Silicon Classroom Trip: Day 4

We woke up and headed to Starbucks for a chat with an investor from Emerson Collective. Emerson Collective is improving lives through education and immigration reform. We spoke with Ross Jensen, an education investor at Emerson Collective. His approach was slightly different from others in the investment space in ed-tech. Ross said that his company is focused on products that target equity and access while affecting the most students, in contrast to focused products that target the population with money. He called this type of influence impact-driven investment, and he prioritizes investments that are catalysts for future change. He wants to make sure that after Emerson Collective makes an investment, the organization can sustain itself. Overall, we liked how Emerson Collective struck a balance between return on investment and making real impact in the education space; however, they do have lots of money to invest being a venture capital firm, so it is easier for them to be liberal with their money. Still, they addressed equity very well by giving money when important education projects need it.

We started our traveling day by heading over to Khan Lab Schools in Mountain View. This unique private K-8 school was founded very recently by Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. The school is based off Sal’s book that proposes alternatives to the current educational system — changes such as grouping kids by independence and ability rather than grade level, year-round schooling, project based personalized learning and much more. When we arrived at the school we walked through the large one-room classroom space.We observed kid’s working individually and in groups on laptops, working on handouts and participating in teacher led discussions.We had an informal Q&A session with the school director Orly Friedman. She emphasized the benefits of student driven learning and the school’s focus on reading, math, computer science and “passion pursuits”. When answering our signature “How does __________ address educational equity” she admitted that while the relatively high tuition of the school did little to contribute to equity, the school planned to release all their data and finding to the public school education system so it could learn and benefit from the bold new techniques tested by Khan Lab schools.

We then took a small road trip to San Francisco. Our destination was Minerva Schools, but some of us got to see Treasure Island as well. Thanks Armando! We arrived at a Minerva School campus in the Nob Hill area of SF. We met with Lucy, a current student at Minerva. She explained that Minerva is a unique form of higher education where students live in cohorts and spend a couple months living in different urban cities around the globe. During their extended study abroad-like experience the students take online classes. Lucy and her cohort were currently living in San Francisco but are transitioning to Berlin in the fall. Lucy described her journey to Minerva — she is from China and attended Bowdoin College for her freshman year. Unsatisfied with her education there, she transferred to Minerva to get a broader and more international education. The demographics of Minerva students are very diverse — many are international and transfer in from other colleges. The Minerva curriculum for the first year focuses on developing advancing thinking and critical analysis skills, and students chose their major in the later years. When asked about equity, the relatively low cost of tuition was mentioned — approximately 10 thousand dollars per year, not including a variable housing fee. We really enjoyed this comfortable and personal experience!

We then took a trip to Education Superhighway, a nonprofit organization focused on bringing the Internet to schools. Their organization worked on the funding provided by government initiatives. The founder of Education Superhighway found that the main struggles for teachers trying to implement new educational technologies were getting the WiFi to work and getting students online, and the difficulties with Internet connection wasted minutes in the classroom. After data-driven research on internet usage in schools, the founder leveraged his connections to lobby for more funding for internet in schools, and President Obama passed a bill expanding the budget in this market by one billion dollars and making the internet data of schools publicly available. Education Superhighway now uses this funding to get high-performing, scalable internet to near all school systems in the United States. This is their final goal and the purpose for their organization, and they are completely fine with dissolving after their mission is done. They were very mission-driven, they identified a problem in the ed-tech space, and they are using the extended government budget to address the issue. The employees we had a panel with seemed very enthusiastic about their jobs, ranging from policy to development to statistics to networking specialists. We really enjoyed their focused perspective on the problem and the solution they are working towards!

Then we traveled down San Francisco for our final stop of the day, AltSchool. We met with a few engineers, who led us through the web product they had developed. They hope to develop a new platform, a new method of education. They use goal-driven metrics to guide students, allowing students to set their own goals and tailoring the education to each individual students. Teachers have a close hand in the student’s education, and can long on and look at each student’s goals. Additionally, they are prototyping a new card system where students can design their own assignments and work to solve their own designed problems. With cameras around the classroom, teachers can monitor students after they work for a day to return and see what went wrong. AltSchool has aggressively attacked the software behind project-based learning, but in a very inequitable and un-scalable way. They are built on a private system where students pay 19,000 dollars for tuition in a year, which is nowhere close to the price of a public school system in a K-8 system. They are not designing with the larger population in mind, and they are creating schools for the privileged who already have access to great education resources. Even though they are in a prototype mode right now, being a startup and all, they have already expanded to 6 campuses in the US. From our lens, AltSchool seems like the stereotypical education startup that jumps into education with more developers than educators, thinking that they can transform the compilcated education system through software. They may make lots of money in the future, but we will keep an eye out to see if they can turn the ship around with regards to equity and get their cool futuristic platform to work effectively at schools across the globe.

Co-written by Nathan Dalal and Sydney Hutton.