Carter works with schools across the country to help them start similar entrepreneurship programs that focus on transforming student and teacher engagement rather than just adding new programs or tools.
The Just Schools Podcast is brought to you by the Baylor Center for School Leadership. Each week, we'll talk to catalytic educators who are doing amazing work.
Be encouraged.
Books Mentioned:
Teaching the Entrepreneurial Mindset: Innovative Education for K-12 Schools by Stephen Carter
The Seed Tree: Money Management and Wealth Building Lessons for Teens by Stephen Carter
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Connect with us:
Baylor MA in School Leadership
EdD in K-12 Educational Leadership
Jon Eckert LinkedIn
X: @eckertjon
Center for School Leadership at Baylor University: @baylorcsl
Jon Eckert:
All right, Stephen, welcome to the Just Schools podcast. Really excited to have you on. We've been wanting to have you on for quite a while as I think you're leading some of the most interesting work in schools right now. So tell us a little bit about your background and what got you to the point that you're at right now in your career.
Stephen Carter:
Jon, thank you. I'm pleased to be on this podcast, and love following your work and what you're doing as well.
Really, the journey was a journey through Christian education. I started in 10th grade in Christian education, graduated from a Christian school, went to a Christian college, started teaching at a Christian school, landed at Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy in Cincinnati, Ohio when I was 24 years old. So that means they took on a teacher who had no idea what he was doing, and they took a risk, right? And I cut my teeth on those early years as an English teacher. And I made a discovery early on, which was if you say yes to things, you will get a lot of awesome opportunities.
I should also point out, Jon, you'll get some not so awesome opportunities, i.e., let's start a debate team at the school. Let's coach cross country. Let's get involved with the fine arts, different aspects of writing, critical reviews for plays. I said yes to everything. And that meant that 11 years ago when Dean Nicholas, who at the time was our principal, came to me and said, "Stephen, we've got this idea for this coffee shop for students. You should help run it," of course my answer was yes, never mind the fact that we are about to welcome our second child and we had all kinds of irons in the fire. The answer was yes.
What I didn't know, Jon, is that would completely change my life. I talk a lot about transformation. That was the defining moment of transformation, when it was here's an English teacher who in my mind had no business starting an entrepreneurship program, stepping into this space, discovering a passion that came alive through student engagement, and now 11 years later, just to borrow one of your favorite words, flourishing, a flourishing program that has now enabled me to help impact schools around the nation as they start programs that enable students to thrive and then flourish through just meaningful engagement. So it's been a journey of discovering what it means to truly engage students around the entrepreneurial mindset.
Jon Eckert:
Well, and I'm curious, and I've never asked you this but did you have an entrepreneurial bent prior to taking this on? It feels like to just jump into what you've done and saying yes as a form of being somewhat entrepreneurial, but did you have that in your background at all?
Stephen Carter:
Well, Jon, I did, but I had repressed it because I thought you had to repress that to be a teacher, right?
Jon Eckert:
Oh, right, yeah.
Stephen Carter:
Because if you're a teacher, you're the academic. You're the person who contains the knowledge. You can't have an entrepreneurial bent. I had a lawn mowing business when I was in school, a babysitting business. I would go door to door passing out flyers to do anything around a house to get some money. I even sold my lawn mowing business when I went to college, not for much money, but the point was I had just repressed it. And when I stepped into this space, it just all came flooding back and it took me on a journey of discovery into what does a renewed mindset really mean? I talk a lot about Romans 12:2 when Paul says, "Don't conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." I experienced it that first year starting an entrepreneurship program in real-time, and then I saw students do that as well and it's just been a journey ever since.
Jon Eckert:
Well, I think it's fascinating and maybe a sad commentary on our profession that it feels like you have to set aside that entrepreneurial mindset to be a teacher. And so I've worked with a group that was the Center for Teaching Quality, now it's Mira Education, but they wrote a book a number of years ago called Teacherpreneurs, and how do we get educators to think more in a more entrepreneurial way about this really human task that we do with students. And so I think that's why I've had such an affinity for your work. You're literally working on entrepreneurship with kids.
