5 Things We Learned When Measuring the Impact of Our Work
Eight years ago, our managing partners Rick Segal and Matt Greenfield started Rethink Education in order to invest in companies that provide access for all learners to reach their full human potential. From affordable early childhood learning opportunities to enrichment and engagement courses for seniors to prevent loneliness, our companies work tirelessly to improve the state of teaching and learning for all ages.
As a firm committed to the progression and outcomes of all learners, we cannot turn a blind eye to the reality that the investment decisions we make today will impact future generations. We believe that impact measurement begins as early as company screening and due diligence. At that point, we can evaluate the mission alignment of the founding team and determine whether impact is integrated into the business model, either intentionally or as a by-product. It is harder to influence a company post-investment to intentionally prioritize impact if it doesn’t inherently align with the bottom line of their business.
Unlike financial metrics that are purely quantitative, measuring impact can be a more subjective endeavor. There are several overarching industry frameworks that set a great foundation for how to think about the topic, but the way that impact is defined and approached across the impact investing landscape tends to be unique to individual firms.
Over the years, we’ve developed a methodology at Rethink Education that measures the breadth and depth of impact across our own portfolio. As a widely applicable benchmark that can be tracked across all of our companies, we ask for the number of students/learners that their platform reaches each year (we call this the “breadth metric”). We also ask each portfolio company to define a company-specific metric that best demonstrates their depth of impact. Some examples include dropout reduction, credential/degree attainment, placement rates in better-paying jobs following a vocational training program, and so on. Finally, we ask each company to provide an artifact or recent piece of evidence that supports their impact metrics. This simple framework of three metrics supported by an annual piece of evidence has worked well for us as a way to track progress consistently across our portfolio.
We are proud to share that, in 2019, our active portfolio reached more than 53 million learners. What follows is a series of lessons and truths about equity and the critical need for more impact on the education investment space that we took away from the process of building our annual impact report.
- More students are now learning online, but logistical barriers to digital learning are real.
Our research tells us that, at the onset of COVID-19 and the shift to digital learning, 1 in 5 students felt that it was “sometimes” or “never” easy to access assignments and classroom work remotely. As the pandemic disrupted schools, workers, students, educators, and parents, we all knew the disruption would be great. But the digital divide has, perhaps, proven to be more disruptive than we realized. Brightbytes and ISTE analyzed data collected across school districts from nearly 50,000 students,12,000 teachers, and 33,000 parents, between April 15, 2020, and June 15, 2020, to uncover the widespread issues that many families have experienced with distance learning. The lack of engagement cannot solely be attributed to broadband access and student participation. Around 25% of parents complained that their child’s schools “sometimes” or “never” provided a schedule for students to follow for remote instruction. These insights were recorded at the beginning of the pandemic and school leaders have worked tirelessly to help mitigate these issues. Scheduling for students is one that can be solved internally. On the other hand, lack of internet access is a structural barrier to learning that may need the intervention of external stakeholders including philanthropic and governmental support to remedy.
2. Investment opportunities in edtech are growing but the education accessibility gap for low-income students cannot be ignored.
Before COVID-19, edtech product utilization in classrooms was found to be a meager 33%¹. The rapid switch to distance learning has forced widespread adoption of digital resources, but the effectiveness of implementation has been patchy at best. Many parents are buying supplemental education products to offset the shortcomings that schools have faced with the swift transition to a new delivery model. While business opportunities are booming on both the B2B and B2C front, many school-aged children don’t have access to broadband to complete their school assignments online or their home environments aren’t conducive to learning. Our team encourages investors to invest in tools that don’t widen the gap in educational attainment between affluent and low-income students. [This spring, we interviewed dozens of stakeholders including superintendents, provosts and CLOs to better understand the investment opportunities across K12, Higher Ed and Workforce and encourage you to review the COVID-19 section of the Impact Report for an overview of our findings.]
3. Better access to data can help school leaders to address equity issues.
Specifically, we learned that school schedule audits can uncover deep equity issues. There is so much data to analyze in schools to measure success beyond test scores. Our portfolio company Abl allows district leaders to take an operations-first approach to equity and resource-allocation. The company gave us a peek into the results of their annual transcript and master scheduling analysis for Federal Way Public Schools. Among other insights, school leaders were able to uncover that students in their district were missing out on an additional 43 instructional hours (nearly two weeks) compared to districts that run on a six-period day. They also found that White and Asian students had more rigorous schedules than Black and Latinx students. Their school leaders had goals of increasing college and career readiness so these insights helped them improve schedules to maximize coursework for all students. When schools and districts have access to such data, they improve the ability to not only uncover, but to remedy, deep equity issues and crises that may go otherwise undetected. At this critical juncture during and following the COVID-19 pandemic, data truly is power.
4. Education for the voiceless must not be overlooked.
With an emphasis on the many challenges facing K-12, Higher Education, and the workforce, it would be a mistake to overlook critical work happening among vulnerable learners such as the American prison population. Research shows that that educational programs in prisons have the power to reduce recidivism rates by 43%². Our portfolio company, American Prison Data Systems provides tablets with educational programming and digital content to incarcerated learners in over 90 prisons and jails across 18 states. In one jurisdiction in Arkansas, the APDS tablet-based program increased inmates’ GED pass rates by 57%. The data provided to correctional officers provide tangible evidence of positive behaviors and a growth mindset, as prisoners are evaluated during sentencing and release hearings. The path to post-release employment is also strengthened as inmates build a portfolio of traditional and/or stackable credentials.
5. Reskilling the current workforce is an urgent growth area.
With high unemployment and more people understanding the urgency of staying ahead of automation through reskilling, those companies investing in timely, on-the-job learning hold a tremendous advantage in futureproofing their businesses. We interviewed Janice Robinson Burns, former CLO of Mastercard who joined our portfolio company Degreed this year as Chief Career Experience Officer. (Degreed is an upskilling platform that matches learners to curated content and learning tools, and then matches skills to available opportunities in a user-friendly, in-work environment.) From the perspective of the company, the ability to glean insights about employees’ skill sets and passions can prove a valuable retention and growth strategy. She notes from her time at Mastercard “Our sales organization saw an increase in product knowledge. Before using Degreed, Mastercard only had about 26% of employees actively going into our LMS to learn on their own. After we implemented Degreed, we saw 92% using it. So really, it’s helping organizations move toward a culture in which people are engaged in continuous learning.”
You can read our full Impact Report here and we appreciate any feedback or thoughts you may have on impact measurement.
