Behind the Platform that has fueled over 1 Million Homeschoolers

The future of Education. I'm Michael Horne. Looking forward to today's conversation with John Edelson, who's the founder of Time4Learning, which is a platform that, as he will describe, supports homeschoolers and their families in a variety of ways through curriculum and other means. But really, John reached out to me and had some provocative ideas, I think, about the future of homeschooling and schooling more broadly that connect in some interesting ways. And we wanted to have a time to dig into that and unpack just what we're learning from the last couple years of people who have maybe come to homeschooling, not expecting to, and are in many cases at the moment, staying. And it looks like it could be a much more durable, significant part of our education world going forward. And I wanted to learn from John in this conversation. So with that, I will bring John up to the metaphorical virtual stage, whatever we call it these days. It's good to see you, John. Thanks for joining me.

Thank you. I'm pleased to be here.

Yeah. And if folks who tune in have questions, comments, drop them into the chat, I'll do my best. Either fire them up on the screen or pose questions to John. But. But, John, I wanted to start where. Where I just mentioned in the introduction, which is obviously, you know, Time for Learning has been supporting homeschooling families since 2004. I believe you founded it. And obviously the numbers of families who are homeschooling jumped significantly as Covid hit. I think a lot of people said, okay, schools reopened, people rush back to schooling. It's not quite happened that way. And I'm curious, what are you taking from this moment? What do you think the future of homeschooling will look like? And as we draw into it, we can ask, what are the broader lessons that we take from that?

Okay, thanks, Michael. It's great to be here. Let me tell everybody that I'm here because I'm actually a fan, I think a lot about the future of education. I was actually following his podcast, his videos for a while, and then I thought, gosh, I probably should participate in the discussion. So that's why I'm here, and I'm glad you did. Time for Learning has been helping homeschoolers and families that do education at home since 2004. And what's striking is how much the pattern repeats itself over and over again. Early on, it was just a startup, and I was not only the president of the company and the investor, I was also customer support. So I spent the first two or Three years talking to customers. They would call up with a problem, with a password, or any of the things people call customer support for. But then I would ask them questions about why they decided to homeschool, how the homeschooling is going, what are they confused about? What do they like? What do they not like? And what I found is what I learned in 2004-2005-2006-2010, 2015, 2020, and through the pandemic is that parents seem to all go through the same, the very same cycle. Basically, most parents put their kids in school because that's what we do, and we expect that to work out. What happens is it often doesn't work out. Now, there's a series of unfortunate events. I've heard many, many stories, but they fall into categories. There's kids who get bullied, kids who can't fit into the school environment for some physical or emotional reason. There's kids who react badly to standardized testing. I mean, there's an awful lot of teachers that have started the school year by saying, gosh, we really got to work hard this year because there's going to be a big test and a lot of you are going to fail and be back in my class next year. That's humiliating. Kids hear that, and the teachers use that as a motivation. A lot of them don't react well to it. And the parents are faced with a situation. So over and over again, parents are faced with a situation. They don't know what to do. The school's not working for their kid, and with not much preparation, often with no enthusiasm, perhaps some resentment, they say, well, what is that homeschooling thing? What is that homeschooling thing? I think I'll give it a try. So in this sense, the COVID pandemic, with all the mask debates, the remote schooling, and all the different things around it looks to me just like the previous 20 years. Parents find their kids at a school that's not working for them. It's a terrible situation. The parent doesn't know what to do. And as a last resort, any safe harbor to storm, they say, okay, I'll try homeschooling. The decision is always tentative. I'll just try it for a while. They do it with often no preparation and no particular insight into education. I think every single family, and it's usually mothers that have decided this, have felt inadequate, terrified. They say things like, you know, I never really understood math very well myself. How could I teach it? And it is with that trepidation that all these Accidental homeschoolers made the jump and became homeschoolers.

It's interesting, John, just to stay on that for a moment, because the anxiety you're describing that they have sounds high, right? It's. And in many ways this mirrors our research about why people make a switch is there's a push, something's not good that describes the bowling, the testing, what you know, not feeling success, not being in an environment conducive to succeeding. There's a poll something you know could be better. That's what homeschooling in this case presents, that escape. But then a lot of the reason people don't make the switch is because anxiety and current habit sort of kicks in and is the friction against which people struggle. In your case, you get to see them on the other side of that struggle. So once they make that switch and either come to terms with the fact that maybe math wasn't their thing or whatever it might be, what do you see on the other side? Then? What have you seen? For those who stay and where they don't stay, maybe what happens there.

