Voices of Freedom - Interview with Brandon Detweiler

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

The movement to expand parental freedom in education continues to experience momentum, an encouraging sign that families are demanding more choices for their children. Dozens of states have passed laws to open K12 opportunities over the last few years, and even more are considering doing the same. Yet many families still don’t send their children to a school that best fits their needs even after these laws are passed because they are unaware of their new education options. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Brandon Detweiler.  Brandon’s work focuses on ensuring that information about a family’s K12 opportunities is literally at their fingertips.  Topics discussed by Brandon Detweiler and Rick Graber, President and CEO, The Bradley Foundation, include:   ·         Obstacles that prevented education freedom from taking off earlier ·         The development of Schoolahoop, an app that informs families about their K12 options ·         Lessons learned from the initial launch of Schoolahoop, including feedback from parents and the education community ·         Outreach efforts to inform families of educational opportunities, including scholarships ·         The implementation measures that parental choice advocates should consider as they try to advance education opportunity in their states   Brandon Detweiler is the head of product at the Foundation for American Innovation. He has a background in edtech, online learning, and e-commerce at Veritas Press, where he helped lead and grow the largest and oldest online classical Christian school in the country and launched the Phonics Museum Reading App. 

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. The parental freedom and education movement is experiencing great momentum after decades of gradual, some might even say slow progress. Several states have enacted programs expanding education opportunity in recent years with 20 more states, 20, considering similar programs, which is fantastic. Yet, I think we all know that passing legislation is only the beginning.

It's really only the tip of the spear when it comes to providing educational freedom to families. Parents just don't know how to take advantage of new opportunities as a result of legislation. It really does dull or impede the intended impact of any legislation. Our guest today, though, is on a mission to change that so that families have all the information they need to make informed choices about their children's education. Brandon Detweiler is head of product at the Foundation for American Innovation, or FAI. He has a background in ed tech, on learning, e-commerce at Veritas Press, where he helped lead and grow the largest and oldest online classical Christian school in the country and launched the Phonics Museum

Reading app. Brandon, welcome. It is wonderful to have you with us. Well, thank you so much, Rick. I appreciate you having me, and I'm excited for our conversation. We'll have a great one. Let's start with you a little bit. Talk about your background.

How'd you get started in the tech world? And, you know, let's follow on to that. What led you to carve out a niche in education technology specifically? Sure. Hopefully, actually, let me, if I can kind of take them in reverse. Sure. My story and my upbringing and my family's history has a lot to do with it. But I come from a long history of K-12 educators. Great-grandfather

founded Miami Country Day in Miami, Florida, which is still thriving to this day. And grandma, mom, educators. My dad's from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Mennonite. And just became a businessman, started a real estate investment company when he and my parents met in Miami. And eventually, they moved to Orlando where real estate was booming at the time. I'm one of four boys. My dad's a real estate investment business going well, had a poor experience at the school that my oldest brother and I were attending and caused my dad to go to a good friend of his,

a famous theologian that passed away relatively recently, R.C. Sproul. And my dad said, you know, hey, what do I need to do to get my kids a great education? And he said, well, it's not about getting the best. It's about getting the least bad. But he said, read this book. And it was a book on classical Christian education, and both my parents read it and said, this is what we want for our kids.

And so they started what's still – what's actually thriving to this day, the Geneva School. And I attended that with my brothers. And that was where they noticed there was a gap in curriculum that fit the classical Christian pedagogy. And so they made a timeline history curriculum that combined world history with biblical history. And the school started using it. And then eventually more schools wanted it they started a little hobby business and it took off now 30 years later it's a pretty large company but that one it went from you know an over-the-phone mail order business to

a digital business e-commerce and around that time i met my wife and settled down. And as I was deciding what I was going to do next, my folks asked me to step in part-time to serve as a marketing director or something like that. And I just took to it. It made sense. It was very logical. Classical education, there's formal logic and things like that. I love spreadsheets. And so as we started to have to build out more technology, like a homegrown student information system, learning management systems, the entire tech stack for building schools, understanding

where parents are looking for new educational opportunities, how to find them, it all kind of blended together. And it just made a lot of sense to me and became... I'd like to think I was always passionate about it, but became something that I felt convicted of and wanted to dedicate a lot of my life to, like generations before me. So I was kind of long-winded, but built a lot of technology for Veritas. I ended up leaving there and was kind of a mercenary executive for some private equity deals. And after the last one sold, my best friend Aaron started

formerly Lincoln Network, and they had the studio. And we rebranded to Foundation for American Innovation. And we focus on K-12 education and helping parents, helping students get access, make them aware, make it easy for them to access the best educational options for them around them. It's a massive passion of mine and helping those the most need it. Well, let's get into that a little bit. I mean, you've developed a new product that really does exemplify technology's ability to make a difference in people's lives by exposing them to educational opportunity, and it's called Schoolahoop.

