Education Disruption: Where are we now?

I’m normally the one asking the questions on this podcast. But when Kelly Smith, founder of the microschools solutions provider, Prenda, reached out with a bigger question around how has disruptive innovation in education evolved since Clay Christensen, Curtis Johnson, and I published Disrupting Class, I was thrilled to join him in a conversation on his KindlED podcast (check it out!)—with the idea that I’d also post it here.

In this conversation, we discussed why technology alone did not (and will not!) produce the student-centered transformation many expected, how entrenched school structures and family habits can slow change, and how microschools, homeschooling, and education savings accounts are creating new pathways for more customized learning. We also reflected on the growing role of parents in shaping educational choices, the relationship between learner-centeredness and rigor, and what a more pluralistic, choice-filled future for schooling could look like. I hope you enjoy our conversation—and look forward to your thoughts.

Michael Horn:

A school doesn’t move to mastery-based learning, but they move to mastery-based grading, which I think is the wrong way to organize the world, but they’ll make that move first. And parents are like, whoa, like rebellion, right? Like, what are you doing? So like, you can see when you jump ahead of them, yeah, you get pushback. But if the parents are in the driver’s seat and they’re sort of piece by piece, like, wait, can I do that? Wait, can I have that? Like, they start to assemble the pieces in community.

Kelly Smith:

Hello and welcome to the Kindled Podcast for another exciting episode. I’m Kelly Smith. I’ll be your host today. I’m excited to be talking to Michael Horn. Michael’s an award-winning author. He’s written 8 books, including a national bestseller, Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. He’s also teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and he co-founded the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, which is a nonprofit think tank, along with Clayton Christensen.

We’ll be talking about that in today’s episode. Michael strives to create a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of meaning through his writing, speaking, and work with a portfolio of education organizations. I’ve known Michael for years. He’s influential in my personal story. I’m very grateful that he took the time to sit and talk with us. I think you’re going to love the insights on what’s happening in the education world, How does disruptive innovation as a theory apply to what we’re seeing right now? And where does this all go from here? So with that, Michael Horn. All right, Michael Horn, thank you so much for joining me on the KindlED Podcast. We’re excited to talk today.

Michael Horn:

I’m thrilled to be with you, Kelly. Like, I was thinking about it when you were starting up Prenda, man, what is it like 10 years at this point or something like that?

Kelly Smith:

Pretty close. I think I was in the year 2017, so that would’ve been 9 years ago.

Microschools Nomenclature

Michael Horn:

Wild. So like, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s been, it’s been fun to watch you all grow and redefine learning and, and, and, you know, around the kitchen table for so many families and families coming together and create such cool spaces. So I’m delighted to be with you.

Kelly Smith:

Well, not, not to go too hard on the love fest here, but you were using the word microschool online and I wasn’t sure what to call it. I actually went through a brief stint. You could probably still find this out there. I was writing about nano schools because I thought, you know, some people are saying microschools really. Feels still like a school. I was really talking about something different, like very small groups with one adult. And I used nano schools a couple times. My wife put a stop to it. She’s like, that’s way too nerdy. And I said, well, there’s this guy, Michael Horn in Cambridge, and he’s talking about micro schools. And she’s like, yeah, I could get behind that.

Michael Horn:

You know, so now our, and now our friend John Danner is saying, call ’em low-cost privates. Cause some of them grow big. And I was thinking, wow. I was like, okay, I don’t even know how to call it anymore. But people sort of understand what we’re talking about, I think. And that’s, that’s a sea change, right? From like again, like 9 years ago where, you know, you, me, and a couple others, right? Absolutely.

Kelly Smith:

Well, first you, and then I just kind of picked up the words. So thanks. Another fun, fun story. I got to do Y Combinator in 2019. This is like famous for helping startups get their, get their launch, and they’ve launched Airbnb and some of these big companies. Paul Graham’s the notoriously eccentric guy at the, at the core of this thing. And Paul’s not as involved anymore in Y Combinator. Of course, he’s busy doing other things, but he came for one day and, you know, a few startups got to meet with him. We were one of the lucky few that we had like 15 minutes with Paul Graham.

And I remember it took a little while for him to get the idea. First it was like, this seems crazy. No one’s gonna do that. And then once he caught it, you could see his eyes, like he’s just visceral. His eyes lit up. He’s like, Microschool, Microschool. He’s like, stop, drop the name Prenda. You are microschool.com. Like that is, Microschool is the word. And he was right. You know, Microschool as a, as a word now, Prenda, of course, stands for more than just microschools to us. We have a mission that is really about what we’re doing for kids. And so we kept the name Prenda. Maybe we shouldn’t have, but he was, it’s interesting to see now here we are in a world where everybody’s talking about microschools.

Michael Horn:

So, yeah, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that story. That’s fun.

Forming the Thesis of Disrupting Class

Kelly Smith:

Well, let’s go back in time. I mean, while we’re already back, you know, 9 years, you, I became acquainted with your work because I’m a major Clay Christensen fanboy. You got to work with, with Professor Christensen at Harvard, famous for the invention of Disruption Theory. Talks about business cycles and how new entrants come in. You know, this is like scientific analysis for those of you who haven’t like studied any of this. There’s, there’s rhyme and reason to the way big industries get disrupted and the reason why big companies don’t often lead the innovation in their space. It happens from outside and all of these things. You guys were turning your attention to education as one of these institutions that maybe hadn’t changed that much and you were thinking, how could, how could this theory apply? I mean, I’d love to just kind of, I don’t know, dive in on reflections on this. How were you thinking about it at the time and would, yeah, would love to take a, take a peek back at your thinking and how you’ve updated it since. Yeah.

