If there is one thing we can all agree with across the education landscape, one facet of the learning experience with which even the most flamboyantly progressive reformer and the staunchest traditionalist would find common ground, it is that sparking a child's interest is the surest way to drive academic success. If a student can find a passion to latch onto, they have a natural incentive to explore the depths of their brain, soak in knowledge, and (mostly important) try hard.

My sometimes co-author Matt Greenfield has a parable of sorts he likes to tell from his professorial days at CUNY that I am likely about to butcher something fierce. It goes as follows: he once had a student that was clearly a bright young man, but was also clearly a poor writer lacking in basic argumentative structure. Matt took him aside and asked, "What is it that interests you in life? What is your passion?"

The answer, as it turns out, was cars. While the student did not think he could write, he was confident in his knowledge of the ins and outs of an automobile. So Matt assigned him the project of explaining why it was he loved cars so much. After refining that piece, Matt then had the student write a research piece explaining the pieces of an engine and how they work together. From there, a piece on how the shape of a car can influence aerodynamics and yield better performance around a sharp turn. On and on this went, until by the end of the semester, the student was right in line with his class: a true writer that could outline a thesis and concretely back it up with data points and grammatical structure. Matt then tasked the student as follows: learn about an auto-mechanic for a NASCAR team, find out the necessary steps it took for that mechanic to reach his chosen profession (from calculus to engineering to various certifications), and outline a path you need to take in order to reach this end goal.

True, the student had managed to eschew the traditional curriculum that called for essays focusing on a predetermined literary set; but what was the goal of that student's education? Was it to retain knowledge surrounding the courtship of Petruchio and the shrewish Katherina, or was it to develop a set of critical thinking and expressive skills that will carry him through his career?

Tapping into a student's passions is undoubtedly the surest path to learning without the student even realizing it, which leads me to introduce a company that has gained amazing traction and a cult-like following (not to mention $15 million in venture funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz) in just a few years: Rap Genius. While on the surface the site is merely a crowd-sourced directory of rap lyrics and their meanings, the reality is the platform has morphed into a vibrant community of critics debating everything from hip hop (before you scoff, I would argue that if Bill Shakespeare were around today, he would make his home on 106 and Park) to Warren Buffett's letters to his shareholders.

I recently met with Ilan Zechory, one of Rap Genius's co-founders alongside Mahbod Moghadam and Tom Lehman (Author's Note: not him), to discuss the site's transition to the education space (Ilan is the one rocking the tan robe and woodman's button down in this video). While not quite as wild as their reputation may suggest, it was none-the-less an entertaining conversation.

This intro has gone on for long enough, and there is still much to get to. I will now quit my rambling. Let's get to know Ilan Zechory:

Elevator pitch: what is Rap Genius, and what problem are you trying to solve?

Rap Genius is... a lot of things. It's a Wikipedia of annotated texts that started out as a side project for annotating rap lyrics. It was just a few friends talking about rap lyrics and throwing out interpretations, interesting historical information, and poetic analysis. It quickly grew and expanded to music beyond rap, music in other languages, non-musical texts like poetry. Before we had 15 songs on the site, there was a Bob Dylan song. Before there were 50 songs, there was an Emily Dickinson poem. We started noticing that people interested in annotating rap were really interested in annotating lots of different stuff, not just rap. Rap was obviously a fruitful place to start for annotation because it is so dense - there's a lot of wordplay and reference and whatnot.

So Rap Genius has grown and expanded into a platform for annotating all sorts of texts. It's not just a platform in terms of a technology (as hard as the technology has been to develop - and it's important to make the technology very good), it's more like a movement, a community, and without the people it would be nothing. There are hundreds of thousands of contributors worldwide who add annotations to the site, and there's a core of about 1,000 editors who are really obsessed with the site, who edit other people's work to make sure it's good quality. Then there is a core of about 150 top moderators who find other editors and do a bunch of the hardcore editing work. These guys are up all night on email lists and various groups making sure Rap Genius is a healthy community.

How does moderation work? Who are these people, and how do you incentivize them to drive usage?

It's a combination. There is some stuff on the product that gives you literal incentive, like RapIQ, which is the point system we have. It started out fairly crude, but it's actually quite sophisticated now as a measure of the quantity and quality of your annotations. So if you leave an annotation and I upvote that annotation, you are going to get some RapIQ because I am a reputable member of the community. If some new user comes and upvotes it, you will get some RapIQ but not as much as if an editor upvoted it. Further, if you leave an annotation and someone else edits it, and there's a final product that is basically half your doing and half someone else's, you two will split the RapIQ boost.

It's a pretty sophisticated system for basically acting as a proxy for how much knowledge you have imparted on the Rap Genius world, and people really respond to that.

More than that, there is a lot of personal relationship stuff to it. The site is still small enough that the main moderators tend to know who the other moderators are. They know each other through the Rap Genius Forum and through the live chat on the site, through interacting and having debates on the actual lyric pages. There is also some social infrastructure built out where if you leave an annotation and I come and edit that annotation, you are going to get a notification. If you're on Facebook, you have that little blurb that pops up to see that someone liked your photo. On Rap Genius, you are going to see if someone liked your annotation. You will click through and see who they are, what kind of stuff they have been annotating. You might want to leave that person a message, or get into a discussion about the lyric itself. Then a moderator might come in and synthesize that discussion into one final product. We are trying to facilitate debate, but we want that debate at the end of the day to spit out a really interesting "one" thing for somebody to read, rather than exposing the whole debate. You can see the whole debate if you click through to view the history, but like Wikipedia, there is one thing you can read--it's not authoritative, and it's not final, but it's still just one thing. When you Google "what's the meaning of such and such line?", sometimes you find debates in a forum or a long discussion, and that's often harder to consume. So we rely on the moderators and editors to streamline that sort of thing.

