Brad Rathgeber ’01 is the head of school and CEO of One Schoolhouse, a “partner to independent schools that envisions and embodies what’s next in education, online learning, and professional development.” The alumnus shares with host Benny Klein ’24 of the Scholar Media Team about working with three other Morehead-Cains as a rising second-year college student for a nonprofit scholarship program in Zimbabwe, teaching and coaching at Holton-Arms School in Washington, D.C., and how his time at the school for girls formed the groundwork for building his own company.
Brad Rathgeber ’01 is the head of school and CEO of One Schoolhouse, a “partner to independent schools that envisions and embodies what’s next in education, online learning, and professional development.”
The alumnus talks with host Benny Klein ’24 of the Scholar Media Team about working with three other Morehead-Cains as a rising second-year college student for a nonprofit scholarship program in Zimbabwe (co-founded by Galahad Clark ’99 and Jeff Pike ’99), teaching and coaching at Holton-Arms School in Washington, D.C., and how his time at the school for girls formed the groundwork for building his own company.
Brad talks about the difference between online learning and “emergency learning,” and how he approaches an inclusive framework to education through identity-affirming classes.
“A great coach helps someone see something in themselves that they don’t yet see, and then helps them find a pathway to get there.” —Brad Rathgeber ’01
The intro and ending music for this episode is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.
The music featured mid-episode is by scholars Asher Wexler ’25 and Emmaus Holder ’23, with voice-over by scholar Tucker Stillman ’25.
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Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.
(Benny)
Hey, Brad. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it.
(Brad)
I’m more than happy to.
(Benny)
The whole point of this podcast for me is to get to know some of the alumni through the Morehead-Cain and hear how they have gone about finding purpose and meaning in their careers. And your story is awesome. I love the work that you’re doing on a personal note, and I’m really excited to talk about it.
(Brad)
Happy to.
(Benny)
So I want to start off before UNC. I want to hear what high school was like for you and kind of the decision to come to Chapel Hill, and what kind of guy you were then, and what were your dreams then?
(Brad)
Sure. Happy to start there, Benny. I grew up in Connecticut and went to boarding school in Connecticut about an hour and a half away from my parents’ house, which gave me a sense of flexibility and an ability to grow in a lot of different ways, coupled with some just tremendous experiences and opportunities that I had at that great school, the Hotchkiss School. When I was looking at colleges, I knew I wanted something that, sort of like my high school experience, helped me step out of my comfort zone, that helped me grow in different ways, that gave me new sets of challenges and opportunities. And so as I started to apply to universities, there were college and universities that, quite frankly, would have been pretty close to the experience that I’d had for four years of boarding school. And as I started to learn more about Carolina and the Morehead-Cain Program, it became clear that that was just going to afford me different and new opportunities. It would make me step out of my comfort zone by coming to the South, by coming to a large research university, by going to a university that had a clear public purpose to it. That excited me and helped me. Certainly I understood that I would grow by going to Carolina in a way that I wouldn’t had I attended other universities.
(Benny)
Absolutely. What were you interested back in high school, and did those interests translate in your first couple of years at UNC?
(Brad)
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I felt like I sort of had to find my way anew at Carolina, which was both a little bit terrifying and a little bit exciting. I kind of always knew that I was interested in education and the ways that education could, as a field, the ways that education could expand opportunities, could lift people up. That was something that I knew from my experience in boarding school and certainly could see at Carolina early on. But, to be honest, coming to a large research university and taking all of a sudden lecture courses with 300 kids and other things like that, that was a big shock to my system.
(Benny)
Yeah. I came from Durham Academy and a 15-minute drive from school. I’m actually at home right now recording, so I had some friends that I knew coming in, and maybe more of a sense than you of what UNC was going to be like. Did you have friends that came with you, or how did you find your crew?
