new kinds of schools.

>> Right. Alpha School. Now you're with this Primer micro-school network as its chief architect, right? And but you have a long. So how did you, let's start with how you first got into this world of education?

>> Yeah. Um, I think it starts when I was a little boy in in uh, you know, in a in a large rural school in Ohio. And um, I was bored. I used to get in a lot of trouble in class. Um, this is second grade, and I would often poke my neighbor.

>> Yeah.

>> Uh, and sort of say, "What are you doing over there, John? I really want to, what, what's for lunch? What do you have when we trade?" That kind of thing.

>> And then your teacher would yell at you?

>> Yeah. I'd get in trouble. [clears throat] Um, and uh, my teacher took, um, put a cubicle in the corner and put me behind the cubicle. And so imagine now instead of 30 kids in front of her, she had 29, and I was in the corner, literally in the corner. And I did worksheets all day. And I remember distinctly peering around the side of the of the cubicle, wondering what the other kids are doing.

>> Wait, she literally blocked you so you couldn't see the class or her?

>> Correct. I was, I was, I was to the left of her desk.

>> What? What did, what did you have to do in a rural school to get that to happen? Did you, like, fire arrows at the teacher? Like, how did this happen?

>> It seems extreme.

>> You know, memory is selective, but um, I, uh, I think it was, I was disruptive for sure. U, you, I'd play with my pencil box and I, you know, I just, I just was really bored. Um, and I did worksheets all day behind, you know, and, and I was pretty convinced that I wasn't very smart. Um, I didn't really belong in the classroom. Um, and it was, and, and I highly disliked school. I hated school. Uh, and my parents, um, who didn't agree on a lot, they were divorced at, uh, when I was pretty young at that point, decided that that something, uh, that that something had to change. That, actually, we don't think he's, it's an issue of intelligence, but something's not working here. Uh, they put me into a monastery school, and that helped me gain some basic skills that I needed, helped me figure out choice to a certain degree. You know, how do I make good choices? But one of the nice things that happens in a monastery is that you're presented with the opportunity for choice in a protected environment. Um, and that means you can start to learn how to make good choices. I remember that a friend of mine, uh, eventually went off to this high-powered all-boys private school, and a friend of mine, when we were seniors, said, "Do you remember when we were, when we were little and, uh, you weren't smart, you were dumb?" And I said, "Peter, I don't think I was dumb. Uh, I think it was the fact that I just was bored, right?" Uh, he's like, "Oh, well, I remember that because we happened to be in the same class as..."

>> I remember when you were the dumb kid.

>> "...I remember that you were the smart." He was quite smart. Uh, but um, I think that's where it started, where I started thinking about [sighs and gasps] how, you know, school is this experience that you have. And I went from really disliking school as a young person to to really loving school by the time that I left high school, looking around at the different teachers, depth of curriculum. I love the, uh, you know, I love digging deeply into, uh, subject matter and a great group of teachers. I had teachers who were highly committed to depth of understanding, um, who were challenging, uh, the, the norms that we would, uh, uh, you know, the normal assumptions that we had. You know, and that was a, you know, was a school that valued Western civil, you know, civilization. We took Western Civ 1 and Western Civ 2 as, as freshmen and sophomores. This is at the high school.

>> This is a university school in Cleveland.

>> All-boy school. You know, we had, uh, we read full books. Uh, we dug deep. We, in middle school, we, you know, we did Romeo and Juliet as an all-boys school. Judy Danahe ran this class where, you know, imagine, you know, in, in middle school, you're falling in love at the drop of a hat, right? Especially, especially an all-boys school. Uh, and so we could really re, you know, Romeo and Juliet, I'm really ready to die for her, right? That all was true stuff for us. And so she brought that to life for us.

>> Did the boys have to play the girl roles too?

>> Which we didn't hesitate in doing, especially in an all-boys.

>> In today's landscape, that can send a shiver down a parent's spine.

>> Different, different world, but...

>> Going back all the way to the Greeks.

>> This was common.

>> Yes, this was common.

>> This wasn't, this wasn't a sign of anything whatso...

>> Okay, I'll keep this quick. Be sure to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the bell so that you won't miss more Dad Saves America as our videos come out each week. And it also really helps us because when we reach out to guests, they look at how many subscribers there are to decide if they want to come on and share their ideas. So, please subscribe to the channel. It really helps us out. And thanks for watching. Now, back to the show.

And so, um, you know, walking out of school as a as a senior, I thought, gosh, I think I really want to be in an independent school. And independent schools, independent private schools were really where education, um, it was a, it was a learning lab for all of education. If we think about the great stories behind, uh, Bill Gates and, you know, his experience at Lakeside and having access to computers, you know, we did in 8th grade, we were programming in DOS, um, because that was something that we had to do in order was a, was sort of middle school, um, graduation requirement. So for a long time, these private schools were places where, um, there, there was no standard curriculum at all. And, and there still are some wonderful schools that do that. And then going back to teach in that world, um, I started to poke around and think like, gosh, what's going to be the next wave of innovation? And that was the internet. Uh, and academia moved slowly.

>> And so [clears throat] there was a a movement, uh, to basically say, you know...

>> Slowly and often in the wrong direction.

>> Correct. Uh, and so we had a couple of heated conversations where, um, they said, "Look, the internet's not going to be what you think it's going to be. It's not going to be valuable in an educational setting at all." And I said, "Gee, I don't know. I, I think the ability to access information, um, uh, democratically, un like this is going to change everything in many ways." Uh, and how do we get ahead of this or how do we think about just how to use it? And I was doing things like, uh, um, you know, using the digital version of the New York Times, right? Um, because I like, this allows kids to take a step further than just the static newspaper. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't revolutionary at all.

>> Right, just the website.

>> Right. I had a...

>> What, what, when is this? This is the early 2000s?

>> No, this is, this is, well, yes, sorry. Early 2000s, right? 1999, 2001, 2002, right? In that range. Um, and I also found that I had an optical drive in my laptop, so I could show, um, lectures of historians like a Shelby Foote when he's talking about the Civil War. Um, which were much better than anything that I could do. And, and I remember in the late 90s, one of the things, just you mentioned Bill Gates, it, it was the case that like Bill Gates missed the early internet. And he, they would, they had bet on on that optical drive, on on on CD-ROM, right?

>> Right.

>> And I think I, I remember there was an, there was a CD-ROM based encyclopedia that I think, I think Microsoft ended up buying, 'cause that was their bet. It was like, "No, CD-ROM is where it's at. The internet's too slow. We need..."

>> You know, we can ship bits faster in a truck than over the internet, which was true at the time. No longer true. Uh, so academia wasn't the only place that was missing the internet. Bill Gates was too, at least in the late, I mean, they caught up fast, but...

And you know, I remember distinctly, um, my good friend, uh, Stuart Hogus, seniors at Washington and Lee in Virginia. Um, he found me in the library and he said, "Hey, uh, I need to show you something." So he brings me over to a computer terminal and he pulls up Yahoo. And I look at him, I go, "What, what is this?" He goes, "This is the internet. You can, you can find anything on this." And we're seniors in high school or in college. Uh, this is 1996. And I looked at him. I said, "Dude, we're in a library. We have microfiche. We have everything we need. This isn't going to be a thing." And [laughter] I got up and I walked away. So that's how aware I was of the internet in 1996. Well, fast forward just a few years, and I was, it was clear that this was going to be something that we needed to, um, understand and something that we could use as a tool to help reach kids. I was very interested in how do we change from this person standing at the front of the room lecturing to figuring out, how do I meet kids where they are? U, and there were a couple of unique experiences as a teacher that that drove me to explore differentiating my curriculum, um, using, uh, you know, using imagery, using lectures from other people, different primary sources, but really trying to approach you, uh, create an approachable, um, ramp, I guess, uh, or on-ramp to for all the kids in the room. And that's where I started to explore what I would argue were, were different models, things which would now you would call a flip classroom or different types of of materials that you would send. And, and good teachers, by the way, had been doing this for years and years. And, um, great teachers really understand where their kids, the kids are in the room. They understand that they have to deploy different resources to reach those kids, and they're doing lots of formative assessment to help kids through.

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>> You did, you get a degree in education? What was your, what was your, um, college experience that led into teaching?

>> I have never taken an education class.

>> You're on the right track right from the start. So how did this happen? How did you know this is the degree in education I have criticized as have others and and people and I'm relying on others who've done the work on this.

>> Sucks. Is the general, the short answer from what I've been told by people who study it.

>> More than just being a bombthrower, just like, "Oh no, it's a terrible degree with a relatively low quality level of students."

>> And highly, highly, I mean, mixed amount, but if you even look at the distribution of things like IQ and academic rigor, it's at the bottom.

>> Sure.

>> Um, but then it's also like the mo, one of the more, maybe most ideologically captured degrees, as I understand it, just in terms of all this social justice stuff and critical theory and all the rest.

>> But that I'd be curious if I, maybe we can come back to that, but it...

>> Well, I mean, what was your sense of the, of the higher ed experience that led into your career?

>> Um, you know, when I, um, goes back to mentors and the importance of having mentors, right? Uh, I had a great head of school, uh, when I was in high school, and he, I had this great experience, uh, my junior year of high school. I was the head page in the US Senate, and so I spent this, the year working in Washington, um, and really learning. I was interested in politics, and I learned from the ground up exactly how the Senate operated and Washington operated. Um, when I came back to school in Ohio, uh, Dr. Holly grabbed me in the hallway and said, "Hey, we need to chat." I'm like, "I've just been back for like a week. What? I don't think I've gotten in trouble. I [laughter] What do I do?" And he said, "What do you want to do now?" And I said, "You know, Dr. Holly, I understand the practical way that the Senate operates. I understand how Congress operates. I understand at a deep level, why, why are we doing it this way?" And he said, "Oh, this is great. We're going to do a year-long, um, class in political philosophy, and it'll be an independent study with just two of us, and we're going to dig into, um, you know, everything from from Plato to Bloom and really build your understanding of how, uh, you know, of why we have the political systems we have." And that, um, that experience really solidified, crystallized the, the, this, um, the ability for schools to help children push into what they're really interested in at a very deep level. Right? It was, you know, he didn't have the time to do this. This was something beyond what he to do. But he recognized that I had an interest, and he happened to have a PhD in the same subject. And so I'm going to take time out of my schedule a few times a week to read great texts alongside you and push you really hard and, um, obliterate some of my arguments. Uh, all my exams were oral. So, so, you know, I would have to present my papers. I wrote a paper once a week, a one-page paper, which was a whole other great exercise of learning how to write a really good paper in one page, very hard. Um, and then I had to defend them orally, like a thesis. And he just, he, he beat me up a lot. But it was a wonderful experience that led me to think, gosh, I think that there's there's another, how, how do you become a teacher? How do I become you? How do I run a school? And he said, "Well, go off and get a degree in philosophy and, uh, and then, you know, become a subject matter expert in something and then go find a great school where you can go do that, understand how a school is built and what's valuable within a school." Um, and so that's what launched me. I never even thought about an education degree or a degree, you know, taking a class in education. I did all had formative experiences. I was a camp counselor. I was a, you know, I was a, a dorm leader. I was a, you know, I worked at a wonderful school called Woodberry Forest in the summers where I was, you know, a summer school teacher. Talk about teaching. I had to teach basically remedial math, uh, for six hours a day to kids who were in summer school, right? Who didn't want to be be...

>> Right. So that just as a student, you're like, "This is, this is the worst. I hate math."

>> "I hate being in school in the summer."

>> Yeah.

>> "I, I, this, everything about this is terrible."

>> Terrible.

>> So how did you, what did you, what did you learn from that? And how did you get, how do you, you know...

>> How did you get those kids to...

>> How do you become engaging every day? Right. [laughter] And they're not excited about this, and frankly, like six hours of algebra is a lot. Right. And so you came up with all these different gimmicks of like, "All right, I'm going to move kids around. We're going to go outside. We're going to experience, you know, just trying everything you possibly could, gamifying, if you will, the classroom in that sense, right? Going, you know, trying to create individual pathways for every child, like all those things that we did, uh, which were controversial, revolutionary, whatever you want to call them, but really we're just saying like, "All right, I'm looking across at this, you know, freshman in high school who doesn't want to be here and is bored. How do I make this day better for him?" And that came to my later realization that our job as teachers is really to bring unparalleled enthusiasm to every day. Um, and to be on stage a bit, right? That we have, there's a part of this which is being theatrical. And our great professors were quite theatrical.

>> Yeah. This, there's these, uh, phrases in education land, the the sage on stage versus the guide alongside, right? Stuff like that. I, I, um, I, I get uncomfortable with any sense of eduspeak, as I call it, these terms that we come up with. Uh, it's like there's this whole lexicon that's just education-based and STEM, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I pushed back pretty hard on all, all that stuff.

>> So, you know, I, I think for me, it was just about how do I become a good teacher? And a lot of that spent time, I spent time watching other people teach and coach. Um, you know, looking at teachers who I thought were particularly good and, uh, seeing what they did in the classroom, asking a lot of questions. Um, and that was what propelled me into that particular space. And I think that the, you know, [sighs and gasps] um, when I think about education today, and I think about what is the purpose of a school of education, I think in many ways it is to provide teachers with teacher certificates, right? As some sort of, um...

>> Stamp.

>> Yeah. Stamp. Um, you know, something that certifies that this person is a good teacher. But really, that's the, you, that would mean that the school itself understands exactly what education is going to look like next, for instance, right? Or understands exactly what's happening out in the world. And I think there is a pretty big disconnect between those two things, ultimately. You know, schools are, are places of imperfection, right? Schools were places that we went to learn more. And what motivated the faculty was that they were on that same journey, right? And you were sort of jumping on the bandwagon with them and trying to figure out, how do we dig deeply into this thing? And so if you think about what should the school of education be? It really should be this place of crazy innovation, right? Crazy experimentation. And we see the exact opposite. I think it's just become part of the, um, the machine, if you will, to make sure that we have people to be a sage on stage.

I, um, there's so many places we could go in this conversation, and one of the things that, and we've talked about this off camera, that has been a challenge to me personally, is I have a strong bias towards the kind of, um, break the mold, lean into self-direction. I did that with my own son, who went to acting academy. I've had Jeff and Laura Santa for both on the show. Mhm.

>> Um, and I, and I, I'm, I'm self-directed. So, I, I'm, one of the things I've realized, partly, is I have a bias there, in that sense. I'm very self-directed. Like, I was doing my own projects until 2 in the morning, going all the way back, like video projects, actually going all the way back to like middle school.

>> And that's maybe weird. And then I, I, um, and then I, you know, I met Katherine Berbles, who calls everything you're talking about a bunch of like, progressive school gobbledegook. And that what we need is incredible rigor, incredible structure, great teaching, and that means something very specific. And this idea that,

>> We need to teach kids how to learn, how to think.

>> Is jumping three steps ahead, and we actually first need to put knowledge in their head.

>> And just actually teach them what to think.

>> So, do you, and she's pulled me more in her direction. And so I'm in like, a, I'm like in a beginner's mind on this stuff, in a way that's even different from say, three years ago when we launched this channel.

How do you think about, let's just start with a really, the most simple question ever, and then get to the...

>> Sure.

>> What's the right kind of school? And is there one right, or is there a right for most kids kind of questions. What is the job of school, of K through 12? Like, what is it supposed to do? And how has it maybe gone beyond that, while maybe also not succeeding at the original thing? Like, how do you think about, like, what the purpose, the, is it the telos, telios of the of a school?