You are obviously starting to step out of just the rap game and branch off into several other directions. What originally inspired that, and was there any fear that your core users might get isolated through that transition?

Occasionally we will see some tweets like, "what is the Mayflower Compact doing on Rap Genius?" There are sports rosters on RapGenius (Author's note: seeing the box score of Dwight Gooden's 1996 no-hitter made me sad. A 10-year old Tom was scheduled to attend this game before he came down with the flu). What you see much more than users feeling weird about it is that people think it's cool. You see a lot of stuff like, "Woah, Cool, I didn't know all of William Carlos Williams's poetry was on Rap Genius!" Most people seem to have the "interested" reaction rather than the "let's just stick to rap, guys" response. A lot of the main contributors to the non-rap stuff came over from the rap community, and there are people now just totally dedicated to their own niche interests. A lot of the contributors that started annotating the Bible were first annotating Tupac. It's the same community, it's the same sort of flavor, it's people who like rap but it's really all the people who like close reading with friends with like-minded interests.

And it's not just individuals. It's classrooms too. For kids in a classroom, if the teacher introduces a new assignment, and the project is we are all going to get Rap Genius accounts and annotate The Great Gatsby, that's exciting for them. The kids in the class know what Rap Genius is, it's a site they use for fun, and it has all this cool music they like on it. So it's kind of cool that in school it's not just like, "ok the teacher is bringing us this generic annotation platform." It's like your teacher is saying, "let's bring in this piece of relevant culture to you as an educational platform." We could reproduce Rap Genius and call it something like "SchoolAnnotationPlatform.com," and kids using the exact same platform are going to be much less into it because it's not this toy that they want to use.

What do you know about your individual users? Can you tell when a classroom of students has registered?

There is undoubtedly a lot of activity that we don't know where it's coming from. There are definitely classes that are using Rap Genius to annotate interesting stuff that we don't know about. We do find out about it after the fact. Sometimes we will hear that "X" University has annotated all this poetry under one particular teacher. It's not like they reach out to us, they're just sort of doing their thing.

Generally we have some ways of tracking this stuff though. There is some classification within Rap Genius, whether something is rap or poetry or another type of text. We track that, and we have started doing some reporting for ourselves to see, "oh look, here is all the poetry that went out this week." It's a big priority for us to try to find out as much as we can about users.

Jeremy is the "Education Tsar" of Rap Genius, and how we discovered Jeremy was we were at the airport, hanging out waiting for a flight, just checking our phones, and we got an email (a Google alert) with a link to Rap Genius from some site. We clicked through the site and it turned out to be a syllabus that Jeremy had created. Jeremy, who we had never met, but was a very active Rap Genius contributor. He had 20,000 RapIQ, and by comparison I have 50,000 RapIQ and I've been at this since the beginning. Jeremy had this syllabus that was like, "why we use Rap Genius in an English classroom, what we are going to do with it, here are some screenshots, here's an example of an annotation" and so on. This was amazing to us, so we reached out to him and were like, "how did you figure this out? What were you thinking?" He was just very creative, very passionate about Rap Genius as a user, and he was also a high school English teacher with a PhD from the University of Texas. He was just an amazing guy. We got to know him a little bit better, and now his whole life (instead of going and becoming a professor) is spreading the Rap Genius gospel and bringing it into other classrooms. He was in California last week working with a bunch of teachers, getting their feedback, trying to train them on how to use the product and share his experiences using it in the classroom. There have been dozens of other classes now, high school and college, that have used it to annotate everything from poetry to novels to scientific papers. There is actually a biology classroom that used Rap Genius to annotate a very technical paper on hermpaphroditic fish, and they had to take each fish species and annotate it with some type of information about that type of fish, or they would take scientific terms that weren't obvious, label them, and expand upon those.

And some classes use it to annotate rap. Big sections of rap history are still not close to being done on Rap Genius. There are so many people in the community now that any new album that comes out, it's going to get annotated really quickly and densely (a lot of people are going to contribute to them), but if you look at stuff from the '80s, the early '90s, there are huge parts of rap's history that still need work. I think a lot of people in classrooms, especially classrooms focusing on hip hop, musicology, and history, like to go in and fill out the catalogue, and have discussions around that sort of stuff.

Now that you are formalizing this education-facing piece of Rap Genius, does that present a new business model?

Right now, we are focused on getting it into the classroom for free, which is hard enough. It's a very compelling product, but there are obviously some teachers that are like, "I don't know... there are some swear words on the page, how can I use this in my classroom?" Some teachers will not use a product like this. It's a challenge just to get people to use something for free. We'd like people to use it on a large scale. We think the idea of creating incredible digital editions of various texts is really exciting. Columbia University is going to be annotating core curriculum texts. They will have their whole freshman class annotating The Odyssey, The Illiad, stuff like that. When the collective mind of the Columbia students and their teachers giving feedback gets to this thing, I think you are going to have the best digital editions of those books in the world. We want to change the way people read a book by contributing and participating and annotating, but we also just want to create the best edition to read so in three years when you want to order The Oddyssey on your iPad or whatever device (Author's Note: :-) ) for your college class, you're actually ordering the Rap Genius version. You are taking in all those annotations, interacting with those annotations or creating new ones, and this sort of changes the format of the book. You could go out and charge schools for a product that they can then use as a teaching tool, or you can try to get schools and students to participate in this movement to create really interesting texts. We are more interested in getting people on the platform, using the tools and creating sort of like a MOOC (Massive Open Online Class, to the plebeian) which I am just now learning about. I hadn't discovered that word until a few weeks ago (Author's Note: tisk, tisk). That's something that aligns pretty well with our thinking about how this works, but it could be a business. The education portion of Rap Genius could end up being something that we sell into schools and develop a course management concept. It's a little far up field from what we are now doing. We are a small team trying to build a huge thing for regular people.

