How to Democratize K12 Education (and not make the problem worse)

Expanding access to K12 education is a worthy goal, but often well intentioned efforts fail or even contribute to inequity. With awareness & creativity, we can cooperate to ensure all kids thrive.

As a young woman, Dr. Rebecca Winthrop was quickly making a name for herself in the field of human rights. After contributing to the adoption of several new rights for women, she visited refugee camps to talk to the women there about how their new rights were benefiting their lives. 

“Thanks for the rights,” they said, “but honestly what we need is to learn how to read and to write.”

These conversations changed the course of her career, inspiring her to focus her contributions on expanding access to quality, relevant education worldwide. 

There is no effort I could think of that has more positive transformational power, to individuals and society as whole, than expanding access to quality, relevant education. The intrinsic value of education is immeasurable. And beyond, from human rights to women’s empowerment and sustainability, if you want to make an impact, universal education is the key to systemic change.

And yet, so often our efforts to democratize education fall short. So often, they even make the problem worse. 

School doesn’t necessarily equate to learning. 

“Many children find themselves passing through two, three, four or more years of education and are still unable to read even a single word in their native languages.”

Dr. Rebecca Winthrop

Online classes, digital learning apps, charter schools and microschools may be inadvertently widening the educational gap.

Due to their perceived scope and openness to socially underprivileged groups, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been presented as tools to enhance social mobility. However, there has also been evidence to suggest that MOOCs are mainly beneficial for privileged groups and could even contribute to an increasing gap in educational opportunities between privileged and underprivileged populations.  - van de Oudeweetering, Karmijn, and Orhan Agirdag, . “MOOCS as Accelerators of Social Mobility? A Systematic Review.” Journal of Educational Technology & Society

With a lack of awareness about the needs of the communities we hope to serve, how to reach them and the unique limitations (especially when it comes to access to technology), we inadvertently end up pulling resources away from these high-need communities, and towards more affluent communities, we waste hundreds of millions of dollars on fruitless efforts, and further the widening education gap between low and high income families.

• Massive Open Online Courses and digital learning apps have privileged the elite (due to a misunderstanding of how to reach underresourced users and low access to electricity, internet and devices). They also compete with, and can stifle local efforts to improve education and technology in the long run.

• Charter schools, despite their initial, beautiful promise of community-driven public education have ended up taking funds away from public schools, while breeding new billionaires profiting off public taxes.

• School choice is a sneaky beast. While the idea of giving every family the option to choose their own educational options is powerfully compelling, when not equitably implemented, school choice can also contribute to a widening gap in education opportunities. 

• Homeschool co-op and Microschools present an utopic vision, but also come with unique challenges for equity. The idea of empowering teachers to reinvent education on a grassroots level in highly personalized, mini-learning labs, while saving money on bureaucracy and expensive buildings and grounds - sounds like a turnkey solution.  I launched the first microschool network in 2015, so I understand the exciting promise, but also the real challenges of this model. The unit economics of these endeavors often mean that teachers are underpaid, and tuition is too high for underresourced families to afford, or at a level that could be adequately subsidized via any type of state funding or scholarships. Teacherpreneurs live on a shoestring, struggling to get by. Parents take on admin as a part-time unpaid job. Due to access to information and startup costs, these opportunities are easier to start in affluent areas. Therefore, the underresourced families are rarely truly included at the inception or in the development of the learning environment  When faced with the question of how to serve all students and make their communities more diverse, many microschools say, “we’ll give scholarships” or they’ll offer a sliding scale. But unfortunately this does little to solve the problem on a systemic level.

• School: As homeschool families know all too well, while creating new schools seems like a great idea in principle, a massive number of children are in school, but aren’t learning. Classrooms are overcrowded, and much of the focus is on keeping children in line, rather than keeping them learning. School curriculum and structure is often homogenous and not culturally relevant to the community it serves.

• Tutoring: After the Covid-19 pandemic, the government poured billions of dollars into high-dosage tutoring. However, the model is unsustainable. Once tutoring dollars run out, so will the support these children receive. 

By not truly understanding the needs of under-resourced families, and the larger context of inequity, we simply put bandaids on the problem, or make it worse (furthering the divide between affluent and low income communities) 

There is definitely hope

For all these models (online classes, charter schools, microschools, etc), there are glowing exceptions - projects that have successfully expanded access to high quality, relevant education to under-resourced families - organizations such as Colossal Academy, Imagine Worldwide and Pathways to Education. In this post, I’ll address all these use cases and how they can serve as vehicles for democratizing education, not fostering inequity. 

With creative modifications, our energy and goodwill could be channeled into successful, productive projects that serve all children well. 

Who this post is for 

This post is directed both at education entrepreneurs, but also individuals (parents, teachers, family members, concerned citizens) who want to contribute to expanding access to quality education in their communities, even by a small effort like starting a homeschool co-op in their house, or volunteering for a non-profit. 

Democratizing education is a noble, sacred goal. It’s a cause that impacts us all and has positive impacts on all. When you transform a child’s life, I truly believe you transform the entire world. 

Whether you’re starting a homeschool co-op for your child and friends, volunteering at the local library, running a national microschool network, or building the best new AI-powered literacy app, this post is for you.

Here, I’ll review the research on the multi-faceted positive impacts of investment in K12 education, and how, with a framework grounded in research and realism, we can all improve our efforts to deliver better quality, relevant education at scale - whether our goal is to expand access to education to one child, in our own community, or to the entire world.  

If you prefer video or audio, you can listen to my interview with Dr. Winthrop on YouTube or any podcasting platform where we cover many of these points.

The world’s best investment

Whether your passion is fighting climate change, finding a cure for cancer, building women’s rights or ending homelessness, expanding access to quality education is a highly effective way to make a lasting, systemic impact.

Educating Girls

In the book, “What Works in Girls’ Education: evidence for the world’s best investment, Dr. Winthrop and Gene Sperling present a systematic review of data from 1000 peer-reviewed scholarly papers, demonstrating the profound impact of investing in girl’s education - not only for girls, but for all of us.  The book stresses the importance of access to quality, relevant education. 

“There are few if any policy areas in the world where the evidence is so deep and sweeping as are the findings that support a far greater global commitment to girls’ education. In advanced nations, we are used to hearing the case for why education in general contributes to wages, growth, and upward mobility. These returns from education are just as strong in poorer nations as well. But what makes girls’ education in developing nations truly the investment with the highest return in the world is the degree to which it leads to better outcomes in not only the traditional economic areas of growth and incomes but also in its positive impact in areas like reducing rates of infant mortality, maternal mortality, child marriage, and the incidence of HIV/AIDS and malaria, along with its positive impact on agricultural productivity, resilience to natural disasters, and women’s empowerment” Gene Sperling and Rebecca Winthrop from What Works in Girls Education 

Among the many benefits, the book highlights how 12 years of quality, relevant education contributes to

• Economic development : The entire community experiences higher outcomes in economic areas of growth and incomes, including increased agricultural productivity. 

• Equity, Human Rights and Women’s Empowerment : With more skills, women can join the workforce and obtain higher salaries, start businesses and obtain leadership roles. Education allows women to take power over their life and careers. Education leads to higher incomes and social mobility for women with positive ripple effects for society as women enter leadership roles and improve democratic systems. As men and women become educated, they are better prepared to obtain and recognize the importance of human rights. Education also leads to reduced rates of child marriage.

• Innovation in science, technology, medicine and across all fields: More people enter STEM fields and contribute innovative research to all fields.

• Human health and disease reduction: Equipped with information and the ability to read and communicate, education results in reduction of diseases including infant and maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS and malaria. More women become doctors and scientists and are able to contribute to the fields of medicine by becoming nurses, doctors and scientists who develop new cures for diseases.

• Slowing climate change and improving sustainability: Education helps communities implement renewable energy and cleaner cooking. As women learn about family planning and enter the workforce, they have fewer children, slowing population growth. Education also helps communities mitigate impacts of climate change and it increases community resilience to natural disasters.

A Systemic Solution to the World’s Biggest Problems 

In 2024, Climate change, the spread of disinformation, and the impact of AI on jobs are huge concerns that many of us lose sleep over every night. Expanding access to education is a solution that addresses each of these problems effectively at the roots. Rather than putting a bandaid on a troubling problem, expanding access to education heals the entire system. 

From climate change to sustainable development

It may be a surprise to some of you that expanding access to 12 years of quality education is one of the most effective solutions to curb climate change. 

Project Drawdown, which researches evidence-based solutions to climate change, projects voluntary family planning and universal access to 12 years of high-quality education could reduce carbon emissions by 68.9 gigatons.

In scenario 2 of their solutions table, “family planning and education” is determined to be the #3 most impactful way to stop climate change, with far more projected impact than recycling, solar power or even public transportation (while taking into account that developed countries have far higher per capital levels of consumption) .

“Increased knowledge about, access to, and quality of voluntary family planning, and 12 years of high-quality education, are essential to achieving the UN’s 2019 medium global population projection of 9.7 billion people by 2050. We model the global impact of this population scenario, which includes increased uptake of family planning and rising education levels (and therefore lower fertility), on energy, building space, food waste, and transportation demand versus the status quo. Fostering equality through this solution could reduce carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by nearly 70 gigatons between 2020 and 2050.” Project Drawdown

In addition to slowing population growth, education slows climate change by helping communities implement sustainable, renewable energy sources, adopt better agricultural practices and gain skills to go into innovative careers that support sustainability (such as engineers working on green technology).

In my interviews with Daniel Jasper and Elizabeth Bagley from Project Drawdown, we address the multi-faceted impact of K12 education on sustainability.   

From disinformation to critical thinking

Education is a critical force in fighting disinformation and misinformation. As we develop critical thinking and sound research skills, we’re better prepared to bring skepticism to what we hear in the media and marketing, check the evidence and come to our own conclusions, rather than purely be swayed by emotions or the opinions of those around us. 

It’s seems to me the crisis in critical thinking is two-fold, one of learning and one of valuing. In the information age where social media consumes are lives, critical thinking skills are more needed than ever. But first of all, we aren’t teaching them adequately to kids. And those of us who learned critical thinking skills don’t apply them nearly as much as we should. Critical thinking skills need to be valued more. Education provides a portal to teaching critical thinking and valuing it more.

I frequently see “studies” and “data points” carelessly passed around in tech and academic circles. Often, the sharer has not checked or does not include who funded the study (and honestly, I don’t think they checked). Many of these studies are based on a survey, not peer-reviewed, have not implemented best research practices, nor do they include a description of their research methodology. Many are not scholarly papers, but obviously sponsored by a vested interest such as a lobbying group or corporation. It’s almost as if people have stopped caring about checking research before they start circulating so-called evidence. We’re so eager to “prove our point”

Almost all of us (including myself) have been guilty at some point of reading a study online and passing it along to a friend, posting it on social media or citing it in our blog post, before we’ve bothered to check the sources, the research methodology, or even whether it was sponsored by an organization with a vested interest in proving a certain point. This is captured beautifully by a hilarious video on YouTube who read a study claiming cats are unlucky which turns out to be “sponsored by mice.”

Many of my colleagues and friends have circulated studies about the learning outcomes in homeschooling by a researcher sponsored by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. The people who cited these include several edtech entrepreneurs, a prominent data scientist and at least two highly respected, brilliant investors with several million followers on Twitter.  They’ve also been used in court cases around the country, defending homeschooling, cited on NPR and in the New York Times. When his studies were “outed” in the Washington post, there was an unfortunate backlash for homeschooling parents. 

