The AI Behind Flourish Microschools

John Danner, the cofounder of Rocketship Public Schools and now the founder of Flourish Schools, an emerging network of AI-native microschools, joined me and Diane to share what’s now possible when it comes to school design in the age of AI that wasn’t previously possible. John explained how Flourish is leveraging AI to deliver foundational skills like reading and math through conversational tutors to free up teachers to focus on building relationships and nurturing students' passions and "superpowers.” John pointedly explained how the conversational models can be much more powerful than previous edtech applications. He also talked about how Flourish is working to use AI to provide real-time assessment and feedback on student projects.

Diane Tavenner

Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn

Hey, Diane. It is good to see you again for our continuing conversations on AI.

Diane Tavenner

You too. This one’s going to be a fun one. You know, our most recent episode, we talked with Alpha School founder Mackenzie Price. Most people have heard of Alpha at this point. It’s getting a ton of attention. And so what we tried to do there was really move beyond the talking points and the marketing to really dig into the model itself, including specifically how they’re using AI, which is turning into a bit of our quest this season. And so this conversation today is a part of that exploration on who’s building what I would call maybe AI-native school models, if anyone. And, you know, what might they look like? What are they starting to look like? And it’s a really fun conversation today because we get to have a chat with an old friend.

Michael Horn

Yes, that is indeed correct, Diane. Today we’re going to get to chat with none other than John Danner. John, for those that don’t know him, has had a decorated career in tech before turning to education, as he co-founded and led NetGravity, the first ad server company, I believe. And after taking it public, selling it to DoubleClick, John went back to school and then became a teacher, and he taught in Nashville for a few years there. And then I think a lot of folks know him because he co-founded, of course, Rocketship Public Schools in 2006, which we, of course, talked about also in our last episode. But Rocketship was a buzzy school for a good while there, marked by its student outcomes, its use of technology, its expansion. And then after leaving Rocketship in 2013, John did a number of other things, including founding an online math tutoring company, creating some very interesting education investment vehicles and more. But I want to skip ahead to his most recent venture, Flourish Schools, which is what we’re going to hear about today.

Michael Horn

So, John, hopefully I did some justice to the bio, but, welcome. It is always good to see you.

John Danner

Thank you, Michael. Great to see both of you. Long time.

Michael Horn

This is going to be fun. This is going to be fun. So let’s start with grounding our audience. My assumption is that a lot of folks know Rocketship and what you did there. Far fewer know about the Flourish Schools model itself and what these schools actually look like. So maybe give us the basics, like what is Flourish Schools, how many of them are there today, how big are they, what’s the grade levels, what does a day in a student’s life look like at these schools? You know, paint the picture for us.

John Danner

Yeah, yeah. So we started Flourish about a year ago. We opened our first school last August. In Nashville, one microschool so far. They’re middle schools, so grades 6 through 8. I’m out in Phoenix today. We’re opening a couple more schools in Phoenix next year, next August. And I’d say the reason for doing it, you know, Diane knows this well, like doing schools is quite difficult work.

Enhancing Foundational Learning with AI

John Danner

I often prefer being on the software side where, you know, life is good. But, you know, schools are hard work and sometimes you have to do them. I think the big motivator in starting Flourish for me was that I had started a couple of AI companies, Project Read, probably the most notable doing reading, which is in a lot of classrooms. And I just noticed that most schools are using AI in a very supplemental way right now, very much the same way they used edtech. And that bothered me because, you know, in reading, for example, I think there’s a pretty good argument that AI for reading is going to be better than the best human reading teacher within the next year or two. It’s not a long way off at all because teaching reading is really hard. Training teachers to teach that is hard. It’s hard to be patient with kids when they’re making lots of mistakes.

And it’s hard to remember everything a kid has ever done when they’re reading with you, right? All of which just is default for AI. So, you know, in watching Project Read roll out and seeing everybody kind of use it, you know, in those last 15 minutes in the class when they were kind of, you know, a kid was done with the assignment and needed to do something else. Like, I was like, you know, that doesn’t seem like how AI should, affects schools. It should be used more strategically. You know, what can AI do, and therefore what do you do with teacher time? I think, you know, for me, teacher time has always been kind of the scarce resource. It’s like whatever teachers focus on is really what schools do. No matter what schools talk about, it’s like, okay, what, what are your teachers doing? That’s what’s going to have the most impact. And so Flourish we, we started with the assumption that what we call foundations, kind of the basic skills, reading, writing, math, are going to be better taught by AI.