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Purpose of school. And Katherine and I have spoken about this. Um, so when I [clears throat] think about school, the purpose of school, it is to provide every child with, um, as many opportunities as possible. Right? So the idea being that I go to school, and when I leave school, I have opportunities. I have choice to what is it that I want to go do in this world? And...

>> By the end.

>> By the end. Okay. Right. So...

>> Not necessarily every single day.

>> No, no, by the end, by the end. So if I backwards map from that, right? The the job here is to say, you know, how do I produce a child that when they walk out of school at 18, I can go choose the path in which I want? I'm well prepared to do what's next. Right? That is, um, with a, um, small asterisk, that school should also be an end in itself in many ways. That part of that journey is that we need to create unique experiences because there are children where they truly value and understand that this experience that I'm having is special. Um, that this experience that I'm having adds to the texture of my life. Right? And so that sounds sort of idealistic, but let's, so let's unpack that.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, schools, in my opinion, um, the chief responsibility is to actually help kids develop habits of excellence, great habits, right? Um, I just looked at a, a young man's, uh, college essay, and his, that what he, um, the activity that he learned that was most valuable in high school was actually waking up early and being prepared for the day. So, where Katherine and I are completely aligned is that children need to understand what does it mean to be prepared? What does it mean to show up on time? Um, what does it mean to have a high standard and have high, um, understand what quality really is objectively? Um, those are, when I think about school, that's really what I come back to. Um, so if we think about, take a, a young child, a K through two child, right? A kindergarten or first grade. What I care most about is they love coming to school. Why do I care that coming to loving school? Because they're children. They're young. And if they love coming to school, they're going to be engaged in school. And that means they're going to be much more excited about learning how to read, which I need them to do in first grade, you know, and I also understand the basics of math. That begins their journey. And remember that when you go to school as a kindergartner, it's the first time that you're separate from your family, and you're your own individual, right? That's a big deal. I need to learn how to work within a community. I need to understand what are the, what are the habits and responsibilities of that community. Um, and it should also be something that I truly enjoy, right? Uh, no matter what my socioeconomic level happens to be, that becomes the foundation for then learning habits, right? Um, I learn how to be respectful. I learn how to be, um, loyal. I learned how to be considerate. And so I think about, um, when I talk about habit formation in school, one of the things I often say is that there's six parts of this. There's that I'm responsible, loyal, and considerate, and I don't lie, cheat, or steal. Right? That's what are the things that I am, I'm trying to work towards being in this community. And we think about that. Um...

>> Say those six again, just so I can just place them in my mind.

>> I'm responsible, loyal, and considerate. And I don't...

>> Responsible, loyal, considerate. Okay.

>> And I don't lie, cheat, or steal.

>> No lie, cheat, or steal. Those, those last three seem like a pretty low, but important foundation of like, any form of civilization.

>> But if we reflect back and we think, if I can strive to do those six things, I'm a pretty good person. No matter what your politics are, right?

>> No matter what, really. I'm pretty... [laughter]

>> Well, and it's like when you think about children, they have to learn not to lie, cheat, and steal.

>> Exactly. It's like we take some of these basic things about what does it mean to be a functioning person in the world for granted. Like, no, you have to actually have a culture, you have to be acculturated into, no, you don't lie, cheat, and steal, right? Because there's cultures that end up rewarding that sometimes by accident, sometimes just as a function of whatever the circumstances.

>> Correct.

>> So, we go back to the purpose of school again. Go back to, I want to produce a child. I want a child to walk out into the world who, you know, is responsible, loyal, and considerate. They don't lie, cheat, or steal. And they are well-prepared. Um, so they have lots of options, so that they can have choice in their lives. Right? So, I've, at the end of the, the, the perfect school experience for you, I am a young adult. I'm like, "I know how to take responsibility. I know what it means to be loyal." Loyal is an interesting one that I want to dig into more with you. Um, and I'm not a crook. [laughter]

>> Like, I'm going to go to a job interview. I'm not going to lie on my resume. I'm not going to steal from my employer, or I'm not going to start a business and cheat my customers or my employees. I'm going to be a functioning adult citizen that's trustworthy and can be a member of the community in good standing. And, you know, lots of schools have these missions that are like ordinary or really hard to do. You know, every school almost talks about academic excellence.

>> Okay.

>> That, that word excellence is like the most devalued buzzword in all of education, straight through to Harvard, right? So, let's just throw that one out, right? I've been involved in schools that talk about, hey, we're going to, we're going to develop world citizens. That's amazing. I don't know how to do that. I don't even know what that means.

>> Right. What [laughter] does that mean? I'm a citizen of the world, right? Do you vote? Who's the president of the world you vote for? What are you talking about?

>> You mean worldly? That doesn't seem like it's the same thing.

>> But so you throw, so you always look at schools and like, that's those are those are really complex. Those are those are marketing m. But I go back, that's why I go back to my six things. But to get there, to produce a group of kids, or to get kids on the pathway, you think about like, all right, one is I need to have examples of excellence. I need to have understand, I have to give them responsibility, which means I also need to give them the chance to screw up, right? I need to, um, create, I need to have a lot of rigor, right? To opportunity means that I have to understand the value of hard work. I have to really work hard, have really high standards. And so that doesn't mean I get to wake up every day and just say, "Oh, here's what I'm going to do today," or "I'm not going to see this through. I don't really want to finish this assignment," right? Or, "Oh, I get 16 times to actually take this test over and over again so I can finally get the score that I need." Right? And so, you know, school should be a place where it really pushes, um, it pushes boundaries. In fact, I like to say that, that, you know, where schools are places that you have to become, you know, part of your responsibility is make kids uncomfortable, right? There's a discomfort that comes with school. And frankly, that introduces this idea of kids taking risk. And risk, intellectual risk, right, is where learning really happens. If I'm just in my zone of comfort, uh, I'm not really learning. I need to, I need to push kids beyond that zone and create this space for them to take these risks, um, to try that harder question, to go out on a limb with a particular argument, to form it really well, right? Um, to make mistakes and fail knowing that they're, they're safe. So, I like to say that, you know, schools are, you know, schools are places where you make kids uncomfortable, but where they're known and loved, right? At the end of the day, when they like fall apart, you pick them back up and you go, "Okay, let's go again."

The, I mean, I think to the, to a most normal people, they would hear what you're describing and say that that sounds obvious, right?

>> I think so.

>> In a certain, like, as not as an educator, but just as like a parent, like, "What do I want my kid to graduate from high school with, as a matter of course?" Like, "Yeah, be an honest person, that has good habits, wants to do well at something, and has some way of deciding what they're going to do next." That seems pretty...

>> To the extent people think about these things, aside from like, "Just do it. You have to do it. This is what you do. You should get good grades because good grades are better than bad grades," or whatever. Right?

>> If you think a little deeper, you want your kids to be set up to have an adult life and be successful in their lives.

>> And I, as a parent, I also want a partner who, in the school, who looks at my kids' writing and goes, "This is bad. [laughter] This isn't good." You know, as a kid growing up in school, there were a couple of really formative experiences for me. I got a D on a test in sixth grade from Mr. Fiorless's math test, and I'm crying. And he looks at me, he goes, "We don't cry over math. It's not what we do." And I'm like, "But this is really bad. What am I going to do?" And he's like, "This isn't." And what he was really teaching me, and then he came back around and he said, "This isn't something to be emotional about. This is something to figure out what went wrong and how do we work through this?" And he was picking, he, you know, picking me back up, right?

>> Yeah.

>> Um, I had an experience, um, [laughter] I had, I had a form of an experience in college where, you know, I, I got a, um, I got a, a D on a, um, on a, I failed the French quiz early on, first semester. I was probably not as focused on studies as I should have been, or maybe...

>> Classic freshman.

>> ...freshman problems. So, good private school kid, >> bad grade. Oh, I know how to deal with this. I walk into my professor's office and I say, uh, I'll leave his name out of it. Um, [laughter] I say, you know, professor, I don't know what I did wrong here. U, can you help me figure out like, what, what do I need to do? And he looked at me and he said, "If you got an F on that, clearly the admissions department made a mistake." And he went back to work. Now, I walk out of his office and I'm thinking [laughter] first, and I'm like, "Screw that guy. Like, I'm not at all, like, I can go do this right now French quiz." Of course, you'd go do it. But those are the, you know, you can't necessarily say those things these days, but those were the things that were really important. Those were the moments where somebody was holding me accountable to a standard.

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As a teacher, I would close my door when class started, and the kids who came late knew they weren't allowed in. That is a safe environment for a child to understand. I got to get to class on time. I need to be on time, right? If I walked in and I wasn't prepared, if I didn't have a pen or a pencil or things that I needed to have for school, I would ask you to leave the class. That seems harsh, but the reality is I need to teach you to be prepared. That's my job. Sure. The content, content fine. We've never had the ability to obtain, um, to, to get content the way we have today. It's never been easier, right? It's never been easier to obtain content. Talk to anything with a screen, and it will tell you an answer that might even sometimes be right.

>> Yeah. I was in India working on a project, and the, the, um, the president of the school, um, network said to me, "I don't need you to tell me what to teach, or even how to access it with the internet. I have incredible access to everything. Everything is happening. What I need help with is how do we do it? How do we build the school model?" And that just struck me as like, "Oh, yeah, like that whole, going back to the beginning of this, of like the whole internet's not going to be important." Actually, that's going to change everything. Right.

>> So you've got this thing that happens, and one of the, so when I've, um, we did a series, uh, called The Poisoning of the American Mind, six, a six-part look at things, and it very much through a critical lens of the Prussian sort of sit there and get preached at thing. And Katherine, I'll come back to her because she's a friend, and because we were collaborating on some stuff behind the scenes, um, was like, "This is your problem. You, you're so American with your emphasis on freedom. It's like these kids don't need freedom." And a lot of what she said, like everything you've said so far, I think actually resonates with Katherine, and I think is like,

>> Is like the stuff that you don't think of as being school because it's not technically academic, but it's probably more important. And certainly as an adult, I found it to be more important. I'd rather have somebody come in to to any organization I'm running and demonstrate conscientiousness and an ability to learn from mistakes than even any particular knowledge element, because I know you can, if you have those two things, you'll pick up the details. Like, "Oh, okay, no, this is not the way we want this video edited. It's this way." Mhm.

>> Um, if you're sort of a slob and can't get things done and kind of miss your deadlines and like, that's way, like, you, like, it's like, "Well, I, I, I'm not your parent or your teacher. I, how, this is, this is real tough. I don't know what I'm going to do with you." Right?

>> Um, how much before we get into like teaching and and these and the models and some, and your experience there, because you have a lot of experience across a lot of different models. One pushback that we get, and I've gotten even in that series from teachers as well as parents, is the kinds of virtues, the kinds of habits you're talking about, they're not getting taught in the home. And if I'm a teacher, and I've got a bunch of little jerks in my class who are like you when you were little, it's like, "I, their their parents suck. Graham is coming from a broken home. He's a mess. I have nothing I can do about that. That's not my fault. What am I supposed to do?" How do you grapple with...

>> The...

>> The fact that the behavior that's coming into your classroom as a teacher, has all these inputs, including the peers, but parents, um, you want to have rigor. The parents are, "Everyone gets a trophy" mindset, or "My kid's never wrong." To empathize with teachers, they get hit with a lot of stuff. How do you think about that? And how do you think about, like, on the weight of the scales of at the end of that 18 years, you're prepared, how much can the school reasonably accomplish when there's headwinds on the social, personal, family, peer side?

>> I know it's a big question, but...

>> And we should, we should, we should put aside for a second the, I think there is an academic toolbox of some really important, let's call it content that needs to be learned. We can, we can chat about that later.

>> Yeah, for...

>> You know, I think that the, um, so I fundamentally believe that, um, it is the responsibility of a school to allow families to discuss the issues that the social issues that that face, um, a lot of our children today, right? And that those are, those are dinner table, kitchen table conversations. Um, and it is our job to focus as a school to focus on those values that we talked about, right? Those six, as well as, you know, that idea of preparedness. At the same time, within those, the idea of loyalty, potentially, or consideration, means that I am, I have certain expectations of behavior that once you walk into this threshold, that's part of being in this community. And the idea that, um, difficult family behavior per se, or a child that is not, uh, it comes from, you know, every child comes from a different family, that that family may not value what we're doing in the classroom. That's all you can overcome all that. Um, I, I really, I really, and I was on a conversation this morning with a parent who used, um, who was rude and used inappropriate language with the teacher. My job is to hold them accountable.

>> Were they from, were they from Jersey? Is that what was...

>> No, they're from South Florida.

>> Okay. [laughter] Uh, but, but, uh, but my job is to hold that parent accountable. And my job is to explain, the same way that your child can't use that language, you can't use that language when we, that's not going to be a productive conversation with a family. And I watch every day teachers in extremely difficult communities, um, socioeconomically challenged communities, uh, uh, families from, you know, with a mixture of different types of family, uh, backgrounds, bring those kids together and and create very productive classroom environments that are doing wonderful things from habit formation all the way through to to learning. So I would, I don't think that, I do think that there is a lot of, um, I do think that there is time that we need to spend working on the American family.

Let's call it that. But I, I truly believe, and I see this, that kids can cross the chasm into what is school, right? They can cross that, that uh, threshold. And you watch these schools do great work, and that will lift a child up, and often it will lift a family up.

I, there are lots of examples of this. Kip, at least the older KIP, when excellence was still in their motto. I don't know what the status of it is now, but they got a little warped in the 2020s. Uh, Success Academy, Roland Friars's schools, like there, there's, if you're looking to falsify the hypothesis that you can't create a good school environment for kids that are coming from a disastrous life outside of school, we, we can falsify that.

It seems like, but, but you're making, so you're saying, what I'm hearing you say to that teacher who blames the external is, sorry, not good enough. We can, we, we know that you can do a good job in your classroom, even with hard students, if you, if you're equipped properly and in the right environment.

That's exactly what I'm saying. And remember, these things compound. Um, a highly bureaucratic school, the inability for a teacher to act with some sense of autonomy, the inability to give the grades that a child deserves, right? I had a friend of mine retired from a school because he was told that, you know, if he gives anything below a C from now on, he has to justify that in writing. Um, and he was, I believe the justification in writing is the test. It's like, well, he got, he only got 25% of the questions right. What else do I need to write here?

This is a teacher who, uh, who's still, yeah, he's still a good friend. When I was a sophomore, um, we turned in, um, these rough drafts of a paper. This is Western Civ 2. And they were so bad that he literally threw them at us in our classroom and said, "You all are not prepared to write essays. You will write book reports." And we, this was, you know, our egos were shattered. Book reports. That's something like fifth graders do. We're in high school. We're sophomores in high school. And he said, "Absolutely not. These are, this, these are atrocious." And that's what we did. Um, but just the abil, but that was acting with autonomy, right? I'm sure there are parents who complained, but the school said, look, no, we, this, just let it work, let it, let the school do its thing, and this will work out.

And so, you know, you have to, I think that that is, you have to have the right environment. So they're compounding. So I, there are teachers who would like to take a different stance in a classroom, but simply are prohibited to do so because of the rules that we've created around the, you know, the system. And so I think one of the things we're able to do at Primer, for instance, is give teachers much more autonomy.

