
Clever Gets $10 Million To Provide A Standardized API For School Data - sethbannon
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/clever-10m-sequoia/
======
pvnick
Good for them! I was recently in charge of a team that developed a website to
teach remedial algebra to children, which is now used extensively in Florida
middle and high schools. The signin system, using Clever as a bridge,
incorporated districts' native signin systems, so teachers and students could
just use their familiar school logins to get in the system. Out of the gate we
had to support over half a million students.

Working with their API was really a delight, and I certainly have experience
with some less than enjoyable services. Apparently public school IT systems
are notoriously a pain in the neck to work with, but Clever just abstracts all
of that out so you don't have to worry about it. Clever's development team was
also very competent and professional. They seemed to really know their stuff
and went out of their way to help us be successful. Assuming they take
proactive steps to protect teacher and student personal data I wish them all
the success in the world!

------
templaedhel
Last Spring, Clever was pitching me for a job (which full disclosure I
accepted). I was dubious, edtech startups don't have the best track record,
and they had barely gotten started (just got into YC). However after hearing
the problem they set out to solve, and seeing how they planned to do it, I was
convinced. Clever bypasses most of the biggest problems edtech startups run
into, specifically selling to schools. Schools don't like to pay for things,
and when they do it's shrouded in bureaucracy. Clever is free for schools, and
instead sells to developers, easing their pain and in turn making it easier
for them to sell and get setup with schools. From the Clever point of view a
new schools takes 5 minutes to onboard.

This is one of the major points that allowed us to see this level of growth
over the past year, and I'm excited to see where Clever takes education going
forward.

We're also actively hiring so head over to our jobs page if being on the
forefront of a revolution in the edtech space sounds interesting to you.
[https://getclever.com/about/jobs](https://getclever.com/about/jobs)

~~~
japhyr
I'm a teacher by day and a hacker on my own time, so I look at ed tech
initiatives with a critical eye. One thing I want in educational offerings:
free and open access for teachers, students, and schools. These kinds of
offerings are the only kind that have the potential to truly disrupt existing
learning gaps.

What you are describing sounds good, but I'd like to know: is what Clever
offers truly open source, or is it just free as in beer?

From my quick perusal of the Clever site, I don't see any real assurance that
this is a truly open offering. I admit I'm taking a quick look on my lunch
break, so please correct me if my impression is off.

~~~
21echoes
there are plenty of non-profits in the edtech space if you're really looking
for "free and open access". Gooru
([http://www.goorulearning.org/#discover](http://www.goorulearning.org/#discover))
is a Google spinoff backed by the Gates Foundation and others, for instance.

~~~
japhyr
It's not so much that I'm looking for nonprofits myself. I challenge the
notion that anyone is really doing anything to improve public education if
they are just another private company, with a profit motive, having access to
student data.

I have rarely seen companies continue to serve students well when there is a
profit motive involved. People should get paid well for their work, I have no
issue with that. But I am wary of where the profit motive leads ed tech
initiatives.

------
hashtree
It is a shame how silo-ed each K-12 system is, in regards to data/integration.
It is also a shame as to what some/most vendors call an API (sorry, a nightly
CSV is NOT an API). Only in education do you see such poor APIs and
programming on a whole making tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. I've seen
source code from several major players that would cause shivers in both the
lack of quality and holes in security.

These are HUGE hurdles for districts. They often realize it too late and end
up getting taken to the cleaners by some freelancer or company who milk the
hours trying to do integrations/data-warehosues (I've seen 60k/1yr jobs that
were solved with 10k/2wk rewrites).

Congratulations on the funding, I am excited to see any company that can help
break down those barriers. Sorry that I sometimes take business away from you
as a freelancer doing integrations sometimes (you do get mentioned from time-
to-time) ;)

~~~
2arrs2ells
Thanks for the support!

No need to apologize for your custom integration work. As a company building
integrations in an automated & scalable way, we can't cover all possible use
cases & combinations. I'm thrilled to see devs doing great work at a
reasonable rate (& let's talk - maybe we can send some referrals your way!).

------
source99
This sounds pretty interesting. I'm a bit confused by your business model
though. It sounds like you aren't selling to schools but instead you are
charging developers of education applications.