“Ray’s research is nowhere near as definitive as his evangelism makes it sound. His samples are not randomly selected. Much of his research has been funded by a powerful home-schooling lobby group. When talking to legislators, reporters and the general public, he typically dispenses with essential cautions and overstates the success of the instruction he champions. Critics say his work is driven more by dogma than scholarly detachment.” Laura Meckler, the Washington Post

That many well educated people and respected publications would cite research funded by a prominent homeschooling lobbying group reflects how lazy we’ve all become when it comes to critical thinking.  It’s become socially acceptable to be uneducated. While it’s our biological nature to be swayed by the “hive mind” and compelling, emotional anecdotes or a striking statistic, the ability to understand best practices for research and critical analysis arms us with a powerful tool to see truth and get power back over our lives. This is particularly critical in areas like financial literacy where low-income communities are often taken advantage of by banks and credit card companies. 

This week, I’ve been listening to a fascinating podcast with Stanford Researcher Andrew Huberman and Dr Peter Attia. The podcast is part of a series where they break down “a peer-reviewed scientific paper chosen because it contains novel, interesting, and actionable data.” In the podcast, they help listeners understand how to read and evaluate studies in painstaking detail. For example, during this episode, they break down the term “reverse causality.” The example they cite is diet soda. While people who drink diet soda are more likely to be obese than those who do not, it would be incorrect to assume that diet soda necessarily causes obesity, since people who are trying to lose weight are more likely going to choose a diet option. 

Imagine if every person was equipped with strong critical thinking skills, a toolbox with principles like “reverse causality” or “checking sources,” to help process and analyze the information they receive. We might make very different consumer choices. In the meanwhile, hopefully those of us who are well educated can start shifting the culture by valuing skepticism and best research practices, holding ourselves accountable to improving our ability to review studies, and being more careful about what we choose to share. Data points can be used to prove or disprove any theory in the world, but we shouldn’t abuse them. 

I deeply appreciate the work Attia and Huberman are doing to democratize research skills. And the popularity of their shows demonstrates how people are craving this information. People want to understand how to think critically and find out the truth. 

While we can all get stubborn about our opinions and the truth can sometimes be hard to swallow, I do believe that ultimately we crave truth and don’t want to be deluded.

For more information on helping to cultivate critical thinking skills in your child (or yourself), I’ve created a post with a list of some of my favorite resources and techniques to nurture critical thinking skills here. 

Nurturing Critical Thinkers

With so much false information spreading around on social media, we need to be equipped with strong critical thinking skills just as much as tools to curb distraction.

From AI displacing jobs to the future of work

In their report, “Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages,” analysts at McKinsey break down what AI could mean for the future of work.  

“Automation and AI will lift productivity and economic growth, but millions of people worldwide may need to switch occupations or upgrade skills…We will all need creative visions for how our lives are organized and valued in the future, in a world where the role and meaning of work start to shift…. There will be demand for human labor, but workers everywhere will need to rethink traditional notions of where they work, how they work, and what talents and capabilities they bring to that work.” Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages \ McKinsey Global Institute

As AI becomes increasingly part of our lives, the need for highly creative jobs requiring higher levels of education such as health care providers, teachers and engineers specializing in renewable energy may increase, while easily automated jobs requiring little education will be replaced by AI. While many fear this transition, it also presents the possibility of an incredible opportunity for people to transition to more meaningful work that utilizes their full potential. 

“Many companies are finding it is in their self-interest—as well as part of their societal responsibility—to train and prepare workers for a new world of work….Individuals, too, will need to be prepared for a rapidly evolving future of work. Acquiring new skills that are in demand and resetting intuition about the world of work will be critical for their own well-being. There will be demand for human labor, but workers everywhere will need to rethink traditional notions of where they work, how they work, and what talents and capabilities they bring to that work.” McKinsey

I may be an optimist, but I look forward to a world where AI allows us all to bring our talents towards creative, pleasurable work, and spend less energy on automated tasks. If we expand access to education, we can make that possible for all. We need to start with ourselves and our own kids, learning the skills for the new jobs of the future.

And AI isn’t the final story. The world will continue to evolve and new technologies will emerge that no one has conceived of yet. This requires us all to be constantly learning and constantly evolving. We need an education system, and educational offerings that can evolve at the rate of our rapidly evolving world.

SchoolClosures, Mastery Hour and my background on this topic

As a teacher and tutor in five cities across three continents, I was distraught to discover the quality of K12 education, in both the public and private sector. Traveling around the world, I heard the same stories of parents frustrated and dissatisfied with the quality of education their children were receiving in a wide range of public and elite private schools. I witnessed firsthand a homogenous, anxiety producing education system that was inflexible and slow to change, burdened by bureaucracy and politics, where corporate and political interests came first, children and families came last.  It seemed to me that kids in public schools were barely receiving an education at all, and children in private schools were mostly preparing for the SAT and entrance into elite private schools, driving them (in my anecdotal experience) to levels of anxiety that required medication and often led to drug and alcohol abuse.

However, it was not until I discovered Project Drawdown and learned about the correlation between slowing climate change and expanding access to girls’ education that I became mobilized to act. Sustainability is a cause that’s been very dear to my heart since I took my first biology class, and I felt compelled to direct my energy to systemic, sustainable change. I found the balm I’d been seeking in expanding access to education, and then parent-driven modular learning as the most effective mode of delivery.

Eight years later, after building two edtech companies, two non-profits, countless side projects, talking to hundreds of families and entrepreneurs working on school based and homeschooling interventions I finally feel I have something of value to share on the topic. These observations come from my experience, personal research and my conversations with many non-profit leaders with in-depth experiences in the area.

During the pandemic, Eric Ries and I started SchoolClosures, a hotline that gave families and schools 24/7 access support with any and all questions or problems related to the sudden closures of every school in the United States. We had 80 partners and over 300 volunteers, so we approached with the mindset that if a solution didn’t exist for a parent, we would solve it for them. We never passed them along to another article or resource. Whether it was tech support, getting a chrome book, access to food or diapers, we followed through until their problem was solved.  We were fortunate that through our partner organizations and collaborations with public schools, we were able to reach over 100,000 families, many of whom might not normally have been aware of our resources. 

The Covid-19 pandemic shone a light on existing problems in our education system, and brought the biggest problems into greater focus. By talking to families and responding to problems as they arose, I got a deeper sense of the challenges and opportunities to expand quality education to all students, and how we can really ensure that on a local, or global level, our projects are contributing to equity now and in the future. 

Education is a human right, not a privilege. It’s the cornerstone of all positive transformation in our world. We need to find a way to bring it to every child. 

I’ve never met an education entrepreneur, investor, microschool founder, parent or teacher who didn’t care deeply about this cause, but we’ve made mistakes along the way, mistakes that have had severe consequences for children and families. 

I am deeply optimistic about our capacity to achieve this shared goal of universal education, if we get smart, mindful and creative, but all of us who care need to be attentive about how we approach this problem, so we don’t make it worse. 

And without further ado, here are the eighteen considerations I’ve distilled that we can keep in mind to ensure education remains high quality, relevant, and that we can build models that contribute to improved educational access for all. 

18 considerations for democratizing education

✅ Founder checklist

In this post, we’ll address 18 essential considerations for those who care about the cause of universal access to quality, relevant K12 education. Before we dive in-depth to each point, here’s a quick summary of the eighteen considerations that I consider most pressing for founders, investors and individuals to account for when they’re trying to expand educational access. I’ve parsed them into four major categories: building a model that works, communication, technology, and solutions. In the post, I’ll address each of the 18 in depth, but first I wanted to give you an overview of each of them so you can see if you’ve integrated them into your efforts. Then, you can read the whole post, or skip to the items that interest you most.

Building a model that works 

1. Involve key stakeholders as much as possible, from the start and all the time

Ask: How much are you involving key stakeholders in the creation and execution of your offering ? 

To build a successful offering, it’s essential to co-create it with people who represent the entire population you want to serve. If you want to bring education to every family in the world, make sure there is a diverse mix of affluent, middle-income and underresourced families involved. If you want to serve exclusively underresourced families, make sure they’re included in the design and implementation of the offering. Integrate your stakeholders at the beginning, every stage and through every level of your organization. Include them as board members, employees and volunteers. Collect their feedback and measure their outcomes in every way you can. 

2. Scaleable Unit Economics at Inception

Ask: Do you have unit economics that can scale to serve all kids ?

What are the total resources available (or potentially available) and how do they get divided among the population you want to serve at scale? Create scalable unit economics at inception to avoid widening the gap and creating more inequity. 

3. Location, Location, Location

Ask: Does the location of my offering make it easy for all kids to participate?

Too often, underresourced families are expected to commute long distances, or wake up at unseemly hours to commute to learning offerings in affluent areas. How can you go to the people who need you most rather than asking them to move, for example, via creating offerings in underserved areas, creating online opportunities or empowering parents? How can you unsure that initial brainstorming meetings are easy to get to?

Communication

4. Outreach Channels

Ask: How do your stakeholders find information ? 

High need communities access information through different channels than affluent families. Connect to local radio, places of worship. You can use these channels to recruit stakeholders for initial brainstorming sessions that reflect the entire population you want to serve. And you can identify more channels through the meetings you have with stakeholders at inception.  

5. Literacy

Ask: Do your stakeholders know how to read? 

Depending on their own education, the parents of the children you hope to serve may not know how to read, or read well. Consider alternatives to written text such as school presentations when informing and involving parents in your offering. 

6. Language

Ask: What languages do your stakeholders speak, read and write ? 

Many underresourced families are recent immigrants and don’t speak English. Translate materials into Spanish and other languages the parents of kids you want to serve can understand. 

Technology

7. Internet

Ask: Do your stakeholders have Internet access?  

Make families don’t have access to the internet, so consider making technology available offline and contributing to efforts to expand internet access.

8. Digital devices

Ask: Do your users have digital devices?

Many children don’t have access to devices, so consider, for example, making print materials, contributing to efforts to distribute low-cost and recycled devices, or making your offering on mobile phones and helping distribute them. 

9. Electricity and Renewable Energy

Ask: Do your users have electricity? 

Many families don’t have access to electricity. Consider making solar-powered devices, distributing print materials, and contributing to efforts to expand renewable energy to underresourced communities. Expanding access to renewable forms of energy improves educational access, sustainability and helps curb climate change.

10. Digital Literacy

Ask: Do your users need IT support?

A large percentage of the world’s population still has never even used a computer, and more don’t possess basic digital literacy skills. Families need IT support to use basic technology.

Solutions and Undertapped Resources: Technology

11. Solar Power

Ask: Can you distribute it on solar powered devices or offer solar chargers? 

In a world where so many don’t have access to electricity, solar power and other renewable forms of energy can be the difference between whether your users can take advantage of your resource or not. 

12. Offline Access

Ask: Can you make your offering available offline?

With so many students without access to internet or stable internet, making your digital learning app available offline or distributing print materials can help students learn now. Technology is not the only solution to the education crisis. Mentoring, Forest schools and other nature-based options can be impactful as well. 

13. Smart Phones

Ask: Can you make your offering mobile friendly?

Smartphones are cheaper to produce than computers, and don’t require a broadband connection, making them more accessible to those who don’t have access to the internet.. If your users need to access parts of your program online, consider making those components available on smartphones. 

Solutions and Undertapped Resources: Engaging the Whole Community

14. Use teens and seniors

Ask: Can you recruit teens and seniors as volunteers? 

Teens need work experience and seniors crave relevancy. They have time and energy to devote to meaningful projects. Can you involve them in yours to improve unit economics? Can you incorporate training to bring other people who need work experience into your project and pay them a starting salary, saving money while supporting their career advancement?

15. Tap into government and corporate Funding + Lobbying for more

Ask: How much Government and Corporate funding is available ? Can you advocate for more?

There is government funding available for education, and organizations can lobby for more to expand access to high quality, relevant offerings. 

16.  Get creative about Space  

Ask: Are there underutilized, low-cost spaces you can use to improve your unit economics? How can you bring your learning environment to your students instead of making them commute?

Space adds a lot of overhead to educational projects. Since new educational offerings are often built in affluent neighborhoods, it can be difficult for underresourced families to access them. Projects can save a considerable amount of money and make offerings more accessible by hosting offerings in homes, outdoors, art galleries, nursing homes or online. 