Michael Horn:

I mean, it’s so interesting to see how it’s changed, right? Um, but at the time, so Clay started working on this in like 1999, 2000, the original folks who had passed the first charter law in Minnesota had approached him and Tom VanderArk, Paul Hill, some other folks had come to him and was like, there’s something here, right? So what I didn’t know when I signed up to start writing the book with him in 2006 was he had like tried to write a book 5 times earlier. Disrupting Class is what it ended up being. But the title is like really important to the story, right? Which is one of the things when I, to your point, took the scientific look at like where could disruptive innovation actually happen? The challenge, frankly, in the United States was like there was not really any pockets of what you call non-consumption., right? Like public schooling was universal, compulsory, largely felt free. It’s not actually, we can get into that because there have been some policy innovations that I think radically changed the game in the last decade. But at the time we were like, so where is this disruptive innovation going to come from? And so we sort of had to wedge into this Disrupting Class, which on the one hand felt great because you’re like traditional classroom model, 1 to 30, like that is not optimized for learning, right? It’s built around this factory model of standardizing the way we teach and test and sorting kids out at various intervals. And then everyone’s shocked when like it does that really well and we’re upset at dropouts and things of that nature. But essentially, right, systems do what systems are built to do. Our schools are perfection, frankly, at that.

And in the knowledge economy, we decide that no longer works. So you’re like, how do you transform the classroom model? And then we’re like, there’s lots of non-consumption of classes that students would love to take within schools. Maybe that’s the opportunity. So we look at credit recovery, advanced classes,, right? Like all these little pockets, unit recovery, if you want to go down to that level. And we’re like, you could launch disruptive innovations within the school system. Maybe, maybe I’ll pause it there, but like, that was where our head was initially of like how you overthrow the, the, the hierarchy of the one-to-many sort of standardized monolithic system. And just to say one more beat on it, the subtitle originally was For Every Child a Tutor. And so that was how like we were thinking about The publishers said we had to have disruptive innovation in there, but the, but that was sort of how we were thinking about it.

It’s not just that you’re moving to digital. That’s not actually particularly exciting. And there’s a lot of reasons as we’re seeing right now that we hadn’t anticipated that aren’t amazing about it. But if you could use it to personalize the learning for each individual and let them move at their path and pace and so forth, wow, that could be really interesting. Ran up against a few realities we hadn’t, I think, fully anticipated that we can talk about. But, uh, that’s why, that, that, that’s why we went with that.

Kelly Smith:

Yeah. I love it. I love it. I mean, really, like, I went through and reread this in preparation for our conversation today, and I just was like, there is a very strong thesis in this book about student-centered learning, like putting a kid in the center, activating things like agency. And I’ve heard Clay Christensen talk about this in other contexts and just the role of of an inquisitive learner asking a question and Jobs to Be Done and, you know, all of these things that, um, that really do grab the human and put them at the center. And you guys hit that. I mean, that’s all here in the book. I think the question is, okay, how is it going to come to pass? And I hear you talk about it’s like, yeah, I, I would have, I think, done the same thing.

I would have said, I don’t see a way in a, you know, kind of monolithic, uh, compulsory system. That that could happen, but I’m going to just joke a little bit here. Data suggests, so this is, uh, page 98. The data suggests that by, and this is, by the way, thank you for doing this because I teach kids algebra a lot and they’re like, when will I ever need, I’m like, Clay Christensen uses logarithms to analyze.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, there you go.

Kelly Smith:

Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Horn:

It turns out if you, if you array it on a 0.1, et cetera. Yeah.

Obstacles to Realizing the Book’s Predictions

Kelly Smith:

Yeah. And you say by 2019. About 50% of high school courses will be delivered online, which is, you know, like a mathematical prediction based on what you guys were seeing at the time. I don’t think 50% of high school courses are being delivered online right now, and I’d love to just sort of, yeah, just get thoughts on that. Like there are more, there certainly are more, and a lot of these things you talk about credit recovery and, you know, all of that.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I guess the one caveat to that one, I’d say where we, well, if you modeled the pandemic, we nailed it. But, um, the, the, the, the one caveat to that is, is in some ways I think what it’s actually really picking up is not virtual, but online, whether virtual or blended, right? And so I actually think we’re pretty close on that if you realize that the data isn’t like a wholly, like, teachers separate from you, right? Most of this is in blended learning environments, and which, which we did say, and then my second book was blended. So I actually think like we’re kind of closer on that prediction. Where I think we fall off the wagon is we wanted it to get to the student-centered learning that you just described. And we had a logic of like how it would, you know, sort of these facilitated networks outside of the world would start to work and things of that nature. And then the system would move from very linear software to something more student-centered and directed with teachers and look at the operating system, if you will, of traditional schools, the time-based nature, the, cover all this in 180 days, how they’re funded, you know, based on butts in seats, not how much you learn. Look for all the reasons in all of our research, and we do say it a couple times, but then we sort of jump ahead and say, well, but it’s going to be different because of this, like has been overwhelmed and sucked into the traditional system, even as those independent classes and like nowhere more so than credit recovery, right? Where I mean, I don’t know how many students, but at its peak around 2019, like tons and tons of students in urban districts are taking tons of online credit recovery courses. But because it’s still based around seat time and not like what you’ve learned, it sort of becomes this synonymous with like a scam market, right? In some ways of like, just like sort of, well, throw them there, we’ll accelerate them in 2 weeks and maybe they learned, but like we have no idea because the traditional system doesn’t care about learning and neither did credit recovery based on how it was implemented.

