2Tor has raised $26 Million to close its Series D financing, which brings its total venture funding to $96 Million. Our Co-investors in this company are SVB Capital, WestRiver Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Click here for the Press Release

The company is also pleased to announce that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is partnering with 2Tor to offer a Master of Public Administration (MPA) program online. They also have announced that a second master’s program geared towards professionals is in the works. Click here for the Press Release

We are very pleased to have Dean Seavers join our LEAD program at City Light Capital.

LEAD (Learn, Educate, Advise, Develop) is a unique offering of CLC to assist early stage venture firms as they grow and deal with the difficult decisions all new companies face. At CLC, we take our involvement with our portfolio companies very seriously, and LEAD enables venture CEOs to access a group of talented, seasoned senior executives who have been vetted by CLC are dedicated to positive impact, and can offer a wide range of skills to help their portfolio companies. This involvement can take the form of: informal advice, longer term consulting relationships, Advisory Board membership, among others.

I have come to know and respect Dean both as a competitor during my career at Viking Group, and as a colleague advancing fire safety on the Board of the National Fire Protection Association. He is a gentleman who has a strong desire to create positive impact in society through his business skills; meaning, a perfect fit for the CLC network!

Dean has had a successful career in the safety and security field. As president & CEO of GE Security, he led a global supplier of security and life safety technologies with operations in more than 26 countries. Dean also led the company through its successful sale to United Technologies in 2010. He joined GE from his most recent role as President of SimplexGrinnell, a $2 billion Tyco subsidiary that specializes in fire detection, sprinkler, suppression, and related services where he served for 8 years including the time he spent with ADT prior to its merger with Tyco.

We look forward to having Dean join us and bring his experience and skill set into the CLC Impact network.

Of course this is not a new problem; high school students, for instance, usually have many different teachers teaching different subjects, each with an isolated view of that student’s growth.   New differentiated models force this issue further, but also offer new ways for the educational team to keep a holistic view of a learner.

This role of watching and supporting the whole student consistently over time—a step beyond a traditional advisory or homeroom teacher role—must be explicitly assigned by the teaching team to ensure that it is done for every student.  It can be assigned to an individual or to the team itself, but it has to be owned and understood.

Some schools have relied upon guidance counselors to keep the whole-student view.  This can be effective, but unfortunately in many cases these counselors are spread too thin to build real relationships with most students, are not actively involved in students’ day to day lives, and don’t have ready access to most information about the student.  Instructors are in the best position to understand the student—but the challenge becomes how to enable them to have a whole view.

 One of my most instructive experiences on this front was working as teaching assistant to a wonderful team of middle school teachers many years ago in Stamford, Connecticut.  One of this team’s best practices was the weekly student focus meeting, in which we selected a handful of students to discuss as a team.   For each student, each teacher would provide his or her own perspective on how that student was doing.  If we had a concern in any area that we felt needed to be addressed with the student or the student’s family, the team member with the best relationship with the student at that moment would volunteer to have that conversation.   This flexible approach proved to be extremely effective at heading off problems, keeping students on track, and making each student feel like the whole teaching team was committed to their success.

While this team-based approach is becoming more widely used (sometimes as a general practice, sometimes in the context of response-to-intervention or other targeted approaches), it is not the only way to do this work.   For instance, in schools where students spend a lot of instructional time with tutors individually or in small groups (like the MATCH School or schools using the Blue Engine model), tutors can develop an extremely strong relationship with students and provide an excellent view of the student that complements the perspectives of classroom teachers.

 Whether it is an individual or a team taking responsibility for the whole view of a student, a number of tools can help do this work more efficiently and reliably.   Some of these include:

•  Lightweight case-management tools.  These tools allow a team to make sure they discuss every student on a regular basis, decide on follow-up action items, assign items to specific team members, and ensure that item are completed.
• Aggregated data reports about a student.  Pulling teacher notes, student portfolios, assessment data, and attendance and behavior records into one place can save lots of time and make it easier to see important patterns about the student.
• Email in place of meetings.  Since it is often difficult to assemble the whole teaching team in a meeting to discuss a student, email or other communication tools can allow rapid collection of the whole team’s perspectives and opinions efficiently. 
• Automated alerts.  Some data systems are emerging that can send out automatic alerts to the teaching team when certain patterns emerge that an individual instructor might not see, such as poor attendance in only certain classes, or sudden student difficulty across multiple subject areas.
• Web-based resources.  Better search engines can allow whoever is watching the whole student to rapidly access information, resources, and new ideas and opportunities for that student given an identified need. 

