đď¸Episode 004 – The End of One-size-fits-all
Itâs 2024. You can customize everything from your coffee order to your car’s playlist. So why are kids still stuck in a one-size-fits-all classroom?
Imagine Amazon only sold one product, or Netflix had just one show. Sounds ridiculous, but that’s how we’ve been doing education for a century.
Our recent podcast with Michael B. Horn started the same way most conversations about education have since Sir Ken Robinson’s iconic 2006 TED talk: the education system has been breaking for a long time.
“One-size-fits-all was never the right way to educate kids or serve families,” Horn began.
Yet despite near universal agreement on the problem, the solution has been more elusive.
Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and author of From Reopen to Reinvent and Choosing College, argues that while change is coming, it’s not going to happen overnight.
For one, most reformers (though well-intentioned) are trying to fix the whole education system through top-down changes. They propose sweeping policies, new standardized tests, or introduce technology into classrooms en masse.
Why do these efforts always fall short?
Horn explains:
“Public schools are part of a complex value network involving regulators, voters, parents, teachers, unions, and more.”
This intricate web of stakeholders and interests makes the system resistant to change. Horn’s mentor, Clayton Christensen (the “jobs to be done” guru), might say that schools get a specific job done for society (perhaps equal parts education and babysitting).
“New ideas that don’t fit into the established processes and priorities are often rejected,” Horn notes.
Hence, system-wide change is met with resistance, and the fundamental structure of education keeps on killing kids’ creativity.
The “Great Unbundling”?
Instead of trying to overhaul the entire system at once, Horn proposes an alternate model of âunbundling” education. Change is more likely to come from outside the existing system, albeit more piecemeal.
Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are one of the main drivers of this unbundling. These programs, now available in at least 14 states (including Utah), grant families a flexible scholarship for a variety of educational options.
“My guess is around 10 million students or so are actively taking advantage of choice options,” Horn estimates.
However, about 90% of families start by spending ESA dollars on traditional private schools. For some families, switching schools is an improvement, but many of the shortcomings of public schools also apply to private schools.
Over time, however, Horn reports that the share of ESA funds devoted to private school tuition decreases while spending increases on curriculum, instruction, tutoring, and specialized services.
In other words, families must learn to customize their children’s education, a process that typically unfolds gradually over time. The forecast for Utah suggests that only 50% of ESA funds will go to private schools, indicating a much higher rate of customization and unbundling.
Matt Bowman, founder of OpenEd, attributes this difference to OpenEd’s long-standing presence in the state. As he puts it, “My Tech HighâOpenEd nowâhas been around for 15 years, showing that there’s a way to ‘Ă la carte’ your child’s education.”
By demonstrating the viability and benefits of personalized, flexible education options for over a decade, OpenEd has primed Utah families to utilize ESAs from the start.
Not Your Grandfatherâs âSchool Choiceâ
The distinction between ESAs and traditional vouchers is crucial here. While vouchers typically offer a substitute one-size-fits-all solution, ESAs provide the flexibility for true customization. However, as Horn points out, this customizability is only valuable if there’s a vibrant marketplace of options for families to choose from.
“We need to focus on creating entirely new systems,” Horn argues, “rather than trying to transform the existing ones.” This means building a robust ecosystem of educational providers, resources, and models that can cater to diverse needs without demanding the full-time parent-as-teacher presence often associated with traditional homeschooling.
Yet, it’s important to acknowledge that the current system is working well for many families. The frictions involved in customizing educationâresearching options, coordinating schedules, managing multiple providersâcan make it unattractive to those who are basically satisfied with traditional schools. As Horn notes, “We shouldn’t expect an unbundling of school to happen en masse or right away.”
The path forward, then, is not about forcing change but about creating opportunities for those who seek them. It’s about building sustainable models like OpenEd that can serve as examples and catalysts. As more families see these alternatives in action, the “Great Unbundling” of education will continue to unfoldânot as a sudden revolution, but as a gradual evolution towards a more personalized, flexible future of learning.
Links and Resources:
- Michael Horn’s latest book: From Reopen to Reinvent
- The Future of Education | Michael B. Horn | Substackâ
- Follow Horn on X
- Clayton Christensen Institute
- Outschool
- Odyssey (ESA platform)
Learn:
- How the education system is moving away from a one-size-fits-all model towards more personalized options
- The growth and impact of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) on school choice
- The challenges of creating sustainable alternative education models
- The importance of the “hidden curriculum” in preparing students for real-world success
- How to teach professional communication skills to young people
- The value of entrepreneurship in developing crucial life skills
- The potential for technology to enhance personalized learning while maintaining human connection
- The role of social trust and word-of-mouth networks in education marketplaces
- The shift from a “how economy” to a “who economy” in educational decision-making
- The need for better rating and review systems in education marketplaces
Transcript
Introduction and Welcome [00:00:00]
Matt: Welcome to this edition of the OpenEd podcast. We’re excited to have you join us. Our guest today is Michael Horn, one of the world’s most respected thought leaders in education. Michael has a long and impressive bio, but in essence, he’s deeply involved in every aspect of education.
