Wildflower’s 70+ Microschools, Eight Years Later: Did Matt's Vision Become Reality?

Microschooling Journeys transcript

Interview with Matt Kramer

Edited for Clarity

[00:00:00] Mike Goldstein: Hi, this is the Microschooling Journeys podcast. I’m Curious Mike here with my friend Matt Kramer. I am in sunny Florida where I just saw the Rain Lily micro school. I’ll talk about that in a second. Here it’s 75 degrees. Matt, where are you?

[00:00:38] Matt Kramer: I am in sunny Minnesota, where it is not 75 degrees, I regret to say.

[00:00:45] Mike Goldstein: Yeah, you’re dealing with the Arctic blast, but this should warm your heart. So Monday, I drove up to your micro school, your Wildflower Network micro school, called Rain Lily.

Didn’t know what to expect, and I pretty much had picked it out of a hat from your 70-odd schools.

The bottom line is I was delighted with my visit.  I really was. And I’ll describe to you what I saw, which was basically three things.

First, I saw the kids before school started doing outdoor play, and it was just the best. Perfect vibe. This was about 30 or so kids. I think capacity at this microschool is 36 or so kids aged 3, 4, and 5. Just sort of like happy, engaged. You know, they’re stacking up the rocks over here and the interactions of the kids were great.

[00:02:00] There were two lead teachers and two assistant teachers. Occasionally kid would need a redirect, perfectly handled. You know, sometimes teachers can be a little grumpy or a little edgy or a little too permissive; but here at Rain Lily, these were just like, perfect.

Second thing was kids walk in and it’s, I don’t know the right Montessori word, but there is new stuff on the shelves, the stuff they’re going to learn with for the next month. And these kids, they were giddy. “Oh my God. It’s the new stuff, the new stuff is out!” And they’re just pumped that later that day they get to start using this new stuff.

[00:02:57] I sort of was shocked at that reaction.

Then there were two reading circles where the lead teachers, Kati and Tania, each took half the kids. And I’ve been to a lot of reading circles; this was just pitch perfect. It was like a 10 out of 10 reading circle.

The kids are engaged.  The, you know, explication is on point. The context stuff is working.  One kid is a little, like, out to lunch, but sort of has enough room to roam, you know? And sort of staying with the group.

My reaction, Matt, was if this school had been near where Pru and I raised our own kids outside Boston, we would have signed up for this in two seconds.

[00:03:43] So I’m sharing that with you first to praise you and your team.

You and I talked eight years ago when you were at the beginning of this journey of creating the Wildflower Network of microschools. Is that what was in your mind’s eye? That you would have 10 and then 20 and now 70 of these things and still growing?

What you were going for or like how much have you sort of been achieving your vision or changing your vision?

[00:04:14] Matt Kramer: Well first, I’m glad that you enjoyed your visit to Rain Lily. I have actually not been there.  But what you’re describing sounds on the one hand great on the other hand approximately what we’re going for. The Montessori approach is to have a mix between the child centered, responsive to interests, making choices about what they do and who they work with, et cetera, on the one hand; and on the other hand, a very structured set of curricular generally manipulative materials at the three to six year old level that the kids only have good choices to choose from.

[00:05:00] And they have a framework that they understand about how they get to choose from things once they’ve had them presented to them. And so it’s a big deal for kids to get the next set of things presented to them and expand the set of choices they have available. Uh, and so what you saw about like enthusiasm about the materials.

My perspective is that this is what kids act like if we don’t squeeze the enthusiasm out of them. Kids are excited to do stuff. They’re excited to learn stuff. They’re excited to do real things. It’s remarkable how much enthusiasm kids show for things like learning how to wash windows or sweep floors or other.

[00:05:39] Like really practical things that they see adults doing.

So when you saw that mix of enthusiasm, strong instruction, engagement with the materials, that is what we’re going for.

