Join us on “The Pinnacle Pod” as we chat with Katie Boody Adorno, the founder of Leanlab Education. A Kansas City native and Pinnacle Prize finalist, Katie’s journey from classroom teacher to education technology (edtech) pioneer is inspiring. Discover how Leanlab grew from a desire to rethink education to partnering schools with tech companies developing cutting-edge tools that truly benefit student learning experiences. Learn about their innovative co-designed projects and plans to impact the future of instruction.  

Transcript

Maurice Watson: 

I am Maurice Watson and this is The Pinnacle Pod, a monthly podcast where we dive into the stories behind Kansas City’s most dynamic emerging leaders. Each episode celebrates the spirit of The Pinnacle Prize, an award that recognizes young visionaries sparking positive change in our community, from subtle ripples to citywide movements. Join us to listen, learn, and be inspired. 

We’re joined today by Katie Boody Adorno, the Founder and CEO of Leanlab Education. A native of Kansas City, Katie studied English literature in college and holds advanced degrees in education leadership. She was a Teach for America core member and taught in Kansas City’s public schools through her work as a middle school math teacher and founding teacher at Alta Vista Charter Schools. Katie has seen the changing dynamics of technology in the classroom. She founded Leanlab Education to put technology to the test in the hands of students to improve the educational tools used in our schools. Leanlab education pairs, education technology companies with pilot school settings to research and develop emerging products. Leanlab is a conglomerate of educators, community members, teachers, parents, students, and entrepreneurs who share, test and grow new ideas to enhance and redefine the education of tomorrow. It’s also the first Kansas City based organization to be funded both by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiatives. Thank you for joining us and welcome to The Pinnacle Pod. 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Thank you so much for having me. 

Maurice Watson: 

First question, you have worked in education for all of your career. What drew you to this as a calling? 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Great question. I mean, for me, I think education is near and dear to my heart because it’s a key anchor of opportunity. And when I think about persistent inequities that have existed in Kansas City and beyond, I think about education as an opportunity to level the playing field. But really what brought me into this career were my parents. Both my parents are or were, they’re retired now, community organizers in Kansas City. They met doing tenant organizing in New York City and then came back to KC as my dad’s hometown. So I grew up with, you know, social justice and community organizing principles near and dear to my heart. Both my parents continued a legacy of organizing around housing rights in Kansas City and equitable access to healthcare. So, I knew that there were inequities prevalent in our city from day one, and those manifested along lines of race and class and the zip code that you’re born in really determined what kind of education you were gonna get access to, what kind of housing was available, what kind of healthcare was available. And, because of that through line that my parents instilled in me, I really felt that education was an area that there was an opportunity to make a lot of impact. So when I left for college, but when I came back to join Teach for America in 2008, I knew I wanted to come back to my hometown. I wanted to make a difference in the classroom. And that’s where kind of this all got started and I, I was able to learn a lot about what the state of education looked like. 

Maurice Watson: 

So, given your insights about social inequities and strategies to address such inequities, what do you see as the biggest challenges facing primary, K-12 education system today? 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

There’s so much, especially in a context of post-covid and the eruption of AI in the last year. I would say a couple things, to kind of back up a little bit about what brought me to this calling was my parents were community organizers, but with that context, I was raised with a deep belief that those closest to the issues at hand have the solution. So, in the context of education, I really believe that parents, students, and educators should be the ones that are charting the direction of the future. Now, when I started Leanlab 10 years ago, after five years in the classroom, we were facing huge systemic inequities that weren’t being resolved. And we saw this manifest in the fact that low income students, students of color, were performing behind more affluent, typically white peers. And there are many reasons for that. However, when the pandemic came, we saw a lot of those reasons be exacerbated. So, you know, when we went to, you know, typically a digital first curriculum where kids were learning virtually and online, that was disproportionately impacting communities, experiencing poverty and communities of color. Now we’re post pandemic, people are back in school and we’re now dealing with learning loss that occurred during pandemic. On top of that, we have kids that are dealing with social emotional learning challenges. They were out of the classroom for several years, perhaps they experienced traumatic events, perhaps they experienced trouble coming back and getting re socialized and at their grade level, all of these things are coming back to the classroom. At the same time, we’re also having a little bit of a reconciliation or a lot of, bit of a reconciliation with what professionals expect from their employers. And we’ve seen a lot of teacher attrition as people experience what might have been the first time, certainly for teachers to experience hybrid work environments, more flexible work environments, work life balance. And now they’re longing for that. And I think it’s come, we’ve come to realize that what we ask of teachers specifically is perhaps unsustainable. So all of this was already under the current pre-pandemic, and I think pandemic just magnified all of what we know to be true. That we’ve had inequities in our education system, that teaching isn’t necessarily sustainable or professionalized to the level it should be. And then last year we had ChatGPT come in and AI, and now we’re seeing the way in which we experience education or instruction be really redefined by what’s possible by these technological advancements, seeing that kids can create essays that are automated, teachers can create lesson plans that are automated. And now, uh, you have education technologists coming to the forefront of really pushing the boundaries of how much AI can be leveraged to automate instruction, to automate checks for understandings, which begs a larger question in the field of really what’s the future of instruction. 

