Why Don’t You Just Start Your Own School?

A lot of people ask me: why don’t you just start a school?

It’s a fair question.

When they see the kind of work we do at Inner Spark — where students have voice, take ownership, and help shape what they’re learning — they assume that kind of innovation needs freedom. They figure the only way forward is to build something new.

I get why they think that.

But here’s why we’ve made a different choice: we believe real change has to happen inside the schools we already have.

Of course, there’s also the practical side to this. Starting a new school is expensive.

In Los Angeles, it costs around $150 million to build one public school. Even launching a new charter can take $250,000–$500,000just to get started, plus another $10–$20 million for a building.

Our approach costs less — and it pushes on something deeper.

Because the real challenge isn’t just about money or new school models.

It’s about the assumptions we’ve stopped questioning.

We’ve gotten used to thinking of public schools as fixed — like they are what they are, and they can’t be anything else.

We tell ourselves that big change is too hard, or too complicated, or that it has to happen somewhere else. And so we stop asking what’s possible. We stop pushing on the system we have.

That’s what Inner Spark is here to challenge.

We want to show that schools can change from the inside.

That they can become places where students have more say in their learning, where teachers can experiment and grow, and where the culture feels more alive — not just for a few, but across the whole school.

And we want people to understand that this isn’t about building something separate or elite. It’s about proving that the schools we already have can hold this kind of work, if we’re willing to invest in them and rethink how we show up inside them.

That’s the choice we’ve made. And that’s the work we’re committed to.

Next time you walk past a public school, ask yourself: What might be possible inside those walls that we’ve stopped imagining?

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