Sea Breeze--
I will cut you some slack because you are neither Jewish nor went to Hebrew school nor have studied in Israel (or perhaps been).
The Essenes, the Sadduces and, yes the Pharisees --all those religious Jewish sects, saw their end in 70 CE with the fall of Herod's Temple. In fact, Judaism was something different when the Jews returned to Jerusalem (along with the Jewish Christians) prior to the Second Jewish Revolt and Simon Bar Kokhba was anointed nasi or "Messiah" which eventually led to the fatal Bar Kokba Revolt in 136 CE and the Jews getting kicked out of Jerusalem (again). There were no Pharisees around at that time.
While it is true that the religious core and practices of the Pharisees make up most of modern Orthodox Judaism today, this is not to say that the Jews of today are Pharisees. Events in Jewish history that Christianity and Western society do not know about, such as the Emancipation, the Enlightenment, the Reform Movement, and Mordcai Kaplan's revolutionary publication Judaism As a Civilization changed everything--not to mention the Zionist movement and literal return to Israel.
There is even a Secular Humanist Jewish religion that has become a major, very major branch of Judaism today. With some 46% of practicing Jews in traditional denominations being either atheists or agnostics according to a Pew Research Center survey taken at the beginning of the 21st century, the JPS is officially releasing the Humanist Jewish Society's next liturgical book this coming January. These are definitely not Pharisees by any means of the word, whatsoever.
As I cannot say I know anything about your Dr Ken, I can say I know about Jewish prophets and the idea of John the Baptist running a "school of prophets." Jewish prophets were "canonized" similarly to the way the Roman Catholic Church canonizes saints. It was a lengthy process, and it did not happen until the prophet had passed and their oracles had proven true.
Take Isaiah, for instance. During his lifetime, Isaiah is said to have walked about naked preaching destruction and damnation to the Jewish people, saying God basically hated them for the lifestyle they were living. Do you think people believed him? It was the custom for most prophets to have disciples, called "sons of the prophets" who worked as scribes for the prophets. After Isaiah died, these disciples saw many of his oracles come to past and continued his work in his name (and this is why we call some of the writings of Isaiah called "Second, Third," and maybe even "Fourth Isaiah" because these are the "sons" or generation of disciples after Isaiah's death who are writing oracles in the style of the original prophet).
Because Isaiah proved to be a real prophet to Israel, the Jewish sages canonized him (the person, not the book). The book itself later became part of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is a simplified explanation, but it is more or less how the process worked (though it could take generations and much debate).
The Talmud lists 48 male prophets and 7 female prophetesses in Judaism. According to the Jewish sages, the era of prophets ended with Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi with Malachi being the last prophet. This makes John the Baptist disqualified from being a prophet and impossible for him to run a "school of the prophets." The age had ended.
Like in the Catholic Church, the Jewish community as a whole has to decide what is what and when, not Christians. Jews decide who the authorities are in their communities and who speaks for them and who does not.
However, Christianity does believe that a new era of prophets began at this time. Ephesians 2:20 states that Christians are built on the foundation of the "apostles and the prophets," meaning the Christian prophets, not the prophets of the Jews, just as it does the Christian apostles. For instance, early Christian writers, like Clement of Alexandria and Theophilus of Antioch, believed the Sibylline Oracles were genuine prophecies and that the sibyl was a prophetess on par with the Old Testament prophets that prophesied of Christ. Even though this is not the only example of the type of prophets from those early years, the sibyl is even depicted in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel murals alongside prophets of the Old Testament. The point is that there were obviously some people with gifts that in the early days of Christianity placed them on par with the Apostles and even seemed to be replacements or similar to the Old Testament prophets to the Christian community.
But as far as the Jewish community goes, those days had ended. The era of Jewish prophets had ended well before Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist were ever born.