Academy Prep's Lincoln Tamayo on School Reform in Massachusetts & Florida

The Learning Curve Lincoln Tamayo

Albert Cheng: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m one of your co-hosts this week, Albert Cheng, and co-hosting with me is my usual partner in crime, Alisha Searcy. What’s up?

Alisha Searcy: Hello there, partner. How are you?

Albert Cheng: Doing well. Doing well. I mean, we got a great guest today, Lincoln Tamayo, so I’m looking forward to hearing his story.

You know, we don’t hear of all the school leaders that are doing their thing across the country, so you know, we really like to highlight the stories we can highlight on the show, and I think his story is set to be inspiring. I know he’s got a great background, and he’s been at ed reform for quite a bit, so we’re looking forward to this, and maybe we should get to him.

So let, let’s talk news, like we usually do on this show. So [00:01:00] Alisha, what did you see?

Alisha Searcy: Well, Albert, I know that sometimes we can be dramatic, uh, I have to say, in life, and I’ll put myself in that category. But I will have to say that the article that I wanna talk about today feels like a huge alarm bell is being rung.

We are in a crisis. Hmm. I need people to understand this is a problem. Huh. So it’s from Real Clear Education, and the article by Bruno Manno is School Satisfaction Reaches an All-Time Low. So specifically, the article points out that American satisfaction with the K12 education system has fallen to 32%, the lowest level Gallup has recorded in its 27-year trend, while dissatisfaction has climbed up to a record 67%.

Albert Cheng: Ha.

Alisha Searcy: Yeah. And so the article goes on to talk about a number of other polls that have been done. Walton Family [00:02:00] Foundation and Gallup Poll did one. So this one was from 2026. There were a couple of other ones that were done. Phi Delta Kappa did a poll in August of 2025, asked a different question, but only 13% of respondents gave the nation’s public schools an A or a B.

And so as the article goes on, of course, it talks about the fact that so many parents believe that their school is doing fine. Yeah. But it’s all the other schools that are the problem. And so it’s very interesting to me. And why I say this is a crisis, we are living and experiencing a crisis in public education when we see a number of indicators.

Number one, obviously satisfaction is extremely low, the lowest of all. We’re looking at test scores, math and ELA scores, reading scores, the lowest that we’ve seen in recent history. You also see this huge focus from the federal level on ESAs and private schools and all of that, and we all support choice, so it’s not about [00:03:00] that, but there just seems to be this lack of focus on having strong public schools in this country.

And I need not tell you, if you compare us to other nations in the world, we know that we are falling farther and farther behind. And so I’m deeply concerned. And so what it does say to me is that not just as policy leaders, you know, advocates, that it’s not just us that understand there’s a problem. Now we see that parents are getting it I hope that this article, and I’m gonna send it to a lot of people, that it gets shared, that a conversation is brought about because we have got to do something.

Now that parents understand, we’ve already known for a long time that we are in a crisis. Now that we all know, it’s time for us to get to work and figure out what it is that we need to do. And I think, you know, maybe our guest today will probably have some solutions around that. We see great work happening across this country in public schools.

We know it can be [00:04:00] done when you have high expectations for kids, when you have the right standards, when you are actually holding people accountable. So we know what we need to do. We just need to do it. Mm-hmm. And so that’s the article that I wanted to bring up. I hope people will read it and will, again, take some action because we are in a crisis.

Albert Cheng: Yeah. I’ve done some school satisfaction research myself, but I just haven’t paid attention to the latest data. I, I think there was a slight decline, especially since post-pandemic, but I don’t know if there was any rebound. But it sounds like there’s not really a rebound here. It sounds like, as, as the headline says-

Alisha Searcy: Yeah, it’s getting worse

Albert Cheng: uh, it’s, it’s getting worse. So yeah. Wow. Lots to unpack there. A sobering thing to really think about, I think. Well, you know, Alisha, I can see some connections to my article actually that I saw. So mine’s comes from The 74, and it’s an opinion piece by Kristen Gaffney. She’s the founder and CEO of Education Interventions and is a certified literacy specialist.

You might like this title, “Families Don’t Want School Choice, They [00:05:00] Want Their Child To Read”.

Alisha Searcy: Yes.

Albert Cheng: Um, which is kind of catchy. But I think it does underscore a related point to the point of your article, which is she’s arguing that, look, we’ve got families signing up for ESAs, signing up to find other educational options, and it’s not that they’re ideologically committed to choice because, you know, they think choice is, you know, whatever.

Not being partisan about this policy choice. The fact is these are parents that just want their kids to read, and I think that goes back to your article about satisfaction. Mm-hmm. When parents find out that their kid is in third, fourth grade, and all of a sudden they’re missing the mark of being literate, it’s like, “What have we been doing for the past three years?”

