Fixing Education in America: What's Stopping Us?

0:0051 % of Americans live in childcare deserts. It's a tragedy to deny a child access to high quality early childhood education. A human's brain, 90 % of it develops in the first five years of their life. There are a few sectors in the economy that have proven to be very, very resistant to technological change. Education is high on that list. We tried to solve the achievement problem in the U .S. before we solved the engagement problem. School districts and state leaders operate in a highly political environment. We're taking risks is not rewarded. It's really no one's job to fix it, and so it's not really getting fixed.

0:40I've never seen this kind of apathy. I think it's gonna be catastrophic for the United States if we don't find a way to end it. What we're seeing is that the best way to make in -roads is partnerships with the private sector and the public sector to be able to fill in those gaps. We can get outcomes, we can get them fast. We can all take advantage of the emergency. There's been a lot of talk about the government recently. But, wherever you sit along the aisle, one thing that almost everyone can agree on is the desire to set up the next generation for success, often through high quality education or child care.

1:14But, despite increased funding toward these sectors, we're not really getting the results that we're paying for. We have now spent hundreds of billions of dollars and those funds are gone and now what? But this is something that we need to figure out because as one of our guests says, we are graduating generations of children who have no idea what they can do with their education. So in today's episode, we'll explore the history of education and where technology fits into that equation. I mean, why is it that 35 years into the modern internet, we've gained access to 5G networks, 3D printing and augmented reality, yet so little has changed in the way we teach.

1:55Every year we have the chance to rewrite how things are done and change the trajectory of millions, but it's a complex calculus involving federal, states, and local government, school districts, teachers, parents, and more. So how do you make enroads with the government and get a new product into a school or district? And what's working or broken about the incentive system? And whose job is it to fix? Plus, is risk ever rewarded? We'll explore all this and more with founders and policy advisors who have navigated this complex system. That includes Anna Rupa, Genkuli, and Chris Bennett. Two founders currently trying to disrupt the status quo.

2:33Anna Rupa is the founder of Prism's, a spatial learning platform that uses augmented and virtual reality to teach math and science through physical human experiences. Chris, on the other hand, is the co -founder of Wonder School, a platform designed to help educators build childcare programs while supporting families in locating that childcare. Joining this conversation as well is A -16Z General Partner, Jeff Jordan. We've led the investments in both prisms and wonder school. Plus, Anna Edwards, co -founder of Wipeboard Advisors, strategy consulting firm, Fogistan, yep, you guessed it, education.

3:05Alright, let's get started.

3:10As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16z fund. Please note that A16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company's discussed in this podcast. For more details including a link to our investments, please see A16z .com slash Disclatures. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ As an outsider, it feels like education and childcare in particular has stayed pretty consistent, despite a lot of the remainder of our world changing, with technology.

3:52And so why is it that so much of our world has changed, but maybe the classroom has not? I think about the inconsistency that lies in just what is the purpose of an education? If you ask the teacher over here versus a superintendent over here versus a chief academic officer over here versus a chief technology officer here, you will get a different answer from everybody. So there isn't a consistent narrative around is a purpose to expose kids to the jobs of today and tomorrow's workforce is the purpose to teach them the canon of all the discoveries in math and science thus far is the purpose, global citizenry such that people can make educated choices and vote on issues pertaining to AI, the future of different advanced technologies.

4:34What is the purpose? And because that purpose is not clear across constituencies, you don't have a comprehensive set of state nor national standards. So what everyone does is we just fall back on the lowest common denominator, which are the state assessments. I was a math director in one of the largest systems and all we did was drive kit outcomes towards the state tests because that's the thing that we could agree on. Thinking back, there have been a lot of efforts to create new standards and the NGSS, which the new science standards, the common core, which was a step towards the math standards, but they didn't go far enough.

5:08It was an incremental change. Instead of learning ABC, they should kind of also learn XYZ. But that's not what I'm talking about when I say the redefinition of purpose. It's saying 80 % of the current jobs in the economy will be fundamentally reimagined by 2030. If that truly is the case, then we need to take a real scalpel to going back to the purpose and the delivery of our educational methods. And I think that's exciting, but a daunting task. Chris, as we address that question of where we are today, are things working? I know Ann Arruppi just talked about maybe there's not even alignment on what that means, but are our children thriving, faltering, and how should we be thinking about that?

5:46It's probably working for like a small percentage of the American population, but for the majority of folks, it's not. And when I think about early childhood education, one of the things I'm coming in terms with is that It's really no one's job to fix it and so it's not really getting fixed. If you look at the agencies involved in early childhood education, HHS serves low income families and what we find is that a lot of states aren't able to generate enough funding from the federal government to be able to serve all the families that need it. For working class families and just all children in general, there's actually no agency and there's no one's responsibility to actually fix the child care problem.