The vision of the Wildflower Network was on one hand, we would have really high fidelity Montessori with all those things I just described.  And on the other hand, we would have an approach that treated the teachers as full, full participants in the educational activity, not in a sort of like part of the production system of education, but like part of the community, where the teacher’s own experiences and visions and passions would be welcomed in the classroom, just as much as anything else is welcomed in the classroom.

[00:06:34] And where you’d have this sense of coherence that comes from the teacher being able to bring them their whole experience and self into the environment. That’s hard to get when you are setting up a school so that 20, 30, 40 teachers have to sort of teach the same thing, which inevitably doesn’t represent their personal individual experience.  Can’t, right?

So that’s what we were aiming for. And I think, you know, the reason why we see the school network growing is because I think a lot of teachers are drawn to the idea that they can bring everything to bear that they’ve learned about how to be an educator to the professional activity of creating and leading a classroom.

[00:07:15] And at the same time, parents feel the environment is tailored to their kids in. Profound ways, you know, the narrow way of they’re working at their own pace and it’s influenced by the things that are interested in the Montessori piece, but also just by being in such a small environment, they feel like their kid gets to be seen as an individual, as a human being, as like just who they are.

[00:07:40] It’s not that hard to tailor the environment for who a kid is because there’s not that many kids around that you’re solving for. And the teacher’s not trying to fit into some broader framework of constraint that I think often teachers feel like, oh, well, I’m supposed to do this and this. Instead, the teacher’s just like able to look at the kid, look at the parent.

[00:07:59] Think about themselves and think like, well, what’s going to make sense here? And we’re just going to do that. Uh, and I think those two things, the way the parents and kids experience it and the way the teachers experience it draws people in. And so, yeah, I mean, I think we would expect that lots of people will want that in their lives.

[00:08:13] Mike Goldstein: I’m going to describe what Kati and Tania told me as the lead teachers.  And you can tell me if this is reasonably representative of the teacher leaders that you see across the country.

They each have a different origin story of why they say: maybe we should have our own little school.   They got to that moment, they find Wildflower, they kind of cross the chasm, where they say: We’re doing this.

[00:08:54] And that’s at that moment, they shift from what they know, which I think is anything with a kid, anything with a parent; to school start-up issues.

Tania immediately finds out she has some kind of crazy non compete agreement with her former Montessori.

Kati is there for months, burns through like real estate agent number one, number two, number three, and number four finally finds a place. And then there’s like a septic problem. And then there’s a legal problem and a zoning problem.

It reminded me of my own experience starting a charter school where it’s like, you’re working on things that are way out of your realm of competency: real estate, zoning, law, finance.

Kati was just so genuinely appreciative of Wildflower’s help. Again, I almost hesitate because I feel like I’m almost being too positive, but I’m just conveying to the audience, like what I saw and what I heard, but she felt like so grateful to  Danielle on your team.  Kati was willing to do the work, the founder work, the business or enterprise side of the work of getting a startup going, but she really needed and received a bunch of help along the way, which allowed her to get to the moment where I saw her yesterday.

It’s 30 kids roaming around and Kati and Tania and their two assistant teachers are past startup and back in their expertise mode: kids.  And I’m curious if that’s a common startup challenge story.

[00:10:42] Matt Kramer: Yeah. I mean, each part of that is common.

[00:10:44] The first part of there’s an origin story and, and those origin stories, by the way, follow patterns, I would say there’s probably two most common patterns. One of them is. Uh, person who has been a Montessori teacher in a private Montessori setting for some time. And they went, they made the choice to go to the school they’re at with a vision that they would be able to create a diverse environment, serving a diverse set of kids.

[00:11:12] Uh, and it didn’t quite work out. It turns out really hard to get real diversity in a private setting. And so after a period of time, they’re like, ah, no, I would like to, I’d like to create something where the economics of it work. to allow it to be, uh, serving more diverse sets of families and kids. That’s one version.

[00:11:29] Then the other version is, I’ve been working at a public Montessori, and the, in the public environment, there are a lot of pressures on, on taking Montessori and squeezing it in some way so that it doesn’t reflect the vision that I had when I got into education. And I just, I look at these sort of.