You know? Yes. And, and when they come to that moment, they’re like, “We gotta do something.” And so it turns out that there are ESAs and, and other options to help rectify that. But yeah, it does raise the point of like, how did we get to this point here? So this article though, it, it is weighing in on some other policy points [00:06:00] about choice.

In particular, Gaffney is raising the argument about, hmm, you know, maybe we need a little bit more oversight to make sure that when parents are looking for a literacy specialist to fix this problem of their child being unable to read, maybe the state needs to provide a bit more oversight into who they allow to take ESA funding.

Now, I don’t know, you know, if you and I might see the issue a little bit differently. I’m not sure if her policy solution is necessary for the goal she has in mind, ’cause I do think parents… Look, if someone was just looking for tutors, I wouldn’t want some requirement for a tutor to have a certain specialization to close off access to certain tutors.

So I don’t know, maybe there’s, there’s a solution here for the parents who really need a literacy specialist. Maybe it just amounts to divulging more information about the provider and maybe not going so far as a requirement to have some kind of literacy specialization to be able to participate. But I can see the issue.

I think that maybe to tie back to [00:07:00] your article, yeah, families don’t want school choice. They want their child to read. I, I think there’s something to think about there in light of your article.

Alisha Searcy: It’s a very powerful argument to make. I did read that article as well, and it really got my attention because, and it also reminds me of we talk often about how parents often choose schools not necessarily for the academics.

Sometimes for some of them it’s just for safety. To me, it argues back to your point about accountability and, like, what states need to put in place. You do need to have some level of safeguards because parents are making choices based on, you know, what they see in front of them, what they feel their kids need.

So whether it’s safety, whether it’s I need to make sure they know how to read because the schools that they’re in now are not serving them. Schools, and I think the state and policy needs to have some kind of guardrails because parents don’t necessarily have all of the tools to be able to decipher, am I choosing a better school that will provide a better quality education for my [00:08:00] kid- Mm-hmm

in addition to them being safe, right? Yeah. Am I choosing a tutor who is familiar with the science of reading, who understands the science behind how to actually teach my kid to read? But to your point, you don’t wanna go to the other extreme where you’d knock out a lot of people who could actually be effective as tutors, even if they aren’t, quote-unquote, “certified” in a particular area.

Yeah. So I think the balance is important, but I think her point is very, very powerful in that sometimes as folks in this world, you know, in this policy making environment, we are so focused on, you know, school choice, school choice, school choice, we sometimes forget parents just want a good school for their kids.

They just want their kids to be able to read. So very interesting point and really interesting article.

Albert Cheng: Yeah.

Alisha Searcy: It has us talking. That’s what it’s supposed to do.

Albert Cheng: That’s right. That’s right. Well, and I hope the conversation continues for everyone else. And speaking of conversation, why don’t we pick it up with Lincoln Tamayo?

And so stick around. He’s gonna join us [00:09:00] on the flip side of the break.

Lincoln Tamayo is the chief operating officer of Academy Prep Foundation and head of school at Academy Prep Center of Florida. In 2001 and 2002, he was chairman of English for the Children of Massachusetts, the successful initiative petition campaign to reform the bilingual education laws in Massachusetts.

From 1977 to 2001, Lincoln was principal of Chelsea High School and two middle schools in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He has also served as assistant to the president of Boston University, secretary to the Boston University Board of Trustees, assistant to the chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, a community columnist for the editorial board of the Tampa Tribune, and a member of the board of trustees for Jesuit High School in Tampa.

[00:10:00] Lincoln currently serves as a member of the boards of trustees for the Tampa Museum of Art and Cristo Rey High School of Tampa, as well as the Citizens Review Board for the Tampa Police Department and on the community advisory board of the Junior League of Tampa. He received his BA in history from the University of Notre Dame, his JD from the University of Florida College of Law, and his master’s in educational administration, planning, and social policy from Harvard University.

Lincoln, welcome to the show. It’s a real pleasure to have you on. Thanks for taking the time.

Lincoln Tamayo: Thank you, Albert

Albert Cheng: Well, let’s have our listeners kind of get to know you a little bit. I mean, you’ve got a remarkably varied and accomplished career in leadership, both in the K12 and higher education settings, and even some electoral politics.

So could you just sh- share with our listeners some of your background? In particular, were there any formative educational experiences that you had to really shape how you go about your work today?

Lincoln Tamayo: Well, Albert and Alisha, I’m looking at my wall with my diplomas. Of [00:11:00] my most important diploma I consider, which is right in the middle, is my kindergarten diploma, the Bachelor of Rhymes-

which I received at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Ybor City, predominantly Hispanic section, Cuban, Italian immigrants for many, many decades. This is where I learned to speak English. I was born in Cuba in December of 1960 and left in August of ’61 with my mother and father. We ended up in Tampa in 1964. I consider Tampa my Ellis Island.

