

Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed - jonathanjaeger
http://avichal.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/why-education-startups-do-not-succeed/

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drharris
A big part of education startup failure is conflict of interest among all the
parties. For an individual teacher to adopt a new technology is not super
difficult; you just have to solve a real pain point, or show that your tool
can help them actually teach students. The problem here is that teachers have
no money. Not only are they rarely given discretionary money to use for the
classroom, but they're severely underpaid professionals who are notorious for
already spending lots of personal money on their students. No way to monetize
this group effectively.

The second layer is District/State boards of education. The problem here is
educating (ironic) these former educators on what the classroom needs. Often,
these people believe that the technologies available the last time they were
in the classroom are sufficient for teachers to do their work. Additionally,
teachers have very little pull in this group, as most are elected/appointed
officials. This group actually has considerable influence money-wise, as there
is a lot of money earmarked for technological purposes. But by and large they
are not aware of technologies that are not prefaced by Microsoft, Dell, or
IBM.

The ancillary of the second layer is the district/state IT department. Let's
just say that the best people in IT don't wind up here, because the pay and
work environment are horrible. To save costs, you're constantly looking into
open source solutions. Likely, these people will believe your excellent
product can be easily replaced by a Wordpress install with a bunch of plugins.
Maybe it's really because they just want to prove they can program like any
professional (hint, they cannot). So, no support from IT for you.

The final layer is at the federal level, people who make policies. Your best
bet here is to have a 20-year Senator who will vouch for your product, lobby
for you with all the other old people involved in setting educational policy.
Here's a hint though - people think Common Core is a radical change but it's
half a century in the making and really doesn't change what anybody was
already doing except for adding more testing. Long story short, if your
product isn't another way to test students in a standardized manner, you'll
get no traction at this level.

So, good luck!

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xname
Please google: teacher underpaid myth

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drharris
I'm related to 7 teachers, across 3 different states. They have much more
education than I do (Masters degrees with lots of continuing graduate
education hours), and make less than half the salary. It's not a myth. Keep in
mind these are not hourly plant workers or night managers at a grocery store,
they are highly educated professionals who work the equivalent time of a
salaried year in my profession.

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xname
7 teachers cannot beat statistics.

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Millennium
Education startups do not appear to succeed because it takes too long to
measure their success. You can't just look at graduation rates and senior test
scores: you're producing people who will be building and maintaining things
for some 30 years, then managing and planning for some 30 more, and you need
data points from this entire time span.

We're only really just starting to get big pictures from the changes
implemented in the 1960s. It's too early to say very much about the things
implemented later on, and we essentially have no data at all on today's
startups. That's why they don't seem to succeed: we can't even really know if
they're succeeding or not.

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mathattack
Great article. Thanks for sharing. I think that the change in time horizons is
very important. It can take a long time to see the benefits of education. It
can also take a long time for companies to realize the benefits of what
they're doing. Outside of Khan Academy, there's not a lot of hockey stick
growth.

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gte910h
I think organizations may reach education better than companies:

[http://codeforamerica.org/](http://codeforamerica.org/) for instance