Who pays the the developers? Is the school expected to pay the developers?

~~~
numbsafari
And this then becomes the problem.

Clever act like they are doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They
aren't.

They act like this is "free" for schools. It isn't. Because the costs of
Clever and LearnSprout get sent right back to the school in the form of higher
fees for the other apps they buy. Oh, and instead of paying one price for
Clever, they are going to pay that price over and over and over.

Clever is just another "Vertically Integrated Network" right out of 1999.
Their customers are largely going to be VC-funded startups who want to show
that they have "solved" this issue by paying the Clever tax. Since most of
those VC-funded startups are going to be offering free-services themselves,
Clever is really just a giant hoover vacuum for VC funds.

It's a 1999 business model and it will likely lead to the same resolution in
the end.

~~~
enjo
Nonsense.

I'll put aside a host of successful companies over the last 14 years that have
been quite successful pursuing similar businesses.

Instead I'll challenge your assumption that the (enormous) efficiency gains
you get from Clever result in higher prices for anyone. This is only true if
the integration was otherwise free for the people selling products to schools.

It's not. It's actually incredibly expensive to perform these integrations on
an ad-hoc basis. I'd bet this solution ends up cheaper for everyone.

I guess you could argue the downside of there being fewer programmer jobs
available since people are having to do less work. That's a bummer I guess.

~~~
ryanhuff
Despite the negative parent, wouldn't you agree that the cost of integration
has to be absorbed by somebody? In this case, the application vendors have to
pass the cost to the schools (plus a margin).

[edit] The question is whether the schools will be better off having one party
in control? That's usually not a recipe for cost containment.

~~~
enjo
_Despite the negative parent, wouldn 't you agree that the cost of integration
has to be absorbed by somebody?_

That's the point I'm making. Of course the integration has a cost. I believe
that it simply costs a whole lot more of if everyone does that integration
themselves. I can pay Clever a monthly fee or I can pay several developers to
go out and learn how to do it at $100k a pop. Even if Clever is charging me
$10k/month I'm still coming out pretty far ahead.

Not to mention the cost of ongoing maintenance every time something changes at
an individual school.

tldr; you can spread the cost of integrating one time out among a bunch of
companies, or each company can do it themselves. One of those is (by far) not
only more efficient, but very likely much cheaper as well.

------
teddyh
Hmm. This is data which has no real value to schools themselves, which they
are enticed to give access to for free. Other people wanting access to the
data in aggregate are then required to pay the aggregators. Other aggregators
can not plausibly compete with a better price, because the original
aggregators (Clever) have occupied the very scarce mindshare of the schools’
“we give our data to these people” role. The schools will not be bothered to
give the data to more than one aggregator, and so Clever thereby obtains an
effective monopoly in providing aggregated data.

(It reminds me of Google book scanning thing, which has the same issue, but
worse.)

~~~
bradleyland
I'm not sure that's an accurate portrayal of Clever's value prop. Clever is
limited in what they can do with student data because of privacy laws. That's
not really their play.

Their value proposition is in providing a common interface to the growing
number of systems used to manage student information at schools in the United
States.

Schools in the US are free to choose -- more accurately, _must_ purchase their
own -- student information system. Many different systems (old and new) exist
in the market. If I'm an application developer who is building a literacy app
that students will use in the media-lab/classroom at school, the customer
(school) will inevitably need a way to get student performance data back in to
their student management systems.

There are no industry-wide standards for this, currently. I wouldn't expect
any to emerge in the immediate future either. Schools in the US are
autonomous, and are structured differently in different areas of the country.
For example, here in Florida, schools are organized in to large administrative
districts, where decisions are made for groups of thousands of students. By
contrast, in northern Ohio, each school is largely independent. Florida school
districts are some of the largest, in the country. According to NCES, there
were 13,629 school districts in the US as of 2010 [1]. That number is trending
downward slowly, but that's still a very large number of independent bodies
making decisions. We'll likely see some consolidation instandards, but given
the backlash against "Common Core" (an attempt at a standardized curriculum),
I wouldn't hold my breath.

1:
[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_091.asp](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_091.asp)

~~~
coob
> There are no industry-wide standards for this, currently.