But I think even just in the way you've built out what you've done at CHCA and now working with schools all over the country, I've seen that mindset in you as I know you've had to overcome some challenges. So what were some of the biggest hurdles for you getting to where you're at now? Because I think there are a lot of schools out there looking at entrepreneurial programs, and obviously there are going to be different challenges, but I would imagine there would be some similar obstacles people might have to get over. So what were two or three of the biggest challenges you had getting this going?
Stephen Carter:
Hindsight is a beautiful thing. I can look back on it and say they were formative, and I would almost call them constraints more than challenges. And the principle that I now realize I operate out of is that constraints breed creativity. So now I seek them out, Jon. I'm like, "Yes, give me a constraint."
So for me, there were a couple big ones. Budget was huge. I'm remembering this. I document this in the book. I went to Dean Nicholas early on. This was a motif in the story. I go asking for money and I leave with very little money or none. That's a constraint. Here's what I've told him multiple times. "If I had gotten the money for the program that I asked for, it wouldn't have grown like it did." The constraint was budget.
Another constraint, time. Time is the number one thing. You talk to school leaders all the time. Time is the biggest constraint. Our teachers are strapped. There's no bandwidth. There's no time. And I would just say the beauty of this is it helps us understand how to better manage our time so that we begin investing it.
And I think the third, this is one I don't talk about a lot, but it was getting over the sense of being almost hypocritical in a space where I didn't have an MBA. I wasn't an entrepreneur technically at the time, and I felt like an imposter. And I'm in a school, like many schools listening, of business leaders where the parents own businesses and they have MBAs and they have these degrees. And I just decided in that moment, I would own it and ask for advice and ask for help and what should I be reading? Who should I be talking to? And it opened up more doors than I ever possibly imagined.
Jon Eckert:
So you mentioned the book, and it's a great book teaching the entrepreneurial mindset, innovative education for K-12 schools. I love it that you built... Because the SeedTree Group is your... That's your group, right? So you've published it that way. Again, it's a great blueprint for it. But I have to have you share a little bit, I don't know if I have the name quite right, but was it the Leaning Eagle Coffee Cart? Wasn't that-
Stephen Carter:
The Leaning Eagle Coffee Bar.
Jon Eckert:
Can you give a... That story just makes me laugh every time I hear it. Can you just give us a little bit-
Stephen Carter:
Oh, my goodness. Well, so we're-
Jon Eckert:
... the genesis of the... Yeah, go ahead.
Stephen Carter:
So Jon, you're referencing our flagship business. And when we launched this whole program in Cincinnati, we started with a rolling coffee cart and three little rolling carts and we're not... This was Jason Oden was a teacher at the time who was instrumental in this. And we built the permanent location and we were going through some naming pieces. Well, the school was going through one of these big rebranding campaigns and had hired all the consultants and all the things. And they had just released this big idea, and it was, "Hey, at CHCA, students lean in."
And so I remember, I'm sitting there as a teacher, we're in the big assembly room, and every teacher turns and you just get this look of like, "Oh, here we go. Where are we going to have to implement this? Oh, another one of these branding campaigns." So I remember the discussion then went into the naming of the coffee bar, and our mascot is the eagle. So it was this tongue in cheek approach of, "Hey, we're the Leaning Eagle because we lean in and take a sip at the coffee bar." And it was really funny for the first two or three years, then the school changes its branding campaign. So now it's like, "Why is the Eagle leaning?" So we have the old school people who remember the why, and it's rooted in that.
Jon Eckert:
Yes. Well, and speaking of constraints breeding creativity, didn't your cart get shut down due to health concerns? Wasn't that-
Stephen Carter:
Oh, Jon, you're getting-
Jon Eckert:
That right?
Stephen Carter:
... all of our dirty laundry out there. And yeah, you're absolutely right. Oh my gosh, those early years, it's so much funny. That's why I tell schools when I work with them. I'm like, "Look, we've been doing this 11 years. I can start you at year seven because you're going to overcome a lot of what we learned the hard way." And I'm telling, this is embarrassing, Jon, but I guess we'll just put it out there. We didn't know we needed a health license. No one told us. We're just selling coffee. We didn't know.
