KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments through microschooling. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
Episode 67: The Microschool Movement. A Conversation with Kaity Broadbent and Kelly Smith.
Education is undergoing a seismic shift as families and educators seek alternatives to traditional schooling, with microschools emerging as a powerful option for personalized learning in supportive communities.
• 48% of parents feel education is heading in the wrong direction
• 17.5% of kids are now outside traditional schools (up from 11.8% in 2018)
• The one-size-fits-all classroom approach leaves many students either bored or lost
• Education Savings Account (ESA) programs across 25-30 states are making school choice accessible regardless of income level
• COVID forced education onto kitchen tables, revealing limitations in traditional approaches
• Microschools transform narratives from "problem kid" or "good kid" to recognizing inherent worth and potential
• Prenda provides tools to make starting microschools accessible, including goal-setting features and portfolio-based assessment
• Some forward-thinking public schools are incorporating microschool elements within their existing structures
• The education revolution is gathering momentum, promising to unleash more human potential
Check out Prenda on social media @prendalearn to learn more about starting your own microschool.
Got a story to share or question you want us to answer? Send us a message!
About the podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
Got a burning question?
We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
Important links:
• Connect with us on social
• Get our free literacy curriculum
Interested in starting a microschool?
Prenda provides all the tools and support you need to start and run an amazing microschool. Create a free Prenda World account to start designing your future microschool today. More info at ➡️ Prenda.com or if you're ready to get going ➡️ Start My Microschool
Hello and welcome to the Kindled podcast. This is our very first episode of season three and we are super, super excited. We've made a little of just a few changes on the Kindled podcast. If you've been a longtime listener, thank you, and you're probably noticing Kelly's face here, who is our new co-host, which we're so excited about. Like I said, if you've been listening, you're probably used to seeing and hearing Adrienne here, and she is off on new adventures, so check out what she's doing. Listen to our last episode for that summary. So this season three we're going to be joined by Kelly Smith, the founder and CEO of Prenda. Kelly, say hi.
Speaker 2:Hi Katie and hi everybody. I'm really excited to be here. I've been a faithful listener and behind the scenes on this thing and love the project. I can't believe. I get to talk to interesting people and explore ideas around kids and education and learning, so this is going to be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Totally, totally. I am super excited for season three. We've got a ton of awesome conversations that we've been having and so so excited to launch them and share them with you. So we thought we'd start this season off with kind of like a recap of the micro school movement and kind of like the moment we're seeing in history right now. So I'm going to hand it over to Kelly. Kelly take us through like early days of Prenda. What were you seeing kind of like in the education landscape that made you want to do something different? Give us like the origin story and like really from your personal, your personal perspective, but then also kind of like at a higher level, like movement wise, Tell us what you were seeing then and what you've been seeing over the past few years.
Speaker 2:This is one of my favorite parts of my job as a founder and in a company of any sort, but especially in education and learning and human flourishing. If you want to really zoom out and think about what we're doing, my job is to read the world right and see what's going on and in retrospect, of course, you can see we were a little early in some ways and we'll talk a little bit about that. But right now we are exactly timed and just grateful to be part of a really exciting moment in education. So if you go back in time you can kind of think about, you know, american education as this. I mean just incredible thing that was done in the mid-1900s, right Halfway through the 19th century. That people well-meaning people said we should educate everyone. We want everyone able to read and write, we want a whole society full of literate and thinking educated people. That was a noble cause and it continues to be right. It's made a huge difference. I think economists would point to that and say you know GDP growth and innovation and technology. You see, you know human progress that's created out of towns with universities and people with higher learning, and so that whole promise of education and it goes all the way back. I was done with the very best of intentions and with the very best technology that was available in the mid-1800s and that was you get some smart people. You eventually really built out as an institution with lots of infrastructure. We see this in every town you drive through or visit there's a school prominently featured. It's a building where parents send their kids and the kids come and they sit down and they receive information and learning and the idea is for that to happen and I think it's done a great job. I think over time there's been a gradual realization that the world is changing around it and that that world needed to also evolve. And so I think anybody from teachers to administrators to thought leaders in the space, to policy people, but especially kids and parents, as we kind of experience this and go through this, there's been this just very, very gradual sense of you know this could be done differently. Actually, this was just kind of fun.
Speaker 2:I went back through old journals. I used to write in a journal as a kid and even at age I was 9, 10, 13, 14. I remember looking at some of my posts that I wrote down in my sloppy handwriting and I was talking about. Why does it have to be this way? You know what? I had great teachers that were nice to me but structurally speaking, you know it was tough, right, they had to spend so much of their time on. They had one behavior challenge in the class or they were pushing forward to the next topic, even though several of us really wanted to stay on the topic that we were on, and I remember experiencing that as a kid, ultimately adding up to a sense of disengagement.
Speaker 2:And, katie, I know you'll talk about the numbers on this we pay close attention but this feeling of just, you know you're sitting there, school is this thing that happens to you. You either comply, which I did, and you jumped through all the hoops and I was second in my class and I got a scholarship. I played the game but still fell far short of what I would call real active, powerful learning. Or you do other things right, and I had friends that you know flipped the bird to the whole thing and just kind of they went their own direction. They caused problems in class, they would just skip school. Some of them dropped out right and they went on to do other things. I think they kind of saw this disconnect between you know who they wanted to be as a human and what they were being kind of conditioned to be in the school.
