Hannah Frankman - Rebel Educator

0:00 [Music] anecdotes for success level up with truth meaning tradeoffs perspective [Music] all right today we have hannah frankman on i said that right correct yes you did i i always panic because we talk on the phone or i've met people from social

0:30 media and then all of a sudden when it's go time to say the name out loud for the first time i'm like oh man but this was an easy one so thank you thanks for coming i just i just saw i'm gonna i'm gonna interrupt you for a second actually be super rude in the introduction um i just saw this quote the other day i forget who posted it on twitter um but it says something along the lines of

0:50 you know somebody's a reader when they say a lot of big words and they mispronounce all of them um and i feel like it's kind of the internet sort of exacerbates that problem but i i don't usually judge people for mispronouncing things it just means you read everything and that's that's a good thing it's good to be a reader it's really solid it does fall a lot easier in your mind doesn't it mm-hmm yeah now 100 so well

1:16 we're excited why don't you just start off and tell us as much as you want about you and then we usually interrupt ask questions and obviously there's a couple points i want to talk about and i i love what you're doing even though it goes against where i work but but you know we no but we've talked about that and that's that's that's how we got in touch with each other and i love it and i i

1:38 think you're doing great thanks so i'll stop talking go ahead yeah i'm going to give you guys a super brief overview and then you guys can redirect me into any of the pieces of this that you want to delve into more um the super short story is that i grew up homeschooled and ended up working in alternative education totally by accident just kept realizing that i felt more strongly about education stuff than i did about anything else so i just kept coming back

2:01 here um the group homeschooled first through 12th grade i skipped college to go work for a college alternative program called praxis which is basically a startup apprenticeship program um and i learned a lot in my years there about um like what actually matters in education as it translates to the real world and building careers um and learned a lot about building my own career which was really valuable and important um it actually is going to be

2:34 six years at the end of this month from when i first landed an internship with praxis that was the most stubborn intern they ever had i just wouldn't leave until they gave me a job eventually it took a long time but i won so worked with them for a long time um worked with hundreds of young people going through the program who were coming out of directly out of high school some of them were even dropouts

2:55 some of them weren't college dropouts some of them were college grads but all of them wanted to go work in business and they wanted to take practice as a more efficient path than four years of business school to go land a job in the startup world so learned a lot from practical experience working with these kids about what actually matters in translating the transition from going to going from being a young person in school to being

3:18 an adult in the workforce um and then after i left praxis full-time i was working as a freelancer for a while and again kept ending up in education stuff and eventually all that translated into building rebel educator which is how i met paul um rebel educator is a media brand or a content brand covering just everything alternative education we want to build a resource for parents who know their kid isn't happy in traditional school but don't know what

3:46 else is out there what other options exist because there are a lot of options but a lot of people don't know that and a lot of people don't know where to start and unless you happen to know somebody who gets you tapped into the alternative education world or you happen to make the perfect google search it's not really easy to find all the stuff that's out there so we're trying to solve that problem so now i get to spend my days

4:08 talking about education and how to educate kids and how to how to raise whole healthy functional competent adults which is a very fun thing to get to talk about all day so that's the short version of my story i'm sure we'll delve into more pieces of this as we go hannah when you say that use the term alternative education what does that mean that's a really good question and that's actually um it's kind of a poorly

4:35 defined term at this point because people ask that question a lot um and i'm stubbornly like no we're gonna stick with the term and we're gonna make it a thing but not everybody knows what we mean um basically broad umbrella sense i just mean anything that's not public school or institutional school um and i say that with the asterisks that like there are a lot of private schools and a lot of homeschool programs that are just trying to replicate the

4:59 traditional classroom at home and i lump all of those very broadly under the umbrella of traditional school like if you're taking the public school curriculum and you're doing it at home you're not homeschooling in like the the purest sense of the word you're just you're not really like solving any of the problems that public school has except maybe the like the social components um so anything that's not that is alternative education so which so what why what's wrong with

5:29 that why what's wrong with that you know the current one or the the social you know whatever the normal if you will for lack of a better term um you know what's wrong with it how long do we have [Laughter] there's there's a lot that's wrong with it um and there's a lot of different angles that you can take to answering this question i mean if you just look at the raw numbers of how american kids stack up globally like

5:56 if we assume that all the things you're supposed to learn in school are actually important which is an assumption in and of itself but if we if we grant that one okay um kids in america score really really poorly compared to most countries um whether or not all the stuff we're testing is even relevant is a separate issue but right it even in its stated purpose of raising kids who are competent readers and are good at like

6:23 math and science and they kind of like are competent in all these academic subjects that we culturally deem as important um even at that the public school system fails it is is hannah's to exasperate that issue if if that's true which which coincidentally i was i was reading something last week was talking about us in math us meaning the and science united ranking like 14th in the world or my numbers could be off but to your point

6:52 we're not number one uh or or even close do we don't we spend the more the most per per student uh in the world as well on top of that or do i have that wrong i actually don't know how we stack up in terms of spending paul might know actually well i haven't checked for a few years but we did and i'm i'm assuming it's still high pretty sure the numbers have gone up not down

7:16 if if we had a producer i'd have them look right now but uh but why you guys are taught i think that i think you're right but right but anyway i couldn't help but throw that in there so we're not doing well and we're and we're as a business person that's not a good outcome but anyway no no if this was if the traditional if the public school system was a private institution it would be out of business

7:40 like the only reason that it's sustaining as is well actually there's two reasons one is it's propped up by government funding so the incentives are off um but two it's just it's so ingrained in our culture that it's just the status quo and it's what you do like parents go well i went through the system and i turned out okay so i'm gonna send my kids through the system and they're gonna turn out okay too um and there's even like general

8:03 generational biases against not going to school that kind of that come from like a couple generations back when people went to one room schoolhouses that only went to eighth grade and they're like well i want my kids to have a better education than that and we just sort of culturally default to that being the public school system but to go back to your original question of what's wrong with it um it does horribly even at its status at

