As someone whose career has revolved around education, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed with these guidelines. The focus is entirely on formal schooling as opposed to education.
The problem is that "widely accepted standards", especially in the US are sub-optimal in terms of educational outcome. Even if Common Core were great (which is not the case), continuing to improve pedagogy and curriculum should be ongoing goals. Similarly, why push people to use a closed system such as Lexile® for rating the difficulty of reading material instead of something open?
On an even more basic level, should edtech offerings be limited to children living in the US at all? I would say no. Most Americans aren't children and most humans aren't Americans.
Agreed. And I would even go a step further. Most often ed (tech) companies focus on education as opposed to learning. It is all about efficiency, organization, administration, and improving conventional education or schooling processes rather than improving the learning processes of the student.
This is a fantastic list, but having experienced many interactions with districts and schools that wanted free pilots over the last 15 years, I would strongly encourage any company to insist on some fee associated with the pilot, even if discounted (assuming you are not doing a freemium model). Pilots don't succeed unless district and school staff are committed and provide the necessary implementation support. In Edtech, your success is critically dependent on effectively engaging with the people using your technology. In many cases, there are people you need to engage who were not part of the decision making process and may even be annoyed that they have to squeeze in yet another one of a zillion initiatives on their plate (perhaps true in any B2B but 10X true in Education). Charging money increases the likelihood that district staff will take your product seriously and put the resources and time behind it that will greatly increase the odds of success. Free pilots are especially tempting in the early days when you are trying to prove yourself, but if your product is truly valuable, a couple successful reference implementations will far outweigh a bunch of fizzled pilots with ambiguous outcomes. Charging for the pilot also helps you weed out schools and districts that are not really serious about solving the problem you solve. Especially in the early days, you want to find those evangelists that will go to bat for you within their bureaucracy and with their more risk averse peers in the market. The serious ones will find the money if you're product is the real deal. Just my two cents based on what I've seen. Never had a single free pilot turn into a school or district sale. For my company, a strong full-price implementation at one or two schools in the district laid solid groundwork for a full-price district deal down the road.
I'm CTO of an edtech company and I'm quite excited to see this list- outside of specialist VCs like Reach and Learn Capital, the typical level of understanding of these nuances by investors is shallow. This will up the game.
However there is one glaring absence: I don't see a recommendation to show provable academic results. You could follow all of these snd still have an ineffective product that doesn't actually advance student learning. Hopefully that will change as schools demand more data driven results from their vendors.
Yeah, I was surprised when I talked with the CTO of a large (raised tens of millions) edtech company and learned that they had done zero work on measuring efficacy for their adaptive learning solution. They literally had no evidence that their platform increased student learning in any way.
To their credit, they were thinking about creating a team to look into this.
I've seen something like this in the marketing industry. I think it happens when success of a company depends not on the efficacy of their solution, but their ability to convince people it works. When customers can't tell whether the solution works or not (or when they can't tell if the metrics you present them are reliable or relevant in any way), efficacy stops being a variable in the business.
Exactly, and I think people view any educational system that is adaptive as necessarily effective. It may be that this is often true, but of course it depends on the specifics and the way it's used in the classroom.
I think this company's strategy was to grab market share with a free product, then start charging for more and more features. By the time people go to pay, they forget that they never actually checked to see if the free product was actually effective in any way.
This doesn't really seem to cover products aimed at homeschoolers or independent learners at all -- are those considered a separate field from "edtech"? And/or are these things YC aren't terribly interested in?
Government stats [1] suggest well over a million homeschooled children in the US. This is towards the low end of various estimates out there. Certainly not non-existent. It varies a lot from country to country, but the YC guidelines are clearly US-centric, and I don't think you can write homeschooling off there.
This is still not that many compared to the children going to school. Additionally that's a very heterogenous group, homeschooling their children for a variety of different reasons, using different approaches following different curricula.
There is certainly space for companies who want to sell educational products and there are companies already doing so. What that means though is that you already have quite a bit of competition in a market that you're not going to completely capture. If this is your target audience you have a relatively low ceiling and you won't be able to push past it.
Additionally you can't scale to different countries or even states that easily. You need different materials to account for different languages, cultures and curricula. You need to account for regulation and a sales teams to approach the various homeschooling groups.
Aren't there specialty publishers for home schooling?
I was home-schooled for a year as a kid, and we used to get catalogs of specialty curriculum (classical education in greek, latin, religious books, etc). Perhaps not material for a "start-up", but there is definitely a very enthusiastic customer base.