There are a lot of possible business models out there and education is one of them. Another one is the enterprise sale of Rap Genius software to solve some communication problems. If you think about the CIA, right now, having a team of people in another part of the world reading a memo, commenting on that memo, and having those comments go back to the original writer in some sort of fashion, Rap Genius is actually a great product for something like that. Selling separate versions that people can host on their own servers--that's a potentially lucrative business that we are fielding a lot of interest about. But for now, we are focused on building an iPhone App, building more features for our core contributors, stuff that makes it fun to use Rap Genius.

When I was in high school, a lot of kids used (and likely abused) SparkNotes to the point where they maybe... kind of... didn't read the whole book, and just read the chapter summaries (Author's Note to his English teachers: Not me! I read every word...). So I always felt like there was this stigma around using SparkNotes, even if you were just using it to get some ideas for class discussion the next day. Is this stigma anything that you would see as a fear when directly entering the education arena with this product?

Well, we always have the texts. That's what's different between us and SparkNotes: it's not a summary. I think SparkNotes is great.

One way to take the temperature of whatever you're doing is to do a Twitter search and see what people are saying. A lot of times, and especially in the last six months, we get tweets like, "Can't believe I just used @RapGenius to help study for my #finalexam in English (or whatever class)." And I think people are, and definitely for poetry. If you go to "The Wasteland" on Rap Genius, that's an amazing resource. It's really well annotated by a bunch of different people, and if you're reading "The Wasteland" in your English class, you can definitely get a lot out of it. I'm not saying people should go and copy the analysis for their essay, or that they won't get caught if they do that (it's definitely Google-able).

It's amazing that people are using it for school. I think SparkNotes has Harvard students write these articles, and they're high quality. But what's cool is if you're a kid studying for your English test, and you're using Rap Genius to cheat, there's a temptation to get in there and actually interact. So a lot of those kids that go on their to study or to steal some sort of interpretation to write about actually end up writing their own stuff on Rap Genius. It's just amazing how many kids we have seen over the past few years that started out at 16 as horrible writers, and we nearly kicked them off the site because they were such bad writers, but instead they stuck around, their writing improved, and now they are getting into good colleges. If you actually get involved as a contributor, it's much more valuable than if you are just reading and picking up on the annotations. The annotations are interesting if you can find what you are looking for, but if you actually start to write it's like exercising your brain... Everyone wants their kids in the classroom to do close reading, and that's what Rap Genius is. It forces you to use annotation to think pretty hard.

Venture Capitalists often have a hesitance toward investing in content businesses because, as Rap Genius is demonstrating, the internet and shifts in social tendencies are increasingly driving the price of content toward free. To what extent do you think there still needs to be an arbiter of what great content looks like, and one that is compensated as such? Or can the crowd truly source the best information?

I am always a middle path kind of guy. I don't think, "It's all the crowd, there's no reason to have any editors." I think if someone has outstanding abilities, writing talent, curating talent--those people can add a ton of value. The relationship between a person like that and the crowd is often very complicated. They are often just a very strong member of that crowd. Sometimes that person is in a totally different place from the crowd, is actually doing something quite different, or has a different level of privilege. But if our front page or any part of the user experience of Rap Genius feels a little too crowd-generated and content suffers, that means we may have to dial a knob somehow, whether that's changing the incentives that the crowd has, or having more resources trying harder to find the best people from within the crowd and give them special privileges. We are just looking for the best outcomes.

In any situation that we have seen so far where it looks like the crowd is a dominant player, there are all sorts of things going on at the margins that you don't know about. There have been articles talking about stuff like, "what's really going on at Wikipedia? Who are the main editors, and how do they promote content to the front page? How do edits take place, and how are they reviewed?" There's always this crazy power struggle, and there are people at the top, certain elements of hierarchy and elements of flat, crowd-based decision making. I think it's sort of like a wild west right now, I really don't know.

There are some people that say, "Rap Genius needs to hire professional writers because you can't trust the crowd to come up with interpretation." Well, I wouldn't trust three or four hired writers to do an excellent job annotating the entire corpus of music and poetry and novels and everything else. I think the crowd is incredibly powerful, it can't be denied. It's where history is going, and you just have to tweak the knobs correctly.

How did you get contacts with artists? How do you plan to make this more of a component going forward?