Speaker 2:So again, I just want to, zooming out, say that happened gradually over a lot of decades. Right, that was a very slow process and it's not any one person or group to blame. I think people will kind of point fingers on this. That's not my narrative of this. I think people will kind of point fingers on this. That's not my narrative of this.
Speaker 2:I think it got to a point where it was time to ask some hard questions and rethink some things. You saw the education reform movement over the last 20, 30 years which has tried to do that. I think there are courageous people in that movement. I think it's really really hard to ask the actual hardest questions of all when you're inside of it. You're steeped inside of it, and I had friends that would run these workshops, right, they would get a bunch of great, forward-thinking teachers together in a room and they'd say, all right, redesign school. You know, blank piece of paper, no constraints, and they would sort of start talking and dreaming it up and then by the end of the session, like three hours later, it looked very, very similar to what school looks like today. Just, it's not anyone's fault. It's just really hard to see kind of outside of that.
Speaker 2:So what we really need is a moment in time, and this moment wasn't here in 2018 when we started our first micro school in my house, but it is here now, and so over the last five years, we've really reached this moment where it just makes sense. It's like learning is available everywhere. I think people recognize that. They see that that's possible, that it's not just about getting content into the brain of a kid. If it was about that, this would be a really easy problem, right? You would just say you know AI for everyone and two-hour school or whatever you'd want to do, and then that would be it, but that's actually an incomplete solution.
Speaker 2:What you really need is this human, cultural, psychological and, katie, you're the person that I would talk to you about this out of everyone in the world. This isn't because we work together I mean, you have so much depth on this but that's the missing piece, right? So you put knowledge and information together with a structure that allows it and a culture that supports it, and human motivation. You put all that together. It's actually the moment for microschools and I honestly couldn't be. I had no idea any of this was coming. We'll talk a little bit about what happened to get us there, but that we're here is just an amazing moment and it's a great time to be the number one provider in microschools. You know that we get to be involved in this great work.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yeah. Just some stats for listeners. According to the Morning Consultant, ed Choice, 48% of parents surveyed in the US feel like right now, education is heading in the wrong direction. So there's kind of almost 50% of parents are being like, yeah, okay, it's time Something's got to give here. 7% of kids are homeschooled, which is up from 3%, so more than doubled since before COVID. So, again like lots of people looking for a different option. 9% of kids are private schooled, which is also increasing, and we're on the board 2% of kids are now micro-schooling, which is like amazing that even people like that's a lot of people when you're talking about all of the people in the United States, right. So like collectively, if you add those up, it's like 17.5% of kids that are doing something kind of like quote unquote out of system, which is up from 11.8% in 2018. And in numbers, that's 5.9 million in 2018 to 8.75 million now.
Speaker 1:So there is this kind of this coming moving shift that we're seeing, where people are doing more than just like wishing school was better. They're actually. You're seeing parents and teachers like taking education into their own hands and really using solutions like Prenda and others. Lots of really cool, unique things happening in education right now and you see the policy arm kind of coming to support that with the ESA school choice movement and it's just kind of this perfect, perfect moment in history and something that I was just reflecting on as you were talking about like early public education and what a boon to society it was. You think of all of the kids who didn't have a private tutor, their family didn't have money, right, so that, like all of that lost potential, right Sometimes people call these like the lost Einsteins, like what kind of innovation, what kind of idea would have come to that little kid in the 1800s if he had had some sort of education?
Speaker 1:Right, like we're leaving all this human potential and the potential to solve very real world human problems on the table, essentially. And we saw the first wave of like collecting this human potential and ingenuity with the advent of public education. And now I think it's time again for like the next wave of like collecting this human potential and ingenuity with the advent of public education. And now I think it's time again for like the next wave of this as we move to personalized education. We see kids I mean statistically, when we interview kids as they come into prenda we have for years and it's always the same. A third of them feel like they're bored and they know everything and a third of them feel like they're lost right. So that's two-thirds of kids where we're not developing their potential and there's so many lost sign signs in that batch and I think the next wave of human innovation is really going to come from nurturing that, from finding it, identifying it and understanding how to really cultivate that. So super excited, such a good moment.
Speaker 2:It's like the most exciting thing in the world to think about what humans can do, what humans already have done right With so little. You know. One of the moments I go back to is 1957. My dad was born in 1957 and people went outside of their house and they looked up and there was this little lit up dot that flew across the sky and it was the Sputnik satellite from Russia, you know. And we're, of course, in this cold war and so Americans are panicked, like can this thing listen to my conversations? Can it drop bombs on me? Like what? What is this?
Speaker 2:There's so much that it was like we didn't even know what we didn't know and the reaction to that as a society, you literally had the President of the United States stand up and say, hey, I need all of you guys to learn math and engineering, we really need this, and tons of work went into that. It was done in you know, tradition, what we'd call traditional kind of factory methods, because that was the best they can do. But I think you know we're there even more. Now there's this need for everyone not to specifically figure out satellites, because that's not the game. I mean, I love that there are people figuring out space technologies right now, please do it.
Speaker 2:But if your interest is health, if your interest is relationships, if your interest is healing human, you know, social fabric. If your interest is creating and expanding imagination, I mean there's literally, you know, there's as many versions of greatness as there are humans and that was missing right From every. That was never possible before and now it's possible. So, yeah, just to think about what that means in terms of those lost Einsteins, or lost everything's right and lost mother Teresa's, last, you know, madam Curie's there, they were all out there and so many more people can now participate and I just get I mean you can tell I get like excited out of my chair to think about what's possible.