And so we've got the student there and he's serving coffee. Well, here comes the health inspector, walks up to him and says, "Hey, where do you wash hands?" And this is probably not the best kid to answer that question. Let's face it, Jon, this is the one kid where you're like, "Please don't ask him anything." So this kid says, "Why would we need to wash hands?" And it's like, "Are you kidding me right now?" I'm teaching an English class and I get called down and it's like, "Why is this conversation even happening? Couldn't you have had a better answer than why do we need to wash hands?" We did not get shut down. But I will tell you this, we had a hand sink in no time, a license at a record pace, and we learned a lot of lessons along the way.
Jon Eckert:
So I love it. Page 188 and 189, they have people saying, you walk into CHCA now, we should talk a little bit about where you're at now with the teaching kitchen and the greenhouse and all those pieces, and people are like, "Well, we don't have that. We don't have the resources for that. But you can do this with $150 and an innovative idea. And I think that's what the Leaning Eagle was. And then that blew up into these things. And then you've had a number of businesses. I remember the... Was it a smoothie business that you're like, "Hey, we didn't have it placed right. We didn't..." And the kids learn so much from that failure about what does work and what doesn't work. And so you want some of that because as an entrepreneur, you have to try things. And the benefit of risk-taking isn't that you're going to be successful. It's learning from that. And so I feel like you have built that in well.
And I want to know how you have built what you've built at CHCA, but then give schools what they need where they have the constraints that are going to be real, but they learn the lessons that you learned in those first seven years because I feel like those are super valuable for you and for the students that you've been leading with. So talk a little bit about what you've built and some of the ways you've built it, even how you got the pizza ovens. I think that's an amazing story where you found state money that allowed you to buy pizza ovens. So I would love to hear a little bit about the current state at CHCA.
Stephen Carter:
So currently when you step into our school on our campus where we are PK-12, over a thousand students, right around 1,200, several campuses, you're going to see a fully fledged program, six full-time faculty members running it, six on-campus businesses, 15 elective courses, a certificate track. It's fully baked, but you're seeing the product of what we learned along the way. Because I will tell you this, as we've already illustrated, when we started, we were living that entrepreneurial mindset. And by that, I mean that famous saying of we had jumped off the cliff and we were building the plane on our way down in real-time with students.
And that's the beauty of it, is the students were experiencing all of these different aspects and having an awesome time. We now have to seek out failure. I hate to say it that way because early on, failure is easy. Now, we have to create it because learning from that is so pivotal. It's one of our four attributes we teach. We built these businesses and then we discovered we needed curriculum and we needed learnings. And so all of this was built along the way as we were going. And we discovered there's four attributes that truly embody the entrepreneurial mindset. And that is truly understanding a directed growth mindset, tethered to mission, vision and values, understanding the why and the purpose and the compass of direction, then developing grit. And that's the goal-setting piece that's been instrumental in all of our business.
I'll give you a little anecdote here. You mentioned our pizza oven business. That started because we had a goal. We wanted to build this teaching kitchen. We had no money. And I'll second your point, Jon. People walk in our campus and they say, "Wow." Well, you should have seen it when we were building these things. It was nothing, okay? So we're building this, we don't even have enough money for the drywall. So we were going to build it without drywall. It was going to be an extra $20,000. And we had a senior at the time who now is at a three Michelin star restaurant who said, "No, we're going to do that drywall, Mr. Carter." And I'm like, "Oh, really?" He's like, "We're going to start a business using that pizza oven and we're going to sell pizzas until we have enough money to finish building that drywall." And that's how it started. It was a goal. And that pizza business is still an operation. And so it's teaching these attributes through the experience of these hands-on businesses.