Nas was the first rapper to annotate his own lyrics on Rap Genius (Author's Note: I guess you could say he is trying to keep hip hop alive?). We were introduced to Nas by one of our early investors, Troy Carter, who is Lady Gaga's manager. Troy is a great guy, has always been such a huge friend to Rap Genius ever since we met him. He was always saying, "we've got to get artists involved in this site, we've got to do something special. You guys should at least meet with Nas, talk to Nas." So we decided, let's do an interview with Nas and let's ask him questions about his lyrics, because we're a lyrics site. We'll do an interview, do a video, and ask him questions about his lyrics: tell us the meaning of this, the back story behind that. We did this interview and it was great, and we decided to cut out those answers and put them on the page itself. So you can click on a line like "sleep is the cousin of death," and instead of some random collection of what kinds around the world said, you have Nas explaining what he was thinking. That was really cool, and we thought, "wow, this should show up differently than our annotations, which should be a different color or something like that, something to verify it like Twitter has 'verified accounts'."

So we built that, and then we built a sort of self-serve product for other artists to use. Any amateur artist could get verified and start explaining his own lyrics. So we started making a real effort. We got to other artists and record labels and managements and would say, "hey, look what Nas is doing! This is pretty cool. You've got all these fans searching for your lyrics, more and more are coming to Rap Genius instead of these other lyrics sites: do something with them! Meet them halfway, or give them something to consume so when you release a new song and millions are your fans are checking out the lyrics on Rap Genius, it's a really great experience for them to be clicking on the green line and seeing what you have to say." We have had a ton of success making that case to artists. They also like the part of it that's like, this is going to be around in 50 years, 100 years, and people are going to be consuming your song (whether it's on rapgenius.com or on some Google Glass Rap Genius App), it's going to be that information, that content. So a lot of artists think about it as leaving a little mark. I can tell this story, I can tell it one time, and it's just there forever when people click to consume my song.

So part of it is marketing and the same reason they use Twitter (get in touch with your fans, Fun + Marketing). But also, unlike Twitter and Instagram, you are making a lasting comment. You do a little bit of effort, and now the song is always carried on by your stories.

The main resistance we get from rappers is, "I don't want to eliminate the mystery for the listeners. Part of the beauty is them trying to understand my raps." Our response to that is, "well you don't have to explain that line, and you don't even have to explain any line, you just have to tell stories." So a lot of times it's like, "oh this is where I was when I came up with this verse, this is how I thought of it," or "here is a funny story, it's actually based on a friend of mine." Sometimes it's stuff that's not cryptic like a puzzle, it's more stuff you could only know as the lyricist. Artists have been really receptive. They really like it. The tricky thing is, many artists are not using computers on a day-to-day basis as much as they are using their phones or even iPads, and we don't (yet) have a mobile app for them to just quickly do some stuff. They have to sit down at their computer, they have to remember their password, so just getting them to use another service, especially someone as busy as an artist, is a trick.

So when do you get President Obama annotating his own speeches? How does that happen?

That has got to happen. We've got a couple of angles, we have actually tried to get Obama verified on Rap Genius. He went on Reddit and did the Ask Me Anything type of thing. It's gonna happen. All of his speeches, literally every speech Obama gives, gets uploaded on Rap Genius and gets annotated by a bunch of people. There's a lot of activity there. A friend of Mahbod (cofounder of Rap Genius) was a White House staffer in the early days of Rap Genius and said that they were looking at "99 Problems" on Rap Genius, Obama and a couple of his staff members. So he's aware of it, he's clearly into it, and it's just a question of his schedule... Maybe after he is out of office he will have a little more time and he can do some annotations.

Which teacher was most influential in your development, and why?

Wow. Umm... I guess I would say that this guy from college: Ludger Viefhues. I took a random class my sophomore year on religious theory and method in the study of religion with him, and it was so interesting, I decided to major in Religious Studies. It was also something that finally helped me understand what the point of theory was, and taught me a lot about close reading. He was really into all those things, and I think all those things kind of informed a lot of my life as a student and also at Rap Genius. He's just a great teacher, I loved him.

Posted by Tom Segal at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The New York City Department of Education launched its Innovation Zone project a couple years ago as a way to band public schools together that are experimenting with novel uses of technology in the learning process. The "iZone," as it is known to the cool kids, seeks to increase student achievement across their lifetime (not just K-12, but preparation for college and beyond!) by supporting personalized approaches and encouraging motivation at the core of learning.

In order to accomplish this, the iZone is beginning to act as a sort of middle man between the teachers and students experiencing headaches in the classroom and the developers yearning to alleviate said head pains from their desks/shared workspaces/local Starbucks/parents' basements/wherever it is that coders code and entrepreneurs entrepreneu. One of the most referenced (and frankly, most legitimate) critiques of the ed-tech movement is the disconnect between the developers creating new tools and the teachers that ultimately drive usage, especially in the all-too-common scenario when a new program is purchased at the district-level and thrust upon the unsuspecting educator with nary an explanation nor introduction. These practices are ultimately harmful to all parties involved. Even the young startup eager to sign a revenue-generating contract will suffer without teacher buy-in. Just about every new company in the education world is banking on the idea that it will iterate off of its proprietary data set, but if administrators are simply force feeding new technologies upon their classrooms then those classrooms are unlikely to generate significant or intelligent usage, especially if implementation support is lacking. The iZone seeks to dismantle these barriers and let those doing the actual teaching and learning communicate directly with those looking to solve their pain points and knock out their inefficiencies.

The latest manifestation of this technology empowerment is the iZone's Gap App Challenge, the winners of which were announced yesterday at DOE headquarters. The "Challenge" is a software development competition launched earlier this year, and the idea is as follows:

There are over 200,000 middle school students in New York City, and they occupy roughly 8,000 math classrooms. However, all middle school math students (and for the purposes of this particular challenge, all 6th grade math students) are not created equal. Approximately 46% are behind by one grade level, and another 14% are behind by two or more. 57% of these students also have trouble reading, which makes word problems an entirely different beast to tackle, and untold thousands simply lack basic motivation to improve. The achievement gap is real and all too familiar to most educators.

