John Failla, Founder of Pearl tutor management platform.
Stressed by the pandemic but flush with cash, many districts turned to the tested and proven solution of one-on-one tutoring to expand the reach of their teaching and, hopefully, the quality of student learning. Some federal funds even resourced tutoring-related initiatives specifically.
While few questioned the wisdom of turning to tutoring, the sudden need for and funding to support tutoring at scale – tutoring for an entire district or state, for example – created challenges. How, for example, can a district make an activity designed to be one-on-one and apply it to hundreds, thousands or tens-of-thousands of students?
And because some state and federal rules required districts to not just reach students with new resources but measure their impact, districts had to scale tutoring and show how it was working. For most school districts, both were new missions and mandates.
Virginia-based Pearl, which describes itself as “the leading research backed, all-in-one tutor management platform,” is helping educators meet those marks and is starting to see good rewards and ongoing opportunities for doing it.
The Pearl platform lets districts, states, tutoring providers and even teachers and partners create profiles then use the space to schedule sessions, share resources or even create virtual tutoring rooms. It’s a connectivity and productivity hub for large-scale tutoring. Perhaps most importantly, the company says it also provides “participants and users with evidence and data so interventions can improve tutoring quality and sustainability,” including reports and data required for or by the government.
“The demand for a platform like Pearl has never seen the current level of urgency. Every day where a tutoring program is not at full scale and optimized is a day where the learning loss in this country continues to climb,” said John Failla, the founder of Pearl.
And while the focus is easy to put on districts, Pearl has been a real asset for tutors as well. OnYourMark, one provider highlighted by Pearl, has said Pearl’s data prowess has made it better too. OnYourMark has published that the average reading scores of its students increased, “from the 21st to the 47th percentile within just 18 weeks and that the number of its students reading at or above grade level tripled across the year.”
That’s probably exactly the type of data-rich impact and value that districts and policymakers were hoping to see from expanding tutoring.
To educators and government funders and researchers, that data has other real value too – offering a rare opportunity to learn about tutoring and other personalized learning interventions with perhaps the largest data set ever.
As evidence, Pearl has developed data-related product features in collaboration with the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) to safely share information that may “guide major research into future learning models, showing not just how tutoring works but also when it works, for whom, and under what conditions,” a company announcement said.
For education, for understanding it better, especially at scale and under duress, the Pearl/Annenberg work may be richly rewarding.
And Pearl’s work helping tutors and districts reach more students has also attracted attention from another group of people seeking rich rewards – investors.
According to a recent company announcement, Pearl just closed a more than $4 million investment from a group of experienced education backers including Blu Venture Investors and Fidi Ventures. The company says it plans to use the new capital for, “talent development and expansion, new data and reporting engines and to improve the engagement experience for educators and their partners.”
The investment is a healthy show of confidence in being able to solve the particular and specific, but very real need of helping districts scale and understand their new tutoring services – though the downstream benefits of informed research and improving the delivery of tutoring itself may prove to be every bit as valuable.
Both are long-term opportunities, which is what Failla sees.
“Today's big question in the edtech industry is how we make these federal dollars an actual investment in sustainability rather than just a short-term solution,” Failla said. “To build sustainability, we need empirical evidence showing great efficacy for learning-loss intervention. This approach necessitates the thoughtful collection of critical data points across instruction, user feedback, and assessments.”
It’s great to see an education company focused on sustainability, not just for their wares but for the sectors and students they’re supposed to be serving.
The company focus on data – and sharing that data with research partners – is good for education too, and the edtech community specifically. For a market that’s supposed to be about knowledge, understanding what teaching and learning value a company adds, or does not add, is too often an afterthought.
Most of all, it’s encouraging to think that, just maybe, the pressure of the pandemic has accelerated some of long-term thinking in some places.