I have a homeschooling family member and her behavior closely resembles that of early Ravelry/Etsy/Meetup adopters: she's finding fellow travelers online, meeting up in person, collaborating on events (co-teaching, field trips), and she feels likes she's at the vanguard of a movement.
I'd say this is a stellar business opportunity, especially for a company that is mission-driven, transparent, and possibly even partially crowd-funded.
Many readers of this message may feel a lifetime away from questions of childhood education, but today more than ever parents are realizing the insanity of letting school districting determine where they work and live. And millions of parents want to give their children a better education than their district offers, but can't move or afford private school.
I suspect non-traditional schooling will be as common as remote working in a decade or so.
My parents have a beekeeping business, and the homeschooling set seems to have been great for them. A lot of people are interested in alternative food/medicine stuff, as well as educational 4H type demos of honey extraction, and the homeschooling groups seem to have referred a lot of people to them.
I suspect there would be a bit of culture clash with ycombinator though.
Not to get all wiseacre but the real culture clash is when primary education amounts to almost nothing.
I've taught in inner-city high schools and I'm positive that a single person (parent or otherwise) with the right motivation and tools can better educate a child than a failing system.
I've been working with an edtech client for the past 5 years and accessibility is something I've had to push, if not slip into my hours marked for other things. Of course, my guy is kind of an idea guy who doesn't seem to want to tap into the larger edtech space (and thus funding, etc.), but as far as development priorities it hasn't seemed to even be on the radar. Which is weird to me, but I can't do a ton about it.
This is definitely an area the Feds have been stepping up enforcement of lately. A good search to get started is something like "ed.gov ocr settlement".
Yep, even well-known (and extraordinarily well-funded) edtech companies have zero accessibility features in their products. For example, there is a popular ELA app that offer a single (small) font size, and that ignores the iOS accessibility setting for increased font size.
In many cases, I think the devs figure they'll rely on whatever accessibility features are enabled by the device (TTS, zoom, etc.), but in many cases these features are not sufficient—or don't even work in the app/platform.
Do you think this is caused by selling directly to institutions, rather than the consumers of the application?
I know there are a few products oriented around specific accessibility features that would be sold directly to the people who need them (e.g. tty devices), but it seems the only progress I've seen in this area in software projects was for §508 compliance.
This was a product that is sold largely to institutions, so that could be the issue. Big companies go after big markets, and they tend to view accessibility as niche (and therefore not worth their time). While a particular need might be niche (blindness = .1% of children), when you add up all accessibility needs, it's actually a large chunk of the student population (at least 20%) that gets left out.
I think some edtech companies improperly equate accessibility with special education and write it off as a separate (smaller) market. But the point of accommodations, in many cases, is that many kids can be taught alongside their peers in general ed classes—if they get the right accommodations.
For example, a kid with bad eyesight has an accessibility need (glasses, or if he can't afford them large text). He is not someone who needs to go to a separate special education class. Unfortunately, the lack of accessibility in popular edtech solutions means that kids like this are not able to be served in a gen-ed classroom. This leads to stigmatization and lower achievement.
When exporting grade level data, denote kindergarten with a number 0 (zero), not a letter K, and denote transitional kindergarten with -1 (negative one).
What. What on earth is this set of "guidelines". Is there a color scheme recommendation somewhere in here, too?
As to data privacy, if one of your customers is on a reservation then you really should check to see what the data rules are for that reservation. Making an assumption that only the state and/or federal rules are in effect could be costly.
There's overlap, at least in CA. My company has a license with the CA public library system, which includes some educational libraries. Libraries also perform educational functions—our tools are used by literacy tutors in libraries, in much the same way that they are used by teachers/students in classrooms. So for some products, these guidelines are probably relevant, but for other (e.g., infrastructure) products they're probably much less relevant.
Not edtech, govtech. Public libraries are run by local government municipalities and are generally a department (Libraries, not each individual library) within a city.
(We work with local governments, including libraries.)
This is fantastic. But this sounds like it's mostly intended for startups at an early/mid stage. What I mean is companies who already run a monopoly are more likely, in my opinion, to overlook these guidelines.
Does it matter? The purpose of these guidelines IMO is to improve the standards of EdTech products and perhaps the value they create for education as a whole.
To be honest, I'm extremely disappointed in these guidelines, given that this is coming from YC. Why? They divert focus away from doing whatever it takes to make something incredible for users: underserved students in a failing system that's becoming exponentially costly and disconnected from our modern society. Even if that means challenging convention and breaking some rules. Think of where Airbnb, Uber and Bitcoin would be if they had stuck to standards, to name a few big examples. This post goes completely against the "naughtiness" YC (PG) has always looked for in founders. For some reason edtech to date has been an exception to this rule.