So the challenge is, if every 6th grade math student in New York City is to catch up to the proper grade-level by the end of the year, what can entrepreneurs build to help teachers support students in this catch up? A call to arms of sorts - come one, come all, and help defeat the evil giant known as tradition, the lethargical library of stale textbooks and paper!

The DOE expected to receive 40-50 submissions tackling the two categories of note: Best Instructional App (content) and Best Administration/Engagement App (systems). It ultimately received upwards of 200, with 170 of those proving to be eligible for participation and the chance to win over $100,000 in cash and web-hosting space available (thanks to the Anthony Meyer Family Foundation), not to mention the REAL prize: the chance to pilot in some of the country's most innovative classrooms.

From the DOE's perspective, the Challenge is a step toward exploring new and creative ideas through learning to accelerate innovation and creative deployment of technology in the classroom--bringing together experts in the ed-tech community with actual educators, bridging the "gap" between problems and solutions (these experts include not just the applicants, but also the panels of judges that included my partner, Professor Matt Greenfield). At its core, the Challenge is an effort to figure out what an ideal school-developer relationship looks like and how it would work.

"The Gap App Challenge has surpassed our wildest expectations," boasted David Weiner, Deputy Chancellor of NYC schools, before Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced the winners...

Ahh yes, the winners:

The award for Best Instructional App was given to: KnowRe. Based in New York City, KnowRe is an online adaptive learning service for math. The program assesses an individual's strengths and weaknesses, personalizes a curriculum for each student's focus areas and engages students through game-like features, attractive graphics and social learning.

The runner-up in this category was Mathalicious, a company I have previously lauded on this here blog. Mathalicious creates lessons for educators that help teach Common Core-approved math concepts through real-world topics and challenge students to think critically about the world. Examples of this include: Should Nike charge different prices for different sized shoes? Is Wheel of Fortune rigged? Are we alone in the universe? 98% of teachers using Mathalicious say the program makes their students better problem solvers / arguers. 71% of their teachers say they like their jobs more when they use Mathalicious conversations. Motivation yields production.

The Best Administration/Engagement App was awarded to Hapara. This is when I am supposed to provide full disclosure as a blogger that my firm, Rethink Education, is an investor in Hapara, and also where I am supposed to gloat/brag about my tangential involvement in the company's success. Good work Jan and team!

For those unaware few, those sorry souls that have yet to taste its sweet Googly nectar, Hapara is an education management platform layered on top of Google Apps. Its tools address critical regulatory and performance mandates confronting schools and districts world-wide. Hapara transforms Google Apps, among the most widely used content management platforms globally in K-12 education, into a powerful learning and analytics environment, while simultaneously reclaiming teaching time and cutting software costs. As schools, districts, and even nations continue to turn to Google Apps as their software solution to managing the learning experience, Hapara's solution will make this App usage more actionable for teachers.

Runner up in this category was awarded to LiveSchool. This program helps teachers, administrators, and parents communicate and collaborate in real-time to improve school culture. Teachers and administrators use laptops and tablets to record and share information with each other throughout the day. LiveSchool's mission is to help schools work together to improve culture and create great environments for students to learn, and this is done literally through pluses and minuses, subtracting a point when a couple students are noisy during a presentation, or perhaps adding a point for the whole class when an exam is completed with full cooperation. Behavior management for the digital age.

Now that all the judging and poking and prodding is out of the way and winners have been determined, the NYC Department of Education, the Innovation Zone and its corresponding schools and teachers, and the companies themselves will be spending the next few months working together to figure out who wants to implement what. Developers will work collaboratively with partner schools to refine the product and provide teachers with implementation support. With over 250 schools in the iZone, there are plenty of classrooms, mouse clicks and eyeballs to go around. And while the winners of the challenge may get the publicity, the dollars, and the credential as NYC DOE-approved, I was informed by Deputy Chancellor Weiner that the other applicants that made it through the screening process would get access to this band of innovative classrooms, with the potential for pilot programs and contracts down the road.

The winners have been revealed, but the work is truly just beginning. Now it is time to truly close the gap - between teachers and developers, between high-achievers and struggling students, between education reformers and traditionalists. We can do better. Building the next solution of products with the students and not simply for the students will undoubtedly yield more targeted solutions.

To paraphrase my good friend Alicia Keys, now you're in New York, these adaptive math curricula will make you feel brand new, big data-mining dashboards will inspire you.

Posted by Tom Segal at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an Op-Ed by Sean Reardon, a professor of education and sociology at Stanford, titled "No Rich Child Left Behind." For an aspiring ed-tech blogger like myself, it was a hard piece to miss, mostly because it was retweeted by nearly everyone I follow on Twitter. The post tells a familiar tale of the achievement gap in education. We all know the disparity between the rich and the poor in educational achievement, but Reardon pushes this further by demonstrating that in fact the gap between the upper class and the middle class has become as wide as that of the middle class and the lower class. Before 1980, the gap between upper class and middle class students had been minimal if present at all. Reardon then goes on to list a number of "myths" regarding the achievement gap, and which ones actually hold some truth to them.