What I noticed are two things when teachers come into Primer. One is that they, um, they really aren't sure where they can flex their muscles. And so often they are saying, "What can I, can I write this email? Can I say this to this family? Can I'm like, yeah, that's your classroom. This is your little school. This is your micro school." I don't love the term micro school, but that's a different conversation or a different part of our conversation. Um, and so I want you to, I want you to establish a culture in that, in your classroom, and it needs to be a culture of excellence. Here are the baseline important ingredients that are important to us as a network, but ultimately, this is your opportunity to shed, uh, some of the bureaucracy, some of the rules.

You know, the other thing too, it's interesting about kids. We often pour more rules into kids. But when you really listen to Katherine, my perspective, and when you look at great schools, it's actually principle-based, right? It's not about more rules. It's about formulating principles and that, and then holding kids accountable for that. So, I think that's what I see.

Um, and, uh, and so we, we, you know, we, we really, um, the other thing interesting about Primer from that perspective, uh, teachers are also scared to tell me things aren't going well. And so there's some sort of thing that happens in the outside education world where they come in and I'm like, "Hey, how's it going?" Like, "Everything's great." I'm like, "Can't be. School is a human endeavor. There, there have to be difficult parents and kids who are falling off the, like the, there's got to be problems, right? This is the nature of it. School's messy, right? It's that's what it is. It's what it's supposed to be. Every year is different." And so I had to get them comfortable with saying to me, "Yeah, I have these like three kids that I'm really struggling with."

I used to, I have often to diffuse that, I say, "I love bad test scores because that just gives us a baseline of where we can start." And so, you know, show me your bad test scores and let's go build.

One of the things that, um, is a, is a very deep problem inside any organization, um, that I've thought about quite a bit, and I've read about, and I've experienced, especially in big companies like when I used to work at Viacom, is there's a tension between these two forces. One is standardization, and and the other is autonomy. Like, and so, and you're talking about this, give teachers more autonomy. So when I think about that, I think about, okay, inside organiza, inside of companies, um, there's a lot of functions that are hard to measure how well the performance is actually going. Like, you've got the bottom line, like, are we making a profit? Right? The sales department, they're really easy to measure. Are they closing deals or not? They, like, it's the, it's, it's like, it's so, it's so much easier to deal with sales people because they have a transaction that validates that it worked, more or less.

But then you get into everything else internally, and you start to get into this more murky world of, how do I know that you're succeeding? How do I measure your success? Let's create bureaucracy. Let's create standards. Are those, and then these standards can be gamed, or they can create perverse consequences. And, and so I, I imagine, and my observation in the school environment, especially in public school, which is this massive bureaucracy that has to process, literally process, like thousands of students in, in these schools, often, um, well, we, we just have to have some standard. And a lot of it's been directed from on high, or it's been adopted as a matter of like, consensus or something.

And now we're just checking the boxes. And if we are going to say, give every teacher autonomy to learn their classroom and just see what the test scores look like, >> right? >> Then you've got to have managers of the teachers that know what good looks like. And like there's a whole, I mean, this is what companies have to do. But it seems like in the school environment, all of that breaks down. Is how do you understand what's going on there and why that isn't happening? Because a consistent thing I've heard from traditional public school teachers, especially in our comment section, but also in conversations, is that they just get very quickly demoralized.

And it sounds like one of the things you've hinted at is that when you bring teachers into a different environment, they have like not been trained to have autonomy at all, and they have to like learn. It's like, "Oh, I'm not in a straight jacket anymore. Well, what's the right thing to do? And how much can I do? And when is like the, the Ministry of Education going to come clamping down on me?" I mean, am I understanding the environment correctly? Flesh that out for me, and for the, and for the parents and teachers out there.

The, uh, so, you know, I under, you said something I think that's important, like processing thousands of kids. I, I tend to stray away from beating up the public system because I believe it has a different, it is a particular mission, uh, and that is different than the mission that the, the schools that I've been involved happen to have. Um, and it is, uh, you know, doing something at scale is really hard. And we know, I think we all know what works and doesn't work, right? In that space. And so, um, I tend to, to, it's really hard to take every child who crosses the threshold and try to get them to a point. Um, and so that's, I, I tend to push, push that one aside and think about, okay, how do we, how do we know what's happening in the classroom? How do we know that we have good teachers?

And one of the things that was frustrating to me as a young teacher was that, uh, I would look around the, my office as a, you know, history teacher, and think, gosh, that guy comes late every day, and I know he hasn't graded those papers in two weeks. Like, that's not good, right? How do I, and, you know, at the same time, he was great in the classroom. So I'm like, well, how do you weigh that, right? He's not good at these things, but he's good in the classroom. He is, you know, and, and probably pushes back from management. And so there's this old academic thing where it's like, I'm just going to give you, and my first teaching job where I wasn't, wasn't a very good teacher. You know, we were just going to give you a class and we're going to say, "Go get them." And, you know, I suffered in the beginning as a teacher because I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I really don't know what to do. And, you know, it was took it upon me to go find out the people who could mentor me and help me and do those things. Otherwise, I would have quit because I'm like, I'm just a crappy teacher.

So, what we do, the first thing it starts with is having a really basic mission, right? Of having, um, and I like three words, uh, but having something that's very clear and succinct that, uh, people understand what that means. So get rid of academic excellence, right? You think about Alpha, for instance, you know, that was, we want kids to love school, we want kids to learn faster, and we want kids to learn life skills. Three basic, very basic things, right? Um, you know, at Primer, we talk about from an academic perspective, we want kids to master, um, math and literacy. Like that's really important, important, right? We want kids to be able to pursue individual interests. Like, we, we think about those, um, in very simple, tangible things.

Then when we think about the roles of the people who are on the ground, we actually build those from the ground up, of saying, like, what is, what is the important thing of this job? What is this person going to be doing every day? How are we going to measure whether or not this person is successful? What work product do they actually create? And so we actually put a ton of work into designing the instructional role, um, with the understanding that it has to, the outcomes have to fit into the actual, what are these commitments we're making to families?

Um, and so, you know, at Primer, we do these crazy pursuits where kids, um, you know, basically are, are doing deep dives into, or into learning, or what they learn in their, let's call it their basic classes, their core classes, come to life, right? And so we have specific questions that I ask candidates, like, are you, you know, talk to me about the projects you've done, how excited are you about doing these things? And I frame it and imagine that, that everything you were ever told you can't do, you can suddenly.

Um, and so then I dig into what their responses are to see if they have the, you know, the genuine interest in, in exploring and pushing those boundaries. Um, that's where the starting point comes in. And then we do a ton of coaching into, uh, you know, what does good look like in this case? How do we raise this particular, how do we, you know, come up with standard? The window into it are the kids. If I want to know what's happening in a school, there are two ways for me to find out. I can go show up, and you know, that's going to be a little bit different, even if I show up by surprise, right? Because like, oh, well, I might change my behavior. But once you get to know the kids and you ask them what's happening, they're super honest. And one of the things that we did at Alpha, which I really loved, was we surveyed the kids every session, and I would go for walks with kids and say, like, "What, how's this going?" And at first, they were tentative, but once they really began to trust, test. They would say, "Well, this person's late every day. This person doesn't know their content." And I'm like, "The teacher or the other students?" "Teacher."

And they would say, you know, "Here's what's really happening." And then when you made changes based on the kids' feedback, everything was different, right? And they're like, "Wow, this is like, this is really responsive. This is something that this, like, oh my goodness, I actually have, I can persuade with good reason, you know, the direction of the school. I have ownership and accountability. I buy into this." That's one way to do it. But I think it's really comes down to under, you know, being unapologetic about what the school's mission is and the philosophy. So what do we do and how we do it, and then you stick to that strong point of view through everything you do. And so if something sits outside of that strong point of view, you look at, you know, that young teacher who might have been me and say, "That's a great idea, but has nothing to do with our school. If you want to do that, you're going to have to do that somewhere else."

Great. Um, let's, let's flesh out what Primer is in very, in very like understandable terms so that, um, and then we can expand back out from there. But that, this, so, so what exactly is Primer? Um, and what is the experience like for teachers, students, and parents?

Primer is a school network that was founded by a gentleman named Ryan Delk, who, um, really, uh, he experienced a micro school. He's got a great story, and it's, and it's out there. Um, but basically a micro school that his mother created, um, when he was a young child.

And what is a micro school?

Micros, don't know that.

Yeah. Micro school.

Um, so it wasn't homeschooling. It was something more than that.

Correct. Right. That on the way to doing it. So there are lots of different definitions of it out there. My good friend Matt Campler at 4.0 Schools in in New Orleans, I think, really coined the first micro school. He's a former KIP guy, which was, um, I don't know if you're familiar, but New Orleans post-Katrina couldn't figure out their schools, right? So, so it became a petri dish to start and really build new school models, which is super exciting.

I think if I remember correctly, roughly Katrina decimates the city, and what comes after out of it is, every school is now technically like a charter school, basically. There's no, the, like, unified school district model is gone, and it's like, yes, they're government-funded, but they are all doing their own thing.

So it becomes this petri dish, uh, and, and where you can go experiment new things.

And just to round that out for people, because I don't think we'll come back to it. My understanding of the picture as we sit here today is there was a lot of enthusiasm, especially from my fellow friends in the in the school choice movement, and the, um, it didn't, and then there was a lot of pushback from the usual suspects, the teachers unions, who in the public sector, I consider to be about as close to a devil as one could construct. I, I do not mince words about them. They're a bad actor in our country, um, and a literally corrupt one. Um, so of course, they wanted it to fail. And then you had other adjacent players, um, who were also big critics. And where it seems like it's shaken out, and maybe you can just add to this if I'm getting some of it wrong or I'm a little out of date, is, it hasn't been a panacea that's produced like the most world-class students the world's ever seen, but they are doing substantially better than they were before. H, that's my understanding of, of it's like, it's, it's not, it's not now that all the schools are like Michaela in London with Catherine.

Correct. But they are better. So it was a step in the right direction because of the competition and innovation and, yeah, and some good data come out of Louisiana. Um, and so, is that, is that an accurate, do you think that's an accurate?

I think, I think that it's ebbed and flowed. It, it wasn't the panacea, it wasn't, um, and I'm not familiar with the exact data coming out of New Orleans right now. Um, there is some good data coming out of Louisiana. Almost always when we provide choice, things get better, right? So if I can provide families a choice of where their child goes to school, the opportunity for them to find a school that matches the, their academic philosophy at home, things tend to improve. It's always shock. One of the big, there's a lot of things going on in our world that are sources of night terrors, let's say. But one of the bright spots in the United States, especially accelerated by COVID, is there has been massive movements for school choice across the country. Just this past May, here in Texas, there was a law passed that opened it up to. So the mo, the, the argument against school choice, I, I just find bizarre. It's like, so you're saying that the grocery stores would be better if we couldn't pick which one to go to? Like, what's the, what other domain of your life do you want to not have a choice in what you get to of the service provider? It's completely bizarre.

Bizarre. Um, yeah, and, and, and so if you think about Primer, for instance, uh, as a reaction to or filling it, it's the largest school network, or largest network of schools operating multiple schools that where, um, the children or families take advantage of vouchers, ESAs, basically school choice funding.

Yeah. So, so you're elig, your schools in your network are eligible for all of that stuff. So, um, and this is Florida, Arizona, Alabama, and soon to be Texas. Um, and so these are schools that are built to be roughly 60 to 90, um, students. So we go back to the definition of, of what a micro school is. I would argue that it's Dunbar's number. It's 150 or less, right?

That's like Acton. Acton size is targeted roughly Dunbar's number. K through 12, right?

Are they K through 12 schools?

These are K through eight.

K through eight. Okay. Um, now there are some folks who would say, well, it's actually six to 10 kids, you know, so there is a range of definition when it comes to that. Um, and, uh, we operate schools in neighborhoods where families simply do not have choices. Liberty City, Florida, right? Uh, one of the toughest zip codes, uh, in the country. Um, and so we're building schools where, uh, families who are not familiar with choice suddenly have the opportunity to send their child to a high-quality school. So access is really important. Um, and these are families that are, um, you know, they want to make sure their child's safe. Safe meaning they don't get beaten up on the way to the bathroom.

Yeah. Physically safe.

They want a, there's plenty of schools where that's not a given.

Correct. They want an adult who's engaged in their child's learning, right? Who knows their child. One of the things that we've built are multi-year cohorts, similar to a to a, uh, a monastery, where kids, um, are have the same teacher for three years. You know, we do this strange thing with kids. We send them to seventh grade, they figure it out, and then we give them like a long holiday in the summer, and then they start a new job. They have a new classroom, they have a new part of the building, they have a new routine, they have all these things. Imagine if we change jobs every nine months, right? Why do we do that? Children.

With a nice long gap in the middle where you're doing nothing.

Zero sense. And so part of this is also inspired by the classic articles, right? You know, Bloom's two sigma problem, or Skinner's shame of American education. How do we just teach kids? How do we meet kids where they are? And how do we, um, you know, how do we actually create more learning during the day? And so, you know, so Primer is, um, you know, it's really a, um, it is a way to provide families with options for education and a focus on building habits, same thing we talked about before, as well as building a really good toolbox in math and reading. It's my belief that in order to be successful in life, I need to be good at math and I need to be able to read and communicate. Right? And so that's.

I have a lot of friends who they hear to succeed, you need to be good in math and say, "Oh no, you've doomed me."

Good in math meaning like, let's have a really good command of Algebra 1.

Okay. Uh, let's, let's understand, let's understand algebra. So a big part of our goal is getting kids to grade level by the time they go to eighth grade. That'll change their high school trajectory. Go back to the what I said in the beginning, which is this gives you the opportunity for greater opportunity, right? This gives a child opportunity. That's what we're all about. Um, and so, um, it's, uh, it's, it's a hard problem to go solve. And what I admire about Ryan, and one of the reasons I was excited, you know, to to join Primer was that we're going to go into really tough communities. Communities where, you know, people, um, the, the need is there, but others have necessarily have have failed, and do everything we can to to deliver on our commitments.

How many schools are in the network at this point?

There are 15 in the network right now.

Okay. 15 schools. How old is the oldest and how young is the youngest?

The oldest is four years. I've been there for about two years. The youngest are brand new. So, we, we just launched in a couple new cities in Florida, Kala, um, Milton, and then added Alabama, which was one of my big pushes. I really, I was excited about the state of Alabama. Um, so, we have schools in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Huntsville.

One of the things that is a, a very deep challenge right now is demand. This is true in a lot of domains. It's true in housing. It's true in a lot of spaces. Demand can shift way faster than supply can react in the short run.

Right? So for example, let's imagine that a major city elects a lunatic, and suddenly you have a mass of people.

Yeah. That are like, "I got to get the hell out of here." And they come to Austin, Texas, let's say, in theory. It's much faster to move to a city than it is to build more housing, just in, even even with no regulations at all. It's like, it's still going to take three, four months to build a house in the fastest possible. Everything's lined up. There's no delays from the subcontract. I mean, it's technically physically possible. I've seen it done. That's about as fast as you can get if you're basically like a vertically integrated home manufacturer. You know, those guys could do that.

You can 3D print a house.

But you could build a nor, traditional house in about three to four months with the most optimal circumstances possible. More likely, it's going to be about a year, maybe 18 months, right?

Okay. So, millions of people come from this soon to be failing city, and now what do I do? We face a very similar problem with in states like Texas and Arizona, and Florida's been at it longer, where now you can, you can technically move your kid out of this school that sucks, or it's failing for your kid. Maybe it's succeeding for somebody, but not for your kid.

And where do you go?

