161. Living in Beta, with One Stone's MacKenzie King

Listeners, Mackenzie King is not here as my guest to perform “student voice.” She’s here to show us what governance and leading by learning could be. Picture a real school board meeting, with fiduciary responsibility, hard decisions, and adult-level accountability, then picture the board chair setting the tone, reading the room, and holding the mission steady. Now make that chair a high school senior. This is not a thought experiment. It’s a normal day at One Stone in Idaho, and Mackenzie King, Class of 2026, is the chair of its board of trustees.

If you have never heard of One Stone, you might assume it’s another shiny outlier. But One Stone is a serious learning organization making a serious bet: young people are citizens right now and school should be designed around that thought. Put students in governance and lead by learning roles and you change what “smart” and “leadership” mean, and you create the good kind of pressure that forces everyone to get serious about the purpose of school.

We start in Idaho, identity, family, language, and karate, then pivot into service and the quiet power of simply showing up for others. From there we go inside One Stone, how Mackenzie found her way there, how learning is assessed through competencies, BLOBs, and a Growth Transcript, and what practice she would stop in American schools because it steals tomorrow from kids.

As always, our episodes are edited by Evan Kurohara and our theme music comes from the catalog of pianist, Michael Sloan. You can reach me at joshreppunproductions@gmail.com.