What are the makings of America’s best schools?

Jeanne: Every option or every school that improves, public, private, charter, and all of the others, because there is some options or competition injected, there’s still millions of students who are without the kind of education they need and deserve.

Kevin: Families often seek the best of the best when it comes to where their children go to school. Whether it’s innovative teaching techniques, outstanding academic achievements, or unwavering leadership, many of today’s schools are seeking to provide best-in-class education to their students. But what makes a school the best? How can we celebrate the schools that are meeting and exceeding our students’ needs? And how can we encourage innovation and transformation in America’s schools? This is “What I Want to Know.” And today, I am joined by Janine Yass and Jeanne Allen to find out.

Janine Yass is the founder of the Yass Prize, an award created to honor and advance education providers delivering a best-in-class experience. Jeanne Allen is the founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform and foundational director of the Yass Prize. They both join us today to discuss the makings of America’s best schools.

Janine and Jeanne, welcome to the show. Janine Yass and Jeanne Allen, thank you so much for joining us on “What I Want to Know.” And I tell you what, I’ve known you all for a long time. I’m excited to have you on. I’m more excited about the prize that you put together. It really honors some of the great American schools.

But, you know, Janine, I want to start with you. We’ve known each other for a while, and the obvious question is, how did you get involved in education and why is this important to you? I mean that sort of sets the tone for everything that’s followed in your career and the work you’ve done, even in helping to establish this prize. So talk a little bit about why this is important and how you got involved.

Janine: Well, I think I’m still running off of the passion and the energy that you and Jeanne created and David Hardy maybe over 15 years ago, when Jeff and I tried to start Boys’ Latin Charter School in Philadelphia, and I was just so shocked at every turn there. First, to look at the schools where the boys would have attended. Second, to see the huge demand in the community for this kind of choice and better schools. And then what really ignited this passion was having to fight for that choice and having to call you, Kevin, I called you the bigwigs. The big guns came down from D.C. when we were denied that charter three times, even though we had people outside the school district and families lined up to sign up for that school.

It was just such an eye-opening experience that I’m so grateful to have seen, really through your eyes, David Hardy’s eyes, Jeanne’s eyes, and mostly through the parents’ eyes. And since that time, you know, we didn’t say no then. It would have been so easy at that time to say . . . I said to David Hardy, the co-founder, I said, “David, why don’t we just make this a private school? I’m so tired of fighting.” And David said, “That money belongs to the families.”

Jeff and I didn’t need to start a school to be beholden forever and fund and be thanked year after year. All that money is in the system. It just such a logical thing for families to have that choice, and then to see it withheld from them, there’s nothing more frustrating. And we see that around the country where we go how there’s so many school organizations and operators and educators that have these amazing opportunities, solutions. Again, they’re denied funding for that. They’re denied in certain states to even start charter schools.

So we really are fighting for the freedom for families to have the same kind of educational options that middle-class, wealthier parents have, that they could choose wealthier school districts or send their kids to private schools. And no one has really thought about, “Well, what about all this money that’s in the system?” Almost $4 billion in Philadelphia, and there are no outcomes. Why wouldn’t anyone release that money to parents and let them choose where they want their kids to go to school?

And one of the things we’re really happy to be able to be doing with this, the Yass Prize, is to really allowing the seed money out there to create schools, because today we just had our first meeting to look at the finalists for this year’s prizes. And we had over 1,600 applications this year.

Kevin: Wow.

Janine: And people are out there really wanting to do this. States need it. Families need it. They need these options. And we’re just so honored and so happy to be able to support this kind of choice in education for poor families.

Kevin: Well, and I tell you, Janine, I do remember the phone ringing and you calling me years ago. And I admired your stick-to-itiveness and also supporting the vision of folks like David Hardy, who’s one of the supreme educators in the country. He’s done an amazing job, not just with that school but with other schools.

And, Jeanne, you and I, I remember we took train rides up there to help get things going. And who would have thought that all these years later, that none of us have gotten tired or weary behind these efforts. I mean there’s still more kids that need to be served. And, Jeanne, talk a little bit about your work with the Center for Education Reform, not just when it comes to this prize, but also just as significantly what’s going on with the kids with the most need and those needs still being unmet.

Jeanne: Yeah. Great question, Kevin. Thank you for showcasing so many great stories over the years, both on the podcast, in your books, in the work you do. And I think that’s why maybe we don’t get tired because as long as you’re talking about the people who matter, it’s kind of hard to get tired. Like we can get tired of our family once in a while, but really when you see them again and you realize how exciting it is to be around them, you get re-energized. And so I think this is a huge family, if you will.