So Time four Learning has seen probably a million parents enter homeschooling over the last 20 years. What we find is they all are fearful. They don't really know what to do. They don't understand what you're supposed to learn in 4th grade math or 4th grade language arts or 4th grade science or social studies. So when they sign up for Time for Learning, the first thing that they feel is kind of amazement. Gosh, here's an entire curriculum, entire education that comes to them automated, online. There's no lesson planning to do. The lessons just flow. For the little kids, it's animated and cute. For the older kids, it's far mature and you have teachers. It's. It's been created. Time for Learning has been created for an online environment. So the videos are short. There's a lot of interactivity. So the kids are sure they're absorbing the information, that they're able to apply it to different situations. They'll be able to think about it in all sorts of complex ways. And there's ongoing little assessments to make sure that you're actually on track and doing the work. What parents find is their kids often flourish and they learn remarkable things about their students. Our advice to parents is, look, the first two or three weeks that you're on time for learning, don't teach your child at all. Let your child learn. It's really very important that the child step up and start learning. Now. This is one of the Most obvious things about education that parents learn, but only when they start homeschooling. Nobody learns anything unless they want to.

Unless they do the work.

Yeah, you can't force anybody to learn anything. It just doesn't work. However, if a kid has a little motivation and they all do, if you don't beat it out of them and they start saying, yeah, I do want to learn what you're supposed to learn in fourth grade. What am I supposed to learn? Oh, here it is. The kids get going and they sit there and they start working. And the parents, from watching their child from behind due time for learning, will soon learn some remarkable things. I remember one mom who called up and told me she had no idea about her daughter and math. Nobody had ever mentioned it. She put her daughter on the fourth grade math program because she was in fourth grade and the girl was bored out of her mind, asked if she could do something harder. So the mom clicked and she was on fifth grade math. She says, oh, this is a little better, but it's still pretty boring, Mom. She put her on 6th grade math and the girl said, okay, this is good. The girl was a math genius, way ahead. Although some of the problems in school had to do with the fact that she was just bored out of her mind. The other thing the mom learned from watching her daughter on time four learning was that in fourth grade you're supposed to be reading. You're supposed to be into chapter books and doing very well. But her child wasn't reading. And when her mom worked with a little bit, she noticed that the girl really didn't understand phonics yet. That somehow she had learned to sight read all the way into upper elementary school because kids can do that. It's not that hard to memorize the words you need. Up to fourth grade. She had gotten that far. So her mom put her on a remediation program where she could learn all the basic phonics, basically reset the program so that she goes through the phonics and the girl, you know, didn't never wanted to admit this in the school, but was aware there was something wrong. In the privacy of her home, with the anonymity of a computer, successfully learned phonics and move forward. And I think there's a lot of lessons in that one story. Yeah, one thing is the teachers have to teach to the middle of the class. They teach to an average, but that doesn't fit a single student. Every single student is somewhere on one side of the average. You're either bored because it's going Too slow in this subject or you're freaked, discouraged and depressed because it's going too fast for you in that subject. This old system of taking the kids through at the same pace, which has been there forever because we never used to have an alternative, is not what I think the future is about. I think we're doing, since we're going back to the one room schoolhouse where instead of being in a batch of students and you're all supposed to move at the same pace, the students are doing the more natural thing, which is learning at their own pace. And the basic technology of something like time for learning, where the students can repeat a class or jump forward, repeat a lesson till they get it is magic for many kids to flourish as students.

Totally agree with you obviously. It's obviously big thing I'm advocating for as well. I'm curious a couple things. One, why do families find their way to homeschooling and time for learning as opposed to say, a full time publicly funded virtual charter school or something like that? What's the difference when they make one choice versus another? Have you learned? Let's start there and then I'll ask my second question after.