17. Use Parents 

Ask: Can you empower parents to teach their kids? 

Parents are the #1 undertapped resource. We assume our offerings need to take place in a brick and mortar school, but what about empowering parents to teach from their houses? How creative can you get when it comes to space?

18. Use Community

Ask: Can you engage community members in delivering your offering?

It takes a village to raise a child. And mentors are key to a successful education. Find ways to involve extended family, single people, local businesses and other community members in helping to deliver your offering. 

Now we’ll break down each solution in detail.

Category A: Building a model that works 

1. Involve the key stakeholders at creation, every stage and as much as possible in delivery  (kids, parents, caregivers, teachers, community)

"Fulfilling the necessity of education and achieving holistic change with proper engagement involves four pillars/sides: students, teachers, parents, and the broader community. If one of these is weak or broken, the entire system will be affected or collapse. If these sides do not support each other, if there is a lack of interaction, the achievement rate drops. Ultimately, schools and the entire education system cannot reach their expected goals.” From Why families and communities are central to education system transformation,” Why families and communities are central to education system transformation | Brookings

One of the biggest missteps I consistently see from well-intentioned founders wanting to make their offering accessible is failing to involve the population they want to serve. These efforts, to succeed, need to go beyond talking to potential users (though that’s a great start), but involving your target demographic in the creation of the resource itself. 

The 100 million dollar donation to Newark Public Schools

In 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million to “fix the Newark Public School System,” While well-meaning, this effort was largely viewed as a massive disaster with limited impact. Their biggest mistake was failing to involve the community in the process. Instead, to everybody’s surprise, it was announced on Oprah.

“It played disastrously in the community because, immediately, nobody understood why do we have to turn on "Oprah" at 4 o'clock to find out what's going on in our own city? And if you want to save the schools for the benefit of our children, why weren't we told?...there were a number of local foundations in Newark that had been involved for years in education…And they were excluded from having any say, but more importantly, there was no way for the parents, the teachers, the principals, the community leaders.. really, really intelligent, smart, committed people who had been in the fray for years in the lives of children in education - to be part of this. And so basically, the board decided to spend the money the way the wealthy donors wanted it spent. And the priorities were not about getting money to the classroom or to the children. The priorities were to have this kind of business model, top-down reform that had become very popular in the reform movement.” - Dale Rusakoff on Assessing The $100 Million Upheaval Of Newark's Public Schools : NPR

Isn’t it a bit ironic that the same founders who are so obsessed with user-centered, user-driven, design thinking products fail to take into account the needs of under-resourced families when contributing to efforts to democratize education? 

In contrast, the Pathways to Education model has been an incredibly successful, widely celebrated low cost reform initiative in Canada. 

In 2016, Freakonomics interviewed Philip Orepoulus, an economist at the University of Toronto, who decided to do an in-depth study of Pathways, which he’d been hearing was “a miracle cure for low-performing high-schoolers.” A Boston consulting group had done a pro bono study of the program. He wanted to learn if the data they reported was true, and if so what were the components that made this program so successful, and were they replicable.  

“before Pathways, the dropout rate was 56 percent, and very soon after Pathways was introduced, the dropout rate was 10 percent. So you had a 46-percentage point fall in the dropout rate, and the report was attributing it to the introduction of Pathways. And this type and magnitude of effect is virtually unheard of in the education literature. It’s like the holy grail of programs that try to improve outcomes, especially among disadvantaged households. And if these results were true, we should try to figure out exactly how to replicate them across the country and in the U.S. because they’re so large it would solve a lot of our problems.” Philip Orepoulus on How to Fix a Broken High-Schooler, in Four Easy Steps (Replay) - Freakonomics

Notably, rather than plan a big program and make an announcement, Pathways founder started by talking to the Toronto school board and then had focus groups with students in the community who’d had success as she started to implement the program. They did a considerable amount of iteration in cooperation with the community at every stage. 

“We brought in focus groups…the young people who grew up in Regent Park who had made it through university, were doing well. We asked them what made the difference in their lives and every one of those people told us somebody took them under their wing. It was either a teacher, it was either a Parks and Recreation person, and they taught them and they helped them all the way. Now, this only happened to a handful of people spontaneously, but we were listening — listening is exceptionally important — and we determined they lack academic support.”

The program that emerged from these focus groups is neighborhood-based rather than school-based, drawing on mentoring and support from locals. So the key stakeholders are integrated beautifully into every aspect of how the organization works. 

If you’re trying to democratize education, include the community, include the school board, include kids, involve them at every level of your company - on the board, as employees, volunteers, and continually gather their opinion and adjust the program according to their needs. This needs to go well beyond user surveys and conversations. You need to observe them using (or not using) the offering. You need to hire them at your company, include them on the board, ask them what they most need, give it to them, and then see if they actually use it. You need to assess how they’re benefiting and learning relative to their own goals at every stage. You need to respect their expertise and integrate them into the offering as much as possible. 

It’s surprising to me how few founders pay close attention to how children are enjoying and engaging with their product.  At Masteryhour.org (our free tutoring project), we track progress simultaneously via adaptive learning apps (not periodically) and require every tutor and student to fill out a feedback form after every single session, including a box that indicates whether an item needs urgent attention. We continually iterate based on these two forms of feedback. As tutors gain experience, we continually promote them to higher levels within the organization until they are training other tutors and ultimately join the leadership team. The entire project is run by college volunteers. 

As you develop your offering, these are the three key stakeholders you need to include at inception and in every stage of development. 

• Kids: Kids are born with a furious curiosity and passionate drive to learn. They also have an uncanny innate ability to understand what skills they need to know to thrive. Yet somehow, adults think education is something that needs to be forced down their throats, sometimes with a spoonful of sugar, sometimes with an iron rod. Education is one of the few products where kids are seldom involved in the creation. It presents an odd problem where the purchaser is not the end user. That’s why so many educational products are both boring and buggy. Kids use them because they have to, not because they enjoy doing so. Beast Academy, Prodigy Game, and Epic! are some of the rare examples of programs kids love to use and where creators pay careful attention to the child’s experience. Spend time asking kids what they need and want. Respect their authority. Observe them using your resource as frequently as possible (both in-person and with tools like Full Story), continually fine tuning it to ensure they’re engaged and learning. It’s not so critical that they’re passively having fun all the time, but that they’re deeply engaged (at the appropriate level of challenge) and not inhibited by technical glitches. Engaged vs entertained is a distinction to watch when it comes to learning. We want to go for active learning not passive entertainment or addictive engagement. Ideally, we want to keep kids in the proximal zone of development where they are challenged, but not so much they give up. You might discover kids love giving feedback on your product. I was so impressed when some of my students offered feedback on the Prodigy Game. I sent these comments to the CEO and he immediately sent me a detailed reply, expressing profound appreciation for these insights. That’s the kind of attitude towards children that needs to be implemented at every level of the organization. 

• Parents and caregivers : Parents know their children and their needs intuitively, better than anyone else. But so often, our school system doesn’t take parent voices into account. Study after study shows family involvement in education makes a bigger difference than almost any other factor. The modeling and forming of healthy attachments through learning is invaluable. As one example, a child using an educational app alone, vs a child engaging with a parent or caregiver as they work through the app provides a completely different experience, the latter being much more impactful on their learning.  But educational efforts rarely involve empowering parents, for instance teaching them how to read and write so they can support their kids. 

• Elders and community members offer a huge untapped resource when it comes to childhood education.  They have a longitudinal, birds-eye view, understanding the systems in the community and how they interact. They’ve seen how things have unfolded overtime and understand the needs of the community (and how that relates to individual families) better than anyone else. They also have resources to offer. They often are the ones paying for private school or supplemental activities. Parents are frequently time and resource-constrained but elders and single or childless community members have time and energy to devote to helping to raise kids, and would be thrilled to bring more meaning into their lives via this avenue. With the mental health crisis as it is, we would all do well to provide more opportunities for those who are traditionally isolated to serve. It could also benefit teens (rather than being on social media, they could replace that time with relational, service-time).

Micro Schools and homeschool co-ops

If you’re interested in building a microschool or small homeschool co-op for your child and friends - consider getting the whole community you want to serve involved at the beginning.  Host a founding meeting for everyone interested in participating. Do outreach through strategic channels (we discuss outreach later in the post). Do outreach for the meeting to discuss the idea, not for the microschool itself. Ask people opinion into account at every stage of the project’s development (including mission, pedagogical approach, place, curriculum, pricing, location and choosing teachers). Talk transparently about the best ways to make it affordable and accessible for everyone. For instance, underresourced families often live in different neighborhoods than affluent families. Is it fair to ask them to commute? Is it worthwhile for them if you’re providing space in a larger home? What is their comfort level with attending classes in your house?  In this way, you’re catering the learning experience to everyone’s needs, fostering real equity, not passing out charity. It also happens to be the best marketing technique to make sure your microschool fills. Parents and entrepreneurs who host even a few meetups at the inception of their microschool typically have a much easier time getting people to sign up when that moment comes, and the community is stronger down the road. 

Or enroll your child at someone else’s co-op or microschool. 

If you’re interested in exposing your child to diversity, you may want to consider joining someone else’s homeschool co-op or class instead of trying to make yours more diverse or equitable. So often we expect families who look or think differently than us, or have less resources, to come to us and try to make our experience feel “more welcoming.” Instead, we can venture out and bring our time and money to their offering, giving our child the opportunity to meet new people, discover their wisdom, lives and culture. 

Most of us, myself included, have been guilty of condescending to the community we’re serving (thinking we know better), rather than offering our resources (time, money, creativity, energy, love) to help support them in the way they best see fit. And anyone who has a friend or family member knows, asking “how can I help?” rather than saying “here’s how I will help,” will make all the difference in empowering someone we love to change their life. 

Tread carefully with scholarships

Occasionally I’ll see a twitter influencer post that they are starting a microschool for their child and friends. When people inevitable ask about equity, the poster will typically reply that they are offering scholarships to underresourced families. 

 I’m deeply grateful for the scholarships I’ve received. As the child of a single mom who worked five jobs, these scholarships changed the course of my life. They are a key reason I can write well and have had the opportunity to travel the world.  

That said, scholarships can set up a dynamic (sometimes subtle, and sometimes painfully overt)  where the underresourced family is in a position of charity, not directly involved in the creation and development of the program, or not as powerful a member so it does not serve them as well.   Scholarships are often only available to a few students (so the student body is not reflective of the general population. Since not enough effort was put into creating a sustainable pricing model that could reach all students and adequately pay staff relative to their value, the microschool leaders and parents are often tasked with devoting a huge amount of time raising funds from a limited grant pool (competing with other efforts to expand educational access), time they could be spending in delivering and developing high quality learning experiences to students. Too often, teacher salaries suffer or these tiny learning environments close. 

When per pupil tuition (pre-scholarships)  is much higher than what a middle or low-income family can pay - or a community can finance, they’re an unsustainable fix on a model that can’t scale, or inspire scaleable replicas that are accessible to everyone. And this is why they end up pulling resources away from underresourced families instead of contributing to greater equity.

These problems can all be addressed through founding meetings with a community that reflects the entire populations you want to serve, and creating sound unit economics at inception. 

Rather than jumping to scholarships as a solution, consider including the community at the inception of your project to see what type of pricing, financing model and learning environment serves them best.

2. Unit Economics at inception

Almost everyone starts educational projects with good intentions for equity. But without scaleable unit economics at inception, these learning opportunities are unlikely to inspire an effective model for global  equity.  They create a power dynamic that can be uncomfortable for the underresourced families, and while that individual family may benefit enormously, risks are that it can contribute little to expanding access to education in the community at large. Potentially, it could  contribute to a trend of affluent families taking resources away from public schools.

The good news is that when we get clever and creative about unit economics at inception (and involve community members in this process), we can build scalable models with the potential to benefit all.  This idea may feel a little complex for those of you who are less mathy, but I feel it is so core to contributing to equity, rather than inequity, that I want to give it the attention it deserves. 