(Brad)
No, I didn’t really know anybody when I got to Carolina. I remember very vividly my father dropping me off at Morrison dormitory on a 95-degree August day into a dorm room with no air conditioning, and him looking at me and thinking, “Oh, gosh, I don't know if this is going to be the right fit.” And in those first few weeks, gosh, again, it was just a huge challenge going from, I lived by myself at a boarding school before, I knew what a dorm . . . I thought I knew what a dorm was going to be like, and then all of a sudden to be living in a dormitory with 1,000 kids and no air conditioning and on a 95-degree North Carolina day, that’s a challenge and a change.
(Benny)
Yes, it is. How did you find your way? What are some of the things you got involved with or maybe classes that stick out?
(Brad)
Yeah. So there are a couple of kind of formative moments for me. One, obviously, the Morehead-Cain Program is just outstanding and helped connect me to like-minded, really passionate people right from the start. And I got to know a number of them at the time that I was in Carolina, a number of the male Morehead-Cain Scholars were part of a fraternity that I ended up joining in order to become just more connected with them and the ways they were looking to make change, impact the world, and pursue their passions. I also spent a summer, I had a couple of summer experiences that were really impactful for me very early on. After my freshman year at Chapel Hill, I worked with three other Morehead-Cain Scholars on a scholarship program in Zimbabwe. We had been raising money throughout the course of the academic year to help a scholarship program that was founded by a Morehead-Cain Scholar, Galahad Clark, who was a few years older than us, and supported by other Morehead-Cain Scholars over the previous couple of years. But we spent a summer working in Zimbabwe, traveling around the country about 45 days, going from city to city to city throughout Zimbabwe, meeting just amazing kids who didn’t have an opportunity to pursue their education beyond what was available in their home villages.
So in Zimbabwe, public education at the time really ended at about what we would call middle school. And so to pursue past that meant going to a boarding school in a city. So the scholarships that we were offering to about 30 kids ended up allowing them to continue their studies in high school. And the scholarship program ended up connecting a number of those scholars to university opportunities beyond that as well. So it was a real formative experience for me, and something I think back to very fondly, traveling down dirt roads with fellow Morehead-Cain Scholars.
(Benny)
Yeah, that sounds like an incredible experience. Scholarship programs like the one that you’re talking about kind of grant that access, the chance to just go a step further. And that’s something I want to talk today about. It’s a theme in your work. And in my opinion, with all the challenges that we face in today’s world, I think education has got to be one of the answers. So I’m really excited to talk about some of the ways that you’ve seen education be an answer to some of those challenges. I know you spent some years after college in Chapel Hill, but you became a teacher soon after at a D.C. school. Could you talk about what it was like your first couple of years of teaching, and then you told me you were a coach. What type of coach were you?
(Brad)
Yeah. So Benny, I did spend a couple of years in the university. I’ll focus on that for one second before I get into the teaching, if you don’t mind. My first job out of Carolina was working for major gifts as major gifts officer for the College of Arts and Sciences at Chapel Hill. And that was another extraordinary experience because it gave me the window into understanding how money impacts the mission of an organization, and understanding how a nonprofit organization can’t fulfill its mission if it doesn’t have a clear sense of finances, financial objectives, et cetera. That was a wake up call for me, honestly. I was a 23-year-old, really impassioned, motivated young man who saw opportunity but didn’t necessarily see that money to reality before. So I was really lucky to have that experience and understand how money and resources could really help an institution move forward, and the lack thereof would be an impediment to the types of things that an organization would want to do.
Fast forward then, a couple of years after some graduate work at Dartmouth, I was able to enter the classroom for a few years. I used to teach 9th-grade history, a world history course, and AP art history. And at the time, I also coached swimming and tennis to high school and middle school kids at a great girls’ school right outside of Washington, D.C., Holton-Arms School.
(Benny)
What type of coach for you? What do you like about coaching?
(Brad)
I loved empowering the girls to just find success and become something that they didn’t necessarily see in themselves. I think that’s a philosophy that I carried forward, not just in the swimming pool or on the tennis courts, but something I was trying to take into the classroom as well. A great coach helps someone see something in themselves that they don’t yet see, and then helps them find a pathway to get there. So that’s what I was trying to do for the students that I worked with as a coach and also in the classroom.
