Amar Kumar, CEO of KaiPod: 70 Microschools and Growing 

Microschooling Journeys transcript

Interview with Amar Kumar

Edited for Clarity

[00:00:00] Mike Goldstein: Welcome to Microschool Journeys. I am Curious Mike. Amar Kumar is our guest today. He is both the founder and CEO of KaiPod and a neighbor of mine. So occasionally over the years, we go for a walk along the Charles River right outside Boston. He’s also a previous guest of a podcast for the Pioneer Institute.  Welcome.

[00:00:43] Amar Kumar: Thank you very much. It’s very nice to be here, Mike, and Happy New Year to you.

[00:00:46] Mike Goldstein: Thank you, sir. Okay, let me jump in with, I recruit my friend, Spencer Blasdale. We hop in the car and drive up to one of your micro schools in New Hampshire. Spencer is, by background, a guy who inspects a lot of traditional schools: how’s the school going? So I brought him along.

We spent a morning at your micro and Spencer is really enjoying the visit. And the first thing he noticed and commented on was the vibe and the culture.

[00:01:34] So for our listeners today, there were basically two rooms, kind of the younger kids and the older kids, maybe seven kids each in a room with a guide. Adult guides Meghan (who we interviewed last week) and Zach.  The vibe is good. The kids are doing their stuff and when it’s time for a break, we  observe them come together for a board game like Clue for half an hour.

Is that culture the norm? Is that something you’ve cultivated?  How intentional is it?

[00:02:14] Amar Kumar: on a scale of one to 10? On intention, this is a hundred. This is the most important thing for micro schools to get right, because they really are built on the premise that students need to feel safe, a sense of belonging and some joy.

[00:02:39] So that they’re primed to learn and we spend a lot of time, we are very intentional about getting those conditions for learning, right? And so our entire schedule, our entire, entire onboarding set up for new families, the way we run demo days in the first week of a child’s time with KaiPod, the way we train our learning coaches and just keep going over and over.

[00:03:08] All of those things are designed to prime the conditions for learning. And what we find is when you do those things, the learning starts to emerge. You don’t have to force a child to do homework. You don’t have to force them to do the next lesson. They want to. Because again, we believe that kids want to succeed.

[00:03:28] They want to learn. But all this extra baggage has been thrown in their way. And so when you create those conditions,

[00:03:35] Mike Goldstein: That baggage goes away. Tell us what’s, when you say “baggage,” what does that mean?

[00:03:40] Amar Kumar:  You have to do this because this is someone told me I have to teach it to you. You have to do this because you’re never going to succeed without it.

[00:03:48] Those are things that don’t work for any child, right? I have a very precocious six year old and you cannot tell her what to do. You can only explain to her why something might be important. And then you’d never have to tell her again. And I think most children are that way, as from when they’re born.

[00:04:04] They have this innate sense of wonder and curiosity. And what we try to do is to explain the why behind things. And it doesn’t take much effort when you only have 10 kids, 12 kids, right? You actually can take the time to help and make sure every child understands that. And so that baggage of someone’s forcing me to do this, I don’t want to learn, it goes away.

[00:04:23] Imagine if you say to a child, you must read this book versus what do you want to read? Which one is going to be more successful, right? And so as the learning coach builds trust with the child and the child starts to respond in a more positive way and therefore the learning coach can start asking them to do harder and harder things, right?

[00:04:44] To be clear I’m not saying just do whatever you want. I’m not saying go have fun. You’re just here to have fun. No, you’re here to do some serious learning. But it will be at the pace that’s right for you, and it will be directed by you and supported by us, rather than something that’s done to you.

[00:05:01] Mike Goldstein: So, Amar, how many micros do you guys have going right now?

[00:05:07] Amar Kumar: We have 16 that we run, and then we have about 54 that we run with support through partners. So, 70 total.

[00:05:12] Mike Goldstein: Okay. And so, in the 16, for lack of a better word, owned and operated ones, how do you assess – let’s nominally say on a 1 to 10 scale or however you do it – presumably you walk into the 16 different micros, you’re going to have different reactions on how well this culture has either taken hold or not.

[00:05:40] How do you try to capture that data and then how do you try to almost manage your portfolio of these 16 pods?