Speaker 2:And just having seen this, for little kids that don't believe that they have greatness, that don't believe you know they've been getting C's in school and maybe some behavior problems it's like guess what message they have. So for them now to see like oh, there's actually a version of me that blows people away, that can make a meaningful contribution to this world that I live in, and it can feel good to me too. I mean that to me is the whole premise of this and it's work. That I mean I'm just going to keep waking up every day, excited to do it, because you can't get tired of work like that.
Speaker 1:Totally so. What are some of the trends that you've seen over the past? You know kind of started in 2018, over the past few years that we've been. It's been an uphill battle. Honestly, we I feel like we get punched in the face like every other, like every few months you know something else. So, like, take us back from the beginning. What are?
Speaker 2:you seeing.
Speaker 1:What are kind of like the trends that have allowed this moment to come 20, 2013,.
Speaker 2:I start teaching my kids and other kids coding at the library. It really was this like adventure for me of just like, let's see if we can do. I didn't even think of it as doing education differently. It was if some of these kids learn to code and maybe there's the next Zuckerberg or whatever out of this class like great. So that was fun. But over five years of doing that and watching my own kids really do what I did in school, like you know, they were doing fine, but the fire was clearly out for them. So I'm putting all this together and I'm thinking what can we do differently? And so this was the crazy idea in 2018 to start this micro school that you know that's seven years ago now, so it's been a little while. Seven and a half years ago, we started that micro school and it really was this experiment. So step one was just like doing it and then trying to help people get their head around what this even is. I was shocked, even in 2018, that, you know, no one knew about it. Right, they were very puzzled, but there wasn't once they understood what we were doing. I'd have people come in and visit and see it Once. They saw it and experienced it. There was generally this sense of like, yeah, that's a great way to do education, even though, kelly, you're so weird. Like, this is really weird.
Speaker 2:And I interviewed for Y Combinator in 2019. I remember sitting with one of the partners and I'll never forget this because he's a kind of really innovative guy who's, like, made a lot of money in technology and innovation and he lives in the Bay Area and sends his kids to expensive private schools and he just looked at me like he said, why would? Why would anyone do this? This is crazy. Like meeting together with your community, like I would not send my kids to that and I'm like, because it's an opportunity for all these things we've been talking about. I tried to give him the pitch but he didn't buy it. Opportunity for all these things we've been talking about. I tried to give him the pitch but he didn't buy it. I mean and I think, a lot of people at that time. Our challenge in 2018 and 19 was just convincing people like look, this is a new way to go and a new way to think about things.
Speaker 1:I remember meeting you then and trying to explain what micro schools were to like my. I was already homeschooling, right, so I was already the weirdy. And so now I'm like coming to the park table with like this new other weird idea where I'm like going to bring other people into the weirdness. It's going to take like 45 minutes of like convincing, of like really trying to like get another parent to like see what this was. And now I go to a random park and I say my kids micro school with Prenda, and 99% of the time, granted, I live in Arizona where, like Prenda, is.
Speaker 2:We have a lot of micro schools, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, and they're like oh cool, like I know what that is, you don't have to explain it. I know someone that did that. They had a good experience. I'm like, wow, like that really is. Uh, is progress Not that like Prenda's perfect, or we solved all of the problems, or anything like that. But like you can see the seeds of a movement and that's just really exciting. We're just barely like tapping into it. We're at the very beginning.
Speaker 2:Totally. And two other things happened Big, big macro things that we all experienced. One of them was every single human on the planet, right, which is COVID, right. So we were in 2019. In 2018, there's one micro school and then three micro schools. In the fall, we had something like 50 micro schools or something like that, and in 2019, this is pre-covid, right.
Speaker 2:But then, all of a sudden, you know there's this virus and we have to be indoors and you can't be with other people and schools are shutting down. I mean, every parent in the in the country is desperately for something and they want to get their kids together in person because the intuition is so strong that kids need to be around other kids and they need that face-to-face and that energy. And so how can we do that safely in a way that fits within the kind of COVID protocols of the time? Covid was just a major moment for education because it really did two things. The first was it just it brought traditional education right onto your kitchen table, like just laid it out for you. So you're looking at these workbooks, worksheets, you're watching your kid on zoom.
Speaker 2:You know in this, I think, what everyone would agree the teacher included, right, that it was just a really inefficient kind of terrible experience for everyone. And yet everyone's trying again like good intentions, using the tools that we had. But I think that opened up eyes to what is. So. Let's say, this isn't COVID and this is what it looks like in my kid's classroom, like I'm sending my kid to you for seven hours a day. Like does that feel good to me? So you know, yeah go ahead.
Speaker 1:I think we all kind of hold this like nostalgia around, like the classroom and your teacher and like September.
Speaker 1:you know what that feels like and what it was like for you, and when you just send your kids and then they come home, you can still pretend that that's kind of what they're getting Right, so it's like it's fine because, like, I'm just kind of backfilling with what happened to me and when you see it, what's going on now, it's like, oh, this is not that right, like different things are, aren't, are very, and like I think a lot of parents were looking at, like what they the skills and like demands of, like the modern day workplace right, this is not preparing my child, right, like this is irrelevant, this is deadening, this is disengaging, like this is the opposite. So it just really brought that awareness in, like this visceral way that you could no longer ignore.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. I think people you know maybe had a sense. We've all seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off, like I reference this all the time where it's just like in what way? You know the professor's just talking and all the students are disengaged. But you know that, you know, I think there was this belief that somehow it's different. I've met my kid's teacher. I know the principal. These are good people and again, they are good people. It's just that if you talk seriously to that person, they're under so much pressure around test scores and district requirements and maybe there's some sort of cultural thing happening on campus and they've got a difficult situation with a kid in their class or with a parent in their class and so all these things adding up to it's just not. That's it wasn't for for very many people it wasn't really doing it even before COVID. Covid forced everybody to see it.