(Benny)
Yeah. I think some of my favorite mentors to this day are my high school coaches. And, you know, the lessons that you learn in high school sports about determination and what’s possible in teamwork, they’re really powerful, and they stick with you. So that’s why I asked that question.
(Brad)
Yeah, absolutely.
(Benny)
Before this interview, you and I spoke about how the Great Recession posed new challenges for schools like Holton-Arms, where you were working at the time. You were mentioning how your school identified online learning as a new avenue to meet its academic mission, and how this turned into a new collaborative initiative, The School for Girls. I’d love to hear how you guys made that work.
(Brad)
Well, in some ways, we probably got a little bit lucky. We were operating at the right time and had a set of ideas whose time it was. So we decided to set up an online school that would be a supplement to the schools in a consortium. So we set it up as not a standalone, degree-granting online school, but instead a supplemental online high school program that could expand opportunities beyond what would be available at any one campus. And in 2009, we started an organization called The Online School for Girls. It served girls’ schools initially and found a lot of good success right at the start. There were classes that would be difficult for any one individual institution to offer. Give you an example, like linear algebra, you might have one or two kids who are ready to take linear algebra in any given year, but you probably don’t have enough to have an entire class on campus. And so by creating a linear algebra class across ten campuses, and then 20 campuses, and now 253 campuses, you have multiple sections of linear algebra that are able to serve kids in multiple locations. So we kind of hit upon the right idea at that right time in part, too, because 2008, 2009, if we can think back to that time—and my guess is some of the folks listening to this, this is kind of ancient history at this point, in terms of internet and technology—but that was the advent of web 2.0 stuff. Prior to 2007, 8, 9, the web was about giving information, it wasn’t about connecting people. And so right about that point, you saw the change to the web being used as a connecting medium. And in doing so, it gave room for online schools to be set up in a way to be a connector to, rather than just a font of knowledge. So we found success because we were building an online school that was connecting across campuses, but also valued the relational side of teaching and learning to a great degree, and all of a sudden had the tools, also, to build those relationships.
(Benny)
Yeah. What were some of the early questions during that period of collaboration?
(Brad)
One of the early questions, and I think this is something that a lot of institutions that have had success in previous models wrestle with is, well, what if this fails? Like a storied institution, an institution that has a strong history, worries about the risk of failure in a way that institutions without that history do not. So one of the ways that they mitigated that risk was by setting up their venture into online learning as a separate nonprofit entity that could fail. And I think that that’s super smart and a super smart lesson for established institutions to think about. How can you set things up in a way that allow failure to be an option when failure doesn’t seem like an option for the institution with that storied history.
(Benny)
Yeah, I think that’s really smart. We’re all resistant to change, especially when what we’ve been doing has been working. So for schools like Holton-Arms or my high school, Durham Academy, catalyzing those changes requires even more careful thought and preparation. And I can see why it was important to angle the online project in that way. Now, what were the next steps that turned this coalition into One Schoolhouse as we know it today?
(Brad)
So as I said, we started as The Online School for Girls because we were serving a group of girls’ schools. Over time, a number of other schools started to come up to us and said, “Well, what about us? We’d love to have opportunities.” Boys’ schools were coming to us saying, “Well, can you create something for boys?” All-gender institutions were coming into us and saying, “Well, we’d love to have your program into our school.” Moreover, we had also built out a pretty robust professional learning set of opportunities to connect teachers and academic leaders across campuses as well. It wasn’t too far into our work that we realized, hey, if we’re creating these great opportunities for students, why can’t we create some similar opportunities to uptrain our faculty, to connect division directors and others who are leading our schools? So we had already developed out a professional development side of our work. We had been asked by a number of our schools to increase opportunities for them. And our girls’ schools were saying, “This could be a really great space for us to create some all-gender opportunities within the context of a girls’ school, as well.”
