Closing the Doors, Leaving a Legacy: Embark Microschool’s Story

Microschooling Journeys

Interview with Brian Hyosaka, Embark Micro School

Edited for clarity

[00:00:00] Mike Goldstein: Hello, this is Microschooling Journeys. I’m Curious Mike. Our guest today is Brian Hyosaka coming to us from Denver, Colorado, well up in the mountains, breathing the clean air. And he is the director of Embark Micro Middle School. Brian, welcome and thanks for joining us.

[00:00:38] Brian Hyosaka: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

[00:00:40] Mike Goldstein: Okay, so we’re going to do things a little bit different than we normally do. We’re going to start with the present or even the slight future and work this story backwards.

So this is a micro school that is coming to the end of, I think, a six year run of serving middle school kids in Denver.

Is that roughly the timing?

[00:01:09] Brian Hyosaka: Yeah.

[00:01:10] Mike Goldstein: And you previously told me the rough idea here was, you’ve been fortunate enough to be backed by philanthropy, and so that part is probably coming to an end.

But you looked at, it didn’t quite make sense for you to try to become a charter school inside Colorado for various reasons that I found very interesting.

Can you just share with the audience? Like if you go from the full autonomy that you have now as a philanthropy-funded little school, and you consider taking the public dollars instead as a charter, how would it have changed your kids’ experience?

[00:01:51] Brian Hyosaka: Yeah, I think it’s a great question.

So even before jumping in there, my personal experience has been in organizations, many times you have mission drift.   That mission drift is very subtle at first, but ultimately you seem to drift away from your purpose, your values, your core.

And you start to ask yourself, well, how do we get here? And I’ve been on that road before.

And as we started to explore what would a future look like in a different funding model than the one we currently have at Embark, that we’ve been fortunate enough to have, we realized it’s not just about the money that we had.  It’s about what we created because of how we were set up.

We’re a tuition free, independent micro school. So we were able to build a population that looks just like public school population. And we were also able to act in a way that was totally aligned with our values and our mission, which is to support learners to courageously inquire, engage, and discover a sense of self.

Now, you start off with a mission, but eventually you live and you breathe it, and it’s just in everything that we do. And so you start to ask yourself, well, if we accept these public dollars, or if we start to charge tuition to parents, what are the impacts?

Well, at some point in time you’re gonna lose a lot of your autonomy. You might lose your student body. Eventually, that mission is going to get watered down into something that could still be great. But it’s very far from what you set out to do.

Now I don’t think any school opens with the notion that it’s going to close.

But when we were faced with this difficult decision, what we realized is we’re going to go out on top.

We’re going to go out being who we are.  We’re going to go out knowing that this is our championship season.  I’m a Bulls fan.  I’m from Chicago originally. You always think Michael Jordan’s going to last forever.  And when he’s gone, the Bulls will just be just as good as they were before. And as it turns out, that’s not how it works very often.

And so we’re going to go out on top here. And that’s what this year has been all about is closing this chapter with our heads held high, knowing that we lived our values and our mission to the very best of our ability.

And we’re going to embrace the change and challenge in front of us.

[00:04:04] Mike Goldstein: I love that.  You’re going out on top after a six year run, the Bulls had a six year run of NBA titles.

But of course there’s a coda to that story, which is Michael Jordan, a few years later, kind of overweight, playing for the Washington Wizards and losing.  (He didn’t go out on top).

So that’s the bad mission creep potential version of Embark Micro that we don’t want to happen.

Can you just say from a day to day point of view, where would you start to see the constraint coming in if you continued and changed the funding model? In other words, I want listeners to understand: Sure, you could be a charter school and take whatever it is, $15,000 per year per kid or whatever Denver gives to its charters, but gradually the conditions attached start to affect what kids are actually doing hour by hour.

[00:05:16] Brian Hyosaka: Yeah, so Embark has three design pillars, embedded, integrated, and learner centered.

[00:05:20] And I, my background is in public education and even private education internationally. And in those situations, you’re really guided. There is a mission, but you tend to be guided by the standards. And above that, you tend to be guided by the test.