[00:11:48] monstrosities of hybrid Montessori and they’re like not exciting about anything. And I wanted to create something that was like true to my vision of the potential of kids. And that drew me into wanting to create my own school. So those two stories, I don’t know whether you heard one or both of those stories, but those sort of represent the pretty common experience as people come into this.

[00:12:06] Um, and rarely is that. Experience of like, Oh, I also ran a small business, so I knew how to do that part of it. Most, mostly we find, mostly we bring people into this who have a reason to believe that they are going to be capable administratively. They’ve played an administrative role, but they didn’t like the way it pulled them out of the classroom or they’ve been a department head of some sort.

[00:12:27] They’ve had some role that’s led them to feel like this is going to work for them, but they don’t, they’re not small business owners when they come to us. And so we have a. program that we bring them through the school startup journey that is designed to, you know, basically help them find the story inside of themselves about the school they want to create.

[00:12:47] Sometimes that’s reasonably well articulated when they, when we meet them, sometimes it’s not yet. And it takes some, some work for them to find that story and vision, what to help them find that vision and then to turn it into a plan and then turn it into reality. And. When they do that, as they go through that, there are a bunch of real challenges that they will face a variety of challenges.

[00:13:10] You know, some of them are related to the regulatory environment that early childhood schools, and also for the schools we have to serve older kids, older kids schools too, but early childhood has got a particular, particularly. Distinctive set of these regulatory pressures, you know, we’ve had schools that, you know, get to the end of the startup road and find out that they, there’s a sprinkler problem that, you know, should have been recognized earlier, but didn’t get called out earlier.

[00:13:38] And the local fire marshal says, you got to fix this. And 60 grand. And, you know, we’ve had schools that get delayed for months because the commercial grease trap that they have to put in for the commercial kitchen they have to install because kids cutting carrots at school constitutes work that requires a commercial kitchen.

[00:14:00] Matt Kramer: That’s, that’s, you know, so we’ve had all those issues, uh, finding space that is close enough to licensable that on a reasonable budget, you can make it work. And that is close enough to your vision that you’re not starting off like in a position of massive Compromise versus what you want. Those are hard things to do and the world does not make it as easy on people as I think it should and so we try to help people through all that and and you know, largely we Are able to do that.

[00:14:26] You know, we’ve now got, as you said, seven, we’ve got 72 schools and it’s only happened a couple of times over the course of the last eight years that we’ve provided a startup grant to a school. That didn’t both open and make it through the first three years of, of being open. It’s only happened a couple of times and, you know, that’s a, I think that’s a testament to the fact that these are solvable problems.

[00:14:51] Um, but they, you know, they mark the journey. And when you talk to the teacher leaders, they will remember that commercial grease trap story for the rest of their lives.

[00:15:02] Mike Goldstein: I remember opening a charter when the easy problem to solve: we were renting a Hebrew school and Hebrew school started Tuesday afternoon, so we had to dismiss our public school early on Tuesdays randomly just to accommodate the synagogue.  But the harder problem was when we had bought this warehouse to renovate.  One day the architect said, you know, we need to add structural bracing according to the zoning guides. And that’s going to cost $700,000 of steel.  Oh my God.

Matt, let’s talk about the socioeconomic diversity.  I want to describe again, what was happening at Rain Lily. And then I’m curious how this varies in your many states.  First of all, their sliding scale tuition ranges from about $7,000 up to $12,000. But a lot of families are able to access Florida public money in a few different tranches.  One is called VPK, virtual pre kindergarten.  Another is for the five year olds: they fall under the education savings account umbrella, so they can get $8,000 per year from the state.

It really allows Rain Lily to then serve families down to like, maybe some of these families are probably paying a hundred bucks a month of like real money from the family just to probably have some skin in the game.

Florida seems like, wow, you could really make that socioeconomic diversity thing work.  How common is it for your micro schools across the country to be accessing state or public monies to allow this kind of varied tuition structure to really work?

[00:16:59] Matt Kramer: I mean, basically all of our micro schools access public money for that.

