PILOTed

Ed Tech Business Forum 2011

The SIIA’s 2011 Ed Tech Business Forum, on November 29, 2011 in New York City, reflected the conflicted nature of the education environment, primarily in the US, but also globally.

Michael Moe noted that we are preparing kids to solve problems we don’t even know about usingtechnology that hasn’t been invented while workig in jobs that don’t exist yet. While education is a significant portion of our economy, at almost 9% of GDP, it’s barely noticed by the financial markets, just less than 1% of total Venture Capital investments, and 0.2% of the capital markets.

But this seems to be changing. There were $9 billion of investment and M&A transactions last year in education. Investors are starting to recognize that education demand, coupled with innovation, are starting to create scalable opportunities. The scalable disruptors that are most appealing for ed-tech investors include:

1. Schools that prepare students to participate in the new economy

   Image by Gates Foundation via Flickr

2. Tailored adaptive learning, that gets more useful with every student click
3. Education platforms that provide engagement to students and are mediums for other educational offerings
4. Edu analytics that provide assessment, the currency of the knowledge economy
5. Partnerships, where companies partner with institutions so each can focus on its core competence

These have attracted private equity and venture capital firms, which, if they prove prescient, will eventually lead to an increased presence in the capital markets.

John Richards showed one reason why education has been less than a rounding error on the financial landscape. Reporting on the SIIA survey of ed-tech market trends, he divided ed-tech companies into four groups by annual revenue: under $5 million, $5 million to $20 million, $20 million to $100 million, and over $100 million. At investment conferences, micro cap  companies generally start at $400 million of revenues.

Farimah Schuerman pointed out that a recent SIIA survey of educators found high agreement that educators’ most common concerns were around

1. Aging equipment and funding to replace it; educators wanted access the right equipment and training on how to apply it
2. Alignment of pedagogy and materials to the common core standards and forthcoming assessments
3. Finding appropriate e-content and fitting it into learning activities, and the content needed to be accessible, editable and either cheap or free

She also highlighted the growing interest by educators in tablets, bring your own device, and online classes for students as areas where ed-tech firms could supply needed resources.

Richard Sims dashed water on the rosy investment picture painted by Moe. While federal funds for education may remain steady for the next few years (barring budget deals or changes in administration), state and local funding, which is about 90% of K12 funding, is under siege, and will not recover to pre-recession levels until 2017. With real estate taxes starting to nosedive, we can expect a 10% decrease in total education funding over the next two years. The good news is that there is some job growth, but a) it is slow job growth and not likely to reach the number of 2007 jobs until past 2017, b) half of the job growth is in the lowest paying jobs (while half is in the highest skilled highest paying jobs, and virtually no growth in the middle pay jobs), and c) states are focusing on cutting state income taxes, which is the revenue source quickest to rebound based on job growth.

Of course, not all boats will sink in the lowering tide; companies need to uncover market niches with good growth possibilities in states where employment and tax receipts are rebounding fastest.

Bob Wise pointed out that the issue is not so much the gross amount of education spending, it’s how you can demonstrate that technology can leverage the effectiveness of educators. In other markets, technology reduced costs. In education technology has always been an expense; if you kept the educator/student ratio constant, adding new technology just increased the cost of education. With demands to do more with less, with the role of teachers changing, with increases in blended learning, and with the goal of ensuring that every child has access to technology that allows him or her to progress at his or her own rate, we have a real potential to transform the education landscape. Wise reiterated Clay Christianson’s prediction that by 2020, 50% of courses will be online.

You can view many of the presentations here: http://hosted.mediasite.com/mediasite/Catalog/pages/catalog.aspx?catalogId=47878f99-468d-4989-9941-2977d011e425

Is this the worst time to be in education in recent memory? Are we on the brink of an education rebirth? Do we have an education crisis? Is it an exciting time for innovation in education?

Yes.

 Also, one more note. We've been featured in PhD in Education as one of the top 50 education blogs: http://www.phdineducation.org/50-incredible-sites-to-find-new-and-inventive-teaching-methods.html

 

Related articles

• BMO Back to School 2011 (academicbiz.typepad.com)
• Supporting Technology Entrepreneurs in Georgia (academicvc.com)
• Reasons to Invest in Education (speedofcreativity.org)
• What are the main areas of technology lead disruption of K-12 Education in America? (compassioninpolitics.wordpress.com)

Reducing Student Dropouts

The National Center for Dropout Prevention (NCDP) sponsored the 2011 Educational Strategies and Student Engagement Institute in St. Petersburg Florida this week. In addition to presenting (on the role of data based decision making to make dropout prevention efforts more efficient, effective, and successful) I got to attend a number of sessions.

Boy, did I learn a lot.