8:23 its stated purpose um but even its stated purpose is kind of flawed like basically the whole system is set up to it's a factory institutional model of creating good factory workers and good citizens like that was that was the whole point when the system was designed was to build these very conformist units that could fit into all of the cogs of this like industrial society that was being built um and there are a lot of really

8:55 detrimental side effects that come along with that of kids learning to just sort of defer to authority and hate learning and they think that they need to have a teacher to learn and they think that learning is this thing that you do just to make sure that you get a good test score and check a lot of boxes and the whole system is just designed to funnel kids through 12 years of public school into a university

9:15 have them get good marks in a university and then go be just sort of like a generic piece in the massive industrial or corporate cogs the corporate system now that we have been trapped in debt yeah and be horribly trapped in debt um you're spot on um and it raises a lot of kids that are not self-sufficient at all they don't have skills that actually translate to the real world i hear this from employers all the time working at

9:44 practices and i'm sure you experience this all the time too you hire people and they don't have any of the actual skills that you need to do well at a job they can tell you what the capital of nebraska is but they can't tell you like anything about any of the things that they're actually supposed to do while they're working which are much harder to google as a sidebar than the capital of nebraska like nobody needs to remember that

10:06 up here we're just gonna zoom in it's like it's right there you know to interrupt you super quick i always laugh with my students uh attorneys have walls and walls of books and resources and and and online uh online databases for court precedence and cases doctors have tr like every profession on the planet has training and staff development things to do but kids are just supposed to memorize stuff yeah hey hannah can i can i push back on

10:39 you here because what fun would this be if we just agreed with with with each other and everything at all please right and and and you know and and um i i'll probably push back at a couple areas because you're you know it's super interesting and frankly to so far nothing you've said sounds wrong to me but but but i have to push back anyway so if if we're so poor in all this and i'm just putting my i'm putting my you know

11:05 hat on to push back if we're so bad at this why do we have the number one economy in the world and why do we have you know the most educated society and why do we have all these wonderful things that make america the wonderful place that that it is and and all these you know well i i which i do believe and i'm sure you do too that we do have a lot of wonderful things but if if

11:28 we're doing a poor job and i think education and this is my economist hat talking i think education is the number one thing we can do for any society if you believe in grown society and making it richer which makes you live longer and have a more prosperous life and and can help help the less fortunate there's so much benefit to that right and if we're if we're you know doing so well in all these areas

11:54 what would be the you know i'll just say well look we're we're winning right so why would we ever want to change what you know what do you think about that or what do you say to that that is a phenomenal question i love that um i have a couple of thoughts on this the first the simple answer is that we have all these things in spite of our education system not because of it um which says a lot about all the other

12:17 like social structures that we have um which is a separate conversation but like it's not it's not because of our education system um and i think a lot of this is there's a lot of um historical a lot of historical points that need to be touched on to answer your question thoroughly um a lot of the world is trying to play catch up to the us so if we're trying for comparing our we're looking just at the date of like

12:45 what our school system is supposed to do and then how it's actually performing um a lot of the the countries that are scoring better than us are just trying to play catch up to the us and they're working a lot harder than kids in our school system are to to catch up to us which whether or not that's a good thing is entirely separate question like whether or not it's actually a good thing for all the

13:08 kids in these education systems in other countries just be trying to catch up to the us um but we've had this really robust economy for a very long time and it sustained itself through many changes in our education system um and frankly declining numbers in terms of test scores and literacy rates and all of these things which is in a lot of ways become really exacerbated over the past few decades it's a lot worse than it used to be

13:37 um but we've had like we've led the world economically and in a lot of ways culturally too for a very long time and a lot of the things that make the us a really great place to live um have their roots in our economic policy and our social freedoms and have very little to do i think with our education system i mean if you look at the us in like during the revolutionary

14:07 war era there was no public school system and yet we had incredibly high literacy rates and our i mean you look at the you read the writings that were supposed to be public publicly consumed literature the newspapers and the commentary of the era and they're using all kinds of big words that kids in school today don't know what on earth they possibly mean um the they were referencing shakespeare and latin texts and greek philosophers and there was this very high level of

14:38 academic knowledge and understanding that was uh sort of built into the culture completely sans public school system um which is a really interesting thing to study too but you know that that was the culture that built the economy that we live in now and i think that if we i actually think that some of this probably will change over the next 40 50 years if on a global scale if the u.s doesn't

15:09 catch up in terms of education because you know you look at kids in india and in china who have who are they're very fluent in english and they're really adept at all these academic subjects and they also know they have tech skills and you're looking at all these tech companies that are us-based that can hire globally um i actually think there is going to be a really big shift where americans coming into the workforce are going to

15:35 be in for a little bit of a shock when they realize they're competing against a global market and somebody in india you can hire them for half which you hire somebody in the us and they're totally like they're fluent in english they're competent in all these subjects they're a good programmer why wouldn't you hire them i actually think a lot of this is going to change but it's really we're not where we are in the us because

15:57 of our education system and when you look at the people that have built the the companies and created the innovations that have made america great most of them didn't go to traditional school or if they did they dropped out or they did very poorly in traditional schools they succeeded in spite of the system not because of it um and i really think the average person is really disserviced by the education system that they're sort of thrust into without thinking because

16:27 it's just the status quo well that was that that was a great answer i was gonna say i don't know if that answered your question at all i feel like i rambled kind of an area i hadn't given up you know i didn't get a lot of thought to this isn't the world i really live in that that much but it it it really makes a lot of a lot of sense to me and and adds up um paul i think i interrupted

16:47 you i apologize no i was i was just gonna say it was it's fantastic because back in the early days of this nation the people that didn't have any type of literacy they had the freedom to pursue interests and hopefully learn how to read and then when the public education was founded it was founded for the sole purpose really to probably train the working class to build our great infrastructure right uh that ship sell and now you have

17:13 countries like india and china that have more english speaking people than we have people and those us-based companies i mean they don't they're not going to just tolerate uneducated american people working for companies when the talents elsewhere i mean that's sort of what you're saying the fields just changed yeah yeah no question about it the globalization point hannah is is is probably going to force some things that that people stuck in the status quo aren't going to be necessarily

