Episode 15: On Startup Barriers

[MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, I'm joined by Shashana Weisman from the Abundance Institute. We'll talk about why it can be so hard to start something new, whether it's a school, a business, or anything that doesn't fit into existing rules. Hi, we're here today with Shashana Weisman from the Abundance Institute. How are you doing today, Shashana? Good. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, great. So I thought we would just start with having you talk a little bit about where you work and what you do. And then we'll get into kind of the meat of the conversation. Sure. So I just started at the Abundance Institute about two months ago. So I'm still getting used to everything. But here we work on energy policy and tech policy, basically. A lot of AI, a lot of nuclear, a lot of electricity policy. My expertise is child online safety policies, so stopping age verification laws. But I plan to tie an occupational licensing reform wherever I can. Like data centers need it for contractors and electricians, because those licenses don't transfer very well. And a lot of them are locally licensed. And it makes it hard if you're traveling on electrician because a lot of laws that recognize licenses from other states don't really apply to local licenses. So I plan to shoehorn licensing reform into it wherever I can. But my title is Digital Director and I manage our digital media. And I'll be doing policy stuff, too. OK, great. Yeah, so what you've hinted at why I really wanted to talk to you, because in the space of hybrid schools and micro schools, they're often started by parents or teachers who are kind of walking away from the conventional public school system. And we deal a lot with this criticism that says, well, who are you to be a teacher? Who are-- if you don't have the right credential, right? Who are you to start a school if you don't have the right piece of paper to hand in to us, right? So we don't deal with it as quite as much as we did in the past, but it still comes up. So can you talk a little bit about this? Like art school choice and school startups and your work in occupational licensing reforms kind of part of the same philosophical project in some ways? Yeah, I think it kind of depends how you look at it, because you can look at both issues from a lot of different kinds of perspectives. But from the government saying no to people who want to try something new, I think that that's a really big area. There's all kinds of different ways you can handle licensed professions that just aren't legal, like letting people work across state lines in a lot of cases, mobile businesses. So sometimes mobile hair cutting isn't something that you can do or working with different populations, like working with homeless people can sometimes like trigger licensing issues. And I guess it's the same with education to a degree, where it's different, but if you want to try a new structure, a new way to do something that it doesn't work quite as well. And it both really enshrine how things work now and make it hard to branch outside of that. So there's a lot of different ways to look at it for sure, but I think as far as experimentation and switching stuff that both areas run into a lot of issues with how the government handles it. Yeah, great. So in our space, we had to deal-- one of my friends who started a school here in Atlanta a few years ago had to deal with local fire codes. So she's running space out of a church. She-- the church wasn't built as a school. And so they ran into the issue of, well, you could have, you know, 40 kids-- you could have 400 kids in this room on Sunday morning, but on Monday morning, if you have more than eight, it's like some huge safety risk in violation, right? So can you-- you've worked with various industries. Can you think of some of the more absurd examples that you've come across with licensing? Oh, there's so many. Yeah. Louisiana fixed this, but for a while, it was only state-to-licensed florists, which just in itself is crazy. Like, it was the only state that did it. There weren't any problems in other states among licensed florists. Like, this was just ridiculous. And there was a court case around it all litigated by the Institute for Justice years ago. And the courts just upheld any ridiculous argument of like, oh, they must have had a good reason for licensing this. So there's-- I mean, the way courts work with economic liberty isn't great. So you end up with judges being like, oh, yeah, this makes sense. This ridiculous thing makes sense. But there's all kinds of things. I think TV and scholars in certain states are licensed-- shampooers are often licensed, like the people who shampoo your hair. And even to the degree I can understand with like using the chemicals and wanting the license that, even though I still don't think you need a license for that, because you can still do that at home. Shampooing generally does not come with danger. And if you do it wrong, you can just wash out the rest later, or you can shampoo again. Like, these are things that literally children do at home all the time, pretty safely. There's all kinds of ridiculous stuff. I mean, even to the extent that you couldn't work across state lines, in many cases, you'd have to keep a new license in every state you wanted to work in. And that's just not how things should work. And that was more of an absence of rule, rather than the rule itself. And I think the last piece in there is how government treated itself. Because if you are a police officer looking to move from state to state, you had an easier time switching your license than if you were a cosmologist. And your record wasn't often checked, which is why problem police officers in certain cases were able to move to different jurisdictions and cause the same problems, because no one was checking. So there's-- I mean, there's just so much nonsense. Even like not letting doctors work across state lines, telehealth is still an issue. If you have a therapist and you go home for the holidays and your therapist is in license, there you can't use them. It's just lots of nonsense all over. I think those are some of the top, though, for me, especially the Flores and Champoors. Yeah, yeah. So how does this happen? In other industries, how does this happen? With education, I guess it can be exaggerated fears, right? Because what about the kids? Maybe an exaggerated fear that people have. And so they're willing