🎙️Episode 002 – When someone asks if you homeschool…
Subscribe: Spotify • Apple Podcasts • YouTube
“Are you a homeschooler?”
This seemingly simple question often leaves parents pausing, furrowing their brows, and hesitantly replying, “I guess?”
What do you call it when your kid takes math classes online, goes to the local school for band, and runs a small business from home?
If you’re scratching your head, you’re not alone. The old labels don’t cut it anymore.
In our conversations with families over the years, we’ve noticed this growing trend of educational experiences that defy traditional categorization. It’s one of the key reasons we’re evolving from My Tech High to OpenEd – to better capture the amazing ways families like yours are already customizing your children’s education.
Incoming CEO Isaac Morehouse recently sat down again with Matt Bowman to clarify some things about the name change (no, the program is not changing!).
We talked about why names matter, and the importance of a shared language that reflects the flexible and open-ended nature of modern education.
And now, we’re turning to you – the parents – to help us tell your stories and highlight the incredible educational journeys you’re crafting. Your experiences are shaping the future of education, and we want to make sure those stories are heard.
The Inadequacy of Current Educational Labels
Since COVID hit, education has changed dramatically. We still have public schools, charter schools, and homeschooling. But now we have all this other stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into any of those boxes. It’s a mix of online and offline, structured and unstructured, traditional and innovative.
Take the story of one student who reached out to Matt on LinkedIn. She described herself as “a homeschooler enrolled in OpenEd (which partners with a public school).”
“I also split-enroll in my local school for band class,” she said, “and I’m pursuing a competency-based associate degree through Southern New Hampshire University.”
Try fitting that on a school registration form.
I hear stories from families like this al the time. Yet most parents have no idea these options exist.
The truth is, education today is more like a buffet than a set menu. Families are mixing and matching, creating unique learning experiences that defy simple labels.
It’s beyond the concepts of charter school, homeschool, tutorial, or co-op. It’s all of them, sometimes each of them, mixed in unique ways.
This isn’t just a handful of families doing something quirky. It’s a growing movement. And it needs a new language to describe it. That’s where you come in. Your stories and experiences are the building blocks of this new educational landscape.
Your Story is Cooler Than You Think
If you spend any time on social media, you might think that unless you’re teaching your 1st-grader astrophysics on a catamaran while island-hopping in the South Pacific, you’re not doing enough for your child’s education.
We’ve all seen those picture-perfect homeschool setups or heard about child prodigies running tech startups from their treehouses. It’s easy to feel like you’re not doing enough.
Let me assure you: that’s not true.
If you’ve chosen to personalize your child’s education, you’re already ahead of 99% of parents.
Think about it. Are you letting your child pursue their passion for music while ensuring they get solid math instruction? Have you found a way to incorporate their love for video games into their learning? These aren’t small things. They’re the building blocks of a personalized, engaging education.
We want to move this concept forward and help as many families as possible be able to open up education for their children. And we need your help to do it. Your stories, your experiences, your creative solutions – they’re the heart of this movement.
So here’s my ask: Share your story with us. How have you customized your child’s education? What unique combinations of learning have you created? Your journey matters, and it could inspire other families to explore new possibilities.
You can email us at reply@opened.co or comment on this post. Let’s create a new language for education together – one that captures the amazing things happening in homes and communities across the country.
Let’s write the next chapter in education.
Learn:
- How the inadequacy of current educational labels led to the creation of OpenEd
- The importance of entrepreneurial thinking in modern education
- Why customized learning experiences are crucial for today’s students
- How language shapes our understanding and approach to education
- The power of integrating diverse skills and breaking down educational silos
- Real-world examples of children solving business problems creatively
- The vision for a more flexible, joyful approach to education that puts the child first
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:30 The Evolution from My Tech High to Open Ed
02:04 The Importance of a Name
03:27 The Power of Language in Business
04:32 The Shift in Education Post-COVID
06:05 Origins and Vision of My Tech High
10:28 Entrepreneurship for Young People
14:40 Real-World Entrepreneurship Stories
23:39 The Broader Vision of Open Ed
28:15 Conclusion and Future Plans
Transcript
Introduction and Welcome [00:00:00]
Isaac: Many parents don’t realize what’s possible in education today. I hear stories of families building custom entrepreneurship courses at home or combining online classes with in-person band lessons. Most parents don’t know these options exist.
Matt: Hey everyone, Matt Bowman and Isaac Morehouse here. We’re excited to discuss the transition from My Tech High to OpenEd. Isaac, welcome.
I want to address our long-time My Tech High families who’ve been with Amy and me for 15 years. This evolution to OpenEd has been thrilling. Isaac, we’ve known each other for a decade, introduced by a student interested in Praxis as a college alternative. It’s amazing to see you now taking the reins. Tell us about the motivation behind the name change when you joined.