There are but they suck.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharable_Content_Object_Referen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharable_Content_Object_Reference_Model)

~~~
bradleyland
There's LTI and BasicLTI as well. I'm sure there are more, but I'm not really
involved in the space much any more. I do know this. I get phone calls from a
friend in the industry asking for help, and every time I take a peak under the
covers, I see that things continue to suck very, very hard. One of the biggest
problems is bad implementations of an already lackluster standard.

I would posit as an axiom that getting _good_ developers to work with shitty
tools is a major hurdle to getting said developers to stick around. IMO,
Clever will have a positive impact on the development of educational content,
because they will abstract away a lot of the "suck" associated with
interfacing with the common SIS/SMS applications in the market.

------
leeoniya
"For developers, that means integrating with individual schools on a one-to-
one basis, and that just doesn’t scale"

sadly, it still means this exact thing for Clever's devs. good luck to them -
it's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.

~~~
hashtree
The quote is not true. I've personally done dozens and dozens of integrations,
which can/are all be applied to any district. It's actually fairly simple with
a functional programming approach, set theory, working with the k-12 companies
directly, and if you think of them as data flows. I've taken over for some ex-
fb/ex-google, large k-12 companies, vc funded ones... and every single one
does it in a really coupled/tangled-mess manner where the statement is
actually true (I take over their codebases). If done right, the integrations
are a few hundred lines of code (even doing schools, courses, students,
teachers, enrollments, grades, standards, etc). The only thing that changes
between districts is typically a couple of business rules which are done as
filters on the data flow. The unit/integration tests take more lines than the
integration.

Example integration flow of SIS to LMS: SIS client (pull) <\- business rule
filters <\- integration itself -> business rule filters -> LMS client (push)

Example integration flow of LMS to SIS: LMS client (pull) <\- business rule
filters <\- integration itself -> business rule filters -> SIS client (push)

Examples of system clients:
[https://github.com/rockymadden/brainhoney.js](https://github.com/rockymadden/brainhoney.js)
[https://github.com/rockymadden/masteryconnect.js](https://github.com/rockymadden/masteryconnect.js)

Example of K-12 specific spec that is often so mangled into most codebases it
causes bugs:
[https://github.com/rockymadden/lti.js](https://github.com/rockymadden/lti.js)

Some I've done (almost a cartesian product): Infinite Campus, BrainHoney,
MasteryConnect, Moodle, IFAS, Blackboard, Safari Montage, Edgenuity,
netTrekker, PowerSchool, Canvas, dozens more...

------
l0c0b0x
I'm not a programmer, but it sounds to me like the 'standard API' will be
proprietary (?). Seems like a fundamental change from SIF
([https://www.sifassociation.org/Pages/default.aspx](https://www.sifassociation.org/Pages/default.aspx)).

Working in education for years, I can tell you there is a real need for an
open standard that is palatable and feasible for schools and vendors aiming to
integrate with student systems.

~~~
ejlax
this is exactly the point. This is only perpetuating the propriety and just
changing the hurdles for vendors and schools to pass data. SIF was great in
its time...it was expensive and cumbersome because it required specific
knowledge which many district admins don't possess. The new SIF 3 using the
CEDS should hope to alleviate many of these issues. As some one who has looked
into data integration with Clever, the costs were prohibitive on a large
scale, especially when you consider they are continual. While development may
be expensive, we aren't paying for it after it is developed...

~~~
dingvarson
There are some examples for SIF 3.0 check out:
[http://kb.nsip.edu.au/display/SATWVC/SIF+REST+-+URL+Structur...](http://kb.nsip.edu.au/display/SATWVC/SIF+REST+-+URL+Structure)
some REST clients here
[http://sif.dd.com.au/demos/](http://sif.dd.com.au/demos/) Example URL
here:[http://siftraining.dd.com.au/api/StudentPersonals/](http://siftraining.dd.com.au/api/StudentPersonals/)
and heaps of training materials
[http://kb.nsip.edu.au/display/SATWVC/SIF+AU+Technical+Worksh...](http://kb.nsip.edu.au/display/SATWVC/SIF+AU+Technical+Workshops+and+VITTA+Conference)
and a github with example clients and endpoints
[https://github.com/nsip](https://github.com/nsip) and Australia has just
signed up to SIF as a country. [https://www.sifassociation.org/AboutUs/Why-
Interoperability/...](https://www.sifassociation.org/AboutUs/Why-
Interoperability/Pages/Statement-of-Intent-\(AU\).aspx)

So open Standards look to be in pretty good shape. Perhaps Clever should
support SIF as well? Then it wont be able to be blamed as being so
propitiatory.