By formally defining and assigning the role of watching out for the whole student, and providing this role with the right time and tools, teaching teams can make sure that no student falls through the cracks no matter how the work of instruction is divided.

Differentiated instruction, in and of itself, is not what is making teachers have to be superhuman to be effective.  After all, the practice of “tracking”—grouping elementary school students into low, middle, and high performers, and giving them different instruction which ultimately leads to those same students becoming low, middle, and high-performing graduates—is a differentiated instruction technique that has been practiced successfully in many schools for decades.  The goal in this model was not to change student trajectories; rather, it was to move each group of students, as best one could, along a path that one thought was inevitable–good or bad.  The average educator could achieve this goal within traditional structures, so the system was content to leave those structures in place—even though most teachers hoped to be able to do much more for their kids and struggled hard to do so.

But differentiated instruction today is aimed at a very different goal.  We want to use it to dramatically improve learning trajectories for all students.  We want to take kids who come in as low performers and put them on a path to genuine academic success.  We want to maximize the learning potential of every child, whether they enter school struggling or already know how to acquire new knowledge effortlessly.  But this kind of differentiated instruction is incredibly demanding on the educator—it demands an understanding of what each child knows and is ready to learn next; it requires work on figuring out how to motivate each student; it requires a tremendous amount of planning on a daily basis to determine what each day should offer for each child.   This is skilled, nuanced, incredibly time-consuming work—and is why a lone teacher working within conventional classroom structures and with conventional tools almost has to be a superhuman to do it effectively.

So it isn’t differentiated instruction itself that has changed the expectations teachers face.  It is the new goal that has done so.  But if we believe in the goal, and it is a goal that so many educators have believed in for so long, why wouldn’t we make every move we can to help every educator achieve it?

In our original piece, we described a variety of ways in which instructional organization and work is being, and can be, changed to help teams of education professionals successfully and reliably carry out trajectory-changing differentiated instruction.   Some of these involved taking advantage of differentiated roles in instruction, some involved leveraging technology, but many involved using the two approaches together.  Other posts this week have focused on the issue of role differentiation, so I’ll turn back to technology.

I was told recently of a comment by a prominent educator that “teaching and learning is a human process, and there is no place for technology in it”.  While this comment puzzled me (and since I’m a tech guy as well as an educator, really annoyed me), as I reflected in the days afterward I realized that the first half of the comment was absolutely right.   Most of us have had our most pivotal learning experiences while engaged with a teacher who challenged us, inspired us, and just “got” us as individuals. 

But the claim about technology is simply wrong.   Technology, in the context we describe it, is intended to help teachers spend their time what they really want to be doing—changing kids lives for the better, and doing it well.  We are talking about tools that allow more of the important human parts of teaching and learning to happen every day, with the right people, at the right times, and with the right challenges.  We use technology-based assessment tools to help the teacher have a more complete understanding of a particular student’s needs, but in a way that minimizes time taken from instruction.  We use technology-based analytical and instructional planning tools to make organizing and managing differentiated instruction more accurate and far less time-consuming so the teacher can target his or her efforts better.  We use technology-supplied content to make sure that the teacher and student have the best activity available for that moment. 

You could view these uses of technology as limiting the scope and importance of teachers.  But you would be wrong.  You should look at these uses of technology as helping educators, and especially teams of educators, to become bionic.

But whether you’re a fan of these particular approaches or not, we have a simple choice to make.  We can either a) abandon the goal of greatly improving learning for all students through differentiated instruction, or b) change the ways in which we organize and carry out instruction—using some methods long-tested and proven, some methods just being invented today, and some methods involving technology—to help every educator achieve the goal.   It is our choice, but given all we have at our disposal today, it would seem simply a shame to choose the former over the latter.

CFO:  “We’ve had a lot of problematic overruns in janitorial spending across our schools.  To control this, we are now making you responsible for setting the janitorial budget.”

Principal:  “OK…do you have guidance for how we should set our budgets?  We don’t know anything about how much floor wax or toilet paper we need.  Can you help us calculate those things?”

CFO:  “No, you’ll have to ask your janitor.”

I also can’t tell you how many times we’ve all seen classrooms and storage rooms full of expensive curriculum products that have never even been taken out of the box, or got used once and then were quietly put away again.  Often these were products that were mandated at higher levels but then proved to be incompatible with the school’s needs or instructional schedule.  Or they were the result of a rushed June 29 spend of remaining budget money so that the money would not be lost to the school at the end of the year.

