A man with a vision set out to revolutionize preschool. It became a $440 million fiasco. Claire Suddath interviewed more than two dozen people associated with Higher Ground Education and its Guidepost Montessori schools, including parents, teachers, administrators, corporate staff and executives.

Ten years ago, a Montessori enthusiast named Ray Girn had a vision. He wanted to bring high-quality, child-led education to as many babies and toddlers as possible, with a chain of for-profit schools that would grow at the pace of a tech start-up. He spoke about doing for preschools "what ride-sharing apps or Airbnb have achieved," and he raised $335 million from investors, including venture capital and private equity firms, to make it happen.

For a while, Mr. Girn's schools, which operated under the brand Guidepost Montessori, appeared to be successful, with 150 locations that served tens of thousands of children. But they also ran up an astonishing $440 million in losses. The parent company, Higher Ground Education, filed for bankruptcy in June 2025 and shuttered about 60 schools.

In Oregon, parents received an email notification on a Sunday afternoon that their school effectively no longer existed. In Wisconsin, a father went to drop off his 5-month-old son at a Guidepost only to find it had closed. In California, a mother learned that her children's Guidepost had been sold and that its Montessori curriculum would be replaced with artificial intelligence.

Guidepost teachers and parents lit up Facebook and Reddit groups with horror stories — allegations of neglect and mistreatment that made a lot more sense now that everyone knew how mismanaged the company had been. For-profit education ventures are notorious for disappointing investors and leaving parents fuming. But even in this context, the Guidepost story is striking. "Schools close sometimes, but usually not this many, and not all at once," said Rebecca Winthrop, who directs the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.

What could have caused such a collapse? More than two dozen former teachers, administrators and corporate employees told me that they were deeply concerned by the company's business model. Seven independently described it as a pyramid scheme. "We were calling it the Montessori Ponzi scheme internally," said Alex Richardson, a teacher at Guidepost's first school, in Orange County, Calif. When Higher Ground opened new Guidepost schools, it often received large advances from landlords to improve their properties.

As long as the company kept expanding, it seemed from the outside as if it were thriving. But when it came time to repay the landlords, and growth was no longer an option, the company collapsed. By the end, some Guidepost locations were losing $50,000 a month. Mr. Girn is still active in the education industry.

Last year, he and his wife, Rebecca Girn — the other founder of Higher Ground and its general counsel — welcomed me at a converted ranch-style house outside Austin, Texas, where they've already opened another school, called Fulcrum. Their three children are among the students. Image Ray Girn adamantly disputed the Ponzi comparisons and said he is proud of what he built. "You can't care about the people that are critics," Mr. Girn said. "We're not apologizing for this."We spoke for several hours, a conversation in which Mr. Girn referenced Julius Caesar, Plato, the founding fathers, environmentalism, Bismarckian Germany and Taylor Swift.

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