EdTech: Jack Lynch of HMH On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education

This won’t surprise you given our conversation so far. To make a positive social impact, any technology must first be human-centered. Technology alone can be isolating, but we can benefit from a best-of-both-worlds approach that fuses the power of technology with the tried-and-true social gathering of the classroom — “high-tech” working in a mutually reinforcing way with “high-touch.”

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. In this particular installment, we are talking to leaders of Education Technology companies, who share how their tech is helping to improve our educational system. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jack Lynch.

Jack Lynch is CEO and President of learning technology company HMH. With more than 25 years of experience in the edtech space, Jack has been active in the K–12 education industry since 1999 and was the founding CEO of startup bigchalk.com and later President and CEO of the Pearson Technology Group and Renaissance Learning. Jack has been named EY Entrepreneur of the Year award for his leadership, a DoSomething.org Empower Player for his commitment to putting students first, and most recently, CEO of the Year by the 2023 EdTech Breakthrough awards. Jack holds a Bachelor of Arts from Boston University.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I grew up in Schenectady, New York as the son of an electrician and grandson of a boxer. My siblings and I enjoyed a healthy amount of independence as kids. But what my mother lacked in supervision, she made up for in inspiration, teaching us to believe in ourselves and to live an adventurous life. I have been married for 38 years to Alice, have two children — Colin and Shannon — and an unruly Jack Russell Terrier by the name of Buck. My wife and I have lived in 14 different locations including Boston, Brussels, Chicago, New York, Scottsdale and Charleston.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

When I was 33 years old, someone took a chance on me and it shaped the trajectory of my career. Oakleigh Thorne, then the CEO of CCH (a tax software business) decided to make me CEO of one of the three companies that made up CCH, the arm that handled legal information services. It was a huge opportunity and a chance to transform a business that was very labor intensive by building in automated, expert systems, utilizing the newest in PC technology at the time. The transformational journey took place over 36 months, unlocked opportunities for both customers and shareholders, and ultimately led to the sale of the company to Wolters Kluwer, which I managed with the CEO and Goldman Sachs. It was a significant step forward in my career. Looking back on this now, I had no business being considered for that job. I simply didn’t have the experience. If Oakleigh hadn’t seen something in me back then, I would not be where I am today.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

One of my favorites is from Dr. Maria Phalime, author and leadership development coach: “Transformation of our outer world begins with transformation of our inner world.” It is always valuable to be able to look inward, both personally and professionally, with objectivity and focus. I think we expand our ability to make a positive impact when we align these spaces.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1) I think focus or essentialism is number one. It is a natural instinct for a leader to try to do too much, to have your calendar full and exhaust yourself and then ultimately not really get a lot done, because you’re not able to keep the main thing the main thing. It is hard to be successful if you don’t stop and think about how to apply the resources you have to really make a difference.

2) It may sound obvious, but empathy is key: one important way this trait translates is in the ability to be being customer-centered so you can create true value. It seems simple, but it is easy to lose sight of this when you think the work is already done. There are always new challenges, and you have to keep listening to the customer so you can evolve with them.

3) And third, an ability to empower your employees — this flows from empathy. At HMH, we refer to a simple equation: “employee success + customer success = company success.” This ordering is important. You have to first focus on an organization that fosters great talent. Employees need to feel that they can do their best work. Once you’ve done that, you will be able to create solutions that serve customers well, and you’ll have a great company.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

K-12 education is a vast arena. The current environment educators face is increasingly complex — from grappling with the lasting impact of the pandemic, to meeting the diverse needs of all of their students, to juggling disparate technology solutions that, rather than making life easier, are making it more difficult. And I am just scratching the surface here.

We know there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but we also know that today’s complicated technology and curriculum landscape is a pain point for teachers, and it is making it more challenging to serve students across the achievement spectrum and help them grow.

Right now, our research shows that a K-12 teacher may be accessing up to 86 different point technology solutions to do their job — and stitching together these solutions wastes time, creates stress, and worsens outcomes. Creating and implementing high quality instructional materials, assessments, edtech solutions and professional services is the heart of what we do at HMH, and this is where we are making a difference and creating positive impact.

How do you think your technology can address this?