This, and hundreds of other examples of watching schools in all kinds of districts figure out how to spend money in a variety of areas, has led me to a couple of conclusions:

• District financial staff are often more concerned about (and equipped to address) financial control and  compliance than they are about helping educators make good investment decisions towards educational outcomes.
• Much of the bureaucratic structure of purchasing practices at every level—from federal to state to local– is based on a fundamental distrust of other levels to spend money wisely.

The distrust factor has huge implications for how school spending works.  While it is rooted in fundamentally important concerns (corruption, mishandling of contracts, and other abuses), it leads today to many schools having little control of their budgets, and districts and schools together trying to make good spending decisions while constrained by a bewildering array of federal, state, local, and external funding streams each with their own constraints, mandates, and reporting requirements.

In Wednesday’s post, I discussed the importance of an “instructional operations” perspective for figuring out how to invest money well towards instructional goals.   If a school thinks about its planned purchase in light of how it expands the capacity of its instructional operation, it can make stronger claims about the value of the purchase.  For instance, rather than saying “we need more phonemic awareness instruction so we are buying this supplemental curriculum”, they can say “This phonemic awareness curriculum will require two hours per week that will be pulled from core time, but in conjunction with our additional tutors it will help us get 20% more of our first graders to benchmark”.   The latter statement is specific, compelling, and testable—and defines every dollar in terms of what the school is trying to accomplish.

So the problem becomes how to trade a finance/purchasing model based on distrust, control, and prescription for one built on transparency, goal-oriented spending, and useful guidance. 

Admittedly, this is an “unsexy” problem, but I think it is an important one for innovators to be working on.  There are many ways that this might be implemented in a purchasing system, but I’d expect to see some of the following elements:

• Information for schools about what products and services serve different instructional goals well, probably less like a What Works Clearinghouse and more like Amazon user reviews
• Purse for discretionary spending at the school level, directly funded by the district and relevant higher-level or outside funders
• Instructional/operational goals, attached to every specific spend, defined by the school and visible to funders
• Follow-up so that the school can record how well the purchased resource was used and how it did in achieving the intended goals

Funding sources—whether they are governments, foundations, or other sources, could relax their prescriptions and reporting requirements in favor of greater flexibility given to grantees combined with the more goal-oriented reporting offered by this mechanism.  And ideally, this could be the basis of a more collaborative—rather than confrontational—relationship between funders and schools.

As we did this work, I routinely saw schools who were only getting a third of their kids reading by third grade, while at the same time seeing others, working with similar populations, who were getting almost all of their kids reading in the same period of time. Like so many of my fellow African-American educators, I found these patterns especially troubling as they were affecting so many children in our communities. But in looking at the starkness of these comparisons, the questions that kept coming to my mind were these: Why aren’t more parents using this data to question the school’s placement choices and instructional decisions? Why aren’t more parents using this data to demand more from their schools? Wouldn’t the work of educational improvement be so much easier if they did?

At the same time, I saw middle-class friends whose kids were struggling in both public and private schools telling me about their difficulties asking the hard questions. They would tell me about how they felt like they waited too long to ask the hard questions, for which they now felt guilty, and that it took them a long time to get real answers and real solutions, for which they now felt angry.

I finally connected the dots when my own son started to hit some bumps in elementary school reading. As an expert in literacy assessment, I expected that I would find it easy to ask the right questions and hold my son’s teacher and school accountable for his reading development. But as it turns out, it wasn’t easy at all, even for me. Perhaps there was something more universal that parents are struggling with, that we all need.

This realization reframed the advocacy opportunity for me: How do we help all kinds of parents overcome their fear, ask the right questions of their educators, and get the information they need in order to demand the right things for their kids?

From my conversations with hundreds of parents from all walks of life coping with academic concerns around their kids, I’ve seen a few factors emerge repeatedly as to why we are afraid or resistant to ask the tough questions.

• We don’t know what we should be asking.
• We don’t know how to evaluate the answers that the schools and educators give to us.
• We’re worried that if we push too hard, there will be some sort of backlash against our child.
• We know some things seem to be working for our child (respect, happiness, or some achievement) and we are worried about jeopardizing those things.
• We’re worried that the problem may be our kid, or something we did wrong, and we’re not ready for that news.
• We don’t know what we would do anyway if the answers were unsatisfactory to us.