The achievement gap created in the years leading up to Kindergarten is most often neither closed nor widened: it is, in fact, pretty thoroughly maintained. Our public schools seem to do a rather excellent job at progressing each student at a relatively consistent pace, or at least until high school (where dropout rates radically distort such statistics with some students continuing on to become lifelong learners and others simply dropping off the learning map for good). Reardon estimates that this gap grows by less than 10% between Kindergarten and high school, a relatively low figure compared to what you might assume. In fact, there is evidence to support that the gap narrows during the school year, but is then widened during the summer, when affluent students are presented with myriad options for their development, and poor students are often left to slog through until the school year begins anew.

With that said, it seems clear that in order to narrow the achievement gap, we must look beyond just the school (as public education appears to holding up to its end of the bargain) and understand how we can engage the community to foster academic growth and passion for learning. Fortunately, there are numerous organizations currently fighting this very battle. I was recently introduced to one in particular by Jennifer Carolan of NewSchools Venture Fund that I believe is making significant strides in instilling a passion for reading that can help narrow this achievement gap.

This group, Reading Partners, is a nonprofit literacy organization led by CEO Michael Lombardo that works with schools, public servants, volunteers, and high-level initiatives to spread a joy of reading to lower class communities through targeted programs. Reading Partners was founded in 1999 when three community leaders (Mary Wright Shaw, Molly McCrory, and Jean Bacigalupi) launched a one-on-one tutoring program to help children with the poorest reading skills at Belle Haven Community School in East Menlo Park, California. Since then, it has grown to serve roughly 5,000 students across the country and engaged thousands of local volunteers.

You all know what's coming next... let's get to know Michael Lombardo:

Elevator pitch: what is Reading Partners and what problem are you trying to solve?

Reading Partners is a national nonprofit that is working to close the early reading achievement gap in Title I schools. We provide school-embedded programs that identify students with significant gaps in their reading skills and provide them with one-on-one tutoring support to get them back on track. The innovation in our model is the ability to provide one-on-one tutoring to large numbers of students and large numbers of schools at relatively low cost. We do that by engaging community volunteerism and harnessing the power of the community to help schools achieve their reading objectives. We have created a structured approach that is organized, that is research-based, and that uses data so that volunteers can be really effective at helping kids in very high-need schools to really make incredible progress in their reading.

Who is it that makes up your volunteer base? How do you recruit/retain your volunteers?

That is the number one question I get. The answer is that it is an incredibly diverse base of people. They are as young as high school students all the way up through retired folks, and every school is different. The Reading Partners philosophy is really about working with struggling schools and helping them lower the drawbridges and bring in the community. The community surrounding that school is going to look very different if it's in the south Bronx versus east L.A. We really try to take all the elements of that individual neighborhood and that unique school into account in coming up with a detailed, grass roots outreach plan for the school.

Nationally speaking, about a third of our volunteers are high school and college students, about a third are working professionals who come on their lunch breaks or on their way to and from work (we also work with a number of companies that offer paid time off for volunteer service which we are huge supporters of), about 10% are senior citizens, and about 20% fall into a variety of other categories: people that are transitioning, people that are stay-at-home parents. As I said, it's a really diverse group of people and every school is different.

How is the organization financed?

It is a truly public-private partnership. We have revenue that comes from the school itself where they will typically kick in about a quarter of the cost of the program. We are federally funded (an AmeriCorps program, which we are very proud of), and we are one of a handful of organizations to receive multiple Social Innovation Fund grants. In some cases, we also get city or state funding, and that depends on the city and state. We operate in about 40 school districts in six states, so this is very different from place to place. We balance this all out with private philanthropy. Generally speaking, it's about 50/50 public money and private money.

We work in a number of SIG schools around the country, and in those cases the public piece tends to be a larger portion of the revenue as these schools tend to have a larger amount of resources to work with, and we help them harness these resources in ways that bring in the community.

What role does your Board of Directors play in the success of Reading Partners? Where is their influence most felt?

The Board, first and foremost, is my thought partner in planning for the organization's strategy and growth. The issue that we are addressing (the early literacy achievement gap) is an enormous one. There are nine million children across the United States that who are reading below their grade level just in elementary school, and the demand for what we do is enormous. For every school we currently serve we have three schools on a waitlist. The National Board of Directors is first and foremost working with me on how we can scale up to meet that demand and rise to meet the tremendous challenge we have as a country in early reading.

When I started here in 2006, we had six employees and an operating budget of about $400,000. Today, we have about 200 employees and an operating budget of around $13,000,000. We have grown pretty quickly over a short period of time, and the number one thing I look to the Board to do is to make sure that we don't run the wheels off the wagon and balance the momentum we have as an organization, the tremendous demand for what we are doing, and the urgency of the problem we are addressing with prudent, sustainable growth and with an eye toward creating an institution that will be able to serve kids all around the country until this problem is solved.

I have been particularly impressed with Julian Castro's work to expand early childhood education, and obviously that goes a long way toward addressing literacy. Who are some politicians, or perhaps some political initiatives regarding literacy that you are particularly keen on or fond of?

One of the closest allies for early reading across the country is Colorado state senator Mike Johnston who we worked closely with on the development of the READ Act in Colorado, which I think is a national model for how to structure a real state-wide focus on early reading. As you might know, there is a tremendous movement in state legislatures right now around what are called mandatory retention laws, which are pieces of legislation that say that if a student is not reading at a certain level of proficiency by the end of, say, third grade, they are automatically retained and can't go on to fourth grade. In the last year alone, 13 states have adopted these laws, including Colorado. Most of the policy leadership for this concept comes from former governor Jeb Bush of Florida, which instituted the first state-wide mandatory retention law. We have seen a lot of activity happening in state houses all around the country around this (as I said, 13 states have adopted these laws in the past year, and at least another 12 states are having these laws move through their state houses right now).