Speaker 2:The other thing that happened during COVID was these new possibilities, right. So not only is it like that's not working, it's like my friend's doing this thing where they're like meeting together with 10 kids and they see each other all the time. Anyway, there's this like quarantine group kind of going and and I'm watching these kids it feels night and day difference. Like they love learning. I'm seeing them make all this progress. I mean, we get to see. We'll talk a little bit about this, but you see, this kind of one to punch right, get them engaged, get them like bought in, and then look at the progress that they make and see what they're able to do, both traditional academic measures, like they're mastering things in math and English, but also, you know, and I remember I think this was maybe during COVID or right after COVID my daughter was in a micro school.
Speaker 2:She was in third grade at the time and she was obsessed with theater still is. She does musical theater. She wrote, directed like, did all the props, sets, a whole play. She did a play herself as an eight year old and she got all of her friends in her class to like participate. Some of them were doing, you know, the tech crew with like the sets and everything. Some of them were headlines and acting in the play. There was like music. I mean we I wouldn't watch this it's not like she's the next Lin-Manuel Miranda but like to see the amount of work she put into this and everything she did to like.
Speaker 2:I mean it was education in its kind of finest form, right, cause she was out there pushing herself, taking feedback, iterating. It was a truly unique one of these educational experiences that I think all of us wish for a child. And that was happening while everybody else is doing worksheets or whatever. It's like the night and day difference, right? So that happened during COVID and again it did force it. It forced it into the consciousness that, one, this isn't working and two, it could be better. So that's important because, prenda, of course, over that time we saw this enormous increase. Family members, friends, close people in my life were all doing Prenda and then afterwards it was interesting to hear them because they'd say best education of my kids' whole school experience. And we're going back because the schools are open and they want.
Speaker 2:But part of this is just the way innovation happens, right, like people, even though we're talking about you know, you just threw some numbers out millions of people now that are starting to that are not only seeing it but doing it differently. There's another 20 million on the other side of that that see it. They're starting to see that it can be different, but they're not going to be the ones that take that leap right away. It's going to take that. They want to see everybody else do it and those kids turn out okay. And so we're still in the middle of kind of a major change, but we're at the early part of it, but it's definitely coming, and COVID was a part of that. Then are we ready to talk. We can jump to kind of seismic shift number two, which was school choice.
Speaker 1:I have a story about penguins. Real quick, go ahead please. There's a penguin story here. Yeah, we were just watching a documentary about penguins and it was like so fascinating because they they're trying to make this big trek and it's all like the little penguins that have kind of been like like they have to fight. I don't remember the parent, the penguin, full penguin saga, sorry. Nature advocates some penguins ice shelf.
Speaker 1:I know we're gonna see, we're gonna hear that in the comments they get to this like ice shelf and they've gone the wrong way, right, and they're like on this huge like cliff and it's like a big cliff. They're all like just hundreds, thousands of penguins are just like lined up along this cliff and they're all just kind of waiting, looking at this one penguin and this one penguin. He's like their little kid leader. He jumps into the water and they all see that he's okay and like a few more jump and soon, like, all of these penguins are jumping into the water and like it's okay, this is the right way, this is the path Right. But it takes those first brave few to like make the jump, and I think that's what we're seeing now and we're like, we're so excited. You know, this is the movement. It's like this is not just a movement for a small few. This is the beginning of the new normal and I think that's what we're seeing here. So, yeah, okay, next cosmic shift Go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, okay, so that's a good point. There are so many people that would benefit from this and we've met a lot of them, I mean, over the years. People will come to me from all you know income classes and all over the world, really. I mean I remember people reaching out from Africa and other continents and saying we want to do this.
Speaker 2:You know, and I was blown away. I had no idea that they would even be interested right in other places. And so this interest is there. And then the question becomes okay, well, how can we actually make this work for as many people as possible? You know private school as an institution and you cited some numbers is. You know it's great, it's definitely serving a niche, but the niche is limited and it's based on money, like in America.
Speaker 2:The way education works is everyone pays taxes and then the state takes that tax dollars and they run. In the past they ran schools. Now there's charter schools and some of these other things. If you want out of that, you have to pay. You have to come up with somewhere between $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, sometimes $40,000. They pay tuition. These are college idea that a parent can choose the best environment for their kid. It feels good. It's actually always been true in America. The problem is it's only true for people that have the money to to pay for it and can afford it. And so you know, in some cases that looks like private school tuition. In other cases, in a lot of cases, people don't think about this. It's moving Right. People will say, hey, I got this new job, I'm going to this new place, and they get online and they research and they find where the schools are good and if they can afford it and, by the way, every parent's going to do this they are going to pay for the house that will put their kid in the place where they think is the most likely for their child to succeed. I don't blame anyone for that. That's school choice for the ones who can afford it, and I just want to make that point really, really clear.