------
wehadfun
This is great. Hopefully this will fuel make the sales channel for grade level
software easier.

I envision a Clever App Store, where districts/schools/teachers have credits
that can be used to buy interactive work sheets, attendance apps, or whatever
else developers dream up.

------
Einstalbert
I'm a manager for a fairly big SIS and I think this is great news. We deal
with a lot of nightly CSV files and it's awful. I'm hoping we take a look at
working with Clever in the future.

~~~
2arrs2ells
We'd love to partner with you! Drop us a line - info@getclever.com

------
drakaal
I work with several schools as part of my volunteer work. And while it's a
neat idea, but it is an EdTech startup that doesn't understand the legalities
of school data. In the 49 states that Clever isn't sitting with servers in
using them would be illegal.

In most states you couldn't store data on third parties servers with out
consent from the kids parents.

Using Cloud Offerings just isn't permissible in most places because of the
legalities. Clever would need a lot more than $10M to change all the necessary
Federal, State, County, City, laws.

~~~
nl
Can you point to the actual law that outlaws this?

I work in edtech, and there is a _lot_ of FUD around this issue. I'm not in
the US, so I'm not familiar with the specifics of the laws there though.

~~~
drakaal
FERPA is the big
one.[http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html](http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html)

~~~
nl
IANAL, but to me that reads like it specifically gives permission of what
Clever is doing.

 _FERPA allows schools to disclose those records, without consent, to the
following parties or under the following conditions (34 CFR § 99.31): ... \-
Organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school; \-
Accrediting organizations;_

And additionally:

 _Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information such as a
student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and
awards, and dates of attendance._

~~~
camworld
I believe this is the why our Armed Forces recruiters often have the names,
addresses and phone numbers of our graduating seniors every year. It's usually
up to the school administrators to release this information upon request, and
most do. Private schools do not have this issue.

------
bentcorner
As a parent it's frustrating that my children's marks aren't accessible behind
some sort of API. We have a web interface that we can use (which I guess is
way way better than what was there when I was a kid), but I'd like to have my
cake and eat it too :).

Getting API access to the system as a parent is hard to impossible. The
vendor's site is geared towards selling to schools and supporting them.

~~~
2arrs2ells
You're right - Clever isn't built for your use case today - but it is one we'd
love to support down the road.

In the meantime, you might want to take a look at the Dept of Ed's "MyData"
initiative
([http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/technology/mydata/](http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/technology/mydata/)).
It's addressing your need pretty closely (although not with an API).

------
bitcow
To the best of my understanding, Clever provides access to read-only data from
the SIS. It does NOT provide a mechanism for education vendors to write data
back into the SIS (an extremely important aspect of the problem in this
ecosystem).

While the SIS stores core student data, there is a lot of missing
functionality that could be supplemented well by products specializing in a
particular niche (eg school lunch tracking, alerting, progress reporting,
special education documentation, medicaid reimbursement, etc). However,
schools feel unable to use these products since SISes generally disallow
information write-back, arguing that accepting data from 3rd party vendors
makes the database unstable and violates their end-user license agreement with
the district.

Clever has helped with the easy problem, but the harder one is no closer to
being solved.

~~~
dingvarson
Agreed. We have plenty of examples of services which dump data out of a SIS
and then run custom scripts to organise it for this use or that, from putting
accounts into AD to creating a census or students ids for state. All been
done. There are other businesses like StudentNet and GroupCall which are doing
much of the same thing for cloud Identity as a Service. Some of these guys can
offer the addition of real identify matching services and the tracking of
students across schools.

------
ryanhuff
I applaud Clever's effort, but a superior solution to this problem is an
industry standard, open interface. The market may be too fragmented for
something like this to get off the ground, but it is sorely needed, and
putting all the eggs in Clever's basket is not the answer.

You would probably be right if you argued that Clever solves an issue of
having to re-create the "integration wheel" for every implementation, and so
saves money in the short run. However, if Clever is successful, they will be a
gatekeeper, and could demand significant fees from software vendors, possibly
resulting in higher prices for schools.

------
discreditable
As someone who works as a school with a few SISes and LMSes around, would it
be possible for me to use clever to integrate my existing systems and save
headache? We're currently knee deep in Moodle, PowerSchool, SchoolAdmin,
Active Directory, Google Apps, and even have some Access databases floating
around.