Yeah. And so now we've got this really interesting, challenging problem of, I'm a parent. I have, I've been empowered with with a voucher or with an education savings account. Where do we go? Okay. Oh, here's a micro school. It's a year old. Is this going to be better? I guess I'll try. So help me as the parent.

Yeah. Think about evaluating this rising set of options, of which you are one, that are new and young.

Sure. And I don't know if this is going to work. And is it just like, hey, what's the worst could happen?

Yeah. But like, help me understand that as a parent, like that choice I'm going to make.

So first, you know, um, I'm keenly worried about the supply side. School choice is awesome. Really excited, especially here in Texas, um, where we have, you know, we have enough funds, you know, we always love more, uh, to be able to to really provide a high-quality education for kids. Um, and that's going to enable us to go into rural communities. It's going to enable us to do, and especially having a universal, you know, we'll soon be hopefully, you know, universal voucher, but be able to go into communities, um, and not, um, and and really focus on building a good program. Um, the, uh, when I think about choice, and you know, I say this often, that there's nothing more Texan than than having, you know, the ability to choose where my kids go to school and how my kids are educated. I think the first thing you do as a family is say, "Okay, well, what do we care about?" I don't think it's just about, is my child at a fa, failing school? That's kind of like, I don't know, this is good enough, right? It's that classic old argument, "Well, this school is good enough for me. Look at me. I'm fine. So my kids are going to be fine."

That's such a low standard, right? My kids are fine. That's all I'm striving towards is just okay.

And it's sort of like a low, it's a, like the memories aren't all that trustworthy because we remember school looking back, thinking that school was this one thing. But it was all these other things that led into where we are now. Some of which had nothing to do with school.

So then we kind of think like, we sort of remember, like, we just have very fuzzy memories, very romantic memories about the best and the worst. Tony Wagger, um, has done a lot of work on this and interviewing adults saying, like, "What do you remember about biology class?" And I'm think, I think I dissected a lamp ray. I remember the teacher. I don't remember photosynthesis. Like, you know, it's like that's all we remember, right? And it's actually just one or two adults during those school years that really formed our overall thought process. And so, you know, like I remember my, I remember in high school, Miss Olsen in my social studies class was a great teacher, and I remember being a little young Republican, and her being a Democrat, and it being great, and being like, this great thing where I felt like, man, I love politics, and this is great. And I remember Mr. Brick, my calculus teacher, who was sort of grumpy and would get angry, but was like a great teacher, right? And I remember Mr. Macowski, who I failed his class almost, and had because it was chemistry, and chemistry was hard, and I wasn't well suited to it, and I didn't do very well, and I had to like clean the chemistry lab once to get a, a near F up to a C, right? Uh, yeah, those are, those are things I can, those are, but if you say, like, "Do you remember the class content?" Habit formation, right? We go back to that.

That, so, you know, part of this is, as a family, I need to think about what is important to us? What do we value from an education? What are the, what are the, the social values, potentially? What are, what, what do I want my child to learn? How big of a school? Where does athletics fit into this? Do I want them to be really well-rounded? Do I want them to be specialized? And, you know, there's some great schools out there that have been around for a long time. Um, you know, great private schools, for instance, great public schools that have been around for a long time. But this is really an opportunity for families to sit back and say, "Okay, what's important to us?" And can we find a school that meets 70% of this, 65% of this, 80% of this?

So, there are the group of families who are like, "I got to get out of here. Like, this is not safe for my child."

Yeah. School choice provides an opportunity for them. That's awesome. There are also families where it's just like, "Oh, I have the, I have, you know, I have the opportunity to take a step back and say, survey the scene and say, what's best for my kiddo?" It's hard to change schools right now. Think about this. If I move into a nice neighborhood, uh, or I strive to move into the nicest neighborhood I could, I can, the old, old calculus on this.

And there's always been school choice in terms of you can choose your neighborhood that you on the basis of how much you can afford. So rich people have always had school choice.

Yeah. Exactly. And I strive to to afford that nice neighborhood, and I have, uh, then I put my child in the school. If things don't go well, and I need to think about another school, I look to my left and I look to my right and think about my neighbors, and they go, "Well, school's going okay for their kids. Why isn't going okay for my kids?" And I also have to have that conversation. "Why isn't Sam going to school with our kids anymore?" "Well, we just felt like he needed something different." "Oh, different. H, okay. Wasn't good enough for you?"

Learning challenge. It's psychologically it's really hard because you're living next to these people who all picked this neighborhood because of the school, right?

Yeah. And so, but what we're basically saying is like, actually, that's okay. It's okay as a family to say, this one-size-fits-all school actually doesn't fit my child's needs, and I need to go find the thing that's better suited for my kid.

How much of that kind of, um, social pressure do you feel like is really out there?

A lot. I mean, in my world, I've got great friends who are like, "I don't understand what you do. Why? Why? Why do you? What, what do you mean different schools? Like, just send the kid to school. What? Why can't? What is it? What is it that you're doing?" Or, "Oh, you're building one of those schools that's going to pull the athletes away from from our community. And so we're not going to be good at baseball anymore." Nope. That's not what we're doing. In fact, we don't have sports at Primer, for instance, uh, and certainly didn't have them at Alpha. Um, like we're just trying to do a couple things. One is provide families with options. Two is try some things that are, um, I don't know, different, push the envelope. I always talk about wanting to be out at the, you know, sometimes at the outer edge of what school can be. Um, you know, in that area, if I'm like re-entering the atmosphere and there's that heat shield, like out there where their ideas are burning up, experimental. And the great private schools in this country, a lot of the great private schools in this country are experimental. They actually try different things. They give teachers the opportunity to, to, they funding to be able to go do different things, right? That's not something you can always scale. It's sometimes a one-off. But there's no reason for us, with the access to information and the way to do things differently from using software and and enabling teachers who really care about their kids to just build the culture of the community in the classroom they want to go do that.

How do you think about the worry that my kid might fall behind? Because I think when I, when a, when a parent hears experiment, most experiments fail. So it gets me scared. Like, I'm going to experiment with my kid, and if the experiment fails, they will fall behind. And then it's uncomfortable to be behind, and then you can get into this cycle of feeling like, "Now I'm not good," and now I'm not going to try because I'm not getting the rewards of feeling like I'm keeping up or whatever. There's all kinds of things you could imagine that falling behind means. How do you think about this idea of falling behind?

Because it is maybe the phrase that gets used the most, just as like, among parents, like, "Are you worried your kids's going to fall behind?"

Well, the, the good news is that, fall behind who is a part of that question, right? The good news is that in our current system, where teachers for the most part, you know, develop the curriculum, deliver the curriculum, and then grade the curriculum, we just change what low expectations look like. So, you know, we just came out with a, a new set of norms, uh, for the MAP test for NWA. And, you know, what was.

What's the MAP test?

It's a, it's a, um, assessment that's given three times a year to about 10 million children, I believe.

Okay. It's like a standardized test.

Yeah. It's a standardized test that's somewhat adaptive. So, it actually allows you, it shows how much you've learned point to point between each test. And it also shows your achievement based on, you know, you really what you know based on other kids who are similar to you. And, you know, what's nice about it is that we've gone from, you know, the 50th percentile, what was 50th percentile two years ago is now 48th percentile, but we just sort of bumped the 48th percentile back up. And so we can just keep moving the middle. Uh, and so it looks like, you know, being on grade level is just, uh, you know, even though, even though scores are technically lower, we can just make those adjustments. We can just, we can just reset the norms to where the majority of kids are. So think about that, right? Like the standard, we just continue to lower the standard from that point.

So the first thing I do, so I want to make sure I'm understanding what you just described, because it was a little technical. Are you saying that that's what's happening in schools right now is that you've got standards perpetually lowering, and so like, we're all falling behind, basically? Like the default right now is your kids falling behind?

Every few years, we reset the norms on tests.

We reset the norms down, right? And so think about like, the norms should be absolute, right? Like, what, whatever was 50th percentile in 1986 could be 50th percentile today, or going up, given like all the information and technology, etc., etc. Why? Why should we be getting less out of our kids than in 1955?

Let's not even worry about going up. Let's just stay. Let's imagine there's some biological speed thing inhibitors. You know, there's 15-year-olds on average can only go so fast, so far. Okay.

Yeah. So, I throw out the whole, I, I actually disallow the word "behind." Kids are where they are.

And why, why throw it out? Because the worst thing I can do to a child who's a fourth grader is say, "Oh, you're below grade level. You're behind." Okay. Yeah, you're behind in math. That translates to, "You're an idiot. I'm not good at math." Cool. You tell me I'm not good at math. My parents tell me I'm not good at math. The test score tells me I'm not good at math. I'm just not good at math. And suddenly that becomes who they are. That's part, part of their the definition of who they are. Because remember, this is their job, right? And they're like, "Oh, I'm, I'm average or I'm below average." And what a terrible thing to do to a child. Why would I, I don't know what that child's capable of doing. All I know is these instruments that we have have determined that this child is below. Nor have I equipped that child with the habits and the ramp to become better.

So, what I prefer to do with a child is say, "Okay, great. Here's where you are today. How do we create a pathway for you to improve, to grow academically?" I'm obsessed with sort of academic growth from that perspective. And so, we, so that's part of this cultural component that's really important. A good friend of mine, unfortunately passed away, Trevor Moad, used to talk about getting to neutral. And his big thing was, as he worked with, he was the number one sports psychologist in the world, um, ranked by, I think Sports Illustrated, some it was always like, who ranks that, right? Uh, but, some stamp, some stamp, anyway. He would say, all these athletes, like, "Stop saying negative things. Just don't verbalize negative things." And so the big thing I was like, oh, takeaway for this, and I would have him work with kindergarteners. It's like, yeah, we just need to stop parents from saying like, "Oh, you're bad at this. You're not a good test taker. You're not college material. You're not an AP kid." And to stop teachers saying like, "Yeah, you're just not good at this, or you're not good at standardized tests." And start kids just saying, "Okay, I am what I am. I'm here. And now how do we create a culture around improvement?" Right? Improvement comes from understanding the value of hard work, right? And so when I look at this whole idea of being behind, um, structurally, we just have a group of kids who are, you know, uh, who, who need to improve or need to grow. We can speak about it relative to grade level. So we can say, okay, you're below grade level. You're below the 50th percentile. Kids can see that. Then if we take curriculum and we actually have them focus on the curriculum they need to be working on. So we meet them where they are. All of a sudden, they realize that they're engaged. The compounding effect of sitting in a classroom where they're just lost goes away. And then a miracle happens. They start to improve and grow and exceed the expected growth curve, and then they build self-esteem, and they show up at grade level.

It's a little more complicated than that. What does that functionally mean? So, if you've got something that you feel confident actually moves moves kids up, one way, one of the earliest people I encountered as I started really paying much closer attention to education thinkers and people that are critics was a guy named Eric Hannesk out of Stanford.

Yep. And his most, he, he made, he said these things that were like seemed so obvious, and the fact that they were treated as like controversial just speaks to what's what's so broken.

Yeah. And he and I have had some conversations.

And, and, yeah. And it was like, "Okay, well, here's the deal. Here's one way to think about how to measure school. Like, you have your kids at the start of your school, your class year. How much did they learn in the time that you had them? Forget like their grade level. Like, they came in here. Where did they get to? That's what you did. If you're not, if you're doing a bad job at that, then you're bad, right? And we fired you. And if we did that for like the bottom 10%, if we did like the Jack Welch, like, just be able to fire people who are bad, like, like real bad, like bottom 10%. It's a radical revolution in school without changing any of the other levers. Just fire the people that like, can't get the kid to like spend nine months in their classroom and end up further than work, far enough ahead of where they were. Yeah. Forget mastery, forget all that, like, just like progress.

Um, how do you, why are you confident in the progress you're making at this stage in in Primer? And is it about looking at the other experiences? Is it, when you talk about that, is it a composite of your experiences? We don't need to focus narrowly on on Primer, but this is where you're at.

No, it is a, it is a, it is a true composite. Um, so I have long been obsessed with growth. If you start with me here, where are you in nine months? Right? Where are you in 10 months? What is the, what is the plan? Um, and where this really started to crystallize for me, uh, was one, back in my early teaching, like, I know I have this diverse group of kids who all know these different things, and I'm holding them to an absolute standard, and that standard is, it, you know, it's really important for kids to understand this. But it was also, but, but ultimately, what I was really interested is like, well, if I have a child who's really struggling to understand these basic concepts, and I can see write a better paragraph, that that really meant a lot. Now, that may not be an A paragraph, but it may have gone, they may have gone from a C to a B+. That means they're growing academically. I mean, something's working. What is actually working, and how do we, how do we do that?

But when I think about it relative to, um, you know, I was at, I was at IMG Academy in Florida, and, uh, what I knew was special about that place is those kids had really clear goals. "I'm going to go to, I'm going to be a professional tennis player. I'm going to go play, uh, football at the University of Texas." They knew where they were going because sports-oriented school, gifted athletes, right?

Okay. And I thought, okay, well, we, we unlike a lot of kids who are going back to this maximizing of opportunity thing, these guys are kind of know their pathway, and we know how many credits they need to do to get in, and we know the NCAA regulations, we know all this information. What if we just backwards map from that, but not only think about it academically, but think about like their sleep patterns, their nutrition, their schedules, their, like, we have this whole, we have, that's a boarding school, so we have this, we can do all these different things. And I started to draw this graph where I was like, wait, if I'm going here and I'm here, then I could actually plot out like a pathway, and then I could measure it as you go. And it's probably going to be a wavy line because kids are kids, right? We're human beings, and ups and downs. But when they have a dip, we could actually change some things. We could apply some pressure at that point in time. We could maybe get them a tutor. We could maybe change their sleep schedule. We could like monkey wrench with things a little bit and probably get them back onto their pathway. Or if they were succeeding, you know, succeeding above where we thought they would be at at a speed, or their learning velocity had improved, well, maybe we're on to something, maybe we should change something.

That was coupled with having conversations with my buddy Charles Thornberg, who created Civitas Learning here in Austin, which started to measure all the data in higher education and think about why do kids fail? Why do kids fall out of the higher education system? What prevents them from reenrolling in community college from semester to semester? And so we're just thinking about things holistically, um, not for the first time, um, but very much.

From the standpoint of, like, we have all this information now. We can warehouse this data and start to think about particular pathways. And where I was really able to put that play into the field was at Alpha.

Okay. Um, where I was able to say, okay, we have, if software is our primary learning engine, and I can take a group of 30 or 40 or 80 kids, and I can actually give them, uh, the instructional material they need, which meets them where they are, then I can focus on growth, right? I could, we can set a pace. And that led me to this whole concept of, like, learn learning velocity, which is still one of my dreams. But basically, the the the basic big point, going back to Eric's point, is, can I measure where I started and where I ended up with true data? And what do I do when children aren't, quote unquote, growing at the rate that I want them to? And I would even get rid of that idea, right? Because kids are, I I have no idea what's possible. As soon as you're sort of discovering it with each individual.

To exactly. There's some average, though, right? I mean, isn't there some, I mean, we're all individuals.

[snorts]

But we aren't that different from each other, right? Where where how how wide is the band?

Sure. But the last thing I want to look at a kid like, okay, let's try to get to average today, right? Like, sure, that you know, you want to be average. It's that old monster.com ad where it's like, I strive to be a middle management. Can't wait to be average in life. Like, that's not, I'm not interested in that. But there's there's clusters of things like middle school age is painful for everyone because of like, the biological, correct, psychological, hormonal insanity and for for example.