I am by no means anti data. I think that data is crucial and serves a critical purpose.

But I also know that once you are forced to deliver an assessment, um, along those lines, you’re going to be confronted with that data. And everybody, when confronted with data, is going to jump to address it, because that’s what we do as human beings. And there’s actually, I wouldn’t say that is wrong, so I don’t want to critique that per se.  However, Embark was meant to show what’s possible in education. And in order to do that, you need to release many of the constraints that have literally put barriers around possibility in education.

And so we would have to deliver those standardized assessments as one thing. And as soon as we got them, not even because the state was telling us to, but because we would deliver those assessments, we would act in turn.

And in doing that, it would just creep in we would make one change here and then that change. Okay. Well that was either good enough or not good enough

Let’s add here and I’ve been a part of this and I’ve been in a in a Montessori setting as well in the public sector, I’ve been a part of an IB school in the public sector.

It always happens: you start the school year with this noble mission in mind for how we’re going to live. And then you get that first formative assessment and you go, well, let’s just, let’s scrap that because that actually isn’t what’s important. And you get to the end of the year and you go, what the heck did we just do?

It’s really not because someone tells you that you have to change.  It’s because we’re conditioned to change by the system. And one of the things that I always talk about at Embark is the system lives within all of us. So it’s going to take something radical to recondition ourselves, and that’s what Embark has served to do.

[00:07:22] Mike Goldstein: I lived this journey as the founder of a charter school. In our case, the kids were doing really well on the standardized tests, and they were from low income families, so then it drew philanthropy, and it became like a thing where all of the team could unite around test score goals because it had this perceived externality to it.

By contrast, whenever we started to go deep on like, oh kids should get really deep summer experiences and so we should reallocate cash towards that, or kids before they grow up and actually go to college should take college classes at local Boston area colleges and we need to support that, that kind of stuff was harder to kind of get and keep.

Everybody could easily agree on like test scores really matter, but there’s a lot of internal argument about where limited resources should go for the everything else part.

And in the case of Embark, you have a pure play where, if you will, the everything else IS the school.  You’re wise to consider where the road would go down.

Our listeners might have a different question: what about just asking all the families to pay tuition?  10k each per year or something.  Why not try to make it a tuition based school?

Brian Hyosaka: Our board of directors and Jill, our executive director, went far down this path of really examining what those possibilities would look like.

They came up with a budget number, it was actually significantly higher than the $10,000 per year per student that you just named. And so we were in a space where it just was not going to happen here without restarting: probably a different staff, student population change.

We realized there’s going to be pain and what we wanted to do was get this (closure) information out as quickly as possible so that our community could be supported to make a great choice for them with what comes next as early as possible.  Not spend the year seeing if maybe this thing could be saved only to in April realize, Oh shoot, it can’t be.  And now you’ve got 30 families scrambling and that that didn’t feel like a dignified way to treat people who are Just so incredible.

Mike Goldstein: Yeah, I love that part of your story.   We had pioneered this high dosage math tutoring that was very effective and expensive relative to many tutoring programs, like $3,000 per kid.  And the philanthropists said you gotta re-engineer this so it’s like $800 per kid.  What if you cut cost by 75% by efficacy then hits zero?

For you, you’re not trying to strip it down to the bone.  I think it’s very wise.

Can you share with us, where are your kids going to school for next year?

Because you’ve built such an unusual community. It’s project based learning, these other cool things that you’re really. Implementing well, and everybody should know people come from around the country to see your place in action.

It really works. So it’s not just that Embark is a particular philosophy. It’s a very well executed version of a particular philosophy.  So then, like, what are their alternatives like in the Denver area?

[00:12:24] Brian Hyosaka: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, of course, our 8th graders were already planning on their exit, and 8th graders at Embark, we have always supported through, from the beginning of the year, we support them by trying to figure out what do they need out of their 8th grade year, and what do they need moving forward.

[00:12:38] What are they looking for? And then we will help them in a very learner centered way, have the learners explore the options that they have, whether it’s their public schools, Jefferson County public schools and independent schools somewhere. And so we actually already had a playbook for this that we’ve been using for years to support our eighth grade family.