17:43 comfortable with and and i i think your argument might be and i it certainly would be mine based on what i'm thinking through that that's a good that's that's ultimately a good thing for us and maybe maybe that's a catalyst for change in in the in the school system or is it just so wrecked that it's it's uh in your opinion is it i mean is it a tear it down kind of thing is it just look for alternatives which it

18:08 sounds like obviously you you helped to provide in in you know in the average person who doesn't know anything about those alternatives um why why what what motivates them to look at them yeah i think there's there's a few different pieces of that question that i want to dig into there so i'm going to answer the first part first um about like the system itself i don't think the answer to any of our

18:38 education problems in america and globally too because a lot of my criticisms aren't just of the us system because like there are a lot of like most standard education in at least western countries is fairly the same in terms of the structure and it's not it's all broken okay um i don't think that reform is the answer i think that reform is an enormous waste of time and energy i think that we have to just innovate

19:03 our way into the public school system being entirely obsolete or having to innovate very aggressively in response to keep up um and i think that's true of any large bureaucracy or large corporation which in a lot of ways becomes a large bureaucracy um you just things become too calcified and too bloated and you're just not going to it's really hard to change even in something that's like very purely free market and capitalistic and it's even harder when you have something that's

19:33 highly regulated and it's got public policy involved so it gets even more more complicated to change it's not going to happen in the public school system and it's a total waste of time to even talk about it in my opinion um change is going to happen by entrepreneurs and innovators building new schools and building new education programs and the customer base which is parents sending their kids to these new

20:05 these new options because they do a better job solving the parent's problem which is how do i prepare my child to be successful in the adult world than the public school system can like that's that's the answer and we're already seeing a lot of that there's a lot of people who are building a number of really cool innovative schools and innovative models and it's actually very exciting that there are a lot of competitors in the space

20:28 because i also don't think that there's one right answer because kids are really different and adults are really different we're all individual humans we're extremely unique and there is no one-size-fits-all education that is correct or proper for every single person yeah there are standard things that it's pretty useful and important for everybody to know but there's not even one standard way of teaching them and kids have such varied goals and varied interests and varied preferences in how they want to learn and what they

20:58 want to learn some kids love learning through projects some kids are super academic some kids get super fired up about like a classical education and other kids are much more interested in learning skills that they can apply right away in the real world and see the impact of those things that they're doing and and let their education evolve around those goals that they're moving towards and i think it's really exciting that we see a lot of different types of education

21:22 models starting to expand and starting to gain traction because i think that's the ideal system is one where there's this whole marketplace of different education options and different schools and parents can pick and choose what's best not just for their children in the plural but for each individual child and even mix and match options for each child as they go through their schooling journey or career or whatever you want to call it i think that's really the ideal and i think

21:51 that's what we are seeing starting to expand which is super super exciting um but i think i think that's the answer there there isn't one answer there's a lot of different answers and the more space we make for people to build these differing answers the more successful we're gonna see our kids become um and then the more like we all will thrive because the kids are the future that's awesome what i uh you know i agree with everything you're

22:22 saying there it's my turn it's my turn to ask the question that pushes back a little uh yeah i'd love more than anything to have a class like mine in every school we talked about that on the phone but we won't get into that i talk to a lot of principals and teachers of even just some of our local elementary schools on lower income sides of town and pretty much i don't think if the school was there the parents of

22:50 some of these families would put their kids anywhere or do anything for them uh so what what do you say to the person that's like well the school was is almost like the the third parent and that did i mean the kids stay after school while parents are working that that the school provides clothing sometimes and three you know two meals of course and then sends a backpack home what what's gonna happen if public education cease to exist that way and we

23:16 had all these alternative education methods which i agree with what what would happen to these kids well i think they're i don't think that we're in any danger of of public education going away completely anytime soon 100 yeah and i think that there actually are some really interesting like i'm just speculating here like i haven't sat down and run all the numbers and seen exactly what this would look like to pull off but if you look at arizona

23:42 which just passed an esa program that allows every student to take their state funding to any school that they want to attend so instead of their it's seven thousand dollars a year per student instead of that being tied to the public school that only goes to the public school it follows the kid so if the kid wants to go to an online school or a private school or a micro school or they want to enroll in different

24:05 programs as a homeschooler that money becomes it either goes directly to the school or becomes a voucher that parents can use for these different programs which is really cool to see um there's a few other states that have um similar programs although they're not universal the way arizona's are arizona's the first state where this just applies to every kid no matter what the circumstance um but it's gonna be really interesting to watch what happens in arizona because the public schools

24:32 suddenly has a level of competition like it's actually playing in the free market in a way like education never like the public school never has before um because historically alternatives were really expensive or like parents had to fund with their own money on top of the tax dollars that they're already paying to their public school system which is really messed up um they'd have to pay with their own money to send their kid to a private

24:55 school or they'd have to invest their own resources to take an income cut or whatever to homeschool and there's tons of options for parents in states that don't have these esa programs is one of the most um this is the faq about alternative education that bothers me the most people are like well i just can't afford that it's like well have you tried crunching the numbers like yes you can if you really care you can make it

25:13 happen um but it's gonna be really interesting to watch what happens in arizona because all of a sudden these public schools are gonna have to really get their act together or they're going to just go out of business effectively but i think there's going to be a really interesting competition opportunity in these lower income neighborhoods like if the public school system is losing funding um there's room for an entrepreneur entrepreneur to come in and build

25:44 something better like there are all kinds of things that are flawed with a model in school across the board whether it's a standard public school in a rich neighborhood or a standard public school in a poor neighborhood and there's tons of room for people to come in and build build something better that serves the same function and solves the same problems for parents um and especially if we see more and more esa programs like the funding is there

26:06 because it's coming from the state so i think there's room for some interesting stuff there's also there's a school um in philadelphia that uses grant money to fund itself and it's not it's not profitable yet but they're funding or they're they're building a school in downtown philadelphia for inner city kids that again like they'd be going to these lower income lower test score just sort of underfunded public schools and instead they're going to this like super