Absolutely correct. And when we think about, uh, and so we we know the societal norms. Like, I mean, like we know, we we know a lot about how kids learn. We know a lot about how kids mature. We know how their brains work to a certain extent. So, that's all information that we need to have and think about as we create these different pathways. Um, but we don't, we we're really good at limiting a child's capability. We're really good at saying, like, oh, if you're a sixth grader, you're not ready to do this, right? Or, oh, that's eighth grade material. Uh-uh. And in fact, they're great examples of this. Um, one is that I I I it sends a shiver through my spine when I listen to a teacher say to a child, "Oh, you read ahead." And the kid's like, "Yeah, I was enjoying this book so much. I I read three chapters ahead." Like, I need you to stay with the rest of the class. Okay. Did you just say that? Really?

[laughter]

Uh, graded homework, right? This is practice, John. This is practice. I'm going to grade your practice. Oh, you missed seven problems in practice. It's going to hurt your grade, right? These things are just like when we say these out loud, we have, you know, this goes back to, you know, uh, it goes back to Steve Jobs' whole relationship with failure. We have such a terrible relationship with failure. Uh, that failure isn't a bad thing, right? That we have to learn from falling down and getting back up. And it's one of actually the important things we have to teach kids. But we've go back to, you know, the beginning of our conversation. This now when I think about like going back to the parent who says, um, well, you're not going to experiment on my child.

Mhm. Let's define what we mean by experiment. And then let's also think, let's couch that into what is the norm? What is happening in the average school or the schools that you have choice, right? How are they grading themselves? What is really happening in the building? And, you know, so transparency, I think, is really important when it comes to these, you know, new schools building, you know, and they're going to be schools that are going to fail, and they're going to be schools that are going to be successful. Um, and but we have to get comfortable with this idea that in many cases, this choice I'm going to make is going to be better than the situation that I'm coming from, because I'm actively making a choice and I'm engaged in that choice for my child. Matt used to say this thing at at 4.0 about, all we have to do is suck less, right? I used to use this at Alpha, too. I'm like, you know, our starting point is so low. We just have to suck a little bit less than what else is out there, and we're going to be winning. And the advantage we had at Alpha is like, the kids love school. So I'm like, if we were just a little bit better academically, and kids love coming to school, like, we just won. We just have to suck a little bit less, right? Now, that's a really low standard to start.

It's funny. It's a low standard, and it sounds kind of horrible. But then if you look at the way compound interest works, and the fact that suck less by 1% compounding over time actually ends up being like a massive difference over the course of just a couple years, you know.

Uh, the, um, I think that this this question of measurement and is is, um,

So we've got these different things that we encounter as parents that are measurement tools. Uh, standardized tests. So it's like my kid takes this test. Like, I remember it was the Iowa's. I think there's a star test here in Texas. I forget.

But so that's comparing where my kid is to other kids at his grade level, at his age.

Mhm.

In the questions asked.

Technically, I guess.

Um, there's the tests and the grades that they're getting in the class. Um, there's how do you think about, uh, like, there's this idea of grading on a curve. Like, which I don't, I don't fully understand. It's like, I know it's like very, very common in all of education, but it's like, well, what is that? What is grading on a curve as part as just as part of the general, like, stuff we encounter as parents about, what does that even mean?

You know.

And you're rolling your eyes, so I think you don't like it.

Yeah. It's just, it's grade inflation, essentially, right? It's like, okay, the average score in my classroom needs to be a 75, and therefore I'm going to adjust things accordingly. So, you know, even if so, remember a test, I I I lectured, uh, I told those kids, you're in my house now. It's not my problem if you don't, I'm doing a great job delivering this information, right? Great job. I remember watching a young lady teach, and she, um, was teaching about, uh, pre-World War II debt in Germany, which is a fascinating subject to some. A group of juniors in high school at 8:00 AM, not. And I'm looking around the room, and the kids are just, you know, this sucks. It's so bad. And after that, she was like, I really nailed that lecture. I'm like, did the kids enjoy it? It's not my problem. I'm delivering that information. I'm doing what you've asked me to do. Like, not really, right? That's not, that's not actually your job, right? Your job is to figure out how do I engage the kids so that they can learn, right? That's not, not, not just simply standing. Anyway.

So, yeah. So, how does that how does that connect to the grading on a curve?

Right? So those kids aren't going to retain that information when she tests them, and they're going to have low test grades. But to help her, um, within the system that we had built, if she just grades that on a curve, she adds a couple 10%, you know, adds 10% to everybody's grade, that norm becomes 75, average is a C, and then everything's everybody's happy. So, yeah, I know I got a 60 on it, but you on the curve, you know, I got an extra 10%, so I got a 70. So it's not that bad. Everybody did poorly on that test, so.

[clears throat]

It's really not that big of a deal.

Yeah, it's so weird. It's like, well, wait, what?

What now?

Right.

It's like, well, yeah, the average grade was a 40. It's like, well, that's that's a sign of something not good, then, right?

And the [laughter] person who should.

What? No, no, no. Now 40 is 100. It's like, well, no, that's not what what does that mean?

But the problem is that we often look at the kids and we say the problem was the kids didn't prepare. They didn't know. They didn't do well on the test. It's the kids' problem. But when we think about responsibility and accountability, the person who's providing the information is really the one who's accountable. It's the teacher's fault. They either built a bad test, they did a bad job delivering information, they did a poor job engaging the kids in school. And so when you ask the kids, and when you really dig in and they trust you, they'll tell you what's going on. And that, to me, is one of the most interesting things that happens. Now, I do believe in accountability. I'm a big believer in accountability and believe it so much that I often use this phrase that I'm 176% responsible for that. Uh, I learned from a good friend of mine here in in Austin, his company does this where they, there's when something goes wrong, there's more than 100% accountability to go around, and just a cultural piece. And so I love the idea, and I look at parents this all the time, and I'm like, you know what, we failed. We did a poor job. We're not good at this yet. It's something that I started a long time ago as a school person. Here are the things that we aspire to be good at, and we're going to work towards those, and there's no excuse for not doing a good job. Actually, it's the way I usually start my parent meetings, and parents are like, not used to a school guy telling us all the things we do wrong. We're supposed to tell you what you do wrong. Um, and so I try to instill that in kids and certainly in teachers and going like, "Oh, this test went poorly. We're going to redo this. We're going to change something about this." And so I think instruments like the MAP test, which we use at Primer and they use at Alpha, are really important. You you should be able to norm your norm your child based on the other instruments that are out there. Some schools choose to play in a separate sandbox. They go, "Not only are we going to build a different system, a different way of going to school, we're actually not going to participate in any of the things a traditional school does because we want to be so different." My response to that is that's not helping anybody. You need to be able to play in the same sandbox, and you need to be careful that the instruments that you introduce don't influence how you teach or how you structure your program because then you will create ordinary. Right? If we use traditional standards, if we used, uh, the common core standards or the TE standards to build the new school, then we're just going to get regular school. So there is a way, and we did this certainly at Alpha, and we're doing this at Primer, to build a curriculum and a program that is not tightly aligned to a group of standards, and we can actually see great results. So kids are going to school differently, and they're seeing really good MAP scores. Um, the this question of the standardized tests and and like the incentives that are baked into the traditional school system, the public schools and the private schools that mirror public schools, which ends up.

[clears throat]

Being a fair amount of schools, I think, especially.

Yeah. Unfortunately.

Um, I mean, one sort of tragic example as a somebody who went to 12 years of Catholic school is I do think that the Catholic school system, the Catholic school system is probably the most exciting place you could make a tremendous amount of difference if someone had the ability to move it because I think it's the largest private school alternative in the country.

I think the world. I think that Catholic school is the largest school operator in the world. Yeah. And and I think on average they do better than their public school alternatives.

But they could do so much more better than they do is my impression. What's your take? What do you have? Do you have a take given that you've you've moved around a bunch? Like how how do you understand the, uh, what the what the value proposition of your average Catholic school in a neighborhood, in a community is going to be relative to the default zip code choice.

Yeah. Um, it really depends upon the diocese at this point. But but, you know, growing up as a kid in Cleveland, Ohio, those schools, those diocese schools were really, really important. Right? They provided an opportunity for a high-quality education at a low price point, and they were part of the fabric of, um, you know, they're part of the fabric of what made a blue-collar town work, right? I could get to the point where I could, you know, I had suddenly had options for school. Go back to school choice. And so this was a really easy opt. That was a part of my community, was aligned with my values, crazy stuff, and I knew that it was a high-quality education, and I could hold them accountable because they were part of the system, right?

And that's one of the things that we've like lost, right? The idea of a community school. Um, you know, I was talking to a few of your folks before about, you know, some of our small community schools like Travis Heights Elementary here in Austin, where I can walk down the street and go to school, and those teachers can live in my community. That's so powerful. Fast forward to Primer. That's actually one of the things that we want, um, you know, that that we strive to do is that we want people from the community who are founding schools in Alabama. We took two schools that were former elementary schools that were closed and turned them back into schools and hired local people to go run those schools, right? Uh, people who wanted to be there and wanted to serve their kids. That's I think the same thing you had in those, you know, those parish schools, right? And and and and I think what's really important is part of the fabric of how our, um, how our communities were built.

These mega schools, which we've seen, you know, we have fewer schools now. The average school size is 500 approximately in the United States.

Don't, you know, teachers come from all over the place. They're not necessarily connect. You're not going to run into those people at the grocery store. It changes a lot when you see those kids, you know, running around your your neighborhood. One of the things that I was, um,

[clears throat]

Shocked to learn, I'm trying to remember where I saw this stat. I haven't had a chance to like double check it or, uh, but that the number of, um, of school districts.

Has has decreased by a factor of 10x, I think was the number. Like we had something like 120,000 school districts, and now we have 12,000 something, roughly. Like, is that?

Is that your understanding? Exact numbers, but yes, that's true. The districts have declined, as well as the number of schools have declined, and the average size of those schools has grown, right? It just becomes because it's about like, again, efficiency, right? How do you know,

Efficiency is not important for me as a parent with my children at all. Like, I would like them, you know, that's that's the thing that's way down the line in in the things. I guess there's certain things I'd love them to be more efficient about around the house, but other than that, uh, but it just comes down to, you know, it's easier. And now there's a great argument, though. Um, and so this is something that I'm super interested in, is, you know, the idea of mall school, of actually taking malls and turning them into, uh, areas of learning because there are efficiencies that come from, um, from sharing, from shared space. So what we do at Primer is we often use shared space. We use, uh, a church, and a part of a church, or part of a community center, or part of a school that's that's, you know, that can't fill its entire footprint. Um, and so there is an argument for saying, like, well, if I have 5,000 kids in a school, I can have a better science lab. I can have a better, uh, I can better facilities. I can hire, you know, I have more money, so I can hire better teachers. There's that's a that's a fine argument, provided that I create, I'm very intentional in how I create the culture and develop these, um, you know, develop the the pathways for the kids in between. And it gets even better if I have school choice, because then I can say as a family, like, "Oh, that's just too big. It's too big for my child. I would rather have the school of 100 over here."

Yeah. The, um, one of the things that's been so difficult, uh, when you try to make these choices about school, um, is it's this bundled good. It's like, it's not just school. It's not just, I want math and and reading and writing, you know, the three Rs. Like, I want my kid to have good habits, not be a not be a liar and a cheat, and be able to read, write, do the most basic levels of math necessary to navigate the world and pay your taxes and balance your checkbook. Um, but then along comes all this other stuff. There's the the PTA meetings and all the adult stuff that's really got nothing to do with the kids, but ends up playing a big role in the politics of the community. Yeah. Uh, there's the sports, which also again has an adult component of excitement and parents and, yeah, class rings and varsity and all that stuff. Um, and then there's the extracurriculars, like the school becomes sort of like the centerpiece of your social life, um, in a especially in a lot of smaller communities where it might also be one of the larger, or maybe the largest employer in your town. And so that this bundle, do you see what you're talking about is like, no, no, no, when you go to the mall, it's not all one store.

Correct.

But it's there because this is where you want to go to shop in the in the late '90s. So, so you know, so like school as mall is a really interesting idea.

Yeah.

Um, do you think we're heading there, or do you like, are you are you excited about the, is that a, is that a very real possibility?

Yeah. So, first, let's think about this. Uh, all of the things that you talked about are adult-driven, uh, decisions that we're making for a particular school. Should have this. I I love listening to adults talk about the things that they think the kids will like. Oh, you know what your, you know what they really like? What if we did this? You know who knows? The kids. Ask them. Well, that's a crazy idea. You know how we should shape this part of our, uh, building, or you know who we should do here in the lounge? These because just ask the kids what they, what they just get their input. Doesn't mean doing what the kids want. It's just about getting their input and buying it. The same thing that we do as adults. And so, you know, a lot of what you're talking about are adult, um, driven decisions that formulate or change. School starts really damn early. You have kids. Is that ever a struggle? It's it's really the early. The funny thing about the the school schedule is it seems like it flies in in the face, especially for like middle school and then teenagers. It's like they, the notion that you're going to get a teenager to learn anything at 8:00 AM.

I'm pretty sure that's like scientifically thing, right? Isn't that like, isn't that like not a thing?

We know factually. So the second thing is, if you follow the child through a day, I start at 7:45, 8:00 AM. My first period is, let's say, algebra 2. Then, right, then you know, at 9:00, I go after an hour of that, I walk down the hallway and I go into, uh, you know, English 11, let's say. Then I have a five-minute, five-minute break, run to the bathroom, and I run to art class. So in my brain, I have moved from math to literature to art within three hours. That's a lot for a kid. Oh, by the way, I might have tests in two of those, right? And so what I often ask administrators is, just follow a child through the day. And some of them come back in tears, like, what are we doing to these kids? The schedule is not optimized for the children. The schedule is optimized for the system, for the efficiency, right? For how do I control the kids going through this product? School should be naturally inefficient that way. Kids should be able to to build depth, right? Um, I was just visiting a wonderful school that actually has school on Saturday mornings, which sounds crazy, but if it decompresses two days a week, where those days are shorter, kids are actually happier, right? They have more time, and that's what they really want. They want time. My good friend John Kettler, who built, um, Tacoma School of the Arts in, or School of the Arts Tacoma, um, you know, they have four class periods a day. So they're just smarter about how they use their schedule. So small school unit economics for small schools are really, really hard. It's extremely hard to build a school of 60 or 70. And.

When you say for, when you say unit economics, what do you mean?

I mean, we get a certain amount of money from the state, and we've got to find great teachers. We've got to figure out how to pay them benefits. We've got to find a building to rent. We've got to buy computers. It's expensive. My counterpart in the public system, they don't have to pay rent. They get the state pension thing. They get these state benefits. They get everything's different for them. I I have to figure out how do I pay for all that myself, or raise the money to go do it. Sure, I can get a grant here, a grant there, some wonderful people out there like Stand Together who are going to, you know, help me figure that out, but it's hard. Uh, and I'm probably not going to make any money for three or four years, right? So, yeah, I'm also like giving up my job at the local school district, saying no to health benefits, and saying I'm not going to, sorry, family, like, we're going to lose one of our, you know, may, you know, lose income for the next couple years. Um, it's one of the reasons that we like to say at Primer, it's it's one of the easiest, you know, to start a Primer, right? So you're not starting your own school, but you're starting a Primer. Um, it's one of the best things to do because you're going to get paid, and you're going to be able to build a school within your own, you know, community. And so if you really, if the value set or the mission and philosophy match yours, then it's a wonderful thing to do. But what mall school enables us to do is to share in those costs. Right. All of a sudden.