Kelly Smith:

When you look at this, I’m super curious about this. And now this is not about the book. This is what we’re seeing since, you know, I, you’ll sit with a room of educators and they’re well-meaning and they get this completely. Yes. Learning should be student-centered. I want this to be, they’ll say things like, I can’t because, and sometimes they’ll point to regulation, but it’s interesting to sit with the administrators on the other side, or even legislators or commissioners of, you know, from departments of education. And they’re like, It’s not actually, the regs actually allow a lot more than what we’re seeing. It’s that, you know, people are used to it a certain way.

Kelly Smith:

And I’ve even heard, you know, the third angle of this is the parents don’t really want it to be that different. So, I mean, what’s your, your kind of, how do you make sense of all of this and why maybe we haven’t raced to a world of student-centered, uh, like we, we all kind of hoped we would?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I think, well, the parent piece of it, I think is real, right? And, and let’s maybe let’s park that because I think you’re part of the movement that could change that over time. Right. But it’s like a much longer time time horizon, I think. But on the first one, so the logic of disruptive innovation, why organizations fundamentally don’t change, why systems, like everyone’s like systems change, systems don’t change. They get disrupted by new systems, right? And so, and the reason for that is Clay articulated is that every organization has a business model in effect, dirty word in education, but it’s effectively a business model where you have a value proposition, resources, processes, and then some sort of financial formula that supports it all. And what you really very quickly realize is all of these things become interdependently locked, like as you’ve run it through a few years in a row, right? And process in particular is where culture lives. And it’s almost like grooves in like a, you know, you’re cross-country skiing, right? Like you’re like the grooves in the snow, you can’t even step out of them or the train tracks, right? And like, just organizations become exceptionally good at making process incredibly rigid, which I get, like a good process is built to design to solve one kind of problem.

Well, it’s not built to solve all kinds of problems. If it, if it was, it’d be a really lousy process by definition. But as a result of that, how many thousands of processes unspoken and practices and like, this is just the way things work here are done in schools every single day. Forget to get for, you know, forget like the planning cycles of master schedules and all those things, right? That just cause it to say it’s like really hard to break out of it. So like I would have this discussion a lot of times with policymakers because when I was at the Christensen Institute, which Clay and I co-founded, I spent a lot of time testifying in state capitols and they would create these waivers, right, for, you know, get out of seat time, right? All sorts of flexibility in the law. And then they’d say, well, like, none of the schools are taking advantage of it. And it was like, well, because like, they’re, they have their pro, like, they have their practices and processes that are extremely exquisitely well honed for the existing policies. And I would even go so far as like, K12 Inc, now Stride Connections, right, then got acquired by Pearson, these full-time virtual learning schools that school networks that popped up in around like 2000, they, I mean, you remember this, Kelly, like they exquisitely have built technology systems to map back to seat time laws.

And then, right, exactly. And then like, you were like, well, why aren’t you doing X? And like, I mean, I guess we could have, but we’ve built this incredible technology that is geared around like the traditional and they couldn’t even get out of their own way. Right. In many ways.

Kelly Smith:

And they would say, well, we had to make some compromises. We were up against rules and requirements, and even if one state allows it, other states don’t. And so you kind of go back to, yeah, it’s interesting to watch this all play out. It’s like, no, everyone wants it to change. Honestly, I can’t think of anybody who doesn’t, but can’t. And maybe an example of this that’s concrete is you and I have friends that have done these workshops, right? You’ll get a bunch of educators together and they’ll always start with the same speech, right? It’s a blank sheet of paper. Look at this.

And they’ll physically have a blank sheet of paper and like, let’s design around what we think school could possibly be and how amazing. And people get excited, the energy’s there. And by the end of that session, it looks very similar. I mean, every time it’s like maybe it has Japanese classes.

Michael Horn:

Well, it’s right. And I think that’s what’s unique about say Prenda or like Florida Virtual School, right? When they did these exercises in effect, because they were creating something completely different that was allowed to operate outside. And that is the innovator’s dilemma or the logic of disruption that you led with, which is it really does take independent organizations that do not make those compromises with the existing system or value chain. I remember our early phone calls when you were designing Prenda. Like my big concern for you was, oh, if you partner with a school, are you going to have to make an accommodation? Like be like, that was my big worry for you, right?

Kelly Smith:

Yes, by the way, you were right.

Michael Horn:

Interesting. Okay. Well, so yeah, I mean, that was my big concern, right? Was like, like you have to fit into, and then my, my colleague at the Christensen Institute, Tom Arnett, like, and loves to talk about on top of the business models, you have value networks, right? Where you’re sort of form-fitting into the ecosystem around you and that further constrains. And look, at some point you are form-fitting into society, right? The question is at what level, I think, and what node.