to make more rules around who can teach and who can open to school. Or having worked in state government, I can see things like legislatorists or local regulators saying, well, I've got a good idea for a rule. And everybody else says, yeah, that's a good idea. And then someone else says, I also have a good idea for a good rule. Here's another one. We write that one down, too. That's good. And over time, you just build this Christmas tree of rules and regulations. And then nobody ever goes back and thinks about what it looks like at that point. So what causes all of this to happen? Yeah, it's all the same stuff, plus a lot of industry lobbying, people who want to keep people out of their profession. That's a really common addition there, too. But sometimes one bad thing happens, and then they think they need a whole new licensing structure, something to fix it. Or it's think about the children, stuff like that. I wasn't there, or a lot of these laws pre-existed when I got into it. But there's a lot of evidence that trade associations lobby for these, as well, too. For some of them, though, it's just like you're saying, someone comes up with an idea, no one really challenges it. One of my favorites was there was a state a year ago that wanted to license Qi Gong, which is the ancient Chinese art of energy healing. And to think that a local licensing board is going to be able to tell you which are the real Qi Gong practitioners is pretty wild. But I wrote an op-ed with my friend, because my mom is into this stuff. And she was able to walk us through exactly how to talk about it in a way that people who practiced Qi Gong would be able to get with. And we were making the points that it's probably not the job of a licensing board. And I found that the legislator was really upset at me for being so harsh on him, because he's like, oh, well, what am I constituents just wanted this? And I'm like, your job isn't to do whatever your constituents want. Your job is to protect them. And I don't think unlicensed energy healing through Qi Gong is the way to go. There's also licenses for fortune telling, which I think that was about worried about people-- legislators worried about fraud or stuff like that. But again, it gets to the point of, are you worried that there's going to be fortune tellers who are bad at fortune telling? Do you want to give other ones the seal of approval? Is that the way to go? So all kinds of stuff there. But it's always hard because when you put a regulation into place, it's really hard to get it undone. And I'm a big fan of testing things before to make sure that they work. But that just doesn't happen in government. Even when it comes to sunsets and sunrises for regulations, they just don't always happen. They're sometimes extended infinitely. But I wish with licensing and with other kinds of regulations, too, that we would test it out a little bit more. And the other thing, too, is we don't think about lower barrier to entry. Like a common issue people point out for contractors is that they can skip out of town with people's money and that that's something that's known to happen. But you don't need a license for that. You just need mandatory registration. Like that's a lower barrier that serves the purpose. Or there's been a concern for massage therapists covering as sex workers and stuff like that. But there's still lower barriers than making people go to massage school. It still comes down to mandatory registration. Or sometimes insurance is the right barrier. Or just saying that you have to get a private certification. But the vibe behind the way we put in regulations tends to be the go to the highest level instead of thinking through what's the right and most effective level in a lot of cases. So there's a lot of factors at play. but unfortunately, we're not in the right place. Unfortunately, there's not a desire to loosen regulations like this. Yeah, I mean, this suggests, too, that these local boards can tell who is a good fortune teller, who's a bad fortune teller. Like they have the expertise to figure that out, right? Or the best energy healer or the best teacher of whatever random kind of school that you want to do. This is a weird suggestion that people think they have this kind of knowledge to go into it, right? Yeah. And so, if a founder wanted to start a micro school or a hybrid school tomorrow, some of the first regulatory bottlenecks that they'll run into are things like zoning that I mentioned, right? Or childcare rules or especially, as you get into higher grades, things like teacher credentialing. So what kind of barriers surprise people the most when they try to innovate in other service industries? So like, how similar are those barriers to what you run into in schools? Yeah, the zoning generally doesn't end up being a big piece of it. There's other kinds of regulations that it gets into here. I think, I mean, sometimes people are just surprised things are licensed. Like, limousine drivers are often licensed by cities. And it can be difficult to get that license or, you know, kind of like taxi medallion, same kind of idea, depending on the state and the locality. Sometimes they're surprised at how much it takes to get licensed or that some things license at all. Or that they can't work across state lines. It's all, it's all the little things in there. There's other, there's other like little quirks when it comes to licensing to like a bunch of states. A lot of states got rid of this, but almost half of all states had rules saying that if students fell behind on, sorry, not students or professionals fell behind on their student loans. The government should take away their license to work until they repay those loans. And we have found data when I was at my last job showing that they did repay those loans by taking out more loans. It wasn't like they just had money sitting around. And we're talking to apply to nurses and teachers, especially, and we have a shortage in those professions. So it's probably not the best way to do that. But there's lots and lots of quirks. I mean, there was even a case of a guy in Arizona who was cutting hair for the homeless and he was in cosmology school, but didn't have his license. And they cracked down on him for cutting hair for the homeless without a license, which is just nuts that they weren't even paying him. So the way the law is written when it comes to cosmology in a lot of states is that even if you're not paid, the law might trigger in. So if