[00:05:51] Amar Kumar: Great question. Yes. So they’re all at different levels of excellence on those dimensions. And the dimensions we look at are the ones that I sort of alluded to student safety, which is not just physical safety, but lots of other types of safety, student belonging, student joy, student learning, and then readiness for the future.

[00:06:10] So we have that kind of a framework and we look at lots of different data. Uh, the easiest things to look at are, for example, attendance rates. When you have an optional learning pod, right, like there’s no like state school truancy officer who’s going to come bear down if you don’t show up, families choose when to come.

[00:06:28] And if we see that they’re not choosing to come, that tells us there’s probably something wrong with the culture. Whereas when we see microschools in our network that are 100 percent attendance rate every single day, that tells us something is going right with the culture, because attendance is optional.

[00:06:43] We look at MAP scores to understand learning. We look at parent survey results. We look at student survey results. So we have lots of data that’s, we would call it soft data, that gives us leading indicators of a pod’s health. And then we have a team of people who are providing academic coaching. Culture coaching, operations coaching to ensure that every site is on its path to excellence.

[00:07:08] Mike Goldstein: When I was a school leader and we had 16 classrooms, there’d be four teachers just kind of hitting it out of the park, eight doing solid, four pretty much struggling.  You can persist as a poor teacher in a traditional school for a long time because the kids don’t really have anywhere to go. The school is going to just keep going. And, however, I would imagine, if the micro kids aren’t having a pretty good hour by hour, day to day experience, the whole little micro institution is going to disappear – four families are going to leave, and then the other five will say “Oh, this is too small.”  What have you learned, Amar, over the last few years about engagement when it’s not going as well as you’d want?

[00:08:25] Amar Kumar: This is probably the hardest thing about running a network of any type of school. Charter schools, private schools, micro schools, learning pods.

[00:08:33] Um, a friend of mine once made this really wise statement, that in education, we always strive, those of us who sit in the quote, central office, if anything, we strive for economies of scale. But in education, you actually have the opposite, you have a dis-economy of scale. Because the further something gets from the founder, the center, the worse it’s going to get because it’s further from the vision.  The charter school networks have this challenge. The private school networks have this challenge, too.

And so one thing we, when I remember hearing this two years ago, and we made a very intentional decision to decentralize more, we said, we’re going to the playbook centrally. But, 90 percent of (a pod) has to be that educator, that guide.  They have to know how to speak to their families, their kids. So, one of the things you’ll see, you went to one of the sites in Arizona or Florida, you’ll see some things that are kind of similar, but a lot of things will be different. The way those adult guides show up versus the two that you saw in New Hampshire is going to be different.

That is the beauty of the model, because the families in Arizona want and need different things than the families in New Hampshire. And so the way we’ve scaled this network is by decentralizing the things that need to be closer to the community.

[00:09:58] So we have fewer of these instances of, like, well, this coach is not doing well, because they’re not doing what I think they need to do. What we look at is the data to say, okay, well, if that coach still has kids coming, they’re still making progress on their MAP scores, families are still happy, but they’re doing it differently than I would have done it?

[00:10:14] I have learned something I should wonder about what they’re doing differently and whether more people might benefit from that and that gets us into a learning mindset and rather than a teaching someone else how to do something.

[00:10:28] Mike Goldstein: So one challenge is, you know, we’ve talked about this over the years, which is there’s the day to day reality of kids in different types of schools.

[00:10:41] And then there’s our friends, Amar, you and me have friends that are education advocates.  Maybe they really believe in project based learning. Maybe they really believe in school choice or charter schooling. Maybe they believe in a certain type of teacher training or something.

[00:10:58] So advocates have these strong beliefs, about what should work sort of more at scale.  By contrast, I’m sort of more agnostic on a lot of those tradeoffs. Instead: How’s it working in real life?

Spencer and I talked to a couple KaiPod kids, Nick and Jaden.  They said the two guides, Megan and Zach, are pretty good at setting boundaries.  If we’re going a little too far with our goofing around or joking, they’ll call us out and we’ll kind of wind it back in.