Speaker 2:What's happening now and this is the second seismic shift is that policymakers in some states in the United States are recognizing that that's not really fair, that you shouldn't just be able to have school choice and opt out of systems. If you can afford it, you should be able to make that choice, whether or not you can afford it, and everyone should be able to do that. So this is the deal that they struck is they worked it out where there are these programs and they're typically called ESA programs. So think like HSA. Sometimes people will say but it's like education savings account, or they use different letters, every state's different, but it's some amount of money count, or they use different letters. Every state's different, but it's some amount of money. It's always less like, sometimes half as much as what the schools you know, the traditional schools spend on educating their child, but less money. But they'll give it to the parents and say, parents, you use this for your kid's education? Okay, so that's um.
Speaker 2:For those of you who are listening to this and never heard of ESAs, that's what it is. Arizona started the first one in 2011. It was limited just to a certain number of kids. In 2022-ish, arizona expanded that program to be available to everyone. Lots of other states West Virginia's done it, florida's done it, texas just passed a huge one, but if you look, there's something like 25 states that have 25, 30 states that have some version of ESA, and some of them are universal expansive programs that allow anybody to participate.
Speaker 2:This is a movement that's it's been building over the last literally three years, and it continues to grow, so it looks like there's still a lot more to come. And what that means, then, is it opens doors for people to participate in micro schools, which are a low cost, private option, and to do that paid for, with school choice programs, means that you don't have to be rich to get access to these micro schools right. You can not only send your kid to a micro school, you can create a micro school. You can build the environment that you want and regardless of your you know income level and your personal wealth and things like that. So it's a really exciting shift. It's definitely changed things up and it's been a ride, as Prenda's tried to navigate, participating in all of these programs and working together so that these micro schools can be available to as many people as possible.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah, the ES. Like there's always been this kind of like underlying, like bubbling pressure in the education world. And when we have people coming to us to start micro schools, they talk about four main drivers that I hear. Maybe you hear others, the four that I hear they want better academics. Right, if you look at the scores, like the NAEP scores, which is like our nation's report card for academics, roughly we have a third of kids that are proficient in math and a third of kids that are proficient in reading. Two thirds of the kids are struggling.
Speaker 1:And you'll hear like a lot of like flashy news titles about this being so terrible and so like it gets new. Like if you look at the 40 year trend line they started this measurement in the 70s it's a flat line of like pretty much a third of the kids are winning and two thirds of the kids are not. And then recently there's been, like you know, there's like little dips where it's like, yay, we improved the score by 1% or something like that. It's like education solved. Or if we dip down by 1%, it's like everything's terrible, like everything's been like this has been the best the system could do for quite a while and I don't know why we, looking at the data, like that isn't the predominant story. But so better academics is one you know. When you're in a classroom you don't get a personalized education. So you're sitting receiving whole group instruction from like a specific for a specific manufactured date or grade level or age Right, and if you're above that you're bored, if you're behind that you're lost. So leaving a lot of kids on the table. They're just not fully allowing them to chart a hopeful path forward, for them to really flourish. So that's one thing. Better academics, values, alignment there's a lot of like. What kids are being taught in school doesn't align with family values, social, emotional wellness. We have a huge mental health and anxiety depression issue going on in the youth population.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are saying that they're looking for other school options because of bullying. This is a big deal, and then that's kind of like the parent driver and then teachers are driving this because I mean I don't know if you, I always used to be a speech language pathologist, so I would work in schools and I would, you know, go into a classroom where this amazing woman or man would be like just owning that room with 30 kids sometimes more than 30 kids and like like they're doing great things in there, but I would like leave with my one or two kids and like go play games my speech games with them and stuff, and I'm like I don't know how this person is doing that. They're wearing so many hats, they're a mom or a dad, a social worker, they're handing the education. All of the behavior Like it's just so, so hard.
Speaker 1:And anytime we hear some sort of like, there's always like a legislative reaction to that where it's like, well, we're going to raise standards or we're going to like double down on testing, like all of these things to fix that problem. All that stuff just trickles down to making the classroom teacher's job next to impossible. And we have so much empathy for for that person Cause you, you don't go into teaching, cause it's like not for the money and it's not for it's like this very noble calling where it's like I just want to inspire the hearts and minds of the next generation, right, and then you get in there and it's like, oh, this is not that.
Speaker 2:Katie, can I throw in a story on this really quick. I was sitting with a teacher who's currently making the decision, like, do I go another year in a traditional classroom or do I jump and make my own micro school? This was two days ago. I was sitting in a coffee shop. We're just having a little chat and it was interesting because we were kind of going over these same questions. You know how frustrating she feels. Her heart is clearly there for these kids. She knows there are.
Speaker 2:There are many in her class that she's just not reaching and she's not able. She could reach them under different circumstances but given the constraints she can't. And it's interesting because she kind of alluded to this you know, one third board, one third lost kind of thing that you're talking about, and maybe the third in the middle, I would even say the third in the middle are it's questionable if they're all with you, you know, on a given day. But but she said you know the district just says they tell her to differentiate instruction. This is the phrase. It's like just differentiate instruction. She's like you're literally asking me something that's impossible, like if I'm the one instructing, like I've got all of these kids and she's just aware enough to realize that that's frustrating, and so then it feels disingenuous and even insulting to her as a professional. She's like I can't differentiate to 30 individuals, I can't even differentiate to.