26:32 entrepreneurial project based school that's you know designed to help give them a crash course and everything they need to go be entrepreneurial adults and it's funded through grants so there's tons of options for people like the woman who's running that school she's just super passionate about creating better options for kids in philadelphia it's just like her life's mission and she gets super excited about going and build this i think there's a lot of people out there who feel that

26:54 way so i do think that there's tons of options for the private sector to come in and build things that are way better than the traditional school system so yeah it is a problem that there are kids who don't have anywhere else to go beside school and they absolutely need to be taken care of but just because public school is what's doing that now doesn't mean it's the only option and doesn't mean it's the best option

27:17 well it's funny that's a great answer and i the fact that certain communities or districts are starting to let parents take their their tax dollars to other schools that's step one uh because right now there's so many non-funded mandates in public schools and then the government sprinkles some money on top of it and the schools have to try to try to make it work but they can't do that if all the money's gone and and i think

27:42 i think i think the void would be phil one more question matt i know you probably have some stuff finally go you know way more about this to me i'm fascinated but do you envision and this is why i wanted young because maybe there are models like this like why can't a company or a business person corporation just create like an institution where where kids come in and apply and maybe live there almost like a prep school like any

28:10 kid like you mean like kids could come apply to go to school with this institution it'd be almost like a talent funnel for the company yeah like said said school you know uh i'm surprised i mean i guess they don't feel the need for it but i i always feel like that's gonna happen someday that's just my wild speculation but i don't know if the public would would agree with that any thoughts on that or is that too crazy on

28:35 my end i don't think it's crazy at all i think we're going to see all kinds of interesting experience experiments over the next couple decades i think that we're about to enter the golden era of alternative education and new models and innovation like it is sorely sorely underrepresented you can see like you can have some some like i don't know tech person come in and fund projects as like a side project and make a huge impact in the realm of

29:01 education in a way that like if they were going and investing in a tech company like maybe they'd have a fraction of a chance at seeing success like everybody's competing in the tech world nobody's competing in education it's so it's wide open it's the wild west like the land is just free for the taking you just got to come in and take it um so i think we're going to see a ton of stuff start to crop up over the next

29:22 couple of decades because people are really really hungry for it um and i think our feet are slowly being dragged towards the fire and that like things are gonna get worse we're gonna have to make some changes um so i don't see why we wouldn't see people experimenting with that i don't have a strong opinion on whether or not it's a good idea i would have to think about it more but it's definitely an interesting idea and

29:46 i don't see why like i worked for a startup apprenticeship program for years that did like their whole their whole business model was taking young people with a little bit of kind of like general customer service service industry working experience and training them in everything that they needed to go needed to know to go become effective startup employees employees doing non-technical things like marketing and sales and customer support and then we had a whole network of businesses that

30:15 we were partnered with that would hire through us so it was sort of like a an outsourced version of what you just described and it works super well it's it's been the first class went through in 2014 and it's 2022 so it's been eight years now i guess that it's been a profitable successful business um hundreds of alumni who've gone through praxis and it works really well and i think they're going to be a lot more whether

30:40 it's it's created directly by the companies that want to hire or whether it's like a third party kind of like a lambda school or bloom tech i guess they're called now kind of model where you're like your business model is training people to come become employees i think we're going to see a lot more of that um like schools that are designed explicitly to train people for the workforce which is like college is kind of support supposed

31:08 to do that but it does it an incredibly roundabout way um and a lot of what's in college i think or what college provides can and should be unbundled too like it's all you just get this lump deal of like we've got this package for you there's like some socializing involved we got sports we've got uh you've got like the college experience where you get to live on your own for the first time but like in a

31:30 safe environment where you're around a bunch of other people who are the same age as you and not on their own for the first time and there's like uh the you know the i forget what you call the person in the dorm the resident are our resident assistant assistant that's the word yeah in case you actually have problems and then we got like you know you get the degree so you're like prepared for the workforce and you're

31:53 getting all this liberal arts education like all of these things should be unbundled you can like all of these services would be much better offered as standalone things that you mix and match and it's not all costing you 60 grand a year at minimum hannah i would i would assume and i believe wholeheartedly and i love the free market solution and because i love it for many things it's not perfect for everything and nothing's perfect anyway

32:18 but i think it's a better answer in a lot of ways but the other thing you'd get out of that is the market would shift based on the the education would shift based on the markets need for demand in certain areas so right now turning turning the school system is is turning a you know a giant battleship right you can't it can't be done it can't be done quickly anyway and and in a in a market system it's going

32:45 to turn like that or you're going to be out of business uh and you know you're going to lose your money your investment whatever the case may be and i think you'd have a much more efficient model in place there uh there's no question in my mind about that um what do you in and you've actually answered a host of my questions as as we've been discussing here but you're so knowledgeable on it and that's clear it's it's fantastic

33:11 what what what do you get from the current teachers you know i i have teachers in my family and and and um we all know teachers right and i think we all respect them and and and they have a a you know have a difficult job and you know this this isn't to bang on teachers i'm sure that's not your intent by any means um but what do you hear from teachers because anytime i get in

33:37 kind of a discussion about this stuff i'm usually told one to stay in my lane and and two you know it's hard and has this and that and and i i have no doubt about both of those things but that's one of the things in in at the top of my mind is what what where do where do what are you here yeah that's important no i have a follow-up after you answered it that time oh okay okay um

34:04 so to be very clear and you you said this too but i want to just be super clear about my position i don't think any of this is the teacher's fault i think the teachers most teachers are really great people with really great intentions who are doing really meaningful work they're trying to help kids become whole adults that's a huge task and very important task to take on right and they're trapped in a really horrible system

34:30 and they're aware of that to varying degrees okay and i think that the teachers that i also the other thing i want to say um i hate the stay in your lane argument because you're an entrepreneur you're a business owner you are the in a lot of ways the customer who's purchasing the product that's coming out of school like you're an employer and you also have the perspective of you're an entrepreneur and any kid who wants to be an

