It's All About That TAM
MagicSchool claims they reduce burnout. Is it just to get that big TAM?
MagicSchool’s Feature Sets Reveal Flaws with their TAM Assumptions
The mission of MagicSchool
MagicSchool’s stated mission is to reduce teacher burnout.
That’s a big market! That means every teacher is a prospective user, because every teacher is susceptible to burnout. There are 3.2 million teachers in the US, and nearly 100 million globally. If they’re a teacher with a pulse, then they’re a prospective user that MagicSchool can attain. They have raised $19M on the back of this market sizing.
While MagicSchool does provide a tool that some teachers find useful, I doubt that these are the teachers most susceptible to burnout. In fact, I doubt that adding one more tool (over 70+ tools, as MagicSchool boasts) on top of the 1,500 digital tools that a school/district already uses will do much to reduce teacher burnout. It’s too much inundation. Too many tools in the toolshed!
I would absolutely love being proven wrong here, because anything that moves the needle on teacher burnout is worth investing in.
This is not a knock on MagicSchool. The product has utility, even if I was totally underwhelmed. I spoke to a teacher who used it to generate a list of multiple choice questions, and it looks like a handful of teachers on Reddit use it to make rubrics, and I find it at least intriguing that teachers can generate IEPs. With a human in the loop, that can be helpful.
But reducing teacher burnout?
“If you want to help us fight teacher burnout, there’s one big thing you can do right now to help. Please help us get the word out and send www.magicschool.ai to any K-12 educators you know.” - MagicSchool fundraising announcement
They make this claim on their landing page, in investor decks, funding announcements, and press releases. Everyone dreams big when they’re raising money. I get it. You get a lot more money when your TAM is 3.2 million teachers in the US. And they’ve already hit 100K global signups!
That’s really impressive, but is this a tiny percentage of massive market, or a decent chunk of a smaller one?
I think it’s the latter, and that they’ve seen a flood of early adopters.
A company’s mission statement should guide the feature set development, and right now, there is misalignment between what MagicSchool says their company does, and the features it is building.
What moves the needle on teacher retention
When I think about my own time in the classroom, and the burnout that I and my peers faced, I’m not sure it correlates with many of the solutions that MagicSchool offers. Several studies have shown that intra-school and intra-community supports are the largest predictors of burnout, followed by feelings of efficacy (Mijakoski, Cheptea, et al). Yet in general, one of the highest correlating factors with teacher retention is teacher pay (Hansen, Lien, et al.). I know that’s why I left, honestly.
Here’s the Institute of Educational Services research library with tons of other great resources. Are the 100,000 teachers using MagicSchool the ones at risk? Would we find that burnout among at-risk educators would be reduced if they were exposed to some of MagicSchool’s tools?
If teachers are burned out from feeling ineffective, is using an easy, AI-generated lesson more effective than a curriculum lesson? I can see how each of MagicSchool’s tools are useful in a vacuum, but the platform now puts the onus (or expects teachers to put the onus on themselves) to create Unit Plans, lessons, labs–entire syllabi. They did recently release a feature allowing users to share lessons and resources with their org., which is a great feature, and MagicSchool rolls out new features on a really healthy cadence.
Maybe in other parts of the world, where a guaranteed and viable curriculum is lacking, this is a really amazing tool. But here in the US, we don’t want for high quality instructional resources. We want for pay; we want for societal support for teachers; accessible mental health supports. I recognize that, short term, we overestimate the impact of technologies, and I know in 15 years AI will have completely transformed every facet of our lives.
But in the short term, I think MagicSchool severely misses the mark on addressing teacher burnout. Two of the nine options on their sidebar are Love and Share the Magic, which are both just CTAs to post on Twitter/X. That’s over 20% of the real estate! What value does that bring to teachers, or to teacher burnout? Or teacher efficiency or productivity?
Advice for MagicSchool
If I were MagicSchool, I wouldn’t reference teacher burnout unless I have actual efficacy data around it, because it’s disingenuous. If they do want to make that claim, they should focus on feature sets that actually correlate to burnout, like community-building and support. At no point in MagicSchool’s product can teachers engage with other teachers on the platform: No meaningful sharing of resources or ideas, or planning with peers.
Users can share their generation with their org, but that just makes the link shareable. Teachers still have to then go out and share that link without context.
Instead, they seem focused on trying to build splashy features that don’t always solve problems, like their image generator, and throwing everything against the wall.
If they are sincere about addressing teacher burnout, they should focus on the the levers that most impact it, such as community support, feelings of success / efficacy, and…teacher compensation.
Note from Chris and Micheal: We’re in experimentation mode, trying different release days and times over the next few weeks. We’re also going to slowly switch to a 2x per month cadence for our free subscribers, while revisiting how we provide more value to our wonderful paying subscribers. Stay tuned!