The way we kind of look at it is if you think of like Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 instruction, it’s really the move from technology as a Tier 2 or Tier 3 product to a Tier 1. So, you know, can you use AI to do kind of tier 1 basic skills and standards-based instruction? And so that was what we did from day 1 at Flourish. We’re 6 months into it now. I would say the lesson learned is, of course, you’re going to have students in any school that like, you know, whatever. We have several special ed, several ELL students they need more time and attention. But during our foundations block, which is an hour long, teachers have time to work with them one-on-one. And a teacher working with a student one-on-one on reading or whatever is like a luxury that like no other school has because that you can’t have them doing that. But when all the other kids are making great progress with AI, having a teacher spend that time, that luxurious time is actually possible.

AI’s Impact on Schooling

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John Danner

So that’s the fundamental thesis is that we can do that in a way that that’s what our teachers are not doing and spending all their time preparing for and teaching during the day. And that allows us to kind of come up with a new curriculum. And I think actually, you know, you guys want to focus on AI and we should. I think the actual interesting question with schools is once you make the commitment that AI is going to do a lot of this basic instruction, then you’re confronted with the now what problem, which is like, oh gosh, what’s school for like moving forward? And I guess that’s, that’s what we’re kind of excited about is we’re in this super serious time of change for students. They’re not going to grow up to a world that we all experienced. You know, my daughter just got out of college. She was a pre-med, but didn’t really want to be a doctor. She gets out in the job market and gosh, there are no jobs.

And like all those other things that she learned along the way about hustle and, you know, you got to go put yourself out there and whatever played out and she found a job. But boy, like if you had just spent all your time in school, like learning algebra or whatever, she wouldn’t have done well. So, I think, you know, our point of view at Flourish is we, we talk about 3 things mainly, relationships. So these are middle schoolers. So how do you get along with other people? And we do an hour we call circles, which is really as kind of therapeutic as it might sound, where kids are sitting in a circle talking about their feelings, how other kids affect them, et cetera. And for many, many of our students, I’d say it’s pretty mind-blowing to actually understand how other people are thinking, you know, as you’re talking and saying things and stuff like that. Really powerful.

So relationships are a big piece. And then we talk about two others, superpowers and passions. So superpowers is kind of our word for what people have called soft skills. I hate the term soft skills because it’s kind of denigrating in a world of like standards-based instruction. Oh, that’s the other stuff that, you know, makes you a human, but it’s not nearly as important as high school chemistry or whatever. Like, we actually think it’s the opposite now that knowledge is pretty abundant and accessible, like the things that make you human are the more important things. So, do you have agency and curiosity and these other things that make you awesome? That’s important. And then the passion side is really, what do you want to do when you grow up? What are you excited about? What are your big interests? Which, you know, as you know, for upper-income families tends to happen at home.

You know, you’re sitting around the table or you go, you know, on a little family field trip or whatever, and kids are discovering lots of different things that they might be excited about. Happens a lot less in working class and lower income families. We’re purposefully mixed income. We took a page out of your book for that, Diane. I think that’s really the right way to do this. And so for our kids who are, you know, working class and lower income, we think like discovering, what the world is and what you might want to be in is super important, especially in middle, so that you kind of enter high school with some idea of like what you’re excited about and some kind of path you might want to pursue. Even if that changes, that’s okay, you’re not just kind of clueless showing up in high school, which, you know, a lot of kids are.

Diane Tavenner

Yeah, super helpful, John. You know, one of the ways I’ve been trying to have conversations with people about what these sort of AI-native models will look like or can look like or do look like is I don’t want to have a conversation where we compare what they’re doing compared to like the old industrial model classroom, right, that’s like not useful to me.

John Danner

We’ve had that conversation. Yeah.

Diane Tavenner

So I keep using the sort of Rocketship and Summit because I know them the best of like best-in-class sort of personalized learning models that we were doing the very best we could at the time with the resources we had, and doing a lot of what you just described, right? Like, I’m assuming circles maybe comes out of Valor, which, you know, it has, you know. So like, a lot of that great stuff we were doing before. So what I’m really, and you’ve alluded to this, I think, with shifting Tier 1 instruction out of the classroom model and the AI is doing that. But let’s dig in a little bit deeper. Like, literally, what’s possible today that we just didn’t do 10 years ago and now we can do it? And what does that specifically look like in the model?

