Publications

November 2022 (Revised March 2023)
Case

OneSmart

By: Nien-he Hsieh, Meg Rithmire and Shu Lin

At the end of 2021, Xi “Steve” Zhang was facing an existential crisis for himself and his business. OneSmart was a premium educational company founded in 2008 offering K-12 afterschool tutoring for students nationwide under a number of brands. The company was founded... View Details

Keywords: Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Crisis Management; Failure; Education Industry; China

July 2016 (Revised November 2018)
Case

Code.org

By: John J-H Kim, Lauren Barley and Allison M. Ciechanover

The case explores Hadi Partovi’s mission to provide every K-12 student in the United States the opportunity to learn computer science. Students can assess how Partovi transformed his passion into an organization that reached millions around the globe through the launch... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Education; Education Industry; United States

09 Jul 2014
Research & Ideas

How Business Leaders Can Strengthen American Schools

prevalent? The private sector's $4 billion per year investment in education is a drop in the bucket when you consider the $600 billion total spent annually on US K-12 education. But it is still a significant... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Education

09 Mar 2003
Research & Ideas

Education, Technology, and Business: What’s the Catch?

the Internet. By 2001, the E-Rate program had wired 87 percent of all K-12 classrooms in the U.S. If we believe that educational performance is a result of investment, it hasn't paid off.—Kosmas Kalliarekos,... View Details

Keywords: by Carla Tishler; Education

October 2022
Case

EducationSuperHighway 2.0

By: William A. Sahlman, Allison M. Ciechanover and Emily Grandjean

In 2012, Evan Marwell launched EducationSuperHighway (ESH) to address a major problem: though most public K-12 schools in the US had access to the Internet, only roughly 30% had true broadband access that would enable every student to have high speed connectivity. ... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Social Entrepreneurship; Social Issues; Leading Change; Early Childhood Education; Infrastructure; Internet and the Web; Education Industry; Education Industry; Education Industry; United States; San Francisco

08 Mar 2016
Blog Post

6 Discoveries I Made About HBS

Recent grad Mallory Dwinal came to HBS after pursuing a PhD in education at the University of Oxford and working as a middle and high school Spanish teacher with Teach for America. Now a few months out of the HBS bubble, we asked her to... View Details

Article

Health Equity, Schooling Hesitancy, and the Social Determinants of Learning

By: Meira Levinson, Alan C. Geller, Joseph G. Allen and John D. Macomber

At least 62 million K-12 students in North America—disproportionately low-income children of color— have been physically out of school for over a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These children are at risk of significant academic, social, mental, and physical harm... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Public Health; Air Quality; Social Determinants Of Health; Schooling Hesitancy; Vaccine Hesitancy; Racial Injustice; Inequity; Inequality; Health Pandemics; Education; Health Care and Treatment; Policy; Race; Equality and Inequality