Inside Primer's Growing Network

Welcome to The Future of Education. And now here's your host, Michael Horn.

Welcome to The Future of Education. As I've discussed for the last decade plus, we've seen a wave of microschools and perhaps more accurately in my view, low-cost private schools emerge across the country over the last many, many years. Many of these are local schools with one, maybe two sites, but a few have scaling ambitions through different mechanisms. These are the names like Acton Academy, Prenda, OpenEd, Wildflower, Kaipod, Flourish, and a few others. And then there's another school network in this list with such ambitions called Primer. I've long heard about the Primer model from many folks and knew several of the team members, but I've never had the opportunity to visit a Primer school. Knowing I would have the opportunity to interview Governor Jeb Bush and Primer's founder, Ryan Delk, in Florida at a Primer school, I was also excited to visit and learn more about the model. What follows is some of the conversation Ryan and I had, and it then gives you a look into the school itself as well as me. For those listening, you're going to miss a lot of the video of the actual schools themselves with the students and teachers, but you should be able to get the basic flavor of the Primer model from Ryan and my conversation. And for those of you watching, I hope you enjoy and learn from the accompanying video of students and teachers as we go inside Primer Schools. Enjoy. Ryan, I've been wanting to see a Primer School for I don't know how many years now. We're here. We're here at Coconut Grove. Tell us about the Primer model. That's the first thing I always hear when I hear about Primer Schools is you have to understand the Primer School model. What is it?

So it's, I'll talk about it from the family, teacher, and student perspective. So the, the, from an educator perspective, Primer exists empower these great educators who have dreamed of starting a school or want to start a school and want to serve their communities. But that's, it's a quite arduous process if you want to get a school off the ground. And so we partner with these great educators. We help them open these schools across Florida, now Alabama, soon Texas. And these are sometimes former administrators. They're sometimes longtime teachers, sometimes Teach for America alums, but they're people that see that the traditional system is not meeting kids' needs, not meeting the needs of their community, but they really care about figuring that out. And so they partner with us to open these schools. From a family perspective, most of our families are in some sort of school situation that's not, they know is not meeting their needs. And they're typically not the families that can afford to move to a better school district, join a private school. These are really mostly working class, middle class, sometimes low income families that really care about their kids' education. They're deeply passionate about this. They believe in education as a driver of upward mobility and the importance of it, but they know that the current setup is not meeting their kids' needs. And so they seek out Primer. They're able to attend Primer often for free or for a very low tuition cost per month. And then from a student perspective, we really believe in this idea of taking kids seriously. That's like our sort of North Star from a student experience. And so we'll talk more about that. And I think we're going to go see some kids in action. Yeah. But this idea of when you create a high agency environment for a student, and specifically around academics, you give them transparency into exactly where they're at. Are they above grade level, behind grade level? And so, Parents, teachers, students, everyone can see, okay, I'm a grade level ahead in math. I may be a grade level behind in reading. Here's the game plan. You give them agency over— you sort of give them the opportunity to, to get to, to either get farther ahead or to get onto grade level. And so all the software that we've built that powers the school day is really sort of built with that in mind. And so you have this high agency environment for kids. You have teachers who are really excited about serving their community, and then parents that are, that are motivated to find a better option for their kids.

Maybe let's back up before we actually get to see what that all looks like and just how many schools are in the network. Like, you're one of a handful of networks that I think of going to scale right now with your model. How many are there? How many students in a school? Like, give us some of those fundamentals, if you will.

Yes, we have 14 campuses across Florida, Alabama, and Arizona. We'll be launching a handful in San Antonio this fall as well, and a few more across Florida. And the average campus is anywhere between 50 and 120 students depending on the real estate. And so it depends on, you know, the campus setup and the number of teachers, et cetera. We will open Primers, you know, we, our model's intentionally flexible from a real estate perspective. And so our sort of, sort of the controlling variable for us is access and cost. And so we have this core value of access is the constraint. And so we start from that place and then we figure out how to deliver a really high quality education in a way that's accessible for every family. And so we open primers in spaces like this. We'll sometimes partner with churches, community centers, charter schools, sometimes property developers, residential developers that want to bring a primer to a residential community. We'll do a lot of different things to get primers off the ground and do it in a way that is affordable to every family as possible.