The key thing is as much better as things have gotten, in that parents have options that started back in the early ’90s with choices in Milwaukee, Ohio, with charter laws, with innovative school superintendents, with the whole wave of 21st-century learning, as much as we progressed, we do also have to remind ourselves that only 30% of our kids and many less, when you look at minority and low-income kids can actually read, write, spell, do geography, civics, history, excuse me, at grade level.

Kevin: Yeah.

Jeanne: Right? And so for every option or every school that improves, public, private, charter, and all of the others, because there is some options or competition injected, there’s still millions of students who are without the kind of education they need and deserve.

And so at CER, that was sort of our quest in ’93, is to try to reach families and help them understand what it is and what was at stake because it was so easy to be comfortable. And we realized that you had to get policymakers connected with parents. And then lots of other people got into the business and started doing the same thing. And today we have a movement of hundreds of thousands of organizations and tens of thousands of people, like an army marching constantly to shake up a traditional system and help people realize that just because your child is in a failing school doesn’t mean it’s your child. It’s probably just not the right fit.

And that was what was so exciting when Janine reached out. Jeff and she were talking during COVID about doing something really different with their focus, with their philanthropy, with their energy, and their time and advocacy is how could we actually seed more quickly the ground for more supply of great options for kids. And so that’s kind of where we are today, is not just continuing to advocate for what’s right for kids and programs that best meet their needs and get new parents involved in that equation, but now we have to have the supply also because if you have those options or you now know what is or isn’t working for your child, you need a place to go and someone who can offer you what those options might be.

Kevin: You know, one of the things I like about the Yass Prize is that we always talk about how we replicate to scale. How do we take a good idea, a good school, a good approach to running a school and multiply it, quadruple it, multifold? And what happens is you run into barriers dealing with the system or dealing with the status quo. But I think that the beauty of what you have put together, Janine, and I want you and Jeanne both to speak to this, is by showcasing what’s possible in a big way and providing support to those schools that are doing really good work for students, it helps to seed opportunities for others and show what’s possible. Was that part of the motivation from your point of view, Janine?

Janine: Well, getting back to what I had said earlier, the frustration of having to ask permission to start schools, like Boys’ Latin, or expand good charters, like Friendship in D.C., or places we’ve been around the country, the fact that families and school providers need to ask permission, sit and wait, fill out applications for charters that cost a lot of monies, waste a lot of time. We did that over the last 15 years.

And when COVID came up, it was like, you know what? People were scrambling. There was no time to ask permission. And a lot of great innovators were saying, “We’re just . . .” Our first-year top award winner was an afterschool program that became a school, just out of these children had nowhere to go during the days. A lot of their parents were EMTs and nurses. They had to open up and they had to educate those kids. There was no time to dilly-dally and wait and have any kind of patience.

And it really made me realize, who needs to ask permission to start good businesses, good restaurants? In education, you have to plead. You have to play with all the politics. And one of the principles for applying to our award is this P, permissionless. And it does just seem obvious, but people just take that as like a rule from above, that you need to sit and wait for opening schools for your kids from some board at a city or a state level. It’s ludicrous. But I also think that we really are hoping this becomes a movement because how long . . .

You’ve been in this a lot longer than me too, Kevin, that it feels like we’re fighting a battle all the time, especially with the media. I open the papers every day in Philadelphia or if I’m in New York City or Chicago. After visiting these schools that no one would send their kids to it and a lot of the teachers don’t send their kids to. But when you open up the papers, you listen to the nightly news, they’re all Valentines of, “Look at this . . .” There might be one bright star out of every thousand kids that might be going to college in Philadelphia. And they shined a light on that.

The media has been very dishonest on how they’re handling all this. And you’re brave to do this podcast. Jeanne is brave to send out newsletters for the last 25 years. But we really are fighting against . . .

Jeanne: Something much bigger.

Janine: I don’t know what the word is. It’s like everyone is being hoodwinked that all this money is going into the system and that there should be a lot more success.

Jeanne: Well, and that’s a great byproduct, too, is one of the learnings that we’ve had, you know, we’ve all been doing this and whatever, we know a lot more than the average person who doesn’t have the luxury of spending the time on this every day, right? It’s not because we’re so smart. It’s our 10,000 hours in Malcolm Gladwell’s language. But we’re visiting the Yass Prize awardees on our road show last year. So we get to the point where we’ve chosen the finalists and then we get the million dollar prize winner, and the finalists also get a half a million dollars that gets announced every December.

