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Multiple Choice: The Power of Microschools with Primer's Ryan Delk | GSVtv Podcast
00:14:47
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Transcript26 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
We are here at the ASU GSB Summit 2026 with Ryan Delk, the CEO and founder of Primer, which is a platform that helps great teachers launch micro schools in an effort to rebuild the US K12 education system. Thanks for having me. Alex, welcome. Yes. Tell us about the origin of Primer. You have an interesting origin story that's personal and it brings you to this really interesting realization which now the whole education system is I think realizing as well. Tell us about how Primer came about.
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A
Yeah, I got lucky because I had a 30 year head start on this. Yeah. So three decades ago my mom takes us to, takes me, I was the oldest of three siblings to kindergarten orientation at this F rated elementary school. And she was very pro public schools. She was, you know, that was, that was the plan. And she gets there and she realizes very quickly that this school was not going to be able to deliver to her expectations for our family. And we, like many families still today, we did not have the resources to move to a new like neighborhood or school district. We didn't have the resources to attend private school and there weren't charter schools available that would work for us. And so she just took matters into her own hands and she said I'm going to go find five other families that are in the same boat and we're going to deliver a great education experience for our kids. And so she just willed this thing into existence. Totally changed the trajectory of my, my life, my siblings life, these other families lives. And I just, I, I got honestly just like super lucky being her child. And then when I started having kids of my own, I got interested in education. Yeah, I'd been building tech companies and sold my last company and, and, and really just got excited about this idea of what would it look like to build a low cost kind of sort of in this similar vein of what I experienced growing up. Option for everyday working class American families. Yeah. And Primer was born.
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B
Exactly. And one of the themes at this year's summit is multiple choice. We call it, it's educational pluralism. The idea that we don't just have to have the traditional options in schooling. And you have been on this train for quite a while. Tell us how Premier actually works. How do you help people start micro schools? What is the model and how do you sort of take this movement that usually was reserved for people with a lot of initiative, a lot of get up and go who could sort of make it work and make it. And lower the barrier to entry.
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A
Yeah. So really there's, there's two things. So the first is we believe that most parents in America want the basics. They want a school that helps their kid become proficient at math, proficient at reading, a great relationship with a teacher, a safe environment, space to pursue the things that they're interested in, a high agency environment for their kids to learn, responsibility and autonomy. And there's a lot of other things that go around that. But that's the core of what most parents want. And then on the teacher side, most parents actually, or most teachers actually like, love teaching and they want to be a teacher. But a lot of these sort of like accoutrement that goes on top of all the bureaucracy and different things in the traditional system really wears them down. And so really what we do is we help great teachers and educators be able to open small schools that serve their communities, and they can do what they love, which is actually teaching and engaging with kids, and they can deliver what it also happens that most parents want, which is a. A school that kind of just gets back to the basics. And so there's not a lot of frills from a real estate perspective. We're not. We don't buy the nicest buildings, we don't do any of that, but we deliver a really great experience for your kids that helps them achieve good academic outcomes, understand what responsibility and autonomy looks like, have a great relationship with both peers and their teacher, and we find that that's really what most parents are after in school.
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B
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about some of the pieces, the components of that. I'm sure there's a of lot. There's compliance parts of it, there may be curricular parts of it. What are sort of the elements that need to be in place to allow a micro school to really take root.
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A
So Primer is full stack. So unlike a lot of other players in the space, we have a strong belief that most great educators that can deliver a great experience for students do not want to spend their time finding real estate or personally guaranteeing a loan or figuring out how to deal with compliance to get access to ESAs or various SGOs. We have a very strong belief that the best educators want to spend their time educating students, and we want to take on everything else. And so if you're a talented educator that wants to open a school in your community, you can partner with Primer and we'll take on all the complexity, from helping find real estate, to getting that real estate approved and compliant and insured, to guaranteeing you a salary to, you know, there's no financial Risk for you to open the school, we give you the full stack curriculum which is built by our academic team. So we use a combination of learning apps, physical in person instruction from the teacher, small group learning. And so we deliver this sort of full stack experience that still preserves the optionality for the teacher where they get to spend time crafting experiences for the student. They get to get to know their kids and deliver a great academic experience that's tailored to that community but without having to take on a lot of the complexity that wears a lot of teachers down.