Okay. When parents decide to opt out of their brick and mortar schools, they really have not done any research and most of them couldn't explain to you the difference between a virtual school and a and homeschooling. They often learn this in their first week of research. Of what should I sign up for? There are some good virtual schools, but virtual schools are accredited and as such they have to follow some pretty strict rules and pretty strict pacing.

So time and all those things actually become into play as well. Gotcha.

Most of them are much like remote schooling. Now, they're better than that because they've been at it for a while. But there isn't the flexibility to really pursue the children's interest and to work at the same pace. Once the parents start working with their children and watching them on time for learning, they often feel the need to do two things. One is to pursue the kid's interests and go all the way. And secondly is to remediate where the kid is having some troubles and needs some help. So let me go back to schools for a second. Some of the studies on schools I don't have the citations in front of me. Have looked to find out if kids are interested in high school and generally middle school and high school. The overall drop off is huge. No, this feels irrelevant to my future. I'm just marking time. Most of these lessons are not very Interesting to me. I just have to get the credentials so that I can go on and live my life, which is really sort of the definition of bad education. So the same studies have been done on all the reform and charter schools and all. And to most people's horror, most of those schools report the same thing. Students are still not that engaged. Now, if you ask the question differently in those schools, you find something quite different. Hey, what's exciting to you about this school? And they'll start talking about the soccer program or choir or the theater program or computer program or the robotic fights. Some of them will pick one subject. Oh, we're doing this amazing thing in science. So choice in a student is a huge deal. They get all fired up. And as we've learned over and over again from one thing, you can learn everything. I think, I think of my own cousin who was a lousy student, but really into baseball, and he ended up learning how to read so that he could read the sports page about baseball. I mean, you, you want to go with the kids interests, let, let them learn. You're not trying to be well balanced. You're trying to find some segment of interest, some vein of interest, some real fire. And from that the kid will naturally learn an awful lot of things. And that's one of the things that's fun about homeschooling, that in schools they have an awful hard time that you

can pull on that thread. Yeah. For each individual. So let's shift a little bit then. You've seen the story play out. A lot of these parents become durable homeschooling families as they've gone through this sort of realization about how schools actually work and how that conflicts with how individuals in fact learn, they stay. What are you learning? You know, obviously one of the barriers historically to many more people homeschooling or choosing these sorts of pathways have been the familial supports that they need around them or the structure during the day, childcare, whatever, you know, you can name it. What are you seeing in the data right now around the numbers of homeschoolers who are staying out of this pandemic? We know is a huge spike, right. Of people who started homeschooling. Black families that probably never considered it before, Hispanic families that probably never considered it before, disproportionately in many cases, represented in that spike. What are you seeing in the data about how many of them are staying as homeschoolers? And if I can get you to predict or project, I'm dying to know. And you don't have to do it for time for learning. You can do it for the sector. Right. What do you think? You know, a few years from now, what do you think those numbers will look like? If we were at, you know, 2 to 3%, say homeschoolers. Everyone argues over this, but, sorry, 2 to 2 to 3 million homeschoolers beforehand, what do you think? We will be on the other side of this.

So the numbers I work with was about 4% of the K12 population was being homeschooled prior to the pandemic. And the U.S. census study last year was that it was around 11% were being homeschooled. And that could be a very accurate number because they took pains to make sure that people understood they were asking about homeschooling, not virtual schooling, not remote schooling. They were asking about homeschooling. What we've seen over the last year or two is people are sticking with homeschooling. I mean, homeschool, you know, time for learning is a business, and people sign up. And we always have had a history that after a while, a lot of people would go back to schools. But after a while, I find that a lot of families were in for three to five years. It also depends a little bit on, oddly, the family pattern that a lot of parents pull one kid from school because it's such a disaster. And once they start homeschooling, the child's happier and they start having a lot of fun. If you think about the school day, you got to get on the school bus, you got to get to school, you got to get through homeroom, you got to switch classes, there's lunch. The actual instructional and lesson time in school is not very long. It's very easy for a homeschooling family to get all of the education, the formal education stuff that you need done in the morning quite easily. And then you've got an afternoon free to do field trips to join with other homeschoolers. Oh, gosh, I love this old homeschooling joke. What's the hardest thing about homeschooling? Do you know this, Michael?

Home, I think, is the word.