And then we spent a couple of months visiting these organizations. Not all of them are schools. Some of them are micro-schools. Some of them are actual schools. Some of them are education centers. Some of them are hybrids. And we’d go and we’d say, “How much money are you getting from the state? How much is the district getting from the state?”

And then we started doing more research into phantom funding and realized that even in the states that provide money following kids, whether it’s through charters or through an education savings account or a voucher, well over 60% still stays in the district that student left. So Pinellas County, Florida is still getting $18,000, where SailFuture is getting $7,500. And we’re like, “We always knew this, but the money keeps staying in the district.” And we keep saying, “Well, why? These folks are challenged with children who need more services, but they’re supposed to do it on that and ask for philanthropy.”

Janine: And they’re doing a much better job. A much better job.

Jeanne: So that has caused this movement, exactly, because then we helped them . . . It’s like the imposter syndrome. They’re like, “Oh, I’m only supposed to get $7,500, and then I’ve got to ask people for money.” And you’re like, “No, no, that’s your money.” “Oh. Oh, it is?”

And so they’re getting liberated into realizing that they’re supposed to be going after that money. And so many of them knew that. Some of them didn’t. Some of them didn’t even know what’s being left on the table. And so of that, what is it, $400 billion across the country that we’re spending on education, most of it continues to go to a system even when kids leave. Like that’s unjust, right?

And so part of what we’ve realized is this didn’t start as like a cause-based thing. Of course, it’s cause. You want to help kids.

Kevin: Yeah.

Jeanne: You want to help supply. But then these folks who become awardees realize, by being with people that they would have never met, that somebody else knows something or is getting something that they should learn about or that they could do better. And they’re learning how to be better educators. Some of them are learning how to be entrepreneurs. Some of them are learning how to expand quickly. Some of them are partnering. And then they’re saying, “Why can’t we have a state like yours where you get money? Or why can’t we have another? Why can’t we change the dynamics?” We’re like, “Great. We’ll help you.”

Janine: That was really [inaudible 00:15:58].

Kevin: It’s like the ultimate support group.

Janine: It was the biggest surprise for us because we never thought about that the first year that we were going to create this family, this network of friends that have gone on to share their playbooks left and right. Like the second year Arizona Autism Schools received our grand prize. And she wants to start an autism school in every state in the country. And there’s such a high need for that, especially in poor areas that the funding and the schools are not really . . .

Jeanne: Keeping up with it. Yeah.

Janine: . . . keeping up with it. Yeah.

Kevin: So let me ask you this, Jeanne, let’s talk about the mechanics. You go about the process of executing on a vision, the vision that you and Janine and Jeffrey came up with. But then you’ve got to establish criteria. And then people are going to say, “Well, is it going to be fair? Who’s going to judge?” Talk through that process of deciding who gets the prize and the criteria you put in place to make sure that it meets the smell test.

Jeanne: Yeah. So we did not have time because we started up so quickly to develop a process ourselves. So we just said, “Who’s done this before?” So we went to the XPRIZE, and the XPRIZE has given prizes for years in major areas, space, all sorts of stuff. They did a literacy prize.

Kevin: I remember.

Jeanne: So we contacted our friends there. We said, “How did you do judging?” And they said they started with peer review. I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So after people apply, then they’re assigned a rubric.

Janine: But this was also after we set the principles that they needed to all check the box.

Jeanne: Right. Good point.

Janine: We had STOP principles that just sort of came to us over the first couple weeks of COVID. I said, “Whatever we do, it has to be permissionless.”

Jeanne: Sustainable.

Janine: “It has to be sustainable.” Meaning that we could start schools, but then there will be something like a charter state that will end up taking over the money, the funding, or an ESA state. So the principles is STOP — sustainability, transformational, outstanding, and permissionless. So once we set those parameters, then we went and looked at the different awards and how they came about.

Kevin: How many schools will receive some kind of award, any kind of award?

Jeanne: Sixty-four education providers will get between $100,000 to a million dollars.

Janine: And we’re also doing a bucket this year of honoring states that have passed ESAs. So the governors are coming to us and submitting applications for schools there that can grow with their ESAs

Kevin: This is so tremendous.

Jeanne: Yeah, the Yass Award for Education Freedom. And we’ll also be announcing Parents’ Choice award as well.

Kevin: It’s incredible. But, Jeanne, it does sort beg the question that many have grappled with for many years. What makes a great school? I mean, for far too long, people talked about test scores and assessments and how do the schools measure up. But there’s far more that goes into the criteria that parents look at when deciding on what is a great school. Talk a little bit about this notion of how America has sort of morphed itself into a one approach to measuring schools and quality schools when we all know that when it comes to families with different needs, it’s not just the assessments.