John Danner

I think the big change here is really one from point and click to conversational, right? Like, that was the eye-opener for me, really, you know, back in the ChatGPT moment was you kind of just immediately it became clear that a conversational agent would be able to kind of work through things with a student in so much better way than, you know, kind of what we all did with kind of edtech back in the day. So, you know, we all, we call it personalization, but there’s kind of a difference between a program more or less knowing where you are and what you need versus what an AI does, which is it knows everything. You know, like in Flourish, we more or less pour everything about a student into it. We have transcripts from everything students say. Like, the AI just is all-knowing about what’s happened with that student at the school. And so when it’s personalizing, it’s 100 or 1,000 times deeper level than like this basic categorization that edtech used to be able to do. So I think it’s much more aware of what students need. And I just think the mechanism of talking to a student conversationally is so much better than kind of navigating through a bunch of screens and the stuff we used to do.

Diane Tavenner

So I’m assuming then you’re building your own. It sounds like you’re building, you called it curriculum, but like that tier 1, because I have yet to see sort of off-the-shelf products that are really, that I would be like, yeah, they’re great. They can do the tier 1 instruction. Talk about what you’re building, what that looks like for middle school kids, you know.

John Danner

Yeah, right. And remember, we’re 6 months old, so anything I tell you is like total work in progress. But, you know, we’ve got good people and we’re working pretty hard on it. So the, you know, the fundamental idea, so I’ll tell you where we started with this and then kind of where we are now. We kind of had this idea that we’d have an agent on our side that was very good at sending kids to the right place to get the right help, right? So kind of like a hybrid between the old ed tech world and kind of this AI-driven world. And we pretty quickly discovered the kind of things that we had discovered at Rocketship, or I’m sure you did at Summit, which is there’s so much friction and stuff involved in manipulating another program. It’s like basically not worth it. And so that probably took a couple months for us to just realize like this is a waste of time.

Tutoring via Adaptive Dialogue

John Danner

And so really the way our system works today is as a student, I’ll tell you today and then where we hope to be in 2 months. So today, the way it works is that we have kind of a pre-assessment where we’re looking for what a student knows. Based on what they know, they enter a conversation with our AI. We often will have a 1 or 2 minute video of like just what that thing is, kind of an old edtech type thing, right? Just because I think a framing is often helpful for a new concept, but that the majority of the real instruction is kind of this dialogue between the AI and the student on like, okay, well, let’s talk about, you know, two-digit addition just for lack of anything better. Here’s a problem, you know, solve this problem for me, tell me how you’re doing it. And then basically just digging in as the student doesn’t get it. And it’s so easy to prompt for, I mean, you know, Zeal, my third company, the math tutoring company, we had figured out all the misconceptions that every student has in math. And so when you prompt an AI with that, okay, here are the 10 likely things that a student’s going to do wrong, when they’re doing two-digit math, it just goes, oh, okay, that’s it, and then it goes deep there, right? So if you think about it, it’s very fluid.

It’s very much what a human tutor would do in that case. They’re kind of responding in real time to what that student’s doing and going, oh geez, you don’t really understand how to carry the tens place, so let’s go deeper there or whatever. So that interaction with the AI happens, and then we go out and post-assess. And so the student’s kind of manipulating where they want to go and what they want to do through that process. Where we’re going, where I hope to be in a couple months, is that that’s all, all the pre- and post-assessment is kind of gone. We’re finding that the AI through that dialogue has just as good an understanding of what that student is capable of doing as kind of any formal assessment process. And it’s much more natural to just have the students sit down with the AI, you know, when they start and talk about what they want to work on. And then, you know, kind of the AI drills into that and shows them a video and does things like that.

So I think it could feel quite a bit like, you know, a student showing up at a tutoring center and that tutor kind of just working with them. It feels like that’s going to work. But that’s where we’re at with it.

Diane Tavenner

Is that voice or are they typing or both?

John Danner

We’re doing typing now. We’d love to do voice. We started there and we really worked hard on it. I would say that the biggest problem with voice for us is that we have never figured out the kind of noisy classroom problem. Very hopeful that somebody does because of the issue, you know, even if you’re off in a corner of a classroom or even outside in the hallway, the AI hears everything. And so it you know, and if you think about it, like when you’re in one of these sessions, the AI hears something and somehow inserts that in the conversation. That’s just weird. It kind of ruins the whole flow.