When you say affordable, like, what are we talking about tuition levels and how are, you know, families here, how are they paying for

it? I think we, I mean, you would maybe know this. It's hard to know for sure. I think we might be the only private school network in the US that lowered tuition for the majority of our families last year. So the majority of families are paying less for Primer in school year '24 than they were in school year

'24.

And my hope is we can keep doing that for a very long time. We've never turned away a child for their family's ability to pay. So if a family comes to us and says, hey, I really want to attend Primer, but $50 a month is too much, we will always work with them. We have the Primer Foundation that unlocks scholarships for those kids when they need it. And so we are really serious about this idea of making this accessible to every family. And then from the families that do pay out of pocket in addition to their state ESA, they typically pay between $50 and $200 a month. Most families, it's a sliding scale based on income. And then in some states like Texas, it's 100% free. So it depends a little bit state by state. But my vision very explicitly is to get Primer to be 100% free or ultra low cost. Some states require some small amount of out-of-pocket, but ultra low cost for every family that attends. And that is our north star.

It's interesting. Purdue University in the higher ed space got however many plaudits for holding tuition level. You're lowering it. That's truly unique, I Talk to us about, you know, sort of the day in the life of a student, right? Are they coming 5 days a week? What, what's sort of the arc of their day look like?

Yeah, something we, we believe that's really important for these kind of quote unquote alternative education models. We really want Primer to feel legible to parents, sort of legible to the existing system. So it feels like a school. So we, we operate from 8 to 3 or 8 to 3:30 every day. Students come 5 days a week. And so when you're here, it feels fresh and it feels new and exciting and different, but it still feels like a school. And that's really important. important to us. And so for parents that are working, that, that, you know, are thinking in terms of a traditional school schedule, Primer fits, you know, exactly what they would, what they would expect. The basic day breakdown, and we'll see some of this in action, is in the morning kids are working on core academics. So all core academics at Primer are individualized for the student. And so they join Primer, they take a nationally normed reference test, the NWEA MAP test. We get a snapshot of where that student is academically. Every student is, is, there's no student that is perfectly at the exact same grade level in every single subject. And so we get a snapshot of this student is maybe half a grade level ahead in math, half a grade level behind in writing, on grade level in reading. And then the system builds an academic model for them. And that academic model includes direct instruction from the teacher. So there's, you know, moments during the day where either the teacher has a small group of students or she's doing group instruction. There's also moments during the day where the students might be learning from a virtual instructor. So let's say they need remedial support in reading. They might be in a remedial math or reading class with another small group of students across the Primer network virtually with an expert tutor that's helping them accelerate back on grade level. There's also points in the day where the student might be working on a learning app, uh, or, or, or software tutor. Uh, some of the students that are really far ahead that have mastered concepts and can move quickly, some students that might need, you know, very specific targeted instruction to a specific concept. And then the 4th sort of modality is, is students working together. So it might be students reading a book together, discussing it. We really want students to learn this idea of, of the sort of, we call it learn how to learn, but this idea of them being able to take agency and ownership over their education, even at a very young age. And not need a teacher hovering over them to make sure that they're doing their work, but be able to sit in a group of students and have a robust discussion and understand that they have the freedom to go do that, but also the expectation that they stay on task and, and, you know, have a fruitful discussion.

And then, so that's the morning block, basically these fundamentals of all the subjects, I guess, reading, writing, math, science, et cetera.