Reading Partners is right now neutral on whether mandatory retention is the right approach for states to take. There is not enough data at this point to know whether it works or whether it doesn't, but we are excited about the opportunity to work with policy makers to implement mandatory retention in a way that has the necessary early identification requirements and supports for kids. We think there is a right way to do it if you are going to go down the road of mandatory retention, and we love to have the opportunity to work with policy makers like Mike Johnston to execute on that.

Candidly, I think we are disappointed that there hasn't been more leadership at the federal level on the early reading issue. I recently published a piece in the Washington Post calling for more federal involvement to provide guidance, highlight the best practices, and give leadership on the issue of mandatory retention.

There are a number of great educational leaders in congress at the federal level: George Miller for example, whose district we program in, has been a great friend to us, as well as Michael Bennett from Colorado. We are excited about the opportunity to work with congressional leaders to address this issue so the federal government can provide leadership and guidance to states as they begin to experiment with new policies.

Where have you seen technology play a role in reading? I have encountered a number of programs recently from Unbound Concepts to LightSail that are focused on personalizing the reading experience for students and supporting a teacher managing 20 kids at once. Are there any similar systems that you know to be particularly effective?

First and foremost, reading is a fundamentally human experience and, as a father of three kids, I know that what's happening when I read with those children isn't just about them mastering the skills of reading; it's also about them deciding to be readers and embracing a love of reading that I hope will last them their whole lives. As much as technology can be a powerful tool in supporting that, I think there will never be a substitute for the magic that happens when a caring adult and a child sit down and read together.

That said, we are tremendously excited about some of the developments in educational technology over just the last few years. At Reading Partners, we leverage technology mostly for the purpose of data collection and analysis, assessing our students, understanding what their needs are, and organizing learning plans for students that can be serving thousands of children across the country. We also utilize technology for incentive programs, so we can give kids the opportunity to read text on an iPad or do word games, usually as a reward for making significant progress in their reading. We also work with a lot of schools that are implementing computer-based instructional approaches that we can augment with a more human and differentiated approach. Read180, for example, is very popular in a lot of the schools we work with, and some of the products you mentioned as well.

But I think at the end of the day, our overall philosophy about the instruction of reading is first and foremost about differentiation, about meeting a student where they are and really personalizing their reading experience, and addressing that in a way that's really going to help the student make the most amount of progress they can make - not just addressing the technical issues with their reading but also their emotional development and making them lifelong readers.

What sort of assessment do you believe is most effective in both gauging skill and encouraging progress in reading? Frequent contextual questioning? More high-level discussion?

I'm a big fan of taking multiple approaches with student assessments. We use one common assessment across all of our schools for the Reading Partners programs so that we have an apples-to-apples comparison for all these students in all these different states. The assessment is a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt product called the "Rigby." It's a running record approach that has a comprehension element as well. The students read the book aloud, they are observed for fluency, they do a retell on the story, and then they answer some comprehension questions about it. I think that kind of engaged and personalized assessment is in many ways the most effective way to determine where a student is with his reading, but I also am a fan of augmenting that with quicker snapshot assessments, with products that do a deeper dive like the DIBELS or DRA. Fountas and Pinnell is another high quality assessment.

It's like that poem: there are 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. Reading is such a complex skill set for kids and it is so deeply tied to cognition that there is no one assessment that is ever going to tell you everything about how a student is reading and what their needs are. Part of our relationship with schools involves a data sharing agreement where we are able to see all their assessment data (from state assessments to sight-based assessments) as well as our own assessments, so we really are taking a comprehensive look at the students and not just saying, 'well, according to the California standards test, the student is proficient, and so therefore they are proficient.' We are really trying to think holistically about them, to look at all the domains of reading and see how the student progresses through them.

Final question: which teacher was most influential in your development, and why?

I was fortunate to have a lot of amazing teachers throughout my academic career. I am proud that I am a lifelong product of public education from kindergarten through college, and it's hard to pick just one... but I would have to say it was probably Mrs. Kurtz (author's note: the horror...the horror...) who was the faculty advisor for the student newspaper at my high school. Like a lot of teenagers, I think I hadn't really figured myself out and didn't know what I wanted to do with myself, and fell into newspaper mostly because it seemed like other people that I thought were cool were doing it. Mrs. Kurtz helped me understand what it was to be somebody that was engaging in a project and was trying to accomplish something and say something in the world. I went from being a back bench staff writer who was just sort of there accidentally to being the editor of the news page within two years, and it was so exciting for me to feel like I understood who I was within the school and I understood what it meant to have a voice. That in many ways shaped the person that I became and set me on my trajectory to end up where I am today.

Posted by Tom Segal at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

When Marissa Mayer took over the controls of Yahoo!, the internet giant whose market position has been squeezed and boxed out with the rise of the Facebooks, Googles, and Twitters of the world, it became clear that the company was ready to make a mark for itself in an effort to return to its glory days. With a new leader on board already making headlines for the breaking of corporate conventions (plus a hefty sum of cash in the bank - over $7.5 BILLION at the end of Q3 2012, or roughly a third of total assets, an impossibly high percentage for a publicly-traded company), Yahoo! appears primed to go on a run of acquisitions, partnering its way back to relevancy and beefing up its mobile presence.