The Impact of Evolving School Choices

Kelly Smith:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a fascinating question. I want to get back to the theory here and just say, if you were to redo this book now and given kind of what you saw, because it sounds like one of the assumptions you had was compulsory monolithic, you know, a system where there’s not really, you could do things differently in the classrooms, but you can’t really get out of it. Now we’ve seen homeschool rise. We’ve been through COVID. We’ve seen families look at this differently. I think you are seeing parents taking a little bit more ownership. They’re at least awake to it. They’re asking questions. What is going on? How is my kid doing? And, and they’re not just assuming everything’s fine. And then, uh, and then school choice, right? So now there’s this mechanism by which families can get some percentage of the tax dollars that would go toward public education. They can use it for educating their own kid. I think those things have shaken things up a little bit, and I would love to just kind of hear your perspective as you think about that now.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, that’s my read as well. I think it’s not in the book, but homeschooling was growing quite a bit when we wrote Disrupting Class as well. It was going through sort of the first boom, I would argue, powered by the online learning, right? That was now, that now made it far easier to sort of give your kid a, uh, an education beyond the couple things you knew really well, right? And, but we did actually that same logarithmic S-curve calculation on the growth of homeschooling and it flattened out at around 10% of families, which I think like finger to the wind is about the upper limit of, right? Families that want their kids at home. But now you couple that with some innovations that have unlocked hey, you can send them over to Kelly’s house, right, for, for learning. You can send them to the church. You can write like these micro schools, et cetera. And then the other piece you just named COVID, obviously awakening a lot of families and asking questions that they weren’t asking before. And then the fourth, which I think is the biggest, is these educational choice.

In particular, I actually think there’s a big difference between vouchers and educational savings accounts. I think the educational savings accounts are a big policy innovation over vouchers because now I have dollars in an account where I’m making a series of decisions across multiple providers and I’m making cost-value trade-offs, right? And trade-offs are really important. And then the other piece of that is now I’m a family in Arizona or wherever, you know, name your state. I could go to the quote unquote free public school, but I’m actually losing out on how many thousands of dollars, right? In the education savings account. All of a sudden it doesn’t feel free. It feels like a negative when I could be customizing my education for my kid. And so now all of a sudden, quote unquote, it feels pricey. And so to me, one of the big unlocks of microschools that was interesting and why I started writing about them before these policies gained steam was I started saying, well, the other place disruption happens is not from non-consumption.

It’s when the existing system overserves families. And you’re like, public schools don’t overserve families. Like, we’re not learning nearly enough, blah, blah, blah. And you’re like, actually not. Not true, right? There’s plenty of families that look at it and they’re like, the academics are like, my kid’s fine on that front, but like, I really don’t care about, you know, the 15 sports teams and the 26 clubs and the, you know, the 5 bands that they like. I just want like the best piano experience coupled with like a tailored learning around this, right? Or whatever it is. And you’re like, okay, so they’re overserved. Plus educational savings accounts now makes it feel more expensive too.

To me, that’s dynamic. And I think it creates real room for, you know, if I rewrote it now, Disrupting Schools. Now we can get out of the system, right? That’s pretty, at least in my mind, that’s pretty huge.

Fostering Family Buy-In

Kelly Smith:

I hope you guys listening at home are recognizing the impact of this. I mean, I think we are at that moment, but it’s interesting to hear you talk about it. I work with a lot of parents. I get to be there often at the, the very first sort of realization of what an ESA even is. And they’re like, wait, what? How does this work? So I’m, we’re not yet at this point you’re describing where, I mean, out here in Arizona, it’s 10% of the kids in, in K-12 in Arizona are doing ESA. So it’s not unheard of, but I’m still, most people, if I just pick a parent and start talking to them about it, they have not heard of it yet. And, and I think. I think as that kind of climbs up the S-curve, there is that tipping point where people say, yeah, there is an opportunity cost to not taking that scholarship.

I think on the flip side, it can feel scary. I mean, there’s all the psychology around, well, now I’m in charge. Once I get that money, it’s like, there’s, there’s at least comfort in sort of just doing what everyone else does, sending them to the school everyone else goes to. Even if I, you know, I personally don’t feel super happy with it, I can at least kind of tell myself a story that feels good. Yeah, the tipping point here is I see enough of an opportunity to sort of quell my fears around that. And it is, you know, I don’t want to just passively sit there and go with whatever the— we wouldn’t do that in almost any other aspects of our lives. You think about health and nutrition and, you know, apparel, like we research the heck out of things.

We study them. We’re agents in our own personal decisions. We’re with our child, our precious child and their whole future 7 hours a day for however many days.

Michael Horn:

It’s, you know, yeah, it’s, it’s, I think I told you this, my, yeah, I think if I can’t remember both of my daughters, but definitely one of them read your book in addition to me, she sort of grabbed it off my nightstand and read it. And she was like, yeah, Dad, like, this is weird. Why don’t you, why aren’t more families doing these things? It was really interesting to like hear her just sort of give her like very childlike, right. Sort of blunt view of like, this just makes sense. Of course you would make these choices. Right. But I think what you just said is right. Like, parents, and you said parents like push back against it.