6:26And so it's left to sort of the private sector to fix it. But what we're seeing is that the best way to make inroads is partnerships with the private sector and the public sector to be able to fill in those gaps. And you work across both of those sectors. And so maybe at a high level, are there any other data points or trends that really grasp you, whether it's data points that go on our promise or maybe also concern? It could be a shortage, it could be a test score is going down. What are you paying attention to here that kind of signals what we should be focusing on. I actually see so much hope at a moment where you could be really discouraged because we have invested declines in student achievement that are still pervasive coming out of the pandemic.

7:0851 % of Americans live in childcare deserts and we had this massive investment in federal funds during the pandemic that actually resulted in a 20 % increase in purchasing power over for four years, for the K -12 school districts and states, and then additional investments that went into early childhood. We have now spent hundreds of billions of dollars and those funds are gone, and now what? But I think we're at an interesting point where because those funds really did help to infuse a lot of innovation, I think we'll start to see a real close look at what's actually now producing results. And then that evaluation will help to inform the new federal education law that we hope to see in the future and alignment in what new standards should look like.

7:55And I think we are at an interesting moment. It's hard to say exactly what the outcome is going to be, but I think states and districts and child care providers are going to have to be a little bit more discerning in what they decide to scale. That's where I think we start to see some of the promise. There are a few sectors in the economy that have proven to be very, very resistant to technological change, education is high on that list. But there's nothing in my structural that we should keep that from happening. So the bet's on what is working in other parts of the economy can have a large impact in education, which is at a point in time where they really need impact.

8:33Yeah, I think another thing that we've witnessed over the last few years is a shift, right, that COVID was part of that, but technology is being more integrated. We're seeing different remote hybrid, learning environments. And so as that has changed over the last few years, what have we learned? Yeah, I think that the question of technology in class is an interesting one to me because there's the technology, but then there are the methods and the principles and the teaching practices that they allow. And most technology that's introduced, there's no real discipline around what are we trying to achieve?

9:06What's the problem statement that tech is trying to solve? So I'm taking VR, AR into schools. I'm not really interested in the VR and AR. What I'm interested is in first person embodied real world problem solving. It happens that I have to use the modality of VR because that's the fastest way to scale. It democratized access to high quality experiences for all kids. So I think that what's really fun about Tech 3 .0, which is what we all kind of in the field call it fondly, is that best practice pedagogy is going to win. It's how do we scale student -centered learning, so learning, as in the basis, in Baltimore where you go to new physically contaminated water, not off of a work problem on a piece of paper.

9:45So I think that what's going to be really exciting about this wave of educational technology is we're moving away from the idea of like Chromebooks, computers, that's not really the object of affection. The object of affection is a teaching principle in my presentation. I don't have VR anywhere because it's kind of irrelevant, right? It's just a secret sauce that oh by the way you need devices because your kids have to be embodied in these real -world problems. So I think that's where it's going is the more and more entrepreneurs leaders, teachers, and educators focus on method. There will be no resistance because the focus is on the relationship between teachers and kids versus a forcing function of a particular technology.

10:20The other piece is that school districts and state leaders operate in a highly political environment where taking risks is not rewarded. And so I think having the data and the research to show the impact of the technology and changes in instructional modality has been a missing piece that hasn't been there. The entrepreneurs that are really going to succeed are the ones that also are doing massive efficacy studies or even real -time evaluation of the efficacy of their solutions. That gives the comfort and peace of mind for risk -averse decision -makers to actually say, okay, let's bring this technology in.

11:01The other thing parents want is if something is working somewhere else, I would like my child to experience it. And so our dream is the world flips in that there's a new modality. It's working. We need it. Bring it in. Yeah. Why isn't that at my kids school? What's really fascinating for me has been student voice in one of our districts. It's a very large urban system. We were in credit recovery for algebra one and these kids took to Instagram and they started to post. I've learned this five or six times already. I never got it. This is the first time I understood it and it turns out the Bortcher read that Instagram post and we went from 120 kids, immediate to 5 ,000 students two weeks later.

11:40Right. So I say this because I think now you have so many more voices and efficacy is not just achievement on standards on assessments because we tried to solve the achievement problem in the US before we solve the engagement problem. We have to get our kids engaged again in their education because we're not going to be pulling teeth in the way that we are right now. So I just wanted to kind of add into that idea of measurement. There is so much more anecdotal and this very strong student presence that I was not as privy to when I was an administrator. You've got so many stakeholders. You've got parents, you've got districts, you've got other legislators.