Isaac: Sure. We recently announced to thousands of My Tech High families that we’re changing to OpenEd and launching a newsletter and podcast. Naturally, many asked, “What’s happening? New CEO, new name?” We realized that the trust Matt and Amy built over 15 years is significant, so introducing new faces and a new name is no small matter. Let’s take a moment to explain our reasoning and vision.
The Importance of a Name [02:04]
Isaac: Matt, when you first contacted me a decade ago, I was puzzled by “My Tech High.” I thought, “A tech-focused high school?” It took me a while to grasp the program because of the name. I assumed it was a charter school teaching only tech. That’s the obvious issue – people might think it’s just a high school or solely about technology.
But there’s a deeper aspect. I’ll touch on some business concepts here. I once read an article by James Currier, a tech founder with a VC firm called NFX. When I was raising funds for Praxis to build a tech platform, he told me, “What you’re building is a job-seeker platform. That’s distinct from Praxis and needs its own name.”
The Power of Language in Business [03:27]
Isaac: I’m big into language, and when you’re trying to rally people around a vision, whether it’s a team or the market you’re trying to serve, having language – which includes your company’s name, but it’s much bigger than that – that people can rally to is crucial. Language is a network effect in business. People talk a lot about network effects. So any kind of product where every additional customer makes the product more valuable for every other customer, right? That’s a type of network effect. Facebook is an example of this, as are a lot of social platforms, but language is also a network effect.
The more people that are using a type of language to talk about a type of problem or challenge or solution, the more valuable that language becomes to everyone else because it’s applicable. It’s common. And when you can give voice to something that’s happening in the market that you are trying to help and serve, and give language and concepts for people to use, there’s a power there.
The Shift in Education Post-COVID [04:32]
Isaac: I’ve seen something happening over the last 10 years, but especially since COVID, in education. The existing language just doesn’t quite capture all these things happening. You have public school, you have charter schools, you have homeschooling, but then you have all this stuff happening that doesn’t really fit in any of those categories.
The number of times I’ve run into parents in the last five years where we’ve asked, “Oh, do you homeschool?” And they’ve paused for a minute and been like, “I guess?” Like, the language isn’t quite doing the trick. And there’s something different happening.
I think what I really was excited about with My Tech High’s history, as we talked about in the first episode, is bridging. It’s kind of beyond the concepts of, are you in a charter school or homeschool or a tutorial or a co-op? It’s kind of like, yes, sometimes each of them, all of them. And so that movement, that broadening, that ability for parents to pick and choose, I felt like we needed some language to bridge that. That not only more accurately reflected what the program is, but the vision of who we’re trying to help and what movement, what change, the big change that’s happening in the world that we are trying to help be a part of and help anyone who wants to be a part of that. And I think it is the opening up of education. And so that was a big part of that name. Let’s really rally around a better way of talking about the shift that’s happening in the world when it comes to education.
Matt: Isaac, it really was because when you proposed the shift to Open Ed, instantly, Amy and I looked at that and said, “Yes, that’s what we’ve been trying to talk about for 15 years.”
Origins and Vision of My Tech High [06:05]
Matt: When you proposed the shift to OpenEd, Amy and I immediately recognized it as the concept we’ve been trying to articulate for 15 years. Many aren’t aware that the original My Tech High business plan aimed to transform 16 and 17-year-olds into tech entrepreneurs. We believed there were concrete ways to guide teenagers toward tech entrepreneurship, and that vision gave birth to My Tech High.
I should also mention High Tech High, a charter school in San Diego that inspired us. It was featured in a documentary called “Most Likely to Succeed.” This project-based tech charter school significantly influenced our thinking. We added “my” to “TechHigh” to emphasize personalization.
Interestingly, in our first year, the average student age was nine. I remember thinking, “Turning nine-year-olds into tech entrepreneurs might be a stretch!” While we kept the name, we shifted our focus to personalized education for younger children. This evolution was never fully reflected in the My Tech High name, which makes this rebranding particularly timely.
A few years ago, I received a LinkedIn request that perfectly illustrates the complexity of what we’ve become. The student, likely participating in a Praxis program task, had an incredibly detailed job description. She wrote, “I’m a homeschooler enrolled in My Tech High, which partners with a public school. I also split-enroll in my local school for band class and I’m pursuing a competency-based associate degree through Southern New Hampshire University.” This captures the multifaceted, personalized educational journeys we’ve come to facilitate.
Entrepreneurship for Young People [10:28]
Isaac: It’s interesting, Matt, that I didn’t know you started with that intention around entrepreneurship for young people. That’s really been my passion from a very young age too – how do we help people in that 16 to early twenties range start thinking about entrepreneurial things?