So it’s easier with middle schoolers to do kind of a text-based one right now. But I, you know, what I’ve told the team is I think the main interface for AI will probably be audio at some point. Like it’s just the most natural way. And so as the industry kind of builds better and better models for that, I hope that this problem gets solved and we can go to audio.

Diane Tavenner

That makes sense to me. And do you then have a knowledge graph underneath that? So even though the students sort of like flowing where it makes sense to them, at the end of the day, you have kind of the macro plan of where you want them to go.

John Danner

And yeah, so we built a super elaborate one for Zeal and unfortunately are more or less rebuilding it now for all of our stuff. Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, as you guys know, the real challenge with AI is often that it’s so good in the moment at these things, but you kind of have to bring it back to reality sometimes. And so, you know, having a prompt that says, hey, pull the knowledge graph and see what’s the most important thing to work on is helpful. It’s kind of like this, you know, savant type tutor that can help a kid in the moment with anything, but kind of loses the picture of like what’s the most important thing to do. So you kind of have to bring it back.

And I think the knowledge is the way to do that.

Diane Tavenner

John, how does this connect with, I know you’re very committed to project-based learning and sort of that approach, which you know that I am as well. And, you know, it sounds a little bit like what you’re describing. You know, at Summit Learning, we have the playlists where you were doing the content knowledge. What you’re describing, I think, is a stronger version of that and what AI can do. How are you connecting it to the projects? What’s the intersection there? What’s going on there? And are you using AI in the projects?

John Danner

Yeah, the answer to the second is definitely yes. And let’s talk about that in a second. So we have a theory as a, as a school system, that’s probably the opposite, at least the opposite of like my alma mater. I’ve been talking to Bellarmine. It’s my alma mater in San Jose, talking to teachers about that. And, you know, AI is a problem for a lot of schools and teachers, right? Like it’s the cheating and stuff like that. We have basically the opposite approach, which is like, assume any kid can use anything that will help them read, write, understand, research better, and then like uplevel what you’re teaching so that you assume that yes, everybody’s writing is going to be perfect now. Don’t worry about that.

That’s not your job anymore. So with projects, you know, the link really is when you’re in a project, you’re trying to apply knowledge to build something to do something. And it’s extremely common to not understand something well enough to do that well. And so you need to go off and kind of research and understand it. So the link that will exist that doesn’t exist yet, which I’d like to see, is foundations lives in its own block right now at Flourish, but we’d like foundations to be accessible kind of basically all the time for students so that that’s the main way that you research as well through kind of an AI interface. So that’s the ideal. Right now what happens is that a student kind of struggles, they go off and use Gemini or something for things. And then we know, you know, the AI knows because it’s paying attention to the project and what’s going on.

‘Oh, this student struggled with this,’ and then in Foundation that kind of bubbles to the top the next day. But like, why wait? Like, just make it real time. If a student’s struggling with something, just go ahead and do it. We do have to figure out kind of the, you know, the tier 1 versus tier 2 of this. Like, if a student’s really struggling and they’ve got a real issue and you just wipe out project time doing that, that doesn’t feel right either. So we’re gonna have to figure out like what level of intervention happens if, you know, they’re still not getting it. But certainly at least the tier 1, like, oh, I just don’t know about this, let’s learn more, should happen through that Foundation system, we think.

Diane Tavenner

That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Tell me about what the educator is doing in these times.

John Danner

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the most important thing really is And I know for many, many teachers, the concern is, gosh, well, maybe you just don’t need me anymore or something. And that’s just completely not true. I mean, I noticed this at Rocketship, you know, people go into teaching because they love kids. That’s like, you know, that’s the common thing that you always hear. Some people go into teaching because they want to be content experts, but not that many, at least at kind of elementary and middle, like, it’s still really driven by like, I really wanna connect with kids and be with kids, not like I wanna be the best reading teacher or whatever. And so, you know, when you kind of push a lot of this like content knowledge and instruction to AI, what really happens is a little bit of like what I was describing with tier 2 and tier 3 during that time where a teacher now has a lot of time. So, you know, a lot of the stuff is going on. Project-based learning is nice that way.