Jeanne: Yeah. We want to know how you think you’re adding value in the life of a student. So you define your outstanding, and you tell us how you’re measuring against your outstanding. And if you’re outstanding is I’m getting dropouts to go back to school and finish, then we’re going to measure you against that. If your outstanding is I’m going to get every one of my kids to and through college, then we’ll measure that. If it is we’re going to make sure they have careers, competency, we’re measuring competency. We want to value and measure not grades. We want to measure what the progress is being made against what you believe and what a parent chooses you to do for them.

Janine: This is perfect timing because this morning we just sat for the first time looking at the final 64 going into this year’s awards. And I thought this last year too. In a way what we see is almost a survey of what the demands are for education in this country. Last year, we had so many applications for schools that really were geared toward neurodiverse and autistic children, realizing there’s a real growing need for that in this country with the increase in that. This year, I think, right at first was there’s a lot more of career training technical schools, people that want to get their associate’s degree while they’re in high school and/or else at least graduate high school career-ready. So there’s a big increase in that this year.

So, really, a big factor, and this is also a no-brainer, is that all these schools have a demand. A lot of them have a waiting list to expand. So we’re just taking cues from the parents of where they want their individual child to learn. Maybe some want to learn in a learning pod in Arizona. That’s become another new concept in education, especially since COVID. Kids love those, learning with 10 other kids in a learning pod, with this great technology. And the technology now is finally catching up . . . I mean, education is finally catching up with this technology that public schools across the country have really not let that come into their curriculums and transform how kids want to learn.

Jeanne: No, not nearly as much. And that’s the whole . . . And you know this, Kevin, better than most, I mean, the whole idea of competency-based, mastery-based education. I will get through math when I have finished and accomplish mastery of a lesson. Not when I’ve gotten 6 out of 10 right, 8 out of 10 right. Since when is passing 60%? We graduate kids who have D records. What does D mean? D’s are you got 60% of 100%. Well, who decided that that 60% was magically going to get you through math?

Well, now we have adaptive learning programs. And so that’s another trend we saw starting in ’21 and now is this 21st century, that’s the transformational, 21st-century learning is what we are doing to incorporate what we know now about the brain, what we know about the way kids learn. It doesn’t have to be a computer or a VR headset, but just what are you doing to personalize the opportunity for kids?

And it’s interesting. People used to say that to me about even raising my kids. It’s, “They’re all the same. Why should they be raised any different than when I was raised, right?” But today, students are insisting that they be treated differently.

Kevin: Yes.

Jeanne: They’re insisting that they be given access to things that actually match the way they learn, what they’re interested in. They care about relevance. And I think you’re right, Janine, that so much is now beginning to come through in what we see.

Kevin: Yeah. You know, what I love about, one, the definition that you laid out, Jeanne, that what is your outstanding. In other words, what is your why, and how are you executing on the why? That sort of simplistic, yet brilliant approach, if we applied that to all schools, it would be amazing because we’re sort of taking away this robotic, industrial approach that everyone does things the same way, the same time, and is measured in the same manner. And I love that. And when you look toward the future, tell me where you think this is all headed in education. We talk about personalized learning. We talk about these specialized programs that meet the needs of parents and students where they are. But will this infect in a positive way the traditional school district’s approach? And if so, when?

Janine: Well, just based on my personal experience, too, raising four kids and having met thousands of kids through them over the last 35 years, you could ask any one of those kids, even if they were going to a private school that charged $50,000 a year. A lot of times when I would ask kids, “How is school? How’s your class?” “Oh, I hate school.” I mean it’s not just in poor areas. Kids today could put together a computer, take them all around the world to learn anything they want to learn. There was not that technology when we were little. We had to sit in these big lecture halls with kids way above us, way beneath us on their learning curves and things. Kids have it figured out. They know how they want to learn. We have the technology now to do it.

Khan Academy, Sal Khan could put the best Algebra One teacher in front of every kid in the country. Sometimes my kids would come home from the first day of school and I’d say, “Who did you get for math?” “Oh, I got the bad math teacher this year.” Well, what did that mean? That means that they had to do a lot more work on their own. Just for the luck of how kids are assigned teachers. The technology could take away all that risk and all the luck that used to happen with getting good teachers. They’re right in your laptop.

Jeanne: Yeah. I agree. And I think where we really are headed, it’s gradual, right . . .

Kevin: Yes.