Distribute the fixed costs.

Exactly. Get this economies of scale of like, wow, we only have 60 kids. We can't possibly afford to have this program or have a football field. But, but if we get like five other schools, now we're actually now we can afford the rent of the thing that has all that other stuff.

Exactly. And so now, so I'm walking through the mall, and the old Gap is school A, and then, uh, oh, by the way, there's this guy who does a ceramics program, and he took over, uh, this little store. And so all of a sudden, I can take the schools as well as all the extracurricular programs, and I can bundle them together in one building. And so not only does that mean that the, I'm sharing the cost of the facility itself, I'm also creating a marketplace because the families that go to school there suddenly say, "Well, actually, I can take ceramics after school." And instead of mom and dad trying to pick that child up and take them across town, they're actually just walking upstairs.

Yeah, that's the other, that's such an interesting idea. Now, I I when push comes to shove on on this at this government level, I'm I'm I'm a radical. I I I would like to, if someone says, you're now the dictator of the of the state of Texas, and you can do whatever you want with the Texas school system.

Yeah.

Um, and it, and like, follow your your dreams.

I would simply eliminate it. I would sell it all off. I'd probably also not even go with the school choice thing and just say, all of your taxes are now substantially lower because it's literally like half of the state budget. But let's imagine we still got the school choice thing for so that there's a baseline of affordability or access or something like that, unlike everything else. Like, so it's basically like food stamps for school. Um, then what gets me excited thinking about that is you, one way to look at it is like, oh, we've got these malls. But you could imagine a world, and this is happening now, where you don't just, you don't have malls, you have old schools, you have schools that have been de that have lost students and are being closed. But it's the school building. I mean, given it's not great because it was built by the guys that built the prison, but it's still there. It's got a basketball court. It's got a big open. It's a school.

Infrastructure.

Is there movement to actually do this? Is there an opportunity? Is is that going on where it's like, hey, rather than one school taking over this giant thing?

Yeah.

Let's get a cluster of schools together, and we'll basically be like, we work school in the old like local Barton Hills school elementary or whatever.

There was a We Work School experiment called We Grow. It didn't go very well.

Um, we'll keep we'll keep the actual We Work people as far away from all of this as possible.

Let's keep that.

But yeah.

[laughter]

Uh, the Yes. So yes, uh, there are, uh, plenty of old schools or former schools that have, in fact, we, as I said, we have two of them in Alabama that have new schools or or shared space where it's like, I only need six classrooms. How many classrooms do you need? I need six. Well, there 12. All right, we'll split.

Great.

Yeah.

Um, and we'll share the cost of, uh, the playground, and we'll be really smart about how we do these different things. Um, I've always thought it's strange that we all have, I get there's a ton of pride in like the stadium with a jumbotron and all those things, but it's a lot of money. We shared that across a couple different districts. I get the private school part of this because it's a little bit different, but it's like we can share some resources and and and doing these different things. So, there's absolutely that movement is occurring. I wrote my first paper on the privatization of school districts when I was a junior in high school, or sorry, college.

Um, I was going to say high school. Wow.

Yeah. High school, much. But what I learned in high school about private, you know, everybody's like, oh, you know, I talked about private schools, but private schools actually are more diverse than public schools, right? Crazy idea, right? Uh, both socioeconomically,

Racially, right?

Certainly the Catholic schools.

For sure. For sure. And

But but yeah, I think even more broadly.

If you just think about the different belief systems of the kids that I grew up with, you know, with a wide range where if I just stayed in my little rural neighborhood in Cleveland, I never, you know, met all those kids. Um, and then so the idea behind the, you know, the mall, or just a space, whether that's, uh, we did this wonderful deep dive, uh, with this group called Retrofitting Suburbia, and where we, uh, basically took classes from them and learning about what's happening in suburban rings, um, with expired retail, it's called, or retail that's no longer utilized. How could we take advantage of that in order to build schools? There's a great project in Oklahoma City, um, at the Crossroads Mall, where I think they have 5,000 students now, uh, charter school students who who are occupying, like, let's call, I don't know if this is right, but the old J.C. Penney and the Macy's, um, and they're going to build out the rest of the mall into a basically what's going to be a community center. It's going to have everything from.

Um, it's like it's like an '80s movie. We saved the community center.

[laughter]

In some ways, but, but more so, think about this, like,

High five, freeze frame.

[clears throat]

Like, think about, um, think about, like, oh, there's a facility, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a fully, there's a facility which takes Medicaid, which now I can get all of the, you know, the medical needs for my children taken care of. There is, um, a teacher training program. There is a, you know, there is a, um, adult co-working. There are all these different things I can add into this particular space that was a dead zone. Have you ever been to a dead mall? They're not fun. I've been to a lot of them, right? They are creepy, spooky places, right? Terrible idea in many ways. And so this, this, I think, and we have Highland Mall, of course, ACC here, ACC Highland, uh, which is a great example of this. But when I walk through those spaces, I'm like, this should be a school. Um, and it can be a school as well as so much more. It can be open from 8:00 AM in the morning till 8:00 PM and become an asset to the community.

Um, you've talked about two different threads. Um, at the level of the student, that I think are interesting, and and they're not in conflict per se, but in the people I've talked to and interviewed, they are often positioned as being in conflict. Perhaps one is rigor, discipline, habits, and virtues, high, high expectations, high standards, so that and teaching. And the other, and again, there's a full spectrum here. If Michaela, you know, and and, uh, Katherine Burbal singing in London is the most, you could say, top-down, teacher-directed, and kicking butt and taking names and beating everybody else on scores. Um, then you have maybe Salisbury Academy, like on the other side, is the most student-directed. Let the kids do what they want. Hey, if they want to come to school and basically pick their nose and play play Nintendo Switch all day long, it's not a good idea. But they'll figure out it's not a good idea. Um,

How do you think about the challenge of of kids being kids and wanting to waste their time and make stupid choices that we as adults should probably step in and help them with?

That's a loaded version of the question, right?

But the student student-directedness, where are its limits? How do you think about that? I fundamentally disagree that students want to waste their time. That children want to waste their time. Students want to be engaged. They want to do hard things. They want to learn. Um, I see it over and over again. Teachers who are disengaged, classes that are boring, a schedule that just sucks. That old, I know you're not supposed to talk about Louis C.K., but I think I can do that here. Like that old P his whole PTA skit where he's like, "You guys are missing the point. School just sucks. School sucks." Like, it's a miserable experience for so many children.

That is the title of the first episode of Dad Saves America. School Sucks with, uh, Mike Yates.

Mike Yates, my good buddy Mike Yates. Um, and but that's the reality. It's just, it's a crappy experience, and we have really low standards. And sure, there's some phenomenal schools out there, as I said, I was just at one last week. Um, and we're trying to build different ones, but that's the baseline, right? So, school sucks. And so, I don't think that I think when you allow kids a lot of room, there are a lot of kids who start, you know, becoming creative, and there that happens. But I look at this differently. I think that you have to start with habits. And it's like the old school figure approach, right? It's it's the Picasso, Dali piece, right? Um, it's I have to start with the basic school figures of what it means to be a great artist. And I can do that, and then once I have the school figures taken care of, right? In the.

What do you mean by, I'm not trying to.

Meaning I have to be able to draw figures. So I mean, I have to be able to draw a perfect. I can't, I I can't, you know, I can't start with cubism, right? I have to start with basically the human form and being able to to to draw correctly, right? I have to learn, um, the basics of the art world before I can then build out, um, you know, before the expression, before before the creativity really comes involved. To be a great writer, I have to learn how to write, and then I can I can gain the opportunity, the platform for, you know, creative writing.

I do not believe, and I'm sure that there was somebody who can argue against this, but I do not believe that great writers suddenly start just being creative off the bat and putting together great sentences and understanding how to effectively use the English language creatively without understanding what a noun is. And so, where I push back and where I've gotten frustrated, this I started at the beginning of Alpha, grammar doesn't matter. That's not true. Grammar matters. Understanding how I use the English language is important. It is important for what everything we do. And, uh, knowing even even knowing that there's software that can improve my grammar, that is great. I still have to make sure that I understand that it's the intent of the language is matching what the computer is trying to do and fix, right? So here's this great software. It's going to teach you grammar. At the end, it's like, okay, do you know grammar now?

Right? Do I actually know how to do this? And do I how to employ this? Right. Um, can I be persuasive? Right. And so what I think about is that that is the po point. So I I am I am fiercely, um, in this camp of, I need to teach good standards. I need to have a really strong toolbox. I need to push kids to, uh, develop a great thesis, right? That those are things that that there are skills that I need to teach them that then as they grow, that introduces the opportunity for choice, that then opportunity is becomes the opportunity of like, okay, now I can start to explore in depth. And part of my responsibility as a teacher is to offer classes and to deconstruct, um, uh, deconstruct what was a traditional class into something that can be more engaging, is to continue to refresh my curriculum, is to not offer the same class every year. So an example would be in history, for instance, we have a very chronological approach. Well, now with the AP, we don't even really do that. It's like, you get two days on, you know, you teach world history, which isn't a thing, that you can do in a year. And you teach.

We're going to teach you the history of the world in high school in a year in nine months. Great. Great.

Let's do two days on Egypt, right? Uh, and so what I would much rather see, and and and I had a great conversation.

It's it is amazing. I'm sorry to interrupt, but it is amazing. This this sense in which there's these things that are done that when you just look at them objectively,

Sure.

They're like ridiculous. Like, yeah, you're going to spend two days on on Egypt. It's like, you're not going to remember any of that. You haven't done the history of Egypt any justice. It can't possibly be interesting if you're going to run through anything, even like a cursory outline of the whole of Egypt's history. So, what why did you do that at all? Like, why are you doing that? Often, you just say the things out loud, and it happens. A lot in the school room where I will just repeat, like, let me, we'll do two things. Is one, I'll say, like, let's get rid of the edgy speak, just say use the simplest words you can, and tell me what you just said. And then, two, then say it out loud, think about what you just said, right? Here's what we're going to, you know, and it goes back to like, I'm going to teach you how to be a citizen of the world in six weeks. Amazing. How do you do that? Right? You're a wizard.

Right? Or here's your course, right? We're going to cover all of this history, and all you know, and it's just not possible. I don't even have the toolbox. I don't understand bias. I don't understand geography. I don't understand. And so, well, what if we stopped doing that? And what if we just thought about like the interconnected, uh, you know, we we thought, you know, you know, sort of transnational, inter the interconnected parts of the world? What if I taught a class like, I don't know, uh, you know, the rise of Christianity, right? And and simply the rise of Christianity, let's say Christianity, you know, through to let's say 1300, pre-Renaissance, right? That's a course I can do in a year. Um, that's really important. That course, you know, to understand how the world works. I need to understand, in my opinion, the rise of Christianity, right? How Christianity's role.

Yeah, that seems like.

You know, the West, right?

The West, right?

Where we live, our whole thing. Our whole thing, like our First Amendment starts with like freedom of religion. So, why did they do that? Why was that the first? I have to understand that. And then I and then, okay.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And I might not teach that course chronologically. I might actually start with a conflict, and I might go upstream and downstream from that conflict. I might actually think about something that's really relevant and engaging for kids right now. I might actually start with a story and tell that story to the kids, just to get the kids excited about this, and just start to push and prod, and then work the curriculum from there, right? That's great, in my opinion, great teaching. That's a much more valuable way to think about learning and how you shape a classroom. Um, and so I think, but again, you have to have the freedom to be able to do that. You can't, if the district or the state bought the curriculum from some large publishing company, and this is simply, I need to be on page 28 by this date, I don't get to do that. I don't have the ability to shape and mold and form. Um, and that's something that I think school choice is going to be able, you know, to be able to help us get back to. I think one of the fundamental tensions when it comes to all this. So, so let me just make sure I I heard you correctly, because I started with the question of student-directedness versus.

Very little student, like almost no, like student-to-student direction. I what I heard was something kind of in the middle, which is.

Before you can make good choices and exercise creativity as a as a young person, and this is very, this this sounds like Katherine, you need to actually have knowledge. Like if you want to be a great writer, you need to learn nouns, you need to learn grammar, you need to practice, you need to do book reports before you can do essays, before you can do thesis.

Yeah. And so you need to be guided by an adult to do that. You need to, as a, you know, I grew up loving to draw, and I just remember that, you know, the first things I was doing was tracing. I mean, yeah, you draw, but if you love, I love the Disney characters, and it's like, I can't just draw a Disney character from scratch. So first thing getting is I'm tracing, and then I'm, there's all kinds of stuff I don't even realize I'm doing there. Like my muscles are getting trained in the space, and then I'm seeing how I do that, that that Mickey Mouse nose, and it's actually like, oh, I should do the head as like a circle and sketch it, and then do the.

Technique practice. But that's not, but connect back to, you know, does that suggest a student agency, self-directedness?

Has a place? It grows over time. How do you think about student-directedness, because it's this, it's a big self-directed education story acting.

These are things that are self-directed, and they put that forward as the fundamental philosophy.

Right. Um, so I believe strongly again on this kind of this habit formation, right? That I have a very clear understanding of what, how my classroom is structured, what the acceptable behaviors are. I want to create room for some level of choice, really structured choice, so that I can, so I can allow kids the ability to understand. I can allow for social collisions. I can allow kids in young years to run into each other, physically run into each other, try to figure out how we're going to work together in this particular space. That sense of discomfort, right? I'm going to put kids in so I can give them an opportunity to make a bad choice in a protective environment so they can learn this process that is separate from, I also want to make sure that kids are doing hard things, that there's a clear curriculum, that there's a clear, like, these are the fundamental things that you need to learn to build out your academic toolbox, and this is really important to be able to unlock the knowledge that you're excited about getting to. But what's important in there, and that good teachers do, is that they also are cognizant of what their kids are interested in, and they are able to pull the children through into that level of interest, right? They're pulling the kids along. In today's world, we as parents, I don't do this, but I know a lot of parents who do, we center our weekends around our children. Hey, what do you want to do on Saturday? I want to go to a bounce house. Amazing. And we watch these parents play into an indoor facility with a bunch of bounce houses, and the kids are popping like popcorn. And that seems bloody awful to me, right? What we need to do more of is pulling kids through and into the things that we're interested in. Let me tell you what we're going to go do today. Pull the children along into your interests. Go explore. Right? This is your life you're living. It's not this child-centered thing where we're going to shape our world around a five-year-old or a six-year-old or a seven-year-old and their desires. And school shouldn't be that either. I'm not going to look at a group of six-year-olds and say, "What do you want to do today?"

What I'm going to say to them is like, "Here's what we're going to go do today." Right? And I'm going to pull them into those things. I'm going to expose them to things that they don't know exist. I'm going to use, uh, I'm going to teach a literacy class based in song lyrics, right? And I'm going to use everything from what they may be listening to right now. I'm going to use some Drake, and I'm going all the way to John Prine, right? I'm going to use all kinds of different things. And what I'm doing is meeting them in some ways where they are. I'm talking about the relevancy of what you know, what's happening in their world. I'm not just saying, "Oh, that's not.

music, right? Instead, I'm meeting them where they are, but I'm still talking about like what makes great song and can we come to commonality on that?" And I'm pushing and prodding them through that process. And so I I think that that's where this whole agency thing, you know, gets lost. Do I think that kids need room to play? 100%. Do I think that kids need room to fall down? I'm famous for looking at my kids and saying, you know, when we were in Arizona, I'll see you in two hours. Don't pick up any rocks without looking first because you don't know what's going to crawl under if it starts to rain. Stay out of the washes, right? Like they'll be fine, right? So I I I I really believe that risk is important and I don't believe we should tell our children to be careful. Um, so that's a, you know, a different part of the conversation. But at school, I need to make sure that they have that toolbox and I need to pull them into that. And it's my job to explain like you don't need to learn a noun just because you need to learn a noun. You need to learn a noun because this is called language and this is how we communicate. That's that's it. So, you know, I'm firmly in this camp that um you need to build a very high quality academic toolbox and that's what's really important. And that's if anything we've watered down. It's like, well, we don't have to read a whole book or it doesn't ma, you know, it doesn't matter if you fully comprehend or have mastered this thing.