[00:12:56] So we kept that going for the eighth grade families. But then. I did that for every single sixth and seventh grade family as soon as the news came out to sit down and say what is a successful end of this year look like for you, given that you had no anticipation that your child would be moving on, how can we help you?

[00:13:14] What supports might you need to identify what comes next? And there’s a portion where they say, Well, the six, a lot of the sixth grade families had just gone down this path last year. And so they had done a lot of research on middle school and they might say, yeah, we already know, like we’re going to go to a Skinner, which is one of the local middle schools.

[00:13:32] But then you do get these families where they say, I don’t know. And I’m scared because Embark was it for my child. And so in those cases, what we’re doing is we’re sitting down and we’re helping them explore every option in the city. for what might be best for them. And so, truthfully, the kids that embark, just like the eighth graders, they’re going everywhere.

[00:13:53] They’re going everywhere across the city, many to public schools, some to Montessori schools, some have looked for a private option, and our goal is to make sure that the kids understand. And feel comfortable about who they are now, next, and what they’re going to take with them from Embark. Not just that, hey, I went to Embark for a year and now I’m scared because my next school looks different.

[00:14:16] Actually, no, the tools and mindsets that they build here serve them anywhere they go. And so that’s been a lot of the work of this year has been, let’s focus on this year, let’s have a great year, and let’s make sure that the kids are, the kids and families are informed and feel as confident as possible about where they’re going next.

[00:14:34] Mike Goldstein: Love it, Brian. And just for our listeners, as a coming attraction, we’ll have some student voice describing what this school year is like at Embark and that journey, which I think people will look forward to. Brian, let’s now go. From the present day and sort of the end of the journey, if we can, to the middle or so of the journey, you became the director, I think you told me, roughly three years ago or so.

[00:15:04] At that time, the micro school had been around for a few years and you had taught there. What were the big challenges to you as a director, if you can recall it, when you made the shift from being a guide or a teacher to running it?

[00:15:21] Brian Hyosaka: Yeah, so I was really fortunate to come in, like you said, as an educator right away when it was being built out.

[00:15:27] And what a dream that was to get to be on the ground floor of building something. It was really startup mode exploring what’s possible. What could that look like? We had phenomenal educators. Uh, who were doing their best at implementing their individual vision for what this mission could look like as we played it out over the day to day, because we had a great couple of great visionary leaders, Miguel Gonzalez and Brian sense who helped to bring this into life alongside Carissa was we came on.

[00:15:57] We had a lot of superstars really just sort of playing their game, if you will. And when I came in as head of school, the job that I had was to help bring all of those games, the best pieces of each together into some form of harmony that actually looked like more of a systematic school. So, whereas initially we were agreeing on some.

[00:16:18] core values, our competencies, but the implementation was starkly different depending on who the educator was leading it and by design, I think, because it allowed for us to really explore what was possible. My job was to help to codify and systematize this so that we weren’t so individual dependent. One of the core challenges that we experienced was wasn’t like a normal school where you say, okay, you’re a fifth grade educator here with a tweak.

[00:16:43] You can be a fifth grade educator here. That’s not true because there aren’t other embarks. So as we would hire somebody, we would hire for mindsets, dispositions, some level of background, and then they would come in and their eyes would be wide open to what the heck is going on here, how on earth do I do that?

[00:16:59] And we also had this sort of existential crisis where we only had three educators. So if somebody who was holding a lot of institutional knowledge left, then what, you know, then you’re almost starting back two years, three years in the past. And so, so much of my job over the last three years has been to make sure that the school thrives absent the individual.

[00:17:19] But in service of the individual in service of the individual learner. And so, so much of who we are is carried now by our learners because they’re just not going to tolerate something that isn’t what Embark is meant to be, which is beautiful. But we’ve also really systematized our practices, our meetings, our planning sessions, uh, our competency and space instruction.

[00:17:40] In such a way that we can bring in new educators and there is a learning curve, but it’s not so stark where they just feel terrified and overwhelmed for an entire year.