I visited, not one of yours, but a different micro school, where the guides weren’t able to pull that off.  They tried to get order, they pleaded, “Could you guys please knock it off” – and then the kids would persist.  The teachers were weak, and didn’t know how to get the job done. And I’ve seen, of course, other places where teachers lack the right relationship, they try to be strict, and kids don’t react well.

You need to somehow is attract unusually good guides – and screen OUT a whole bunch of very nominally qualified people, who aren’t going to really make the culture work day to day.

How do you do that? How do you go after talent on the front end?  And then, how do you assess, like, and show some people the door when it’s not really working out?

[00:12:43] Amar Kumar: Yeah, I mean, we are extremely selective on our guides, or learning coaches as we call them. Uh, I don’t remember the numbers, but our very first year, I think we took 10 percent compared to all the applications we got.

[00:12:58] This year it’s probably even tighter. So, we look for learning coaches or educators with classroom experience, first. Second, a sense of curiosity. about kids and a strong sense of self. They know who they are and they are comfortable in their skin. And we have learning coaches who just cannot stop telling puns.

[00:13:21] We have learning coaches who are really quirky about music. We have learning coaches who are theater nerds. And they own it. And we look for that as a very important characteristic in each of our learning coaches because that helps the students know that you can be vulnerable. You can be weird. It’s okay to be different.

[00:13:36] And that creates a huge sense of safety. A huge sense of trust in a micro school. So your question of how do you create that sort of control or sort of management of a pod when it, when children are sort of. Um, I think part of our secret is the students of every KaiPod feel a sense of pride at the fact that they get to come here, that it’s theirs.

[00:14:08] They helped create the culture. Everyone creates the pod norms at the beginning of the year. They teach new kids about the pod more. And so when A coach says, hey, like the two of you, like it’s getting a little rowdy. It’s not that the coach thinks it’s getting rowdy. They’re hearing, oh, your friends think you’re getting rowdy.

[00:14:26] And so they sort of self correct. And that’s really hard to do. I’m not minimizing how great of a job some of these learning coaches have done. And we don’t always get it right. But it involves. They’re being a little bit more of a power sharing in a pod where kids feeling like they helped build this and not something that’s being done to them.

[00:14:47] Mike Goldstein: What about when you’re not happy with the guide or the teacher coach?

[00:14:52] Amar Kumar: Yeah, we’ve had to make changes and we’ll look at lots of data points before we do something like that.  Because that’s a big disruption to that person, but also those kids.

When we’ve had to do that, we look at family survey results, student survey results, academic scores, attendance rates, overall culture and health. And we say, okay, “This guide or this coach doesn’t have sort of those one of those three criteria that I was talking about, right? The ability to sort of command, guide this room.” And if they can’t do that, then those students won’t have the sense of safety, the sense of belonging, the sense of joys that they can actually learn.

[00:15:30] And so we have to make those changes. Thankfully that’s rare, but when it happens, yeah, it disrupts the culture of the micro school. But generally, on the other end of it, it gets healthier, because then we find someone else who can actually do those things.

[00:15:46] Mike Goldstein: So Meghan, who is one of the guides, who’s a ball of energy as you know, she had taught in traditional New Hampshire Public Schools for the previous four years before joining you guys.

[00:16:04] And she’d had her ups and downs, classic story of like, generally loved the kids, administratively less so, complicated story. And she’s just like, like you said, she had a personality and that was present with her, like for the entire time we were observing, really good. When we talked to her, it reminded me of a challenge I’d had in our charter schools and a challenge that persists in networks like KIPP and so forth, which is we weren’t able to get teachers typically that both a) met our criteria, and b) kind of wanted to do it for 20 years.   Our charter sweet spot was if we could find a great teacher who’s going to burn the midnight oil and do a good job for four years on average. And then move on.  I came to accept that.

[00:17:26] What’s your vision for the plausible or typical length of stay of a KaiPod guide?  What are you hoping for and what are the challenges there?

[00:17:39] Amar Kumar: Yeah, I’m hoping for 100%, but I know it’s not going to be possible right away. I can tell you, we’ve been around for four years. We still have guides from our original school year, right?

[00:17:49] There are people who’ve been here for a long time. Just last month, we did an anonymous coach survey across all of our network. And I think it was 60% answer to the top box, this is the job for me; 30% I can definitely see myself doing this for lots of years; 10 percent said, I don’t think this is working.