So yeah, so science, social studies, history, those happen in the afternoon through pursuits. And so, um, pursuits are sort of, um, are, you think of it as, as in this, it sort of accelerates over, uh, or becomes more robust as kids get older. But we wanna figure out what makes every student tick. What are they excited about? What are they intrinsically motivated about? And then develop a set of projects that they can work on that align with those interests. And so when kids are younger, you know, these, these are group projects like let's build a community garden. Let's, you know, learn about local politics and, you know, how a new law is gonna, you know, become, uh, law in Miami-Dade County. Um, these are, these are projects that the, the, the primary leaders, you usually kind of facilitating as a group. But as kids get older, it turns into, let's start a company, let's go work on a microbiology research project, let's launch a podcast, you know, let's publish a book on Amazon. And then we have a team that works with both the students and the primary leader to set academic milestones for against state standards, against different gaps that the student might have that weave into that project. And so we really want the pursuits time in the afternoon to, from a parent perspective, to almost feel like something that you would expect to be paying for as like enrichment or after school, but it happens during the school day. And then from a student perspective, this is when they learn that agency and that, that sort of, you know, by the time they're in 6th, 7th, 8th grade, it's, hey, this is, you have 2 hours today. How are you going to use that time? Are you going to hit your goals? These are really important skills that they learn. And they're also getting, you know, these academic milestones plus the ability to work on these projects they're excited about.

And this is a K through 8 model, right? So it's, it's, it's those early years and sort of this arc of having more and more agency and into these maybe bigger projects as they get older. And then you mentioned your tech system. So, uh, you, you take the NWEA map in the beginning, it sort of maps out this, what, what your academic plan is gonna look like. How are you measuring mastery and then sort of pulling that back into the system to right-size that educational experience? Because I'm assuming not all the kids are moving at the same pace and so forth.

Yeah. So, um, this is probably the thing I'm most excited about that, that we're building. We actually just shipped a new version of academic progress last week. But the basic idea is we want every teacher, every student, and every parent to be operating with the same— there should be no information asymmetry. They should have the same fidelity on how a student is doing. And so we show the parent in our mobile app, on their desktop view, every concept, every academic milestone, every concept, every state standard, depending on where they are for that child's education, exactly where they are, whether it's on grade level, ahead of grade level, at grade level, and exactly how they're progressing. And we actually project into the future and say, okay, your child is, let's say it's a 4th grader that's a half grade level ahead in math, by the end of this school year, here's exactly where we expect them to be based on their current learning velocity. Or let's say that it's a child that's a grade level behind in reading based on their current learning velocity. Here's where we think they'll be by the end of the school year. And if, and if that says, hey, they're going to be caught up, that's really exciting. If it doesn't, then we're going to work with that child to set more aggressive goals. And the primary leader is going to be involved in that. They're going to do that every session, every 5 weeks. And the parent's going to see that, the teacher's going to see that, the child's going to see that. And then, then it sort of incentivizes them to want to work harder to get, to get on grade level. And so the transparency and then fidelity is sort of key to the whole way we think about mastery. And then the actual data itself is coming in from a variety of exit tickets, virtual instruction for students that might be behind, direct instruction from the PL and their notes, learning apps like they could go on Khan Academy and take a quiz or Newsela or Frax or different, different applications we use. And so our system ingests all of that.

So basically lots of measures of assessment, lots of measures of mastery and you can almost triangulate. Exactly. Do we really figure out, has this kid really mastered this?

Exactly. And the thing, the number one thing that alternative schools or whatever you want to call them like to do is come up with these kind of internal metrics for academic outcomes that are sort of a black box and sort of shun third-party nationally normed testing. And what we do is we take the NWEA MAP 3 times a year. And what that does, parents get that data, teachers get the data, students get the data. And what that does is it keeps Us honest. And so we have this—

you're looking at your internal metrics and does it line up?

Exactly. So we have daily information on every single student that every individual primary leader has a dashboard view of their classroom that, that sort of aggregates all the student data. Every campus leader has a view of all their classrooms at their campus. And then our academic team has the view of the whole network and they can drill into any campus, primary, uh, individual classroom and any individual student. And then we look at the MAP data and make sure that it correlates with what we expect. And so we can actually project what we think the MAP score is going to be for each student based on their learning velocity. And then of course, when those things are not tied, we adjudicate like, okay, was the kid sick when they took a MAP test? Did they not sleep well the night before? We're sympathetic to those things, but it creates this, I think, very robust picture of how kids are doing academically. And this is, I just think it's really, really important as part of this kind of low-cost, high-quality school movement to be honest about, we have to deliver academic outcomes for kids and not shy away from that.

