Matthew Weinberg and The Barrett School: Building an Education for Every Kind of Mind

Most schools are built on an assumption so deeply embedded that nobody questions it.

The assumption is that there is a correct way to learn. That if you present information clearly, structure the environment consistently, and measure outcomes accurately, most students will learn what you intend them to learn.

The evidence does not support this assumption. But the assumption persists because it is convenient. It allows institutions to design for the average rather than for the individual. It allows accountability systems to measure outputs that are easy to quantify rather than outcomes that actually matter.

The Barrett School was built on a different assumption entirely.

What We Built and Why

Together with my brother, I co-founded The Barrett School at Destin, Florida.

The school serves students from PreK through 12th grade. Its core mission is to provide rigorous, individualized STEM education to students who thrive outside traditional classroom structures, with particular focus on neurodivergent learners, students with learning differences, and students who learn best through hands-on, project-based, and inquiry-driven methods.

We did not build The Barrett School because we identified a market opportunity. We built it because we had spent years watching extraordinarily capable students be failed by environments not designed for them. And because we believed, based on research and personal experience both, that it was possible to do better.

The Educational Philosophy Behind It

My doctoral research on game theory in education provides the theoretical foundation for everything we do at The Barrett School.

The core insight, developed in Why Dr. Matthew Weinberg Applies Game Theory to Education, is that students behave rationally within whatever incentive structure their educational environment creates. If the environment rewards accurate recall under pressure, students optimize for accurate recall under pressure. If the environment rewards genuine inquiry and collaborative problem-solving, students do that instead.

Traditional schools create incentive structures that reward a specific cognitive profile. Students who can sit still, process written text quickly, retrieve information reliably under timed conditions, and perform consistently across standardized assessment formats do well. Students whose cognitive profiles differ, even when those students are more creative, more analytically sophisticated, or more capable of genuine understanding, often do not.

At The Barrett School we redesigned the incentive structure.

Assessment at The Barrett School is primarily formative rather than summative. Students receive feedback continuously rather than being evaluated at fixed intervals under high-pressure conditions. Learning is organized around projects and problems rather than around units of content to be delivered and tested. Students are expected to think, question, argue, and revise their positions. They are not expected to perform.

The result is an environment where the cognitive profiles that traditional schools most consistently underserve become assets rather than liabilities.

Technology and Innovation

The Barrett School integrates advanced technology into the learning environment in ways that most schools do not.

This includes immersive virtual reality experiences that allow students to engage with concepts in quantum physics, ancient history, and environmental science through direct experiential learning rather than textbook description. It includes artificial intelligence tools used as research partners and thinking aids rather than shortcuts. It includes coding integrated into mathematics instruction rather than taught as a separate subject.

The goal is not technology for its own sake. The goal is expanding the range of cognitive pathways through which students can access and engage with complex ideas. A student who struggles to extract meaning from a dense written text may engage deeply with the same content through an immersive simulation. A student who cannot sustain attention through a lecture may concentrate intensely on a hands-on engineering problem.

Technology, when deployed thoughtfully, increases the number of minds a learning environment can genuinely serve.

Who The Barrett School Is For

The Barrett School serves a community of students who share one characteristic: they learn differently from the narrow profile that traditional education was designed to serve.

That includes students with dyslexia, ADHD, autism spectrum conditions, apraxia, processing differences, and other learning profiles that traditional classrooms consistently underestimate. It also includes students who are neurotypical but who thrive in hands-on, inquiry-driven environments rather than in passive instruction formats.

My own experience navigating dyslexia, and the experience of watching my daughter with apraxia and my son with ADHD move through educational systems, shapes how I think about every policy and practice at the school. This is not abstract for me. It is personal.

More about my personal experience with neurodiversity and why it shapes my work is in Matthew Weinberg on Neurodivergent Learners and Why the System Needs to Change.

What We Have Learned

Building a school that genuinely serves neurodivergent learners is harder than describing one.

It requires constant revision. What works for one student does not always work for another. The individualization that is central to the mission requires more from teachers, more from administrators, and more from the institution as a whole than a standardized model demands.

It also produces outcomes that a standardized model cannot.

Students who were told by previous schools that they were not good at learning discover that they are. Students who had internalized the message that their minds were problems to be managed find environments where those same minds are recognized as assets.

That is what The Barrett School is built to produce. Not test scores. Not credentials. Students who know they can think.

A full account of my background and educational philosophy is available here. More about my philanthropic work supporting educational institutions is on the Philanthropy page.

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Dr. Matthew Weinberg, PhD, MEd is an educator, author, co-founder of The Barrett School, Vice President of the Gloria C. MacKenzie Foundation, and founder of Grammar & Stone Publishing. His books are available at Barnes & Noble. Follow him on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X.