Speaker 2:you know, people do these groups and rotations and stuff but, so far from being able to actually do what she knows she wants to do, what her heart says to do, and so I just felt for her. You know these teachers are trying so hard but they're given. I mean I've said this before, it's hard because I know there are people that are doing it really well, but it essentially is an impossible job. And so if you're doing the impossible, kudos to you. If you're trying to do the impossible, like thank you for that sacrifice and work, but we feel you. I mean that is so, so hard to be in inside of those constraints and micro schools. Of course you know we'll get to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's like you're sitting in this tension where it's like no one's happy but there just isn't another thing to do besides, like I'm so unhappy, I will homeschool, like right, like that's like the ultimate, like opt out. So we see that, and it's 3%, what now? 6.7%? Right, like that people that are that in that much pain or, like you know, want to do that, like that's growing still. But for the people who are like I can't quite do that but I need a better option, I think that's where the combination of options like Prenda, making starting your own school like 90% easier, right, like, if you think about you having the idea I'm going to start my own school and then your first day of school or your last, you know, just like in there you're like we're doing this right. It's like that moment in Peter Pan where they're like I'm doing it, like you're flying, like it's happening this, this magical moment. Well, it's like there's like a thousand things in your way.
Speaker 1:It's like this weight of like I've got to figure out the laws and I've got to figure out tuition and I've got to figure out curriculum this laundry list of things that's like maybe I'll just sit in my pain a little longer yeah maybe it's not that bad.
Speaker 1:And then we, we stick it out. I'll, you know'll, teach for another year, like we'll just keep them in, like it's fine. And we just kind of get fine with mediocrity or like just accustomed to our pain and with ESA being like okay, now it's affordable. And with options like Prenda I've been like and now it's easier. You're seeing this huge potential for like all of these, all of this kind of pain that's in the system inherently is like now. Like okay, now there's a different option that's a little easier and it's not expensive. Like those were my two big blockers. Those things aren't issues anymore and people.
Speaker 2:You just see this huge flow. Wow, katie, did you just compare prenda to pixie dust on accident? Is that what just happened?
Speaker 1:I think I might have you can fly sorry? Perfect. There's lots of uh. Yeah, I know you're new to hosting, so like I will tell you there's.
Speaker 2:It's fine to sing as the host, so oh okay, I just worried about disney, um disney copyright law, so do I have to edit out?
Speaker 1:all right, so anything else you want to share about that?
Speaker 2:no, I think you nailed it. I mean, and those, those drivers? So to go through those two major things, covid, and then school, school choice, and school choice being a driver that continues right.
Speaker 2:That's a vector that's just leading to more possibilities for more people. I spent time in Arkansas recently. It's a new law. There are lots of people that are. I mean, they're chomping at the bit to do these kinds of things for all the reasons we've been talking about. So, yeah, you know, we talked about the moment. This is the time for micro schools. Right now, it's not one penguin jumping off a cliff. This is, you know, dozens of penguins and pretty soon it's going to be thousands of them.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I will. I just want to bring up one thing before we fully move on here. Yeah, I think it's interesting that there's this like opt out notion or like that you have to leave the system to get this. And right now I think that that's by and large true because of, like what you're saying, like you have to differentiate your instruction, you have to expose to grade level content, like there's things that are hard coded into the system that make doing something different like literally illegal. Right, but there are some forward thinking, progressive like educators out there. We've actually run a micro school inside of a public school. What is this like? Year six of this fun little micro school?
Speaker 1:year, six or seven, can you like walk through that because like it doesn't like jumping off the penguin cliff, like does not necessarily meaning like disenroll from your, from your neighborhood school. Like we could form partnerships, like prenda early days we operated within the charter world. Like there could be a partnership and and we want I think from Prenda's perspective, would prefer that like we want to, you know, encourage people to participate in the already established things in their neighborhood.
Speaker 2:We've just gotten so much pushback yeah, so I'll just do it like I think it's really great we'll do it as a teaser, because we are going to do an episode, hopefully.
Speaker 2:This is on the books it hasn't been recorded yet, but I want to spend a whole episode on this and actually a second episode. There's a forward thinking superintendent out in Indiana that's been making some headlines doing micro schools and he's agreed to come on the podcast as well. So, fingers crossed, I'll do both of these interviews. But early in Prenda's story I got some feedback that I think was really good feedback. That said, look, you're going to design for the people around you and the people that you work with, and if you want this to really be transformational, you need to make sure you have, as part of your design, a chance to do this work in different communities than yours. So I went to friends in town it's not that far from my house, it's maybe three miles away. There's a Title I elementary school, but it is a different crowd and some really you know trauma and different challenges that some of these families are facing and these kids and they have a visionary principal that hopefully you guys will get to meet that immediately saw how having a micro school on campus could not only open up possibilities for 10 kids in a micro school and on campus micro school, while those kids still got to participate in free lunch, free breakfast, social services, sports music, pe, recess, all this. You know, the non-education stuff that you know. I think it was really visionary for him to say we could do education differently. The core he had to, you know, do some negotiation right with with his leadership and you know they were able to see, and thankfully very quickly, they saw kids off to the races academically and the metrics were looking good. So he was able to justify like, let's keep doing this, but yeah, to put that in place, it not only helps those 10 kids. What happened is there were kids that were wanting more from education and as a the time, you know, there's series of disciplinary checkpoints. I don't know the exact system, but he was level C or something and the next level was go to a different school. They have a school just for those kids that are like on the verge of you know, just, the district doesn't educate you anymore. But there's one more like last ditch effort, and he was going to get transferred to that school and I was calling it like a jail school. It's just like you're going to the prison and it's sad to be joking about this, but that's literally what was happening for this boy. Of course, that's not who he really is. He was responding to a whole bunch of stuff and the principal brilliantly saw an opportunity for this kid, said let's put him in the micro school, this guy, within weeks. I mean just seeing.