I’d like to give a special shout-out to his most recent book, “From Reopen to Reinvent,” which features My Tech High, now OpenEd, as one of the highlighted providers. Thank you, Michael, for joining us today. We’re really looking forward to our conversation.
Michael: It’s great to be with you guys. I was chuckling at your introduction, Matt. You said “one of the most respected” and so on. I’d say I’m most respected in your corner of the world, but I’m not exactly wandering the halls of Congress anytime soon. So who knows?
Isaac: Matt, which page was it that My Tech High was mentioned in the book?
Michael: You guys are mentioned a few times in there.
Isaac: Matt probably knows exactly which page it first appears on. That’s how excited we are to be chatting with you.
Michael Horn’s Recent Book and Personal Connection [00:45]
Matt: We’re so glad to have you, Michael. Let me share a personal story that you might not even remember. Back in 2015, I had been running My Tech High, now OpenEd, for several years and reading everything you were writing. I thought, “I’ve got to chat with this guy somehow.” So I responded to one of your blog posts, challenging something you said. You actually responded, and I was incredibly impressed by that. We ended up having a dialogue, and I’ve been honored to be connected with you ever since.
What I shared was that our model had been following the disruptive innovation cycle to a T. We found non-consumers of the public education system, i.e., homeschoolers. We then innovated around the edges of regulation, without crossing legal boundaries. We predicted that regulators would attempt to catch up and edit regulations, even if they weren’t changing the law. All of those things were in your disruptive innovation cycle. I thought it was fascinating that you nailed it so precisely.
Michael: I had forgotten about that specific interaction, but I remember because I always loved engaging with people who gave earnest pushback in comments. That’s how you learn, right? If someone’s just being a jerk, I’m not going to read that. But I remember, I think I was testifying in Utah – or maybe it was some conference in Utah. I’m just recalling now. I’ve been in some state legislatures, but you came up to me at the conference and said, “We are doing this, look at what we’re doing.” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Then I’ve obviously learned a lot more about you all in the years since.
I agree that not just in the K-12 system, but through college and into employment, you all are truly rethinking what I would argue is the value network of what it means to get educated in this day and age. It’s a very different world from the 1930s when there were a lot more middle-class jobs that didn’t require advanced learning.
Discussion on Education Models [03:34]
Matt: So, Michael, tell us more about what you’re seeing these days.
Michael: My perception, and you guys are much closer to it because you’re educating the families, is that one size fits all never made sense. It was never the right way to educate kids or serve families. It worked for a number of decades because the expectations were such that it sort of stayed in line, but it wasn’t really the way to optimize learning or development or opportunity.
The system has been breaking for the last several decades. And then, my perception is that parents increasingly are not putting up with one size fits all. They’re saying, “We are making choices.” They’re making lots of different choices.
Some of them are going to the micro school for everything.
Some are going to an independent school for everything.
Some are going to a charter.
Some of them, increasingly, I think, are starting to say, “We’ll take a little bit from here. We’ll go here for the sports. We’ll take this tutor,” and they’re cobbling it together.
Parental Choices in Education [04:39]
Michael: I think a lot of people are worried about the transaction costs on parents. I am too, but I think parents have always dealt with this stress in coordinating after-school activities, figuring out who’s gonna care for their kid in summer, and so forth. So I think it’s less of an add-on than we think.
And frankly, to your point, policy is starting to catch up in some meaningful ways.
Somewhere between 13 and 19 states now have education savings accounts type policies (ESAs). I think it’s very significant. You obviously have figured out how to partner with districts and help them stand up alternative schooling options in some pretty neat ways. My belief is that this competitive pressure is a good thing because districts are going to have to find increasing ways to offer a portfolio of options and get out of the one-size-fits-all mindset.
Adoption Curve in Education [06:18]
Isaac: Michael, you’re probably the best person I can think of to ask this question. I would love your take on where we are on the adoption curve. For decades, if you say “Oh the education system is too rigid. It’s too confining. It constrains curiosity,” everyone agrees. But then all these innovators come out there and say “here’s this new model, here’s this new thing.”