>> I [snorts] um one of the things that is shocking when you hear it, if you aren't aware of it, is that on average, I I believe that undergraduate college students do something like a total of under 30, might be even under 25 hours of work. Mhm.

>> both um class time and study and out-of-class work.

>> Mhm.

>> Which seems crazy to me. I And I I I I'm trying to even remember mine because I I I basically went to trade school. I went to film school at Penn State. So the first the first uh two years were the some basics and then very quickly I was in like what's what's like a studio art. It's like architecture film school is like you're doing projects and you're basically working like an animal. I I worked then the way I work now. Like a 50-hour week feels like a normal week and is not even the is is often not the typical. But 20 hours a week it's like so let me get this straight. I'm going to pay what am I paying now? What am I paying? 30 grand, 40 grand, 50 grand, 60 grand, something crazy. And then you're gonna work 20 20 to 25 hours a week. Um, how how do you think how do you think about like the the the paths for kids and are they ready for them and then do they it seems like schools that really prepare kids in high out to high school and do a great job. Those kids go to college and like this is freaking easy. Is that been your experience? Like how is college if college has gotten soft? How is that part of what's pushing standards down in K through 12 or is it part of like a general lazy soft safety thing in the culture? Like what's what's killed rigor? The longest way to get it's like the longest way ever to get to a single question. That's sometimes how I roll.

>> Oh yeah, the killed mind, right? Um

>> uh yeah, that is a such a great question. I think uh part of it is the the the part of what's broken is the understanding um of the you know the correlation between work and outcome. Um it turns out that the more time you spend learning learning not in school learning like actual learning time the more you learn.

>> Shocking. And then the begs the question, well, how much time does a child typically learn at school? This actually was relevant to alpha. Um, like if an hour-long class like what is the effective learning time? We basically came down like we think it's about 25 minutes. So if they're doing software for 25 minutes and they do software then that's like in basically three core subjects that becomes or four applications that becomes two hours of learning. Oh, okay. So, we can reduce that to if it's intense, the actual learning time. So, I think there's this like disconnection between the time that I'm actually putting in true effort and the outcomes of the that effort, right? I think there's a shift in what the standards are of just like what is high quality look like. Um, if you spend some time reading essays or written work that may not be essays but attempts at essays of young kids, um, you would be aghast. Uh, right. But what have we done? Well, you don't have to read all of Hamlet anymore or you don't have to do all of this course anymore. Um, we've sort of created this cheat code. And and if you think about curriculum even in its sense, it's total sense like there isn't that much content between kindergarten and nth grade, right? So, so the idea of a child learning two grade levels in one year is totally possible because there's just not that much, right? There's a lot of overlap. Um, and so, you know, I think it and I think it's a it's a it's a loss of standard. It's also easier to hold kids to a lower standard, right? I don't have parents who are upset with me. I don't have uh, you know, people I mean, I remember the first this was a Christian Science Monitor article um when I was a young teacher about talking about the number interviewing professors with the number of parents who called the professor after the professor gave their child a low score. Could you imagine that calling your your child's professor say I want you to reconsider the number of parents that I had hear from who are like can I know this is the rule but can we make an exception? No, we can't. Your child also knows the rule. That's the standard. This is the way it's going to go. It's going to hurt, but you know, it's going to be okay. The parent who goes, "I'm a really tough parent. I hold my child accountable." Well, then why are you here delivering their computer second period when they forgot it at home? Because if you're holding them accountable, you just let them sit there. Why are you bringing their lunch? They left their lunch at home, but they're going to go hungry. They're going to be fine. This is the hardest stuff is that and it's like even I'm not perfect at any of this and I try and I like literally preach this stuff all day long. Um, there is like this other benchmark that I come across that is upsetting which is if you look at the reading level target for presidential speeches over time.

>> Yeah. It's like and if you just go back and like like go back to like the first recordings like of FDR's fireside chat. That's

>> right. And then you can and let's leave aside like the kind of you know neuvo [snorts] re like Trump's a particular character and he's not he's like you know there's there's different levels of eloquence in our presidents but um their speeches are usually written by a speech writer and the the grade level target and the level of like literacy and sophistication has just gone like straight down. It's like the which means that I think it's something like in the 1950s like a third of Americans were high school graduates. It's something like that. The numbers on we have these stories we tell ourselves when it comes to school and education in America that when you just like look at basic historical facts like wait a second I don't understand like oh the school system built the American middle class. It's like, well, how is that possible if as ear as as recently as 1950 only a third of Americans graduated from high school?

>> Mhm.

>> Like, how does that work? Like, I don't like what does that mean? Um, and so there is there it does seem like we have become a dumber lower-skilled society at the level of the kind of academic rigor that would have been average in 1920. If you went into a went into like a a high school in 1920 you went to a high school in 1920. Those kids read all the classics. They probably had to learn Greek. they could write an essay better than a college student. Am I wrong about that?

>> No, I think I think that's generally true. [laughter] Uh, I think generally true. I mean, I think it depends upon uh, there are probably, you know, it depends upon where you were. It also depends upon race and there there's some other things that we'd have to take into account if we really to look at it. But overall, I use the and you know, I use newspapers and news as a often way to to to measure this. you know, the the um, the USA Today used to have a little box in in the left-hand corner. I haven't seen one in years. I think they still publish it, but and it was like here are the headlines you need to know today and there were six bullet points. And what I found was that most people just read those and like okay, I'm up to date and that's it. And so that's the adult view. What's the cheat code to knowing what's happening? What's the what's the quick five-minute thing I can listen to in the morning to be up to date on the news? what's the quick uh what's I don't have to read the whole book uh what is my you know AI-driven uh you know quick summary of this and now I can I can I can do that I can read this on 2.5 speed audible you know we've just created all these cheat codes and that's just drifted down into what a child experiences I don't need to learn grammar because I have spellcheck and and Grammarly and these other programs and so what's the value of this I've you know I hear this all the time I've got a computer in my back pocket I don't need to know this

>> I don't need to know anything I can just have the the black mirror tell me everything,

>> right? But never have I had this time where I'm thinking, well, it's not just about the knowledge, but it's also like the development of the muscle that is your brain and how do I learn, right? How do I, you know, increase my learning velocity? And so I think when we go back to rigor, it's just a very unpopular I mean rigor for the most part except for like the Austin like workout scene, the hit those sort of thing. I think it's like a it's just a very unpopular thing. We love to talk about, by the way,

>> yeah, rigor is good for gym bros and whatnot. And that's

>> and we also love to talk about like these, you know, you know, it's like this this hustle and grind work culture where all we do is we're on Slack and and email and we're, you know, constantly like just constantly doing in this, but there's actually nothing that's being we're not building anything. Um, and I think about a lot of when I think about going back taking this to to the school world, I'm like, what is the work product that this child has to show? What are the books they've read? If I look at a child, like I think this would be an interesting question. Look at a child from a competitive high school and say, "How many books did you read? How many papers did you write?" Right? I think I think my senior who wrote a lot last year at Westlake, I don't think he'll write a full paper this year.

>> Not one.

>> I don't think so. Maybe one or two. He'll probably get mad at me, but like that's gone, right? And so, and it's just And he wants to write. This is the thing that I think we we we going back to like the the the engaged child. Kids want to be tested. They want to try things hard. There's a tension there. We see it in video games and those things and they want to do those things, but it's just become wildly unpopular. Parents are often excited about not having homework because they don't want to sit with their child and help them at night. It's which to some extent is understandable, right? Because it's like I used to be great at math. I used to actually like get A's in calculus and now algebra algebra comes home and I'm like I don't remember how to do this. How can I even be helpful exactly? I'm not even sure how to be helpful here. I have to like relearn algebra so I can then try to help you with it and then how am I even supposed to help you cuz I just shouldn't just do it for you. So what's my job here now?

>> Great. Your job's actually not to help them with their homework, right? Their job is to figure out how to help themselves. they have to learn how to learn. And so part of that exercise is, you know, when we think about homework is like the homework if it's well-built to reflect what they were doing in school. It should be practice of that, right? And they should have enough of a guideline to figure it out on their own or they don't and they walk back into school and say, "I'm confused." Right? And so this goes back to like, you know, I don't want to help the children, nor do I want them doing three hours of work at night, right? I don't want them spending this time, you know, um, working hard. I want them to be able to take a mental health day. I want them to be able to take a half day on Wednesdays and maybe not go to school on Friday. I want a flexible schedule. Um, I want to do school on my terms, not your terms. Right? And and this is all deteriorated. you know, what we consider risk or the standards that exist in schools. Is it a trickle-down effect from higher ed? Maybe it seems like it's part of something that is hard to talk about because it's like all-encompassing. It's it's a wealth effect and a basic biological imperative to conserve calories at every turn.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> We don't we like Why do I want to read the short thing? cuz I'm saving energy. I don't even realize that's what I'm doing, but that's what I'm doing. I'm saving energy. It's like I'm Okay, let let me do the quick thing. Let me look at my ground news quick summary. Okay, got it. That only took like 10 calories. [laughter]

>> The amount of content that's produced, right? The amount of what we have to keep up on. Um, it's daunting the how active our brains are moving around, watching a child, uh, you know, do their homework, play a video game, and watch a a video all at the same time, and you're thinking, you're actually not doing anything right now. We've become a society, I think, that that celebrates the dabblers, right? Instead of going deep in things, we, you know, and pushing kids to go really deep in things, we're like, oh, we love this sort of well-rounded, like, I'm kind of can do this and I kind of can do that. U, which means you really can't do anything. Um, and so these are just like things that are somewhat unpopular. You know, we were I was just talking to your crew this morning. Um, and we were talking about like the value of trades, the value of being the guy who has the HVAC company or the pool company, right? Um, that really learning with your with your hands, right? Of of doing hard things like that. There's there's something that's just we've just lost in our school world. it's become so digital and and just not enough um not enough producing great work product.

>> Um, this has been a far-reaching conversation. Um, a lot of themes, a lot of uh principles on a pra one practical level as we sit here is artificial intelligence um and its impact on education. M I know this is like an enormous topic, but it it strikes me as fraught in a bunch of ways.

>> Um, in that it's a little too easy to use. [laughter] I mean, we now have a pretty solid version of the Star Trek computer that you can talk to and that gives you answers and they're like 85% of the time pretty accurate and 15% are lies.

>> Um, but that's still pretty good. That's probably better on average than talking to a person, even a well even a good professor. So, how do you think about where we're headed with a world in which AI is already pretty darn good at like knowledge stuff or language or

>> teach me a thing, tell me a thing, write me a paper, do it a little better and with just a little bit of prompting. And um, and is there a way you think you're you're looking at it that's productive and can be good for making the brain work

>> or is it really something we should protect our kids from to the best of our ability

>> until they've already established the capacities necessary to make it additive instead of a replacement for their brain.

>> Yeah. Uh, first I think that AI and education is actually a pretty boring topic.

>> [laughter]

>> uh, to be blunt. Um, it's like it it goes back to the internet thing that I started with like we don't know exactly anybody tells you they understand how AI is going to impact education is not telling you the truth. We don't know. um just like we didn't know I didn't know how the internet was going to it was going to be a thing. I knew something I had to keep my eye on. I had to figure it out. Uh, probably would have been you know, probably good to like start with some guardrails and think about how we use this with kids and like what is good usage not just to like not just push it aside but you know, it's like oh, this is this new tool just showed up. Let's let's let's dabble, let's in in in this from the standpoint of just using it and trying to figure it out right we should be somewhat experimental with it. But this idea that it's suddenly going to change education forever. Um, I just I don't buy it. Um

>> you don't think we're going to have individualized robot teachers that are meeting us where we are on a onetoone basis. You mentioned the um the blooms two sigma. Isn't that the basic insight that then the only thing that makes a two sigma impact on educa on people learning is a onetoone relationship?

>> Isn't that isn't that a you don't think that's a possibility? No, we already have, you know, we've been able to build fairly individualized pathways for kids where they can, you know, they have a we can we can assign them exactly the work that they need. We can measure how long they're working. We can measure their growth. We're not that far off from that. Um, is it true that kids often like to ask a a machine, a bot, a question versus a person? Yeah, because there's a psychological part of this, but kids want three things from school. They want a relationship with another child. They want a relationship with adult outside of their household. and they want a sense of place. We know that. Um, and so those things aren't going to go away. That's human nature, right? Aristotle said we're a man, you know, we're we're we're social beings, right? By our very nature. That's not going to change. Um, and so, and I don't I believe that what's important when we go back to mentorship and how we formulate relationships with young people, it's part of that is being motivating. The other part of it is having knowledge that I want, right? because I'm trying to figure out like who am I going to be in this world and when I look around and I see my teachers and I see the other adults in my world who are somewhat inspiring to me um and they're not just in school, right? They're they're everywhere. I think what what is the knowledge that they have? What is the experience they have? How do I build my life? That's not going to happen um with artificial intelligence. Now, I know there's a bunch of data that's come out about how college kids are using it as a, you know, social guardrails and and trying to figure out how do I handle this situ. The girl just rejected me when I asked her out. What do I do? How do I feel about this? I know that's all happening. Um,

>> or just writing your paper for you. I I mean, like, but Jeff Saner said to me uh like the fall of the release of chat GPT, like version three or whatever, the first public chat GPT, and he's like, "Oh, yeah. I'm already hearing that all of the college students are using it for other stuff.

>> There's lots of data around that.

>> Yeah.

>> And you know there I think there will be a a bubble um at this point and Michael Lewis said this he's a much smarter individual I did but he I'm not very impressed with the actual intelligence of artificial intelligence. I don't think it can do those things that are creative yet. Um, and so my reaction to that is like, okay, well, if chat GPT can write a paper, then I need to change the way that I'm teaching and assessing like, isn't there an opportunity in here to think about how do I structure my classroom differently? The same way that I thought about relative to the internet. Um, do I start to experiment with what that looks like, right? If I stick to the way that things were working, well, that doesn't make any sense. I mean, just think about shoot and the time that you know that that you know from the time that I've gone you know when I started in school we had one of those um duplex machines right that like you know where you you know it was like blue ink and that's how you made copies and now we have [clears throat] you know um everything's completely different every kid has a computer right

>> but our printers still suck [laughter]

>> suck for sure

>> it's like this is incredible and it lasts all day battery with an OLED screen and then I go to print and it's like why doesn't that work? It still doesn't work.