I learned to speak English. I lived in a typical three-generation Cuban home, my grandmother, my parents, and I, then my siblings, my younger siblings coming in pretty quick succession. So we spoke only Spanish at home, and I learned how to speak English at the, in the lap of Mrs. Ferlita as a kindergartner back in 1966.

I see that as the great entry point of my citizenship as an American. I was naturalized a [00:12:00] year, a year later. God has a very interesting way of shedding light on our paths in life. I had thought going to college and then going on to law school that I was gonna pursue a career to serve our country with either the FBI or the Central Intelligence Agency.

God had o- other plans for me. It’s just absolutely fascinating That he led me to Academy Prep of Tampa, just three blocks away where I learned to speak English 36 years earlier. It’s kind of my story as an immigrant to this wonderful country of ours. I was educated very well by the Jesuits here in Tampa in high school, then off to college, and I thought going to college that I was gonna pursue a career in intelligence or law enforcement, but again, God had other plans.

I had an uncle by marriage who was a high-ranking officer in the Cuban army. During the background investigation stage with both the, uh, agency and the bureau, [00:13:00] I let them know that my uncle by marriage, who had divorced my aunt in 1964 when I had already left Cuba and was still only three years old, was a high-ranking officer and I could not get a top secret clearance to serve our country in that way.

So I had to find a new career path. It led me to becoming the assistant director of admissions at Boston University back in 1987, and BU started its partnership with the city of Chelsea, Massachusetts, one of the poorest cities in the nation, in 1988. The first partnership of its kind, where a private university is running a public school system.

At least the first and last. There’s never been anything like it since. I ended up in the president’s office at Boston University in 1990 and became a member of the management team from Boston University, overs- kinda like a school committee overseeing the Chelsea school system. Then Dr. Silver called me into his office one fateful day in 1997.

“Lincoln, [00:14:00] you know that the schools in Chelsea are still in rough shape. I think you need to be on the line and not on the staffs.” He sent me to Chelsea to run the high school and the middle schools. Did not have a minute’s worth of experience as a teacher or as an administrator in the school system, but I have to say that as soon as I landed there at Chelsea High School, I knew that this is exactly why God put me on this earth, was to serve kids in some of the most important years of their life.

I realized very quickly, I knew this really coming in, but being there directly in the trenches, I… But I shouldn’t, I should never consider Chelsea High School or anything like that, like a trench. It’s not warfare. Mm-hmm. Mm. It’s really beautiful, beautiful work that it takes everyone And I do mean everyone.

Janitors, teachers, staff members, administrators. The decisions that all of those adults make for these kids, and especially in places like Chelsea, where at the time 80%, I, I don’t think it’s [00:15:00] changed that much, but it’s 80% of the children going to Chelsea, Chelsea schools spoke a language other than English at home, and it was from all over the world.

The decisions that people make in guiding these children literally minute to minute, hour to hour, day by day, determine whether they make something out of their lives or go off into oblivion. And I’ve always taken my responsibility now as an educator to instill, you know, we have been given as educators the public trust to guide our kids and to guide them as they are.

So I really come into this position more as a parent than I do even as an educator. What are those things that I would absolutely demand of my own three children or for my own three children that I should be demanding for these kids that I and we have been given the public trust to educate? So off we went, and those were among the four best years of my life and my career, was guiding the middle [00:16:00] school and, and the high school kids of city of Chelsea, Massachusetts

Albert Cheng: Well, thanks for sharing all that, Lincoln.

Definitely appreciate you giving us a, a sense of the heartbeat behind what you do, so thank you again for that. So let’s get into this a bit more. Uh, you know, I wanna ask a few more questions about what you’ve talked about, your experience at Chelsea and BU. But first, you know, let me pick up where you ended.

You know, you were talking about what would you demand as a parent for your own children? And now one of the things in your career, as I understand, is you’ve been a pretty strong proponent of a K-12 education focused on classical liberal arts, you know, with standards and content-rich curriculum, E.D. Hirsch style.

Share with us what’s your take on that? Why is it that you think that that type of educational approach is important for forming just our students, to set them up for success, to prepare them for citizenship even?

Lincoln Tamayo: It’s vitally important that we broaden the intellectual horizons of all of our kids. It’s as simple as that.

And of [00:17:00] course, they need to have a very strong basis and foundation in the English language and language arts, mathematics, science, and history, but it goes well, well beyond that. The intellectual habits of children, their curiosity. In addition to all of those academics, we should include the arts, music.