Do you want to rehaul the entire system or just help a select few? Do you want to give every child the potential to reach their full potential (whether they’re affluent, middle-income or underresourced? Or do you only want to help a few students, leaving the rest further behind then before. There is everything right about helping an affluent, gifted child get the education they need to build a cure for cancer. And we can simultaneously give a gifted, underresourced child that same chance, and raise a society that’s capable of critical thinking and can contribute together to solve our most pressing social and environmental issues. The more bright minds we have working on these issues, the better. We can do it all if we’re careful about unit economics at inception. 

When building a new model for education, it’s vital that this model will be affordable at scale (even if it’s your intention to create a small homeschool co-op in your house). What this means is that the average resources required per student (money, time, teaching, volunteers, space) is not greater than the total pool of resources available (or potentially available in the future) - accounting for costs and resource availability varying from community to community and communities potentially sharing resources.  If making your model available to every child would exceed resources available, it’s likely to contribute to inequity, rather than reverse it. But once you get honest about unit economics, you can get creative about resources and help reinvent the entire system as a whole.  

Here’s an equation you can use to determine if your unit economics check out. 

Resources per student (Money/Time/Volunteers/Personnel]

X Multiplied by

# Number of students who need help (eg your community, state, the world, whatever your big vision is)

< or = Must be less than or equal to 

Total resources available (or potentially available in your community, state world)

Is your big vision to help your neighborhood, the entire country, the world?

If your costs required (including time and volunteers) per student x total students you want to serve are greater than total resources available in the entire demographic you want to serve, you will likely end up widening the educational gap instead of closing it. 

In 2015, I went to an open house at Altschool NY. At the time, Altschool was building a promising network of microschools that had raised over 100 million dollars from prominent VC’s in the hope of democratizing the education system. (I was following the Altschool story closely, because I was bootstrapping CottageClass, my own network of microschools at the time. I pitched many of the same investors who reasonably opted to invest their dollars in a better funded company than mine, equipped with an army of some of the best engineers and product developers in tech).  A single mother spoke at the Altschool open house about how every morning, she took the bus for two hours back and forth to give her daughter the opportunity to receive this education. She had also commuted the four hours to speak at the open house that evening. Full tuition was $27,000, but her daughter had been granted a full scholarship through the Altschool (which was able to operate as a for-profit and nonprofit by becoming a certified B Corp And Delaware Benefit Corporation. 

In 2016-2017, the average public school spending per student in NYC was $20,078 (one of the highest in the nation). For charter schools, it was “$14,027.”  Across the nation it was approximately $11,000. 

As many of us know, in 2017 Altschool shut down its NYC locations and in 2019, the entire company shut down.  While Altschool continually promised they would drive down cost per pupil, they were never able to create a model that didn’t end up burning cash, and ultimately putting them out of business. 

My opinion is that the problem with Altschool was that they never tested a model that had unit economics at inception that could scale to truly serve all students. They didn’t start with a pricing model that could be ever adopted by a public education system. If scaleable unit economics had been adopted on day one, they could have evolved their quality within an equitable model, rather than assuming equitable unit economics was something they could tack on later. 

What was also frustrating about this situation was that the Altschool was set up in a wealthy neighborhood, and the underresourced family had to spend significant time and energy to commute to the location. 

While it’s common to build a financial model for venture startups (how much money could we make if we capture this fraction of the market), it’s less common to crunch the numbers and see what it would take to give every child access to your offering (and if those resources are available).  

If you want to build a model for a new public education, you can’t make tuition higher than what’s allotted per pupil to attend a NYC public school. You probably shouldn’t make it higher than what’s typically allotted for charter schools, or vouchers available in states that have school choice. 

If you’re trying to scale high dosage tutoring, start your efforts at a rate that schools and states could reasonably compensate. Don’t assume the price will go down later. Start things off right. 

For those of you feeling overwhelmed at the thought of lowering tuition costs, don’t despair. With out-of-the box thinking, you can absolutely fund a luxurious learning environment with reasonable tuition rates. We’ll discuss creative resources later in this post, but it’s critical to start with unit economics that make your offering accessible to all from day one. When you get honest with yourself about unit economics, then you can get creative about financing the initiative, whether that’s government funding, tuition rates that vary from one neighborhood to another so an affluent neighborhood can help finance a microschool in a lower-income one, using underutilized space, drawing on technology or volunteers. 

Building a financial model for democratizing education

Here are some questions and considerations you can incorporate when you’re creating unit economics that can scale to meet the needs of the whole population you want to serve (affluent, under-resourced and everything in-between) It’s essential to build a model that allows for the impact you want to make. Remember, democratizing education means building the capacity to serve all students in a community with the resources available in that community (grants, tuition), not just a select few under-resourced ones. Too many efforts price their initial offerings beyond what any realistic expectation of an educational system could support.  

The simplest approach to looking at unit economics is by taking an honest look at the per pupil funding available and matching your rates. 

• In 2019-2020, The US spent an average of $17,013 per pupil enrolled in elementary or secondary school. It may not be reasonable to expect the US could allot this amount to each student in your school, but it’s a good starting point to see if your network could even hope to be a viable replacement from traditional public school (if as you claim, your intention is to build a new education system to replace public school) Keep in mind that these numbers will vary considerably from district to district. Utah has the lowest spending per pupil, while $8,968 while New York spends a whopping $28,704 per student (which should be mentioned is still less than half ot tuition at elite private schools in the area)

• It may be more realistic to take a look at what type of funding has become available for parents who have access to school choice. Arizona’s new voucher program allots $7,200 for every parent who wants to opt out of traditional school and make their own education choices for their kids. Florida offers vouchers of $7.700 as scholarships for private school.  

• If you’re offering tutoring, building a digital learning app or extracurricular class, you might want to see what per pupil allotment is on these types of offerings in different states and schools. (Many public schools purchase apps and collaborate with vendors for afterschool programs)

All of these numbers may vary considerably from school to school and state to state. So keep that in mind. And also, using funding from one region to help another area with less means available is a clever work around.   

This can get subtle. While home-based preschools are gaining appeal (certainly a creative use of space), it’s unclear how many qualified teachers will be willing to sustain programs in their homes when laws prohibit them from taking more than 6-8 students at a time (nor should states allow a higher ratio for children so small). When I do the math, I don’t see an average tuition times six or eight covering the salary of a highly qualified teacher. For example, Headstart’s  program's annual cost per pupil is about $10,000 (that would equal 60-80k per teacher not taking into account insurance, supplies and other program costs). Additionally, wealthier families may not want to commute to homes that are based in lower-income neighborhoods (where teachers earning 60k would more likely be based) Does this mean only affluent teachers can serve affluent families in affluent neighborhoods? Are you starting to see the problem? 

As you start to build a flexible financial model with unit economics that scale, here are some key questions you’ll want to consider.

• What is the size of the total population you want to serve? This is your big pie in the sky vision.  (Is it your local community, the city, state, entire world) Also, keep in mind that you don’t need to serve this entire population. Maybe you want to democratize education for every child in your state, but you’re just looking to build a co-op in your house. I’d still encourage you to look at what the unit economics look like for a larger area so others can model their environments after you. 

• How much does it cost to produce one unit of education for one pupil (for example, the cost of an app, tuition per pupil)

• How much would it cost to fully serve this total population?

• Where do these resources come from? Government funding, parent tuition, private donations, foundations, corporate grants.

• Are there enough of these resources to serve every child who needs help?   (taking into account that some might have more funds or time to offer than other, For instance, if you take into account families with a high income, and those who have a low-income, could the more affluent families adequately subsidize the costs of underresourced families in that area, or another?

• If there are not enough resources, can more be created (for example, by lobbying for school choice or training volunteers)

• Are there any creative ways to reduce costs (for example, training young teachers, operating out of unconventional spaces like people’s homes, or empowering parents to teach their own kids.) 

• Do costs change as the offering gets more popular? Perhaps you’ve built in a volunteer training program and the cost decreases because you’re able to train tutors via some type of online course. 

• How does cost per person change geographically?  How do these numbers change in different regions? These numbers will vary widely from state to state, city to city and neighborhood to neighborhood. Maybe you’ll want to imagine a model where tuition from microschools in more affluent areas helps fund those in lower-income communities. This will involve some crunching of numbers and intentionality about where you start your first programs to lay an effective foundation for this model. You will need to iterate, so starting out by creating a network that reflects this intention will be key. 

• What is the cost of space in the communities you want to serve and how does that impact the costs of running each microschool?

• What is the availability of volunteers like in each community? How many competent volunteers are you likely to attract in each community? Will funds need to be allocated towards training?

• What is the cost of living and how that may impact teacher salary and quality?

• What about travel costs? People are not likely to want to travel far to attend the microschool. Too often the burden of traveling falls upon under resourced families, using up already scarce time, money and energy.  Or, if a microschool is built in a lower income community, the school does not have enough income from tuition to support it.  As you start to crunch these numbers, you may start to see how if your mission is to truly democratize education, you may want to consider building microschool networks in lower-income communities and exploring alternative sources of funding, or alternatively, getting creative about transportation to school.

• What percentage of a parent’s salary (if any) is reasonable to expect the average parent to pay for their child’s education (taking into account special additional expenses like medical care or childcare which may impact that parent’s ability to pay)  

• What are the income levels of the population you want to serve?. What percentage of the population is poor or near poor? Do you want your microschool to reflect the demographics of your population? For example, maybe you want to democratize education in the United states. According to the US census, child poverty in the US doubled to 12.4% from 5.2% the year before.  Can you build a model where 12.4% of enrolled students start in poverty?  

• What other resources (or potential resources) are available within that community? When we think about resources, we’re talking about funding available. We can also look at other resources such as volunteers or even space (such as a teacher’s home) For example, if you’re building a microschool (or a microschool network) and you want to be able to give all students access, you might want to think of   For potential resources, once you’ve gotten clear about funding, you can get creative about tapping into resources. We’ll dig into this later in the post. Closing your eyes and hoping for the best later will not allow you to iterate on your model, discovering challenges and opportunities along the way. 

This effort doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s more about taking the time to envision what your effort looks like when every child in the world is using it, and imagining how that could be funded.

Unit economics is not just about money. It’s also about resources, the amount of space and people available to support your efforts. Are there enough of these resources to reach everyone?

At Mastery Hour (our free math tutoring non-profit), we were committed to find a way to scale quality 1-1 tutoring. Mastery Hour is not an expensive program to run, but our most valuable resource is our volunteers. When I took a look at unit economics and how they could scale, I realized that we ran into a resource scarcity problem.

While 1-1 tutoring is profoundly impactful, it has also been preventively expensive to deliver high quality 1-1 tutoring at scale. Our approach was to recruit math majors at colleges and universities to volunteer, train them in developmentally appropriate communication strategies and inquiry-based learning, and pair them with adaptive learning apps to help their students learn. College math professors (who were also volunteers) and would pop into different breakout rooms to observe the student tutors and give them feedback. For the college students, this helped them get teaching experience, fulfill service commitments, and improve their mental health through other-centered activity. We were also able to include a mentoring program and support them in their efforts to pursue higher levels of education and get career placement. 

However, when I ran the numbers to see if we could serve all kids in the United States through this model (or even all the ones living below poverty), I discovered a problem. There were way many more underresourced children who needed math tutoring then there were math majors at colleges and universities. There are 50.7 million children enrolled in public school.  20.3 million students were enrolled in undergraduate programs in 2022. Currently 16% of American children (11.6 million) live in poverty and 13 million children faced hunger in 2022.  This would mean that we’d require 50% of undergraduate students to tutor to even reach the highest needs students, and this wouldn’t begin to cover the total population that needed support. Our model would not be able to serve all the children in the United States, much less the world with the potential math major volunteers, or even the potential college students available. In fact, we were already running into trouble because our tutor count would drop dramatically during final exams at colleges and universities. And as we started dipping into state schools and community colleges for volunteers, tutors started needing a significant more amount of training, vetting and support. 