Building Teacher-Student Connections

John Danner

Kids are working on things, which feels kind of like a big Montessori classroom or whatever, where like everybody’s being industrious and getting things done. But like, you know, the question is always, okay, so like what’s the best and highest use for the teacher at that point? So I think, you know, our opinion in general is kind of building trusted relationships is the most important thing you can do as a teacher, right? Like anytime you think about teachers that affected you, it’s because for whatever reason they spent the extra time to kind of get to know you, understand what you were going through, and like became kind of a trusted friend and advisor. And I think buying time back to allow teachers to do more of that is by far the highest value. Of course, interventions and things like that are awesome. Having students reach to do higher-order thinking once they’ve finished a project, all that’s great, but I think it’s all in kind of service of making that connection between our teacher and our students such that the student is more excited and interested to, you know, learn and think with that teacher about other things, you know, especially with superpowers and passions and things like that. Like, we have it, I’ll just brief aside, you know, we have these report cards that have superpowers on them. And so they say things like, you know, organization or self-awareness or whatever. So you can imagine our parent-teacher conferences are pretty amazing because while a parent is like, yeah, I don’t really know much about middle school math and frankly don’t care that much.

Boy, when you bring up self-awareness or something like that, they can go on for a long time. And so you have these really deep discussions about these kinds of things and kids by middle school, certainly in high school, they’re not really listening to their parents about these things very much. They’re kind of sick of hearing this. So I really do think schools have a way better chance of kind of influencing how children are doing these things, especially around superpowers and passions. But that requires trust and trust, you know, it’s hard to build. So we think that the best thing for teachers to be doing is kind of like getting into deeper conversations with students and talking to them about like, you know, what their interests are, what they like. And building that in the hope that they have influence over that student’s trajectory.

Michael Horn

Well, so, John, I think this actually is perfect translation into the other thing that AI is doing to free up teacher time for that, which is, as I understand it, at least from, from what you’ve written, is that you have this AI coach that is quite involved in the project-based learning piece of this equation. And I think two distinct ways. So, maybe talk about that.

John Danner

Yeah, I mean, again, work in progress, so I’m not super happy with how it’s being involved right now, but I’ll tell you what I want it to be doing well. So I think that, you know, and Diane, you live this, that the real challenge with project-based learning is there’s kind of like this huge amount of really mechanical stuff that happens in project-based learning, whereas students are confused about what they’re doing, or they’re tired and not motivated, or whatever, and you watch project-based classrooms and like actually like 80% of the teacher time is like walking around doing that stuff where they’re like, come on, Joey, let’s get going, you know, blah, blah, blah. Which of course there will still be some of that, but to what extent can you create a really awesome thought partner that kind of does a lot of those things? Like, hey, Joey, you know, what we need to focus on here is this. Have you thought about, like, you know, kind of re-engaging the way a good teacher does. Because if you can free them of a bunch of that kind of, you know, really mechanical time, I think not only does it free time, it also like kind of frees your mind up as a teacher to kind of think deeper and like look for relationships and, you know, these kind of things that we really want teachers to do. So I think that’s a big piece of what we’re hoping that this coach does. The other thing it really does for us, and you asked about this before as well, Diane, is it listens. So we’ve got mics all over the place, students are talking, it’s all anonymized, but basically the system knows what bucket to throw all the comments that students are making, etc.

This season of Class Disrupted is sponsored by Learner Studio, a nonprofit motivated by one question. What will young people need to be inspired and prepared to flourish in the age of AI as individuals, in careers and for civil thriving? Learner Studio is sponsoring this season on AI in Education. Because in this critical moment, we need more than just hype. We need authentic conversations asking the right questions from a place of real curiosity and learning. You can learn more about Learners Studio’s mission and the innovators who inspire them at www.learnerstudio.org.

Teaching Soft Skills

John Danner

And when you think about like superpowers, these soft skills. One of the other difficult things in that kind of curriculum and approach is like, and you see it in kind of SEL-type schools all the time, it kind of devolves into like playtime sometimes where it’s not as rigorous. And what AI can really do there is by looking for evidence of, you know, perseverance, for example, when did the student show that they didn’t just stop, they kind of asked the next question and kept going? Like when the AI can provide those examples in each student’s kind of superpowers report card of those things and the teacher can review it, that is so helpful because, you know, when it comes to like pushing for students to improve in these areas. Teachers really have to know, like, kind of where everybody is, where is John on these different skills, where should I focus. And so helping to provide data so that teachers can do that is, is really, really important. I would say it’s pretty good. Like, here’s one thing that kind of surprised me, we did this like a month and a half ago, the AI assessing these, we have 24 of these superpowers across all the students in the school. And we did the AI-rated students on a scale of 1 to 5, and then 3 teachers rated those same students.