They tried to do vouchers back in the 90s and either if it’s a private alternative, they never get that much scale, or even if it’s a policy change, it seems pretty limited. I heard a stat, I don’t know if this is true, that there’s 47 million students in the U.S. that have access to some kind of school choice program or another, and only 1 million of those are actually taking advantage of it.
It feels to me like since COVID, the adoption has actually increased in a meaningful way – like an exponential growth, not linear growth. There are more and more parents that actually are ready now for the things everybody’s been talking about. But I could be wrong – all these ESA policy changes could be innovators getting too far ahead of their skis and the market might not be ready for it yet. What’s your take on where we are on that adoption curve?
Challenges in Education Innovation [07:32]
Michael: It’s a great question. Here are a couple of thoughts:
My estimate is that about 10 million students are actively taking advantage of choice options. That number could be higherâpossibly 25 millionâif you factor in families like mine who can choose where to live based on school districts. But let’s stick with 10 million as a conservative figure.
Now, these 10 million aren’t necessarily “unbundling” their education. They’re not engaging in the more radical forms of choice or what we might call “permeability”âmoving fluidly between different educational options. The group doing that is smaller, probably closer to the homeschooling population of about 4 million.
COVID has significantly accelerated this trend. While many rushed back to “normal,” a substantial subset realized, “Wait a second, we can do things differently. And it’s kind of awesome.”
The ESA movement is fundamentally different from vouchers, and that’s important. A voucher is essentially a ticket for one thingâit’s still one-size-fits-all to some degree. An ESA, on the other hand, says, “Here’s a pool of money. How do you want to distribute it across various options?” If you don’t use it all, it rolls over to the next year, expanding your future choices. It’s a very different mindset.
Supply and Demand in Education [10:25]
Michael: I think the big question in terms of “are we getting out ahead of it?”âand I’m worried about thisâis that I don’t think the supply side is at the maturity it needs to be. The demand, I think, is growing. But in terms of a real marketplace of different options that are sustainable? I don’t think we’re there yet.
I say that because I’ve seen a lot of micro schools and other options that don’t feel like they have sustainable business models past year two or three. It’s often teachers saying, “I’ll volunteer for a year.” But that’s not what we want. We want you to make a living doing this, to have it work out for mutual benefit for everyone.
I don’t think we’ve spent enough time thinking about real sustainable models. This has to be bottom-up, not top-down, but I don’t think there’s been enough focus on building models that can last.
Microschools and ESA Policies [13:56]
Matt: I just want to add a couple thoughts. The Wall Street Journal comment around ESAs being just vouchersâwhat’s interesting is that the data from these ESA providers shows that still 90% of ESAs are going to a single provider: private school.
Except the forecast in Utah is 50%. People in the market are projecting Utah’s usage to be 50% because My Tech HighâOpenEd nowâhas been around for 15 years, showing that there’s a way to “Ă la carte” your child’s education.
I find it fascinating that as other states adopt ESAs, and even you’ve said it in articles, the adoption over time goes from a single-payer voucher to an Ă la carte model. We see that happen over years of an ESA, and Utah’s ESA just started August 7th. It’s the first in the market right now, and they’re projecting people are going to use it more Ă la carte than any other state.
Michael: That’s tremendous, Matt. I didn’t realize that. The evidence, I think, is supporting the idea more broadly. I agree with the 90% number, but if you look at Florida, I think it’s now down to 70% or something like that. So more people are realizing they can break this up, fracture it, and fractionalize it in different ways.
It’s something you see in all markets, right? People are initially not aware of how they want to customize things. Think about the Henry Ford Model Tâany color as long as it’s black. That’s great, it’s an automobile. But then people start to become aware. “Oh, I want a different color. Oh, I want a different seating arrangement.” Suddenly, choice becomes more viable as consumers get more experience with it.
Vendor Side of Education Marketplaces [17:58]
Isaac: You know, it’s funny that the vendor side, the provider side, I think is a little bit overlooked. There’s this idea that if we pass an ESA, then boom, the market’s open and all these providers will flood in. But this is a two-sided marketplace, and any two-sided marketplace faces the cold start problem.
In this case, it’s not too hard to get the parents and students because you’re basically just offering to give them money. That’s a really easy thing to sell. But on the other side, I think there’s been a lot of hesitancy.
If you go look at most of the existing ESA marketplacesâand that’s probably an overly generous termâit’s usually just literally a list of text with hyperlinks to different providers. There’s very little marketplace functionality, but it’s also just too broad.