34:55 entrepreneur is going to be following the same path that you're following so in a lot of ways i actually think that the perspective of people like you is more important than the perspective of teachers which again not anything against teachers but they spend their whole lives in the education system they go to school for 12 years the traditional like first k through 1st through 12th and then they go to college and then they go immediately into the

35:16 classroom as a teacher so they most of them have never had any experience outside of that except maybe some summer jobs and so everything that they know is theory because getting a job in the teaching world is nothing like getting a job in the private sector it's completely different so a lot of them are extremely knowledgeable about a lot of things but your perspective is somebody who's again like you're the employer and you're also the entrepreneur and

35:42 business owner that some kids want to become your perspective on what's broken and what's wrong is extremely important because you're seeing things that a lot of teachers aren't just by nature of the system that they've been in their entire lives and it's really hard i think for a lot of them to look at the system really objectively when it's all they've known like if you've only ever lived in i don't know western kansas your entire life it's really hard for you to look at

36:06 it and say like yeah these planes are really flat compared to the mountains 600 miles to the west because you've never seen them you don't know how to compare it's like yeah this this is how this flat land compares to the flat ocean because you've never seen that either if you don't have anything to compare it to it's really really hard to objectively analyze what's going on um but to actually to actually answer your question um

36:30 i get there's a few different things that i get i get a lot of teachers who are um definitely system apologists who are just like i'll make a criticism they're like we do that on anyway and i'm like i think you missed my point because like there's there's nuance here that i don't like maybe you're doing it and that's awesome but i don't think you're doing what i'm talking about um so there's definitely some of those

36:52 but i actually hear from a lot of teachers who are extremely on board with what i'm talking about and who reach out and thank me for what i'm saying or who um comment on twitter threads that i write with their own insights about like yeah i've seen this problem crop up in this way or like yeah i've really noticed that this thing is lacking and a lot of them feel really trapped by the system and are really excited to see people

37:23 building other options i've heard from some teachers who are trying to get out of the system and are you know trying to figure out where where they can take their teaching skills to go support some of these innovators and entrepreneurs or who can go become like they're interested in becoming teachers in some of these alternative programs that are starting to crop up i was talking to a teacher recently she's the sister of a friend of mine who

37:45 just quit her public school teaching job this past year and she's building a micro school in virginia and she's taking this huge leap like she doesn't know if it's going to work or not but she's right and she's like getting the kids signed up and it's wow so cool there's a there's another person who reached out to me on twitter this summer who said he just quit his public school teaching job he's in central illinois where the only option the only in-person

38:09 option is public school there aren't any private schools and he's building a self-directed learning center and he's trying to get kids signed up and he said the response has been really positive from local families they're actually really interested in what he's doing so i think there are a lot of teachers that are aware of how broken the system is and are trying to get out i mean there's a number of people like paul who are doing these

38:28 really really amazing things inside of the system who are such a blessing to the kids that are there who are trapped you don't have any alternatives besides what you're offering so i think there are a lot of people out there who are really awake okay well that's what i was gonna ask what what do you tell the teachers that say i love to teach i i i think i make a difference if i have more freedom i need

38:54 to get out of the system uh you you kind of touch base with that uh i actually have more specific thoughts on that if if we have yeah no that that would be yeah go ahead i'll stop that yeah so one i think like if you're in the system and you're trying to you're trying to make a difference inside of the system i think that that's a noble and valuable thing to do um they should all message paul on

39:22 twitter and get his playbook for what he's doing like that's actually what you should do but but what paul is doing is really really awesome and i would love to see more teachers doing what you're doing um i think there's you know we're seeing more and more schools and and organizations that are supporting schools cropping up so for teachers that want to get out of the system i would say um go do some research on some of these

39:51 different schools and look for teaching opportunities that are open synthesis is a really cool school that's um it's based on elon musk's at astra school which he originally started in california for his kids and the kids of other spacex engineers and tesla engineers um and it's now been morphed into this online school that's open to anybody and um it's run by some of the guys who co-founded at astra with musk um and it's

40:21 they hire guides their their waiting list is enormous they're trying to scale really quickly there's opportunity to work there um i would look into montessori schools i would look into acton academies action is really really cool um the model that they're running and they they call their teachers guides also and they're probably there they're active academies all over the world um and a lot of them around the us and there may be opportunities there to teach or to start your own too there's a

40:49 company called prenda that actually their model is they work in states that have these esa programs they're in five states right now they're in arizona louisiana new hampshire colorado and kansas but they're working actively to expand and i hope they expand really quickly um but they they use state funding to fund micro schools and so they'll have a teacher that'll start a micro school and it'll be like 10 kids and they'll get the state funding for all 10 of those kids and a

41:19 little bit of it goes back to prenda hq and then the rest of it pays for the teacher's salary and then you know the teacher is running a really cool alternative curriculum that's provided by prenda and they're doing like there's they have a lot of freedom to set up their their classroom however they like and that's i think primarily for elementary school kids um but that's really cool look at sora schools which is online project based

41:43 middle school and high school um they're expanding as well i think there's a lot of opportunities for people who are teachers and want to do something where they have more freedom to teach in the way that they feel is best there's a lot of different companies already doing this stuff that they could look into working for or start your own like go build a self-directed learning center go build um a micro school of your own go start a

42:07 sudbury school go start a montessori school if you have the entrepreneurial bug and you're willing to put in the effort of starting something there's definitely a market for it can you explain to our listeners slash viewers a little bit more about micro schools yeah micro schools are really cool um a micro school is basically usually it's about 10 kids the size can vary it can be a little bit bigger it can be a little bit smaller

42:34 and usually it's mixed grades so you'll have like an elementary micro school that's like third through sixth grade or something like that or or like k through k through second third through fifth it gets divided up into sort of grade level or like age levels but you have a lot more overlap between ages so that older kids can teach younger kids and they can collaborate with each other um and usually they're running so there's like one teacher or one guide