Speaker 2:One of the things Prenta does is it allows kids to set their own goals. We introduced them to Khan Academy. We said what, where are you at in Khan Academy right now? It was like he was at right on grade level, like sixth grade. I think he was at the beginning of sixth grade math and where do you want to be by the end of the year? He was like I don't know, like I want to do, I'll finish all of sixth grade. Well, he starts in.
Speaker 2:It was a little bit into the semester, so I think he started in like October, early October. By Christmas he had finished all of sixth grade math. He was doing more than his required goal every day by a lot. He was like engaged. They started calling it. There was a math competition between him and this other kid in the class and pretty soon it's like you know what what's going on Like and I think his teachers would have been shocked that like, oh, this guy turns out, loves math, has a gift for it and he's all about like driving himself and pushing himself. Meanwhile his behavior problems disappear and his teacher in the old classroom that was spending so much of her day kind of battling with him is now not having to do that right and able to still run her class with ease.
Speaker 2:So yeah, to think about this as a plug-in to really the system in any format, and I love telling parents and teachers that come to me wanting to start a micro school, say, look, you don't have to do the full-on thing, you can start with a conversation where you just ask your principal, ask your district, you know, say this is what I'd like to do and see what happens.
Speaker 2:I think it's always worth having that conversation. I will just say there's a lot of inertia and just I think people are pretty comfortable. So I have had those conversations go well, like I just talked about, but I've had more of them go not great. And I literally remember one principal and I think she was really well-meaning but she just looked at me and was like why would we do that? You know it's she's struggling already to just keep everything running as it is and so for her it was this unnecessary leap and you may run into that, and that's OK. Like I think the main thing is let's give it a try and there's lots of ways we can. We can do this innovation together.
Speaker 1:Yep, I think that a lot of the things we see kids go through in the traditional classroom that's just information. All their behavior, all their struggles, just information about what the needs that aren't being met. And it's irresponsible of us to continue to just tell the teacher like meet their needs, like you have to be this, like infinite well of need, meeting like they can't. That's not an infinite system. We're humans, right, we have to build a system that creates the culture and enables kids to set their own goals. Like.
Speaker 1:What happened in that story was that kid was bored, probably, and he started acting out to get like either some connection, some relationship, to feel like he was in control, things like that. And then he suddenly became like the bad kid, right. So now he's telling himself this story about he's the problem kid and all the teachers are like oh, that kid, like you know, he's that in the narrative of his life, he's that character, right, and what Prenda aims to do is meet needs social, emotional, academic, everything so that kids can be like I can actually revisit the narrative, right. So that kid went from being the problem kid to like math hero in a few months and nobody, nobody in that kid's life would have predicted that. Right, because we're not.
Speaker 1:The schema that we're used to like living in is like oh, like that's a helpful child, that's a good kid, right, like they listen, like they're easy, they're good, like that's. These are those stories and narratives, and it's not until we change our beliefs about human potential that we'll see kids potential changing. And it's just, it's just so exciting to be, to be involved in like this, this movement where we can really do so much human healing. And I'm just like every day when we sit down to build Prenda, I'm like, oh, it's such a joy.
Speaker 2:Katie, I know we're running out of time, but I'd love to just add one more story to this, and it's personal because it's my own daughter, so my older daughter. I already shared about Maisie, my younger daughter, doing her play. My older daughter was she was getting all the so. Similarly, she had a story. The story was she's the good kid, right, she made her teacher's life easy. She sat there politely, quietly, she did anything that she was asked to do. She, you know, kind of didn't ever disrupt or disturb. She could even be like activated to like go take care of some sort of chore if the teacher needed something. So you know, we would go to parent teacher conferences and I just remember the teachers just raving about Molly. It was like she is the best. We like love her so much and she really is like a sweet personality. But what was funny is my wife went in and visited the classroom and she's looking. She's like wait a minute, that's not even. That's not even her. Like she.
Speaker 2:She was adopting like the narrative, she was buying into what just like you just described, right, but in this case it wasn't a bad I'm the bad kid narrative. It's like I'm the good kid and in a way that was holding her back. She wouldn't take any risks, she wasn't really engaging. We saw her learning her her backflip at gymnastics. I remember she she did tumbling and she's learning this back tuck and it was like so much work. She's falling on her head and we're out there spotting her and she won't give up. I mean her ferocity. So I'm seeing these things in other aspects of her life, like that's her, that's what she's capable of, that type of greatness. And that wasn't not only wasn't being exercised or practiced in the classroom, it was being downplayed and diminished in the classroom. Right, it's like we don't want you to do that, we don't want you to try for something bigger or more.
Speaker 2:And I saw I mean I kind of saw all at once, like what the implications might be of that for her life.
Speaker 2:She would, like me, you know, go through and get patted on the head and get A's or whatever, and never really find out what she's capable of in this world. And so seeing that all happen, that was a big part of me wanting to start the micro school. And then, you know, fast forward years later and she's doing robotics and she's writing a novel and she's doing these things that she wouldn't have otherwise tried through her micro school and I believe and she's turning 16 pretty soon she's obsessed right now with driving. She's always asking me to like go out and drive and she just has this like this gusto. You know, she just wants to go take on the world and I love that about her and I think it would have been a risk, right, I'm not sure that that would have emerged to the degree that it did if we had sort of left her in a traditional environment. So I'm so grateful that each kid can have a change of narrative, embrace that new narrative and then build into it for greatness.