Disclaimer: I just submitted a YC W2017 nonprofit application as the solo-founder of Bloom, a new education system powered by software. I'm not sure if this comment will help or hurt me if I get responses, but I think something needs to be said. I put my app up on Dropbox for you to check out if interested. Still searching for a great cofounder. If this is an issue you really care about, feel free to DM me on Twitter. I'll fly out anywhere.
Bloom YC W2017 application: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1szvs6o4qs15djj/KD%20%26%20Bloom%2...
The cost efficiencies of conventional public and private education today are abysmal. Teachers don't scale. Campuses don't either and are physically isolating. And Common Core, courses, grades, tests, and degrees are arbitrary practices that could by replaced by something completely different, something designed for the digital age. Something not only better than public schools, the most prestigious private prep schools and the Harvards and Stanfords, but something that could scale to everyone in the best and worst of areas of the world. Education is a lifelong right that everyone clearly needs and deserves as technology continues to advance exponentially.
Yet for some reason, edtech hasn't been able to look beyond the current state of things and build something completely new. There isn't an "Uber" or "Bitcoin" of edtech. And I believe the reason why is solely because of posts like this: advice that places too much importance on working with inefficient systems, industry best practices, laws and trying to fix a broken system instead of ignoring all of that unimportant stuff to just focus on users and build a new one from scratch through software. As a result, current edtech solutions are fragmented, inflexible, slow, general and boring, just like physical schools.
So what will education look like in the future? In my opinion, it will be a cohesive system that’s modular, peer-to-peer and mobile. That’s the only way an edtech platform can both scale to ->7.5 billion users and support arbitrary specializations adaptable to the future.
I think a good parallel to the approach I'm talking about is what Urbit has been trying to do to re-decentralize the Internet. Instead of trying to solve each problem one at a time, they've built a cohesive system from scratch on top of the old, broken Internet, which solves all of its problems in one go. This is the approach I think edtech needs to take, and ignore everything else.
Yes, clear product vision and implementation ease are important for edtech startups. But you could say the same about Uber and Airbnb.
Yes, viral current content is important. But you could say the same about Netflix and Twitch.
Yes, flexible, optimized pricing is important. But that can be solved in other creative ways.
Yes, exceptional customer support, respect for privacy and organization transparency are vital, but that's expected of any great YC startup.
I'm just shocked software hasn't eaten the education system yet, because ultimately the quality of kids' entire lives are on the line. I would know.
> Yet for some reason, edtech hasn't been able to look beyond the current state of things and build something completely new. There isn't an "Uber" or "Bitcoin" of edtech. And I believe the reason why is solely because of posts like this: advice that places too much importance on working with inefficient systems, industry best practices, laws and trying to fix a broken system instead of ignoring all of that unimportant stuff and just focusing on users to build a new one from scratch through software.
The number one obstacle quite frankly is law and accreditation. They force the certain basic foundation that hinders a revolutionary startup from inventing a different modality.
But that's my point. Uber and Airbnb and Bitcoin didn't confine themselves to laws in the beginning. They just built something that worked. Yes, now that they are big they are hitting legal obstacles (like NYC's ruling on Airbnb rentals today, a top HN post). But they are also now known, and so users are aware of the potential innovation that the current state of law is inhibiting. And that increased demand for these kinds of inevitable new products and services will lead to faster change over time.
Keaton, you make it incredibly clear that you have no understanding about how education works. It's really sad that you criticize YC and our excellent educator community. Your neglect and lack of respect for teachers and traditional schooling is appalling and disturbing.
The saddest part is that a large number of young techies (you are 19) feel like you. Nevertheless, I want to empathize with you, and suggest that you step away from your computer and spend just any small amount of time within our public education system to see the challenges and complexities of serving our students. It is a complex problem and you are grossly understating and trivializing the importance and purpose of existing institutions. The founders of Uber and Bitcoin and Airbnb got nothing on education. Serve even 10 underserved students and drive them to prolonged success, and then come back and talk.
I don't take offense as much as someone running an edtech company, as much as I take for being a part of an outstanding community of people improving education.
But the mean in education isn't all that great, is it?
There's issues that stem from assumptions about education that were correct in the 14th century but have since become a bit dated. You can improve a system built on the wrong premises, but you can't fix it.