Our aha moment came when one of the math professors we were working with asked if their 12 year old son (who was highly gifted at math) could tutor. He was a hit with the younger kids! We realized we could draw on high school and even middle school students to volunteer to tutor. The high school students were highly motivated to build their college portfolio and get experience that would allow them to eventually earn income tutoring. As our kids got better at math, they were also able to start stepping into the role of tutor as well. This greatly expanded our pool of quality tutors, and also helped us see how we could expand the pool further by converting students into tutors once they’d improved in math. 

Realistic unit economics + getting creative about funding 

Just because the funding for your unit economics doesn’t exist now doesn’t mean that it won’t someday. Think big, but keep your unit economics realistic.  Airbnb and Uber have been wildly successful because they’ve focused a huge portion of their company on changing legislation. There are a lot of people hard at work trying to implement school choice laws that would make funding available to parents to homeschool or attend private school. You can be part of these efforts. Out-of the box ideas like recruiting high school students or grannies or parents to volunteer, hosting classes in your home, or getting recycled computers for kids can further your efforts. 

Even if you don’t want to reform the whole educational system, and you’re simply building a homeschool co-op in your house that you want to make accessible, it’s worthwhile considering whether you’ve built a model that has unit economics that could be replicated and eventually serve all underresourced families in the community, or if it’s just helping that one child. If your plan is to charge affluent parents more, are you sure they’re willing to pay that? Is that enough to finance your initiative? Otherwise, you risk just assuaging your own guilt, and unintentionally contributing to the widening achievement gap in education by not creating a model that can serve everyone. 

3. Location

Location plays a pivotal role in democratizing education, as it directly impacts accessibility for underresourced communities. Too often, families with limited resources are burdened with long commutes or inconvenient schedules to access educational opportunities in more affluent areas. To truly democratize education, it is imperative to reverse this trend by bringing educational offerings to the doorstep of those who need them the most. This can be achieved through initiatives such as establishing learning centers in underserved areas, leveraging online platforms to deliver education remotely, and empowering parents to facilitate learning within their communities.

Creating educational offerings in underserved areas addresses the geographical barriers that impede access to quality education. By strategically locating learning centers in these communities, students and families are spared the hardship of lengthy commutes, making education more accessible and equitable. Additionally, leveraging online platforms provides a flexible and convenient alternative, allowing students to engage in learning from the comfort of their homes. This not only eliminates geographical constraints but also caters to diverse learning needs and preferences.

Empowering parents also plays a crucial role in democratizing education, as they are often the primary influencers in their children's educational journey. By equipping parents with resources and support, they can actively participate in their children's learning process, regardless of their geographical location. 

Ensuring that initial brainstorming meetings and planning sessions are easily accessible further fosters community involvement and collaboration, laying the foundation for a more inclusive and democratic education system. Ultimately, by prioritizing location as a key consideration in educational initiatives, we can strive towards a more equitable and accessible education for all.

Reaching the people who need you most

When you set up that first meeting and want to start involving the community in the creation of your resource and getting their feedback on unit economics, and creative approaches to finding resources to make the offering sustainable, you’ll need to understand how to connect with underresourced families.

Category B: Communication 

4. Outreach channels

When we think of education models with great unit economics, online courses seem like a no brainer. However, despite their huge promise, Moocs (massive open online courses) have failed to democratize education in the way we’d all hoped. Free online classes and digital learning apps have unintentionally privileged the elite more than they’ve expanded education to all. 

A significant reason for this is the way that people find information. More affluent families are more likely to know that MOOCs exist because they are more likely to hear about them from traditional channels.  (Access to internet, electricity and IT support clearly impacts this as well)

It’s not enough to create an accessible offering. You need to ensure that the people who need it the most know it exists. 

When I founded SchoolClosures, I too was excited about the promise of the internet to give every family access to information to support their children during the crisis. One of our early partners, EdNavigator (an incredible non-profit that’s highly in touch with the needs of the community it serves) quickly pointed out to me that if we wanted to reach the families who needed us most, we needed to be more creative about our outreach plan. 

When you involve the community you want to serve at the inception of your offering, you can learn about where they find their information and focus there. 

Here are some communication channels we found effective when we were expanding SchoolClosures and Mastery Hour. 

• Places or worship: You can approach local churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of workshop and ask the parishioner if they can make an announcement about your service. You can offer to set up a table and give people information. 

• Local Radio: Doing an interview on a local radio station or placing an ad can be a particularly helpful way to reach people during work, or on their way to work. As it’s an auditory channel, it can allow you to reach people who may not have strong reading skills. 

• Partnerships with Schools: With Mastery Hour, we found that partnering with local, Title I schools was particularly impactful. We chose to contact the principals directly, and ask them if they felt students could benefit from free tutoring. Many were highly enthusiastic and offered to let us present Mastery Hour at their online parent meeting, or even offer it as an in-school intervention. They also were able to offer invaluable feedback on how to improve our offering for their community. The emails and phone numbers of school principals are public data and easy to find. 

• Community organizations: There are likely many wonderful nonprofits and community based organizations already working with the community you serve. At SchoolClosures, we had 80 partners who were vital to making sure our outreach efforts reached the communities who needed them most. We served as a central point of information where families could access all the free offerings and support available so each organization didn’t have to reinvent the wheel for its community.  

• Places of Work: One of our partners was Panera Bread.  They were committed to supporting their employees during the pandemic, many of whom were parents. Additionally, Panera bread already had partnerships with 3,300 charities nationwide, including food pantries, veteran services and youth shelters to deliver meals to the hungry.. 

Approach the organizers of these channels in the spirit of humility. You are proposing an idea and asking for their feedback. If they think it’s a good idea, you are offering your time, an open mind, your expertise, resources and active listening to help implement it.  Perhaps they might invite you into efforts they’re already working on. Typically, the organizers of these channels will be enthusiastically responsive provided they believe there is a need for your service and if you invite them to offer feedback and be as involved as much as they want in tailoring it to their community’s needs.  Remember, they are often time-constrained, so they’re glad you are willing to step up and do the work.

5. Literacy

11% of US adults don’t know how to read. Many more don’t know how to read well. According to a Gallup analysis of US DOE data, 54% of US adults read below a sixth-grade level. Worldwide, 773 million adults cannot read or write (and they are primarily women).

“According to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a large-scale international literacy study, 11% of American adults do not have the basic literacy and language skills. That’s 43 million working American adults who do not have  “the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”  Adult Literacy in the United States”

When you’re thinking about how to support parents in finding and learning to use your program, be wary of relying on information that needs to be read. Live video and podcasts are gaining popular appeal, but as we’ll discuss, many underresourced parents don’t have access to the internet. 

That’s why outreach channels like radios and live presentations at schools and community organizations are so vital to expanding your efforts. People may also be ashamed that they can’t read well and not tell you, so try to close the loop with people you talk to in person, ensuring they have the information they need, rather than re-directing them to a website or a brochure to learn more. 

With SchoolClosures, we set up a hotline so that any parent could call us and ask for information. We never directed them to outside resources that they would have to read. Instead, we made sure we closed the loop with them on every request, ensuring they got the support they needed. With Mastery Hour, we gave many live presentations via the schools we collaborated with, and made sure there were ways that families could sign up through their teacher if needed. 

We also offered orientations to families in English and Spanish.  

6. Language

Along with literacy, it’s critical to keep in mind that parents may not understand or speak English. 

“In 2019, about 63 percent of children in households where at least one of the parents held less than a high school degree, did not speak any English at home in the United States” U.S. children who don't speak English at home, by parent's education 2019 | Statista

When we started expanding Mastery Hour, we approached Title I schools, asked them if they thought free math tutoring would be helpful to their parents and if there’s anything they’d like us to change about our offering to make it more useful to their parents. The first school that expressed interest in the program said they would share the program if we offered it in Spanish. So we got right to work. An Argentinian-American high school student translated all our materials and enrollment  forms. She also hosted Spanish language orientations and served as my interpreter at school presentations.  We  recruited math tutors who spoke Spanish to volunteer. There was such a high need for Spanish language math tutoring that many schools were willing to partner with an almost completely unknown program. We then developed a habit of asking every parent their native language when they enrolled. This information helped us see we needed tutors who spoke Vietnamese and Chinese as well, and we began a process where tutors would identify which languages they spoke when they signed up and joined our Zoom room for tutoring so we could pair them with kids who needed tutoring in that language.  

Ultimately we found that what was most critical was having the orientations for parents in Spanish. The parents needed to understand how the program worked. Afterwards, the children could be tutored in English or Spanish. 

You need to be aware of the languages parents speak in the communities you are serving and make sure that your program materials are available in that language. You need to offer orientations in the community in that language and have live support in that language. With AI, it’s easier than ever to translate materials into multiple languages so parents can read them and all kids can participate. 

It might be easier than you think to recruit volunteers to help. You’d be surprised at how many college students or even adult volunteers are excited to practice their foreign language skills with a native speaker in a volunteer capacity. 

Category C: Getting real about technology

What’s possible now and in the future? 

Building an AI-powered literacy app seems like such a great idea that every time I open LinkedIn there seems to be a new startup re-inventing this idea.

But how can we truly help the kids who need to learn how to read when so many of their parents and caregivers lack access to the internet, electricity, tablets or understand how to use basic technology?

These problems are not insurmountable, but they need to be taken into account if we don’t want to risk growing the education gap, rather than decreasing it. We need to focus on expanding access to the internet, renewable energy, devices and improving digital literacy. But in the meanwhile, we need clever workarounds, like mailing print materials, distributing solar-powered, offline devices and offering IT support to use them. In many ways, efforts like expanding access to renewable energy are just as impactful to widening educational access as building literacy apps (if not vastly more so). 

This needs to be included in the financial model for equity where you make unit economics scaleable at inception. If your big vision is to build a literacy app that can teach every child to read, how much does it cost to get internet or electricity to every child in the US or the world? If you’re building a microschool with online class components, how does getting electricity or broadband to high-need students impact the cost of tuition? What’s the most cost-effective, quick way to do this in the short and long-term? What kind of team and resources are involved in making this happen? Do you need to hire lobbyists or hardware engineers? Or will you focus on phone support or mailing materials for now? How does that impact unit economics?  

7. Internet access

How are families supposed to use your app if they don’t have internet access?

Despite considerable growth in internet usage over the last few years, 2.9 billion people still have never accessed the internet, and 96% of those people live in developing countries. 

The internet may well be the most powerful innovation in history when it comes to  democratizing education. Yet ⅔ of school age children have no access to this tool. 

“That so many children and young people have no internet at home is more than a digital gap –it is a digital canyon,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director. “Lack of connectivity doesn’t just limit children and young people’s ability to connect online. It prevents them from competing in the modern economy. It isolates them from the world. And in the event of school closures, such as those currently experienced by millions due to COVID-19, it causes them to lose out on education. Put bluntly: Lack of internet access is costing the next generation their futures.” Two thirds of the world’s school-age children have no internet access at home, new UNICEF-ITU report says

In the United States, according to the Pew Research Center, 7% of Americans don’t have access to the internet and 12 million kids don’t have access to the internet at home.  

The Federal Communications Commission has partnered with several internet providers to provide free or discounted wifi via the Lifeline Program. However, solving this problem is not as simple as providing free Wifi to all. For many families in rural areas, access to the internet would mean costly infrastructure changes, such as  laying down a cable.  

What this means is we need ways to solve this in the future, and also in the present so kids can benefit from the educational resources available whether they have internet or not. It impacts our offering and our outreach strategies.

Certainly, expanding access to the internet is a great focus for anyone looking to close the educational gap.  Indeed, every founder of an online class or digital learning app would do well to get involved in advocacy to bring broadband to rural America and around the world. The internet is one of the best self-directed learning tools that exists. 