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B
That's exciting. And the world has really changed pretty rapidly in the last few years. There's been an enormous boom in the micro school movement in school choice movements of all stripes. Estimates now put between 750,000 and 2 million students attending micro schools full time, nearly 40% using ESAs and other state funded school choice programs. So what do you think is causing this change and what has it meant for Primer to see the sort of entire education ecosystem sort of shifting towards the model that you've been sort of, you know, excited about for quite a while?
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A
Yeah, it's definitely a little surreal how many things like when I go back and read know like memos that we wrote or decks that we built four or five years ago, things that we were, we were sort of very high conviction on, but still very contrarian how those have now become consensus. And in some, some ways I was actually telling someone, you know, if you had told me in 2021 where we would be in 2026, sort of for school choice in general, I would not have believed you. I was, there's no way that, that, that would have all moved that quickly. And so I, I do think the movement has moved extremely quickly. I think as far as, you know, the number of parents that are choosing these options. I actually find it very unsurprising. I think it's a function of the demand was always there, just supply didn't exist. And you know, parents have always wanted great education for their kids, but most parents didn't have options. And so now that supply is, is coming on board and there's these scholarships and options for families, I think you're seeing sort of the natural conclusion of that which if parents are eagerly and earnestly seeking out the best education options for their kids and that often happens to be these smaller schools that they feel are more tailored to their needs.
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B
Yeah. One of the aspects of the Primer model that I think is fascinating, you've mentioned it a couple of times, is that you sort of Take teachers who love, love education, love teaching, and lower the barrier for them to actually become entrepreneurs, school founders, business owners, and sort of teacherpreneurs, we sometimes call it, but in this very particular way, to turn their passion into an actual fall business, which could be, you know, financially beneficial for them and incredibly good for the community. Where did that come from, that idea of teachers as the founders? Because that's not. Most schools are not founded by teachers, you know, in the regular public system or even charter system.
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Yeah, I think it came. The original impetus for it was this bet that if you could take on all the complexity and all these sort of arduous financial and bureaucratic and regulatory tasks that they would have to do, actually, they could deliver an exceptional experience for students. I was talking to one of our early. He's actually launching a new primer outside of Fort Myers as we speak. And when I was interviewing him for our fellowship, which is our program that trains up new teachers to launch primers, he said, ryan, I. What I. What I've come to realize he was actually a teacher for a long time, and then he was an administrator, and he was leaving to. To launch a primer. And he said, what I've realized is that I love teaching, but I hate being a teacher. And I, I it like, those words sort of like, stopped me in my tracks. I asked him, I said, what do by that? And he said, you know, I love being with students, you know, helping them learn, watching the light bulbs go off. I love everything about the, like, classroom experience of being a teacher of teaching. But I hate everything else that goes with being a teacher. All the bureaucracy and the politics and the. We have to do this change next year and this new curriculum we're rolling out, this is the new state to all these different things. And it was this sort of eureka moment for me of if we can take on all that complexity for them, there's tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of teachers that would, I think, would be really excited about the option to actually do what they love all day, which is engaging with kids and in this case, also sort of running this small operation without having to take on kind of all the bureaucracy that goes on in the traditional system. And so I think that's really attractive to great educators, and I think specifically educators that have a deep connection to their community, they're excited about what that can unlock, you know, not just for themselves and their own satisfaction, but the satisfaction they get from seeing that in the community.
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B
Yeah. So I don't know if you see yourself this way or not. But it strikes me that you're kind of creating a two sided marketplace in a lot of ways. Right. You're helping teachers create schools that are really high quality, that bring their passion for teaching, and then helping the communities around them find these schools. In some ways. I'm curious what that looks like, because in a way this is like, I wouldn't say it's like a Airbnb or Uber or anything like, but two sided marketplaces are a very particular business model. I don't know if you see yourself that way, so if you could push back on that metaphor. But it's a really interesting way. You sort of become this facilitating, you know, facilitating agent that allows teachers to create their own schools and then to change the communities around them or to leave the schools they're in and create their own new schools. How, how do you react to that?
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A
I think it's a reasonable analogy. I think where I would push back or, or maybe reframe is I think we, we aim to be the most trusted brand in the space, both for teachers and educators, but also for families. And so we don't leave, you know, up to chance the quality of a primer.
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B
Right.
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So we do, you know, we really invest in nailing everything from the real estate to the curriculum to the, you know, family experience to the educator experience. And so from that perspective, I think of us almost more like a, you know, if it is a two sided marketplace, it's, it's sort of like very sort of guided and you know, sort
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of like it's like a franchise. Ish metaphor. Is that crazy?