Here at Academy Prep, we even require chess- Hmm … for all of our kids. Strong physical education as well. All of our students take at least three physical education classes every week. They have physical recess every single day, which is something we rarely, rarely see in our schools, including private schools.

So it is just a very broad range that broadens the intellectual, physical, social, and horizons of all of our kids. As far as civics is concerned, it is amazing to me what little seventh and eighth grade students and children in the United States know about the foundations of our government, of our democracy, [00:18:00] of our republic.

Here at Academy Prep, you cannot graduate from Academy Prep of Tampa without having passed the naturalization test to become- Hmm … a citizen in the United States. Every American eighth grade child, student should have a strong foundation of who we are before they can go on into high school. I strongly believe that.

Alisha Searcy: Hmm.

Lincoln Tamayo: So that’s what we require. We need to demand much more of our students. What I’ve seen coming out of our schools, even in fourth and fifth grade in mathematics, has been just abysmal. The overwhelming majority of students in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is here in Florida, when they are in eighth grade, are taking pre-algebra at best Pre-algebra.

At Academy Prep, pre-algebra is required at the seventh-grade level. It is already taught to sixth graders at the honors [00:19:00] level. By eighth grade at Academy Prep, you must take either Algebra 1, Algebra 1 Honors, or Geometry Honors to graduate from Academy Prep. These students are endowed with the same gray matter as every other child, and the three of us on this call in this podcast endowed with the same gray matter.

And unless we hold our children to those kinds of standards, they’re never gonna reach it. And lo and behold, you have hundreds and hundreds of– well, actually tens of thousands of schools in the United States where the overwhelming majority of eighth graders are not at grade level in math and reading.

But when you’re holding your children to such derisory standards, that’s not a surprise

Albert Cheng: Well said. You know, I’m very much in agreement with that and I appreciate hearing you articulate that argument and that vision. I wanna bring President John Silber back into our conversation here. Um, as you said, he was the president at BU, Boston University, and he was the one that asked [00:20:00] you to get involved with the partnership with Chelsea.

So could you talk to us about, um, how did he view K-12 and higher education generally? My sense is that perhaps his views of education as places where there ought to be academic excellence, institutions that promote equality of opportunity, that maybe shaped your understanding a little bit. I mean, talk to us about Silber for a little bit.

Lincoln Tamayo: You just touched on it, Albert, and this is something that Dr. Silber constantly pounded on. It’s equality of opportunity. We are not in Cuba, we are not in China, we are not communists or socialists. There is no such thing as equality of outcome. There is such a thing, though, and especially as American, all of us, and it doesn’t matter what our background is, how much melanin we have in our skin, what our financial tally sheet looks like, everyone in America should have an equal opportunity to be able to pursue happiness based on their talents and [00:21:00] have an equal opportunity to get to the greatness that God has put in them.

I felt that already before I, I met Dr. Silber and worked with him, but we were definitely simpatico in that very, very strong belief. And children, if held to a standard, and if guided and shepherded by adults who mean what they say and actually act upon their words, they do rise to the occasion. I’ve been seeing it now for 30 years.

A truly great man that, a man that, who had the courage of his conviction. I will tell you that there were times, many times actually, that I felt like I was Mercury next to the Sun. It can get awfully hot and working and serving under John Silber. Just a truly, truly great man. And something like this, this partnership is one of a kind in American history.

Partnership between a private university and a public school system, that was the brainchild of John Silber. [00:22:00] And then having one of his proteges go into a place like Chelsea and know that we could do things like a beautiful play of Macbeth from our kids, regardless of what languages they came to us.

They could play chess. They could go on to places like MIT and Harvard and Boston University because we had someone with the courage of this conviction, the ideas and the engagement like John Silber to get it started

Albert Cheng: Wow. Well, you know, a lot of reason to be, I guess, thankful that we had Dr. Silva’s leadership at that time.

I wanna pivot a little bit to now talk about these initiatives specifically and just what it took to implement these and sustain some of these efforts. So let’s start with the partnership between Boston University and Chelsea Public Schools. I think anyone listening on the show knows it’s not easy navigating K-12 education systems.

Higher ed is complicated in its own way, particularly if you wanna do reform . So what did it take to make this happen, and how did you navigate all of these political and [00:23:00] institutional dynamics?

Lincoln Tamayo: Well, having a partnership between Boston University and Chelsea took out the governmental bureaucracy and red tape that can kind of stymie, if not kill reform, even though we still needed to deal with collective bargaining and the unions and all those things.

We were working with a public school system. It was just very good to know that all I needed to do was be, you know, wound up and get in there and get the job done, and then you had the support of Boston University in getting those reforms and changes done without all the red tape and bureaucracy of a public school system in an urban school district.