And you see it like, I’ll give a couple examples where you see it in big, big places, right? Number one is like a school doesn’t move to mastery-based learning, but they move to mastery-based grading, which I think is the wrong way to like organize the world. But, but they’ll, they’ll, they’ll make that move first and parents are like, whoa, like rebellion, right? Like, what are you doing? And so, so like you can see when you jump ahead of them, yeah, you get pushback. But if the parents are in the driver’s seat and they’re sort of piece by piece, like, wait, can I do that? Wait, can I have that? Like, they start to assemble the pieces in community. And I think that’s the big part that you’re pointing to, right? Like with social proof, with others around it, it’s not like data saying, is this a good choice or a bad choice? But like, man, I know my friend did this and now I’m going to like have that experience too. And our friends at outschool.org are like, done some great research right around the importance of social proof in helping people actually use those ESA dollars and actually activate them. To me, that’s like the bit by bit where you start to see maybe that S-curve actually materialize in a way that’s not just like we’ve digitized the existing system, which by the way, not only was that not great, it also like has had a bunch of negative ramifications, I think, within traditional schools. And I think we did actually predict that. I don’t think anyone like took that part of the book seriously.

We warn vociferously about cramming technology into existing, into the existing system, but whatever. But, but I think in a new system, right, piece by piece, parents making these choices, that’s how we start to build a movement over time. And look, I don’t, I haven’t really looked at the calculations. It’d be interesting to do so, but yeah, I think it’s probably a longer timeframe for a full transformation, but, but I think there’s actually way more opportunity now than there was.

Kelly Smith:

Well, I’m now very curious to run the S-curve and the logarithmic analysis again.

Learner-Centeredness in Support of Rigor

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I was going to say, get your students to get some of your students to do it with like the growth of ESAs or something. Look, you’ll have some exogenous factors that are tamping it down, which is, as you know, outside of just a couple states, like they’re not fully funded. So you’re getting weight. So like we’d have to put some assumptions around that. But I think the momentum is there. I will tell you the other pushback. So there are some people who are against student-centered learning. There are a lot of my friends who like believe in science of reading and things of that nature. I’ll just call it out. ‘Cause like they’re very into the whole classroom large thing. And I guess what I would say is like, they want more rigor in academics.

Kelly Smith:

Sure.

Michael Horn:

I’m with you.

Kelly Smith:

Right.

Michael Horn:

But like, I can’t imagine what’s more rigorous than making sure that like Michael understands how to decode, you know, like this set of phonemic things before, like he jumps into some crazy text way above him. Like I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want that. And look, I want conversations and so forth, but I want a conversation around a text where like I can actually participate and have a real exchange of ideas. And I don’t know, like most 30-person environments for that are not that great. But what’s your ratio, like 6 or so?

Kelly Smith:

Yeah, 7.5 is the average per class right now.

Michael Horn:

Okay, so there you go. Like, that’s probably a pretty interesting conversation.

Kelly Smith:

No, and I know these folks too. They’re friends. I’m always curious. It feels a little bit like like just apologetic or it’s basically, it’s hard to be an educator, which I agree with, to really be and do teacher-led. And there’s not that many of ‘em, so that’s what brings them to 25 or 30 kids. But I, I don’t think they would say if you had a great educational experience for 10, I think most people would say that’s, that’s gonna be better. You can dive deeper or you can get into it. And with, with more data, more visibility as well.

Kelly Smith:

Yeah. I don’t know. Do you see those as mutually exclusive? Rigorous learning and student-centered? I mean, are those two competing ideas?

Michael Horn:

I don’t, I don’t even, yeah, I, I don’t personally, I don’t. I get that there have been some parts of the quote unquote personalized learning world that have been less rigorous in the sense of like concepts are a little bit too atomic. They’re like lack coherence, right? Yeah. In terms of like what you’re learning about and sort of like a lot of ping-ponging around and piecemeal. I don’t I, look, I, I helped set up the Robinhood Learning and Tech Fund back in 2015, and the basic hypothesis around literacy was you could use the technology to really personalize, like, the, the mastery of the skills of how to read, right, while creating a really content-coherent, rich set of opportunities for students to, to, to build that background knowledge to access anything. I guess the other thing I would say is there’s a group of folks who I love, but they’re convinced that there is one canon in all of this. And I don’t know how you think about it, but I agree there’s a lot of useful texts that are like culturally helpful across. And but like, I do think that there is an exaggeration of like how common that is.

Michael Horn:

And I suspect that they would be pretty horrified at some pretty foundational texts that I have never read. Yeah. And I think I have gotten by okay.

Kelly Smith:

Well, let’s not expose ourselves too much here, Michael. I don’t want to, I definitely don’t want anybody watching this and judging us, but the same, right? And I think they would also be intrigued to find something that I have read and that’s, that’s made a difference in my life that wasn’t in their list. Right.

Michael Horn:

Oh, that’s interesting. It goes both ways.