“People from historically disadvantaged communities, especially Black and Hispanic populations that lack internet access, are subjected to consistent and perpetual inequalities. Most notably, poverty and the restriction of opportunities in education, employment, health care, entrepreneurship and more are prohibiting their access to improved quality of life. Being subjected to the digital divide has added to the existing inequalities of some rural residents, making it imperative that states, localities, and tribal lands ensure that the goals of the IIJA serve the least connected communities first.” Why the federal government needs to step up efforts to close the rural broadband divide | Brookings

In the meanwhile, there are a variety of ways to make education accessible now by making the resource available offline. 

• Print materials. EdNavigator mailed curriculum to parents during the pandemic. 

• Having a phone number. When we built SchoolClosures, we specifically started with a hotline so that families could call in to get support. With Mastery Hour, we used Zoom, which provides the option for families to call to connect with a tutor, rather than to have to log in with their computer.  

• Offline availability. Companies like Khan Academy ensure that their digital learning apps are available for offline use. 

• Partnering with libraries and community organizations. Since families use the library for internet use, companies can ensure libraries have their digital learning app or online resource available for use there. 

• Make your app mobile friendly and distribute mobile devices with solar chargers. Smart phones don’t require an internet connection, just a data connection and are more cost-effective.

• Get creative. If someone can play piano on the piazza, why not set up a computer lab there too? I love the idea of pop-up labs outside or in community centers where kids can get access to digital technology. Sugata Mitra’s famous Hole-In-The-Wall experiment is an inspiring example of the power of bringing computers and the internet to kids and watching education unfold. 

8. Digital Devices

How can you use a digital learning app if you don’t have a digital device?

Common Sense Media reports about 75% of US children under 8 have access to some type of smart mobile device or tablet at home. That’s 25% who can’t benefit from digital literacy apps in their home environment.  75% of American Children Under 8 Have Access to a Smartphone or Tablet

When we were running SchoolClosures, we discovered that some public school districts were short as many as 20,000 tablets. The implication was that the children who didn’t have devices were not able to tune into any classes during the duration of the pandemic. Getting devices to parents quickly became a critical concern for us as more and more parents called in to tell us their child couldn’t participate in school because they didn’t have a tablet.  To address this, we launched a campaign called givecomputers.org where we partnered with PCs for People, a non-profit that recycles old computers and donates or resells them at an affordable price. 

While we’ve made progress since the pandemic, there is still a shortage of devices for students. 

This has been compounded by supply chain issues since the Covid-19 crisis, making it harder to produce low-cost devices as quickly as they’re needed. Entrepreneurs seeking to expand access to education need to consider how children will get the hardware they need to fully benefit from their offerings. And if you work for a corporation with extra computers lying around, please consider donating them to an organization that recycles computers. 

See: The Digital Divide Starts With a Laptop Shortage - The New York Times

9. Electricity

Even if you have a digital device, how do you power it if you don’t have access to electricity?

According to World Bank Data, only 44.8% of low-income people have access to electricity. The most recent projections by the IEA suggested the total number of people without electricity was projected to decrease to 745 million by the end of 2023.  

The pandemic and global energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dealt a strong blow to progress on improving access to electricity. The number of people without access globally increased in 2022 for the first time in decades, rising by around 6 million to roughly 760 million. This setback was primarily concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where four in five people without access live today. Access to electricity – SDG7: Data and Projections – Analysis - IEA

As we’ve established, there’s a strong correlation between efforts to help the environment and expand access to education. In addition to educational access, getting electricity, particularly renewable forms of clean energy, has a huge impact on climate, economic development and human health. Project Drawdown lists expanding access to renewable energy as it’s #2 priority for curbing climate change, secondary only to reducing food waste. 

A shift to renewable energy for all people is absolutely possible. And those of us who care about education should keep electricity at the top of our minds as we talk to elected officials and design new programs to support educational access. 

As we look forward, an electricity transformation is undeniably possible. Already, a shift away from coal-powered electricity is underway in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and much of Europe. The price is dropping, and economics favor wind and sun over fossil fuels in many places—further accelerating the transition. The speed of transformation is the issue at hand. We must start with renewable sources in places where electricity is just being installed. And we must curtail and supplant 19th- and 20th-century forms of production more rapidly—including the large pipeline of proposed new coal plants—while ensuring that the future of clean electricity is equitable and empowering for all. Climate Solutions for a New Decade

Founders need to understand that electricity is a limiting factor for many families. They need to look into solar power and other renewable energy sources to power devices, participate in efforts to expand access to renewable electricity and focus on educational efforts (such as print materials) and outdoor learning programs that don’t require electricity. 

10. Digital literacy

Devices aren’t enough. Families need IT support.

The Institute for Education Statistics estimates 16% of US adults are digitally illiterate, meaning they’ve never used a computer, failed a basic computer test or “opted out of a computer test.” That number grows to 26% across OECD countries. In 2021, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) released a report revealing 37% of the world’s population (2.9 billion people)  have never once used the internet, and 96% of those live in developing countries. 

Looking back at our work with SchoolClosures, there is one family I feel we failed. As a founder, we always try to focus on the wins, but it’s hard not to remember that one person you wish you’d helped more. At SchoolClosures, we were deeply committed to not passing people off, but closing the loop with them until their problem was solved, whether that meant dinner on their table that night or a new computer delivered to their house. 

A grandmother called us because she couldn’t figure out how to log onto Zoom. She was raising her grandchild who needed Zoom to use his classes at school. At first, our volunteers talked to her and helped her walk through the process, to no avail. As more people started calling in with needs for help with IT support, we realized we needed to recruit volunteers who were IT support specialists from google and other major companies to help with requests. They were also not able to assist her. Finally, the CEO of one of our partner companies, also a mom, called her twice and spoke to her for hours trying to help her figure out how to log into  Zoom so her grandson could participate in his online classes. No one was able to close the loop. Ultimately, I got distracted by running six different projects, hosting anti-racism workshops, recruiting more volunteers and attempting to turn SchoolClosures into a fully integrated tech platform (which we never accomplished). We never closed this loop.

If I were to approach this problem again, what I would have done is find a volunteer in her neighborhood or at the child’s school to put on a mask, go to their house and teach the child and the grandma how to log into Zoom in person. 

Many of us grew up surrounded by technology. Parents often laugh when they find that their two-year old has figured out how to log into their iphone and watch YouTube videos. However, we often forget that % of the world does not have basic digital literacy skills, and what a huge learning curve this can be for someone who has never used a computer. 

The implication is that it’s not as simple as handing a family a free device and giving them wifi. They need support in learning how to use these tools as well. 

A mindful approach to technology

Digital Literacy skills go beyond simply knowing how to use a computer. We also need to teach children how to navigate technology mindfully.  Mounting evidence shows a direct correlation between the teen mental health crisis and the adoption of social media. 

In our interview on Teach Your Kids, Rachel Thomas and I talk about the difference between active, educational, relational screen time, vs passive screen time. Time children spend engaging with parents while using educational apps would be the highest quality screen time, while watching a YouTube video alone that has no educational value would be the lowest form. Anyone who has talked to a friend on Zoom understands this “screen time” has a very different feel to it than binging a reality TV show on Netflix. 

I always encourage parents to engage with their children when they’re using digital learning apps or watching YouTube videos. The educational benefits are enhanced when parents and caregivers ask questions and engage with children while they’re going through the material. 

In Mastery Hour and Modulo, we pair digital learning apps with live tutors (another example of active, educational, relational screen time). This method has proven highly effective in accelerating learning because the digital learning apps provide scaffolding and a well-constructed curriculum; the live tutors encourage critical thinking and foster a secure attachment with the kids which creates a safe, motivating environment for learning; they apply inquiry-based learning, make sure the children are absorbing what they’re learning and can articulate it back. 

Category D: Solutions and Undertapped Resources

If you care about closing, and not widening the educational gap, and you’ve discovered that you need to re-think your unit economics, and approach to technology to make your offering scaleable (and thus equitable) do not despair. 

The good news is that the world has more than enough money and resources to democratize education if we’re intentional about how we go about this. 

Now we’ll delve into the resources you can draw on to fine tune your economics and build a model for expanding high quality, relevant education worldwide. First I will address effective approaches to technology, and secondly I’ll discuss how to harness the power of the whole community to deliver your offering (saving money and significantly improving quality and relevancy in the process).

Technology Solutions: Solar Power, Smart Phones and Offline Access

11. Solar Power 

While we continue to work towards expanding access to renewable energy and the internet we can integrate our awareness about the lack of access to electricity into the products we design. In addition to supporting the expansion of renewable energy worldwide, we need to take into consideration that many stakeholders we want to help who don’t have it now. 

Imagine Worldwide is an organization that’s taken a promising approach to the electricity, tablet and internet problem. They have been distributing solar-powered tablets preloaded with digital learning apps to schools in Malawi. The devices can be used offline, so no internet access is needed. Furthermore, the organization has taken the additional steps of training the teachers to use the tablets with children. After less than five months in the program, 50% of children participating in the program advanced on national literacy benchmarks and after 13 months, 72% attained “emergent or fluent mathematics status.” 

Imagine Worldwide understands how indispensable IT support is in the implementation of their solar, offline tablet in schools and makes teacher training a vital component of their work. Even if families have electricity, get the internet and shiny new tablets, they may not have the digital literacy skills to understand how to use them. 

Experts suggest distributing smartphones and cell phone coverage is much easier and cost-effective than changing the physical infrastructure in a way that allows for wireless access. If we can provide solar power for these smartphones, it will allow families to use them without electricity. 

A recent study by Afro Barometer found that in 35 African countries cell phone service coverage has spread much faster than other utilities. More citizens had access to cell phone service than electricity, piped water, paved roads, or sewerage. This has already spurred numerous innovations from solar-powered phone chargers to low energy consuming lights to mobile banking, where countries such as Kenya are the global leaders...The increased connectivity has changed the pace at which knowledge and information are dispersed, opening up access to people around the globe of all socioeconomic levels Skills for a changing world: Advancing quality learning for vibrant societies | Brookings

12. Offline access

With so many families who don’t have access to the internet or stable internet, making digital learning apps available offline can make all the difference in the ability of a child to use their offering or not.  Khan Academy Kids is an example of a company that understands the needs of its core users and has made their app available offline. 

Not all learning interventions have to be digital. Nature-based programs are wonderful, and have profound impacts on cognitive development, as well as emotional and physical health. 

During the Covid-19 crisis, EdNavigator sprung into action and distributed printed packets to underresourced students in rural areas without internet access, ensuring they could continue to use 

13. Smartphones

While the use of smartphones in schools is controversial, they offer one of the most accessible means of accessing the internet and educational content, particularly in areas where Wi-Fi networks are scarce or nonexistent, thanks to the broader coverage of cellular data networks. 

The distribution of mobile phones is cost-effective and experts suggest that it is entirely feasible to distribute mobile devices on a global scale.

“advances in technology are by no means reserved for industrialized countries. Thanks to mobile phones, experts estimate that this type of technology can reach every person in the world. One estimate finds that, by 2020, more people in the world will have smartphones than electricity. Already today, 70 percent of households in the bottom fifth of the population have mobile phones, providing their main source of internet access, in developing countries. The improvements in technology have helped increase access and decrease prices, and the average mobile subscriber cost decreased by 99 percent from 2005 to 2013. Developing countries have been able to “leapfrog,” or bypass hard-wired communications technology into much cheaper digital technology. Skills for a changing world: Advancing quality learning for vibrant societies | Brookings

If you’re building an adaptive learning app, make it mobile-friendly and include mobile phone distribution and innovations like solar powered chargers as part of your big plan.