Albert Cheng: Yeah. And you know, this is probably the age-old question, you know, how do we navigate the political economy and build support and have a collaborative and unified effort to make these pushes? So let me ask you a similar question about a different initiative. Back in 2001, 2002, you led English for the Children of [00:24:00] Massachusetts, a successful initiative petition campaign to reform bilingual education laws in Massachusetts.

Tell us about that experience. What were the legal, political, and educational lessons you learned about Massachusetts politics and policymaking to get this to take root?

Lincoln Tamayo: For the 30 years prior to that initiative petition in 2002, the state had had, or the Commonwealth had had a law where if you had 20 students in a district who spoke a language other than English, you were required within the school system to teach them in their native language for anywhere from up to two to five years before they were finally mainstreamed into an English language classroom.

That impacted almost exclusively Spanish and Portuguese-speaking children. So what we were doing was creating Spanish and Portuguese-speaking ghettos in our public schools. And there were, of course, all these studies that were commissioned by schools of [00:25:00] education that this was a necessary way of transitioning kids from their native language to the English language.

And we should know just by common sense that the younger you are as a child, the faster you can take command of a new language. That’s just the way our brains are wired. It took me all of at the lap of Mrs. Ferlita in kindergarten at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Tampa, not speaking a word of English when I started, I was speaking as a kindergartner like a parrot In English.

You can speak like a parrot in English at the age of nine, 10, 12, 13 if you are immersed into the English language. So that was something that just needed to be done. I made the very difficult decision of resigning my position from the Chelsea schools. I realized that that would be a political lightning rod for me being in a place where so many Hispanic children and Portuguese-speaking children were in the schools, [00:26:00] so I avoided Chelsea having to go through that.

So I resigned and then took on this campaign. We had the entire Massachusetts delegation, including Senators Kerry and Kennedy, vehemently campaigning against this initiative petition, but we had ended up winning with the highest number of yes votes in the history of Massachusetts initiative petition politics.

I think that that was for the benefit, near to the benefit of Massachusetts kids who are coming to this nation not speaking English. But, you know, one thing I’ve learned, it’s one thing getting something like this over the line to get it started, and then it’s a whole other thing maintaining it. My understanding is that law, that change has been watered down significantly not too much longer after I’d left, and I think that there are still too many districts in Massachusetts where they are still doing this bilingual education, and there’s not enough willpower or heart [00:27:00] to enforce how the laws should be implemented.

I learned, too, you know, campaigning, I was a classic citizen politician. There was something happening in my society that I felt very strongly needed to be changed, so I left my farm to run this campaign and, and to change the law, and I determined that when I was done with that after campaigning for a year and a half, it was time for me to go back to education and was asked to come and open these schools here in Florida.

That was a great experience. I did learn one of the things that I, I believe is lacking tremendously among our politicians in this country is a lack of courage of conviction, which was something I clearly saw in someone like, uh, John Silber. I, I wish he had held his temper a little bit better and not blown up on television like he did the week before the election for governor.

I think he would’ve been a great governor of Massachusetts. So few politicians have the courage of their conviction and will [00:28:00] actually do in public what they’ll say or promise they’ll do in private But it was a great experience, and I loved working with Rosa Lee Porter and Christine Rousselle, who were my co-chairmen.

Very committed people, brilliant people. It was my honor and my privilege to run that campaign.

Alisha Searcy: Beautifully said. There’s so much I could tap in on as a former and reformed politician- … who has a few battle scars to show for it.

Lincoln Tamayo: R- right, Alisha.

Alisha Searcy: But we won’t go there today. And I will say, it’s interesting. I wonder what that response would have been like these days, right?

Not in 1998, but in 2026. I think voters kind of like passion and authenticity and a little fire.

Lincoln Tamayo: Yeah. I think all of us as Americans are craving it.

Alisha Searcy: Absolutely, especially if it’s on behalf of kids.

Lincoln Tamayo: Yes, that’s right.

Alisha Searcy: And so I wanna talk about your experiences working in both states. You know, over the last 20-plus years, [00:29:00] you’ve been in our native Florida providing outstanding educational leadership, which it’s clear that you’ve made a tremendous impact.

Can you talk to us and give us a brief overview of what you see as the similarities, differences, and the challenges in K-12 ed reform found in both the Bay State and the Sunshine State?

Lincoln Tamayo: Well, let’s go immediately to the differences. I’m just really disappointed for the sake of the children in Massachusetts that Massachusetts has done away with the MCAS, with standardized testing.

Standardized testing should not direct what is taught in the class, but there has to be a means and instrument to see how your students are progressing academically as they’re going from kindergarten through grade 12. And not to have that now in place is inviting flying into a mountain range with no sight, no visibility, and no radar.