[00:17:50] Mike Goldstein: Part of the story of innovative schools is this kind of rise and fall of systems inside of the school.   You have have one extreme, every teacher for themselves.  Just get a bunch of talent, unleash them.  That’s the school. And then at the other extreme, I would say a successful charter network like Success Academy, has highly proceduralized so many things.

You were trying to find the right inflection point on that curve between max system and max individuality.  And it sounded like you joined as leader where you were max individuality, and you were trying to find the right blended approach. Is that a fair characterization?

[00:18:47] Brian Hyosaka: That, that’s exactly right. And both are great and they both serve a great purpose. I never had more fun. Then when I had free reign as a guide, and I also never felt more stressed out when I had free reign.

So it’s not, it’s certainly not all positive no matter how you look at it.

[00:19:07] Mike Goldstein: So you go from the being the guide, the sort of individual player to like helping create this like team vibe to it from a day to day. How did the actual Embark student experience change over time? What did you learn? What did you guys add? What did you subtract?

[00:19:42] Brian Hyosaka: Yeah, you would find that there’s of course going to be some similarities, and I would also say a good amount of difference. So we don’t, Often separate by grade level, and that has been true throughout, and so early on, that was true.

[00:19:54] The COVID year was different, so it’s almost like you have to just erase that one from your memory and something because we were cohorted during that year, but one of our founding educators, Karissa, who is still with us, she was really big on learner agency, and so from the get go, our kids were creating their own schedules.

[00:20:09] That is something that you will see. You’ve always seen, and I venture to say, If Embark were to last another 25 years, you would continue to see that play out as just a core of who it was. And so she’s continued to be really the pioneer of that, but it’s now a part of all of us. Whereas before scheduling was Carissa’s, now it’s part of everybody’s.

[00:20:28] When I came in, I was really big on the authentic learning, what we call embedded learning. And so what I brought to Embark was project based learning. And so, whereas initially I was the only person doing that. At that point, there was a lot more just really, um, academic focus of literacy and math, and you had some choice around when you’re going to do literacy and when you’re going to do math.

[00:20:50] But in a lot of ways, the coffee shop wasn’t as, as brought to life as it is now. So that was really what I brought to the table was, no, no, we’re here to be embedded in a real business. Let’s lean in hard. And the best way we can do that is through project based learning. So now what we have is this blend of.

[00:21:08] of learner centered and then project based learning. And, uh, and I think what we’ve tried to do every year is just get better at a certain aspect of our program. And so, as somebody comes in, they do need to understand what we’re doing, but we also know that we are influenced by the individual. And so, I think that you’ll see subtle shifts here and there, and So some of the things we were playing with this year, for example, was time.

[00:21:34] We started to ask ourselves, well, how long should a learning experience be? We typically had them be five to six, but we thought, well, let’s try a two week and let’s try an eight week and see what types of learning experiences work for two weeks versus eight weeks. Eight weeks bombed horribly. Two weeks we found was good sometimes, but a little bit stressful because you’re planning so frequently these new units of study.

[00:21:56] And so. It really is interesting in that way. I think like the day to day for the kids, they’re not going to feel that drastic of a difference. And that was part of the design under my leadership was let’s make sure that they feel comfortable and confident in what we’re doing, but let’s make sure that we’re not getting complacent as the adults.

[00:22:15] Mike Goldstein: Yeah. Just to contrast this with a failed experience that I had at Match Charter in Boston, we had this little bit of extra space.  I was like: it’d be cool if we opened a student-run cell phone store as an entrepreneurship academy.  It was a little store, but it wasn’t really meaningfully integrated in the school.

From far away, the Match cell phone store sounds a lot like the Embark collaboration with Pinwheel Coffee.  But in real life, ours was like an inch deep and yours is legitimately a mile deep.  They sound the same as like a partnership and an entrepreneurship thing, but they’re quite different.

That’s one of the beautiful things generally about a micro is if you want to go deep on something.  That kind of opportunity doesn’t scale well if you have 400 kids in your school.  But what do you guys have, 30 or 40, something like that?