And I'll end this point on this note. What we discovered in hindsight is it's not a business as much as it is a laboratory, and it's a laboratory to experience in real-time problem-solving via systems. Hey, we're out of cups at the coffee bar. That's an awesome problem. Why? Because it means something failed in our system, which means we need to address that failure, which means we need a better system so that we can replicate the success in the future. That's the learning. You're going to have kids graduating with this program. I don't care if they start a coffee bar. Frankly, I don't think they should. You lose a lot of money unless you open 15 of them. Don't start a coffee bar, listeners, okay? At your school, it's fine. But you've got kids leaving who know how to solve problems and create systems to prevent future problems, I guarantee you every business owner in the country would hire that kid on the spot.
Jon Eckert:
Yeah, that's well said. I think sometimes we get caught up in the product and where we get to and we miss the whole point of it, which is the learning that goes on and the problem solving, which is so key. And so you having to seek out opportunities for failure, that's a great place to be in. But I do think it's important that we don't miss that, that kids need a chance to try some things that as adults, we're like, "Ugh." And you have been doing it for 12 years. That's probably not going to work but at some level, you need to let them learn that lesson or better yet, prove you wrong. Because that's what entrepreneurs do. They see something, they see a hole, they figure out a way to solve the problem. And then in doing that, they're solving all kinds of problems. So I love the mindset that you're teaching because I think that's what's so integral.
What opportunities do you have do you see for schools who want to partner with you? I know you're with 25 schools now. You want to get to 50 schools in fairly short order. What opportunities do you see for that? Because I think there's been a huge interest as I've heard people talk about you and to you about the opportunities they have.
Stephen Carter:
So when I talk to heads of school, typically I hear problems. I used to hear problems around enrollment and things have changed to where there's not a lot of that anymore but engagement is huge. And it's teacher engagement, student engagement, and parent engagement. And here's what I'm really seeing as a massive opportunity. Parents are now coming to school saying, "We want this. We want this. We want this." But they don't exactly know what they want, just that they want this. And the same often at schools. And schools have the problem of we've got a lot of programs, a lot of great programs, and often you can get program fatigue. It's like, well, we're going to launch this other program. Well, does it have a long shelf life? Is it just going to be another maker space idea that turns into a storage room?
So for me, the opportunity is transformation over tools, or I could even put it as skills over content. We are at a defining point in education when it comes to shifting to meaningful real-world skill building for our students. Think about what Malcolm Gladwell said last summer on stage at an event. He said that collaboration is the skill of the 21st century. We've been doing collaboration in schools for as long as we can remember, but when you collaborate with a group of students to build a brand new venture on the campus that is still going to be there 10 years later, you're collaborating around a legacy. You're collaborating in real-time to learn leadership skills, effective communication, all these core skills, even emotional intelligence.
So I'll answer your question like this. The opportunity is parents want this kind of programming. Students are engaged by this kind of programming. And here's something really cool. Donors come alive with this programming. When I work with private, I mostly work with private Christian K-12 schools around the nation, and here's what I'll tell them. 60% of our program here in Cincinnati, Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy, 60% is funded by donors who are alumni parents that had stopped giving to the school. That to me, we're not talking about robbing, giving to other programs. We're talking about new interest. So the opportunity is low barrier to entry with massive ROI around engagement and true transformation.
One of the big areas of this business, it's not just starting a program. It's training teachers to then engage the students through the program toward a certificate that demonstrates key learnings in the entrepreneurial mindset. So it's student-facing and teacher-facing with the mindset to transform the entire school culture. So Jon, I am pumped.
Jon Eckert:
Yeah, and I feel that for you. I should say full disclosure here, I'm on the Cincinnati Hills board because I love what Dean Nicholas is doing as head, and I love the entrepreneurial program. And we went and studied your school as part of a book project we were doing several years ago. I walked away thinking this was some of the most interesting work that I've seen in schools, particularly because of the engagement piece. And I think your point about donors getting excited about it and people seeing the value in it, it's when you see kids truly engaged and doing meaningful work together in this collaborative way, not this cheesy artificial collaboration that happens in schools where we give kid, "Now, this is your role and this is your role," and you lead the discussion. It's like this is real money and you now have six businesses that are flourishing. That's really powerful.
