For the past four years, Matt Candler has obsessed over students, families and teachers, despite the existing, outdated school system around them. Finally with 44 education startups under his belt, he’s starting to see the future of schools change in ways he had only imagined with 4.0 Schools, a non-profit incubator for education-based startups.
“4.0 Schools exists because there are no places to innovate schools and education in The United States,” said Candler, 4.0’s Founder and CEO. “But, we are not an accelerator for startups. We are a community of people re-imagining the future of schools.”
In 2010, 4.0 Schools was founded in New Orleans on the belief that schools could be made dramatically better. However, outdated systems and the hierarchy that surrounds education creates inefficiencies that make any kind of change nearly impossible. 4.0 Schools equips people with the resources needed to create those changes, using an entrepreneurial mindset. The goal is to create startups or even new school concepts that can help shape the future of schools.
For Candler, the best way to improve schools and education was to work around it by focusing on the user instead of the school system. Rather than working with the often-political school system, Chandler helps entrepreneurs and education leaders define the problem, test it quickly and launch a startup within three months, changing what is often a structural issue into a tangible one that can be solved.
New Orleans may have seemed like the most unlikely place to experiment with new education concepts, since the city arguably had the worst school system in the country before Katrina. Now, with the rise of charter schools and the help of new education innovation, New Orleans has made remarkable progress. Candler admits that the education system is still at a C level, but what New Orleans has done so far is unprecedented and continuing to improve with 9 out of 10 children now attending charter schools.
Besides new educational concepts and technology, new schools have also been founded out of 4.0’s programs. (Yes, schools.) Candler saw a new opportunity to change the future of schools by creating actual institutions, but soon realized that he needed to change how schools were created if he was going to take part in changing the future of it.
Prior to founding 4.0 Schools, Candler spent 20 years helping people start new schools. The process of starting a new school often took several months of research and incubation periods in a quality school and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars, in addition to a 200-400-page charter application detailing its structure and goals. In other words, it was a lot of time and money that could have been put into the actual operation of the school and educating its students. However, until recently, that approach worked.
During 4.0’s first year, a member of the inaugural cohort challenged Candler’s approach. Entrepreneur Josh Densen started holding information meetings in living rooms asking parents what they wanted out of schools. He listened without the intention of selling anything to them, and what he found from his research was that parents wanted socioeconomic diversity and a focus on creative thinking. But, rather than following Candler’s long and arduous process, he decided to host pop-up schools at a weekly music festival in New Orleans. This idea was inspired by a highly publicized debate that was simultaneously happening between old-line New Orleans restaurants and food trucks.
With the same concept of having a portable restaurant, he had a portable school and started holding his pop-up classes once a week at a partnering school called Samuel Green Charter School. After doing pop-ups and several small-scale pilots to prove that his concept worked, Densen opened Bricolage Academy - one of the most diverse schools in New Orleans.
“Josh represents part of what is happening here in New Orleans,” added Candler. “He started with Teach For America in New York City, so he understands “ how to teach children living in poverty. After business school, he moved to New Orleans with his family, advocating for a specific type of school.”
Other Josh Densens have gone through 4.0’s programming in order to bring new school concepts to life. Jonathan Johnson will be launching Rooted School this fall through a program called the Future of Schools Challenge, which is a partnership of New Schools for New Orleans, 4.0 Schools, and Khan Academy to incubate radically new public school models for New Orleans. Rooted School aims to bridge the gap between what’s being taught in high schools and what skills are needed for the jobs being created in Greater New Orleans’ high-growth, high-wage industries. With 4.0’s help, Johnson has learned how to build a board, how to negotiate, and how to be a visionary leader, as well as several other valuable lessons that have been a key to his success. In addition, 4.0 Schools has helped cover his startup costs and travel costs that allowed him to visit schools who followed a similar model.
“We are standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before us who got charter schools to where they are today,” said Johnson on how new, innovative charter schools and entrepreneurs are changing the education landscape. “We can see farther because of their efforts. We have been able to sift through all the data of our country’s reform efforts over the past 20 years and, if you’re anything like me, you know that more can be done.”
Johnson also added that he is part of a group of people who are paving the way for the next generation of school builders by showing there are less risky ways to test largely untested school designs, which, he believes, has been a huge barrier to innovation within school design.
Since 2010, 4.0 Schools has helped execute 44 startups and schools with unique training and programming throughout the year. The programming ranges from multi-day training, one on one coaching, and a bi-annual launch program, which last three months each. This year, 4.0 will be launching a lab in New York City to provide a home for their growing community. Their network of alumni, mentors and community members will parallel 4.0’s efforts in New York in order to run more programming and host a Launch program this fall.
In addition, they are launching The Tiny Schools Project, which will help 4.0 Launch alums execute one-year pilot programs of new school models. The program will provide design guidance, financial support between $25,000 and $150,000 and coaching for up to 18 months. Pilot programs will start with 15 students or less each, just small enough to be able to get feedback from the students, teachers and parents in order to manage risk and make progress towards a longer-term school. The schools will also have the potential to become the best local schools, with a larger goal to contribute to the redefinition of what schools might become in the future.