you're just doing a friend's hair, the law is technically triggering in and lots of people don't know that you're probably not going to have it enforced against you, but like that shouldn't be on the books that way. We shouldn't even be on the books if you're paying because I don't think we need to license that. But there's a lot of weird quirks within these laws that a lot of people don't know about for sure. So you're either a secret outlaw, right? Right. Or you know you're an outlaw and it kind of degrades your your respect for the law in some ways. Yeah. Right. So what about, so for founders, what are some things that they underestimate about local and state government regulators when they get into new industries? What are people underestimate about these people? I don't know. I think it varies because the regulators themselves vary so much like some really are there to help and want to make it as easy as possible and they still have to follow the rules, but they're trying to make it easier for people. But then others are it like you just have your opera see for its own sake or you have people who enjoy the power trip. So it kind of depends on the on the local and the different people there. But some people have been surprised at how unhelpful they've been and how difficult processes were and how basically unhelpful that either the regulators or the or the people implementing the regulations have been but others have had a much easier time with it. So I think it kind of varies depending. Yeah. Yeah. So so another question would be then what kind of mindset should someone so say someone is a parent. And they've got a group of friends who want to start a school or they're a teacher who's stepping away from their public school career to start one of these. What kind of what kind of mindset should they have going into all of this stuff right when they're going to have to deal with the locals or zoning people, the fire people, the child care regulator, all these other things right. So what kind of a creditors for schools right. Is it do you find that it's better to be to just go in guns blazing and be adversarial. Is it better to be cooperative is it something else. Like what approach do people need to take. Yeah, so it depends on the goal if the goal is to just do this thing like to participate in the profession. It makes sense to just be as cooperative as possible and as helpful as possible. But if you want to go in and maybe see them for not letting you then you know that there's different approaches to take. But generally if your goal is just to participate in whatever profession or to start a school or to do whatever regulated thing you want to do. You want to be as cooperative as humanly possible and and show that you're going to be easy to work with because I think that gives you the best chance. So there's even been cases where I think people were too hard on on bureaucrats and cases where the bureaucrat wanted to work with them. But the people just wanted to like make a big deal out of it, which I sympathize with. I get wanting to retaliate against the rules, but if your goal really is just to do the thing like you want to be as cooperative as possible. It sucks because it's you might not want to you might not like the rules, but these people are just enforcing them and there's no it's not going to help if you're difficult to work with unfortunately. So just making it as easy on them as possible, but but again, if you want to fight the rules, then there's different ways to go about that too. Yeah, so so we're not we're not tough space a lot of times where they're kind of art rules right a lot of these schools emerged from. And they opened up these micro schools and these pods and all these different kinds of things and the regulators did it know what they were looking at. And so they started writing rules and somewhere helpful, somewhere not helpful right. And now we're kind of like deal like kind of we're still in this mode of trying to sort it all out right. So what so let's move on let's think about a big win that you've seen across the country like what can you think of like maybe the biggest one you've had of some some license getting like revoked or some regime getting changed. That really like that really helped the industry that they were working in. Well one thing I was really excited about is Louisiana getting rid of its floors by some last year like the public. Can you can you first can you steal man that argument for us like what is this strongest argument in favor of licensing florists. So I've seen like genuinely there is right. Yeah, I've it's genuinely just corruption, but it's I've like there's arguments I've seen for other professions where I'm like I understand this a little bit more even if I don't agree. It's like there's there've been all these arguments like I forget if this one happened in the court case or not, but I think it might have that what if a bride is walking and is holding flowers and then she falls on the stem staffer like that was genuinely one of the arguments or invasive. I suppose that could happen. Yeah or invasive species or stuff like that, but nothing in the regulations. So I worked with that like the original test was was a written exam and then a floral arrangement exam judged by license florists and the pass rate for that was lower than the bar exam. So like that's yeah, there's there's just there's no way to justify it for some professions. I'm a little bit more sympathetic even when it comes to cosmology and the chemicals and some of that stuff and the health and safety stuff just making sure everything sanitary, which you can do without a license too. I'm a little more sympathetic there, but yeah, the floor's license was just ridiculous and the Pelican Institute did some really great job to work to get rid of it and the bill sponsor was amazing on that too, but that was something that made me really excited because a lot of us have hated that one for a long time, but it's sad we don't have the example to share anymore. So I think that was one big one, but then also just the universal licensing recognition that was a really big deal and the first bill was from. Can you explain that it is what does that mean? Yeah, so basically it lets professionals work across state lines usually they have to register with the state, but if they can prove and it's the laws written differently depending on the state. So in some cases the laws from the state you come from have to be