Looking Ahead to the Future of School Choice

Kelly Smith:

Who’s to say like, this is an education, you know, that feels very, 18th century schoolmaster in Princeton or something. What do you see as, just as we look at where we’re at and we don’t know where we are on the S-curve, but it’s definitely climbing. It’s rising. One quick test I do on this is I look at Google Trends for the word microschool and I go all the way back to 2004 and it’s just nothing, nothing, nothing. There’s a little blip and then there’s this like spike in 2020, which of course, right? Everyone was talking about microschools in 2020. And then, um, since then it goes back down and it’s just this noisy but consistent, like steady. I mean, we’re well above where we were at peak, peak COVID in terms of just Google searches, right? People are actually looking up this word and thinking about it. And we see this in, in the business.

Like we’ll go out to a new entity, right? Texas has an EFA program, ESA-style program, and we do a webinar about microschools and people come, they show up, and then we talk to ‘em on the phone and they’ve researched and they’ve got a vision for what they want to do and they’re ready to go and making plans. And, and so you can feel the maturity of the concept. Yeah. And I think depending on your interpretation of how parents think about this and what they want, I think we could argue that we’re still relatively very early stage in microschools. As you mentioned, it’s a, it’s a long journey. It’s, it’s a lot going on and it’s going to take, I would imagine, a long time, but I don’t think it caps at 10% either. I think there’s a lot of families that are going to find a lot of value in this. Be curious to just hear your, yeah, your thoughts. Just what are you seeing today? Things that make you excited, things that you’re maybe concerned about.

Michael Horn:

So I largely agree with, well, I agree with actually everything you just said. So let’s start there, right? Which is to me, it feels like the momentum is growing. The numbers are growing. A lot of families want different experiences. And look, I think some families will continue to opt for a traditional experience, but like, it’ll be an active choice as opposed to a passive thing that it’s just because I’m supposed to. And I think that’s part of this is like, I imagine that there’s going to be just a multiplicity, like an explosion of opportunities for students in the future. And where I am in Massachusetts, we’re the furthest thing from having an ESA, I think, probably anywhere in the country. You can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m like, I am just fighting to have like an array of very different options open for my kids by the time they get to high school.

Like, that’s my mission is to see like, hey, there are 6 meaningfully different options that you can choose that fit like the the kind of person you think you want to go be, right? And then you have the information to make that choice yourself. So I feel like it’s growing though in the other states. You know, you mentioned Texas. By the time this comes out, I think it’s going to be oversubscribed already, right? The number of slots, we’re well on the way to that as of the day we’re recording, day two of having them released it open or whatever it is. So that’s exploding, I think. The things I’m worried about at the moment are a couple things on the policy front. One, legislators who are putting in input-based or accreditation requirements as part of these, I think that is a very bad idea. It’s not been a good quality seal in higher ed where we have a lot of experience about this.

I think that would, like, we want lower barriers to entry. We don’t want to do anything that raises barriers to entry in my mind in terms of education entrepreneurship right now. And then the second thing I would say that sort of like I think goes alongside that is there’s a bunch of the newer ESA laws that make it tuition first for those dollars. I would much rather the families have much more choice on like how they spend it. Look, you come up with your guidelines of what counts in your education marketplace, but then let the families make the choices around these things. You don’t know their circumstances. You don’t know if they need like a one microschool anchor experience with other things around it, or if they are going to, you know, go full à la carte. I think that’s the minority for the foreseeable future, but Certainly in Florida, more families are moving to a lot of interesting experiences around that.

And I think that’s great. Understand, hey, my kid already knows X, Y, and Z because of our home environment. This is the thing that I want them to go chase. Like, that’s awesome, I think.

Kelly Smith:

Yeah, no, it’s exciting. And I share your concern. I mean, it’s interesting your point from earlier, and you’re saying it again here that, you know, putting the money in their hand as money. Not like a coupon to go to a private school. It’s like, this is dollars and it has a dollar sign. Now it shifts the psychology. I’m going to think about this differently because, you know, I understand how money works and I understand how markets work. We, this is, this literally just happened yesterday.

I talked to an educator in Florida, 26 years with special ed education. Like she’s deep and she’s so passionate and so caring and she’s frustrated. She’s been limited in her, you know, traditional environment for what she’s able to do, and a lot of emphasis on testing, just things that are getting in the way of her responding to what she sees kids need. So she’s ready to start a microschool, right? And these are the conversations I love. She immediately comes with this question of, well, what about IEPs? You know, what about special ed and how does this work? And it’s interesting, right? One, this is private. It’s outside of, you know, the normal realm. So you don’t have the lawsuits and all the litigious aspects of, of special ed, which is what it turns into sometimes. But then in terms of accommodations, accommodations, you know, if you worked with Prenda, like we’ve built in most IEP accommodations and offered them to every single kid.

So you, you really have so much flexibility, so much ability to just tailor the experience. And then I said services is an interesting one. I actually used to like be afraid in these conversations to say, well, you know, services can be tricky. Like we don’t really have the ability in a microschool to provide everybody with the right therapies and speech and, you know, different things that you need. And the parents are actually like, thank you, I get my money. I have a person I already like, I want to work with them. So the question is just, will they accept ESA? And it’s an easy process for them to get registered as a vendor on the, the system. And so all of a sudden you’re seeing the market kind of evolve to those needs and respond.

