Episode 20: On A Learner-Centered Future

[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, Koi Marie Morfield, from the Beacon Center of Tennessee and Education Reimagined, delivers the opening address at the 2026 National Hybrid Schools Conference in Atlanta. Our first speaker this morning is Koi Marie Morfield from Tennessee. Koi Marie is the founder of the Lab School of Memphis, a pre-K through eight private school. Over time, the Lab School earned a Yoss Prize stop award. Was selected as a Drexel Fund portfolio school and served as a partner site with the Education Reimagined Learner centered ecosystems lab. Koi Marie now serves as entrepreneur and residents at the Beacon Center of Tennessee, advancing policies to support learner centered ecosystems. In 2025, she joined Education Reimagined as partner for ecosystems, where she supports school systems and leaders nationwide in building educational ecosystems that serve the evolving needs of young people. So please help me welcome Koi Marie Morfield. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Eric. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. You guys look great. All bright-eyed and bushy tail. Eric made me think about something when he talked about those who were in the room. And I'd love to start by acknowledging you. I would love for you to just look around the room, like actually really look. Turn your head both ways. Yeah, exactly. You are sitting next to people who said yes. People who said yes to something that the system told them was too small, too fringe, too idealistic. You are sitting next to people who looked at the way we've been doing school and said, I think we can do a little better than this. Some of you built a school in your living rooms. Some of you left a salary and a title in 401K. And some of you are here because a child, maybe yours, maybe someone else's needed something that didn't exist yet. So you decided to build it. I know that story, too. I've lived that story. And I want you to know before I say anything else, I need to say this. What you are doing matters. Not eventually, not someday, not when the legislation catches up right now, right now. If you don't remember anything else, remember that. As Eric said, my name is Coimary Morfield. And I'm a senior partner for ecosystems at education, reimagine. I am also the founder, proud founder of the lab school of Memphis. And he told you a little bit about that school. It grew from six learners to a school that has been recognized nationally for its model of doing school differently. But I wasn't supposed to be a founder. My education story begins the way many of ours do, not as a builder, but as a child, as a student. I entered a private monastery school in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood at age five. I didn't know then what that would mean for me. I was just going to school. But over time, I did notice that I had a very different relationship with learning than what I saw from other peers that I would encounter outside of school. I knew that I was trusted to explore. And I knew that the adults treated me like I was capable of something significant. And I believed that about myself. That journey took me to a magnet high school in Chicago, a public magnet high school, and then back to Chicago's West Side as a teacher. And over the next decade, I got to experiment with different learning models and theories and best practices, all of the things that come out of teacher prep and professional development. And really got to see a full range of what we were offering as a country and education. And what I found that I couldn't unsee once I saw it was what all of you have seen. The compliance and the checking of boxes, the standardization that just isn't designed for young people, or maybe it is, but it's certainly not designed for the young people that live in my house. So I don't know what your houses look like. The painful reality of our education system is that it causes us to accept the status quo. It often means that we fail to see anything beyond it, and after seeing that and realizing that, it led me to do something really dramatic, which is leave. I left. I was like, this is wild. I'm not doing this anymore. I walked away, vowed never to look back. And then I became a mom of twins twice. So yeah. And I don't know how many of you have nursed twins in tandem, but it's not easy. And things didn't get any easier when they went to school. I thought, well, surely this is the height of challenge. If I could make it through this, yeah. But then it was time to go to school. It was time to release my babies into a space and a place that I didn't have control of for like seven hours. That was a lot. So they went and trotter-- that's baby B-- he wouldn't sit on the circle. And Knox, he wouldn't talk to anyone other than his twin. Turns out trotter was really bored. And Knox needed an intentional on ramp of relationship. He didn't need a speech therapist, as was suggested. What he needed was trust. What he needed was someone to decide that he was worth the patience. And then he would also decide they were worth the same, because it's the relationship, right? It goes both ways. So I knew exactly what I was looking for for them. I needed it to be empowering and challenging and affirming and honor them as whole humans and make room for that creativity. You know all the same copy that we all have on our website? Yeah. That's what I was looking for. And I just couldn't find it in Memphis. So again, I plan to do what any determined and well-resourced parent would do. Leave. Again. I didn't know how to run it. But God had other plans quite simply. So we opened the lab school with six learners, two of them were my six learners. And we set about teaching and learning in what I began to call a radical gospel, not to be confused with the biblical gospel, but gospel that is truth. That's how I'm using this here. A gospel that said, "Well, what if the key to building new neuro pathways for the