I think it was Daniel Pink’s framework of autonomy, mastery, purpose. I repeat that a lot when I talk about this job, whether it’s for our guides or coaches or a new micro school founder, they need to feel autonomy that they get to decide how they do their job.  They need to feel successful. That’s mastery. And they need to feel like they’re making a difference. That’s purpose.

But most teachers out there in traditional schools, I don’t think, would say, “I made a difference today.”  I think they would say, “I really tried hard. I worked really hard. I just couldn’t get through that lesson or I don’t think these kids got what I was trying to teach.” And that is what drains people.

That is why the average tenure of an American teacher is dropping. That is why some of the smartest kids coming out of high school or college are not going into education, because they feel like that’s not the place to make a difference.

[00:19:15] And I think what we see is in micro school founders or learning coaches is that equation changes. They have more control. They feel successful every day. and they can see the needle moving. When you have 12 kids versus 150 kids a day, you have a lot more time, right?

[00:19:37] You have 10, 12 times as much time with every child. And so you can advance the needle 12 times as much every day. That sense of impact every day is the drug that keeps it going.

[00:19:51] Mike Goldstein: You have to make some trade offs in any type of schooling environment.

You anchor first on culture.  And a lot of education people flex first on curriculum.

The question I want to bring to you in terms of trade off was one that Meghan identified.

She certainly felt a high sense of autonomy. She said, I have a mixed feeling of mastery.  Kids are each engaging (with their Mom-assigned curriculum) at different levels of intensity. And if a kid doesn’t want to do the work, previously, when I worked in a traditional school, I feel like it’s my job, and it feels organic to me, to say “Hey buddy, it’s time to get back on task.” And I do that in a nice way, but in a firm way and whatever. In the micro school, I don’t necessarily do that, I’m a little bit less sure of the trade off of if the kid doesn’t want to work.  Am I sort of forcing it? No. Am I firmly saying, hey, you gotta get back on this? No. I might be trying to independently figure out for each of my seven kids what that mom wants to happen.

Amar, there’s some trade off on that, and I wonder if you could speak to us about how do you want that to play out across your guides?

[00:22:09] Amar Kumar: This is one of the most controversial things I think about KaiPod, and it wasn’t something that was in my original business plan, but I learned as I evolved that families, a lot of times, have strong opinions on, uh, it could be project based learning curriculum, or Montessori curriculum, or college prep, or faith based, and I spent some time trying to figure out How do I convince them to use the one that I’ve picked?

[00:22:34] And that wasn’t something that a lot of these early homeschooling type families were interested in. And I thought back to my time in the classroom and the importance of me being the teacher versus the curriculum I chose. I thought about my time at Pearson when I was running Connections Academy’s product team and the curriculum we built, we spent 50 million dollars building curriculum.

[00:22:55] How important was that versus everything else? And I think I came to the very controversial insight that it doesn’t really matter. What matters a lot more is these other conditions for success. So we released the constraint that everyone must use our curriculum. We said, okay, you bring in the curriculum that’s right for your family and your child.

[00:23:16] That instantly create a sense of Ownership, sense of buy in, a sense of excitement for the child because they were already used to that. And they got to bring it in. So that was the immediate impact. But then what we started to learn and why we’ve stuck with this decision so many years later is it allows to be in the right thing for them.

[00:23:40] So it’s like, you know, like imagine going to a gym and you have a trainer who’s looking at 12 different people working out, someone’s doing legs, someone’s doing core, someone’s doing arms, someone’s doing shoulders, right? Because that’s what they need today. Right? Like if I did core yesterday, I don’t want to do core again today.

[00:23:55] I want you to do something else. And so what that allows is the child to be in their zone of mastery. The child does the thing that’s right for them. It makes it harder for the learning coach, right? That’s what you were saying. That is a trade off we made and we said, we would rather. Make the learning coach do the extra work of ensuring that every child is doing the right thing and supporting This person on their arms and this person on their legs and shoulders Rather than having the child do something that’s suboptimal for them just so that the learning coach can feel successful.

[00:24:28] That make sense?