Jeanne: . . . but not nearly as slow as it used to be, is to an environment where you’re actually seeing dramatic differences in traditional schools breaking up. We have schools that are seceding from their districts. We know traditional public school educators who have broken out of the box. Look, here’s the great news, not good for us who are getting older, but the great news is there’s a bunch of younger people who are coming in the system and going, “Wait. This is not the system I want to run, or that I want to work in.” Right?

And we didn’t have that luxury. That’s what I’m saying it wasn’t good for us. It’s great for us now, but we didn’t have that luxury. Now they’re saying, “Oh, I’m going to question that. I’m going to go look it up.” Right? There are so many tools at their disposal. We just have to give them the license to create. And I do think it is going to exponentially grow, as our friend Michael Mo might say that, as you accelerate, there’s a point in time which it really literally begins to spiral even more. And I think we’re probably just a few years from that spiral.

Kevin: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.

Janine: But we’ve been saying this for 20 years, that technology is going to disrupt education. And because of the big systems that don’t allow it and that don’t allow bad teachers to go off their payroll and good, young, smart teachers to come in and show us this technology, it won’t disrupt if people think that all the money has to stay in a system that’s failing and then add on more hours after school to catch up with math, with these great blended learning programs. I mean, it’s not fair. I always say it’s not fair. This is why our first year’s awardee was an afterschool program. They used to have to go to failing schools from 8:00 in the morning till 3:00 in the afternoon. And then with all good intentions have all these afterschool programs, boys club, girls club, all the afterschool sports programs or tutoring programs come in and try to help them make up for that time.

Now, I don’t know any kid or any adult that could sit in front of bad teaching or a bad job for eight hours a day and then say, “Okay. After work or after school, now you’re really going to do the real thing.” I think it’s really an injustice that we do that for poor kids stuck in bad systems. So it’s great if those schools could become the real seat in time learning program.

Kevin: I think they ultimately will. As Jeanne said, the good news, as long as we’ve been doing this is we’re starting to feel movement underfoot. I mean I think that there’s a newer generation of learner. There’s a newer generation of potential teachers that they’re not going to accept the way it’s always been. And you can feel it. You know, in the schools that we run at Stride, we can feel it.

And this leads me to my last question, and this is what I really want to know. Talk to me about what advice you would give to an aspiring school leader who has a vision. They have that why that they want to execute on, but they feel that bureaucracy, Janine, you talked about, could be an impediment. And yet, I believe there’s hope. What advice would you give to that leader that has this vision for some specialized program? How should they move forward?

Janine: I think they have to fight for those families that want what they’re creating. And it is political. It is political. They have to be brave enough to go to their state reps, their congressmen, their mayors, their governor and demand this. And we don’t have that . . . What we are hoping with the award is that we do amplify the parents’ voice. A lot of this we’ve been talking about everything on a school level. School organizers and leaders know about this, but it’s not getting down to the family level. And until there are authentic voices and protests outside of school districts wanting this, it can’t just be put on school organizers. They have to make sure that parents are aware that they deserve this choice, this option and mobilize their voices. And they become the face of this.

I mean, Jeff and I have our kids out of school. Jeanne’s kids are out of school. We have no skin in this game. But for other poor kids to have the same opportunities that other children have all around in states and suburbs that offer better education.

Kevin: Jeanne?

Jeanne: Only thing I would add to that is, and I think it’s all parents and all kids. I mean I do think that there’s a diverse movement of support afoot. And it’s important that we have pluralism at work in our schools and in our advocacy. And I couldn’t agree more. If you’re an education entrepreneur out there who wants to do something and is feeling roadblocks, learn what other entrepreneurs did. They’re all over, through our work and others. And then get the people who you are targeting, who you want to be supporting, and get them engaged. And if they get engaged, you know, Kevin, you were a state lawmaker, you know, a city lawmaker, D.C., which is like a state and 10 people call you, you woke up, right?

Kevin: Yeah.

Jeanne: It doesn’t take that much. It should not be that daunting. It does not take you running for office to have an impact. You just have to create some noise. And so I think let’s just make some noise.

Kevin: Yeah, well said. Let’s make some noise. That’s a good way to end it. Look, Janine and Jeanne, thank you so much for joining us on “What I Want to Know.” I look forward to working with you all for many years to come.

Jeanne: Thanks, Kevin.

Janine: Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin: Thanks for listening to “What I Want to Know.” Be sure to follow and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app so you can explore other episodes and dive into our discussions on the future of education, and write a review of the show. I also encourage you to join the conversation and let me know what you want to know using #WIWTK on social media. That’s #WIWTK.

For more information on Stride and online education, visit stridelearning.com. I’m your host, Kevin P. Chavous. Thank you for joining “What I Want to Know.”