And I agree with everything you’re saying about just watching parents feel empowered and intentional, I guess, even in the way they’re thinking about this. So it’s it’s shifting. I guess I didn’t see this coming, but it’s a, it’s a shift in perspective. That’s almost a side effect of the way that the programs are structured. That’s fantastic.

Michael Horn:

I didn’t, that’s a great story also. I don’t think I appreciated half of what you just said, but that’s a really cool evolution. And the people who work in special ed in the traditional system will tell you that the incentives are all backwards, right? In terms of, uh, like if you prize, uh, like an efficiency innovation that makes it way more accommodating and streamlined for a that, that’s a negative in many cases because all of a sudden, like, you did it with fewer dollars and what, what, what happened, right? It’s, it’s, so the, the opportunity to custom build for each kid from the ground up is just a much better way. And Diane Tavenner, my co-host at the Class Disrupted podcast, she always says, like, people think this is more expensive, but that’s because they’re doing it from a system that was built to standardize and they’re layering it over as opposed to designing from first principles around personalization and optimization for each kid. And when you build it in from the beginning, it’s often not just like, it’s not more expensive. It’s actually, forget about even cost neutral, can sometimes be less expensive. Because you really are tailoring it for that kid from the get-go.

Kelly Smith:

1,000 micro schools plus, we’re probably closer to 1,200 now. And our average is $6,800 tuition. So that’s less than half of what the average in the US, you know, Public dollars spent on education. So yeah, I mean, absolutely true. Now we’re also saving money because people are working in free spaces and they’re doing this all outside the system.

Michael Horn:

I want to— sure, but stay with that, stay with that for a second, right? Like, because to me, this will be the other piece of it, which is that the market that you just described innovating to create, say, the special ed marketplace or whatever it might be, I think we’re going to see continued innovation around that. Like, the hallmark of disruption is not that it comes in with its initial offering and that initial offering stays the exact same and everyone moves to it. It’s that that initial offering improves in a variety of ways to tackle quote unquote more complicated use cases or problems. And piece by piece, people migrate out to the disruption as it becomes capable of doing it right. And so in some ways there’s something symbiotic around 5 parents moving to the system, right? And 5 parents are watching it, but they’re like, can they handle my edge case? And then like the system innovates and then they come in, right? And like you sort of have this iterative nature on a very almost one-by-one basis. Right. And so the conversation I was having recently with our friend Tyler Thigpen at Forest Acton was like, you know, high school has been relatively rare in the microschool space. And like my hypothesis has been a lot of families, it’s not the academics that are holding them back.

It’s like high school is a big part. A big part of high school is identity formation. Right. It’s like Friday Night Lights, like all these things that we sort of make fun of a little bit in the culture, but like are actually helping you understand who am I within my community with common experiences. And so we were talking about all the intentional ways microschools can build a, like other kinds of identity forming experiences that, by the way, are more inclusive, I think, but can start to more intentionally pull people and say like, oh, like if that’s the thing you’re trying to solve for, like we can help you with that.

The Role of Districts in a Choice-Filled Future

Kelly Smith:

So interesting. I want to stay on the future where this all goes and just get your look. I know we’ve talked a little bit about this so far, but any other thoughts on that? And one specific twist I’ll throw at you, because I know you’ve worked with the, you know, on the legislative side of this, you’ve worked with leaders from that have heavy ties to the system as it stands, right? The actual incumbent system. Um, maybe this goes back. This is a story from early, early Prenda, and it goes back to your, your comment about train tracks or, uh, cross-country skiing. By the way, I’m in Arizona, so I have to like think about what cross—

Michael Horn:

Yeah, yeah. You have to adapt that. Sorry. I have to come up with an analogy for the warm, uh, the warm environment.

Kelly Smith:

I thankfully have done it before, so I know what you meant, but I had this microschool going in my house and I had already seen by that point, you know, 8 or 9 kids that had had a, what I’d just a breakthrough, you know, like they started to see themselves differently. The student-centered nature of this was taking. You’d see offshoots of their, their young roots growing and it was working. And I’m saying, this is a great model, but like, it’s crazy that I’m doing this at my house and using the park down the street for our playground. And so I went and I was friends with the principal of the school locally. We, I had known her pretty well. And I explained what I was doing. So some of these kids did drop out of your school and they joined, you know, my thing, but I’m not here as like a muscle thing.

It’s just like, I think there’s an opportunity here for them to still get, you know, what if they need free lunch and what if they need counseling? What if they want to participate in PE or be in the school band? And I can’t offer all of that. So I said, what if we did micro schools on your campus? And it was this interesting moment where she, she, you could tell she’s like thinking about it and processing it. And she kind of looked back at me and just said, why would I do that? And I think I have like a, I have a, an ungenerous version of that, which is like, because maybe you don’t care about kids enough or something. But as we talk, I think it’s actually different than that. It’s she was on tracks that would literally have required her to take a whole train off of tracks and do, do something different. I guess I’m curious, just your thoughts on where this goes relative to the the system as a whole. I know in other, you know, in the business model examples that you guys give, like the steel mills go out of business, the mini computers go out of business, but that’s not necessarily where I think I want this to go or anyone wants for schools to quote go out of business. So how does this recover or what happens next, I guess?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, it’s a good question. I’m not sure I have all the answers on this. I guess my take is, you know, often look, some part of the incumbents stay around, right? And So that may be part of this story. I think part of the story is we see, you know, in Florida is a good example, right? Where there’s probably been the longest history of choice in all forms and to most students, a lot of districts are starting to innovate themselves, right? And they’re like less wary of the microschool or fractional, you know, the Tim Tebow law, right? Sort of stuff or like offering a set of services that they’re really good at into the ESA marketplace. And so you’re seeing some really cool innovation there. And so I think that might be part bit, I could imagine some district school, like the biggest challenge with the response to COVID in the last several years has been sort of the one-size-fits-all way that districts like met the moment. You could imagine that starting to break down, I think, in the years ahead and then starting to be like, like, what if we had 10 different microschool communities in the, in the building, right? Like there are some examples of school, traditional schools that have done that. They’re few, but if they see that, like, if I don’t do that, I’m going to lose students.