“In their account of technological evolution, MIT technology and business experts Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that the Digital Revolution is transforming people’s relationship to cognitive or mental work…Thanks to mobile phones, experts estimate that this type of technology can reach every person in the world. One estimate finds that, by 2020, more people in the world will have smartphones than electricity. Already today, 70 percent of households in the bottom fifth of the population have mobile phones, providing their main source of internet access, in developing countries. The improvements in technology have helped increase access and decrease prices, and the average mobile subscriber cost decreased by 99 percent from 2005 to 2013. Developing countries have been able to “leapfrog,” or bypass hard-wired communications technology into much cheaper digital technology. Skills for a changing world: Advancing quality learning for vibrant societies | Brookings

💡 What if someone built a solar-powered mobile phone pre-loaded with the best educational adaptive digital learning apps, available in every language with audio-based instructions showing parents how to use the phone (and live IT support for families)? The organization could also distribute the devices personally and train parents to use them with their children.

There could be incentives for progress and usage. Perhaps there could even be an open-sourced element, where users could build and contribute new apps to the device. Maybe kids could safely connect with volunteer tutors, or other children around the world and practice language skills. Imagine the impact that could make!

Community Solutions: Teens & Seniors, Shared space, Government & Business, Parents, Other Community members.

14. Teens and seniors as volunteers

When Julie Vuong, Elvin Lin and I founded Mastery Hour, our vision was to make free, high quality tutoring available to every child. Initially, we struggled to find reliable tutors, but we discovered through trial and error that if we focused on recruiting math majors from college and universities, with a little bit of training in child-centered communication and pairing them with exceptional learning apps, the quality of the tutoring was consistently high. The added benefit was that they’d already been pre-vetted by their college admissions committee and math professor, saving us time and resources.

But then we ran into a problem with unit economics. As I suggested to you in consideration #2, I built a model to see if our unit economics checked out, if resources were available to serve all children in the world. I took into account monetary costs, volunteers, and technology needs discussed above.

In terms of costs, we were golden. I even factored in purchasing devices for kids who didn’t have them. We handled the internet access problem by allowing users to call in via a toll free number. 

But with scale, our model ran into a volunteer scarcity problem.

Ast turned out there 15.1 million college students in the United States and only 1.275% are math and statistics majors. 

It dawned on me there were not nearly enough undergraduate math majors in existence to meet  EVEN the tutoring needs of the 13 million in the United States living in such abject poverty that they’re at risk of extreme hunger. And there are so many more that need and can’t afford math tutoring.  I wasn’t about to limit the offering to only children in extreme poverty. I wanted to make it accessible to all. And I wanted the same offering to help accelerate high-performing affluent students as much as underresourced students. Mastery Hour was intended to be a premium product, available to all. 

Our “aha” moment came when one of the math professors asked if her 12 year old son could volunteer, “He’s very strong at math.” This young man turned out to be one of our most popular and effective tutors. We increasingly found that high school students were highly motivated volunteers and had more time and a higher incentive to volunteer. In addition to the intrinsic value of giving, and the significant mental health benefits of service, high school and even middle students had the additional motivation of wanting to build their college portfolio. Many have zero teaching experience, so this gave them a perfect way to start building their resumé. The younger children responded very well to peer tutoring, and to our surprise, older students were not ashamed to be tutored in calculus by a younger student. If anything, these younger students were closer to the difficulty of learning math and able to support their peers through it effectively. 

On the other side, we were surprised that some retired professors and teachers were eager to step in and serve. These grannies and grandpas understand the importance of education and are eager to stay relevant and connect to the community in a world where the aging population is increasingly isolated. In this way, we built a diverse community where everyone was learning and growing from each other. 

I’m surprised by how many of us implicitly undervalue youth and the aging. We would do well to draw on the significant energy, creativity and motivation they bring.

If you’re looking for ways to reduce costs, consider bringing teenagers into your volunteer force or paying them a small fee. Offer them training and credentialing. It’s well worth the investment. Seniors can participate as mentors and trainers. You’ll be surprised at the wisdom, energy and goodwill these volunteers can bring to your efforts.  

It’s worthwhile to underline that high school volunteers will likely need more training than older students because they have no job experience. It’s important to be patient. I’ve often engaged high school interns and volunteers in my various efforts to democratize education (Some of the marvelous organizations I’ve worked with include All Star Code and Black Girls Code.). Frequently, I took the interns that no one else wanted due to their lack of experience, poor interviewing skills or late application to internships. Some of my interns didn’t necessarily start knowing that they had to arrive on time for work or be responsible for tasks assigned to them. They didn’t know I counted on them to be there, or that multiple complaints about illness could be off putting for an employer.  But when I took the time to train them without judgment, it gave them invaluable skills which paved the way for them to get  into top universities and get selected for internships and employment at top tech companies. As a teacher, I understand beginner’s mind and took the time to give them training in skills that seemed obvious to me, but are actually skills one accumulates through modeling in the environment and experience. 

15. Government and Corporate funding

My friend Shiren Rattigan is a major advocate for equitable school choice. She is also the founder of a growing Microschool Network called Colossal Academy in Florida (check it out if you want to build an equitable homeschool co-op or learning pod). Colossal Academy is a non-profit and uses donations to help fund scholarships. However, they also accept  AAA and Step-Up Scholarships. These government programs provide funding for parents to make their own educational choices.  

Uber and Airbnb have built massive companies on fierce local and federal lobbying for changes in housing and transportation laws. They’ve experienced major setbacks and also made mistakes along the way. However, without this advocacy these companies would not exist. 

Shiren doesn’t stop at existing resources. She’s actively involved in creating more resources where they didn’t exist before. 

By combining advocacy with healthy unit economics using a hybrid funding model that draws on private tuition, grants and government funding, Shiren has built a model that is accessible to all students at inception and has the potential to scale to serve all students anywhere.

Since Covid-19, numerous new avenues have emerged to fund educational programs that are more accessible than many founders realize. These include tax credits, corporate funding, school choice vouchers, and also becoming a vendor for a charter school. Most notably, in Arizona, parents now get an allotment of funding per child to spend on educational resources, which they can allocate to private school or homeschooling. 

Mel Science, a unique science program that sends a monthly science experiment to kids, has boldly democratized their offering by becoming a certified vendor for hundreds of charter schools and government-funded programs across the United States. 

In my interview with Joe Connor, founder of Odyssey, we explore this evolving landscape.  

16. Shared space

The Growing Season is a beautiful documentary about a preschool in a nursing home. In 2018, their trailer went viral, showing the resonance of this idea with society at large. I couldn’t help feeling what an utopic vision this was, making preschool more affordable via an underused space while bringing love, light and purpose into the lives of aging adults.  Clearly, this type of initiative would run into lots of issues scaling. Nursing homes are highly regulated and there are additional, DoH and DoH regulations on childcare that are tough to work around. But in principle, this kind of intergenerational learning environment that takes advantage of an underused space and engages the elderly with children is a golden idea. 

In American society, there are few spaces where childrens and adults can co-exist. There is school, and then there is work, and then there is home. In Europe, it’s common to see a playground near a coffee shop, but in the US this is less common. Adult spaces are rarely child-friendly (they have lots of pointy corners and breakable items) . I remember one time when I invited families to come to the large open office of my tech accelerator to do user interviews. While the children were well-behaved and didn’t interrupt anyone or break anything, the energy and the volume of the children was clearly very jarring to the other founders. I was essentially told that I couldn’t invite kids there again. This is the same space where happy hours with loud music and drinking were part of the culture, even when founders were working late hours. The activities we do in these spaces are set. We often take for granted that a class or a school needs to be based in a dedicated space, and moreover one that can feel a bit cold and antiseptic, then warm and welcoming for children. 

In 2019, 10 percent of per pupil public education spending was allocated to property, infrastructure, and renovations. “Buildings and grounds” are a huge expense for learning environments that we often take for granted. Wonderschool has been addressing this problem by creating a network of home-based preschools across the United States, eliminating an expensive part of running a school (space) and creating a cozy, comfortable environment for children.  

When I founded CottageClass in 2015, we got very creative about space, renting out art galleries, co-working spaces after school centers, martial arts, dance studios, and used school buses (the real life magic school bus in action!).

In the Reggio Emilia tradition, they say, “the environment is the child’s third teacher.” I strongly believe the way we set up the environment to support learning is critical. And we also need to keep in mind that this applies to the home as well. Children are learning all the time in their environment.) Homey, safe places are ideal for children’s learning.  They are at ease. They are in their lives. One mistake I see founders make a lot is to save money on space by acquiring the cheapest space they can find and not renovating it. It feels cold and antiseptic. Parents visit and they don’t  want to send their children there. A beautiful warm, comfortable space where children feel at home and can learn securely is a better choice. 

The outdoors is also a beautiful place to host children. Forest schools and other outdoor learning environments have become increasingly popular educational options. “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing,” they say in the Waldorf tradition. Children thrive in the outdoors and it eliminates the overhead of a space all together. It’s healthy for their immune system, for their mental health and physical strength and endurance. Families and educators interested in starting or joining can check out the Forest school network.

While this idea may seem odd, we’d do well to remember that only 100 years ago, all children were educated at home. If you actually start to think about why a brick and mortar school is a better place to go every day to learn. It may be more difficult to start coming up with great reasons, especially if you start to need to justify things like why children would need to travel two hours every day to get to school.  

There is so much underutilized space during the day.  If we want to reform education and make it accessible, a shift in consciousness is needed. We need to question the way we’ve been doing things in the past. We need to start getting more creative about space. 

There’s also an added benefit of solving transportation friction when we get creative about space. It’s often challenging for underresourced families to commute to school and other learning opportunities. Sometimes children need to wake up at 4am to attend a learning environment. 

In Pathways to Education, free transportation was a critical component in making the program successful. 

“when interviewing the students participating in Pathways, it’s clear that the public transportation is a big deal to them, that they feel that they have to participate in order to get the public transportation tickets, or else that they would be walking to school.  And when they see their friends getting the free public transportation as well, I think that they see that as a big advantage that they want to do.” Philip Oreopoulos on Freakonomics

By getting creative about space, we can make learning offerings come to students, instead of making students come to them. 

As of this writing, despite my multiple emails, Brian Chesky has still not integrated my idea of incorporating “day space” into the Airbnb model. What if all those young Wall Street Bankers and lawyers with fancy apartments in midtown sleeping five hours a night rented them out to preschools and homeschoolers during the day? 

17. Empowering parents & caregivers

In terms of underutilized talent and resources, parents, grandparents (and other caregivers) come in  #1. One of the most unquestioned assumptions in education is that you have to be a trained teacher to teach your kids. Lately, I’ve been hearing a refrain that 1-1 tutoring has a high impact, but it’s not possible to deliver at scale. 

But there’s a workaround. 

If you can provide families with quality curriculum and digital learning apps (designed for home use), and perhaps (though not always necessarily) a minimum amount of information about how to communicate with kids so they can learn effectively, a parent can easily become their child’s learning guide. 

Family involvement in education

Indeed, the impact of 1-1 tutoring is so huge that it doesn’t need to take a lot of time every day. The Student Impact Accelerator at Brown University research suggests just 40 minutes at a time for elementary students and 1-2 hours a day for middle and high school students for optimal results. It’s not even necessarily beneficial to do more 1-1 tutoring than that because the optimal amount of time per day that needs to be spent in focused study is limited. Kids need lots of unstructured time for mind wandering to develop cognitively. 

Many of the people who have chosen to homeschool are teachers. They’ve seen firsthand the problems with the education system, care about education, have natural confidence in their ability to teach and want to provide the best educational options for their children. (This doesn’t mean you have to be a certified teacher to teach their kids. It’s just that teachers don’t question their abilities the way non-teacher parents sometimes do. These teachers turned homeschool parents would be the first to affirm that.)

Since homeschooling has been going on for so many decades, optimal patterns have emerged, many initiated and developed by these teachers turned homeschoolers. After speaking to hundreds of successful homeschooling families who are homeschooling primarily for educational reasons (as opposed to political or religious ones), the most common pattern I’ve seen are these 1-2 hours a day of Mastery Hours, or focused learning. 