[00:30:00] I think that is a big, big mistake that they’ve done in Massachusetts, and I hope that that is reversed in short order. It’s a very good thing that we still have that in Florida, standardized testing, but I do wanna stress that those tests should not dominate how a child is guided and educated. So for example, in Florida, these tests are administered in Florida three times a year.

They should not be spending their time, their two or three months before each test preparing the kids for that test as if it’s the invasion of Normandy. Because what happens is when you are doing that and your schools are graded based on the outcomes of those tests, you’re doing everything but focusing on the other things that can broaden the horizons of your kids.

So for example, you’ll, you’ll see art go by the wayside, music go by the wayside. Forget about even offering things like chess or even physical education or having much of recess. We are [00:31:00] allowing our public schools to become massive widget-making factories where the kids really aren’t learning. They’re just learning how to take a test, and by the way, they’re not doing very well on those tests anyway.

Alisha Searcy: Right.

Lincoln Tamayo: So we better change what we’re feeding our kids as well, and that’s, you know, an example I gave earlier was about what we’re doing with mathematics. So, uh, similarities, differences, I would say too that the teachers’ unions in Florida are, even though they are still very influential, are not as strong as they are in Massachusetts, and I think that leads to the benefit of Florida’s kids, to not have the teachers’ union have too much sway over what happens, but there’s still a lot of reform that needs to happen there as well.

Alisha Searcy: Very interesting. So you are the chief operating officer of Academy Prep Foundation and head of school at Academy Prep Center of Lakeland, Florida. And for our listeners, this is a highly [00:32:00] regarded network of private, nonprofit, coeducational college preparatory middle schools. So could you talk to us about the successes and challenges of leading middle schools, which I know is very challenging, and whose students are often considered among some of the most difficult to educate?

Lincoln Tamayo: Absolutely. I consider a middle school, I call it the academic Dunkirk. It’s the last chance you have to save a child from, you know, going off into oblivion, because if you are at below grade level in math and reading when you start high school, you are dead in the water. You’re done. You’re done. Those are four incredibly…

And I, I say four because Academy Prep’s grade levels are grade five to eight, so those four years are just crucial. And when you add to that, I don’t know, Alisha, why, why this is so, but why is it when you’re looking at schools and school districts where, say, 80, [00:33:00] 90% plus are qualifying for free and reduced meals, children of color, why is it that the percentages of those kids meeting grade level, whether it be grade four, five, eight, or on, that those percentages are so high, those kids who are not meeting grade level, who are Black, Hispanic, relatively poor?

It shouldn’t be that way. There’s just no excuse for that. At Academy Prep, for example, 100% of our kids qualify for the federal free and reduced meals program. Almost 100% of our students are either Black and/or Hispanic. When our kids enter Academy Prep in fifth grade, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not a surprise because they have not been held to a high standard from kindergarten to grade four.

They are significantly below grade level in reading and in English language arts. And if you look at line graphs, our fifth graders, the [00:34:00] percentage of fifth graders at or greater than grade level in math and reading are far lower than those high-performing public schools in our district. By eighth grade- Our eighth graders are outperforming even the very best of the public schools in Hillsborough County and Pinellas County and in Polk County where we have our other Academy Preps.

That’s not a surprise. These kids have been endowed with the same gray matter as you and me and Albert and our children. It is no different.

Albert Cheng: Mm-hmm.

Lincoln Tamayo: But you have to have standards and you have to act on those standards for your kids, and they will rise to the occasion. But the real tragedy is, and yeah, that’s all great and good.

We can pat ourselves on the back at Academy Prep, but the real tragedy is, is that there aren’t 500 or 5,000 Academy Preps. We should not be the exception. Mm-hmm. We must not be the exception, but we are. It’s astounding. [00:35:00]

Alisha Searcy: It is. And I wish you could say that about 500 more times on this and every other podcast.

It is about expectations. It is about standards, and it’s about having a clear understanding that a kid’s zip code or background, whatever it is, is not the determining factor for what their potential is- Exactly … and what they’re able to achieve.

Lincoln Tamayo: Exactly, Alisha. I mean, one, one of the things I’d say relatively often, if you think, by the way, uh, little Academy Prep in Tampa has had s- seven of its graduates admitted, enrolled, and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Deerfield, Choate. These are more kids than even those seven. But I say to our kids all the time, “If you think I’m gonna lift a finger to a recommendation ’cause you are Black or Hispanic or you are relatively poor financially, you are sadly mistaken. But if you get up every day and you strive as [00:36:00] hard as you can to meet your responsibilities, and you will make many, many mistakes just like I do, but you do that on a regular basis every day, we will move heaven and earth three or four years down the road to get you into these schools because you have truly taken advantage of the opportunities given to you, and you have earned it.