43:02 for the small school um a lot of people run micro schools out of their home so there's i got a i got a virtual tour of aprendo micro school in arizona a couple weeks ago and it was the coolest thing um i just got like walked around the this this couples that i've been friends with for a long time um they they're running a micro school the the husband works for parent hq and then the wife is the micro school teacher and

43:28 they've got ten they've got two of their own kids and then eight other neighborhood kids that just come to their house every day and they all sit around the kitchen table and in the living room and the kitchen island and each kid's got their laptop and they're each working on their own thing they're using like math apps to learn math and different programs to learn grammar and they all set their own goals for the year and also for the day it's

43:48 like okay my goal today is to do x y and z and then i'm going to like work in a self-directed way towards that goal and my guide is there my teacher's there if i have any questions and then they have like collaborative um portions of the day where they're working on projects together or whatever there's a lot more room and that that's the prenda model specifically like other people start micro schools and do different things um but that's kind of

44:14 the general the general setup is like mixed ages about 10 kids one teacher a lot more room for personalized attention and and customization around each kid's needs and goals which is really really nice for the kids um and you know these micro schools aren't stuck with all of the traditional schools kind of standard requirements so you don't have to waste all this time on state required stuff that isn't actually helpful for the kids

44:45 at all and it's smothering their love of learning and instead you can give them as much self-direction as they can handle and give them a lot of space to go chase the things that they find interesting usually in a much shorter school day because it's a lot more efficient than public school um and you end up with this like really localized education model that's 100 focused there's no you know huge administrative system that you're

45:15 working under your building a system that's its sole purpose is to cater to the needs of the kids of the community which i also think is really cool i think that localized education is way way better than this like huge bloated standardized model that assumes that some rural kid in wyoming who wants to be a rancher needs to learn the same thing as a kid in backwater louisiana who like really just wants to get out of

45:42 louisiana and go to new york city so that they can become like a work on wall street and some kid in arizona who just like really wants to get a really well-rounded liberal arts education because they want to be a writer and they just want to like know as much as they can about how the world works so they can be a great writer like assuming that all those kids need the same thing is ridiculous and so localized education that caters

46:05 to the individual kids in a community is really exciting too to me that's so exciting because it almost sounds like the model of how i have 15 kids for two hours a day and then they go back to their home school and they accomplish way more than they do in the three hours but and then i have 15 in the afternoon uh and they explore if anything they think they're interested in i almost try to talk them

46:29 out of it because i want them to keep exploring keep exploring keep exploring but to do that at a younger age oh my gosh i mean they want their sponges at younger age whether it's languages or mathematics or science or exploration or travel or imagination that's got to be really cool to see one of those and to see that it's it's really cool and the thing that's really exciting about the younger ages too is that kids are innately wired to learn

46:54 yes they're extremely curious like it's it's in our biology we wouldn't survive as a species if we didn't want to learn things because we don't come out of the womb knowing how to survive in this world we have to learn it so kids naturally want to do that and one of the things that the school system is really really good at is making kids hate learning and not want to learn anymore like kids graduate from school

47:15 this is one of the great tragedies of our era kids graduate from school so excited that they never have to learn anything again and that is tragic and it is it is almost criminal in my mind it is it is a moral failing that we are it is immoral to do this to children and yet we do it to almost all kids in our country um and around the world and so when you have kids in these

47:41 alternative programs they get to learn how to like they get to maintain this excitement around learning but whatever they choose to pursue in a self-directed manner they're learning this meta skill of learning how to learn which especially in the 21st century when the job market is changing so fast and probably half of the jobs that kids 20 years from now are going to be going into probably more than that actually don't even exist yet like who was who

48:06 was going into kindergarten in 2000 going i want to be a social media manager like that didn't exist right so and yet how many of those kids are social media managers now um so kids are preparing kids for a world that doesn't exist yet so the more adaptable and the more self-directed we're raising kids to be where they can go learn whatever they need to do for whatever jobs are emerging in a decade two decades three decades

48:31 that they're really excited about and they want to go work in like that's the best gift that we can give them that's the best way we can equip them for the future and that's what all these alternative programs are letting them be self-directed or allowing them to do which is another reason why i think what paul's doing is so cool so so hannah how do we know that these opportunities uh outside the traditional education objectively how do we know

48:52 that they're better is are we measuring them in some way yeah i mean there's a lot of different ways to measure them um it's pretty common for kids in these alternative systems to actually score better on standardized tests because even though they're spending less time on like training for um they're they're able to learn really quickly and again that that

49:23 enjoyment of learning hasn't been smothered so it's actually a lot easier for them to just like go study and and pick up whatever they need to pass the test um so they're one of the actin academy is one of the schools i think is really really awesome um and one of their like in their early years they had a kid who got a perfect score on the psat and he was like not in any like advanced

49:47 math programs or anything like that he was working in this very um kind of free range open-ended schooling environment and scored amazingly well alpha school in texas is another really cool one um they get kids that score fives on on ap tests all the time and they don't even have teachers they're learning everything from apps in a really self-directed manner so there are a lot of schools that we do have test data that we can look at

50:15 um but i think a lot of it like we're looking at the whole person right because you're raising whole people you're not just raising test takers um kids who are going through these alternative models and you see this a lot with homeschoolers too um they tend to do better adapting to the real world they tend to be actually more confident and more poised because they're interacting with the real world with more agency in a way that kids in traditional school never

50:41 get um you look at their job performance when they start working a lot of them can start working sooner because they're not spending as much time on all of these general requirements that kids in regular school spend seven hours a day in the classroom doing and then bring home and do for another two or three hours a day because i guess the seven hours wasn't sufficient to you know have them get everything done um a lot of them start working sooner but a

51:06 lot of them are really competent in the workforce because again they're they know how to pick up new things they know how to learn and they the transition is just a lot easier when you've already had that agency as a kid it's already a known thing to you um so i think like you can look at these different individual schools and if you look at the different models too they all have success stories too like they're they're trying to sell

