Ted Fujimoto is President of Landmark Consulting Group, Inc., a management and investment consultancy for scaling innovations in learning. Ted helped to design and create the replication systems and strategy for several of the highest performing public school designs in the country that created over 350 schools, including New Tech Network and Big Picture Learning.

I’ve been following Ted on Twitter for many years and am constantly learning from him. When I reached out to Ted, he welcomed me with open arms. I really enjoyed our conversation and added excerpts with links, resources, and pictures to complement his podcast.
 
About you and your family

I was originally from the Napa Valley in California. During my developmental years, I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and I lived overseas as a teenager in Japan. I have two kids. One is finishing up her third year of medical school and the other is finishing college who just got married this summer. My wife, Leigh Rachel Faith @unleighshed, is an actor, writer, and producer in the entertainment business. We live in Los Angeles.
 
What school was like when you were growing up
I was in a traditional school in a single room country schoolhouse. Oversees, we had correspondence school where we had to mail in our assignments and then got them back literally a month later. I was one of those kids who felt that school was boring and in the way. What got me through it was kind of cracking the code. For example, when I was in the correspondence school, I knew I could get the school work done by 10 am and then jump on the subway to tour Tokyo until 6 pm every day. So I got done by speeding through.

Even in college, I got through in three years. There was a bunch of classes where I just went to the midterms and finals. That’s what I needed to do to get the grades and that’s all I did. Even as a professional some 20 odd years later and started dozens of education organizations, I looked back to figure out what part of my education contributed to what I know today. I would say maybe 5% – there were a few classes that gave me a perspective and helped me to do what I do today. But, actually, about 80% was not useful at all.
 
New Tech Network

 
 
 
 
When I moved my company from Silicon Valley to Napa Valley where I was originally from, we were one of the first tech companies there. Then Napa was a farm town then and we couldn’t find employees to help us grow. My first foray in transforming education was literally out of survival. We needed employees even entry level and that resulted in starting that Napa New Technology High School in 1996.
About New Tech High School: https://youtu.be/NuurI4v8nSY
I hired a number of students as interns and later as full-time employees. It was really creating a school that gave kids the real skills that I could literally use the next year. We hear about project-based learning and the variety of ways to do it.  I can tell you with New Tech and the teachers like Paul Curtis who went to sabbaticals with the Buck Institute. We wanted it rooted in real-world work and toured the country to find schools that. But we couldn’t find schools with that authenticity. One of the people who designed New Tech was involved with Silicon Graphics. The purple that New Tech uses is the purple from Silicon Graphics. Now there are over 200 schools in the New Tech Network.
 
Big Picture Learning
My involvement is to help communities connect to school designs that scale and are replicable. I was on the board and executive team with Big Picture Learning and now am a thought partner. I helped Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor design and create the replication syst...