It's a system that works through sheer force of will, and squanders the efforts of educators and students alike.
The ambition of education technology shouldn't be to rehabilitate 10 underserved students, no matter how noble of a goal that is. It should be to make sure they aren't ever underserved. The current system can't do that period.
By the time you have fixed the issues that prevent it from doing that, you've ripped out and replaced 90% of it. The way class progression works. Automating lecture components. The testing components. How responsibility over students is handed from teacher to teacher. Assuring best practices are used, both by students and teachers. The curricula and how they feed into each other. Tracking student progress. Negotiation of homework quantity between teachers. Enabling broad collaboration between teachers in matters of teaching materials. Quality assurance.
The rage is not against the fact that there is an education system. It's that it could be so much better. It's against the waste of youth. A class of 30 with only half of it engaged wastes 180 childyears over their K-12s. That's 2 long lifetimes, in the years when their minds are the most malleable.
I've been incredibly inspired by YC and only mean for my criticism to be constructive. But by naming their edtech initiative "Imagine K12", they've already lost.
I care as much about solving education as they do. I think the basis of my argument is factually correct. Just look at the data.
Why not treat education like any other disruptable industry?
Most educational systems are rooted in child-care, not in actually educating students. And the ones that do have the resources to properly educate students are often so entrenched in politics and status that they become better conduits for indoctrination instead of empowering students to better make decisions themselves. Like any old organization problems, it is going to be incredibly difficult for them to shed that history.
I quickly skimmed your site. I think the assignment on counting a room full of cash was brilliant. That should instantly get students attention in general and to how they might count their future stash. I'm interested in hearing how well that assignment did in both learning and creative solutions from students.
You may be right. But if I'm right, I'll help more kids faster. And that's what I care about. And I think I am right, because I see what I'm talking about every day.
With the exception of a few incredible teachers and mentors out there (I myself had several), education today isn't genuinely exciting for most students. Many teachers are truly great people and are valuable to students. But are they a necessity, or a luxury? Either way, in order for educational content to stay current in today's system, teachers need to be taught new information first before they can then teach their students. Physical teacher-to-student teaching is an O(n^k+1) solution that will never be in every city let alone the developing world. If -- and that's a big "if" -- learning could come from a single software-based source of information in a way that was just as good or better than physical teaching today, a world-class education and credit for it could be accessible everywhere. All a student would need is a smartphone, which is relatively nothing compared to the current cost of education. Look at Duolingo as a great example of this for language learning and language-fluency credentialing. And on top of that, is the role of the teacher to in fact teach, or to guide and mentor? Great mentorship is invaluble, but that can also come from anybody great even if they're not in a formal teaching role.
Most learning today, whether technology, science or art, happens through books and YouTube videos and students teaching each other anyways. This peer-to-peer model works. And because through this model, young, radiant students are the primary source of content delivery, this model is also addictively social and exciting. All you have to do is remove the system and let kids do their thing. There's a reason products like Reddit are so popular -- it's an Internet ecosystem for youth all over the world.
Almost everyone who's been largely successful in any field has been self-taught. This isn't a coincidence. Those who truly love what they do enough to commit themselves to becoming world class by definition transcend the limits imposed by conventional educational standards. The problem, then, is not a teaching problem, but an exposure problem and an excitement problem to help kids find their passions and solve problems with friends in person who they love. Could an edtech platform be as viral as a Snapchat, Twitter, Netflix, Twitch Reddit, Buzzfeed? That's what I'm set to find out.
The best prep school in the world Phillips Exeter Academy, where I went, ironically is designed around kids teaching themselves. And parents pay $40,000+ per year for it.
You make some good points and I appreciate the links. The one thing you're leaving off that public and private schools teach are the lessons learned from face-to-face social interactions with peers, bullies, and authority figures. Public schools largely held be back as a savant where I had to learn most shit on my own. Some teachers were great enough to try to help me on the side. Nonetheless, the basic principles on human behavior I've encountered in various workplaces were the same as I dealt with in public schooling. Other people good at balancing various tradeoffs in the schools did well in the workplaces I've been in. Among the worst were the homeschoolers with one or two exceptions. Especially when they were trying to change things with resisting authority figures before getting slapped in the face with constant expectation to do what you're told. If anything, those of us from public school experience more freedom going into average workplace than we had then.