And it was only off from kind of the lead teacher by about 10%. So like you know, that to me, that’s like, it’s close enough. It’s kind of like stuff where it’s like, you’re probably right, like a super expert teacher can absolutely do a little bit better. But like, we kind of want to get it to the point where the teacher’s like, yeah, you know, I pretty much trust this. I’ll look at the evidence, but more or less, it says that, okay, like, what should I do about that?

Diane Tavenner

And John, that assessment from the AI was just sort of that natural capture of all they’re doing and assessing based on, yeah, to me, like, then assessment is a no-brainer. That should, I think it’s a conflict of interest for teachers to be assessing, quite frankly, but that’s another conversation. But,.

John Danner

I mean, the other point here, right, is that when you do assessment that way, I think it’s both more valid and stops taking classroom time, right? It just happens naturally. And that’s how it happens in the real world too. It’s not like you sit down and.

Michael Horn

You go, right, we don’t stop and say, now here’s your time.

John Danner

You don’t give somebody a 5-question assessment. 6 months or so. It’s crazy.

Diane Tavenner

Yeah, yeah. So, can I just play back to you what I think you’re just, saying, just to make sure I’m getting a real picture of what’s happening or what you are moving towards happening? And you’ve only been at it for 6 months, but you’re making pretty quick progress, it sounds like. So this, like, if I’m a student in my project time, and we all know this happens a lot, there’s some kids who, like, literally, you know, the teacher’s bumblebeeing around, and every time the teacher bumblebees around, maybe I’m productive for that moment, but then the teacher bumblebees away, and then I’m kind of playing or I’m whatever. But AI knows what I’m doing in those in-between times, and so I’m getting some sort of feed or feedback of some sort, and the teacher’s seeing it, my family’s maybe seeing it, of like, hey, this is what’s going on in your time, and so we’re going to hold the mirror up, give you some feedback, tell you like, this is the stuff you could be doing to be more productive. Is that kind of what you’re describing? And If so,

John Danner

Yeah, we’re all going to have that. So this is another thing, like one of the things we think about a lot at Flourish is like, is this different than the real world’s going to be or the same? And I think we all basically need that. Like, you know, if you had a voice that was kind of going like, John, what are you doing? You’ve been doom scrolling. You know, like it’d be pretty helpful, really.

Diane Tavenner

Well, one of the big conversations is about motivation, right? And like, oh, you can’t, you have to like motivate kids to use the technology to learn. But actually, I think you’re flipping the script here and saying like, no, the technology is like literally helping, young people be motivated because someone’s paying attention and they’re noticing what they’re doing and they’re giving them feedback on it. And you know,

Feedback and Rewards Drive Success

John Danner

The feedback thing is the important thing. It’s like basically if something’s giving you feedback, like even if the feedback’s not perfect, it’s so much better than not getting feedback. You know, like the classroom where everybody’s got their hand up and they’re just waiting for the teacher to call. Like that’s a bad place to be. So now you’ve basically got this continuous loop. The other thing I would say that I think is just almost for free in this world is, you know, the gaming world has figured out a lot of things that they do when you’re doing a pretty basic task to play the game, and you might not be that excited about it, but like, you know, they’re setting up rewards. We use badges, um, you know, so like an example is you might do 2 or 3 different projects, and by doing those 2 or 3 different projects that was built up to a badge. And so the badge is kind of hanging out there and some other student in the class got it.

And so you want it and things like that. And, and those like really kind of basic game things are very helpful at different times during the day, right? Like we kind of all need a little bit of push. We’re very conscious of intrinsic versus extrinsic. motivation. And so like projects are a good example where the default is intrinsic. We want students to be kind of working on that project because they’re interested in that, because they want to do it. But there are definitely times where the AI is paying attention and kind of prompting and even, you know, doing some rewarding and things like that is actually quite helpful for them to kind of persevere.

Diane Tavenner

John, I want to talk to you about, I think you’re the perfect person to talk to about this. So one of the things I hear out there a lot is like, oh, the hyperscalers are just going to build this. Like, number one. Number two, most schools and school systems have zero ability to actually build what you’re building. So you’re sort of this unique person because you sit at the intersection of like opening, operating schools and the ability to build sophisticated technology. Is that, are the hyperscalers going to build what you’re building? Like, are you, like, how do you think about the building of the technology here for schools?

