John Jong-Hyun Kim

Within a matter of weeks this spring, we saw virtually every school building in the country abruptly close, sending students home with worksheets and/or laptops and leaving district  staff scrambling to figure out how to provide not only instruction but meals and other critical supports to students and their families. This sudden shuttering of schools has given parents and our communities a deep appreciation for the important and myriad roles that schools play. In addition to its mission to educate our nation’s students, public schools are critical to the functioning of our communities and to the health of our nation’s economy.

In early 2018, Diane Tavenner, co-founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, a charter management organization, was full of hope and anticipating good outcomes for its future student graduates. The graduating class of 2017 was Summit’s first cohort of high school graduates to have been educated under Summit’s personalized, student self-directed learning model using the Personalized Learning Platform developed along with engineers on loan from Facebook. The design and implementation of this new learning model had been a bold makeover of Summit’s previous high-touch learning model, which had earned it rave reviews. This new model unbundled the conventional roles of the teacher, expected students to advocate for themselves and make decisions about how they learn, and shifted the importance of technology from the margins to the center. “We made a big bet,” Tavenner said of the model change, “but a bet I felt we owed it to our students to make.”

In March 2020, India announced a three-week national lockdown requiring everyone to stay at home to counter the transmission of the Coronavirus. Government officials urgently began looking for ways to ensure learning continued in a remote environment.

Madhav Chavan, co-founder of Pratham, an NGO which focused on high-quality, low-cost and replicable interventions to address gaps in the Indian education system, realized that Pratham needed to assist the government. Could their digital initiative, PraDigi Open Learning, launched in rural residential communities, away from schools, be part of the solution?  Chavan pondered on the challenges of moving education completely virtual and aligning with the formal school system.

During a break after starting and selling several successful technology based startups, Hadi Partovi decided to make a short film to inspire students to learn computer science. “Code.org started as a hobby project,” Hadi said. “I had helped pay my way through college as a computer programmer and had a fantastic career in the tech industry. I had been living the American Dream. Meanwhile, the skills I had learned that created the opportunities I enjoyed, were not being offered in the vast majority of U.S. schools.” What started as a hobby turned into a mission to provide every K-12 student in the United States the opportunity to learn computer science. Hadi quickly learns the challenges of introducing a new curriculum to 13,500 school districts and more than 100,000 schools in the US. Are Hadi and his team on the right path?

Educators and entrepreneurs alike are excited about the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to change the way learning will look like in the future.  There is a confluence of factors such as the availability of large sources of rich, granular data; fast connectivity; powerful processing capabilities at a lower cost; and the ubiquity of mobile devices driving the imagination of entrepreneurs who are envisioning a world powered by AI to change the way learning should happen.

Connections Education (CE), now part of Pearson’s Online and Blended Learning business, was created in 2001 to develop a new, more flexible, and more personalized type of learning for students for whom the traditional classroom was not a good fit. In early 2017, CE was supporting the operation of 32 tuition-free, full-time online (“virtual”) public schools in the U.S. for students in grades K-12 with a total enrollment of more than 65,000 students. In the past several years, CE launched an “institutional” business to offer online solutions such as online courses (courseware), teacher professional training and development designed to prepare a district’s teachers to provide personalized instruction online. Steven Guttentag, co-founder and CEO, believed that to penetrate the mainstream market, CE needed to grow its institutional business. But working with school districts to build their online offerings meant a loss of ecosystem quality control and very likely some economies of scale, and the freedom to innovate. Without innovation and scale, online learning would not get better. What should be his long term strategy?

By 2014, the traditional textbook publishing industry is being transformed by technological innovations and new student achievement standards. Rob Waldron (MBA ‘92), takes over as CEO of Curriculum Associates (CA), a “sleepy” traditional supplemental workbook company and sets about completely transforming the company.  How can a small privately-owned company leverage its strengths and innovate while grappling with the challenges of providing software-as-a-service in the education sector?

In 2013, Brett Peiser, CEO of Uncommon Schools, a very high performing charter school management organization (CMO), and his team are surprised by the results of the more rigorous Common Core State Standards. For nearly 10 years, Uncommon had successfully fulfilled its mission to bring high-quality education to students in low-income, urban areas using a “network of networks” structure, where regional networks of charter schools operated independently, guided by Uncommon’s shared beliefs and practices. While the new test results show that, on average, Uncommon’s students still perform well compared to their district peers, the results were also far lower than management had expected. What changes should Brett and his team make, if any?

This course is designed for students who want to understand the central role that education plays in our economy and society and who may want to play an active role (e.g., as entrepreneur, board member, etc.) in shaping the future workforce, bringing about a more equitable society, and improving the trajectories of our nation’s youth. 

The cases feature social entrepreneurs leveraging entrepreneurial and managerial practices to deliver pattern-breaking change in K-12, Higher Ed, and education focused non-profits.  The course covers adaptive and personalized learning, disruptive innovations such as AI and machine learning, achieving system-level change amidst competing goals, and deepening understanding of the complexities and constraints of the sector to ferret out what works.  Cases are set in various markets including U.S., China, and India. Nearly all of the sessions include visits from case protagonists. 

The course also tackles career questions for students who wonder how to make a difference in the education sector while pursuing a career in other industries.