~~~
2arrs2ells
Clever should be able to help with a few of those integrations! Send us an
email (info AT getclever.com).

------
scoot
_Clever is 100% secure_ [1]

That seems like a dangerous claim.

What does that mean in real terms, (beyond "end-to-end encryption")?

If ~10% of US school-age children's personal data is stored with Clever,
that's a lot of data to potentially lose...

[1] [http://getclever.com/schools](http://getclever.com/schools)

------
sputknick
this seems like the type of thing teacher's unions would squash/render useless
quickly. Anything that tracks data as a function of teacher performance would
not be allowed, severly limiting the usefulness of the software. I HOPE HOPE
HOPE I am wrong, can anyone explain to me why I am wrong?

~~~
2arrs2ells
(Clever cofounder here)

We get love from teachers all the time at Clever (which, as a former teacher,
makes me incredibly delighted).

Schools are using more and more technology (see
[http://edsurge.com/](http://edsurge.com/) for some examples), but often the
burden of tech falls to the teacher. I remember burning the midnight oil
manually setting up class rosters in MasteryConnect as a teacher, and fighting
"roster rot" as students switched in and out of my class over the course of
the school year.

With Clever, teachers get to focus on using the tool with their students,
instead of managing data. They love it!

~~~
sputknick
that makes sense. Thanks for the heads up! I clearly read the article with my
own biases in place. Best of luck to you!

------
bradgessler
Does anybody know if Clever for Higher Ed exists? (Clever is super focused on
K-12)

~~~
kcollignon
Good luck with that.

------
salemh
Ignorant question maybe, is Clever going to integrate into LMS, ala Canvas,
Blackboard? Do they relate in any way? I imagine it could enhance the LMS/port
too the systems?

------
sdp1
Interesting I have not seen any mention of InBloom - since they are both a
standard API for School, and unlike Clever, an open standard. And they already
interoperate with SIF.

~~~
bitcow
Thanks for the InBloom mention! Looks like they have pretty good traction.

------
namuol
What's Clever's equivalent for the Health Care Complex?

~~~
2arrs2ells
We love the work our YC S12 batchmates Eligible are doing in the Healthcare
space. Check them out - [https://eligibleapi.com](https://eligibleapi.com)

------
nl
How does Clever deal with SIF?

~~~
clavalle
It doesn't (thankfully). SIF is a bloated mess.

~~~
nl
_It doesn 't (thankfully)._

:(

 _SIF is a bloated mess._

It is indeed.

Are you interested in international (Australia) expansion?

~~~
dingvarson
Huh? SIF used to be complex, but now its simple. It uses the same approach as
Clever http[s]://<hostname>/<SIFObject Name>s[/{id}|<SIF Object Name>]. Thats
very similar to Clever. So how can it be bloated, or maybe your not
experienced with SIF? Which NSIP.edu.au can help you with. try
[http://sif.dd.com.au/SIFDirectRest/sif/v2_5/objects/au/v1_3/...](http://sif.dd.com.au/SIFDirectRest/sif/v2_5/objects/au/v1_3/StudentPersonals).

~~~
nl
Hi Dan ;)

I think you'll find that's SIF 3. I think that last time we spoke there was
only one SIF 3 deployment around, and that was a pilot. All production
instances are SIF 2 - or has that changed recently?

As I've said previously - I quite like the SIF data model, but I'm not keen on
the SIF 2 programming model (to be fair - as many have said: it's pretty old
software now). The SIF 3 programming model is a lot better.

~~~
dingvarson
Hey What a laugh - to meet you on here. Yes my comments were about SIF 3.x.
Now that said the best thing that happens with SIF is that schools and Edu
Authorities get their Data into order - so it can be used properly externally
- WHILE - it remains under their control. So this means ALL the SIF 2.x
projects can migrate to SIF 3.x with a update to the software (as I pointed to
its on GetHub) - but they dont have to change the data, the business events,
their authorisation etc. So SIF 3.x bring both a low entry option for those
wanting to share there data and a migration path for those existing.

I have a full online course in SIF 3.x and the Open Source Framework if you
want to learn more.