Tell us about that, including the story behind the name. It's an amazing product, and I really want everyone to hear more about it. Well, I appreciate that. Like with many names to products, a lot of the times you don't really know where or who the name came from because you'll sit in a room and you'll just kind of brainstorm ideas. And then once you get some good ideas, you'll go on a domain named registrar and start to see what's available. And so I think just School of Hoop came from brainstorming with the team. And obviously, it's catchy. It's easy to tell people. It's memorable. And so those are all the things that you want in a domain name. And so we were very fortunate that we came up with a name. So I certainly cannot and will not take credit for it,

but I do love it. Tell us what it does. Yeah. So high level over of School of Hoop, and it truly has evolved over the two and a half, three years since we started the process to develop it. And it started with the Miles Foundation in Tarrant County, Texas, coming to us with a problem. We said, hey, we have a lot of these choice schools that have availability, but they're underutilized. Why? Help us figure that out. And so we deployed what we call our user research process and started diving in to solve that specific problem, that one problem initially. And it consisted of user interviews. It consisted of us literally sitting behind parents as we asked them, like, if you were going to find an alternative school, how would you do it? And we were specifically focusing on

parents that lived in, say, lower income areas, were lesser educated, maybe not college educated, possibly didn't even graduate from high school, or their kids are attending or live in a district as a failing school. Because those are the parents that are truly the most in need. And I see that every day when I talk to families, because if you're talking to affluent parents, you know your options, you hear about it, it goes through the telephone line and everybody understands. When there's a new school, you kind of know, it's just in our network. Those families will be found in our research. First, 80% of them could not name, and this statistic was staggering and was really the

initial light bulb moment. They could not name a single alternative school to their locally zoned public schools because their network was not aware of them. And then, so that was the light bulb moment. And then we ran down the path of, well, why is that the case? And every single parent that we asked to try and find alternative schools, we go straight to Google. The results on Google, top three results, your locally zoned public schools. Then after that, it was Zillow, Niche, some other options. And they were all tilted towards the locally zoned public schools and not making it easy to find alternatives. These are just the schools, right? Not the choice programs, which is where we eventually added that to the product and is incredibly important.

But so that was the initial problem that we set to solve. And Miles was such a great partner in that and has been a wonderful partner since the beginning. And through all of our surveys and analytics, we've been able, I think we've built a product that works and helps parents solve that. So essentially what your product does is it enables parents to go online and say, these are the parameters or this is what I'm looking for in terms of education for my children. And it spells out exactly all the options that that parent might have within a particular geographic region. So if you're a parent in the city of Milwaukee, where I'm sitting today, the home of the Bradley Foundation, a parent in the city of Milwaukee, where I'm sitting today, the home of the Bradley Foundation, a parent in the city of Milwaukee could plug in and know

instantly what's out there, right? Exactly. So thank you. School Loop is the fastest and easiest way for parents to discover what their options are, their choice options, or all options. We do include public schools, only those that are locally zoned, which is unique, as well as the scholarship or choice program opportunities that they are eligible for, can apply for, and then we will match parents and schools to parents, parents to schools for the program they're eligible for and help streamline the enrollment process and the application process to whoever the program provider is. And so there's never been a platform that does both and brings them together, which I guess is a great opportunity for us. And again, we're a nonprofit. We're not trying to build a billion-dollar company. We just want to help parents. We're passionate about this. But you need to be able to tie both together because parents,

not only are they not aware of the schools we found out, what their choices are, but my wife and I, we started a private school in Jacksonville Beach, Florida last year. And I give a tour every other week. And we're still at the beach. We're dealing with relatively affluent parents. I haven't been keeping close notes on this. But I think only 40% of the parents since Florida passed the Universal ESA were aware that they were eligible for it of the people that I personally have been giving tours to. And so I think about that downstream

and it got, you know, it kind of, it's like a punch in the gut of how few people are actually aware that this opportunity is open for them, not just in Florida, but in Wisconsin, in Arizona, in every single state. And so that's the problem that we want to solve. That's the problem we are solving. And what I wake up to every day and just get excited about. But it's kind of like legislation. You can pass a law.