51:30 the thing that they're building so there there's a lot there that you can go and you can look at but i've seen like just anecdotally i've known a lot of kids who are homeschooled i've known a lot of kids who went to public school and i've worked with a lot of them in praxis and teaching home school classes and all different types of things that i've done over my career thus far working in education and i often see a distinct

51:54 difference between kids who went through alternative models and kids who went to public school and there's some kids who went to public school and are doing amazingly in spite of public school but it's very clear that the ways that they're thriving are in spite of schools the things they're fitting in around their school time um but i think i think there's going to be more and more of this data to look at in like a really statistical manner as

52:18 we just see more kids coming out of these different alternative programs and as more data gets collected but anecdotally speaking i think the models absolutely work and if you just talk to a kid who's at a micro school and you're like hey what are you learning about they're actually super excited to tell you and they can tell you eloquently and articulately and they can look you in the eye as an adult and they can tell you about it and they can show

52:40 you a project that they're working on like none of those things like that that would be a rarity to see in a public school kid that they'd be confident looking at adults in the eye and explaining what they're working on and be excited about it um and i think that in and of itself speaks volumes i can i tell you that the time that i realized that the traditional education doesn't really work in the classroom yes

53:04 [Music] so for 17 years i taught every level of social studies from 7th through 12th grade and i'm trying to teach global studies to 9th and 10th graders that have never left their town or maybe they've been to disney world right or whatever and it's like i can't pronounce some of the names of the chinese emperors we're talking about like i don't even know how's this 9th or 10th grader supposed to know it so i finally just gave the kids every

53:32 unit we were studying i just gave them the notes no projector at the time only you know letting one line of knowledge come out at a time so they could write in the filling blank and i'd give them all the all the the notes with a lot of spaces and then this was the time youtube started coming out you know i'm dating myself a little and i would just find videos and little blurbs of any any important topic we

53:56 were talking about and then they would get in groups and talk about it and ask questions and play what if that happened when you were that age and they'd start writing and writing and writing and writing and then when it came came time for that regents exam they always crush the essays because they had stories and you know we do vocabulary because you know you do have to know if you you don't have to know how to

54:18 pronounce it like we said at the beginning of this podcast but you have to understand what the word is but we we did most our reading for telling stories and looking at pictures and looking at videos not reading books and textbooks different from books and that really that really made a difference to me so i sorry if i ramble too much but ever since that day i'm like they don't need you to spoon feed them knowledge they need to explore with

54:45 you by their side to kind of keep them on the right direction if that makes sense yeah i i love that i think i'm glad that you brought up youtube actually because i think this is another thing that like the kids the world that kids are growing up in now is very different from the world that their teachers grow up in and i think that often gets underestimated um like people talk a lot about the problems like you know kids have all

55:07 this extra peer pressure because of social media and they have all these distractions from social media and all that those are accurate criticisms but kids also have access to information in um in ways that you know two generations ago we couldn't have even dreamed of and there's a really i can't believe i'm blanking on i'm clearly not a basketball person because i'm going to tell you the story and i'm i'm i can't remember this guy's name um

55:35 oh man this is gonna it's gonna come right out it's the it's the young guy on the celtics the young superstar you can tatum there we go thanks guys so jason tatum there was a really interesting wall street journal article on him a couple years ago about how he used youtube to become a basketball star um and it was about how different his basketball education was than the the older guys in the league that he was

56:04 like coming up and playing against and beating and like basically he grew up with youtube like he he kind of grew up on the same timeline that youtube was growing up and so he had he was able to go watch clips of all of his favorite players he was able to watch kobe bryant michael jordan and all these guys play basketball and he was able to watch their highlight clips and he was able to watch them again and again and again and

56:29 he's able to pause them and rewind them and slow them down and study all of the different moves like signature moves that these guys had and then he was able to go and practice them until he'd master each one so we could go through and watch all of michael jordan's clips and like master each one of these things that he did in a way that kids who didn't have access to that in like the 90s they were growing up watching

56:55 basketball on tv and that was that they'd get they'd watch a game and that was it and you know you look at like how kobe bryant would have learned how to play basketball he go watch michael jordan clips and and like he'd watch him on tv and that's it and then jason tatum comes along and he can watch the same youtube clip a thousand times until he's mastered it and he just did that compulsively as a

57:17 kid because he wanted to be a basketball player and he loved basketball so he'd spend hours on youtube watching these superstars and that just like completely changes the game pun not intended of like learning how to play how to play basketball or how to master any other subject and so when kids are motivated to do something and that's like a separate conversation how do you motivate your kids because some kids have a really strong sense of passion and purpose and

57:41 some don't um but once kids are motivated to learn something they have all the resources they are like really the scarcest resources time because so much of their time is being sucked up by requirements that we haven't re-examined for a very long time and haven't really like sat down with and said okay like going back to first principles what is the world that we're actually preparing kids for what if this is relevant anymore what isn't what are we missing

58:04 that should be included here but they're wasting all this time on stuff they don't even have time to use the tools that are available to them but i think that's also sorely underrepresented in the conversation around education is like look kids have access to whatever they need we just have to teach them how to harness that and help facilitate the chasing of these different passions that they have but the youtube thing's really important i think harness that's the key because

58:30 the the public schools in general i mean we already made it clear there's a lot of good teachers they want to be the gatekeeper for everything in the control and the authoritarian when really it's all about connections and harnessing and guiding and mentorship and anybody that gets through the system whether they like school or not they'll go back because i have it happen all the time and i see it with my friends if a student comes back to you years later

58:56 and starts telling you all about their high school experience it has nothing to do with high school it has to do with the connections and mentorship you provided and we don't need this big archaic system to do that you know you talked about all the alternative ways and i'm in love with that whole micro school thing now so i'm i'm rambling again but the youtube and the jason tatum and the mentorship that's the future yeah it it is the future and i think

59:23 i mean the school system and i talk about a lot about this a lot with universities because when you look at the history of the university it originally was founded to be the central hub of knowledge like it it was a nexus of information in a world where you had to travel by horseback hundreds of miles over many many days over rough terrain to get to a place that had this like central hub of information of knowledge of

