Teachers Own Curriculum
This is more of a K12 trend than an idea, but a ton of ideas become possible if it is true. For decades, there has been a deep tension between ‘administrators’ (principals and central office staff) and teachers over curriculum. Politically, textbook companies like Pearson were able to convince states that a single curriculum would give them the most consistent results. That began state level adoptions of textbooks. The problem was that the barrier to entry here was getting on the state adoption list, not necessarily the quality of the textbook adopted. So a lot of bad textbooks got adopted, which suited everyone in the political class well, but bugged the heck out of teachers, because this is what they do every day and they don’t want to do it poorly.
Into this situation came digital tools. Initially, these were also sold top-down, usually starting at districts, sometimes schools, but never teachers, because everyone knows that teachers don’t have the money. This basically replicated the state-level adoption mess, but now the superintendent was the one forcing the curriculum, so everyone had to be nice to her until she left. That thankfully was about every eighteen months in urban districts. But still, teachers were left to shovel sh*&.
About a decade ago, modern SaaS practices started to be used, principally a freemium model where teachers could use a product for free up to a point, and then someone had to pay for it. The more successful were generally feature-limited as opposed to time-limited (free trials) because within that box, teachers could become extremely loyal to the product. A great example of this is Freckle (previously Front Row), which has built a very good math practice app and gave it away. Here’s where the trouble comes in. Ultimately, these companies need to make some money, so they went back to principals and superintendents, showed them how many teachers were already using the product, and made some money. This was certainly an improvement over top-down adoptions, but the friction of that buying process is severe, requiring large sales forces and modest growth rates for these companies.
In the last few years, an even more interesting idea is starting to play out. Software and content are both non-rival goods, meaning that once you create them, it doesn’t cost you anything to give them to everyone. What if you could price these things so low that even teachers, or at the worst case the principals that were sympathetic to them, could adopt what they wanted and pay for it. The first version of this to reach scale was Teachers Pay Teachers, where a teacher would create a set of materials, let’s say for Thanksgiving history, package it up into a pdf, and other teachers would buy it, often for $1 or less.
That was cool, but pdf’s are pretty limiting when you are trying to deliver a lesson, so inevitably richer platforms came along to share and deploy lessons. Nearpod is one, with a nice sized marketplace of teachers buying curriculum that deploys seamlessly on their content delivery platform. The most modern of these is called Padlet, an app that is like the child of Instagram and Microsoft Office, a visually beautiful environment to build content. Sure enough, teachers became the main users, and teachers shared what they built with each other. It’s not a stretch to imagine teachers will begin buying content on Padlet, since a teacher’s time for lesson prep is their most scarce resource.
So, is the idea that teachers will be able to construct their own curriculum seamlessly a good thing or a bad thing? In my opinion, it’s a very good thing for a couple of reasons. First, for the first time, this creates a business model that can scale very quickly for companies trying to empower teachers. Second, an empowered teacher is much more likely to wake up every morning excited about their children’s learning (as opposed to flipping to the next page of the Pearson math textbook) and teacher motivation translates into student motivation better than anything. Will we lose some rigor in terms of what and how we teach? Yes we will. But teachers will teach the things they love and kids will inherit that love, which is really what school is about.
For founders, what does this mean? It means that if you can find product-market fit with teachers, and price your product at a price they can afford (say $1–5 per month for a subscription that includes the platform and some amount of content), you have a market of 70 million folks by 2030. It’s not hard to see how you get to a billion dollar company that way. Would it be awesome if schools started to move curriculum budgets down to teachers? Sure it would, I don’t like teachers spending their own money. But if you give away a huge surplus of value, they will be happy to pay today, and maybe some day the system will catch up with them.