Maurice Watson: 

Tell us the storyline behind your founding Leanlab Education. 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

So, like I said, I’m from Kansas City, grew up here and grew up with a deep belief in the power of communities. And I had the great privilege of teaching middle school at Kansas City Public Schools and then being a founding teacher at a charter school at that time, Alta Vista Charter School, Guadalupe Education Centers. And I taught middle school math. And I then was quickly rising kind of through the ranks. I was becoming an instructional coach, getting my admin degree and I really thought my pathway to changing the field was gonna be through school leadership. But the longer I stayed in it and the kind of higher up vantage point I got, I began to realize that if we were gonna be really serious about attaining educational equity, particularly for students of color, students experiencing poverty, we were gonna have to reconsider how we were doing education. That the way we were doing it, which at that time was kind of just still very much aligned to a traditional industrial model, direct instruction. You teach, you take the test to sit and get model, but we try to just do it harder, faster. It wasn’t working, it wasn’t yielding to outsized impact for kids, which made me think we needed to reconsider.  

Maurice Watson: 

Let’s focus on how Leanlab and how education technology addresses the needs, especially the needs of kids who come from communities that have historically been underperforming. 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Yeah, so I think it’s important to acknowledge when we first started 10 years ago, wasn’t just education technology. So, we really believed that there should be innovation in the sector. That the way in which we were doing education wasn’t providing the gains we needed to see for kids. And by and large it was because the sector hadn’t evolved in, you know, over a hundred years we’re still seeing a very traditional model of education. But one thing that’s challenging about the education industry is that innovation isn’t really incentivized. There’s not even any space to even discuss innovate. Your days are so rigid, your curriculum’s so tied to a mandated state exam. Most schools don’t even really have teacher lounges anymore where you can just engage, you know, have water cooler conversations. So, the first idea is that we really just needed a space where we could think more creatively and more expansively about how to rethink how we did education from an instructional standpoint, from a pedagogical standpoint, just a space to be more creative. We really wanted to create just a lab space and wanted a central tenet of that to be that it was led by those most impacted in education communities so that it wasn’t just researchers or technologists or entrepreneurs sitting in a corner saying, education should look like this, that it should be deeply tied to the student experience, the parent experience, the teacher experience. Like these are the constraints we’re feeling and we wanna work with others to find out how we can evolve this sector. So that was really the genesis of Leanlab. And early, early on, we actually did have parents, students, teachers themselves prototyping early solutions for what they wanted to change in their classroom. So, some of those were early different school models, so school models that pushed the boundaries of traditional assessment structures and wanted to be more, wanted to be more holistic in their approach. And then we had some teachers that were seeing the potential of different types of curriculum that were more, again, project based relevant less, you know, focused on teaching to a test. And then we started seeing early on more and more of these solutions lend themselves to technology. Now this is in the context of 2013. Back then the accelerator, the startup community in Kansas City was just taking off. So, we had Techstars coming into town, the EDC was sponsoring seed grants, there was LaunchKC. So there was a little bit of a buzz and a little bit of, of a zeitgeist around, you know, what, what is the potential of startups or technology in this kind of work? Now, fast forward now, you know, especially in a post-pandemic context, almost all of the instruction went digital. So now if you’re talking about, it’s not so much that we believe technology is a answer, is that technology is a reality of how instruction is delivered in schools today. So the question then is how can it be leveraged? 

Maurice Watson: 

So, I have a follow-up question related to that. How do you decide what educational technology programs or services match up or aligned with the needs of students, parents, teachers? 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Yeah, I think the first thing is you start with the school first. So, we kind of work as a double-sided marketplace. We have two different cues of stakeholders. We have technologists we work with who are developing technologies for education. And then in another queue we have schools who are wanting to be on the cutting edge, who are wanting to rethink how education is done and to do so in a research backed way. 

Maurice Watson: 

What’s a background of education technologists? That’s a term that many people won’t have heard of before. 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Typically, these are entrepreneurs who are starting new companies that develop technologies for learning. So, new digital textbooks or new apps that have education services. There’s a lot of intervention tutoring platforms right now and social emotional learning tools that have come out. Most of them, I would say about 85% of them at least, were educators before. 

Maurice Watson: 

Great. So, they do have a background in education?  

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Yeah. Yeah. Many do. Or someone on their team that’s influencing the instructional design desk. And many of them are former educators that wanted to build something that had a, a larger reach or a larger, had the potential to scale beyond their, their classroom or school. But to answer your first question, like we have those two queues and then we assess the needs of the entrepreneurs, what stage of development is their technology and what type of development or evaluation does it need? And then on the school side, we’re evaluating what their priorities are, what they want for their future, what their opportunities for innovation are, and what their stakeholders from a, again, a community perspective, parent, student, teacher, see as viable for the future or desire for the future. And from there we just match-make.  

