What Students Want

Summary:Having connected her clients to over $200 million in grants through the work done by her company - EnvisionEdPlus, Michele Timmons is the right person to go to for an in-depth look at the funding panorama. She is passionate about helping schools support young people to thrive in school and beyond. Today, she walks us through the “Three Buckets of Money” available, the trends in funding, ho...

AVI CHAI has invested over $300 million to benefit Jewish education through a wide variety of programs. As Executive Director of the North Ameria branch of AVI CHAI, Yossi Prager brings to the table a wealth of insight into philanthropy and wide-ranging experience with education. A graduate of Yeshiva College and Yale Law School, Yossi serves on the boards of communal and public policy organizatio...

“All of that student-directed theory is great, but how does it play out in real life?” you might ask. What if we told you that a 12-year-old boy decided that his school needed a playground upgrade, polled the students and the community to determine needs, gathered support for his project, wrote a grant proposal, and scored a $180K grant from Great Outdoors Colorado? This is the story that Sohne Va...

Did you ever sit at your desk, engaged in a daytime fantasy in which all of the stakeholders in your school were cheering you on, passing along their positive experience to others, and looking for ways to more deeply engage with the education community centered around your school? It doesn’t have to be a dream…Jethro Jones, a school principal for nine years, and host of the Transformative Principa...

Outschool is a community marketplace of live online classes for K-12. Today, we have the great pleasure of hearing from Amir Nathoo - one of the founding partners of Outschool. As an innovative learning platform that is social, interactive, and online, Outschool is uniquely positioned to meet the exploding need for learner-directed education. In fact, Outschool has currently reached nearly 40,000...

Change is daunting. Change to entrenched systems and institutions can feel impossible. Even thinking about where to begin can be exhausting. For schools that are interested in remaining healthy and relevant in the 21st-century, Transcend brings resources, experience, energy, optimism, and support to the design process. We are joined today by Sujata Bhatt and Anirban Bhattacharyya from Transcend -...

Nina Rees is the president and chief executive officer of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. After working for more than 20 years in Washington, D.C., including at Knowledge Universe, the U.S. Department of Education, and working as a deputy assistant for domestic policy to Vice President Dick Cheney, she needs no introduction in the education sector. She is passionate about the ult...

After a few years of incubating the idea inside the Denver-based Donnell-Kay Foundation, ReSchool launched as a non-profit in 2018. Their goal is to create an entirely new state public education system in Colorado. Working directly with parents and learners, they try to help families create learning experiences inside and outside of school. Amy Anderson is the Director of ReSchool Colorado. Today,...

We typically highlight a few of the most interesting quotes from the podcast - by which we seek to tempt you to listen. Tony Wagner is the kind of guest who makes us want to dangle the entire transcript in front of our audience. Everything he says deserves to be a featured quote. As one of the most cutting edge thinkers in innovation and leadership, and a globally recognized voice in education, To...

David Perell is a bright, curious mind, dancing around important concepts with a global tribe. We hope that a lot of our 21st-century students will turn out just like him. His weekly podcast offers interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world. His blog is the voice of our society’s pioneers, laboring to come to terms with the impact of technology on our ideas. And his writing c...

Conor Heaton guides expansion strategy for the Cristo Rey Network as their Director of School Growth. A former trial attorney in Chicago, Conor is an expert on the legal side of feasibility studies and what it takes to launch a school. It is his passion for helping young people, however, that speaks most clearly when he shares his experiences with us. The Cristo Rey concept is based on a work/stud...

In this episode, Ted Fujimoto, President of Landmark Consulting Group, entrepreneur, and expert in leadership development and organizational redesign, leads us to understand how to scale a school design with “fidelity.” The goal is always to achieve world-class performance. He explains the ways that system replication is not the same thing as “cloning.”Everything Ted does is built on the pillars o...