I wanted to circle back and then we'll do our lightning round. I wanted to circle back to this initial thing, you saying yes to so many things. We have a lot of people who are educators, and some of them are in their first four or five years of teaching. And I'm always citing this David Brooks quote, "A life of commitment requires saying thousands of no's for the sake of a few precious yeses." And I really worry about people saying yes too often. I'm a people pleaser. I say yes too often all the time, and I don't treat my yeses as precious enough. But I wonder, your comment, constraints breed creativity, is there a way to balance those yeses with that constraints breeding creativity mindset? Do you see any through line there? Because I think you cannot be saying yes to everything anymore-
Stephen Carter:
Right, right.
Jon Eckert:
... because I know you can't manage that. So how do you see those two things in tension, constraints breeding creativity and saying yes to cool opportunities?
Stephen Carter:
Oh my goodness, this is the best question I've heard this month. This is awesome, and I'll answer it with a little bit of Greek mythology. There's a character in Greek mythology who's considered the god of opportunity, and his defining characteristic is he has a lock of hair in the front of his head and the rest of his head is bald. And the idea is he's got winged feet, he comes running by, and if you want to grab onto opportunity, you got to be ready to grab that lock of hair or all you get is the bald back of his head.
So for me, it's not just about like, "Oh, when opportunity comes, I'm going to get up off my seat and open the door and I'll begrudgingly... I'll put my coffee cup down and go." No, I'm already outside the door and I'm going to see him running down the street. And in that moment, I'm going to decide if that is an opportunity that is within my why and my vision and my mission. And to me, that's why we always start with a directed growth mindset.
If you come into our greenhouse, you're going to see these tomato plants, Jon, that are 20, 30 feet tall. You don't get to be a 25-foot tall tomato plant unless you do some pruning, and you've got to prune those leaves and you've got to prune those suckers. And that means you have to know where you're going and why. So I would answer your question by saying I would never chase opportunity until I knew where I was going and why, and that is what we're teaching to our students in real-time.
Jon Eckert:
Love that. That's so needed for all of us, not just our K-12 students. So we always wrap up with a lightning round just to get quick, short burst answers. These are the ones I'm the worst at always. But what would be the best advice you've ever received as an entrepreneur, as an educator, or just as a human being?
Stephen Carter:
Kaizen, the Japanese word for continuous improvement. Never stop learning or improving. Best advice I ever got. In fact, I even have temporary tattoos I pass out that say kaizen on them.
Jon Eckert:
I love that. Love that. What's the worst advice you've ever received as a teacher or entrepreneur?
Stephen Carter:
Probably I would say every single idea has validity for you. And that led into chasing opportunities I shouldn't have chased.
Jon Eckert:
Yes, good bit of wisdom there. Best book you've read in the last year? This could be education-related, business-related, or just being a human being.
Stephen Carter:
I read 52 books a year, and there's one of those that I reread every single year, every year. And that is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. I'm telling you, this book has changed every part of my life.
Jon Eckert:
All right, that's been popular for quite a while, so...
Stephen Carter:
Yes, it has.
Jon Eckert:
It's good.
Stephen Carter:
It's old-school.
Jon Eckert:
Yes. But hey, when there's wisdom, there's wisdom. So that's great. All right. And then what would you say your greatest hope? If you were to distill down your greatest hope for what's ahead in education into a sentence, what would you say it is?
Stephen Carter:
This is the time for education to experience true transformation, and we as educators get to be part of that leading toward impact. And to me, impact is refusing to stay in the same place but committing to the same path.
Jon Eckert:
That's well said. That's a great place to wrap things up. So if you're interested in knowing more about Stephen, his work is out there. He's part of the SeedTree Group, and he has written the book Teaching the Entrepreneurial Mindset. He's put out a number of other pieces. I've heard him speak. He's great. You can always hear the energy and the passion in what he's sharing. But it's a blessing to have you on, and I'm so grateful for the work you're doing in schools at Cincinnati Hills and now all over the place. So thanks for being with us.
Stephen Carter:
Thank you, Jon. Appreciate what you're doing and appreciate the opportunity.