You can have a great piece of technology. But it doesn't do any good unless parents are aware that either exists, either the legislation or the app. You got it. So how is it working in the different states? How are people making parents aware of this tool? The beautiful thing about technology is that it can have an exponential compounding effect on your dollars, right? If it works, not everything works. That's why my department, we call ourselves fail

now, right? We have sunset and discontinued certain products. But when you get something right and you reach escape velocity, the impact is almost unfathomable. It's been a benefit to us in that we didn't roll out nationally overnight. We rolled out state by state by state, which has helped us become a very unique product in each individual state. For example, in Wisconsin versus Florida, pre-K is called different things. It could be VPK 3, VPK 4, or it could be called pre-K. It could be called – there's just a number of different things. And so now part of our process when we roll in every state,

and we learned this, frankly, from School Choice Wisconsin, among a lot of things, is that we need to customize those filters, those names for every single state that we're in so that we're speaking a language. The platform has a language that parents understand. And so a couple other things as far as how we're reaching parents. Our initial user research process was very influential in our strategy. When we would ask parents to go find alternative options, they all went straight to Google. So what we're able to do when we roll out in a new state, we spin up Google search ads and we can ensure, even though we have SEO efforts that we're working on and have gone well, but immediately we can hit the top of the search

results and we can get parents exactly where we're trying to get them. So when they're looking, they find us or they see us. That'd be one. We also learned like press releases and there's some other things we can do with social media, but that really has been a big piece. And then the other, I would call more of a grassroots piece. And this was where our work with School Choice Wisconsin has significantly influenced everything we've done from there in having a boots on the ground partner that has deep relationships with the actual schools in the state. They're able to engage them in ways that we cannot. Sure. Right. And so when they reach out, the schools listen and they respond. And by doing so, and by engaging a couple other partners, we have seen, and this year, we're really seeing the benefit from it with our traffic up about 2,500% year over year.

Wow. The benefit of that. And so what we've done is we've leaned into trying to build the technology so that it actually, it's not only a tool for parents, but it's an internal tool for these organizations. So when the people that are actually doing the work on the phones, parents have something or have a question, they have the technology that helps them find what they're looking for. And so those things have really helped us grow significantly and help us reach parents wherever they're looking or even in areas

where they're not because they're getting engaged by local leaders in their community. Makes perfect sense. I mean, I think back on Milwaukee and the Bradley Foundation's been involved in parental choice since the very beginning, which was the 1980s, long, long time ago. And, you know, 30, 40 years later, the city of Milwaukee is at the point where about half of the students in the city of Milwaukee attend something other than a conventional public school. But look how long that has taken, you know, decades and decades to get to this point with a lot more work to do. I got to think that a tool like School of Hoop can speed up that process a lot. Would you agree? I completely agree. I think one of the things that keeps me up at night is I see a lot of policymakers or people that have been so focused on getting these choice bills or ESA programs acrossutilized, and eventually get rolled back with the next administration or the administration after that.

Because, you know, it's the build it and they will come. That's not the way the world works, right? And so you can have an incredible product, but if nobody knows about it, then they're not going to use it. Right. And which is where I think School of Hoop really fills the gap. And we've kind of found our niche is that initially we thought, okay, School of Hoop could be this national brand. All these people will learn about it.

It'll just spread like wildfire. Guess what? It didn't work. And so what we did, we pivoted and we started investing and building technology for the organizations like Jenny at Love Your School or School Choice Wisconsin or Step Up for Students. And all of these organizations that are like blood, sweat, and tears doing the work on the ground, the local experts, and by enabling them and building tools like our white label school finder application that they can just, with basically a quick club of a button, embed on their website, make them significantly more effective, all ships rise. And the ultimate goal is, you know, children getting the greatest education.

And so not only by us seeing our numbers go up, like what that means is that more students are getting enrolled in amazing schools and potentially like changing their future. Have you had a chance to talk to parents directly who have used the tool and have had great success using it, have changed their kids' lives? Oh, tons. I bet that's fun and satisfying. It is. Those are the types of conversations and emails and messages that you get that put wind in your sails.