So soon I was going to conferences and saying, “Hi, I’m the head of The Online School for Girls. But we’re not just online, we’re not just a school, and we’re not just for girls. Our name needed to change. So it became pretty clear that that was a part of what we did, but not encompassing of us all. And so in 2017, we renamed as One Schoolhouse and have continued to grow out the opportunities for students and the opportunities for adults so that, by the time we got to the COVID pandemic, we were really primed to be able to help meet schools’ challenges and needs where they were.
(Benny)
That’s amazing. You guys offer 88 courses now, and some of the statistics that you were sharing with me before the interview are incredible. One that drew my attention is a course called Happiness: The Psychology of What Makes Life Worth Living. Two of my favorite teachers ever are Mr. Ulku-Steiner [Michael Ulku-Steiner ’92] and Mr. Lee Hark, who taught a course my sophomore year of high school called Mission-Driven Life. They sound similar in the way that we explored what it means to live a fulfilling and happy life, and what’s our own mission statement. Happy is just one word, and it has a lot of definitions for every one individual. And so we tried to drive at what is our goal in this world. And Mr. Ulku-Steiner started the first lecture by saying, “We want and we think that this course will change your life. It definitely has for me.” And it stayed on my mind. So I’d love to hear more about that class and the importance of some of those values in One Schoolhouse more generally.
(Brad)
Yeah. To me, again, it’s about expanding opportunities so that students can find their purpose. And to help them. This goes back to my coaching philosophy to help each student become their best selves and become a self that they couldn’t even imagine before. A class like that does that. A class that is identity affirming also does that, too. We offer a number of identity affirming classes, a black identity in the U.S. class, for example, that really helps make sure that students feel seen in the classroom, and allows them to go beyond what they might have thought or dreamt possible before. That’s some of the work that I’m most proud of that we do in the student side of our work.
(Benny)
One of my qualms with my own online classes during the pandemic was the lack of connection and the forced breakout rooms where your camera’s off, their camera’s off, neither of you are paying attention, and it just misses. I think the moments that I do remember of breakout rooms are when some of the basketball players were in there in my big 400 lecture classes, and then I was really locked in. But I’m curious how you fostered connection from people all over the country.
(Brad)
So I think one of the things that folks are learning during the pandemic and in their forays into—I wouldn’t even call it we did online learning, I think it really is remote distance learning, or emergency remote distance learning—is that in online learning, you have to be super intentional in order to achieve the outcomes that you have. In the face-to-face classroom, you can kind of wing it because there are assumptions that are made there around connection and collaboration and creativity and real-world application that you can’t necessarily make in the online space. So I give incredible credit to the teachers and professors who had to pick up distance learning, and do it on a moment’s notice in the fly at a time when we were all surrounded by trauma. But that’s not online learning. There’s a whole pedagogical approach to online learning that values relationships and connections and is super-intentional about building those. That’s just not what we did during the COVID pandemic. And so I think we’ve got to recognize, coming out of the pandemic, that online learning has promising capability that we only just scratch the surface of in those that dabbled in the space during the COVID pandemic.
(Benny)
Right. I have to be honest. I probably haven’t given enough credit to my professors when classes aren’t as engaging as we both probably had hoped. To be fair, one of my teachers is actually teaching from home today with COVID. So I do owe them a lot of credit and have to realize that they are adapting to an online environment that we grew up with, but they did not grow up with.
(Brad)
Well, Benny, think about it for a second. In this way, faculty members were not trained in the tenets of online learning pedagogy, right? They were trained, if they were trained at all, and in college professors’ cases, you’re mainly trained in your discipline, you’re not trained in the art of teaching. They were trained, if at all, in tenets of good face-to-face instruction. And we’re just trying to then mimic what they were doing in good face-to-face learning in the online space. And that’s not what really good online learning does. It kind of upends the pedagogical approach and changes it to suit the advantages of the space. I like to say face-to-face classrooms have incredible advantages over the online space. But you know what? The online classrooms have incredible advantages over the face-to-face school, too, over the face-to-face classroom, too, not least of which is the data that we have very differently in an online space. Well, if you’re not using data in order to change instruction, to gauge instruction, to increase engagement, to increase relevancy of the work that you’re doing, then you’re not taking advantage of one of the core components of an online learning space. And there aren’t many professors still out there yet, even two years now into the COVID pandemic, that are quite there yet.