So, if kids left the normal educational system for your app, how would you replicate that experience gained in soft skills when most of their learning is just watching videos or messaging/talking to people through a phone? Or are you going to push it off to parents hoping they just all change in terms of how they facilitate training in social interaction? Remember that many students being held back by poor education are in the hood, rural areas, homes with apathetic parents, etc. The schools might be the closest thing they get to learning from some decent or just diverse people. Plus, there's the side benefit that they're like a day care allowing parents to go to work or have a mental break at least until summer. ;)
>>> Nonetheless, the basic principles on human behavior I've encountered in various workplaces were the same as I dealt with in public schooling. Other people good at balancing various tradeoffs in the schools did well in the workplaces I've been in. Among the worst were the homeschoolers with one or two exceptions. Especially when they were trying to change things with resisting authority figures before getting slapped in the face with constant expectation to do what you're told. If anything, those of us from public school experience more freedom going into average workplace than we had then.
I get what you're saying here, but if the chief virtue of the educational system is that it beats people into submission ready to face life in authoritarian (or micromanagement-disguised-as-teamwork) workplaces, I'm not entirely convinced that it's something worth protecting.
I'd be more interested in thinking about what a workplace should be like to get the best out of people who haven't been taught the kind of deference that seems to be expected.
"I get what you're saying here, but if the chief virtue of the educational system is that it beats people into submission ready to face life in authoritarian (or micromanagement-disguised-as-teamwork) workplaces, I'm not entirely convinced that it's something worth protecting."
I'm against the public school system. So, we agree with each other. Yet, I'm for putting them in situations where some aspect of what they have to do is dictated so they learn respond to that properly. Some of them will allow a clever response to succeed while others will not. Just like in real world.
They need to expect and be ready for this as the authoritarianism is dominant in workplace and government.
If you look over my application linked in the OC, you'll see our number one design goal is to connect users physically. There's something incredibly powerful about the social experience that school provides like you're describing that no big edtech platform today has made an explicit design goal. In short, we'll have to "design for trust" a lot like Airbnb did (see Joe Gebbia's TED talk). The locations could be anywhere from a local Starbucks to a public library to the nearest college campus. If educational content could be optimized for the smartphone, a lot like Snapchat has optimized the Snapchat story as their primary unit of content on mobile, then any place could become a sort of classroom. So long as you're surrounded by kids like you learning and making things with you that you care about. Meetup.com has accomplished this to some extent for working professionals, but we don't think it's specific enough towards specific projects in the context of youth education.
This is going to be a really hard problem to solve overall from a design perspective. And like you hinted, it will be even harder for us to do this for kids in poor or rural areas in contrast to rich kids in urban areas. But we're going to figure it out somehow. If the timing is right, self-driving cars and improved cheap public transportation will help this tremendously. Our app could then in theory automate the entire process of getting a group of kids connected somewhere safe and public. The value and safety of those kinds of experiences could be built upon even further if you add in a kind of crowdsourced mentorship experience on top of that, like Uber for chaperones in a way. If you're a local software engineer or cinematographer or biophysics researcher, you could give back to your local community by helping out local kids who want to contribute in your field. Now all the sudden everybody can become a teacher, which feels really good. Like Quora answers, but in person.
Your application is very interesting but it looks like you're trying to do too much at once. Especially with the AI part haha. I think a subset of it is achievable by one, focused person for a limited set of students and topics. As another said, the crap people deal with today is mandated by law and policy under a regime that won't buy into what you're proposing. Further, many places require by law that the kids are in what educational system considers a school rather than your app. So, you might want to prove the idea by hitting the market for workforce training and personal improvement then pivot into general education as both will use similar resources.
Another problem with your proposal, a huge one, is that there's nothing in it about countering spread of misinformation. Quick link to give an idea of how easy invalid information spreads and persists across social media:
That or another Facebook study also pointed out that retractions (eg a Snopes article) only slowed misinformation in the 30-40% range IIRC. The bad info spreads more and lasts longer in your model. It has to be detected somehow with official counters on any topics where there's a consensus that they need to know. That means your model, like the others, needs human beings that act as sort of teachers and moderators. This is even true for a high-quality forum of smart people like Hacker News. Alternative is some AI that knows everything about how people speak, these topics, how to explain them... artificial teachers of nearly human intelligence that nobody has built yet. Since you lack that and need humans, your model can't scale for general population at the rate of technology scaling. Instead, it's something like N teachers per M groups where the N to M ratio is however much stuff the teachers can follow and moderate. You then modify this somehow with the fact that specific people or groups vetted by teachers as knowing the material can be rated among the N as their input is trustworthy. Might even compensate volunteers somehow a la StackOverflow or Quora if they contribute a certain amount.