When you actually have an impact in something that you did, something that you had your hands in, that truly does change the trajectory of somebody's life, it's a rush that it's hard to describe, right? So designing an app state by state, I assume they're all very different

because you said just the language alone is different from place to place. You know, with 20 states thinking about this at the time, there would seem to be enormous opportunity, but also a monumental task to roll this out beyond the state you're in. So talk about where you are right now and what the future holds. Sure. So I'd say one, this is where, again, rolling out individual state by individual state has helped us, which is exactly how you want to build a technological product, be iterative. But so what we've done is we've built a platform so that it is applicable universally to every state, right? And so then what we do is we customize certain aspects of the platform, like the filters or the scholarship quiz, where parents can answer a series of questions and we'll tell them specifically which program they're eligible for. Like in Wisconsin, there's several programs and it can be very confusing. Right.

Even the partners that are trying to help parents apply didn't have like a cookie cutter, very logical way to say, okay, answer. Okay, cool. This is the one we're going to apply for. And so we can save them time by doing that. Not only the partners on the ground, but the parents. And so that's the way that it's universally applicable. But then you have to start thinking about scaling, right? So we're currently live in, obviously, Wisconsin, Arizona, Texas, which is where we initially launched, Florida, Kansas City metro area. There's a lot that goes into becoming live in a state. We want to make sure that the data is

accurate. If what we saw in our research, if the data wasn't accurate, if the email bounced, or if the phone number wasn't right, or if the information on the school wasn't correct, if parents didn't know the tuition cost, then they wouldn't pursue it. And so we've developed what is not the most scalable solution yet, although it gets better over time, is a way to aggregate data from multiple data sets. So we pull it from NCES, we pull it from the state DOE, We work with local boots on the ground partner, four or five different places. And now that we've rolled out in several states, we've seen, okay, this platform is really good with this data piece, but there's 30 to 50. And so we built this, what we call web scraper, and then it aggregates everything.

So then we know, okay, this one prioritize this data source and this one, then this one. And then we actually have a team that manually goes through and verifies things. We continuously build out the automation for that. Because frankly, we need to, it's data that gets updated on an annual basis. And,

but our timeframe to launching in a new state has probably reduced, man, probably 3x from initial to the point where we can roll out pretty quickly. And it just continues to go down. And not only does that go down, our costs go down to roll out in a new state. But it's something very top of mind because we do dream of being available in all 50 states

and something i think unique to us is we not just want to help with the school search but also help parents discover the choice programs or the scholarship programs that help bring that like make all these options accessible and then also identify a boots-on-the-ground partner and enable them, which is probably the most unique thing that we do. There are some organizations that have school finder applications, right? You go to grade schools or even Zillow or Niche. They're doing these things. But what we've found really is the secret sauce is every state is so unique, right? Down to the verbiage that they use. And if you don't have a partner on the ground that you're working with, it's kind of like

launching a business or launching a sister company or another branch in a foreign country. If you don't know the language, if you don't know the culture, it's going to be hard to be successful. And so that's why it is absolutely imperative for us. If we don't have those partners, we would miss out on probably 40 to 50% of the things that end up, they seem small, but in the end, they're the things that make you valuable and unique and keep parents coming back or referring other parents to you. And so that's why it is an absolute imperative for us to do that. When your local partners are rolling this tool up, are they branding it as School of Hoop? Good question.

Honestly, they can do whatever they want. What we do, we have a white-label version of School of Hoop is what we call it. So it's as easy as embedding a YouTube video on a website. Because what we found is some of the partners that we work with don't have an internal tech team. So we had to build it in a way that was very easy to implement. And frankly, if they have difficulty, my team will jump in and help them do that. So we do that and create a school finder on their website. And I think there's just like at the very bottom, it says like Powered by SchoolHoop.

But it looks like a native application to their sites. We customize the colors, the button, the language. We put their logo on it so that it does look like something that they did, which I think is wonderful for them. And then the other piece that we do is we build a state landing page on School of Hoop. So, you know, West Virginia page, Wisconsin page, Florida page. And on that page, on that landing page, I'm trying to give parents a complete overview of what their options are. Here are the programs that you could potentially be eligible for. This is how many schools you could put your address in here. We'll tell you, take this quiz and in a very easy, digestible way, trying to help them at a very high level understand

all of their options. Brandon Detweiler, thanks so much for leading this important work. School of Hope is a wonderful tool for helping parents find the right school for their children. And we wish you all the best with its continued state-by-state profile. Well, Rick, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us next month on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation

on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.