You’ve earned our recommendation, my recommendation. You’ve earned it.”

Alisha Searcy: So very powerful. I can only imagine what it’s like to be in your schools every day. If all of the adults in the buildings believe what you believe and speak to students the way you do, you can see why you’re getting such great results.

So that’s very inspiring.

Lincoln Tamayo: And it’s gotta be every single moment. I, I mean, Alisha, we start our day, we have 141 students at Academy Prep Tampa. The day starts with the eight homerooms lined up at the front of the school doors, and before we start convocation, all 141 students have to pass [00:37:00] by me or whoever’s running convocation for that day and look each other in the eye and shake hands and say, “Good morning.”

Even just that, and we’re losing that as a society. We are not wisps of wind. We are human beings that need to engage with each other, and even just that kind of engagement on a regular basis, being engaged with the world in front of your face opens doors

Alisha Searcy: That’s it, and they need to feel seen. I love that.

So I think you would agree that we have to create the environments for which schools like yours are available to students. And for many decades now, Florida has been a national policy leader in expanding school options for students, which it’s done consistently. Can you talk to us about the transformative school choice policy changes you’ve observed in Florida?

Lincoln Tamayo: When we opened Academy Prep in 2003, there were, I believe, Alisha, [00:38:00] 55,000 students on Florida tax credit scholarships at the time, and now we’re approaching, I think it’s a million. That has dramatically expanded the choice for our kids, and especially those kids who need it the most. I’m a member of the Republican Party here in, in Florida, but I don’t agree with what the Florida Legislature did in making the vouchers now, and now we have not only Florida tax credit scholarships, but also vouchers.

So these are coming from, you know, publicly allocated funds. I’m good with vouchers, too, but I don’t think we need to make them universal. I think they should still be… The first two priority levels are for those who are neediest, but now we’ve opened up the spigot to everybody. I personally don’t believe that someone coming from a home with an income of half a million dollars should be receiving a $7,500 scholarship to attend a private school.

I think that those funds should be earmarked [00:39:00] far more specifically and exclusively to those children who need that assistance to be able to attend a private school like Academy Prep.

Alisha Searcy: It’s so interesting you bring that up. We’ve had a couple of these conversations about ESAs and vouchers, and had recently someone on from AFC talking about the same conversation about what are the components of ESAs or vouchers.

So I feel like we need all of you together to have this good debate, and I’m in a very different place. So anyway, it’s, it’s very interesting that you brought that up.

Lincoln Tamayo: Where do you land on that, Alisha?

Alisha Searcy: Well, I’ll just briefly say I’m a believer in parents having options. I think when you talk about in the private space, there are so many holes in these programs, to your point, whether it’s low-income families not having real access because the voucher is not going to be enough for the high-quality private schools that they actually would wanna access.

You know, whether it’s kids coming from low-performing schools that can’t be served [00:40:00] well in private schools. I just think there are a lot of challenges with the way the programs are implemented. And so while I believe in it philosophically, from a practical standpoint, I don’t think it’s serving the kids that need it the most.

Lincoln Tamayo: Right. You’re talking too about the relative quality of even the private schools where these parents are sending their kids to, because just because a school is private doesn’t mean that they’re effective.

Alisha Searcy: Exactly.

Lincoln Tamayo: There has to be, I believe, a much higher level of accountability for private schools receiving those funds, and I think Florida still falls short of that mark.

Alisha Searcy: Which is very interesting, and I absolutely agree with that point, and I think that’s the biggest piece is the accountability is missing, and it’s very different, you know, state to state.

Lincoln Tamayo: Yes.

Alisha Searcy: To that point, I wanna ask you what you would consider to be the biggest challenges you see to the continued success of Florida’s K through 12 education policy over the next five years.

And so we’re thinking about, is it the state or [00:41:00] national politics? Is it motivating new high-quality private school supply? Is it managing the complexities of the ESA programs, establishing or maintaining high academic standards and results from teachers and students alike? What do you see as some of those biggest challenges to the continued success of this ESA

Lincoln Tamayo: policy?

Well, so, so I would say yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes- … to those. So yeah, we talked about high academic standards. We need to… And just like we just said, just because a school is private, doesn’t matter what stripe they are, public or private, if they’re not maintaining a high standard for their kids, then they are just wholly ineffective and shouldn’t be funded and should be closed

Alisha Searcy: There you go.

So my final question for you, just this last week, the 2025 program for International Student Assessment, also known as PISA, global tests were alarming to say the least. Quote, “US teens’ reading and math scores slid to the lowest point [00:42:00] since the PISA test was first administered in the early 2000s.” End quote.

