Inside Primer's Growing Network

Ryan Delk, the founder of Primer, an innovative K–8 private school network focused on accessibility, mastery, and student agency, sat down with me at a Primer school in Florida to help me learn about Primer’s schooling model. Ryan explained how Primer partners with passionate educators to launch flexible, community-focused campuses that prioritize affordability and transparency for families. Our discussion showcased how Primer leverages technology to personalize academics through regular assessment, supports teachers by reducing administrative burdens, and cultivates real-world skills and student empowerment through project-based “pursuits.” And we have clips throughout of teachers and students interacting in the school, as Ryan gave me a tour of the school. I can’t wait to hear all of your thoughts in the comments.Michael HornWelcome to the Future of Education. As I’ve discussed, for the last decade-plus, we’ve seen a wave of microschools and, more accurately in my view, low-cost private schools, emerge across the country. Many are local schools with one or two sites. But a few have scaling ambitions through different mechanisms—names like Acton Academy, Prenda, OpenEd, Wildflower, KaiPod arguably, Flourish, and a few others. And then there’s another school network with such ambitions called Primer. I had long heard about the Primer model from many folks and knew several of the team members. But I had never had the opportunity to visit a Primer School. Knowing I would have the opportunity to interview Gov. 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 a look into the school itself. For those listening, you’ll miss a lot of the video of the actual schools but you should be able to get the basic flavor. For those watching, I hope you enjoy and learn from the accompanying video of students and teachers.Creating a high-agency learning environmentMichael HornRyan, 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?Ryan DelkSo it’s, I’ll talk about it from the family, teacher and student perspective. So from an educator perspective, Primer exists to 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 a quite arduous process if you want to get a school 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, they, they partner with us to open, to open these schools.From a family perspective. Most of our families are in some sort of school situation that they know is not meeting their needs. And they’re typically not the families that can afford to move to 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, go see some kids in action. 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 get, 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 excite