[00:23:32] Brian Hyosaka: Yeah, we’re at 30 right now. 30,

[00:23:34] Mike Goldstein: And not all of those kids are going deep on Pinwheel Coffee, so you can really make the deep connection happen.

I want to go back, Brian, to something you just said about making their own schedule. So executive function is a big challenge in all schools.  This includes micro schools, homeschools, obviously traditional schools, private schools, whatever. It’s just a big issue for kids.

And a lot of times, by the way, inside the same kid. If they’re doing something they find interesting, have very high executive function, like love fishing and they’re entering competitions and they’re watching videos about bass, etc.  like When it comes to like schoolwork, they might be a lot less interested.  We’re all wired like that.

What do you guys do for bread and butter academic topics kids need to learn, where relevance of curriculum isn’t enough of a draw?  You gotta learn slope of line at some point and it’s just hard. How do you try as a micro school to go at this issue that sort of spans all types of education?

[00:24:49] Brian Hyosaka: I’m going to go off your question, then I’m going to come back to it.

I happen to be married to a high school counselor at the biggest school in Denver Public Schools.  I work at the smallest school in Denver. At the dinner table, we talk about: What is it that makes a high school successful and it’s executive function.  It’s knowing themselves as a learner. It’s being able to self manage and advocate for themselves.

That’s the core of what Embark is. And so while we look different in terms of how we instruct, people are often like, are they gonna be prepared for high school? Like, oh, they’re over prepared for high school.

[00:25:25] It’s almost laughable to me how over prepared they are for high school because the core of what they need They’re getting here and they’re not getting other places at the same time You do need core academics and that is something that I would also say I think that certainly if you went to the local standards based school, you’re you are going to get more core academics You’re also not getting the executive function skills that are core to being successful in high school.

[00:25:49] And so One of the interesting things that happens at Embark, and this is just how humans, I think, and kids especially are wired, is the projects that we do, by the time they’re in eighth grade, a lot of them are like, Oh, whatever, what they end up getting really excited about is the boring academic lesson that the teacher is just telling them as from the whiteboard.

[00:26:08] And so it ends up being honestly this reverse. So we do have roughly half our day, which is in core academics, a little bit less, but They get excited to be taught math in a traditional way for a period of time. Whereas, I have been in these middle school math classrooms and those kids are, like half of them, they’re just, when can I leave?

[00:26:31] When can I get out of here? So simply by reversing our focus. When we get into core academics, they are generally speaking, loving it because it’s the different thing that we’re doing and the projects that we’re doing at some point in time become like the academics for the like, okay, cool. Interesting.

[00:26:49] Yeah. Uh, so, so all that to say, I think we actually get more focused academic learners at Embark because we’re not emphasizing it to the same degree that other other schools are. So it sort of works. I think it’s a little bit counterintuitive almost.

[00:27:06] Mike Goldstein: Brian, let me switch topics a little bit. You’re part of this sort of movement, if you will, of micro schools.

A lot of people come to visit, probably some of whom want to start their own micro schools.  They want to see what it’s like to be with your 12, 13, 14 year olds and your team. What’s your big picture take the micro school movement? How do you interpret that and where do you think it’s going?

[00:27:32] Brian Hyosaka: Sure. So before coming to embark, I wasn’t even, I wasn’t even sure what a micro school was. I had, that was news to me and that was, I’ve been here almost six years now. So not that long ago. And as I came here, I realized, whoa, this is a really, this is a really big movement. And like you said, We’ve hosted visitors from around the country.

[00:27:50] Yesterday, we had 25 visitors from the East Coast through our school. And so it’s been very interesting to hear what people are trying to do. The take that I have is the micro school movement is incredible. And I think it’s something that we need to continue to move toward. Not that every school needs to be a micro school.

[00:28:08] I don’t think that’s the right, right solution at all. But what it does is it allows people to pursue something that is more tailored. To what they are looking for, and so micro schools could be like ours that are highly learner centered and focused on authentic and embedded learning. They also could be something that’s really just invested in core academics.

