We recently connected with Robbye Kirkpatrick and have shared our conversation below.

Robbye, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

A partner and I recently launched Texas TransformED, which is a non-profit that seeks to make Texas #1 for K-12 public education. Texas is currently ranked #44. This transformation will require leadership, cultural changes, and data transparency throughout the state system. It will also require significant rule changes within the Texas Education Agency through the State Board of Education and massive legislative action in our 90th legislative session. Texas education 5.5 million K-12 students, so the impact is on individual lives as well as our entire economy. We are working to attach business leaders, parents, and teachers through a grassroots campaign.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I started my career at The Trammell Crow Company as a commercial real estate professional. Early in my career, my team represented The Los Angeles Unified School District in their headquarters relocation. I learned through this experience that despite a $7B real estate budget and a massive public works project to deliver new high schools, that the district also had a 50% drop out rate in the 10th grade. This news was shocking to me. My curiosity about urban schooling led me to start volunteering with kids in these schools and ultimately to leave corporate world and become an English teacher in a Title I middle school, arguably one of the worst performing public schools in America. I served four years in LAUSD as a teacher, and I gained a front row to seat to why schools fail. I met with the best performing teacher in America at that time and developed a strategy to transform reading scores and life experiences for kids in my classroom. To that end, I started a classroom non-profit. My students performed Shakespeare and competed against elite private schools in debate and speech. I also implemented a before school reading program, and watched my students reading scores jump two to four grade levels year after year as a result. Over the years, I ended up back in corporate world, but my passion for fixing schools and improving reading scores has never changed. I have navigated Texas’ school system with my own children, who have special needs, and in the last year the desire to do something to fix what is broken has influenced me to start Texas TransformED.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

My co-founder in Texas TranformED is a visionary woman from Lubbock, Texas, named Ashley Cash. Ashley and I were introduced through mutual friends in politics. At that time, I had an 18-point plan to totally overhaul public schooling. Ashley was launching a pod-cast about education. From our first lunch meeting, we were fast friends, and often completing each other’s sentences about schooling reform. We launched Texas TransformED in the summer of 2025. Both of us run various businesses and projects, so we are both entrepreneurs, juggling four kids each. We have different skill sets, which are complimentary. Ashley leads our government affairs, and is extremely involved in local and state level politics on a variety of issues.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

The number one book that has influenced how I run all of our projects, businesses, and Texas TransformED is Traction, by Gino Wickman, which is the basis for an operating system called Entrepreneur’s Operating System (EOS). Every business has an operating system to grow and scale. This is ours. EOS has a cult-like following because it delivers results, but also because you can apply it to your personal life. It is about getting really clear on your vision, then putting the right people in the right seats to deliver the vision. This is the only way I could run two businesses + a non-profit and juggle my family and kids’ activities. It is about focusing only on the things in your personal zone of genius and delegating the rest to people with the zone of genius you need covered. If someone asks, how do you do all this? The short answer is– I don’t. I have visions, and I put high performing teams in place to accomplish the things that need to get done to fulfill the vision.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.texastransformED,org
• Other: Our socials go live in late fall.