substantially similar or they just have to be similar. You might have to be a resident you might not have to be a resident and obviously I prefer not having the residency requirement, but if people moved your state now they can work a little bit more easily. You can maintain a license in multiple states in a lot of cases and a lot more easily than you could have beforehand, which is really important, but mobility is really important for economic growth that if you want to move up the economic ladder you have to be able to move to places with the jobs that you want and that are going to make sense for you. So this enabled a lot of that and Governor Ducy and Arizona signed the first law like this and I got to be there for that which was really cool, but there's a lot of that and it kind of started before that with military spouses because they were a commonly licensed group that often moved from state to state and had to start all over in the licensing process and each new state they went to. And if you're only there for a year or two, it takes months to a year to get licensed like you're just not making money, which is terrible and that it hurts those people really badly, but there's other people who move around a lot for different reasons or who would if they could. But the expansion of universal licensing recognition to almost half of the states now is that's really exciting. And we need to loosen up some of these laws in certain cases and expand them to localities to because a lot of licenses are handled by cities rather than states, but but it's still really great to see that it's. spread the nation and that like Republicans and Democrats like it that everyone seems to like it except for occasionally the people who don't want the conversation. Yeah, yeah, this is a big thing with teachers, right? So teachers are certified in certain states and they're for a variety of reasons and they are it's a little more difficult to leave sometimes. So what so but what happened? What's the aftermath of this? What has been the outcome of first of you know you got rid of the floral licenses were brides tripping and getting stabbed all over the place and then what's the aftermath of the universal licensing reform? You know it's funny for all the harms that that that are talked about around these regulations there's very little study of them in a lot of cases which is frustrating but there's no data showing that more brides aren't being hurt but there haven't been more stories about it so that's great and states just don't keep the kind of data that would be helpful in a lot of these cases but in Arizona there was data showing that thousands of more people were able to work in the state. A lot of them who were already there too they still had a license active in another state but they were actually able to transfer it in after the law was enacted so that was really exciting and there's going to be more of that over time I think as people become aware of the law and in other states I haven't seen the data on it but Arizona's was really good like it helped thousands of people be able to work in professions that they wanted to work in were presumably they were making more money. So that was really exciting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we're seeing all kinds of new schools pop up just because people are sort of side stepping some of these rules right so they're operating under their state home school laws rather than their public school laws which require teacher certification and leadership certification and all these things. So this is a really, this is a really, it's still a growing industry this hybrid and micro school space but what last question to you what's the most interesting thing that you're working on right now that somebody who is kind of stepping into the wild west of opening some kind of little school would be interested in hearing about? I'm not sure so right now I don't have any big licensing projects I'm still getting used to the new job which is part of it but I'm doing a lot with AIDS verification a lot of proving that it causes data breaches and stuff that's a little less relevant but I want to jump back into the data center stuff it's again probably not super relevant for the group you're talking about but there's data centers just need so many different kinds of professionals and presumably a lot of them will need to travel as there's new data centers to be constructed and there's an article showing that it like really helps local construction communities and those populations but presumably they'll also need some experts that know certain parts of data centers better than others so I want to look into and figure out more what other kinds of licensed professions. I don't think plumbers are going to be in there but maybe they are but definitely electricians and figure out and make other states and state lawmakers aware of the problem with the local licensing. I think I might be off on this but I think it's a lot of East Coast states do licensing locally a little bit more than the western states and the southern states but I want to try to make it so that one it helps our AI future and helps America that way but also helps people do the job they want to do grow America faster and let people you know do professions that make sense for them but it's it's an interesting overlap I remembered seeing the article I'm in I think last March or April from the head of BlackRock who is saying we need more traveling electricians but we don't have enough licensed ones and I'm like oh I know why that is and I was able to answer for you. Yeah exactly so I want to see what else is there because I love being able to show how licensing reform is relevant in all different areas where people are thinking of it like I don't think the CEO was thinking of licensing reform he was talking about we need to train more electricians and that's probably a part of it but it's not the whole story when you have electricians who just can't work on the project because even if they'd want to travel to work on it their license doesn't transfer and they don't have the ability to get their their license recognized in time. Yeah great all right Shashana Weissman newly of the abundance institute thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project in Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show or want to learn more about what we do please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalescollege.com/hybrid.