[00:17:03] There are a couple of exceptions: places that have no ESA, no voucher type program, no charter school law.  Otherwise we access public funding.

It’s childcare subsidy programs that are administered at the state or county or city level, depending on where you’re talking about. And sometimes administered at multiple in the same jurisdiction, which gets stacked on top for individual families.

[00:17:42] We have Wildflowers that are charter schools in Minnesota, New York, Washington DC, two in Colorado, and just got approved for one in Ohio and have two more coming in other states.

And in those places we are sort of breaking a charter school down into little micro sites, which is not the ideal regulatory environment, but we found a way to make it work.

We use ESAs and vouchers are available.  And then we use sliding scale to further differentiate it because we want to serve a mix of kids and families that loosely represents the diversity of America.  That means that we want in each school, not just the network as a whole, we want something like a third of the kids to be in families that are facing real economic hardships, like, you know, the kind that would qualify you for free or reduced price lunch in a traditional public school environment.

[00:18:32] And we want a third of the families to be above median income, some cases well above median income. Uh, and we want a third of families in the middle, what, you know, what we might once have called like working class in America. We want all economic backgrounds to be able to get, uh, to be able to participate in the schools for access reasons and for belief about what kind of country we’re trying to create and what it takes to get there.

[00:18:57] Mike Goldstein: I love it.

Would the charter school version of a Wildflower be something like you might get a charter that says, “Hey, you can open a school that in total serves 400 kids. But in real life, you’re going to have 10 little campuses that are semi autonomous, each with 40 kids or whatever, and collectively, they operate under this umbrella governance structure called a charter”?

Really, you’re trying to find that right balance where you can just maximize autonomy down to the teacher leaders. Am I saying that right?

[00:19:39] Matt Kramer: Yeah, you know, what you just described is exactly where we started.  What we realized as we’ve opened up charters in different places is the laws are differently supportive of that structure and different communities.  An example where it doesn’t work, in New York City, They’ve got a charter law there that says you can’t serve two kids at the same grade level at different addresses.

[00:20:02] Mike Goldstein: Oh, oh my goodness, okay.

[00:20:04] Matt Kramer: It’s a specific anti microschool clause. Yes. So what we’ve done in New York is we sort of have one, like, normal vertically set up charter that goes from young kids up through upper elementary.  That’s just really small. That serves like a total of a hundred kids.

And we have a second one in Colorado that’s operating on sort of that frequency for different reasons. So we’re open to both of those things and, and we just think we’re going to learn as we go. What I also hope will happen as we go is that states will think about what it means to have a charter that works for micro schooling.

[00:20:41] You know, it’s, it’s interesting to me. We don’t have any schools in New Mexico, but I keep hearing the story from people in New Mexico that they have like a dozen charters in the state of New Mexico that only have like 30 to 50 kids. So they must already have a charter law that works for micro school size. Well, I don’t know anything about it because we’re not there, but in other places we are, 30 to 50 kids is well below like minimum workable scale to deal with the compliance expectations of charter schools.

[00:21:07] And so, you know, so what I hope it will be the case that over time more states will think, yeah, our charter concept is designed to spur innovation and one dimension of innovation is Is the size and sort of the form of the schools. You know, we’re not trying to lock schools in to only 300 kids or more.

[00:21:26] That was, that’s like an unintentional consequence of the design. And so I hope states will make that easier.

[00:21:33] Mike Goldstein: Totally makes sense.  Political rulemaking once you do any version of owning. starting, launching, operating something called a school…varies massively across states and then additionally across localities.

These are often complex regs that are interpreted different ways by different people in the same locality.

So you need that headquarters level to support these 72 micros, technical consulting to help teacher leaders navigate this complicated ecosystem.

Matt, is you’ve been at this now for a while.  You and I talked in 2017, I think you’d started it in 2015.  What’s your take on the word “microschool” now?  What’s your take on the movement?  How do you feel like Wildflower fits and doesn’t fit into the larger picture here?