HMH is the only company that integrates assessment, instruction and professional learning services in one solution suite to save teachers time and improve student outcomes. We are reimagining the core classroom experience by building one elegant platform for all students, regardless of where they are on the achievement spectrum. We aim to simplify teacher lives with superior, easy-to-use, integrated experiences, delivering high quality predictive and prescriptive assessment data that is deeply connected to instruction and professional learning. We believe that the right technology can essentially serve as a virtual assistant to an educator, in service of improving student outcomes.

The meaningful connection between instruction and assessment is critical when it comes to differentiated learning and, with our acquisition of research and assessment organization NWEA earlier this year, we will deepen educators’ understanding of how students are growing academically and what areas need focus and, going one step further, how this translates to core learning.

An important point to remember in all of this is that the teacher is the architect of the student learning experiences and classrooms are fundamentally about relationships. We all saw what was lost during the great experiment of remote learning during the height of the pandemic, when school communities were not able to gather. Everything we build at HMH is grounded in a philosophy we call “high-tech, high-touch” — a learning experience centered on human connection but supported to a meaningful degree by technology. We want to extend a teacher’s capabilities to give them time back for what matters — relationships with students, facilitating peer discourse, engaging classroom experiences, deep support for the social and cultural context each student brings into the classroom, and much more.

One of the most exciting opportunities is the potential that GenAI has to transform K–12 learning — imagine the positive impact for educators, with new ways to develop dynamic lesson plans or assignments, an AI-powered assistant who can suggest new ways to differentiate instruction, and much more. With regards to GenAI, we’re focused squarely on how it can save teachers time and fit into their workflow, in keeping with the ethos I mentioned above. This is a rapidly emerging landscape, and we also need to ensure the right safeguards are in place to protect students and teachers. We’re balancing our enthusiasm and passion with optimistic caution and trust.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?

This is a personal story that the folks I work with know well.

In the autumn of 1999, I met Kathy Noble, my son Colin’s Special Education teacher. Colin was 10 at the time, and until then my experience with doctors, therapists, psychologists, and geneticists was centered on Colin’s disability. By contrast, conversations with Kathy focused on Colin’s unique sense of humor, his all-consuming fascination with Harry Potter books, and his uncanny ability to catalog facts regarding the myths and folktales of cultures across the globe.

Kathy had that talent to bring out the strengths of each child in her classroom. She accepted all her students’ idiosyncrasies and treated each of them with dignity and respect. Always flexible, Kathy built in time for the inevitable outburst or behavioral roadblock, creatively adapting her lesson plans to foster a positive learning environment.

Kathy was one of the very best, most faithful, most empathetic educators I have had the honor to meet over the last two decades. She made it her job to know what made Colin tick. She embraced everything about him and even indulged his compulsion for lunch menu restrictions — every day with the same peanut butter and jelly, a slice of baloney, and a drinkable yogurt. She personalized her instruction around Colin’s passions as well as his developmental needs, met his stubbornness with patience, and worked incredibly hard to reveal his extraordinary gifts — not for us, his proud parents, but for him, so that each hard-won level of confidence building achievement would be the foundation for the next.

Sometimes, in an area as big and critical as K-12 education, you can lose focus on what matters most. At the end of the day, what matters can be summed up easily — it is the relationship between a teacher and a student. The transformative power of this relationship is foundational to my passion for education.

How do you think this might change the world?

I think about teachers like Kathy and all that she was surely juggling and still managed to achieve. And I think, how can we do more for her, and for all educators so that they can spend more time deeply connecting with their students? How can technology empower and bolster that human connection?

I’ve spent a good portion of my career in education technology, and I can tell you that when approached the right way, edtech can be transformative. Technology is a means to deepen student engagement and help deliver compelling learning experiences while also supporting teachers’ workflows. For example, GenAI can help us strengthen data collection, access greater insights, and inform more robust teacher and administration dashboards — and it can do all of this in a narrative, conversational, and digestible manner for educators rather than providing a list of numerical data that requires more work to translate into action.