That's it. Staying home. There's so much going on in terms of other homeschoolers and field trips and sports and joint classes of different sorts. It's really a very social experience.

Yeah.

So what happens to that family with three kids, One kid's home doing stuff with mom and doing all the stuff. The other two kids now feel trapped in school, and they say, you know,

why they want to opt In.

So one of the normal trends that we see over and over again is one child from a family starts homeschooling and boom, all the others come home too.

So for it, 11%, what do you think that means? Because now a lot of people have gotten a taste of this, maybe more kids of theirs will come in. Where do you think we're going to end up in the new sort of balance?

So let me talk about the mega trends underneath.

Yeah, great.

First of all, a lot of people homeschool for three to five years and the reason they give up on it is often mom just burns out because it's really a lot of work. What mom does find is that it's a lot of fun. It's very exciting. That feeling of inadequacy and not knowing what you're doing. And all the sort of naive ideas you have on education melt away in the first few months. And about six months a year in, you're really having a lot of fun and you're making friends and you're meeting other homeschool people and now you feel like super mom. I mean, all moms, all dads, we all feel inadequate. It's so hard to do to be a great parent, and we're all anxious about it. But I will say that an awful lot of moms, six month a year and they go through a euphoria period of, gosh, I got this. And things are going well and the kids are happier than they've ever been. But some number of years in, the kids want to change. And three years, five years, some parents go all the way through. But this is a change from long ago when parents. Once you became a homeschooler, you were often some quirky curriculum. It was hard to integrate again in schools. One thing about using time for learning is we are a standard curriculum. We teach the same stuff you learn in schools in the same sequence. So when it comes time to go back to school and you print out your time for learning reports, it's in the language of the formal school system, and the schools recognize it. They say, oh, I see what you've studied. Okay, very good. And they are very comfortable looking at it. The next mega trend is how happy people are going to be with schools. And here I have some. I have real fears for the American educational system. The American educational system is built around teachers, teachers in classrooms. Perhaps you've been to restaurants lately and noticed a shortage of waiters and, and people to clean the tables. Perhaps you've been to stores and seen help wanted. Well, if Schools put help wanted out. Theirs would be the single biggest sign and I'll tell you the definition that everyone agree on a bad education. Substitute one followed by substitute two followed by substitute three. I mean that does not work. So I fear that the American education system will shoot itself in the foot because they just don't know how to find and motivate great teachers. Now it's not the principal's fault, the principal's just in the system. I don't want to point the finger at the school system, but I will say when we look at the news and we look at how the culture wars are hitting schools and we look at what this means for the life of a teacher, where after the last few years where they've all been taught that we have to address the social emotional learning of the student and they naturally engage on that only to find the politicians telling them look, we don't want any social emotional learning in the school. Teach them the facts and nothing but this is not good for the teacher's morale. It is not very good for teacher recruiting and they also have the great resignation going on. So I think, you know, irrespective of anything else, schools are shooting themselves in the foot and it's going to be very difficult for parents to say, oh yeah, I'm going to put my kid back in that. Now you can break it down by demographics. Black families, African American families, which traditionally did not homeschool, shifted to homeschooling big time in the last two or three years and have found it very refreshing, very, very popular that they could take control over the kids education and deal with the real issues that they want. Hispanic families too have homeschooled and started homeschooling in greater numbers match the other demographics. Other trends are by now every college in the country has gotten very skillful at evaluating homeschooled students and deciding whether they're up to snuff or not. And they accept them in proportionate numbers. Employers too now know how to look at a home resume with homeschooling on it and what to expect. So I think all the trends are in favor of homeschooling. The other thing is when time filtering was introduced, we were the only automated curriculum that was true multimedia and a real experience for the student. We've attracted a lot of competitors, we've been very successful. The $20 a month model, that's roughly the price, has been really popular with homeschoolers and all the value added wraparound services so parents don't feel alone have been fantastic. We've attracted a lot of competitors and it keeps us on our toes. We keep moving forward trying to be two, three steps better than everybody else. But as better and better materials become available to homeschoolers and there's more and more communities and more and more ways to work with other students, I predict it'll that fuels.