Speaker 1:Can we circle back to her narrative that you labeled I'm the good kid. Can I change?
Speaker 2:it yeah sure.
Speaker 1:I think her narrative was I'm the good kid if and when she jumps through those hoops and it's helpful that reinforces the goodness.
Speaker 2:but it reinforces a conditional goodness which plagues us for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 1:Right, there's also a lot of crying on the Kindle podcast. Um, but when we, when we teach a kid, you are good, you are valuable and I don't care if you are helpful, you know like, yes, I want you to do those pro-social behaviors and we'll get there. But it's like when we infuse kids with like value, then they're able to take those risks because they're not trading on their value right, like they're not risking. They're not risking their value, their worth as a person, because they know that they, that nothing can change that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the inner change that we're looking for and I think it's so, so vital and so like what a glory that she has was able to to make that shift and to sustain herself, her like inner self, as her, and not like the conditions that other people were putting on her. I love that.
Speaker 2:Okay, so to wrap up quick like overview.
Speaker 1:What's Prenda working on? Prenda's not perfect, but I want to dive in a little bit on like what are the problems we're still seeing, even in the micro school space? That? We're kind of like give us a little teaser for what we can see oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm going to do that. I have to do this quick and we're going to need another episode because we are like out of time. But we, there's structural, the structural thing of like what a micro school is, how to actually put that together. You talk, we talked about pixie dust, like the thousand things that you have to worry about and Prenda's knocking out, you know, one after another, it gets easier to start a micro school literally every day as Prenda continues to invest in just structurally setting that up and I have people all the time that will come and just like I want to do this, my heart wants to do this, I have no idea, and it's like we've got you, like, literally, just click this button, follow our instructions, we'll talk to you on the phone, our team will help you out. It still is hard to do micro schools.
Speaker 2:The hard part is human, and I would say that's the second thing is. I call it human technology or social technology of just how to do, katie, what you just talked about. Right, it's to actually see a human being through all this, and you know it's so easy for humans to slip into. This is a, you know, some fill in the blank with the label or this is a problem to be solved, or this is a widget in an assembly line, or this is a, you know, a test score that's going to count against me later, like all these things that we might do to objectify children. But what we want to do, instead of objects, we want to see humans with infinite worth and infinite potential, right Like what is this child really and where does their value come from and what are they they capable of? To be able to systematically build that and to know how to apply it. We've gotten really good at that and, katie, you've been such a huge part of developing that. Our guides will talk about the trainings you give and the things that you're teaching them over and over again, as this is what makes me truly effective as an educator, and then I'll just add content, obviously as part of this and learning, the actual learning systems. We live in a world that's super exciting, where you can actually have each child right at their learning frontier. We intentionally and to do it for really efficient, effective, powerful learning, and so that's really what we're about is trying to sort of build those tools and systems in.
Speaker 2:So I'll talk about just quickly a couple of those. One of them is this goal setting feature. So kids set the goal at the beginning of the year. They do that with their guide and with their parent. If we can get that conversation going, they work towards that goal. Our software breaks it down for them so they can see every day what they need to be doing. And then we have we've replaced the report card. We think letter grades are stupid and arbitrary and ineffective. But if you show here's your goal, here's where you are towards your goal, it could be a really powerful feedback loop. So you know, okay, I've got to spend a little bit more time on math today, or maybe I can skip my ELA work and just read my book today, or you know things like that. So if you know helping kids stay on their goals, the other piece of that in the report card is the ability to just put your work out there.
Speaker 2:And we have a portfolio kids share. You know artifacts of the work that they've done. It tends to be visual and fun and interesting. So you could imagine a video of my daughter's play, a script, some photos of the costumes that she designed. You know all of these resources that kind of come with this huge educational undertaking and now it's documented and it shows up in the portfolio.
Speaker 2:And then, finally, we're paying close attention to how these kids see themselves as learners.
Speaker 2:We want to change their narrative right. So we ask kids every week do you like learning, do you feel like you're challenged appropriately? Too hard, too easy? We ask them if you're motivated and we ask them if you felt control in your education, and then we keep track of that data and we show it back to the kids so they can kind of see, look like maybe I'm feeling a little passive in my learning and I can engage in a way that that will help me feel more control. So I know I'm going super fast through this. I'd love to spend more time on all of this, but Prenda's really built tools to put into action these concepts and these ideas that we've been talking about and that you know, you guys on this first two seasons of this podcast and we'll going forward these principles that we talk about. But Prenda is all about applying them and making it easy to operationalize, to put that into action for lots and lots of kids. So I'm more excited than I've ever been. I can't wait for what we're doing.
Speaker 1:Same same. All right, well, let's wrap this up for season three. Just quick housekeeping. You'll see Kelly and I alternating as host. We're going to dig into a lot of like learning science type things. Let's talk about math, let's talk about writing, let's talk about policies, talk about all of it. So we already have a ton of really, really great episodes coming, uh, coming your way and we're super, super excited about them and we hope that you'll participate in this community and let us know. If there's a guest we should interview or a topic that we should tackle, like, let us know we're here. So with that we'll wrap this up. So thanks for joining us everyone and thanks, kelly. We'll see you next episode. The Kindled podcast, is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy to start and run an amazing micro school based on all the ideas we talk about here on the Kindled podcast. Don't forget to follow us on social media at Prenda Learn and if you'd like more information about starting a micro school.