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Maybe a little bit, yeah. But I think it's really, for us, we really care about this idea that parents, our parents are looking for something different, but they don't want to take pedagogical risk on their, on their child. Not, they're not interested in like trying this like crazy new fancy thing. The basics.
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Exactly.
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They want something that works. Yeah. So we really try to be that option where you're not taking pedagogical risk, you're not taking curriculum risk. You're, you're, you're, you know, you can walk into a primer and it feels like school. It feels like, feels familiar, but it feels new and fresh in different ways. It's really interesting. And that's really what we're, that's like the lane that we're trying to play in.
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B
Makes sense. And so, you know, there's been a criticism of the microschool movement, which is that it serves families who already have options and you said early on, based on your own story, it was for that's not your goal at all. Right. You know, it's not meant for only families that already have a lot of resources. Yeah. You've actually said Primer can deliver world class education at about 60% of the cost of the traditional school system in Florida and that some Primer schools will be free to families. Tell us about the economic aspect of this.
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A
Yeah, so primer is 100% free in Texas. We're opening schools across San Antonio next year and it's 100% free. And that's been a goal of mine for a very long time, is to get to free. And we hope to be able to replicate that in other states. But even in states like Florida and Alabama, parents are paying 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month on top of their ESA. So it's radically affordable relative to the alternatives. But I think that the thing that we have a set of core values and we really orient around this idea of access as the constraints. So I think about the cost of Primer is actually like similar to how you would think about a feature in a product. Like cost is actually a feature. Like we are aiming to be radically accessible. And so we start from the constraint of Primer must be accessible. We cannot jeopardize that. And so when we think about ways that we're going to change the program or our staffing model or our state operations or all these different variables, we're starting with the constraint of access. At most schools it's the opposite. You start with this program, we're going to start this classical Christian academy and then our tuition is going to be sort of an output of a model. That's our cost and our cost to educate. And we do the opposite. We say we're going to start with this access being the constraint that we operate with and then we're going to figure out how to deliver a great education within that constraint. And we're relentless about that. I will never ever compromise on that. And sometimes it's very frustrating for the team because we're really serious about it. But I think it forces us to innovate and do interesting things that a lot of other people either don't think about or aren't willing to compromise on. And we're able to deliver, I think, a really great educational experience at a price point that every parent can afford.
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B
Yeah, it's great. You mentioned that Primer is a. You want it to be a recognizable brand that's sort of synonymous with quality. It looks like school, you've rebranded recently and it's really, it's. You have a beautiful rebrand. I'm curious what that process has been like because edtech companies sometimes do do a lot of really amazing work, but they don't always brand it so well. You, the, the Primer brand is beautiful. People who have not seen it should definitely check out the website. Tell us, you know, for other entrepreneurs or other people in the ad tech world, what, what does it take to get to a really, really, you know, sort of top notch brand?
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A
I actually think this is a mistake that I made is I didn't. I sort of viewed brand as like a distraction. I was like, the only thing that matters is schools, like launching more schools, serving students well, serving families, serving educators. And so I sort of viewed brand as like this, this sort of thing that we were, we didn't need to invest in or wasn't perfect for all. Yeah, yeah, Surface or just sort of like ego, vanity, like matter. And then I started to realize actually this does matter a lot. And so we waited too long to invest in it. And then we, we corrected for that recently as, as you noted. But the brand was really inspired by this idea of the original primers or primers or you know, that sort of the, the, the, the first 200 years of American education were built on. These were like the founding tools of American education. And I think in a lot of ways, you know, a lot of parents want this kind of return to what works and what's always worked. And Primer in, in a lot of ways is that we're sort of this like, okay, if you had a one room schoolhouse, but it was in 2026, what would that look like? How would it work? How would you leverage technology thoughtfully, but not in a way that dominates the experience, not in a way that replaces teachers, not in a way that, where students are just only engaging through screens. And so we really think of ourselves as this sort of return to what's worked, but also preparing students for a future that is going to be more dynamic with a higher rate of change than we've seen in the past. And we want Primer to really nail that. We want the brand to communicate that. So that was the original inspiration. And I think the team, I can take very little credit for it, but I think the team nailed it.
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B
That combination of sort of historic safety and future orientation, it does come across in the brand. It's really beautiful. Ryan Delk is the founder and CEO of Primer. Thank you so much for being here with us. At the asu. GSP Science.
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A
Thanks for having me.
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B
Appreciate it.