I wonder why not take like the things that they do offer in terms of the community and create these more umbrella opportunities. Right. And so I guess I’m curious about where that goes. I don’t have a strong, I can tell all the reasons why it won’t happen, but I don’t have a strong hypothesis yet one way or the other, because there are some compelling case studies of districts that have made these switches. And I think we should honor those and, and, and like see where it goes. And part of my hypothesis would be the way microschools sort of climb that last part, if you will, of the curve, is that they do create ways of creating bigger communities when that is appropriate for the given, you know, like when being part of a bigger community, it makes sense relative to the activity or, or culture or whatnot. I do think the existing system like provides an incredible umbrella for that gathering space. So can it re-envision itself as more of a community center in effect where there are these à la carte services that you might provide? And look, some kids I think probably need the full bundle, right? And so maybe, you know, there’s a version of this that is more tailored around them because it becomes smaller and more personal where they’re getting everything from that.

And then there’s others that are sort of plugging in, right, in a more à la carte or ad hoc fashion as they’re deciding on the ground makes sense. I don’t know yet, but I do think, yeah, I mean, I guess I will say like in the, in the retail space, right? Like the traditional retailers that have done well, they haven’t done well by like trying to out-Amazon Amazon. They’ve done well by like really leaning into experience, right? And what makes them compelling. And I do think I’ll take higher ed for example. Where I spend, you know, like 40% of my life, which is do you think like, you know, labor markets are regional and people hire based on who you know. And like, I think in the world of AI, that’s actually going to increase. I think it’ll be 80% plus of jobs will be filled somehow by social network. And so creating communities where people can mix and do stuff together, I think will be really valuable and important.

So that is opportunity, I guess, to lean into place and experience and stuff like that. We’ll see what the form factors are that get that done.

Kelly Smith:

Yeah, it’s a, it’s an open question for me too. And in fact, one of my personal goals is to just partner with more of these forward-thinking school leaders. I was just at an event with Tom Vander Ark. He was gathering folks together and just talking about new pathways. And I said this on stage, you know, if you are a school leader, I’ll say it here, you know, to your crowd as my crowd. If you’re a school leader and you think, hey, maybe a microschool would work, I will donate a microschool to, to do it as an experiment and we’ll make this happen.

Michael Horn:

Well, by the way, can we just say it for a second? Like that act alone would, I think, jump a lot, start a lot of this. So like coming out of the pandemic, I was having a conversation with our local superintendent here and, and her cabinet and they’re like, okay, we think we’re ready for a microschool. And so I sort of described to them what it would take for them to do it. And you could see like the blood just drained from their faces over Zoom. And I was like, that was really dumb of me. Like I made it. Yeah. Like I went about this the exact wrong way. I think the more it’s like in a box almost, right?

Clay Christensen’s Impact on Michael

Kelly Smith:

Like here it is, the better. There you go. This has been so fun. I feel like I could talk to you for hours. Really appreciate the work you’re doing, your writing and thinking and just helping shape all of this. It’s, it’s huge. We’d like to ask everybody before we wrap up just to kind of think back in your life and name somebody that’s been somebody who’s kindled a love of learning for you. It could be all the way back in childhood or later in life., but would love the opportunity to just kind of have you reflect on that question and shout somebody out.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. I mean, am I allowed to say Clay Christensen? Because he was certainly the most influential teacher who changed how I saw the world, but then created this desire. Clay loved it when someone proved him wrong because it was an opportunity to learn and refine the understanding of the world. And he didn’t I think when he first came out with Disruptive Innovation Theory, he wasn’t like, this explains everything. It’s perfect. The evolution of that over time through people saying, doesn’t quite work here. It doesn’t quite work here. And I think school frankly has been like part of that humble pie part of it as well, right? Has sharpened our understanding.

And so it’s a cool, like lifelong learning model of not like, oh, you were wrong being like a dagger, but like, oh cool, tell me more. Right? And so he’s one I don’t always live up to, but I try to keep learning from.

Kelly Smith:

I appreciate that. And yeah, I think so highly of him. I didn’t get the chance to work like you did with him and he’s passed away now. I just shout out to Clay Christensen and, and thanks for that. And thanks for being here. This has been such a fascinating conversation.

Michael Horn:

I wish you all the best in, in your work and look forward to staying in touch. Vice versa. The entrepreneurs of the world create the future and, and you all have been a shining light for our families and kids, and I just really appreciate what you’ve done, Kelly.

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