Robbye Kirkpatrick’s journey from commercial real estate to classroom teaching and education advocacy offers a powerful networking lesson: durable change depends on bringing unlikely partners together. Texas TransformED is building a coalition of business leaders teachers and parents around transparent results and practical priorities for students across Texas.
Robbye holds a 360-degree view of public schooling. As a highly mobile child, she experienced first-hand what it’s like to fall between gaps in the system as well as the power of one highly skilled educator to remove barriers to achievement. Early in her career at The Trammell Crow Company, her team was hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District and delivered an award-winning transaction that saved the district over $85M. There she glimpsed a sprawling urban system with a multi-billion budget delivering failing academic outcomes. Deep curiosity led her into one of the worst performing schools in America, where she served as an English teacher for four years. Later, as a parent of special needs kids, she navigated high performing Suburban schools, only to find that these schools are not teaching basic reading, writing, or math instruction to mastery. These experiences as a student, vendor, educator, and parent/customer fueled the vision for Texas TransformED.
Robbye is a real estate professional and investor with a teaching and schooling passion. At the core of Robbye’s work is the belief that our public education system can be transformed through transparent performance metrics and by empowering values-based leaders who instill a culture of excellence.
As a new teacher and while completing her master’s in education at Loyola Marymount University, Robbye identified the highest performing teacher in America and systematized his approach in her own classroom, raising $75,000 in private funding to carry it out in year one. Her Title I 7th and 8th grade students performed Shakespeare on real stages, debated elite private schools, read over 1M words per year of high school level literature, and traveled extensively. As a result, these students experienced jumps in reading between two and four grade levels and experienced what Robbye calls human flourishing, which is the real goal of education.
In 2010 Robbye adopted three siblings out of Los Angeles County foster care. In 2015 she returned home to Texas and to the global commercial real estate firm, Newmark. In 2020 she founded RubiCrown Commercial Real Estate and in 2024 RubiCrown Development focused on midscale projects in tertiary markets around Austin. She is also a small business investor, leading the acquisition process with her husband and business partner, Shawn Kirkpatrick. In June of 2025, she co-founded Texas TransformED, an ambitious plan to radically transform public education.
Company: Texas TransformED
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Robbye Kirkpatrick: I am the co-founder of Texas TransformED, which is a non-profit that seeks to make Texas #1 for k-12 public education; currently Texas ranks 44th. I am primarily a business person and a mom of four kids with a background in commercial real estate brokerage, development, and investment. My career path took an interesting turn in my early twenties, when the team I worked on at Trammell Crow Company was hired to help the Los Angeles Unified School District consolidate 5,000 administrators into one headquarters building to free up the other sites to build high schools. I learned in this process that despite a $7B real estate budget, that the district had a 50% drop out rate. This information was a bit like a spiritual awakening. One minute I was a real estate broker/consultant, the next minute I needed to solve schooling. I ultimately left corporate world years later and became a teacher in one of the worst performing middle schools in America. I needed a first hand understanding of why urban schools were failing. I spent four years there getting an inside look. Fast forward fifteen years and four kids later, and I co-founded Texas TransformED, which is a movement toward sweeping change in Texas’ public schooling.
Can you share a time when your business faced a significant challenge? How did you navigate through it?
Robbye Kirkpatrick: Texas TransformED is in it’s infancy, but every day is a challenge because we are a tiny non-profit trying to take on a system that is failing to properly educate 5.5M school children, 63% of those children economically disadvantaged. Education is the number one line item on the state budget. It is severely over-regulated, which means to do almost anything differently, you need to change a state law. Our state legislature only meets every two years for 140 days. It costs millions of dollars to get laws passed because of the lobbying required. Add to this the fact that public education is a political battlefield and a marketplace of ideas of what should be taught. There is also a huge underbelly as big as Big Pharma that profits from public schooling; some of those groups benefit financially from keeping it broken. We are navigating through it by building a broad coalition of business people, teachers, and parents. We are fiercely independent. We are focused on the facts– only 54% of kids in Texas read at grade level. We are focused on policies that will move the needle on reading, math, financial literacy, and preparing kids for jobs, military, or college.
How has a failure or apparent failure set you up for later success?
Robbye Kirkpatrick: Again, we just launched in July. Our first initiative was to get the governor’s office to approve an inter-agency webpage that would institutionalize and make fully transparent, the performance of districts, school boards, superintendents, principals as it relates to reading and math scores of the students. Currently Texas uses something called A-F, which is a grading scale applied to schools and districts. It is opaque. Our system would clarify not only which schools perform well, but also which schools are the best stewards financially. We’ve identified nearly $7B of waste in the system through our data set, which is compiled from the Texas Education Agency website by a third party called Education Resource Group. Despite multiple meetings with at the legislature, this initiative still is not approved; however, we are optimistic in two things. First, our governor will likely make education a cornerstone of his next campaign, and he has a track record for making Texas number one is jobs, economic development, corporate relocations, etc. Secondly, we think there will be strong interest in this data by business people/tax payers and teachers–two groups that usually are not paired together. We are working on rolling out this data to individual stakeholders to gain deeper traction.
How do you build a resilient team? What qualities do you look for in your team members?
Robbye Kirkpatrick: We run all of our businesses on a system called Entrepreneurs Operating System (EOS), which is about establishing a vision and then putting the right people in the right seats to execute the vision. Texas TransformED is no different. As an example, former State Representative Rob Eissler, who chaired the Education Committee during his tenure, just joined our board. We look for people who are experts in their job, whether that is designing a campaign or lobbying at the state.
How do you maintain your personal resilience during tough times?
Robbye Kirkpatrick: I pray that citizens of the state of Texas will be moved by what we’re trying to accomplish because it is about their money, justice, and the future of 5.5M young people/children. I workout. I write. I spend time with people I love because they encourage me constantly.
What strategies do you use to manage stress and maintain focus during a crisis?
Robbye Kirkpatrick: I manage stress through exercise. I maintain focus by time blocking and building teams that solve problems.
How do you communicate with your team during a crisis?
Robbye Kirkpatrick: We communicate regularly. Most of the crisis in this work is not a lack of will on behalf of good people to fix things. K-12 education is in a state of crisis because it is over-regulated and we have the wrong people in key seats, and their jobs are not tied to student outcomes. We are working to fix this in the next legislative session.
What advice would you give to other CEOs on building resilience in their organizations?
Robbye Kirkpatrick: I am an absolute fan of the Entrepreneurs Operating System (EOS) and the emphasis on right people in right seats and full transparency through scorecards and dashboards around performance. This eliminates a ton of drama. If you hire the right talent for jobs that are rightly aligned with your vision, resilience is built in.
How do you prepare your business for potential future crises?
Robbye Kirkpatrick: We try to anticipate things that can go wrong, and fix them or take a different course before those things happen. For most companies the big crises occur around cash flow. Non-profits are no different. It takes significant support from donors to pass the laws we are trying to pass. Donors and supporters are investing with us to make these changes. In this realm the job is educating the entire coalition and arming them with facts. As of today, we have 484 days to the 90th legislative session; we are planning now and arming voters and leaders with information. The real crises here is that Texas does not transform it’s educational system and continues to make incremental moves.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about leadership in times of crisis?
Robbye Kirkpatrick: Be brutally honest, take bold steps in the right direction, and do not be afraid. Dishonesty, fear, and panic are the enemies.
