Middle School MBA | John Foster

In this episode of The Ashley B. Cash Show, Ashley sits down with John Foster, founder and president of Middle School MBA, to discuss why teaching students real-world business and economic principles is essential for their future success.

From understanding supply and demand to entrepreneurship, inflation, and free markets, John explains how his innovative, hands-on curriculum equips students with the practical knowledge they need to make informed financial decisions, think critically, and thrive in today's economy. Ashley and John also explore the importance of teaching life-ready skills in K–12 education and how parents, educators, and school leaders can bring these lessons into their classrooms.

If you believe students should graduate prepared for the real world—not just the next test—this conversation is one you won't want to miss.

About The Ashley B. Cash Show: The Ashley B. Cash Show features conversations with education leaders, policy experts, parents, teachers and reform advocates who are working to transform K-12 education. Host Ashley B. Cash brings her perspective as both a parent and business owner to explore systemic education issues and practical solutions for creating better outcomes for students, families, and communities.

About Ashley:  As both a mother and business owner, Ashley brings a unique dual perspective to education reform advocacy, driven by her desire for better educational outcomes for future generations and informed by her firsthand experience with the skills gap facing employers today. Her passion for transforming K-12 education stems from witnessing the real-world consequences of educational failures and recognizing the critical need for a system that prepares students for diverse career pathways, not just college. Through this podcast, Ashley champions solutions including aptitude-based education tracks, expanded school choice, practical skills integration, and alternative career pathways that align with students' individual strengths and interests.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the Ashley B Cash Show. I'm Ashley Cash, and I'm super excited to introduce today's guest, John Foster. He is with Middle School MBA. He is not only the president, but also the founder. Middle School MBA is a graduate level business and economics for middle schoolers. An executive MBA for kids, if you will. Teaching kids the skills to be executives, small business owners, but really it's teaching kids how the world really works. He also has a really unique program called Links by Middle School MBA, which is actually a gaming system that teaches kids all about economics and how the real world works in business and beyond. John, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Well, I'm so glad to have you. As you know, we you and I this week, we are at the Teacher Freedom Summit, which is put on by the Teacher Freedom Alliance. And um John and I met each other and immediately realized that we were both doing things to try to make um our kids have real world skills. And he has this really amazing product that I wanted all of our viewers to find out about. Now you take middle school MBA, which is meant to teach kids skills for the real world, all about business, and you actually drop it into schools.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Exactly. It's the scalability is one of the wild things. Um we can we can be in a school literally overnight. Uh teachers on board themselves in about a half hour or 30 minutes, and and teachers who would tell you up front, this is above my pay grade, I can't do this, I'm intimidated. In just a few minutes, they're like, I got it, get out of my way, I'm gonna go teach this to my kids. So um we've made it so clear and simple that this thing that they used to be, you know, economics and business. Oh my god, it's so inaccessible. We've made it super accessible.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

Well, what I love about it, and just in the short time that I've been able to see it, and I talk to the viewers all the time about kids needing to graduate with skills, right? And this program gives them those skills and it makes them understand the bigger world as a whole and the part that they potentially are going to play in it and how they interact, right? How prices of something that they buy at the grocery store, why it's that priced, because they can see the whole business chain getting there. They understand the economics around it, and they and then they will actually understand how to be in the business, bringing capital to the table, bring creating some sort of widget and selling it to the market. And I think it's absolutely awesome.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Yes, no matter what role they're gonna play. I mean, everybody, you're you're in the world as not necessarily just a business owner, but an employee. Uh you're a much better employee if you understand how the whole business works and what your boss's problems are. Um, as a consumer, you're way better off when you don't fall for marketing scams or payday loans or that kind of thing. Um, and as a citizen, uh, you're much better off understanding how the whole world works. Because what what people always try to do is is sell you a little slice of it in in some sleight of hand way, right? With if you don't see the whole picture, they'll they hand you something with the right hand and take it away with the left hand.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Or they tell you that this is happening to you because um of one factor when it's really it's the way economics work. Right? Yes, prices are higher at the grocery store, but it's not because someone's doing evil to you, it's because of the way economics work. If you take it all the way back to the original input, I mean it's awesome. There are prices along that way that impact your price at the grocery store.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Correct. And and there are there are factors like uh, you know, the Fed printing too much money that that creates inflation. And and those things are, I mean, Keynes wasn't right by very much, but one of the things he said that was right was not one in a thousand people can detect what's going on with inflation. Right, and and every civilization in the world has eventually inflated their currency away and and you know really wrecked their their people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

We saw that happening not too in the not too distant past when we were just printing money for the sake of printing money just so that we could. Um, and we had skyrocketing inflation. And unfortunately, we're still dealing with a little bit of that residual. Still dealing with it. Because it lasts past the time that the inflation was high. Um, that's I think the part that most people never understand, right? They always want to blame it on a certain president or a certain politician, but you have to look backward to see where it originated. And usually it was the person before, or sometimes two before.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Correct, correct.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Um, and so understanding that is so critical to understanding how the world works, and so that you can actually be somebody that is not having the wool pulled over your eyes.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Exactly. So better citizen, better consumer, better employee, better business owner, better.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