When we started Praxis, it was aimed at those after high school graduation, whether they’d been in college for a few years and didn’t like it, were deciding if they wanted to go to college, or maybe even graduated but needed career help. That was our target demographic. But immediately we found that so many of these kids needed a de-schooling process first. They came to us with mindsets and assumptions that they had to unlearn if they actually wanted to be entrepreneurial or even work at a fast-growing startup.
I kept thinking we needed to reach kids earlier, to expose them to the right ideas sooner. Parents constantly asked us, “Is there a version for high schoolers? For middle schoolers?” I could never find a feasible way to get employers to take on 12-year-old apprentices, but we did launch a teen entrepreneurship course as a way to prepare people.
You eventually keep going backwards. You think, “Okay, these high school students would benefit from thinking about these basic concepts at 10 or 12.” Eventually, you realize it just starts at the beginning. The environment of being around things that allow you to experience the basic concepts of entrepreneurial thinking – which doesn’t necessarily mean starting a business, but seeing the world as full of opportunity – that can start very early.
Matt: Exactly right. I remember in the first few years, still trying to find 16 and 17-year-olds who wanted to be tech entrepreneurs, they couldn’t escape the societal pressure. It was all about preparing for college, ACT prep, writing good essays. That pressure was so heavy I couldn’t even get their attention to think about entrepreneurial things.
Real-World Entrepreneurship Stories [14:40]
Matt: We regularly run entrepreneurship competitions or invite kids to submit their pitches for extra seed funds. It’s interesting to see how they pitch nonprofit opportunities. That’s great – they see an opportunity to solve a problem in the community and decide to organize it as a nonprofit instead of a for-profit. To me, that doesn’t matter. Thinking like an entrepreneur is about seeing a problem, solving it, and creating opportunities.
We also regularly had meetups at different businesses. One story I remember is when eBay in Salt Lake hosted one of our meetups. The model we used was to have the executive team from the campus present some challenges eBay was facing and give everyone in the audience 10-15 minutes to gather in small groups or individually and come up with solutions.
The average age in the audience was probably 10. So here’s this board of executives at eBay Salt Lake City, and they gave 10 minutes to the audience. I saw all these teenagers and young kids writing on poster boards, and then they got up and pitched in front of the audience. After that, the executives turned to each other and said, “These are better ideas than we’ve had from our adult crew. We’ve asked the same question to present.” It was honestly better, more innovative, practical ideas for eBay to improve.
One kid said, “Your logo is out of date. It just doesn’t attract me as a young person. Update your brand.” I thought that was so cool. The eBay executives afterwards were saying, “Matt, thank you. We are actually taking some of these ideas back to our leadership team and seeing how we can implement them.”
Isaac: I love it. There’s something about kids before they’ve been sort of tainted with things that feel obligatory, like “you’re supposed to learn this.” I know with my own kids, if you’re a parent of multiple kids, I’m sure you can relate to this – my younger kids are so much less tainted than my older kids because I’ve learned how to parent better over the years.
With my older kids, when they expressed interest in something, I’d immediately say, “Oh, cool. Well, we should set up a website or we should get a blog.” And something about my excitement, they’d interpret as “Dad’s trying to make me do something I don’t want to do” and they would resist. With my youngest, I’ve learned how to play it more cool.
Literally right now today, he’s up there doing data entry voluntarily. He’s seven, but he’s gotten into baseball cards. He wanted to trade them, and when his friend asked how many Braves cards he had, I suggested creating a spreadsheet to enter them all in and then sort them. He was intrigued, and now he’s always asking, “Dad, can I go put more cards into the spreadsheet?” I’m thinking, do I have the heart to tell him that nobody wants to do data entry? He loves it. He’s having a blast up there, entering every card.
When you don’t frame it as a subject with a restrictive criteria, but just as exploring an interest, it’s so fun. I remember with my oldest, one of my favorite entrepreneurial stories: He was about 10 and really into making fancy sandwiches at lunchtime. He always wanted my wife to buy specific baguettes and meats. He said, “There aren’t enough places to buy these. I should sell them.”
I suggested he ask my brother, who had a tech company with about 40 employees, if he could sell sandwiches there at lunchtime. The first time, he just had all the sandwiches the same and sold them, but he felt people bought them just because he was a cute kid selling stuff. I suggested he send a survey next time with options. He did that, got additional supplies, and sold them all again.
He kept getting requests for more meat, but he wanted to use fancy, expensive meats. We priced it out, and he found people didn’t seem to care about the quality as much as the quantity. This bothered him because he didn’t want to compromise on quality. Then people started asking for chips and drinks too. He figured out the margin was much better on chips than on sandwiches with fancy deli meat.
