Robbye Kirkpatrick

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. In June of 2025, she co-founded Texas TransformED, an ambitious plan to radically transform public education.

Outside of work, Robbye is deeply grounded in faith, inspired by classical literature, and energized by big ideas. She and her husband, Shawn, endowed the First Gen Champions Scholarship at Texas Tech University, where Robbye served on the Alumni Association National Board from 2021 to 2025. She and Shawn also serve as members of the building committee at St. Elias Church.