It’s remarkably effective for helping children learn fast. At Modulo, we’ve seen kids go through 9 years of math in six months with an hour of guided learning every day, the same amount of time the average engaged parent or caregiver might devote to helping with homework. 

In many ways, this is similar to helping with homework (we know the impact of parent involvement here is huge), but it’s helping with homework at the time of day when children are most fresh, with the optimal curriculum and learning tools for their learning archetype, and leaving lots of time for creativity, problem solving, self-directed learning and play. 

18. Involving the WHOLE community

It does take a village to raise a child. The education of children impacts the entire community and it benefits all community members to be involved in raising children. 

In addition to talking to the community about your offering from day one, the more you can involve them as active members in day to day operations of your program, the more effective it is likely to be.  As one might imagine, the need for extra support becomes all the more crucial in low income communities when parents are resource constrained, frequently working several jobs just to get by. 

At the beginning of the blog, we talked about the unprecedented impact of Pathways to Education, a program in Canada that drew on community members as mentors for youth, drastically increasing graduation rates in a matter of only a few months. The theory was that children who were succeeding were part of “an old boys club” with mentors and support, so that mentoring could be extended to others, they would also succeed.  This proved invaluable to the success of their program.

“It’s possible that the program is succeeding because there’s not enough support at home or in other parts of the community. I think all households to some degree or other sometimes miss out on providing encouragements or that nudge towards using services that students themselves may not feel that they want to use. I think one interesting possibility is that the program is working essentially by mandating that some students see someone on a regular basis to talk about their academic goals, to get reminded about why they’re in school and where they are going. And to get mandated to use tutoring services even if they don’t really feel that they have time or that they need the help.”  Philip Oreopoulos on Freakonomics

Brooklyn Apple Academy, a homeschool resource center in Brooklyn has a field trip day where they visit different sites all over New York City.  The founder, Noah Mayers, has developed hundreds of relationships with small businesses and corporations that are happy to welcome the children, share their space and expertise with them. 

A few years ago, I described babysitting to a friend from Iran. She was completely shocked that people pay someone to watch their kids. In her family, aunts, uncles, older siblings all pitch in and help raise the family.  In the US, it’s common for people to move away from friends and extended family, which I believe is a huge driver in the childcare crisis, and the loneliness epidemic. 

When I was in my twenties, many of my single, childless friends expressed their sadness that when their friends got married and had kids, they never had time to hang out anymore. A few of us tried to address this by offering to help watch their kids, for free. But the idea of unpaid childcare was awkward to American families used to more transactional childcare relationships. 

In order to address the education and childcare crisis, there will need to be a cultural shift. We need to change the way our communities operate. Parents can’t be expected to raise children alone. And the answer isn’t to outsource raising children either. 

These types of programs that integrate community members into their implementation and delivery tend to be highly effective. Empowering community members can involve drawing on them as volunteers, as employees and making them an integral part of the early research phase and ongoing implementation of initiatives.

Education isn’t just the business of parents.  This is the future generation and we’re all counting on them.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS…

Underresourced vs underprivileged

In this post, you may have notice, I used the word “underresourced” instead of underprivileged. I tend to shy away from softening things by being politically correct, but I do believe language and the choice of words matters. The world privileged implies that education, food, nutrition is a privilege, not a right, and those who have those resources are somehow of a higher status. I find it somewhat offensive. Because who is giving that privilege? Their family? Their community? You? And is something wrong with that family or community for not offering it? 

Education is not charity.

Education is not a gift.

Education is a right. 

Whenever I see a founder using the word underprivileged, I cringe. It makes them sound like they think they’re the savior swooping down to save kids. 

Parents haven’t failed. Society has failed. 

When we use the word underresourced, we make it clear that education is a human right. We position ourselves as equals, eager to serve and eager to learn. We’re not giving out charity, we’re helping people connect with what they deserve. Every child deserves a quality education, clean water, food, a safe environment to live. As a society, we’re failing, but we’re trying to do better. It’s not the child and the family that’s failing by not having access to quality education. We’re the ones who have failed to deliver the kind of education children are entitled to. We can help provide them with those resources and move society towards greater equity, and advance society as a whole. Their education benefits us all.  We should be grateful parents are willing to collaborate with us to help us make amends and settle our enormous debt to them and their children.

Since underprivileged has connotations of charity. By using the word underprivileged, you risk offending the same community you’re trying to serve. Would you like to be called underprivileged? Underresourced is a word we can relate to. It acknowledges we all have basic needs we have to get by. It acknowledges that our situation can change. Today we might not have  the resources we need. But tomorrow, we can.  

Quality, Access and Relevancy

Dr. Winthrop has a great recipe for democratizing education: quality + access + relevancy.

As we seek to democratize education, quality, access and relevancy must all be present and work together in perfect harmony. 

• Quality without access widens the educational gap and pulls resources away from those who need them most. I do believe there is inherent value in creating lab experiments to develop new models of education even if they don’t immediately serve underresourced families, but too often founders say “we’ll find a way to make this affordable later” and they never do. It’s better to have this in place on day one. (To ensure quality and access, pay attention to unit economics and be strategic about outreach efforts) 

• Access without quality is merely an emperor without clothes, doing nothing to help the children it serves. (To ensure quality, observe children using your offering, ask them their goals, measure outcomes and iterate. Too many educational products fail to take into account the needs and impressions of the end user - the child. )

• Quality + Access to education not relevant to the unique needs of children and community it serves will be futile and unsustainable. Relevancy is critical to keep the children, family and community engaged, and ensuring the program supports their most pressing needs. We see this now with the current US school system. As an example, Black families are the fastest growing homeschooling population, citing the failure of schools to teach Black history as a key reason in their decision to exit the system.   Even the highest quality education will fail to engage students if it’s not relevant to their interests and personal goals. (The best way to ensure your offering is relevant is to involve kids, parents, caregivers and community members at its inception)

There is no better cause than democratizing education. And right now, there is more energy directed towards this cause than ever before. 

How are you contributing to efforts to expand access to quality, relevant education? 

How have you gotten creative about resources? 

Please share your answers in the comments so we can all collaborate together.

It’s going to take a lot of work, a lot of offerings and a lot of resources to bring quality, relevant education to every child. The more we collaborate, the more we work together to open up new resources and utilize undertapped ones, the less we compete for finite ones, the better chance we’ll all have of reaching this goal. 

Works Cited and Further Reading:

Challenges and Pitfalls

COVID-19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt could last a lifetime

MOOCS as Accelerators of Social Mobility? A Systematic Review

Developing countries and MOOCs: Online education could hurt national systems.

The Reading Crisis Among the World's Poorest School Children | Brookings

With State Formula for Charter School Funding Likely to Change, City Costs to Grow More Than Budgeted

Digital Devices

75% of American Children Under 8 Have Access to a Smartphone or Tablet

The Digital Divide Starts With a Laptop Shortage - The New York Times

Digital Literacy

Addressing Digital Literacy and Other Reasons for Non-Adoption of Broadband

A Description of U.S.Adults Who Are Not Digitally Literate

Digital literacy for children — 10 things to know | UNICEF Office of Global Insight & Policy

A Global Framework of Reference on Digital Literacy Skills for Indicator 4.4.2

Skills Matter : Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills | OECD Skills Studies | OECD iLibrary

Social Media | Jonathan Haidt

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence | Jon Haidt (After Babel)

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence.

Why the federal government needs to step up efforts to close the rural broadband divide | Brookings

Rachel Thomas Unpacks Homeschooling: A Deep Dive Into Screen Time | Teach Your Kids

Electricity and Renewable Energy

Access to electricity (% of population) | Data

Access to electricity – SDG7: Data and Projections – Analysis - IEA

Electricity | Project Drawdown

Government and Corporate Funding

EdChoice

Joe Connor: Accessing Government Funding for Education Alternatives

Impact of Education

Assessing the Economic Gains of Eradicating Illiteracy Nationally and Regionally in the United States| Gallup 

What Works in Girls' Education: Evidence for the World's Best Investment

Impact: Climate and Sustainability

Project Drawdown

Climate Solutions for a New Decade

Family Planning and Education | Project Drawdown

Table of Solutions | Project Drawdown

Climate Education and Hope is a Very with Elizabeth Bagley | Teach Your Kids

Daniel Jasper: Climate Action for Parents and Kids

Impact: Critical Thinking

How Brian Ray’s flawed research legitimized American homeschooling - The Washington Post

Nurturing Critical Thinkers | Teach Your Kids

Nurturing Critical Thinkers

Journal Club with Dr. Peter Attia

Impact: AI and the Future of Work

What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages: Jobs lost, jobs gained | McKinsey

Internet Access

Two thirds of the world’s school-age children have no internet access at home, new UNICEF-ITU report says

7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they? | Pew Research Center

Facts and Figures 2021: 2.9 billion people still offline - ITU Hub

Internet Access in Sub-Saharan Africa

Imagine Worldwide

Results & Impact - Imagine Worldwide

Options and Challenges in Providing Universal Access to the Internet (Part 1)

Lifeline Program for Low-Income Consumers | Federal Communications Commission

Modulo

Nearly a Quarter of US Households Don't Have Internet Access | PCMag

Millions of Students With Home Internet Access Still Can’t Get Online | EdSurge News

The High Cost of High-Speed Internet in Rural America - Tech News Briefing - WSJ Podcasts

U.S. households with home internet 2022 | Statista

Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?

Language

English Fluency Among Parents: Why It Matters for Student Success

U.S. children who don't speak English at home, by parent's education 2019 | Statista

Literacy

EdNavigator

Adult Literacy in the United States

Parents and Community

How to Afford Homeschooling - Teach Your Kids Community

How to afford homeschooling 💰

Model Dimensions | National Student Support Accelerator

Family involvement in education - Teach Your Kids Community

Family involvement in education

Panera Bread

Pathways to Education

Tutoring with adaptive learning apps | Modulo

Why families and communities are central to education system transformation | Brookings

Why I babysit for free

Smartphones

Skills for a changing world: Advancing quality learning for vibrant societies | Brookings

Smartphones in school? Only when they clearly support learning | UNESCO

Space

COE - Public School Expenditures

Watch The Growing Season Online | Vimeo On Demand on Vimeo

CottageClass: A Microschool Hub That Connects Families With Small-Scale Teachers — & Takes Care of the Business Side – The 74

The Growing Season Trailer

Unit Economics

Colossal Academy

Child Hunger in America | Feeding America

Fast Facts: Expenditures (66)

Kids Count

How to Fix a Broken High-Schooler, in Four Easy Steps (Replay) - Freakonomics

Incredible (And Free) School Hotline Provides Support For Parents And Kids

Julie Vuong - Medical Assistant - Woodbridge Medical Centre | LinkedIn

NCES Blog | National Spending for Public Schools Increases for Third Consecutive Year in School Year 2015-16

The Surprising Poverty Levels Across the U.S. | TIME

Mastery Learning Hour

Online Learning Resources with a Strong User Feedback Loop

Beast Academy

See my interview : Navigating Math with Curiosity: Jason Batterson & Jasmine Eyal on Beast Academy

Epic! Reading

See my interview: Epic! Reading with Suren Markosian and Kevin Donahue

Organizations making an impact

Colossal Academy

EdNavigator

Imagine Worldwide

Panera Bread

Pathways to Education

About Pathways: How to Fix a Broken High-Schooler, in Four Easy Steps (Replay) - Freakonomics

Results & Impact - Imagine Worldwide

Odyssey (see my interview with Joe Connor)

Projects I’ve built to democratize quality, relevant education

CottageClass: A Microschool Hub That Connects Families With Small-Scale Teachers — & Takes Care of the Business Side – The 74

School Closures: Incredible (And Free) School Hotline Provides Support For Parents And Kids

Mastery Learning Hour

Modulo

Are you building a project to help democratize access to quality, relevant education - or do you have questions about how to do so? Please share in the comments so we can all help each other.