[00:24:29] Mike Goldstein: It does.  Let me tighten up the question a little bit. So yes, a cool thing I observed was each of the seven kids in a room had a different sort of mom approved homeschool curriculum. That the typical kid was said: I come in here on Tuesday and Thursday.  I’m home Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I’m basically working on Tuesday with the continuation of the math, English, science, history stuff I was working on with mom on Monday.

So this is a different physical place. This is the gym. That’s what I was doing in my home workout, and I’m sort of keeping up at the gym. So if I was using Khan Academy for math on Monday with Mom, I’m still using Khan Academy for math in front of Meghan.

Meghan had no problem navigating the different curricula.

Her question, if I’m stating it correctly, was more like: “Most of the seven kids are trying hard.  But 1 or 2 kids, no matter how perfectly you try to tailor the curriculum, really don’t want to do this.  So as a guide, how much do I flex on not on are you stuck mentally, but more on are you stuck on motivation and effort?

[00:26:28] Amar Kumar: Yeah, this is probably a better question for our academic team, who think about this a lot. But my, the question that I wonder is, what is it about this child that is not getting them to engage in the slope of life problem? Is it a relevance thing? And if so, then yeah, then Megan would be talking to the child about why this is important.

[00:26:47] Do they understand that? And if not, that’s the thing to focus on rather than saying, put more effort, get it done, right? That’s not going to help anyone. I remember there was this child in one of the pods that I used to go a lot to, um, who just could not, like, for math, calculus, great, would not have to tell her twice.

[00:27:04] But anything writing and grammar related, she would not do it. She would always procrastinate. And so the learning coach there, her name was Kim, she really focused on, and Kim happened to be an English teacher, that’s a coincidence, really focused on the importance of this. Like, you know, if you want to be a great mathematician or a great scientist, you need to be able to communicate your ideas.

[00:27:25] And writing an expositive essay or writing a book report or whatever, is the way you learn how to communicate your ideas better. I can’t say that solved the problem, but it certainly helped that child learn why this stuff was important. And so it’s this continuous journey of helping children see the relevance in their work and just beating them over the head with like, go do it, go do it, because it’s your homework.

[00:27:49] Isn’t, that doesn’t work. We know that. And so what we try to do is to say, okay, instead of 150 kids, it’s 12. And I use 150 seriously because you have 25 30 kids a day, 5 6 periods a day. That’s why, that’s the average teacher load that we talk to some of these teachers who are coming into our roles. And we say to them, you only have the 12.

[00:28:09] And so you get a chance to help each of those kids move up on that relevance journey. So that it doesn’t feel like a battle to get them to do the problem.

[00:28:19] Mike Goldstein: Amar, on money. This NH KaiPod was an innovative situation where from a parent’s point of view, they were able to join tuition free for a while through a state level grant, I believe, that you had been able to arrange.

What is the normal KaiPod tuition for someone who goes, let’s say, whatever your median micro school, a couple days a week? And can you explain how education savings accounts are used, and what conditions you need to fulfill in order to take that money from the government to subsidize one of the kids to attend your pod?

[00:29:12] Amar Kumar: Yeah, let’s do this in reverse order because I think they’re billed. So the education savings accounts, if people aren’t familiar, It’s a state program, state by state program. There’s I think 14 or 15 states now that have this, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, etc. Um, the states who say, if you choose as a parent not to send your child to a local public school, the state will give you a savings account of, on average, 8, 000, 9, 000 per year, per child.

[00:29:42] To then direct that savings account towards qualified educational expenses, which could include private school, it could include micro schools, it can include tutoring, textbooks, buying laptops for your kids, etc. So that’s what the concept of an ESA, an Education Savings Account is. And so what happens in these states is, as a vendor, we get approved to provide educational services.

[00:30:04] So the state has us go through certain checks, ensuring we are a background checking employees, ensuring we are actually an academic provider. In some states we have to show teacher certification, etc. And then the families get approved. So the families say, Okay, here, I do live in this state. I do have a child who’s at K 12 age, etc.

[00:30:21] And once the family is approved, they can then direct that savings account to KaiPod to pay to come to us. That’s our norm model in most states. New Hampshire, as you mentioned, is a bit of an exception because for the first few years we had This really gracious state grant and then we’re going to be transitioning to the education savings account in new hampshire this school year So that’s how it works Our average price I think in new hampshire is sixty five hundred dollars for the full year for a full time program If you only want to come two or three days a week, it’s around Let’s call it 3, 3, 500 a year.