Maurice Watson: 

You’ve talked a lot about innovation and the need for innovation and evolution in education and certainly those are watch words for technology; ever changing, ever evolving. As technology evolves and changes, how does Leanlab evolve and continue to innovate going forward? 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Yeah, I mean we are constantly, I think, responding to this sector. Like I said, early on our first five years, we actually acted as an incubator. So we were giving seed money and grants to people with early stage ideas. We were giving them coaching and support, and we are connecting them to schools a little more informally through meetup events and through really light touch pilot environments. About five years ago in 2019, we brought on board a full-time researcher and we realized there was a challenge we had in our program design is that we were launching commercially viable ventures, but we didn’t know a whole lot about their impact. They were going on, they were raising money, they were gaining traction, they were closing deals, but we didn’t know if they were making a difference on student outcomes. So, that’s when, about five years ago, we started looking sector wide to see who’s actually really holding technologies accountable, who’s really making sure they get designed and partnership with school communities and who’s really evaluating if they were effective. And we discovered it was a huge problem across the sector, that a lot of technologies, there was no regulation from the federal government mandating that evaluation be done on these tools. And in absence of that, it was just kind of like the wild, wild west. 

Maurice Watson: 

No accountability.  

Katie Boody Adorno: 

There are federal guidelines for evidence and there are suggestions or recommendation, but there’s no like FDA approval process or that, you know, demands that technologies go through certain safeguards or pass certain thresholds for evaluation to go to market. It’s really at the impetus of the founder. However, what we learned from a lot of education founders is that there was a real desire to make sure that their technologies were, you know, producing outcomes for kids, but they were resource constrained. And their experiences with the traditional research that exist were really detached from the realities of building a startup. So, this is where we thought we had something to offer. This is when we started deepening on our relationships with schools, negotiating contracts and agreements essentially that allowed for research, tried to really think through what would be a way to do research and partnership with schools. And that’s where we totally evolved our business model, where we began charging EdTech companies and giving money to schools for their participation, paying teachers and giving unrestricted grants to schools to honor their expertise. And really redid the whole way we approached innovation. No longer were we an accelerator, we were getting our hands dirty and working directly with products and schools and researchers to see how these things were actually working. 

Maurice Watson: 

You have been fortunate in that you’ve gotten some significant funding from national funders like Gates and Chan Zuckerberg, which is the Facebook founders foundation. Do you get support from local funders as well? 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Yeah, so we had, I should premise this by – when I founded Leanlab, I was in the classroom, I was 26, I had very little social capital – 

Maurice Watson: 

– Or financial capital either. 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Or financial capital. I was a teacher. Right, <laugh>. Right, 

Maurice Watson: 

Right. 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

Very. So, like the story I always tell people is that when we founded Leanlab, you know, we had always shout out Ed Mendez, who was my principal at Alta Vista at the time. We had an empty science lab and that was it where I had donated space. And um, and eventually I cashed in my teacher retirement, which also wasn’t very much. And we had to kind of bootstrap it from there. And that took about five years before we brought on National Capital. So, the early days of Leanlab, we were really stringing together small amounts of financial commitments that did come from local foundations. So, Health Family Foundation, Kaufmann Foundation was an early partner. We partnered with other organizations so that we could access more capital because at the time we didn’t have a track record. And that was a, a barrier to accessing more substantial funding. So, it was always that chicken and egg situation of how do you get the track record to unlock more funding? And then about five years in, because we started working with entrepreneurs, both regionally but also nationally, we were able to have conversations with national funders. Because one barrier we also had was, in order to access more substantial local funds at the time, we needed more of a track record. We didn’t have that. So we had a bootstrap, but in order to access national funds, we needed to not just be a regional organization. So we were trying to figure this out and it was really challenging. And finally, you know, I think what national funders were attracted to was the fact that we did actually have such strong local ties and had such a deep commitment to what we call co-design. And you know, designing a partnership with our community that they thought that actually could be a model that grew nationally and kind of what they were predicting at the time to be, you know, a more expansive, larger impact that technology was gonna have on the sector. 

Maurice Watson: 

Katie, given this story of your work and your organization and the opportunities you’ve had to work nationally, what does the future look like for you? Are we gonna lose you? Is that, is the Kansas City community gonna lose you so you can go to a bigger market where you might have even greater impact? What are your future plans? 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

My future plans are to stay here. I got married this last summer to a Kansas Citian who works here. We bought a farm about our west of Kansas, but still very local. The luxury though of the of the pandemic was that we were able to build a distributed team. So, while our leadership team is still in Kansas City, we have folks elsewhere, but that it gives me the freedom to stay here and stay close to our roots. And if anything, I would say the future hopefully will allow us to bring more resource to bear for the region here specifically. 

Maurice Watson: 

That’s great to hear. How can our listeners connect with you and your organization to be supportive? 

Katie Boody Adorno: 

The best way is to go to our website. It’s www.leanlabeducation.org or to follow us on LinkedIn. Those are probably the best ways. 

Maurice Watson: 

Thanks to our audience and thanks to Katie for all the wonderful work that you’re doing. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter@pinnacleprizekc.org to continue to listen, learn and be inspired by dynamic emerging leaders in our community. 

 

Hosted By Maurice Watson

Maurice is a recognized community leader and has more than thirty years of experience working in law, social and public policy and board governance as a lawyer, advisor, and board member. He is the co-founder and principal of Credo Philanthropy Advisors.