[00:23:19] Matt Kramer: it’s a great question, and I think you, your premise right to me of it is a very big umbrella that sort of holds the micro school community. And it, you know, it ranges in things from, you know, what I would describe as like a shared support structure for essentially homeschool.

[00:23:36] Kids like homeschool cooperative spaces that sort of call themselves micro schools, you know, pandemic pods that sort of like held on post pandemic and are still going to some, in some way, schools that have, you know, anything less than like 150 kids often can refer to themselves as micro school, what we do, et cetera.

[00:23:57] So there’s a lot of different things under this umbrella, I think, as you’re rightly noting. I would say we are. We are one, one sort of category under that umbrella, which is just, you know, schools that are like one or two rooms and that’s the whole school. And I would say, you know, some of the features of our version of this are that the schools have real estate.

[00:24:21] You know, I think one thing that occurs in the micro school world is there’s a lot of schools that don’t really have a place, you know, they meet in a person’s kitchen or, uh, their homeschools, but they get together at a library or whatever. Um, and those, you know, those are interesting too, but they’re not what we do.

[00:24:37] What we do is just things that, you know, in some ways remind you of what you think of as a school. It’s got a location, you know, you open up the door and there’s a place to hang your book bag and, you know, put on your, take off your boots, and there’s a teacher there, and there’s some learning materials, etc.

[00:24:54] We’re that kind of micro school, and there’s a bunch of others like that as well. But I think one of the challenges of micro schooling is that the word conjures up a lot of things, some of which apply to us and some which apply to others. And I guess the last thing I would say is, in some ways it’s also like the label of alternative schooling, which pops up from time to time, which also is a very wide grouping of sometimes related things and sometimes unrelated things that get gathered together.

[00:25:24] And you know, I don’t have a better alternative, so we just kind of roll with it. Uh, but I do think, I think you’re right that micro schooling doesn’t really convey that much that is really specific to a, you know, user to a family other than an orientation towards small, which I think is, you know, meaningful feature of what we do.

[00:25:43] It’s just not all of what we do.

[00:25:46] Mike Goldstein: And Matt, the micro school movement to me. Is loosely politically coded in under the school choice umbrella. Right? So there’s a lot of different ways to look at it.

But I guess my like, simple version is there’s a political advocacy group and constituency of people who are anchored around the traditional local public school.  That’s what they think needs to be celebrated, funded, protected.

And then there’s a loose confederation, not that it’s particularly aligned, but of everybody who operates outside of that traditional local public school context. Sometimes that’s, you know, school choice inside of a district.  It’s certainly charter public schools, private schools, home schools, micro schools.

You guys have an interesting inflection because you’re avowedly going for certain progressive ideals: to be particularly welcoming; old school we would just call it tolerance as a really big and lived value.

But you’re part of a school choice movement that sometimes gets coded a little bit red, with Wildflower values that sometimes get coded a little bit blue, but I don’t want to try to brush airbrush away all the nuance and complexity here, but I’m just curious, as I serve that up, how do you react?

[00:27:58] Matt Kramer: Well, I think, I think you’re on an important point.  It is the case that, that, you know, people who are looking to find things that are smaller than whatever sort of their default setting is, or customize to their kid in a meaningful way beyond what is available in their default setting, that group of people.

[00:28:24] You know, that group of people, it’s not that the group of people sort of tilt red, it’s that the group of people sort of connect to this broader choice questions that you’re describing. And, uh, and I think over the course of the last few decades, exactly how choice fits into the. Blue and red boxes has evolved quite a bit and not just in one direction, you know, it’s a quirky issue for the standard definitions of our political and so So I guess what I would say is, you know, there are versions, you know, there are moments where wildflower schools don’t Don’t push the envelope on this very much.

[00:29:05] Don’t struggle to fit into sort of a standard framework. And that is when they’re, when they are serving the youngest kids and using childcare subsidies, et cetera. I think, you know, America has accepted that a mixed delivery system for pre K. And so that, so, you know, that doesn’t really challenge the framework of who’s, who’s on which side of this thing, you know, but then there are other schools that do do sort of get in the middle of that framework.