And not shy away from it. Everyone is buzzing about AI, as you know. What's the role of artificial intelligence in what you just described or what you're developing?

I'm more excited in the short term, and this is a bit of a hot take, of how AI impacts the kind of administrative— so maybe just zooming out, like what I aspire Primer to be for an educator is that we take on all of the sort of crufty bureaucratic administrative junk that you have to do. We'll talk to educators who say like, look, I spend like 2 hours on the weekends filling out paperwork for different students, all this crazy busywork. And so I don't know that any Primary leader has ever filled out a piece of paperwork ever. I think it's just all abstracted away for them. And so that is extremely important to us. And so a lot of the ways that we're using these new models is in empowering the teacher. If you think about a teacher's day, my mental model for this is that you want You want to maximize the number of minutes where that teacher is doing what only they can do, which is engaging with a student one-on-one or in a small group or the whole class, investing in a kid, building a relationship, building trust, helping them through some really important learning unlock. And when they're tied up thinking about schedules and rosters and who's out sick today and all those things, all that takes away both from like a cognitive load perspective, but just literally from like a minutes in the day perspective. And so, A lot of what we're doing right now is on the teacher and the parent side, creating more robust visibility. But we will test and we will deploy all the latest technology for students. And so we don't shy away from that. And so if the team will find some really exciting new math AI tutor, and we'll go, if some students want to try it, they'll try it. We'll look at the data, we'll look at the learning velocity. We actually just concluded one, which which I won't name here, but it didn't, you know, it didn't beat the current system. And so we said, hey, we're not going to, you know, we're not going to deploy this. And so it's not that we're sort of shying away from the student side, but it's just that I think my current view is that the underlying models have gotten to the point where they can deliver incredible academic outcomes, but the sort of packaging of it in a way that is accessible to students, that's multimodal, that meets students exactly where they are, and then importantly, that creates on the backend, has the data architecture to be able to map whatever's happening in the AI tutor to state standards, to learning outcomes, that is still quite messy. But I think we're like 3 to 6 months away from that. And, and sort of the whole point of the software or a significant point of software we built is to ensure that we can plug in those best-in-class tools and deliver for kids when they're ready.

Well, something that seems distinct about your model compared to a lot of the other models I see and hear about right now is that rather than saying we're going to sort of reduce the number of inputs into a kid's education, you're basically saying Flowering. We want, if a teacher one-on-one or in small group with you is the best modality, great. We'll take that and ingest the data and figure out, did you master? If it's this software program, if it's a tutor, whatever it is. And basically the system is sort of taking all these inputs and refereeing or sort of coming up with a picture of mastery. Talk about that philosophy because that does seem distinct, I think.

Yeah. There's 2 things that I would say. One is we are, we are big believers in the educator and the teacher as a sort of sacred part of a child's school experience. I think that's true for any kid. I think it is especially true for children increasingly that come from one-parent households or situations where their home life might not feel as stable. Teachers provide a really important role for those kids, far beyond just the education. And so this idea that like AI is going to replace every teacher, you know, we sort of reject that future. And I care much more about how do we empower teachers? To do exceptional work, to build these relationships with kids, to be, you know, how do you take a, you know, 75th or 80th percentile teacher objectively, and how do you, how do you make them a 99th percentile teacher? How do you give them superpowers? By taking on all this admin work, by, you know, can, can this, we're starting to do this, this thing called learning alerts where a teacher can get a ping in real time when a student is struggling with a specific concept. And so imagine, you know, a 99th percentile teacher is sort of constantly keeping in their head where each student is, what concepts they're struggling with, and like knows when sit down with them one-on-one and grab the scratch paper and intervene. Well, what if the software did that for you and said, hey, this student right now in real time, you know, 10 seconds ago was struggling with 3-digit subtraction. I think it's a really high leverage moment for you to grab some scratch paper and, and dig into this with him.

Yeah.