[00:28:29] I just spoke with the woman last week who is opening a micro school out of her home for eight kids. That is based on is a Montessori micro school. And so I think what I have found, though, is that people who want to open micro schools are doing so out of Pure passion. And I think that what often happens is they themselves are paying the passion tax and it might be worth it to them.

[00:28:51] But the question is, is it sustainable? So I think we get a lot of people who are based purely on passion and then our program focused. And when I sit down with them, I ask them, what’s your plan for the operations? What’s your plan for the funding? What’s your plan for risk mitigation? What’s your plan for transportation for sub coverage?

[00:29:08] And as you start to go down that path, you get a little bit of like the eyes wide open, like Whoa, that’s not what I’m signing up for. And it’s like, okay, well, it might not be what you’re signing up for, but I hate to break it to you. That’s a core part of this job as well. And so I think a lot of what needs to be figured out is how to.

[00:29:25] Make a micro school sustainable, whether that’s joining a micro school network or having a business partner who has more of that business and operations lens. But absent that person, I do think that you’re going to pay the passion tax so severely that I don’t know how sustainable it will be in the long run.

[00:29:44] Unless something shifts dramatically in our country and maybe that would change. But currently that’s what I see is some of the coolest ideas are so much more achievable in a micro school. And, and yet it does take a toll. It does take a toll on, on the founder, especially.

[00:29:58] Mike Goldstein: I’m vigorously nodding along.  When you look at the 8,000 or so charter schools that started, a lot of founders who come to it also with passion about a certain type of education,

And the barriers to starting a charter are high: find a 50,000 square foot building, and large operational challenges, so it sends a certain group of educational dreamers scurrying for the exits.

The micro school, because the scale of it, you’ve got 30 kids.  There are still challenges.  What’s our septic system?  What’s our zoning? What’s our safety procedures? You start to hit and run into these different ops things. In states that are creating education savings accounts, it partly opens the door to potentially viable micro schools that can hold out over the long term.

When your visitors come to observe Embark, are you seeing any difference between them coming from states with ESAs versus those without?

[00:31:47] Brian Hyosaka: I don’t know that I’ve gotten to that level of specificity yet, but what I would say there’s a level of creativity that I see in some of the most successful micro schools around funding, where it takes a little bit of everything. So it takes a little bit of dipping into homeschool money in some places or, or per people funding here or drawing on grants here.

[00:32:11] Or, you know, and so any little or significant amount of funds that can come through might seem like a drop in the bucket to a bigger institution, but is actually life sustaining for a micro school. And, and so whether it would be like an education savings account. Or, or in the past, a grant that might be opened for something that is like loosely connected to a school.

[00:32:34] I mean, I have heard all sorts of strange ways that people are trying to hack the system to just simply exist and, and put food on the table for their families, uh, let alone keep the lights on for a school. So I do think whether like something’s got to give. For these micro schools to, to exist in perpetuity, because of course, Embark’s model isn’t a sustainable one.

[00:32:59] And we never tell people it is. That was one thing, not just because of what happened now, but we’ve never told anybody, Hey y’all, you know what you should do? Open a coffee shop, have three educators, charge no tuition. Never once did we tell people, here’s the path towards sustainability. We said, here’s what we’re doing, because what we’re trying to do is show you all what could be possible and push on your thinking, not show you how to do something, because this is not how you do it.

[00:33:27] And that was, that was, that was evident.

[00:33:30] Mike Goldstein: The Last Dance was the documentary series that chronicled your beloved Chicago Bulls’ six titles. And I think your story and what you’ve been able to achieve at Embark with your team, with the kids and families is really a remarkable story as well.  I’m really glad you shared it with us.

[00:33:52] Brian Hyosaka: Yeah, thank you so much for providing the opportunity. I know that we, while we have a lot of different emotions and I shouldn’t speak for everybody, I will share my overwhelming sense is gratitude. It’s been amazing to be a part of Embark and I hope that everybody is lucky at some point in their career to experience what I’ve had the privilege of experiencing over the last five years.

[00:34:12] Mike Goldstein: This has been Microschooling Journeys with Curious Mike. You’ve been listening to Brian Hyosaka talk about Embark Microschool in Denver. And thank you for joining.