As a national non-profit, Matchbook Learning is often presenting to potential philanthropic donors and funders our vision and model for turning around public education in America. These presentations inevitably coalesce at some point to the inevitable "hockey stick" question and our response to that question. Funders want to know that what they are investing in, whether it is in say a for-profit new technology venture or non-profit social venture, has the growth trajectory as evidenced by its financial and/or impact projections, of a hockey stick -- flat during the initial period of investment before skyrocketing upwards and onwards as time progresses.
Alex Hernandez of Charter School Growth Fund, a friend and colleague in this space, writes insighfully on what actually scales in K-12 in the online publication edSurge. In looking at the data, Alex argues that the ideas in public education that have reached significant scale (i.e. >25M students in the US) have all been mandated by law or public policy (i.e. State Standards, testing, textbooks, school lunches). In the last 10 years, the only idea that has reached more than 1M students is Khan Academy (online content provider).
This would suggest that the key to having a successful idea in K-12 incubate and significantly scale could involve leveraging technology in such a way so as to effect a change in public policy. By tackling the most challenging of schools and their student populations and enabling these schools and their students to perform at the very highest levels by leveraging the power of personalizing, student-centered technology, Matchbook Learning hopes to create with this technology-infused approach to school turnarounds a means to which we can eventually change public policy first for underperforming schools and eventually for all schools to be competency based, student-centered, blended models of teaching and learning.
