Looking for a Hero
Are profit-maximizing VCs the right stewards for education?
One Big Idea: Empathy and Respect
Education in this country has been broken from the very beginning.
We don’t have to pretend it hasn’t been. Every year, it seems like it breaks a bit more. Some of the voices of reason, like Audrey Watters of Hack Education, have left from burnout.
Schools in America are breaking. We all see visible, tangible evidence from declining NAEP scores. FAFSA was a disaster. Colleges and higher education have totally dropped the ball on wanting to educate students affordably. They have ceded any moral high ground by saddling three generations of Americans with insurmountable debt.
We sound so pessimistic these days. Track the trajectory of this Substack and you can see that we’ve been stewing on this for a while (and a tasty stew takes time: here’s our favorite recipe for Anthony Bourdain's Boeuf Bourguignon). It’s hard not to be pessimistic when all your saviors stumble.
‘No Child Left Behind’ was meant to save us! The $100M investment from Mark Zuckerberg was meant to save Newark! Nevermind that we thought it would be a good idea for the person who moved fast and broke democracies [along with teenage girls’ mental health] to have disproportionate influence over a school system that predominantly serves students of color.
The hundreds of billions of dollars that VCs pour into startups, or that PE uses to acquire companies, haven’t saved us. Walking the floor at ISTE feels a bit dystopian: Samsung shows off new thousand dollar smart boards, or Meta showcases new augmented reality offerings. And I wonder: Who is this for?
“I've been writing about ed-tech for over a decade now, cautioning people about the repercussions of handing over data, infrastructure, ideology, investment to Silicon Valley types. And for what?” - Audrey Watters, Hope for the Future, March 8, 2022
Can education be saved?
We have no clue. We hope so, but it seems like no one (including ourselves) has an actual answer or solution. But let’s actually reframe the question: “Who can save education?”
No. That’s not it. How about… “Who can’t save education?”
Milton Friedman disastrously gave companies carte blanche when he wrote that a company’s purpose is to maximize shareholder value. Nevermind the community, ecology, or downstream implications to people everywhere. Coca Cola working with death squads in Colombia? MAXIMIZE SHAREHOLDER VALUE. Fast fashion’s race to the bottom on child labor? Foxconn’s abhorrent working conditions? Milton said it was okay. H&M has to maximize shareholder value. Even Harvard is now all-in on PROFIT MAXIMIZING. Feed kids horse meat? Sodexo has to MAXIMIZE VALUE!
This is the dialectical opposition we invite when we put our faith in companies like Meta, or Chegg, Byju’s, or “cop shit” technology (to borrow Jeffrey Moro’s terminology about student surveillance tech) to fix education.
We write about the EdTech investment landscape, and have both worked for VC and PE backed startups. We are not inherently against EdTech’s ability to improve educational outcomes: It’s why we work for these companies after our years teaching. But we do want to point out the dichotomy of putting the future of education solely in the hands of profit maximizing startups whose products are built in lab-like behaviorist settings.
We’ve seen with Meta and TikTok that shareholder value isn’t necessarily aligned with stakeholder outcomes. In fact, you can argue that it rarely is, based on the track records of almost every public company out there. Stakeholder and shareholder value alignment is incredibly rare; to the point that the companies that do seem to get it right (like Patagonia) are perceived as outliers.
And it’s worth asking how companies (especially publicly traded companies) can maximize value without extracting it. Either they charge schools and districts more, they pursue rent-seeking or monopolistic behavior so they can lower costs (and increase price), or they use customer data in creepy or strange ways (Common Sense Media has done great reporting on how many EdTech companies do sell student data, even if partially anonymized).
If not them, then who?
First, let’s address the power imbalance. The people making tools aren’t the end users. And the end users (teachers and students) are perhaps the least influential stakeholder in the purchasing and adoption process for new technologies. This isn’t to say that only VC investors who have taught should be stewarding capital to EdTech funds, but we’re also not not saying that. In fact, having experience in the classroom is probably more important than having interned at BlackRock and gone to Wharton.
Second, let’s look at some of the other industries that have been infiltrated by PE. Housing is a mess in this country. One of Thoma Bravo’s portfolio companies is being sued by multiple states and investigated by the Justice Department for helping landlords coordinate rental price increases. How about healthcare? PE-owned hospitals and nursing homes have been proven to provide worse care at higher costs.
In the absence of any imaginative intervention on the government’s part, we are ceding the role of change-maker to private capital. Is this objectively bad? I don’t know. Maybe.
Lastly, let’s do one final reframing. We acknowledge that the system is broken. But the system perhaps doesn’t need saving. Saving reinforces that power imbalance and implies that teachers and students are incapable of saving themselves (although one could argue that nothing can stand against the crushing wheels of PROFIT MAXIMIZING). Schools don’t need saving.
They need empathy and respect.
Empathy and Respect
Schools, teachers, and students need empathy from the companies that are developing tools to help them. Empathy implies a deep understanding of the issues affecting teachers, and that understanding really only happens when you have spent time in classrooms. We don’t need tools built in labs by technologists who went to elite institutions. We don’t need them, and honestly, those tools won’t work, because hey, you wouldn’t have understood the market and its needs.
Schools, teachers, and students demand respect. Respect because teachers’ time is both more finite and more valuable than non-teachers’. A teacher does more in 8 hours than most people do in a week. Bad tools might be purchased by school, but they won’t be adopted by teachers.
Those tools might sell, of course. Especially D2C products, and especially when examined through the lens of behaviorism, the tragically victorious education modality that has earned scorn from Audrey Watters and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, one of the leading education historians and former Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Behaviorism, as set forth by BF Skinner, is predicated on the notion that we can and should control the environment a student learns in with the exactness and precision of a mouse in a lab: With instant and immediate gratification (in the form of multiple choice assessments or nudges), by dictating every minute of a student’s schedule, by controlling the entire discourse and instruction.
Behaviorism won out, and you see it in how technology companies prey on the behavior of children, with nudges and micro-transactions and algorithms that control every little thing they see without ever inviting actual engagement. We have an iPhone and iPad generation because we put Silicon Valley in charge of children’s time and attention. And that mentality has seeped its way into EdTech because those engineers who worked at Meta go off and work at TikTok and they bring along all of their theories around the “technologies of behavior.” And then, because they are focused on maximizing profit and never actually taught, they focus on metrics that serve shareholders and not stakeholders, like time on screen.
And so stock prices might go up, but NAEP scores will go down.
Guest Post
Next week we have an exciting guest post from Claire Talley, Associate Director at Polygence, and a former teacher. Aside from being a really talented writer, her post addresses some of our concerns outlined above and proposed solutions for building tools that serve all stakeholders.