Note that many of these worries have little to do with whether the school seems approachable or not (though that obviously affects how we feel as well). But because of these fears, parents rich and poor feel too intimidated to ask their schools how they are doing by their kids. And with this core set of worries, imagine how much more difficult it is if you don’t speak the language? Or if you yourself don’t feel educated? Or if you fear your child has some kind of learning disability that you don’t understand?

Again, let me be clear that I do not underestimate the great differences in educational options that parents of different economic classes may face. What I am saying is that there are common needs that most parents have in learning how to advocate effectively for their children.

Now while more and more data is becoming available to parents about every school’s performance and environment, the questions around what one’s own child needs, and is getting, remain highly personal and emotionally charged. Even the best data available today only presents part of the picture.

So what are the questions that we should all feel empowered to ask of our schools and educators? Some of the obvious ones include:

• What do you know about my kid, both academically and otherwise? How do you know it? How do you update this knowledge?
• You’ve identified some issues where my child needs work. What are you doing within the school day to work on these individual issues?
• Is my child with the teacher best suited to support his/her needs?
• What is the school doing to support my child’s nutrition and physical health and growth?
• How can I help my child’s academic and personal growth? And how can my efforts stay in sync with yours?

I would love to see a service or tool (and fellow education entrepreneurs, I’m looking directly to you here) that helps every parent ask these questions, understand the answers and their importance, and act on this information for the benefit of the child. Such a service would tackle, clearly and directly, the following questions:

• What questions should I be asking of the school and the educators working with my child?
• What answers should make me comfortable, which should give me pause, and which should raise red flags? What kind of evidence is convincing?
• If there are issues, how can I find other parents sharing the same issues and how can we work together to get the change we need in the school?
• If I ultimately conclude that this school is not the right one for my child, how do I find better alternatives?

A service like this could be the basis for more effective parent engagement, more useful community advocacy, and more high-quality education reform. Most organizations evolve in response to their most demanding customers.

But helping parents ask the right questions is only half the battle–the other half is schools being able to offer good, real answers. And for this, a school has to understand how it has engineered itself to serve individual student needs. I’ll talk in my next post about what it takes for schools to develop this understanding of their own instructional operations.

I am an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at City Light Capital focused on the education sector.

Two passions have driven my career—education and software development.  As a teenager I made my spending money by tutoring older kids for their SATs and by developing software and databases for local businesses.  As a middle-school teacher after college, I became fascinated with the possibility of using software to support the learning process.

In 2000, I co-founded Wireless Generation, an educational software company, as a way to fuse my interests in a single venture.  We created software tools to transform the way in which teachers analyze student needs, and then use that information to create highly effective learning experiences for K-12 students.  Over a span of ten years, we built a successful business reaching tens of thousands of schools and millions of learners.  In the process, I found that I enjoyed the work of designing a scalable organization as much I had already enjoyed designing useful software.

Despite the success we were having in getting our software into many schools, I became increasingly troubled by patterns of student progress in the districts we were serving.  Despite the introduction of data into the teaching process, many schools—especially those in underserved communities—were not succeeding in adapting to the needs of learners and producing growth.  As an African-American, I grew especially frustrated and angry that so many students of color were not enjoying the rich educational experiences they deserved despite our efforts.

It became clear that the educational software community needed to get better at understanding the operational realities of schools—and then delivering smart technologies, tools, and algorithms to unlock the ability of teachers to serve a wide range of learners well.  We had the ability to be part of a project called School of One, an important experiment in fundamentally reorganizing a school (with the aid of both instructional and operational technologies) to serve learners individually.

By the time we successfully sold Wireless Generation in 2010, I found myself asking new questions about the educational technology field as a whole:  What new technologies were on the horizon that could dramatically improve the learning and lives of students?  How could I find promising young companies doing this work and help them reach millions of learners?   What creative work could be done to make the whole industry better? 

I hadn’t planned on working in venture capital as my next step, but as I got to know City Light I was delighted to find an investor group that was really a team of entrepreneurs–each of whom was asking the very same questions about the sectors in which they had built their careers.   And I was impressed to see the team spending as much effort analyzing the social impact potential of a business as they did the financial return potential, and bringing thoughtful approaches to the ongoing work of helping CEOs deliver both kinds of return over time

I knew that this would be the right platform for my next stage of work.  I’m now enjoying building the kind of investment firm that I would have valued years ago as an early-stage entrepreneur, and that could have helped me and my industry serve all stakeholders even better.   I welcome investors and innovators who want to join us in this mission.