(Benny)
It’s amazing how—we talked about this before—a global pandemic for an online learning platform, or an online platform at all, greatly shifts what your scope is and who you’re serving. And so I can imagine that a lot of your resources have been extremely valuable during this time.
I want to pivot a little bit to the questions of access and diversity and equity and inclusion that we referenced earlier. Statistics are still extremely low for African-American women, in particular, for college degrees. And those numbers are still not rising at the rates that we want. And so I’m curious, how do you combat issues of access, funding, and getting your services to the right people?
(Brad)
It’s a challenge for us, in part because of how we’re structured. I’ll be honest on this. So we are structured as a consortium of schools and don’t act as a gatekeeper or a sending institution. So my organization doesn’t market, my organization doesn’t have a marketing budget at all. Instead, we connect with schools and work with them in order to find appropriate students for the types of expanded opportunities that we can offer. So I don’t really have control over who comes into the classrooms that we teach. What I do have control over is making sure that the classrooms that we have are incredibly inclusive and accessible to everybody. So we spend a lot of time thinking about core standards and the like around areas of inclusive innovation and accessibility for students, so that when a student comes into an online class, they, again, have their identity affirmed, have themselves affirmed as a learner, and see themselves reflected as well within the learning that they are doing. And we try to accomplish that through a number of different ways.
(Benny)
What are some of the tenets of a great online course? And how do students from all across the country get to meet, and what are some of the benefits or results of that that you’ve seen?
(Brad)
So the major tenet of great online class is that it puts the relationships between the students and their teachers and the students and each other at the fore of everything. So it does not think necessarily about content first, it thinks about relationships first. It thinks about how can I make sure that these connections that we have, between students and students and students and their teachers, are central to the learning process. Students don’t learn unless they feel comfortable, affirmed, and connected. And so we want to make sure that that’s centered. I think that leads to kind of one of those challenges and differences between what’s happened, again, I would use that phrase “emergency remote distance learning” and what I would call “online learning.” It’s that shift in what’s important and what you’re building off of and being super intentional about what you’re trying to achieve.
(Benny)
Brad, it’s clear to me how you have combined purpose and meaning with your career. Was that intentional when you went about these things? And what are some of the things that you’re looking forward to related to that in the future?
(Brad)
I mean, anybody that enters education, there’s some intentionality behind that, in part because this is not a business that you go into thinking that you’re going to make a ton of money. If you’re going to be a classroom teacher, if you’re going into education in some sense, you know you’re not going to make a ton of money in that space. And so you have to be driven by something larger than money, and yet driven by a super-strong purpose and desire to do good and do well and to act in an incredibly ethical way as you go about building.
(Benny)
Absolutely. And is there anything that you’re looking forward to in the future? Obviously, the pandemic was a great changer of online platforms, and so I’m curious if there’s anything that you’re looking forward to?
(Brad)
I think that the pandemic in my fields accelerated trend lines that were already existing. So in my fields, we could see that online learning was going to be expanding quite a lot prior to the pandemic. What happened, though, is where we are currently in 2022 is where we thought we’d be in 2027 or 2028 or even further on out. So I’m excited with that acceleration having taken place, what that’s going to mean for innovation in the space, and how that’s going to impact the ways that we can create more accessible and inclusive outcomes for students around the world.
(Benny)
That’s awesome. It has been an absolute pleasure getting to talk with you. The work you’re doing is fascinating, and I really appreciate you taking the time and everything. And so thank you so much.
(Brad)
Thank you, Benny. Have a great one.