John Danner

Yeah, I mean, we’d be pretty happy if the hyperscalers built it, first of all. We’re, you know, so I think that the main challenge over the next 20 years in education is going to be how quickly do we move to a world where students are living in the current world as opposed to the, you know, 20 years ago or whatever. Like, and, and so these basic things we’re doing like foundations, I think it’s important for students to live in that world now. And so what does it take school systems to move towards that world? I know that your approach at Summit, our approach at Rocketship in the beginnings of the edtech world were, hey, let’s just build these kind of basic model schools and hopefully people will come visit and go, oh gosh, you know, that doesn’t look too bad. Like I could probably do that as well. So I think a lot of the point of Flourish is creating this proof point where people can come and see and go, huh, that, that actually works well, and it’s definitely not dehumanizing. I see the teacher interactions with the students as being more human, um, than my classroom. So I think that’s like actually our point, our reason for being is to kind of be that model.

And, you know, we’ll build a network and we’ll get as big as we can, but, but really kind of purposefully influencing school leaders, district leaders, state leaders to think about, like, you know, what they could do as well. On the technology side, I’m generally of the opinion that a lot of this will get easier and easier for everybody who’s not at the foundation level over time. I will say, like, there are some exceptions to that. So, like, with Project Read, with phonemes and graphemes. When you’re doing kind of deeper reading stuff, they may get there. I mean, the AIs may know everything at some point, but like there’s not a super strong reason for them to get there earlier. So there are pockets like that that probably will be specialized for longer. But, you know, as a school, it’s just better for us the faster all of that becomes a commodity.

And the more we can just, you know, get off-the-shelf stuff, like there’s no real joy in building all of this stuff. And for the change to happen, we don’t want people to have to think about all this stuff, really.

Diane Tavenner

No, I have to ask about scale because your point that the faster we can get kids to be living in today’s world versus the old world suggests that we need to scale as quickly as possible for that to happen, to get as many kids there. You and I both bear a lot of scars around different efforts to scale both mortar schools and influence type things. This time you’ve gone with a microschool network. What’s your, you had grand ambitions with Rocketship and clearly Rocketship’s great and Preston’s done an amazing job since you left, but it never reached sort of the scale that I think you originally hoped. What is your thinking now? Why microschools?

John Danner

Yeah, I mean, you know, putting it like just putting it bluntly, I think politics killed charter schools more or less. Like, you know, you look at most high-performing charter schools, they tend to look more and more like the districts that host them. You know, they actually, like, I look at RocketShips around the country. They actually look as much like the district they’re hosted by as they look like RocketShips sometimes. You know, it’s like, ‘cause you know, your authorizer authorizes you and they have a lot of influence. So it was kind of like this cool experiment that at the beginning probably created a lot of innovation and then over time kind of has this like bringing it back to the, you know, kind of what the districts are doing. I think that microschools, certainly microschools, are starting in a very different place, you know, where the way I think about charters is the compromise happened right at the beginning. Where we would like to receive public funding and for that we will like to fit into the system.

Whereas the microschool movement kind of started with a different point where the stronger position was taken early on when the laws were formed that like these things are independent. They’re way more like private schools than they are like district schools. And of course, there will be some influence from states and others on that, but nowhere near like, you know, what we saw in the charter world where it was like, you know, I remember the story I always tell is Rocketship had specialized teachers for math and reading in elementary school, which was not normal at all. And I was just tortured for years by districts over this. You know, the main thing was like, no, it’s, you know, a student needs one trusted adult, you know, when they’re that age. And if they have two, it’s going to like, you know, all fall apart, which was, of course, total bogusness. But I had to go through that anyway. Like, you know, that was just time of my life spent arguing something silly.

Whereas with microschools, you just don’t have to argue that. So I think the big question is, what will be the ultimate, like, kind of political destiny of microschools? Will they get capped in the way that charters did? Will they somehow kind of get influenced in a way they aren’t now? Right now they’re pretty great. I mean, you know, you basically build a school that parents and students love and, and you build the curriculum and the program you want. That’s nice. Something you would have enjoyed, Diane.