So what would you like to see governors, state legislative leaders, K-12 policy makers, or as you described yourself earlier, a citizen politician, do to dramatically elevate the academic performance of American school children?

Lincoln Tamayo: Oh, th- there’s … Oh my God, so many things we could do. Save us. Uh, okay. So expand the school year.

We do not need our kids to be taking two and a half month-long summer vacations. At Academy Prep, we’re all cast to the winds for only a month, and I think even those four weeks or five weeks are too long. But expand the school year. Expand your school days. Why does a child only need to be in school, say for example, here in Hillsborough County, in elementary, I think it’s from 8:00 until 2:15?

Have a longer school day. Mm. Expand it. And, and I think you can still do that within the environment of collective bargaining. [00:43:00] You know, why not stagger the schedules of your faculty and your staff and administrators? Have one group working from 7:00… We open our gates for our kids at 7:00 and we’re closing them at 6:00.

Have one group work from 7:00 until 3:00, the other working from 9:00 to 5:00 or 10:00 to 6:00. Stagger it. You can do that. You don’t have any one faculty member or staffer spending a 12-hour… I’m the only one on this campus that works 12-hour days, but everyone else, the schedule is staggered, so we’ve got someone who’s fresh, ready to go in front of the kids all the time.

We have to absolutely bolster, we’ve talked about this already, we must bolster the standards in math and in English. For example, here in the state of Florida, in the standardized tests, only reading is tested, not the mechanics of the English language. It’s not vocabulary, spelling, punctuation [00:44:00] Sentence structure.

So are we saying that we are okay with a child who has some minimal concept of comprehension of what they’re reading, and that as long as they can comprehend what they see in a text message or on their stupid cellphone screen, that we’re okay with that? No, we need to have a command of the English language.

We need to know how to write it, how to speak it, and that’s just gone right out the window here in Florida. We don’t even test for language skills. We’ll test reading comprehension, and even then we don’t do very well. I think we need to vastly improve and invest in vocational training at the high school level and at the community college level.

We must do that. We have to demand attendance. School is very much a part of the real world. I cringe when I hear people ask kids, “What are you gonna do in the real world when you get out of school?” Well, school is part of the real world. This is where we begin to teach our [00:45:00] kids and guide our kids that there are real consequences, good and bad, for all the decisions we make.

For example, if you miss 5, 10% of your workdays when you’re 25, 30, 35 years old, the consequences are gonna be much worse than getting Fs in all your classes like you do here at Academy Prep when you’ve missed five days without excuse in any grading period. So attendance, being present, and actually acting and teaching kids that there are consequences for not being there, for not being present, for being late too often.

We just must have more courage in our conviction to guide our kids. There’s so many things that we need to do. It’s pretty sad that it’s been, how many years now? 72 years since Brown versus Board of Education was passed, and we still have this just massive swaths in our country where our kids are just not being held to very [00:46:00] good standards.

We are failing as a nation in these areas.

Alisha Searcy: Wow. Thank you so much for being with us, Lincoln. This has been a fantastic conversation. You’re very inspiring, and we appreciate all that you are doing to impact the lives of young people in Tampa and in Florida. And keep up the good work.

Lincoln Tamayo: Thank you, Alisha.

Thank you, Albert. Thank you very much, both of you.

Albert Cheng: Pleasure is ours

Wow, what a powerful story to listen to. Just to listen to his years of wisdom and experience, and even to wrestle with issues that are live debates in ed policy. Great conversation.

Alisha Searcy: Very good. He was inspiring as a … I love that when we have school leaders on because they’re in the work, right? They’re doing the day-to-day.

They get it. I think he had some great solutions for how we create [00:47:00] some change in our schools, and I’m always inspired by that level of passion and just the reminder that we have to have high expectations for all kids.

Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, that’s gonna bring us to the end of our show, and so let me leave everybody with the tweet of the week.

This one comes from Chalkbeats, and it is flagging an article, a feature article, of a 23-year-old who won a $200,000 David Prize for teaching kids about financial literacy. So check out that article. Hey, we know it’s needed. You know, I’m always torn myself, Alisha. You know, I like … I’m a math guy, so I know it’s important to teach math as math- Yes

and I don’t want it to just be financial literacy. But I’m there, too. You know, financial literacy is something, a practical skill – Yes … that, that we all need. But anyway, check out that article and hear her story. Alisha, you know, speaking of leaders, we’re gonna have another one next week on the show. We’re gonna have Tim Murray, former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and he’s gonna join us to [00:48:00] talk about voc-tech education, so should be a fun show.

Thanks for being on, Alisha, and co-hosting. Great to see you. I’ll see you next week. Yes. And I hope all of you will join us for that episode as well.

Alisha Searcy: Yes. Everybody be well.