If a store announced that it would provide merchandise to 70% of the people who paid for it, would we accept it? If a car company announced that you could buy a car that would get your to 70% of the places you wanted to drive, would they stay in business?

Yet we now live in a society where only 70% of children graduate high school; and of those almost half cannot read or calculate at a 12^th grade level. Is this acceptable? Is this what we want for the US?

Most students do not drop out because of academics. In fact 60% of all dropouts have grades of C or better; 80% have grades of D or better. So efforts at just fixing "school" or "education" are bound to fail.

One of the factors most used to predict the likelihood of dropping out is school attendance. Schools make efforts to contact parents, contact the child, counsel the child, but these rarely work on high school kids. And attendance is really just the symptom, it's not the problem. You often really have to attack the root causes of the problem, which generally are factors outside of school.

For example, if a student goes into Juvenile detention for two weeks, he or she comes back too far behind schoolwork to catch up without individual help. If a student is faced with the choice of working or losing his or her apartment, school is going to take a back seat. If a student has a child and no day care, he or she can't just leave the baby and come to class, and day-care programs for teen moms are one of the earliest victims of government education cutbacks. If a student goes home to a house where the electricity has been turned off for nonpayment, how can he or she complete his homework?

There are no easy answers, and we cannot expect the school alone to solve these problems.

If a kid lives in poverty and attends a school with other kids in poverty, if they are one year behind in reading by 3rd grade, if they have been retained, then in most districts, that child has a zero percent chance of graduating high school.

When poverty is so correlated with low academic achievement, how do some schools achieve success? It's only in the last ten years that we have started to understand the differences between kids growing up in poverty and those who are not.

We heard about Perry County, the poorest county in Alabama and one of the poorest in the country. How have they been able to achieve 98% graduation rates and 75% college admissions for their high school graduates? We heard about success stories from Portchester, NY; Dayton's Bluff Elementary school in Saint Paul, MN, Taft Elementary School in Boise, ID, and Osmond A. Church School in Queens, NY.

Lesson 1: We need to modify our goals. It's not just that we want kids to graduate with a high school degree. We want them prepared to lead productive lives: work, become a functioning member of the community, and contribute to the common good. And when we make the goals low, our lowered expectations permeates their lives. If we don't give those kids higher expectations, they will never gain hope.

We need to rid ourselves of remedial programs that keep expectations low; by watering down the curriculum, we are not helping the students; in fact, we are ensuring that their reading, writing, and math skills will never reach the levels they need to. Successful schools in poverty areas provide needing kids help so that they can succeed in mainstream and advanced classes.

Lesson 2: We need to rethink how we support kids, especially the kids without family support networks, so that they see the relevance of school to that overarching goal, and so that they get the resources they need to navigate system to obtain those resources. Children of poverty need the community, and we need to involve the community not just the schools, to provide the resources that they cannot get at home.

Lesson 3: Most at-risk kids want more than anything else is a relationship with a caring adult. Children of poverty generally do not have the social capital to navigate through school and society to obtain the resources they need. They need that caring adult or group of adults to help them. The most obvious person is a school counselor, but these offices are generally understaffed, so they end up focusing only on the most successful and the most disruptive students. A number of presenters referred to a Community Action Team, mobilized to support each student.

Lesson 4: Get the students interested in college early, as early as elementary school. Make them see the relevance and the possibility of college. Many kids in poverty have never been to a college campus, never interacted with a college student, and have no college models or mentors. By middle school, they need to have the confidence to know that they are "good enough" to go to college, with a plan that they can review with a caring adult periodically. By high school, children of poverty need to start seeing what a strong high school transcript and college application look like, they and their parents need to understand how to fill out a financial aid (FAFSA) application that gives them the best chances of obtaining aid.

Lesson 5: Get the children involved in giving back and helping the community. HS students can help elementary kids with reading or math; there are tons of ways they can help the cognitively challenged, they can help kids whose parents are overseas stay in touch. When students are helping others, they have great self esteem, and they are more motivated to succeed in all facets of life, including academics.

Lesson 6: Schools can do a better job of using the information they already have to focus their resources on the interventions that are known to work. More than just an Early Warning System (EWS), this involves

1. Pulling the data from myriad sources into one system that can analyze it
2. Getting the information in actionable form to the people who are best able to act.
3. Following their actions to know if they are taking place and are effective
4. Recording and modifying procedures and algorithms based on knowing what is working, and what is not.

Today, about 1 in 4 children in the US are growing up in poverty. These tend to be the children who have the most likelihood of dropping out. I'm hoping that as a society we can start implementing these lessons and improve our ability to grow all children into productive, functional, and happy adults.

Related articles

• The Online Dropout Rate (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• New Report Details High School Dropout Prevention Efforts (usnews.com)
• Digital Dashboards to reduce dropouts (PILOTed)