And and able to then take charge. Knowledge is power. 100% and able to then take charge of your life and make informed decisions that are from real stuff. And you no longer just have to listen to the talking heads. You because you have this knowledge that you're bringing with middle school MBA, you can now sift through what's being said to actually find the truth.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

And and you know, it's it's it's comforting to understand. I used to back when I was actually in the classroom teaching it uh long ago, kids would always raise their hand and say, Why is this class so fun? And I'd be like, I'm not here to have fun, could get back to work. But they kept asking me that exact same question. And I so I thought about it. And I'm like, all right, well, if you're 12, we live in this world of commercial transactions, and it's like being in a blaster fight on Star Wars. You know, it's just boom, boom, boom, all these disconnected things going on. But once you can like see the whole picture and you understand what's happening, you're like, oh, this isn't so chaotic after all. And it's it's very comforting. Oh, this is something I can grasp and I know how to go play in this world. And and that just and their their vocabulary at that time is fun. But what it really is, it's it's comforting. It's I like this.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Well, and I understand why that is. You know, it's so scary when you enter a world and you don't understand the language, right? And and it it is all foreign to you as a result, and you're struggling just with the basic concepts, let alone the more in-depth things that they start discussing. And so this program, just even being able to introduce it to middle schoolers, you know, or high schoolers. Um, I love it because it's introducing the language, it's introducing all the parts and pieces, and it's doing it in a more gamified way, a very interactive way, where they're getting to play with the different parts and manipulate them, have their own negotiations. You were telling me um that by the end of it, the kids are having negotiations, they're critiquing themselves on their presentations, which is another part I love that you're actually having the kids do presentations so that they learn those good communication skills as well.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we want, we try to have everybody involved in everything. So if two kids are negotiating, one is being a timekeeper, because we for everything we have time pressure and risk of failure, because that's how life. And then the rest of the class is judging that, they actually have a score sheet. And oh, did you did you open an anchor? Did you use this technique? So they got a list of techniques, and they actually afterwards they they recap and talk about who did what and how it worked out. So yeah, we we like to get everybody in the game whenever we can.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

That's awesome. I we need practical skills-based classes like this that actually teach children things that they can use in the real world. And I think that's why I was so excited when I saw it, just because it's not only doing that, but you're doing it in a way that's fun, that engages the kids. And that's, you know, that engagement is the number one factor in whether a child will be successful at it. Yes. And it is very engaging. And tell us how you go about dropping this in schools and what parents out there can do. Can they go to their schools and ask them to adopt this?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Absolutely. Uh, usually it's a parent that brings us to some school. Um, and it's it's really simple. The uh they can go to our website, the the principal or whoever can contact us, the teachers on board themselves in 20 or 30 minutes. Um we send uh we send them a kit with the little pieces and parts for experiments and and um you know different activities so that the teacher just projects the software on the wall, pulls what they need out of the kit, and they're off to the races. We we try to be really, really time efficient with the classroom because there's there's not enough classroom time and we don't want to waste it. And so uh yeah, it's the implementation is super easy, 100% scalable anywhere in the world tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

That's awesome. And you start off in the beginning just explaining to the kids like you have this one slide that I love that talks about when you don't have any financial literacy, you're drowning. When you have personal financial literacy, which Texas kids will have now starting this next year, um, you are not drowning, but you're still floating with the current, right? You now have control of your own personal money, but you don't understand how the rest of the world around you works. But then when you get into this middle school MBA, it gives you complete and total control over your life. You have control over your personal finances, but you understand how they work in the world around them so that you can make choices, good to informed choices. And you also then have the ability to start a business or to move up in your business because you understand the way all the economic parts of the business work, which gives you an advantage over most of your other other employees. You become a player. And so I love that visual of drowning without financial literacy, floating with the current, but not drowning, but floating with the current with financial literacy, personal financial literacy, and then having total control over your life and all things about it from an economic standpoint with the middle school MBA. I just think that's such great visual. Um, and we'll put that up on the screen for all the viewers so you can see it. Cause I was like, ah, it makes sense. Um, but so you start at the very basics, you start with vocabulary and you move forward with different concepts, and you have a model that the kids can see to understand all the different concepts. And then ultimately the kids create a business out of some widgets, they form the widgets, they figure out all the costs, they write a business plan, then they present it, they negotiate with their classmates or the principal or some or some business leader to come in and negotiate their costs, their prices, their everything, and then ultimately figure out how to sell it, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Yes. Uh a little more truncated along the way because again, we're trying to be really, really efficient with classroom time. But but yes, that's essentially right. Um and the idea is with every lesson, we try to start super simple and and then we we progress smoothly to something that's essentially profound. You know, we we start off talking about for supply and demand. How does uh how are we gonna price a hot dog? You know, and and we look at the laws supply and the law demand with no no charts or graphs, no numbers bigger than your fingers, but they visually again see exactly how you balance supply and demand. And then we take that up to even more um abstract and profound stuff, like uh shortages, the the shortages that they have in Venezuela because of price controls and how to prices and then what is money? We uh, and then even into uh how does blockchain work and all that. So very, very fundamental and you know like I think of it if if you teach somebody coding, if if you teach them uh a coding language, that's great, it's useful. But in in 10 years, it's gonna be gone. There'll be a different language, as you have to know. But when you teach these principles, they'll have that forever and and they can apply it to to anything their entire lives.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Well, and to any market that they happen to find themselves in. And it's my understanding that that you also talk about free markets versus different other types of economies.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