[00:29:31] And, you know, my, my experience has been that families. may come to this topic with some sort of political leaning that reflects their, the, like the political environment of their childhood, or maybe their own political leanings, but that when it comes to their own kid, um, people are. People hear the needs of their own kid much more loudly than these other things.

[00:30:03] That doesn’t lead them all in a single way. It’s not like people listening to what their kids need all end up not in their district school, right? Many kids, the district school turns out to be a wonderful environment, but for people who find that there’s something that’s not quite working. You know, there’s an article that just came out about one of our schools called the queerest school in America.

[00:30:22] And it’s talking about a school where not, it was not actually the underlying intention of the school. When it got started, it didn’t set out to do this. It set out to create a space that was really going to work for this, for older kids, for high school age kids. And they set out to create a school that was going to be incredibly customized and very flexible around kids needs.

[00:30:38] And it turned out to be a haven for LGBTQ kids. And as a result, uh, it’s got a very distinctive culture that emerged from the, from that. And the people who have their kids there, the, the, whether they’re on, whether they sort of started out on this deeply believing in a district school or not, it’s sort of became less relevant when it turned out they needed something really special.

[00:31:01] for their kid. It’s been my experience is like people may come into this from different perspectives. Some of them may come into this from the perspective of wanting to have a program that sort of like, you know, for example, has an alternative integration of religion into the framework versus what traditional district education is.

[00:31:17] Those people may have like a bias of this is what I think I’m looking for. And people may come in with a bias. I think I’m looking for my district community school, but like, you know, it’s, I think what we’ve all, everyone who works in education just knows that like, it’s not always the case that whatever it is you thought you were going in to get turns out to be right for your kid or another kid.

[00:31:34] And I think that transcends political party. Yeah, I think it transcends ideology of like people have a sense for what their kid needs and they want it.

[00:31:45] Mike Goldstein: Matt.  I first met you in 2010. You were working for Teach for America where you later became the co-CEO.

TFA was recruiting thousands of people from tens of thousands of applicants.  You and I talked in 2010: how do you try to vet who are likely to be the good teachers? And how do you select them? And you had a lot of data because the scale of what you were doing was so large.  I always thought TFA’s work there, particularly in that era of 2010 and so forth, was really sophisticated and thoughtful.

So how does Wildflower decide if Mike Goldstein raises his hand and says, “Hey, I’m ready to start a micro school, I’m an experienced Montessori teacher,” how do you vet me?

[00:33:07] Matt Kramer: It’s a great question and it raises, I think, much more profound topics about what the role of a teacher is. In a classroom. I mean, just one thing to note sort of as a way into this question is in a traditional academic setting, the teacher is an incredibly central mediating force in almost everything that goes on.

[00:33:37] Right. The teacher is the deliverer of the content. They’re the center of the classroom tone. They’re like everything.

[00:33:43] Mike Goldstein: Yes.

[00:33:43] Matt Kramer: And it’s not surprising in an environment that is set up like that, that we find massive differences. Right. In how effectively teachers are able to help kids learn stuff and help kids feel included in all the things that we want to happen in schools.

[00:33:58] The teacher turns out to be like a central part of that story in a setting that is so teacher centered. In Wildflower and in Montessori, that’s not our vision. Right? Our vision, we don’t even call them teachers in Montessori, we call them guides. And the classroom environment is a mix between the individual perspectives and desires of the kids, the framework and choices of the Montessori materials in the classroom environment, and the teachers Skills as a guide of helping the kids connect to each other, to the materials, et cetera.

[00:34:32] And so, you know, there is less of the entire experience of, of, of, uh, personal growth and development that occurs in a Montessori school that is mediated directly through the teacher. Um, and that is important. I think it’s important for the child’s development because actually we don’t want to teach kids.

[00:34:51] That everything should be mediated through the nearest authority figure. Like that’s not my vision of the world, but also it’s important because it sets up different questions around like what are teachers supposed to do? And so, you know, going back to Maria Montessori herself, she used to say that actually she would prefer to start working with somebody who had never.