>> Right. Right. [laughter]

>> Yeah. No, there's still these things like again these basic things where we don't really do a great job like who prints anymore, right? But

>> yeah, I think that we but that's so that's so I I just like if I were um I think that and we're already seeing some of this, but it is the human relationship still that I think drives schools. And so we're just going to have to get smarter about or smarter differentiate how we teach. Um, and I I think that kids will if if the shortcut becomes I just going to ask this bot to write something and I've sat with lots of kids who've said read this back to me

>> and they've read it. I'm like you didn't write that. They're like no. I'm like what does it say? I don't really know. Okay. Well that's an opportunity like shape around that. Right. And so we have to become smarter about how we do that. Um, there probably tasks and things that are going to be nice to be replaced by an engine of some sort, but I just I think it is it's one of these things where the right answer is like we don't know yet and we're going to find out and the kids are going to lead us there, right? You know, I already know that kids will take a, you know, photo math which has been around for a little while. I can take a picture of a mathematical equation. It can walk me, I can give me the answer, but it can also walk me through all the steps. That's interesting. So if I'm doing homework, I can take a picture and it can walk me through step by step. Is that a bad thing? Maybe not. Maybe actually I'm learning how to do that and if I can, you know, so I think there's a lot of value in some of these things. Uh, if I can take a mathematical equation and shove it into Google and it's just going to solve that answer for me. We have to figure out another way to to to teach that because the skill set, the way my brain works, I still need that. Um, and so I don't know. It seems like it one one place that could be protected and be like a baseline for all of this is when it's time. You said you had said earlier in our conversation that you you know you had you had a class where it was like you had to do an oral exam. You had to write your thing and then you had to get interrogated about it.

>> Um, and I think this is probably already starting to happen in a bunch of schools. I think I've heard in places is okay, we're going to have all these different inputs. We're going to there's going to be a lot of experimenting with where where where it's useful, where it's not. We're lazy creatures that want to conserve energy. There's we're going to have to combat that like we always do. But when it comes time to take the test, maybe that should just be with pencil and paper in the room.

>> Sure. It's that seems like probably like a pretty good like way to keep the human keep the I'm gonna judge what you you actually know what you actually can produce unaded.

>> What do you think about that? Do you think that's

>> I ran this experiment at at AL um and part of that was you know kids were doing really well on their app work and I gave them a paper and pencil test. Didn't go very well and it wasn't negative. If it wasn't like, oh my goodness, this isn't it's just like, oh, we have to there's another muscle here that we actually haven't built and so we have to build this part of the muscle. This guy's been he's been curling, but he has any squats, right? So, we just have to think about this differently. People look at that like, oh, that's a you know, that's a negative on software. Like, no, it's not. It it's just we're figuring how to use these things and that means we we have to iterate. One of the things that I believe that schools need to do is um iterate on a regular basis. It's something we built into a lot of different schools. So you mentioned letting people go. We do we make the decision, you know, when somebody is, you know, when somebody's underperforming because it is our job to provide the very best person in the classroom we can for the kids that are there because it's about the children who are there.

>> Yeah.

>> And then two is when things don't work, we change and we don't hire a bunch of consultants and we don't um, you know, we don't do a bunch of studies. We go, "Okay, well, this clearly isn't working." So, we need to do something different. I think the same thing is going to happen with the AI world. We're going to think about how, you know, what is the value of an assessment? What is the value of a term paper? You know, is there still the same value of that or is that changed? Is that something, you know, how do we do research? I was talking to David Pell about this like how would you teach writing? You know, and I think about it like, oh, you know, and he talked about like, well, maybe it's like how do you actually learn how to ask a really great question? And so I said, "Okay, well, think about this history class, uh, my rise of Christianity class, right?" Um, instead, what I'm doing is reading something and then I'm asking I am using the AI engine to help me formulate really good questions and then I'm taking those questions and bringing them into a discussion and that gives me the opportunity to so I have a depth of understanding and I'm just using it to help you know basically how do I because that's what's important, right? the questions of the heart of good fellowship and I'm using that for in interaction with other humans, right? This this conversation. So what does it do well? What does it not do well? Those are all things we have to think. We also have to give ourselves time to do that. And a lot of those things don't play well at scale. So this idea that somebody's going to, you know, do something at scale really quickly and this isn't going to happen, right? You know, we you have to do the things you can do today that you can't do at scale. So a big school district that has, you know, 10,000 kids and that's a small school district, but you know, let's say you just have 10,000 kids like creating the space where you can go figure out AI, that's and still creating the academic result to sending kids to college and doing all these other things. That's really really hard to do. It's going to happen in small schools. the um I'm thinking about a theme of our conversation and one of the things that I feel like you have done repeatedly is take a beginner's mind approach. Ask like a why do we do this? What is this for? And like you said earlier like just say it out loud like why do we do this? What's that for? Does it do you think that does that? Um, that is in in and of itself a really powerful skill and it would you say that that is a key thing for a viewer especially as a parent to embed from our conversation if there's one takeaway for parents for how to navigate this world a world that is if you have older kids it it's like scary about the future of the job market and all all this stuff everything's scary everything's changing rapidly If you've got young kids, you're at the early stages of being a parent and you don't trust yourself and you don't know what you don't know. Um, you know, what what what should parents take away from from your experience that would help them

>> Yeah.

>> feel like they're they're armed to navigate a world of other school choices than just the school in their zip code?

>> Sure. Um, I think it starts with [snorts] being intentional, right? Uh, making deliberate choices for your kids and realizing that that step one is what's important to us and is this choice that we're making aligned with our family values, with our look at our view at education, or are we making this choice because we're simply going through the motions? you know, we're simply following those around us who are simply doing what the generation before necessarily did did. Go back to um why does a school do these certain things? Most of the time when I spend time at a school, I ask basic questions like why why do you start the day with chapel? Why do you start why why does lunch work this way? Why does the day end at 3:00? Um, well, is this what we've always done? Well, this or it's like actually this is, you know, we are a, you know, uh, we're an Episcopal school and this is what's really important. We're going to start every day with prayer and that's the way we do this. Awesome. I love that. Be really deliberate. Now,

>> have a reason for the things you're doing.

>> Have a reason. We end at 3 because it's because athletics begin at 3:30 and we want kids to have 30 minutes before they go to or whatever they, you know, just just be really intentional in that process. And so I think when when I think about like all right, well one, you know, what are the principles that I care about that my kids have? If my job as a parent is to make sure that this person can go out into the world at 18 and be happy, be successful, hopefully have a situation where you can launch your child into the world where they can make choices and be happy. Backward map from that. How do I want to build um opportunities for them to learn how to make good decisions? How do I am I intentional in in making sure that they have the opportunity to build their academic toolbox, their social toolbox? Um, and how do I also understand that, you know, that part of my job is to bring joy to their lives. So, life's hard. It's really hard. The world's going to be tough on the kids. People worry about, you know, well, I need to level set the children and I need to his family, right? Like, the world's going to do that for you. You need the patiosis that I had who look at you and go, "This is a really crappy paper." Yes, that's going to exist. Go find those people. But at home, you know, love those kids, support them, don't tell them they're not good at things, right? So, I think it's just intentionality. I think too often I just watch parents go through this process, especially in the college thing, right? They'll say to me, "I don't really care where my kid goes to college, but let me tell you where they're applying." I'm like, "Hm, really?" And I'll talk to their kid and like, "It's so nice to see and they'll start rattling off their list of schools and I'm like I haven't even said hello to you yet and I'm not going to ask I don't care where you go to college like really I'm like no by the way no senior wants to talk about where they're going to college anyway right like I think that's the biggest thing and so when the nice thing about school choice or how I educate my kids or what I build around them or when I give them an iPhone just figure out what's most important to you and then follow through with that right I think that's the that's the that's the crucial thing that that I would give, you know, advice to parents.

>> Um, I heard maybe Katherine said this some or maybe somebody else along the way that Americans tend to say when presented with success, you're so smart. And that let's say the Chinese, I think this is how it was presented to me. the tiger mom, the Asian tiger mom says, "I'm so proud of you. You worked really hard."

>> And that the former is a big mistake and the latter is the way to go. Did Did have Are you Does this ring true to you? Have you heard this thing? I imagine you've come across this kind of this rubric. I I we I come from anal I come from a big Italian family that loves to love on the kids and think their kids are smart. And I will never forget my mom um uh tells the story of she I had a I I was an artist from a pretty early age and my mom went to art school. So she went to the kindergarten and and said, "Hey, you know, I think little Johnny has is like has an aptitude for for drawing. I think he I think he's like you should just know." And and and and she said

>> all Italian mothers think their their children are brilliant.

>> which she has told that story to this day. I'm almost 50. I think I heard this story recounted this past year. I don't even remember why. Um, what's your advice on this score? How do you think about this as a parent?

>> Yeah.

>> For for for like what does it mean to give effective praise and you know that that's actually going to work and and be heard the right way in a way that's healthy and helpful.

>> Yeah. Uh, most parents say to me, um, you probably hear this all the time, but my kid's really that smart. They're really brilliant. I'm like, funny. I never hear that. And then I say it back to them. They're like, well, I know, but my kid, I'm like, I love the fact that you think your kid is brilliant. You should, right? That's great.

>> [sighs]

>> Um, I fall in the tough standards, you know, I I think about go back to those six things. Those are things I really value. Um, and what I want I really the hard work thing is more important to me than a high test score, right? for for my own kids. And so I think we do have this we we tend to la praise, right? We tend to be like, "Oh my god, you're so great at this." Well,

>> the self-esteem movement on steroids.

>> The kid knows they're not. That's the thing that happens. I watched this happen with friends of mine. You've got, you know, young lady who's been practicing piano and then the young man comes in and like basically plays chopsticks and the mom's like, "Oh my goodness, look how you're really good at that." And the kid's like, "Thanks, mom." Marissa is going like, "I suck at this." And by the way, I just proved that I like suck at this. It's like she's really good at the kids know. The kids are really good with it. They will kids will stack rank themselves all the time. So

>> you can give them all a trophy and they'll a a they'll beat each other with it, but but but b they'll know like like I suck. I don't deserve this. And like I me having this means that our number one players isn't like this is all terrible.

>> They they'll stack rank themselves, right? It's [laughter] actually a fun exercise to do with kids is have them stack rank themselves according to different things. They're really good at that. They know who's good and who's not. And so I think you let a lot of those things occur. What you value then you go back to here's what we value as a family. This is what I care about and then I have objective standards, right? And so I often look at my kids and they'll hand me something they wrote and they like what would you grade this? I'm like C minus. I'm like awesome. I'm like why is that awesome? Like well because I'll get an A. If you say it's C minus then I know I can probably get a B plus A minus out of this thing. I'm like oh that's amazing. I'm really on very straightforward with my kids about those things. And I was raised in a household where things were, you know, there was no um it was, you know, was there was an objective standard. And I think that's really important. Um, you want your you want to love your children. You want to pull them into the things that are really important, right? And I think that the idea of um, you know, and and I also think that you don't want to use you don't want to limit them. Meaning I don't want to look at a kiddo and say like you're not good at math or I mean there's so many kids I learned like my brother's the smart one and my sister's the smart one and I'm just good at the these things, right? But the the world will stack rank your kids in a lot of ways. But I think it's you pick the things that are important and then you create objective standards around those. And so it might be simple things like cleanliness. What does it mean to be clean? What does it mean to be respectful? What does it mean to be um, you know, what does it you know, how do you shake a kid's you know, somebody's hand? Whatever it happens to be. Uh, and and then create those objective standards. I'm not an everybody gets a trophy thing. Teams that I've coached, we got rid of the multiple MVPs. We got rid we built built the standards back into like how you get a you know, a varsity letter. I love the coaches. This is contrary to all, you know, who would rip my kids apart, right? And it's cringey, but you're like, my kids love those guys, right? Oh, I I had this senior year for Matteo, he went to um he he switched schools from from Acton to a local small Catholic school here. And a lot of it was just there was a bunch of reasons for it, but one of it one of them was he actually got to play on a more serious football a basketball team. And the coach was real hard on them and would yell at them and and I and and I knew that it was good for them and he knew it and it was so obvious and even though I know like people get upset. It was like this was great and he looks back he's like oh yeah coach Michael

>> great

>> he kicked he kicked our butt. I got so much better. It was awesome. Did you ever see remember the movie Miracle

>> about the 1980 hockey team?

>> Oh yeah. Yeah.

>> That scene the legs feed the wolf scene where he makes them skate back and forth and back and forth after the game until they're basically like puking and falling apart. And then one, you know, because and he keeps on saying to him, "Who are you?" And the kid's like, "Here's my name and here's who I play for." And it was always their university. And then finally one kid goes, "I'm, you know, and I I I play for the United States of America." and then he sends them off realizing like this importance of team. It is hard when we put our kids through these arduous things, right? Or when we put them in situations where it's going to be real and let it play out, right? Um, that's hard for us to do as parents. This is whole goes back to my whole thing about risk and stop telling your kids to be careful. Just say just go be smart and knowing that they're probably going to make a mistake. They're probably going to fall down and break something. they are. Um, and I think that's like that that's the way I look at parenting. That's the way I look at school building, right? Like I don't really know what your upper limit is, but when you produce something that's good, I'm like, "This is good. Now, let's work on being great." But I don't actually think that you're ever, you know, that great thing is going to be out there, right? We Yeah.

>> We talk about building standards.

>> I talk about like a relentless pursuit of excellence or a relentless pursuit of improvement, which means that as soon as I get to this point, I'm not done. Then there's a point beyond that. And that's what I try to instill in my kids and certainly the kids that I've been around academically. And I will tell you whether you know when I was at university school as a child with growing up in the household I was the constant pursuit of what is good, what good meant, what is great, being excellent. That was instilled in us over and over again. And the school that I, you know, was just at last week, same thing. What what does it mean to be, you know, what does it mean to be great? What does it mean to have thorough understanding? What does it mean to be polite? What does it mean how we conduct ourselves? Those are all really important values and they're doing that. I think there's there's, you know, as a parent, that's kind of what I want, right? I ask this question of every guest. Uh, the show is called Dad Saves America because I think that's a role we play. That's

>> really high very important. It's it's I think it's an honor. It's a privilege. It's something I recommend everybody do if you're a guy.

>> Yep.

>> Um, and in the proper order. Get married first. that would be optimal. It's way better. It's the right It's the right way to do it.

>> Um, but it's a role we play that has this impact in the world that I think is profound. Um, both as a dad, but more broadly, how do you think about your role in the American story?

>> Yeah. Um, you know, I I uh um easy answer obviously for me is that as a dad uh to two boys um uh it's the most important job that I have. Um, and certainly as a school person, I have what I believe is a duty to um to show up as the best teacher, as the best administrator, [clears throat] as the best builder that I possibly can. Um, when you spend time in education, you realize how vast it is, how hard it is to change. It's one of the reasons I believe in in small schools, one of the reasons I believe in vibrant private schools that stay intentionally small. Um, and so when I think about my own how I fit in this little space, um, I hope that I produce, you know, um, schools, classrooms where it's possible to fulfill those six things that I talked about, being responsible, loyal, and considerate, not lying, cheating, or stealing. And I hope that my kids go off, my two boys go off and um and they're both great guys. Um, and lead engaging lives, understanding what their responsibility is, even if that responsibility, you know, that ranges from walking down the street and picking up some trash and throwing it away to running, you know, towards problems, right? You know, that old classic thing, I want my children to be acceptable at a dinner party and, you know, and essential in a crisis. Like that's what I see. Um, and so when I think about my part of the American story or where I fit into this whole thing, it's it's that little teeny corner. Uh, you know, I think some of the school stuff we've been able to do is really exciting and maybe there's a really small list somewhere where somebody's interested in that, but really it's like, you know, how can I be a better community member and how can I help kids understand, you know, do the same thing.

>> Graham, thanks for being on Dad Saves America.

>> Thank you for having me. This has been awesome.

>> [music]