59:51 books it had libraries and scholars and like it was you needed this physical hub of information because it was the only way for information to be transmitted and the entire university system became completely obsolete the minute the first computer went online the minute the first computer connected to the internet the death warrant for college was signed because the purpose of college was like it's no longer relevant we don't need a central hub of information anymore um and i think a lot of that's true for

60:20 the school system too where people really get i i hesitate to even say this because again like so many teachers are great but there definitely is an ego thing too for some people where they're like i'm i am the the conveyor of knowledge and you need me and there's sort of this ego built into the system itself um not even the people in it but the system as a whole where it's like you you need us to teach you to teach you

60:43 the ways of the world and how to be cultured and how to be educated and how to sound intelligent and you really don't at all but the system is very very married to like well this is just the way we do things and there's a lot of that i think that needs to be again it all comes back to innovation for me like it just has to be it's the system isn't going to change we just have to

61:04 build better better systems and then everybody will leave and then the system's going to go oh no i guess we better fix our fix ourselves or we're gonna go bust you know we'll we'll wrap this up in a minute i mean first of all we're gonna have you back someday because we haven't touched touched anything about the the kickback uh kids and parents and and just generally people in society get when they decide not to go to college we

61:30 haven't we haven't talked about uh so many other educational issues uh oh crap i'm losing my point now i actually had one the the kids the kids like i was gonna end this on a bang the kids laugh when i do this uh i hate when that happens man go ahead i'll no well no no i mean i i was going to say the same thing sounds like you got it paul but i mean we definitely want to

61:57 have you back hannah but i i hope i hope you can continue to get a good platform to have these conversations with because i think it's super important and i'm sure there's some and one of the things on the next conversation i'd like to dive into the arguments against what you're saying you know in some depth because there's always there's always a push back there and i'm not i'm not saying the the right but i like to look

62:19 for those those pain points and those other issues because it's fascinating and i think it's i think it's also responsible but i hope you continue to get a platform to have these conversations because i i can't i can't keep seeing what i'm seeing and not just see something that's needs tremendous improvement i think there's a tremendous number of people in the system already ie teachers and i'm sure administrators who would be the first i know two people they sh

62:50 two teachers this year or one who's already quit one who's looking to when they're young um i can't imagine how many are out there i think there's so many who would love to continue down this path but under a different system and i hope you get an opportunity to keep having these conversations because i i i don't want to overuse a word but or be hyperbolic but vital i think it's vital and and people need to have these

63:15 conversations especially people within the industry and and who know you know more than i do and and can challenge some of the weak spots and help improve upon them because i'm sure that's what you want anyway you you know you you don't have all the answers i'm sure you'd be the first to say but but you you i'm these conversations have to be had so i i honestly wish you the best in that i would love to have you back in

63:37 the future but i hope you can continue to have these conversations and challenge uh the system in a way that that because i think it needs to be done so i'll stop there paul go ahead now uh i was gonna say uh when i dive into teacher twitter education twitter there's a lot of people complaining about working conditions and teacher pay and teachers leaving the profession and deep inside i mean individually everybody stories their story but for a systematic

64:08 for something systematic structure that i don't personally like it's not really a bad thing no it's just bad if they don't get to do what they love anymore but that's why people like you hannah and your platform rebel educator uh is good because maybe maybe it'll help guide people with alternatives to keep teaching as well right i i hope so i that's that's that's the goal that's the dream um i think you know like matt you use

64:35 the word vital i think i don't think that's an overstatement at all because it is it is really important education's the beginning of everything childhood is the beginning of everything you have to it's really important it's a really important thing to get right and the bar is very low to get it more right than most of us currently are and it's so exciting to me to hear to meet people like paul who are doing really cool

64:56 things inside of the system and to meet people who are stepping outside of the system and building new things and i think i think we're really at the start of a big wave of change i think that covid opened a lot of people's eyes i think the death of the institutional education system is going to be one of the enormous silver linings of covet it was going to happen anyway but it's dying a lot faster than it was on

65:19 track to because of people bringing school home and seeing what actually is happening in schools and sort of breaking through some of the taboos around having your kids home all day so i think i think we're on the cusp of a lot of really big changes and it honestly kind of feels like an honor to get to be part of that conversation this early and to get to be meeting all of these people that are frustrated with the system or doing

65:44 other things and hopefully being able to be helpful to them um and this was a great conversation too you guys asked me some questions that nobody's ever asked me before actually this was really really fun i had a great time thank you so much for having me i would love to come back absolutely and and i'm gonna put you on the spot now because we are on camera i'd love you to zoom with my classroom sometime

66:05 i'm in okay well i figured it wasn't really honest no invitation declined how dare you i would love to i would be it would be my pleasure well thank you hannah tell everybody where they can find you and and social media platforms etc go for it yeah you can find um rebel educator on twitter it's just at rebel educator you can also find me on twitter at hannah frankman um rebel educator we have a website rebeleducator.co.co

66:37 we have we're building out a pretty big content library of articles and resources we're just getting started but there's going to be a lot getting published there over the next few months and you should also absolutely sign up for our newsletter rebeleducator.substack.com my friend taylor writes that and he is an amazing writer and if you're not subscribed to this you're sincerely missing out on really amazing spicy but also very useful content in your inbox every week

67:03 um so that's where to find us you can always i run twitter you can dm me anytime i am always happy to chat happy to answer any questions that people have so definitely don't feel shy about reaching out if there's anybody listening to this who has questions or if there's any way i can be of service i'm always happy to be but twitter is probably the best jumping off point because everything else is linked from there

67:26 super powerful isn't it twitter that's a whole nother conversation get kids on twitter that's that's a very loaded scene there's a lot more nuance to that but also it's very useful that's the first project we do in class linkedin accounts and twitter accounts and after i love that so much no tic tac yet all right hey until next time thank you hannah keep fighting we appreciate you yeah thank you so much guys this was great absolutely

67:57 you