12:15And then as you mentioned just now, you've got the children. And of course, in lieu of just being able to put a headset on every single person and have them experience that, I'm curious what you have learned about the methodology to convince. Is it just getting the right study out there or other other learnings? Yeah, for the last four years, I've been pitching and pitching. And I have this VR headset in my backpack and it never comes out. And I'm like, why am I taking this dead weight on these trips with me all the time? And it turns out stuff that what people are drawn to is the thinking. It's an aspiration.

12:53It's this movement away from passivity that's come into our education system versus the active, the kinesthetic, the constant movement. Our kids are most engaged in PE, right? Let's be clear here. And so what they're actually really excited about is the learning methodology. It's the problem -based learning. And so our entire conversation is about the hope and the aspiration and what's possible. Most of the people put a headset on after the deal is closed, everything has been signed at teacher institute, which is typically four months after those first conversations. And I think that's relevant.

13:25What is K -12 really starved for? It's not starved for technology. You walk in, there's computers everywhere, laptops everywhere, robotic arms everywhere, raspberry pie everywhere. There's tech everywhere. What there isn't is innovative thinking and really doing something differently because digitization is fundamentally different from innovation. I probably spend the majority of my time talking to legislators, staff of governors and a lot of agency leaders. And what I'm noticing is folks are just looking for results. There's been a lot of money spent, but a lot of the systems just haven't delivered results.

14:00And that's what's led to a lot of our adoption. We started working with governments in 2020 during the pandemic because states were scrambling to get people back to work. And they were noticing that it couldn't get people back to work because of childcare. And so we started working with states. And we've seen them partner with these like huge multinational services companies that charge them an arm and a leg are late on delivering the technology and then the price of the technology to modernize the state systems can sometimes 4x 5x. So what we started to do is build technology to help a lot of childcare administrators get data on what's going on in respective childcare programs to understand what parents need when they're searching for childcare and what we're finding as agency leaders are starting to use our technology to figure out where to start childcare programs.

14:49And what But this is leading to is starting child care programs all over the country. In Mississippi, we were able to start 37 programs in a week. And this is like mind blowing for a lot of state administrators because it's just not something that has really been done before at the speed at which we're doing it. We're focused on delivering outcomes and getting these programs up and running instead of just what's happening right now is teaching people how they could potentially start a child care program. This was super interesting to me because the target market was not government as conduits into childcare.

15:23It was families and individuals and the pull from governments was so substantial that it led Chris to, you know, changes go to market emphasis. It was so counterintuitive to me, especially running a consumer company at the time. Steph, I'd love to come back to your question about convincing. ultimately workforce and economic development are the main drivers of governors and state legislators and what they're thinking about and the investments that they're making. So and a rupee can contextualize what she's doing in creating future employees that have the STEM skills to fill high tech jobs that the governor's are trying to recruit in their states.

16:04Similarly, Chris is able to talk about the reason governors and state leaders might not be able to recruit employers is because there aren't enough childcare slots to help their workers actually go to work. And so this is a way to tap into an untapped workforce by providing enough childcare slots. And so I think that is a really compelling part of the narrative that's driving a lot of state interest. Something we're kind of meandering our way into is this idea of selling to the government. I think Chris, what you just shared there is so interesting that a lot of people do kind of stay away from selling to the government because they think it's unintuitive long contract cycles really hard to penetrate.

16:44How does a product actually make its way into a district? Like what do you need to do to get a product like wonder school or prisms into a classroom or to set up one of these child care programs? Yeah and I think it's a misnomer that sales cycles in K -12 or long. That's actually not true. The way that typically our emotions run is unless you get the executive, i .e. the superintendent, you will have a fracturing of the implementation. So I always start with the CEO, who's a superintendent of, let's say, Howard County, Miami -Dade, West Palm Beach. Once that executive is in line with your vision, you then have to go to their academic leaders, right?

17:20So the Chief Academic Officer Math Director of Science Surface, that's the next level of cabinet that sits underneath a superintendent. But then you have your instructional coaches and I will actually oversee the operation implementation. You've got to get them on board. But last but not least, you have your principles in your teacher. So we will not close a deal unless we've gotten full buy -in of all teachers. They put their hand up and said we opt in because you don't get that. You will not get the expansion. You will not get the renewal. You're going to get a lot of pushback and implementation.

17:47Now, you might say, oh my gosh, those are a lot of presentations. No, they move really, really quickly. because our problem statement is aligned to their problem statement. That's a very important part of this. The tech reviews takes about a week. The biggest question is around the RFP process. If there is an executive champion and they want it, they're gonna make sure it closes. So that's just kind of a high -level motion, but I wanted to talk a little bit about the state. For example, in a state like Florida, is we launch across all the large urbans, tons of worlds, the panhandle. We're in so many districts and just about a year and a half.