That's the kind of thing that we get really excited about. So we're, that's sort of our vision for the future. And then I think from a, from a sort of modality perspective, we care a lot about ensuring that what we put in front of kids, uh, and the way the school day is structured meets our internal bar for delivering academic outcomes. And so we're very thoughtful about screen time. We're very thoughtful about the technology that kids are exposed to. We're very thoughtful about what we ask of teachers. And so it is, you know, we're sort of, we've built the system to be highly flexible around the best-in-class tools, but we still have an extremely high bar for what makes it in and what students are exposed to. And that will never change.

So we've talked about how you measure the fundamentals and mastery around that. You've talked a lot about the importance of agency and these other habits or skills, right, that are going to serve students, not just in school, but throughout their lives as they try to live choice-filled lives. How are you measuring and looking at that? Right. Because that seems like a really important piece of what you're doing.

Yeah. We think of those as like the inputs to, you know, there's academic outcomes and then there's the inputs to academic outcomes. And so we call them habits of work. And so every time a kid engages, a student engages with a pursuit and other parts of Primer they know that the habits of work are really important input into the score that they get or the grade that they get. And so, you know, these are things like, you know, is the child showing up engaged? You know, is the student working hard? Are they hitting their goals? Do they have legible goals? And I think that piece of it, I think, is an underrated part. You know, so many people are focused on the outcomes and, you know, what's the MAP score? What's the grade level? What's GPA? But we care a lot about these inputs. One, because I think they are inputs to academic outcomes and they're important. But to your point, like if you're launching a Shopify store as part of your Pursuit, learning how to show up, you know, even if you didn't sleep well the night before and be focused and work hard for 45 minutes or an hour on that is a really important life skill. And if you learn that in 6th grade, that's going to pay dividends for you, you know, well into adulthood. And so we think about them both because they're important for academic outcomes, but also because they're just important for life.

And it's the context in the academic outcomes. What's the connection between I'm learning the fundamentals of English, math, and so forth, and then I get these projects in social studies, science in the afternoon. Is there a connection? Do the students say like, hey, I'm learning reading so that I can do this thing? Like, do they understand that connection?

Yeah, we, um, we had a student. So yes, the, the, the, the high-level, uh, sort of answer is that we want students to feel a direct connection between what they're learning academically unlocking these cool projects that they're excited about. And, and, and the, the point of that is, you know, eventually it's, it, it, it grows to, okay, I'm gonna go study this thing for 4 years in and then go become this, you know, or I'm going to go to trade school, learn this set of skills, and then go, you know, have this profession. And so this, this starting to sort of develop the pattern matching of, hey, I can learn this thing in school and then it unlocks this project for me is really important. But what we, what we try to do is we try to both, both have that happen kind of fluidly and natively within the projects, but then also explicitly create that. And so I think last year we had a student that was really interested in statistics or, or math, and they're really excited about the NFL draft and, and like how teams were going to, you know, were going to to be able to decide who they were going to draft and relative to their current roster and salary caps and all these things. And so I was able to connect her with an NFL team and we, you know, we were on FaceTime talking to them about, you know, who they were going to draft and why they were going to draft them. And that was like a very, you know, you could, you could tell the kind of like eureka moment for her of like, okay, you know, I learned this math and then I was able to use that math to like create this sort of view of like what the optimal strategy would be for a draft. And then like it, I actually got to talk to an NFL team about it and, and have a conversation. And that's just like a very, a very small anecdote, but I, but those Those are the kind of connections that we want to make for kids. And I think that if, you know, if we do that, especially 5th, 6th, 7th grade, that'll pay tremendous dividends.

That's real empowerment.

Empowerment indeed. I hope you enjoyed this special edition of The Future of Education as much as I did. Being able to be in a Primer school with the students and teachers live was just a huge treat. So a huge thank you again to Ryan for joining me, and a huge thank you to the whole team at Primer and all the supports behind them that helped make this There were a lot of logistics to make all these things come together, and they just were absolutely top-flight professionals in making it happen. And a huge thank you, as always, to all of you for joining this special edition. I look forward to hearing about all your reactions and thoughts and comments to the episode. And as always, we'll see you next time on The Future of Education.