[00:35:09] Rather than try to take somebody who had been trained as a traditional teacher and, like, re educate them about Montessori and her views of what children are really like, because it was like, sort of, you know, it took, like, real work to undo misleading lessons that had been absorbed. Now, I don’t think anyone really thinks that quite in the same way anymore, in part because the child development that’s taught in ed schools these days is a lot closer to reality.

[00:35:33] Then it was 100 years ago in Italy where child development theory taught to teachers was not so aligned with our modern sensibilities, but, uh, but that idea of like, you know, the teacher’s role is something different. So when we think about this at Wildflower, what we think about is. If a person has embraced the philosophy of what their role as a teacher is, you know, as evidenced by the fact that they have been trained as a Montessorian in a high quality Montessori setting, and they’ve worked as a Montessorian and they found it to be like a good fit, it seemed right for them and they seemed right for it.

[00:36:07] We think that’s actually a lot of what we’re looking for. And, and the rest of what we’re looking for, the way we think about this is we should create an environment where people who have what it takes to do this. Thanks. Are going to feel at home are going to feel drawn in are going to feel like they fit and people who do not are Going to sense that there’s a misfit of some sort And so we basically in the I referenced the school startup journey before in the school startup journey Our desire is to create an environment that progressively reveals to you what this is going to be like And if it’s not going to be like something that you either want to do or are naturally good at, it should reveal that to you.

[00:36:47] And people opt out along the way. And we have these two stops along the journey where a panel of other teachers are assembled for what’s called advice panel. And the The teacher leaders who are in the process of starting a school, they present once in the, at the planning stage. And once at the visioning stage, they present their ideas for what they’re going to do to this panel of other teachers.

[00:37:08] And the teachers gives them feedback and advice on it and says, you know, this thing you said, my experience is that didn’t quite work that way. I think you should like, go learn some more about these different things. And that’ll be helpful to you as you design like that experience of, of hearing from other people.

[00:37:23] Saying, you know, this is what I thought would or wouldn’t work. And what I think will work in my mind, people respond to that really differently. Some people respond to that. I was like, Oh, that’s great. It’s helpful. I know now some things I’m going to do differently for the next step. Some people are like, Oh my God, I, anyone who would say the things those people said to me, that’s not a community I want to be part of.

[00:37:40] I don’t belong at wildflower, which is great. Right. We want people to be able to discover that. And, and we want people to be like, Oh, actually, you know, the problem here is not philosophy. The problem here is the thing. They told me that my plan is not going to work. And the things they explained to me about how my plan is not going to work.

[00:37:55] I don’t even know what they’re talking about. Maybe I’m not an administrator or entrepreneur. And so that’s the theory is not so much. How do we like use data to screen people? But how do we create a role of the teacher that doesn’t put everything on the teacher? And then how do we create an environment where it is going to self reveal to the teacher and other people who are watching the teacher, whether this makes sense or not.

[00:38:15] And as a result, really, we don’t tell people they can’t do this. We just tell them what it’s like and let them decide they can do

[00:38:23] Mike Goldstein: it. Fascinating.  Like so many things in education, you know, proof is in the pudding. It’s really about the execution.  You’re trying to lead people through this experience that will reveal to them whether they’ll be effective in your microschool network.

But as we know, you know, like most people think they’re above average drivers. Most teachers think they’re above average teachers. Most cops think they’re above average cops.  It’s challenging.

[00:38:51] Matt Kramer: Importantly, I would say one thing on that is importantly, we don’t give them a rubric by which to judge themselves.  I think that does spark the, you know, all the children are above average phenomenon. The question we asked them: Let’s start creating a school together, and see if you like doing this.  And if you don’t like doing it, it’s not because you’re below average. And if it’s not a good fit, it’s not a good fit.

[00:39:25] Mike Goldstein: You’ve been spending time with Matt Kramer, the CEO of the Wildflower Foundation and network of micro schools across the country.

[00:39:36] This has been micro schooling journeys with me, Curious Mike. Thanks for joining.