Thirty-Two Incredible Reasons For Optimism In Education

Guest post by Amar Kumar, Founder and CEO of KaiPod Learning, a national micro-school company and semi-finalist for the 2022 Yass Prize.

An invisible flywheel is at work in public education today.

The best teachers are contemplating leaving the profession in droves, concerned that teaching affords them neither a living wage nor the respect they deserve. As these teachers leave, schools are forced to pay more to retain the rest.

With rising expenses, district bureaucracies are forced to cut investments in basic infrastructure and new learning pathways. Unsurprisingly, when great teachers leave and schools cut programs, academic outcomes go down and parents start to look for alternatives. When parents leave, public education dollars follow, as they should, which further exacerbates the funding shortfall, starting a whole new round of teacher departures.

The outcome: we spend more money, churn through more people, only to achieve the same or worse outcomes. And the flywheel spins.

As if all this weren’t enough, school budgets are about to hit a “cliff,” the likes of which we have never seen. More than $190 billion was allocated for COVID-era education stabilization, equaling ~$3,800 per student, all of which is set to expire in September 2024 – just as the system starts to recover.

In all of American history, if ever there was a case for more education innovation, it is now.

Accelerating innovation

COVID gave parents a first-person view of the quality of their children’s education. And, for the first time, parents are using these insights to be more actively involved with their schools. When their voices go unheard, they are leaving to pursue alternatives such as charters, private schools, online schools, and micro-schools. Interest in these alternatives is the highest it has ever been and is still showing signs of growth.

Second, it is now impossible to deny that technology ought to play a role in teaching and learning. With more millennials becoming parents, this horse has left the barn. School systems must now grapple with how to effectively support their teachers with these tools.

In this landscape, the Yass Prize was formed to spur greater innovation. Their stated vision is appropriately ambitious: “to be the Pulitzer of education and the Oscars of innovation.” More than $10M will be awarded to innovative education enterprises across a variety of school models: public, private, and charter schools; online schools; microschools and learning pods; education technology and other school-focused resource providers.

The prize is ideological in all the right ways: it prioritizes those who pursue sustainable solutions rather than rely on permanent philanthropy, those who are holistically transforming education and not just providing point solutions, those who have shown outstanding results that handily beat the status quo, and those who can grow without waiting for permission. For me, this last one really speaks to the cultural and political context we find ourselves in.

Unlike other prizes which focus on the application and the winner, the Yass Prize is doing things differently. The entire cohort took part in a 4-week Accelerator with guest speakers from a range of backgrounds and plenty of open time to build community. By the end, we started to realize that the lessons we learned and relationships we built will last far longer than the cash prizes.

And therein lies the clear insight of the Yass Prize team – being an education innovator is lonely work. You get into political hot water, it is easy to get discouraged, and your impact can feel like a tiny drop in a vast ocean. But, being in the room with my cohort reminded me there is strength in numbers, my ideas matter, and that our collective impact will shake the ground we stand on.

32 pitches for the future of American education

The capstone of the Accelerator was a 3-minute pitch where each of the contenders make an argument for how their innovation is clear-eyed about improving education in a sustainable, transformative, outstanding, and permissionless way. The rapid fire format reinforces the incredible diversity and breadth of the cohort. Three clear themes emerged.

A.) Reinvention: Almost half of the semifinalists are innovating and reinventing core components of the K-12 learning experience. The majority of American children still attend bricks-and-mortar schools and these innovators are reinventing the portions that don’t work for kids. This group included charters, private schools, and supplemental providers that enrich the high school experience.

B.) Resources: A second group of organizations are providing important resources to families, students, or schools. They recognize that a school building must focus on more than just the core subjects and build connections into the community, to parents, and to careers.

C.) Replication: And the final group of semifinalists pitched the successes they have had innovating entirely new models for learners and families. This group comprises learning pods, autism-focused charters, and career intervention programs. This group shared a vision for how to replicate their model and reach more students.

KaiPod Learning fits squarely in this last bucket. For 18 months, we have been building KaiPod Learning with a mission to allow more parents to take charge of their child’s education. We operate a network of in-person learning pods across five states where students come for academic support, enrichment activities, and a social learning environment. Our students make progress at 3x the rate of their traditional school peers and we have 100% year on year retention.

With 5 million students expected to be interested in online schooling or homeschooling, we want to make it easier for parents to choose these alternatives. To meet this growing demand, the Yass Prize enabled us to launch KaiPod Catalyst, a first of its kind accelerator for entrepreneurial educators to launch their own learning pods in their own communities.

We are open sourcing our playbook to help make these founders successful. We’ll leverage our online school partnerships to help them fill seats, our software to operate their pods more efficiently, and our professional development will help them get outsized academic gains.

Incentives matter

The entire Yass Prize experience made it clear to me why a prize of this type is so useful: it creates a gigantic incentive to create, share, or scale innovations in a way that traditional systems cannot.

And while there can only be one grand prize winner, everyone else still wins by benefiting from the lessons and community we built.