Can you imagine if Amazon from day one was like, “We’re the everything store. Literally everything you want can be bought and sold on our platform. Go ahead, vendors, start listing stuff.” It’s too big. They started with used books only. Or Airbnbâif they were like, “You can rent anything from anybody.” No, it was just rooms in a house. It wasn’t lawnmowers and kitchen utensils.
The Importance of Niching Down in Education [21:51]
Michael: This is a crucial point because markets and investments thrive on certainty. Out School, as you know, conducted research through their foundation, entering various markets and essentially giving away money.
To Isaac’s point, distributing funds is straightforward, but encouraging families to spend it is challenging. It requires social trust, recommendations, and guidanceânot in a top-down manner, which often raises red flags, but through grassroots social trust. It’s about families saying, “Oh, that provider is trustworthy, and you’ve used them? Alright, I’ll give it a try.”
This process takes time. You’re correct in saying it’s more effective when the initial scope is narrow. It becomes comprehensible and digestible. As Clayton Christensen would say, it solves one job to be done, not millions. If something claims to solve a myriad of problems, it’s likely solving none effectively.
Challenges of Nonprofits in Education [24:18]
Michael: Having run the Christiansen Institute, a nonprofit, for a decade, I’ve seen firsthand how challenging this sector can be. It’s often death by a thousand cuts. One funder initiates this program, another starts that program, and suddenly you’re juggling numerous initiatives without a cohesive strategic direction.
It’s tempting to say, “Of course we should do that. How could we not help that one child?” But sometimes, the best course of action is to recognize that a child might be better served elsewhere. Our greatest service might be saying, “We’re not the right fit, but let us help you find the appropriate resource,” and being comfortable with saying no.
We struggle with this approach. Here’s an unpopular opinion: I believe we do ourselves a disservice by distinguishing between social entrepreneurs and regular entrepreneurs.
Isaac: Amen.
Michael: At its core, building a business is about helping someone make meaningful progress. By creating a separate category for social entrepreneurship, we inadvertently invite the very problem you’ve described.
The Value of Private Pay Options [26:44]
Matt: That’s a fascinating perspective. Isaac, you’ve expanded my viewpoint on this. You suggested we should have some private pay options, and I see the merit. It’s an effective way to get immediate feedback on quality and accountability. When services are free and lack that financial buy-in, we miss out on a valuable feedback loop that can drive higher standards for teachers and curriculum.
Michael: It might feel counterintuitive in education, but a clear indicator that someone truly values your service is their willingness to pay for it. I shared this perspective with another nonprofit CEO about a year ago. I told them, “You don’t need to fear charging for your services. It’s a strong signal that you’re providing something valuable. If people aren’t willing to pay, do they really have enough skin in the game to follow through with what you’re trying to help them achieve? I have my doubts.”
The Role of Ratings and Reviews in Education [27:54]
Matt: This ties into the ESA marketplace we were discussing earlier. We’re missing out on the ratings and reviews that Amazon has mastered. Almost nobody buys anything on Amazon without looking at the ratings and reviews. In the ESA marketplaces, we haven’t seen that yet, and I really think that’s a crucial missing piece. What are your thoughts on that, Michael?
Michael: I completely agree. I’ve made this argument to my friend Joe Connor, who runs Odyssey, one of these ESA transaction platforms. I’ve suggested that ultimately, he’s going to need to become the guidance function because he’ll need a way to represent value. I hesitate to use the word “quality,” but let’s say “value” in varied ways, because people aren’t going to think about value in a monolithic way.
In some ways, he’s going to have to innovate beyond what Amazon or Yelp have done. He’ll need to give texture to what a service is helping accomplish and whether it’s succeeding. I think we’re going to need more of this kind of feedback system. And I believe it should be a very bottom-up solution to help reduce friction, increase transaction volume, and create good matches on these platforms.
Matt: That is the challenge because sometimes we’ll get feedback from parents that say, “Hey, my child loves ALEKS math,” or “My child doesn’t love ALEKS math.” Parents ask, “Well, what’s the difference? Describe your child.”
So now it needs context in this ratings and review system of what type of child was using this. Then, you know, based on that, it was a 4 out of 5 for this type of child, but a 1 out of 5 for this other type of child, and that’s complex.
The âWho Economyâ in Education [30:19]
Isaac: This conversation reminds me of my experience in the B2B SaaS startup world. We had a podcast where we explored the concept of the “Infocalypse” – there’s too much information out there, and trust in typical sales and marketing tactics is breaking down.