After about four or five weeks, he decided, “I figured out the only way to make enough money to make it worth it is to make products I wouldn’t buy myself. So this isn’t the business for me.” He’s very much the purist artist, and he knows that about himself. I told him if this were his career, he’d need to find a different market that values and is willing to pay for what he wants to make. Some of my other kids would say, “I don’t care what people want. I’ll give it to them if I can make money.” But it was fun watching him have that realization through experimentation.
Matt: What draws me to entrepreneurship for young people is that it breaks down traditional barriers of cliques and groups. When you’re trying to develop an entrepreneurial pursuit, you realize the value of differences amongst all of us. You need someone who reads and writes a lot to be your messaging person. That girl or boy who always has their nose in a book? You need to attract them to your team because you need well-written content for your marketing website.
The kid that’s always coding or into tech? You need that person to join your team to create the backend website, automate things, and set up the tech. The kid who’s always talking and selling? You need that person. The person who loves math or spreadsheets? You need them for your financials.
Entrepreneurship creates the most integrated, heterogeneous society that we need. That’s what I love about pushing kids to be entrepreneurial – it makes them step outside of their own expertise and bring in people with other expertise, knowledge, and competencies. To me, that’s the real power of saving our world: developing this sense of entrepreneurial thinking.
Isaac: That’s amazing. It’s really funny as you’re talking about this. I don’t want to overplay this, but I heard somebody once say you can explain a lot of the world if you just assume that it’s always a battle between the jocks and the nerds. That kind of thing happens in rigid educational structures where kids who are good at sports go over here and hang out together, kids who are good at book learning or interested in tech go over here, and there’s not much integration or overlap. These different ways of seeing and approaching the world don’t blend into each other, which can lead to conflict.
If you go to any successful company of any size, they have all of those things. Anyone who runs a company will tell you that the more integrated the company is, the less siloed each of those departments and skill sets are, the healthier and better it is. It’s hard to break down those silos if they’ve been conditioned into you from an early age.
The Broader Vision of Open Ed [23:39]
Isaac: We went off on a fun tangent about tech and entrepreneurship, but I want to bring it back for the people who’ve reached out about the name change. We’ve launched a daily newsletter, the OpenEd Daily – go to opened.co and subscribe if you want that in your inbox every morning. This podcast, obviously, and for the families who’ve been with this program for many years, the podcast, newsletter, and even the opened.co homepage are clearly broader than just a description of the program currently set up in the states where we operate. That’s intentional because we’re trying to rally people as part of a movement.
Conclusion and Future Plans [28:15]
Isaac: I should also reiterate that Matt and Amy are very much still here, involved, active, not going away. In fact, if I can tease a little bit, they’re working on something special – a book that should be coming out before too long. So they’re taking on the role of evangelists, telling these stories and going out there speaking and writing even more. That’s kind of in the future for you and Amy, right?
Matt: Yes, Amy and I are so excited to document the stories we’ve heard, the lessons we’ve learned, and hope that it can help more families access this mindset of opening education for their children. It’s a mix of everything. OpenEd is pretty much the only entity on the planet that talks about all versions of education. Everyone else sits in their silos of either homeschool or public school or charter school. We say our loyalties lie with the kid. Let’s bring the world’s best resources to the child to help them thrive, succeed. Equally help the family, the parent have peace in their home, and bring a joy of education to the family that sometimes is often just lost. It’s a drudgery for so many families, fighting with their children over getting up in the morning or going to bed at night, tired, exhausted because of homework. We want to bring all of the joy of education and learning back to families, and open education is what will do that.
Isaac: That’s a soundbite right there. Well, hey Matt, this has been a lot of fun. And for all of you families who have been My Tech High faithful through the years, send us things you want us to talk about, things that would be helpful for you in our newsletter, in our podcast. Pass those along. I’ll be continuing to get to know more of you, and the program that you know and love is only going to get better.
For all of those who are new, who have never heard of My Tech High and are new to OpenEd, welcome. If you are in a state where we don’t offer our current program, we’re trying to come there. We want to do as many things as we can to help you, whether it’s related to stuff we have or not. We’re going to try to put together resources for every state, not just things that we offer, but things from all different organizations and businesses. We really want to move this concept forward and help as many families as possible be able to open up education for their children.
We love hearing from listeners and readers. You can email us, let us know things you’d like to hear us talking about. You’ll hear a lot more stories from families, parents, and a whole variety of stuff on this podcast and in our newsletter. So Matt, this was fun. Anything we should close out on?
Matt: No, that was great. Isaac. Thanks.
Isaac: You bet. We’ll see you next time, everybody.