But still, the end goal for all of us is supporting student growth and nurturing positive outcomes, and we know that the student-teacher relationship is critical to this goal. Transformation is possible, but we will only be successful if we keep this point front and center.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

In his powerful book The End of Average, Todd Rose writes, “From the cradle to the grave, you are measured against the ever-present yardstick of the average, judged according to how closely you approximate it or how far you are able to exceed it.” This societal reality has often allowed edtech to be placed in the role of personalized learning. Our education system was set up around this notion of “average” despite what we all know is true — we are all different. And while using GenAI to personalize learning is a great advancement in education, the most salient feature of a classroom in which a teacher organizes the learning experiences of 30 kids, is human connection. Learning is not transactional. It is social and I think the highest and best use of technology is to help a teacher orchestrate meaningful learning activities to advance the learning of every student.

We learned what the “Black Mirror” drawback of technology was in Covid during remote learning — students sitting in front of devices all day long getting a steady drip of device-mediated instruction when, all the while, they craved connection with their teacher and fellow students. The AI personal tutor for students has a role to play but it isn’t the answer to education’s challenges. Over indexing there is the Black Mirror scenario — you can’t replace an educator.

How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?

Our goals at HMH are predicated on the promise and evolution of technology, on staying on the pulse of emerging tools, and first and foremost on defining the right ways to support students and teachers. As discussed, we see the path forward as a reimagined classroom experience that leverages technology to create a holistic, effective, and easy-to-use platform. This will allow educators to orchestrate dynamic instruction and differentiation to enable student growth, all in a seamless and simplified manner that never sacrifices human connection.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1 . This won’t surprise you given our conversation so far. To make a positive social impact, any technology must first be human-centered. Technology alone can be isolating, but we can benefit from a best-of-both-worlds approach that fuses the power of technology with the tried-and-true social gathering of the classroom — “high-tech” working in a mutually reinforcing way with “high-touch.”

2. You have to intimately understand the problem space of the customer first. It is easy to jump to a solution but taking the time to do a comprehensive review of the pain point, the customer perspective, is integral to making a real impact.

3. Iterate, iterate, iterate. You have to fall in love with the scientific method, not just the idea. Talk to the customer, as I just mentioned, and get feedback all along the way. Be willing to adjust, learn and grow.

4. Technology that makes a positive social impact is easy to use, but even more importantly, it is delightful to use. When we think about delivering our programs at HMH, the entire experience has to feel good to the end-user, from ordering to onboarding to usage.

5. For edtech specifically, making an impact always comes back to the teacher, increasing the capacity of the teacher and saving them time. Extending the teacher, but never replacing. If your product is helping with that, then the teacher can do more of what they do best, helping kids learn and grow.

In the realm of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?

This is both an ethical and legal issue. Student privacy, safety, and wellness must always remain at the forefront as edtech capabilities expand and usage increases. We are very attuned to this at HMH, have robust policies in place around data usage and privacy, and are committed to handling student data with great care. Technology is not stagnant, so we work closely, consistently, and proactively with state education agencies, school districts, schools, and policymakers to address best practices on an ongoing basis.

If you could tell young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Living life pursuing a purpose greater than oneself is incredibly gratifying. There is no better reward for your work than knowing you’ve made a difference in the life of another human. To do that, work on being your best self — it will have a multiplier effect on society. Remember that the most important opinion is the opinion of yourself. Monitor your self-talk and guard against negative programming. One hack to consider is getting off social media or at least be more intentional about the amount of screen time you dedicate to it.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them.

Xander Bogaerts. I’ll share a little story — I’m a Red Sox fan, but an understated one. For many years I resisted the temptation to buy a Red Sox jersey — I didn’t want to get too caught up in the fandom at Fenway, over cheering and making a fool of myself. But in the Fall of ’22 I gave in to my inner fan and bought a # 2, Xander Bogaerts jersey.

He was my favorite player — an incredible athlete who grew up in Aruba, learned four languages and helped the Red Sox win two World Series. He’s widely regarded for his dedication and team player mentality. He played for the Dutch national team in the 2023 World Baseball Classic and I lived and worked in the Netherlands for some time so I’m sure we’d have a lot to talk about. Unhappily, two months after I bought his jersey, he was traded to the San Diego Padres. Still, I’d love to sit down with him and I’m still a fan, Fenway or not.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I often write pieces for HMH’s blog, Shaped. You can also find me on LinkedIn and you can follow our work at HMH at hmhco.com.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.