delexic mind is found in a tree?" What if the need for ADHD medication? is dictated by the demands of the environment. And then what if we change the environment? This, this gospel, this truth, refused to ask children to perform learning and invited them to actually do it. Our approach was built on three beliefs and there was no negotiating them. That is learning's personalized, this experience-based, and it is inquiry-driven. And we partnered with a local farm, built a culturally affirming farm school, and we sent the children outside to play, to problem solve, to build. And then, speaking of radical truths, we counted what was happening in those trees as real learning, because it was. We were, I came to understand this later, outliers, aliens doing something that the establishment couldn't quite categorize. And you're sitting in that space now. There's a whole field of us, innovators, the go-firsters, doing something that other people haven't been able to categorize. That field is the space we're sitting in right now. I wanna name something about this conference as I looked at the list of presenters and sessions and workshops. I thought, and I mean, this as a compliment, this is probably one of the most ideologically diverse rooms that I've ever been in at an education conference. I mean, yes, woo-woo, that's a good thing. We have classical educators and progressive ones. We have school choice advocates and learner-centered practitioners. We have accreditors and un-schoolers. And people who are here because of their faith convictions, people who are here because of research and neurodiversity, and people who are here because they just couldn't find anything else for the young people in their lives. As I said, that breadth is not a problem to manage. That breadth is the point. That's the whole point. Because, see, the children don't care about our ideological categories. They just need us to care more about them than we care about being right. Some of you know Shereen, Shereen Radigan at Colossal, whose motto has been cited in national research, as one of the places where students report the strongest, most joyful learning experiences anywhere in the country. Here in Atlanta, we have people like Kyler and Caleb who are doing incredible work at the forest school and Dr. Monica Hall over at Thrive Academy, who has built a campus, a campus that wraps itself around black and brown children in a way I've never seen. Different models, different philosophies, different zip codes, but one conviction that children deserve better than what we've been giving them. And that actually really is still a radical truth. That's still a radical gospel. And every single person in this room is preaching some version of it. Speaking of preaching. I'm going to tell a story about Martin Luther, not that one. Shout out to MLK, but not the one who marched here. We honor him too. But this time we're talking about the German priest and professor, Martin Luther, who over 500 years ago wrote the 95thesies. The 95thesies was written questioning the traditions of the church that he pledged his life to. The Theses in Resurrection are considered to have launched the Protestant reformation in the birth of Protestantism. But at that time, it wasn't intended for a revolution. It was intended to start a debate, a conversation, a dialogue. Martin Luther wanted to get people talking. He wanted to align what they were doing with what they knew in their souls, in their hearts, to be true. Kind of sounds familiar, right? The church wasn't happy about this. The establishment, the church. And after three years of institutional deliberation, which is a true bureaucracy, right? Not much has changed. Three years later, they demanded he renounce the teachings put forth in this 95thesies. And in response, Luther stood before a leadership at the church and said, I cannot and will not recant anything. For to go against conscience is neither right nor safe, and he closed by saying, here I stand. I can do no other. His conscience wouldn't allow him to walk back his questions simply because they told him to. So I'm going to borrow those words today, and I would invite you to do the saying. I'm going to borrow those words and say, here I stand, protecting my right to question the system that I gave my life's work to. Here I stand, demanding we respect young people for the version of themselves that show up each day, and not the version that's easiest to teach. Here I stand, challenging your ego in a fight for young people's independence of thought. Here I stand, refusing to delineate between public, charter, private, hybrid, Michael's school, unschool. When young people, there are young people in every single one of those environments that are still losing. Here I stand, daring you to ask yourself why every single time you put a task in front of a young person. Every single time. Here I stand, asking for the data that proved standardized test performance is in direct correlation with lifetime economic mobility. Here I stand, asking why you're so passionate about building and investing money into education, but you wouldn't send your children to most of what we built. Here I stand, protecting my right to question you and me. And this whole beautiful, complicated field in service of the young people to whom I've played my life. I'm no longer the CEO of the lab school of Memphis. Before I tell you how I feel about that, I'm going to give you a framework, a model. Because I think it explains not just my story, but the story of almost every person in this room who's building something. There are two models to build a business. Two impulses that live inside every founder usually in tension with one another. The first is the design led model. You're building from values, from a personal story, from a deep, non-negotiable belief about what school should be. The design-led impulse keeps you honest about why, the big why. It protects the vision. It refuses to compromise the child's for the convenience of the system. The