We interviewed the founder of Trust Radius, a software review site. He shared fascinating insights about the limitations of traditional review systems. Other sites like G2 suffer from what we call “4.7 star syndrome.” Everyone has figured out how to game the system. If you have 5 stars, it looks fake. If you have less than 4.7, you don’t look good. So everybody aims for 4.7, and the ratings lose meaning.
Trust Radius found that the aggregate score of a tool is about 50 times less important to buyers than who the rating comes from. If you’re a CFO trying to buy financial software, you don’t want to just see an overall rating. You want to know what a CFO of a similarly sized company thinks of that software.
We’ve moved from a “how economy” to a “who economy.” People don’t ask, “How do I solve this?” They ask, “Who like me has solved this already that I can go to for help?”
This is why it’s so hard to sell into the homeschool market. It’s the definition of the who economy. It’s all word-of-mouth networks. I’ve moved to five different states and plugged in as a new homeschooler in every one of them. It takes a couple of years before you discover all the opportunities because it’s all just word-of-mouth networks.
Trying to combine the trust built in that one-to-one, who-do-you-know sense and scale it onto some kind of digital distribution is a really unique challenge that we’ll start to see solved.
Michael: I totally agree with everything you said. Understanding the situation and circumstance is critical. We need to combat against that while creating social trust in the interim. That’s what you just said, right? It took you two years to build that trust.
It’s interesting to hear those reflections because I’ve said similar things without the depth of experience you’ve had. Two companies trying to sell into the homeschool space… But word of mouth and trust is very deep. People can hear, “Oh, that’s how they thought about it. This does or doesn’t reflect my situation, what I’m trying to accomplish. I will or won’t take that recommendation.”
The Hidden Curriculum: Equipping Kids with Essential Skills & Habits of Success [34:09]
Isaac: I want to get some advice for parents from you because you are a parent yourself. You have kids. You’ve written some really interesting stuff about what you call the hidden curriculum, which I think is just so cool.
It’s like, what are the things that you are learning maybe without even consciously knowing it? The environment that school puts you in, you learn what’s explicitly taught, but you also learn other things. Some of them are not necessarily useful things in the market, like that there’s one right answer, or you have to wait until somebody tells you what to do for innovation.
But you mentioned things specifically like project management, networking, understanding professional norms. I could go on rants about that for a long time when it comes to hiring young people. These are ways of building social capital that aren’t ever explicitly taught, but that are probably more important than how well you do in algebra.
This kind of hidden curriculum, how do you recommend parents think about this and help equip their kids? How do you try to equip your own kids with these kinds of social capital, emotional intelligence type of skills?
Michael: You’ve just made it more relevant. You’ve made the skill much less opaque. It’s clear what we’re actually trying to convey here and why we’re trying to convey it. Okay, you did it there. Now let’s do it on some other domain. Let’s transfer because we want you to build the skills so you can take it to different places.
That’s valuable. Ideally, you’re doing that starting with some real-world projects and you’re then moving into an argument about the political landscape and then something about history. You can move around. You’re Galileo trying to convince people why they shouldn’t burn you at the stake. I don’t care, but you’re trying to build this skill set and we’re trying to make it clearer about, “Hey, that’s not gonna land well, put yourself in the other person’s position, why did this argument fall flat?” Well, when you lead off with, “Listen to me,” or whatever else, turns out that doesn’t work.
The Benefits of Youth Entrepreneurship [45:07]
Matt: Well, that’s where I just need to give a plug for my passion around young entrepreneurship. I really think that having children dabble and experience with starting businesses at a very young age, even if it’s our children went around and sold pumpkins out of a wagon that we had from our garden. Those skills just starting to think like an entrepreneur have always been the bedrock of My Tech High and now OpenEd.
Youth who apply entrepreneurship principles will learn so many other skills that they don’t – those of the hidden curriculum – because entrepreneurship just draws those out naturally. And you realize what you don’t know. You now need someone to write a marketing flyer for you, or you need someone to code your backend, or you need someone to go manage your finances. It creates this interdisciplinary group that is natural versus forced. So that’s why I really love geeking out on entrepreneurship for kids.
Isaac: What a mic drop moment to end on. This has been so much fun. Michael, so glad you were able to come on and join us.
Michael: Yeah, a total blast. Love what you guys keep doing for kids and schools, and frankly, learning ecosystems around and at all levels. Cause like that, you know, when Matt came to me, it was like, we’re reinventing college. And I was like, “Whoa, this is cool.” So I love what y’all are about, what you’re doing, and where it’s going to go.
Isaac: Keep up the good work. We’ll see everybody next time on the OpenEd podcast.
Matt: Thanks.