Yeah, well, so let me ask you this question then, Bob. One of our listeners asked, are there trends between primary and intermediate grades, middle school and high school students joining homeschool? Do you see this cutting any different ways based on age of the student?

I will tell you one difference. When parents are educating their younger children, they're incredibly idealistic. They are absolutely want to teach the kid to love learning. They're not drilling them on state capitals or teach them to ask really interesting questions. The fact is high school is different in that it is both a process of getting credentials to get into whatever you want to do next as well as education. And the homeschoolers understand this and we work with them on it, that you don't just go to high school, you go to high school to get someplace. And that makes it very different than the elementary and middle school grades. High school does require a fair amount of expertise and while our online courses provide a lot of it, they tend to be a lot more being done with co ops. And the biggest trend is in high school. A lot of parents take advantage of the opportunity to enroll their kid in a local community college which is generally free or very low cost. And the kids make the point of getting straight A's at college level courses which will help them get into a competitive college if that's where they're headed. So those are some of the differences that we see.

No, that's super helpful. So last question as we wrap up here, which is you are in conversation. The folks you work with are in conversation with these families constantly. If we think about the greater evolution of schools, you've already stated some priors that I hope come true around varying of the personalization of pace and so forth. Right. And following passion and interest and things of that nature and pulling on those strings for individuals. Are there other things that we ought to learn from those who have homeschooled successfully and that you think maybe will inform the broader set of options and system itself that we might see some evolution over the years ahead?

Yeah. So high schools have tried to reform themselves dramatically in the US And I think in some ways they've done a good job. The vanilla high school is almost gone when you get to a High school, you choose whether to enroll in the health academy or the IB program or the robotics computer programming. They've already tried to make this very vertical. The problem has been staffing it and doing all of these things. I think they learned a lot of this from homeschooling and I think formal education does have a lot to learn from homeschooling in terms of what the future systems will be like. Let me share an observation. In any conversation, everybody seems to agree that the American educational system is badly broken. 100% consensus. However, trying to get two to three people of any ilk to agree on what direction we should go, it's a nightmare. One of the underlying problems is a total lack of consensus and not much understanding of what education is really like. There's an enormous amount of harking back to a mythical history of when education was whatever it was. But it of course has nothing to do with what kids are like today, what careers are like today, what skills people actually need to survive in the world today. I mean we're not preparing people to go for a career of 40 years with the same company. People are going to be bouncing around and your need to be able to be a self learner as an adult is so, so huge that that's perhaps the single biggest thing we should be teaching to kids. Where do they learn that today? They learn it in homeschooling where the kids are basically given a lot of agency and they get to buy in on their own on their, on their education. So I would sort of predict that we all know that choice is important. Homeschooling is the one place where this is done best in terms of how the schools are going to change. To be honest, I'm a little pessimistic. I've been reading the news the last few weeks and it's. They're going in the wrong direction in so many ways. But you know, we'll reverse and things will upbeat. In the meantime, homeschooling is legal in all 50 states. It's terrifying to take the jump. Once you make the jump, there's a terribly large number of choices. I would suggest, of course, start with time for learning all four subjects in a package. Easy to use. Watch your kid learn. Then a few weeks in, you'll, you'll know where you want to supplement and whatnot and the kid's interest will start to express themselves. Stick with it as long as you can. Work with the other people in terms of how the educational system will evolve. This is, this is a big topic maybe for another company. But I think there's a lot to be learned from the success of homeschooling, where the role of a parent is a mentor and an orchestrator of resources. And the school model, where you've got a teacher who's the sage on the stage and the embodiment of all the knowledge and they're transferred to the student. That's a little passe. There's such good learning tools that when schools take advantage of these, the role, the teacher can change. And I'd love to see that on a, on a, on a large scale.

Well, amen to that. And John, thanks for joining us. Thanks for the work you're doing with families and Time for Learning. You can check it out. The name is right there below. Time for Learning. The number four and altogether is one word. But John, appreciate you. Appreciate you coming into the conversation and reaching out so we could have this conversation live in front of folks. And for all those tuning in, thank you. If you like this content, give us a thumbs up so we can have more of it and appreciate it so much and we'll see you next time.

Michael, thank you very much. Great work. You're doing well.

Thank you.