Reimagining Teachers’ Roles

Diane Tavenner

Yeah, no, I mean, it’s tempting. I will say Michael’s always so kind because when we start talking schools, I just take over. So he’s being so patient. The thing that’s coming to me, and maybe this will lead us to wrap up, is, you know, you and I both taught, and were passionate about teaching. And as you start talking about politics, one of the sort of sad elements of that politics to me is I think teachers get involved in kind of, or, you know, blocking some of these changes, a lot out of fear, a lot of out of like but my identity is teaching a classroom of students and writing great curriculum and like doing all, you know, being a hero. And I think what you’re offering is a new identity for a teacher that might actually be more aligned with why they got into it in the beginning, which is instead of judging myself by the quality of my classroom instruction, I’m like literally focused on every single kid learning and growing and, you know, in your words, flourishing, right? It’s such a profound

John Danner

In general, I think that professions that go in the direction of being more human, where the human elements are like the differentiator, they’re going to do so much better. So I, you know, wrote a piece on this. I just think, you know, while most parents would not have counseled their kids to become teachers in the last 20 years, I think that conversation is likely to change because I think it’s going to be both a more enjoyable job and probably more resilient to kind of the whole AI apocalypse than most jobs.

Michael Horn

Agreed.

John Danner

Yeah.

Michael Horn

I think that is a good place to part us. But John, I feel like we have like 10 other questions like sitting in our dock that we could have dug in with you. But let’s pivot. This is fascinating. It’s really cool to see what you’re building and hear both the frustrations, but also frankly, the North Star for where it’s going. And one day maybe Massachusetts will have you here. But I’ll pray for now. But let’s pivot.

We have this section that we always talk about things we’re reading, watching, listening to. We try to do outside of work. People track us on this stuff. Diane and I occasionally fail. I’m going to fail today. So you can go wherever you want.

John Danner

So, yeah. I’m rereading the Culture series, Iain Banks, right now. So my brother works for Tesla and Tesla just, as you probably heard, kind of made this transition where they knocked off the Model S and Model X and are building robots. So he’s building robots right now. So that makes it much more personal to me that like the future is coming soon, and so, you know, I’ve always been a science fiction reader, but, but I think one of the cheat codes in Silicon Valley is like the amount of science fiction consumed equals your ability to be comfortable with like what’s coming. So yeah, culture series.

Michael Horn

Good rec, good rec.

Diane, what’s on your list? You said you’re cheating.

Diane Tavenner

So, I’m cheating, I’m failing today. Sorry. Ted Dintersmith has his latest book out and sent it along. I couldn’t resist. The title is very provocative. It’s called Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You. And, you know, this is really, you know, for those who don’t remember, Ted, like, goes hard on the things we’re doing wrong and really tries to bring public awareness to them. And, I think lots of us have been concerned about how math is taught and not taught and whatnot for a long time.

So, that’s what this one’s about.

Michael Horn

I have an email from him in my inbox to send him my address, so I will do it after this conversation, uh, so he could send it to me as well. But, I’m also cheating. I’ve been really interested in, not just how schools start doing new things, but how do they stop doing old things? Like, they are just really bad. And it’s not just schools, by the way. Like, all organizations are really bad at deimplementing or pruning, like, old things that don’t make sense anymore, whether they’re bad habits or frankly habits that just aren’t fit for the current age. So I’ve started, like, trying to read some of the academic literature and just learn about that. And there’s a book, Making Room for Impact: A Deimplementation Guide for Educators, by Aaron Hamilton, John Hattie, and Dylan William. And so I’m just cresting the end of that book right now, and, and then looking at all the healthcare studies that they’re citing.

And I haven’t decided if I’m going to read those, but that’s where I am right now.

Diane Tavenner

So is it a recommend, Michael, or no?

Michael Horn

I mean, it’s, it’s like a, it’s a deep workbook, right, on the topic, um, is what I would say. So like, if you’re a school and you’re trying to work through this, definitely dive into it. I was more interested in like, who’s, who’s thought about, like, how do you de-implement? How do you prune, right? And because there’s just not a lot of conversation except for educators griping about it. And so I wanted to learn more and it was a good starting point. So huge thanks, John, again for joining us. We appreciate it. Really check out his Substack as well if you want to just sort of follow along on the journey, I guess is what I would say. And we’ll watch as Flourish opens two more in Arizona in August and keep up the good work.

We appreciate you. And for all of our listeners, keep the emails, notes coming. We love it. We learn a lot from it as well, and it inspires us on our future topics. And so, as always, thanks for joining us on Class Disrupted. We’ll see you next time.

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