Education and the Startup Culture
3 min read
This is a follow-up to some ideas I posted yesterday.
Start up culture is about many things, but a core piece revolves around getting outside funding to support growth for a business that, at its inception, has no source of revenue. There are exceptions, of course - and these exceptions are generally companies like GitHub that were bootstrapped and take advantage of what Tom Preston-Warner calls "the infinite runway." Success at a startup is generally equated with getting funding for an idea, and then, depending on the goals of the founders, either having an IPO or getting bought out.
And this is where many educational ventures get it wrong. They approach it from a "let's build a widget" place - these are things that investors understand. For example, adaptive testing is a widget that a lot of people are building - and this makes sense, given the amount of foundation and government money that is getting poured into using standardized assessments as a means of determining "excellence." But, from an educational place, many people who actually work with kids know how much even the best testing instrument will miss - so in the case of the new great testing widget, it doesn't matter how great it is, because the product isn't meeting an actual need, it's meeting a manufactured need (aka, a need that a policymaker, lobbyist, or marketing professional brought into existence).
And this creates another collision point as startups careen into education: many people building educational products fail to understand why, where, or how their product fits into the process of learning. Some of this can be chalked up to unfamiliarity, and some of it can be chalked up to hubris, but there are a lot of funded startups building products that only look good on a pitch - when they get shoehorned into a classroom, they stand out like a substitute teacher trying to get kids excited about phonics.
In short, awful ideas get funded all the time. Ideas that make sense in a meeting, or within the offices of corporate reform minded investment funds, often don't work well in the classroom. Getting funded means that the pitch was good, but it doesn't guarantee that the product will do much.
And to emphasize, a lot of startups are doing great things. But the reasons that people get excited about startups - usually money, and/or a product that promises "disruption" - are the wrong reasons.