18:16So then we were then able to go to the Senate president and then the House Speaker and say, hey, Senate President, you have a real focus in rural counties. You're from Miami. You care deeply about urban education. So then you're able to take the successes and the outcomes and the results that you've been collecting at the district level and you take that up to the state. And now we're doing a pretty significant statewide deployment across Florida, but it was completely grassroots. It started at the district level. We delivered outcomes. We had to pick those right senators who were the right voice what we were trying to do and the push and appropriation through it.

18:45And I think what's really interesting also, I thought, I was going to be going to the DOE. I'm not going to the Department of Education. Everything is through either the Workforce Development Infrastructure Channel. In the case of Oklahoma, it's directly with the Governor, in Rhode Island, directly with the Governor, and it's all around regional workforce development strategies in light of both fear and anticipation of what AI is going to do to their local economies. This is classic bottoms up because you're starting at a few schools in the district, and if you produce results at those districts, you know, it's the classic land and expand, and writing it all the way up.

19:18I remember once when I was at Salesforce, the first big bottomed -up company at the internet era, Mark Benioff met with my boss, Meg Whitman, and said, I just wanted to thank my largest client in person. And Meg's very gracious when Mr. Benioff walks back to my tube and goes, we're Salesforce's largest client. I'm like, I didn't know. Is it? And we were a very large client because it was solving individuals' working. So the hope in the case of prisms is if we can do a great job at a subset of schools, it becomes super compelling to expand into more schools in the district, we're doing a great job at district, if it becomes more compelling to evolve at the state level.

19:59So it is a classic sales strategy done in the VRAR world. And Chris, how do you think about that and making your way, whether it's into the district or the state, and then how do you think about building a product that in some sense needs needs to be scalable, but then also needs to fit these unique needs. There are a couple of agencies that we can sell into. So Department of Education, Department of Early Childhood Education, Department of Labor, sometimes work directly with the governor. And what we found is we have a number of products. And our land and expand motion is usually we start with one or two of these products.

20:35And then we show success, we show outcomes with the state. and that ends up leading to states wanting to essentially adopt more of our products so that they can help solve the childcare crisis. Your customer is typically the state and then it's just how much they're buying, whereas in a rupee off and we'll start with a subset of the state's district, schools. Exactly Jeff, for Wonder School, childcare is actually managed by health and human services. And so a lot of our go -to -market doesn't really have a district model and childcare is regulated by the state. So we end up spending the vast majority of our time working with states.

21:11Anna, I'd love to get your take here because I know you work with not just these two companies, but others. And so how would a company try to participate in this world start and think about who they should be relationship building with or is there in at the DOE or is it not? It's such a good question and I've been doing this for 20 years. So it's kind of all I've focused on and worked on for a long time. And we love data and companies that love data. And so first identifying ideal customer, just like in any industry, and then thinking about the characteristics and the market environment in which those customers are going to be able to make purchases is really key.

21:51So we like to do 50 state analysis, looking at what makes for a favorable market environment and start to work with entrepreneurs to figure out we want a solid budget situation. Maybe we don't, maybe if there's a budget crisis it's easier to go in and sell. I do think that there's at the state level an X factor that is really important to know that is particularly as a company is getting started with the first set of one to five states to really launch a state level program which is really strong and innovative leadership. There are state leaders willing to take a risk that know that they have a problem that they need to solve.

22:29They don't want to wait around and pass it to the next governor that comes after them. And so really figuring out who those innovative leaders are, building relationships with them, understanding their challenges and articulating the solutions in the context of those challenges is really important. And then to just point about kind of land and expand, once you have the first five states going, it starts to become a trend. And then the neighboring governors are all watching their PRC success and the governor of Alabama is looking at Mississippi and saying, you launched 37 programs in a week. And we haven't launched 37 programs in a year of our current investments.

23:11What is Mississippi doing? And so that's when it starts to really take off. And some of those state leaders that might be a little less reluctant to innovate will start to catch on. We spend a lot of time looking at org charts and the timelines of appropriations and legislative sessions. But ultimately, there is this X factor of innovative state leadership been tapping into those leaders is really critical for getting going. You talked about how finding perhaps the right legislators is important. Are there any frameworks things to pay attention to there? Is it just really like being on the ground and studying what these people are saying?

23:46Or how do you identify who's really willing to stick their neck out and try some of these programs? There are certainly networks of state leaders. So you've got the National Governors Association and you can look at who's really leading on education and workforce and childcare issues within that organization. There's the national conference of state legislatures and so you can start to see the leaders that are rising among their peers nationally and outspoken on certain issues so that would be a way to start to identify where there might be a state based on leadership that would be good to focus on.