second is the product-led model. That's when you're building from evidence, from feedback, from the question, is this actually working? The product-led impulse keeps you honest about the weather as in weather or not. It demands proof, it forces you to pivot when the data says the thing that you love so much isn't doing what you believed it was doing. The best schools are both intention at the same time. But where they diverge sharply is in governance, decision-making, and I'm gonna say the G-word growth. A design-led organization protects the vision fiercely. Sometimes at the cost of growth, a product-led organization pivots past, but sometimes does so at the cost of coherence. I believe most of us started design-led by necessity. We were building from conviction or from a wound or from a child, and we didn't have a growth strategy, which is how to call it. The tension arrives when you try to scale that, right? When you try to replicate a calling. When institutional funding walks in the door and starts asking questions that your founding story alone can't answer. That is when product-led thinking gets introduced, and the founding culture has two choices. Integrates it or fractures around it. So let's talk about what integration looks like. The lab school of Memphis was acquired by an operator in Memphis with a portfolio of charter and private schools, private schools in our city. I need you to understand, I'm gonna say this first, I promise I tell you how I felt about it. I'm gonna say this very clearly. That is a win. It's not a consolation prize. It's not a bittersweet compromise. It's a win, and it's a win for learner-centered education, and innovative models everywhere. What I've come to understand is pure microschools like the lab school, no matter how innovative, no matter how beloved, hit natural growth limits. One building, one zip code, 100 learners, if you're extraordinary. The lab school was ferociously designed led. I mean, we die on that hill. We protected the vision, refusing to compromise. But that stubbornness honestly is likely what made us worth acquiring. So we won't dismiss that. The same systems that dismissed folks like those of us in the room today for so long, they are now seeking out exactly what we've proved works. So we've now gone from being ignored to being acquired. Instead of one school that serves 75 learners, the lab school now has the potential to reshape how thousands of young people in Memphis experience education across eight schools with a product-led operator who has the infrastructure to scale what we had the conviction to build. Design led built the proof, but product-led will build the reach. That's not a contradiction. It's actually the whole point. The lab school was always meant to be exactly what its name says, a lab, a place for research and development for learner-centered practitioners, everywhere to come and see and enjoy. It was never meant to stay in one building and I've come to believe that it's possible the highest calling of any founder is not to build something that needs you, but to build something that doesn't. Thriving communities are not built around founders. They're built around connection, around members finding one another, developing deep relationships, and growing together in ways that a founder could never have described, predicted or scripted. The founder's job is to create the conditions and then get out of the way. And that's what the lab school became. And in the next community that I build, I pray that the same thing happens. The goal is to build something real, build it for the people it serves, and then love it enough to step aside and let it grow. Before I go, I need to make a little confession. At the top of this talk, I told you that I wasn't supposed to be a founder. And that was at least in part a lie. The truth is, I've been making attempts at entrepreneurship for probably more than half of my life. I mean, there was the personal shopper, the MLM, we won't spend time on that. The blogger, the stylist, I mean, building a platform, training someone for this or that. And every single one either taught me something, cost me something or both. Heavy on the both. So why did I say I wasn't supposed to be a founder? I think I needed to believe and maybe some of you that I arrived here by accident. There's something about the ego that enjoys thinking we just kind of wandered into it. The school found me, I was just another mom looking for something. But that's not the whole truth. The whole truth is that I've been making my way here for my entire life. And every hour earning an MBA that I was convinced I'd never use, every relationship that I built from scratch as I built a client portfolio in finance, every failed venture, every pivot, everything I built that didn't scale, didn't survive and didn't become what I envisioned. That was all rehearsal. It was all a lab. The lab school was never the beginning of the story. It was just the first time the story got loud enough for other people to hear. And I think if we're honest, some version of that is true for you too. You didn't wander into this room. You were built for this room. Every classroom that you couldn't fix, every child you watched fall through a gap that the system pretended didn't exist. Every moment you sat in a meeting and thought, I know there's a better way to do this. But didn't yet have the language or the community or maybe even the courage to say it out loud, you have been making your way here, your entire life. So here we stand. Not reluctantly, not accidentally. inevitably. And the last thing I'll leave you with is everything I've shared with you, the questions, the failures, the gospel, the lab, all of it is simply truth. And the thing about truth is it's light. And the thing about light is that it's shines. We can do no other. Thank you for your time. [Applause] Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project and 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 coalscollege.com/hybrid.