[00:30:55] So we think it’s extremely affordable, extremely price conscious. And if you have an ESA and in New Hampshire, for example, you qualify if you’re at, I think, 400 percent of the poverty level. So for families who may not be able to afford it, the ESA covers the cost.

[00:31:10] Mike Goldstein: What’s your best state so far in launching these things?

[00:31:15] Amar Kumar: I love them all.

[00:31:15] Mike Goldstein: I know you do.

[00:31:18] Amar Kumar: Our biggest state is Arizona. So in Arizona and Phoenix particularly, I like to say like, um, Phoenix is to school choice as New York City is to restaurant. Right? Like, Yes. There’s a school in every block. There’s three schools in every block. If you don’t like a school as a parent, you decide and you go find another one and you can enroll just like that.

[00:31:40] It’s truly consumerist education, which I think is a, In many, many ways, it’s a very good thing. Parents get to be decision makers. They get to advocate for their child. The schools have to compete and the schools have to, you know, do the right thing for the child, not just for the adults in the building.

[00:31:56] So Arizona is our biggest and most successful state because we’ve built something that people want. We built something that families gravitate to. They’re telling their friends about it. We have very positive word of mouth, knock on wood. Thankfully, the next biggest state that’s growing fast for us is Florida, because same kind of thing.

[00:32:13] Lots of school choice. Florida probably has the country’s longest history of school choice, and we’re like, we we’re starting to see tons of momentum there. Uh, but uh, beyond that, you know, New Hampshire, Georgia, the Carolinas in Indiana, Ohio, all of these states, they’re starting to create. More options for families, and that’s the trend we want to follow is where families are saying, I want more options.

[00:32:37] I want flexibility. I want to be sort of in charge. Um, we like to open sites their

[00:32:43] Mike Goldstein: Final question. Micro schools have been growing.  ESAs have been growing in a number of states.  A lot of families, if the state is able to give them $8,000 or $10,000 a year to spend on their kid as homeschoolers, then the family can turn around and give say $6,500 of that $10,000 to a KaiPod, so your kid has a great place to go a couple times a week.

What is the biggest limiting factor to KaiPod’s growth?  And the biggest risk to micro school growth overall?

[00:33:48] Amar Kumar: It might be the same answer in my mind. I think the biggest limiting factor is the supply of really high quality micro schools.

[00:33:57] Where you walk in and it’s, the kids are joyful. You know, all the things we described at the beginning of this episode. There’s very few of them out there. There’s no real data. I think the National Microschooling Center has a number of about 100,000 of these micro schools, but it’s hard to really measure.

[00:34:13] And so we think that’s the biggest limiting factor. We have a program called KaiPod Catalyst that’s explicitly designed to solve that. Because we know there are hundreds of thousands of teachers. who want to do more, who want a different way to be a teacher. And we want to encourage them to start microschools.

[00:34:31] And we think that if they start a microschool to use our playbook, they’re going to be successful. And so this Catalyst program is an accelerator to solve that big rate limiter. And imagine that you have 100,000 teachers starting microschools across the 50 states. You’re going to get parent awareness, you’re going to get more ESA programs, you’re going to get good competition at the school district level, right?

[00:34:50] We see school districts get better when there’s competition. They have to compete. That’s a good thing for kids. That’s a good thing for this country to have people competing for families. Because, not because they’re locked into a system, but because they have choice.

[00:35:06] Mike Goldstein: Mr. Kumar, it was a pleasure to visit one of your KaiPods in New Hampshire.

[00:35:12] Thank you for welcoming Spencer and me to visit. And it was a great pleasure to talk to you and actually record it. We’ll have to go for another walk along the Charles River sometime soon.

[00:35:24] Amar Kumar: Kust when the temperature rises to about 45

[00:35:25] Mike Goldstein: It’s Boston, so we have to wait till May for that to happen.

[00:35:30] Thank you, buddy. I appreciate you coming on.

[00:35:33] Amar Kumar: Of course. Thanks for having me.