So, yeah, with our with our model, we we go, we show the exact mechanisms for how the market works. How do prices and capital interact and how are prices formed, and how it's it's actually prices that allow an economy to respond to consumer desires. That's the mechanism by which it works. And once you understand that, then we'll we'll take the opposite case. The opposite case is Marxism, where well let me one step back from that. Prices are essential. You must have prices. You find prices by negotiating to discover what they should be. You can only do that when people are owning the thing they're negotiating, negotiating over, right? I can't negotiate with this other person's car. I can't negotiate that price, it doesn't belong to me. The price we get won't be real. And so to have real prices, you have to have private property. When you go to Marxism, there's no private property, and so there's no prices, and so there's no way to know what to do. Your capital structure is a disaster, your economy is a disaster, and and then what people naturally do in that case is they go, Well, this isn't working. I'm gonna make some side deals over here, you know, with my friend under the table. And then the state has to go, no, no, no, no, no, no, you know, stop doing that. And that's the reason all of these systems eventually become authoritarian because the people resist what they're trying to do to them. Because it doesn't work, it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I'm starving, I think I'll do something different, right? I gotta protect my family. And and now I'm gonna put the the state says I'm gonna put you in jail for trying to to do this. And so and it's the same story. So you've got you've got a market economy on one end of the spectrum, you've got Marxism on the other end, and in between there's you know, there's a whole continuity of different things. But the more you attack private property, the worse off you're gonna be. Uh I mean it's it's so so clear from things like the economic freedom of the world, you know, they they plot economic freedom from many countries and and what kind of results they achieve in terms of living standards. And it's just so obvious that the more free your economy is, the the better off everybody, the more peaceful, the more prosperous. It's it's just so much better.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

But that's exactly why it's so critical that we teach this to kids.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Because when you don't understand it, you can be told anything and you might be willing to believe that.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

You can look at a little piece of it and oh, it looks like this. But if you look at the whole picture, no, no, no. It's and and so yeah, we first we show the exact mech, we we don't do any, it's uh I think it's uh unforgivable to to um to mislead a child, you know, they're they're and and so we don't do any everything we do is is like we were teaching physics. This is connected to that, this is connected to that. And then when we go to Marxism, we use we use the communist manifesto, you know, we use the original diamonds. Here's what Marx wanted, and and then here's how that plays out. And and kids just see for themselves, we don't make value judgments, we're not we don't push a point of view, we just let them see how things actually work.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Well, and I love that because I think that's what's really important in education is that we just tell the truth and then we let things fall where they're naturally going to fall, and we let people have their viewpoints, you know. I think that's important, but I think making sure that they all have the correct information and then they can make their decision, right? Is the is the really important part. So I love that that's how you do that. Um I think it's a great program, and I think that there are so many opportunities for it. Now, we talked about you dropping it into schools and the parents and the grandparents out there. If you think this would be a great program at your school, whether it's a private school, a charter school, or a public school, or even homeschool, there is an option for parents who want to buy this for themselves. Absolutely. And you you can be a participant with your children, you can have all of your children do it, or you can get all of your friends' kids together and run this program and have them do it together. And I think that's another really great way to make sure that your children have this available. So I'll probably have to buy one today to take home to my kids. Now they're all above middle school, but I still think that this is more beneficial than anything they've seen. And honestly, I think this is better than a lot of things they're doing in college, frankly.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

But it actually is.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

It actually is. Yeah. Yeah. So while it is called middle school MBA, I think that that's just a starting point. I think if you have kids of any age, heck, I think a lot of adults could really benefit from this as well.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

And and we do have some products for adults. We have a video called Economics in one video. Okay. Uh again, it's like 20 minutes long, assumes you know nothing at all, and takes you all the way through business cycles and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

So well, as I told the viewers when we started today, we are here at the Teachers' Freedom Summit, and there is a big rally going on just behind us. So if you're hearing cheering and things, that's why. But um, would you please tell people again where to find you and how they can get in touch?

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Yes, just um middle schoolmba.com. Okay. Uh everything's there.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

And this has been our interview at John Foster today, and um he is doing dynamic things to make kids' lives better and make them have real skills to graduate school with and know how our real world works. So, John, thank you so much for joining us today. Well, thank you. It's been an honor. Thank you so much. Well, thank you all for joining us today, and I hope you will join us next time for more ways that we're planning on transforming the K through twelve education system. Thanks. Okay. I kind of had to I meant to make it go longer, but that was getting a little loud over there.