Far as full experience regardless of bandwidth, do look up the concept of progressive enhancement as illustrated with this project:
That thing even works on Lynx. Now, you want images, video, interactivity. The images can be compressed quite a bit while still being clear. Same with video. More compression for lower bandwidth links. Animated GIF's done well can illustrate in a few images what otherwise takes a video. Still popular on many sites. Use straight-up text where you can as my old text & RTF files were way smaller than Word or Web files. :) Support for distributed, file sharing within group if on Wifi. Alternatively, on SDcards where they could just buy one, have one person who affords Internet pull the data, and pass the shared card(s) along to group members.
I like how you mix it being a paid service with tax deductions and donations. I predict you'll probably put most or all of the services on the same infrastructure. What you can do is use the money that comes in for business or professional courses to cover creation of general ed material. The cash flow is split to cover each. The people making general ed material should have a track record of writing books or doing online courses that actually worked. They'll adapt it to your model. They'll have to change it for increased effectiveness as user feedback comes in like any other marketing. The cash flow also expands the distribution network so people with low income or poverty can access the material without overloading organization. A number of them might become contributors or paying users later.
So, those are some ideas I got as I read your application.
I think new education systems that are based on software will eventually replace most teacher-based education systems. Not only do teachers not scale, most of them don't understand the subjects they are teaching at a deep enough level to teach these subjects effectively.
I am convinced that software tutors that are based on AI research which was primarily done in the 1970s and 1980s will form the core of these new software education systems. For the past few years I have been working on an AI tutor for solving elementary algebra equations that can already teach parts of this subject better than a human can. If you are interested in discussing how AI tutors like this can be used to help realize the vision you have for Bloom, contact me using the email address that is in my profile.
And I agree in the sense that I believe in YC more than anybody. But I disagree in the sense that no edtech solution to date is dramatically changing the world as much as a Facebook or Uber, so something must not be working. And I'm calling out Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, EdX, Khan Academy, Codecademy, Vidcode, Jumpcut, MakeSchool, AltSchool, HackClub, codings bootcamps and regular school itself. Honestly, the best solutions right now are in fact YouTube, Reddit and Hacker News.
YC won't do your homework for you. There's great resources out there tho - start by spending a few hours on EdSurge. I literally started the company to inform folks like you entering the space to learn what's going on, who's doing what, and how ed is different from other industries being impacted by tech. It's the best resource out there.
The main takeaway I have after seeing so many enter this space in the past 7+ years is that the incurious never get very far. Be curious and seek to understand the paths of others before you, and you may find your place in it all.
With all due respect, it's a total fallacy that edtech has to be different from other industries. There's no physical force in the universe forcing education to be any certain way. So if one way is provably better, we should just build it, and deal with the obstacles when they come up later. Kids, both privileged and not, have been dropping out for years because they're tired of things. I'm building this for them.
To quote Balaji Srinivasan of 21 & A16z:
"Don't argue about regulation.
Build Uber.
Don't argue about monetary policy.
Build Bitcoin.
Don't argue about it.
Build the alternative."
Re:industries, you don't think that the fact that education is about humans, rather than say.. power grids, or financial instruments, or mines, or laundry detergents.. makes it at least somewhat different from other industries? Or that those being served (children) are often not in a position to be the sole determinants of what's best for them, and thus your buyers may not be your users (and all that entails)?
Re:physical forces, there's actually several that have defined why education is a certain way today, and that will shape it in the future. Probably the most powerful is that it's first and foremost about human relationships - foundations of values, trust, physical presence, belonging, etc. And the second most powerful is that poverty is a physical context that shapes outcomes in the most profound of ways. I only bring these up because a) they're taken for granted by many tech entrepreneurs who did not have to worry about them in their own lives, and b) they're the reality tech entrepreneurs grapple with when they focus on the core of education problems, rather than the periphery where most wind up.
You sound pretty dead set in thinking you've got this though, so I wish you the best of luck.
Great point! The wellbeing of millions of students, and the complex web of relationships a school creates in a community, deserves a well regulated industry.
The problem is that "widely accepted standards", especially in the US are sub-optimal in terms of educational outcome. Even if Common Core were great (which is not the case), continuing to improve pedagogy and curriculum should be ongoing goals. Similarly, why push people to use a closed system such as Lexile® for rating the difficulty of reading material instead of something open?
On an even more basic level, should edtech offerings be limited to children living in the US at all? I would say no. Most Americans aren't children and most humans aren't Americans.