When you want the box seat view of what’s happening across-the-board in American education, you ask Liz Willen, Editor-in-chief at the Hechinger Report. She takes the gloves off for our Enrollhand interview and punches education “jargon” in the jaw, throws a strong right hook at funding cuts in the arts, and gives a head-butt to “innovative” rollouts that fail to garner support or create optimism....

What do you get when an MIT physics graduate volunteers at the public library computer lab to tinker with a few kids building cool games, websites, and apps? He suddenly decides - with no background in education - to start a school, and a neighborhood micro-school called “Prenda School” is born. Eight months later, Prenda Schools are spreading like wildfire across the US - with 80 launched so far....

Has the wild, wild west ever really been tamed? We consider this and other burning questions like: Is A/B Testing actually misleading? with our guest - Caylee Migliorini. Caylee has a rich career history in the education management industry. She joins us today to share her experience and expertise in marketing for school enrollment. She is currently the Senior Managing Director of Creative Service...

Keara Mascarenaz joined us for an explosive jaunt through innovation in education. We visited destinations such as: personalized paths for students, differentiated teaching, strong relationships vs. screen time, student ownership and choice, self-management, competency-based education, collaboration, social-emotional learning, building trust, inclusion and the value of diverse voices, making clear...

Our guest today is Many Pearce. She brings over two decades of fundraising experience to the conversation and generously shares her knowledge of the funding landscape. Mandy knows how to simplify a complex topic, and offers a long-range view of the changes happening in the grant writing world. In this episode, her dynamic teaching style brings so much infectious enthusiasm to the discussion that e...

Indra Sofian offered us an inside look at the founding and launch of a progressive, student-directed high school known as Sora Schools. He walked us through the launch process from inspiration through formulation and iteration and ended with a glance towards his dreams for the future. As a co-founder at Elevate Media, an Atlanta-based content-driven digital agency that provides marketing strategy,...

Terry Ryan knows education from every angle. He is the CEO of BLUUM - a non-profit organization working to develop leaders and support innovative schools in Idaho. Terry has a lot to say about charter schools, philanthropic funding, how to create a community of practice, and the ways that charters and districts might put aside their differences and capitalize on the strengths of each arm of educat...

Catherine Fraise is passionate about creating educational spaces and environments within which children can innovatively realize their potential. She has a vision for changing education and is making it happen at her 32,000 square foot facility in Connecticut. As the Founder and Executive Director at Workspace, Catherine takes us down an exciting trail of discovery as we learn how families are cho...

Social-emotional learning is a hot topic. Today, Erick Roa shares with us about his contribution at Empatico and The Kind Foundation. Erick serves as Head of Partnerships at Empatico. He takes us through the grant application and award process as he has experienced it, and gives advice for schools that might be interested in the grant process. Erick shares with us about how students can develop so...

John LaPerch is a funny guy with an in-depth knowledge of marketing. He is Director of Online Marketing & Social Media Content Creator. We didn’t have a set agenda for our conversation about school growth and marketing, but our casual discussion ended up covering everything from digital word-of-mouth to how schools should embrace authenticity. John takes us through the process of how he moves...

Our guest today is Jim Tiffin. He infuses excitement into everything he does, and his enthusiasm will infect you in this podcast. Jim is the Director of Media/Maker Programs for Mount Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta, Georgia. He knows how to make learning personal and authentic, how to engage teachers in the process, and how to connect parents and kids with “possibility thinking.”In this epi...

In this episode, we dive deeper into the exploration of how school funding works. This is important for anyone looking to grow their school, but also matters if you are simply interested in the future of education, wonder how education will evolve, or would like to know how the funders are thinking. Our guest today is Jackie Coleman. She is Senior Education Investments Officer at Hartford Foundati...

Our guest today is Anthony Kim, Founder and CEO of Education Elements. Anthony built virtual schools before anyone had heard of such a thing. He has worked with over 1000 schools and school districts on projects ranging from the adoption of personalized learning to project management and leadership capacity. Anthony works with a focus on seeking to achieve better student outcomes, higher student e...