Step one: the purchase of Summly, a tool that can summarize news items into 400-character passages (not quite a Tweet, but c'est la vie). For the world of smartphones and people on the go, Summly proposes to make news consumable on-the-go.

This acquisition has made headlines around the globe neither due to the product itself nor the launch of a new direction in operations for Yahoo!: instead, it is the age of Summly's founder that has everybody's attention. At 17-years old, Nick D'Aloisio just sold has company for $30 million, a company he founded when he was just 15.

Since the deal was announced, D'Aloisio has garnered an assortment of praise from the media and tech reporters at large. "Wunderkind!," they shout. "Genius!" "Prodigy!" "He's the next (fill in the blank)!!!" And these reports may in fact be correct. This is a story that we are growing quite accustomed to of late: teenager who never sleeps and spends every waking hour grinding out code as if he were experiencing some sort of binary bender creates unheralded product and sells it for $XXX Million / goes public. Zuckerberger, Dorsey, Systrom, the list goes on and on. The tools and applications that we all acknowledge to be flipping the world on its head are increasingly the brainchild of frustrated young adults looking to disrupt the status quo. An example from my own portfolio is that of Engrade, a learning management system that was originally created in a weekend as a gradebook by a high school student named Bri Holt when he was frustrated with the amount of time it took his teacher to return essays. The teenage student, as many a young hacker might do, then posted this gradebook tool online to be used free of charge. In a few years, the user base grew to millions with nothing but word of mouth in the teacher community.

While we sit in awe of these teen and twenty-something superstar programmers, it is also of little surprise that they are leading the way. After all, they grew up with computers in their blood. They never really had to learn the language: it was merely their native tongue.

Early access to computer technology is a game changer, plain and simple. Much as bilingualism has been shown to greatly benefit creative thinking in the learning process so too does the language of tech - even for a non-coder like myself.

I am not a tech-savvy person in the slightest. I have a basic understanding of computer programming (something about ones and zeros and such), and I can usually manage to find the settings menu or perform a reasonable search, but my skills do not extend much further. However, I have been using personal computers since my early childhood. I have never really lived in a world without internet (even if my first taste of it required five minutes of dial-up and I hadn't the slightest idea what to do once I actually logged on).

While I possess just a faintly adequate working knowledge of their construct and functionality, computers (and the tech-drive at large) have shaped my way of thinking, my core instinct: techstinct, if you will. When my dad and I argue during a baseball game about the guy-on-deck's slugging percentage the previous season, my first instinct is to reach for my pocket - iPhone - Google -www.baseballreference.com - iPocket.

By the time my mind thinks to get my phone, my hand has already unconsciously done the work. His first instinct is to just keep on arguing his position, even if it is a concrete fact. Mine is to go to the source (and once I get my Google Glass, I won't even have to reach into my pocket. Right Jaime Casap?).

This is not meant as a negative critique of my father, who is admittedly getting better. It's simply an interesting reality; a tangible generational gap that likely has a deep psychological impact that someone much smarter than I could explain.

And here's the crazy thing: it will only grow.

We all know the stats: prices are down, broadband access is permeating the wasteland, software is better, smartphones, big data, blahblahblah. To paraphrase the great Buster Olney; today is better than yesterday. I grew up with AOL Instant Message and Oregon Trail. Today's kids grow up with... seemingly anything they want. And what about my kids? Assuming I somehow find a willing female counterpart and we manage to avoid a geomagnetic storm driving us into a Revolution-like tizzy, my progeny will have unfathomable access. Literally. I cannot fathom what they will see, how they will think, how technology will influence their basic instinct. And you better believe I will make them learn to code, though I have a sneaking suspicion that such a thing will be as ubiquitous as learning to brush one's teeth by then.

A famous anecdote from the infallible Malcolm Gladwell (or whatever you might call his stories?) is that of young Billy Gates and the extreme luck he had (and we had) in attending Lakeside High in 1975 and getting exposure to its Altair 8800. If little Bill had not been at the right school at the right time, he never would have had access to the tools that ultimately drove the founding of Microsoft and the launching of a global industry that literally revolutionized every other global industry. A one-in-a-million chance. We have scaled that up pretty darn quick.

So today we marvel at the 17-year old superstar. Tomorrow, he may be a dime a dozen.

Posted by Tom Segal at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Something has always bugged me about State of the Union addresses, and I don't just mean the ripe clementinean glow that has been emanating from the top right corner of my TV screen for the past 4+ years. It's the priorities of the speech with which I take issue--they seem so, out of whack.

No, I am not making some grandiose claim about the wayward American soul; a "woe, is me", shame-on-us attack on fast food, Hollywood, and teenage sexting. Instead, I quite literally mean the construct of the speech itself: it frequently appears out of order.

By unwritten rule, each one of these addresses tackles the same cadre of political firepower: the economy, foreign policy, human rights, gun control, immigration reform, tax policy, energy... and oh yeah, throw a quick bone to education.

Education is treated as a wholly separate category from the rest of these topics, yet by its very nature education operates tangentially to each. What good is the economy without a learned population speaking a common language and operating at a high level? What good are human rights without a populace that knows the existing law and understands the cost/benefit analysis of change? How can we have a legitimate discussion about tax policy if the majority of Americans do not understand where cuts would be coming from and how they would affect their lives? How can we spark change in the financial sector if the average citizen does not understand loans, interest rates, and basic budgetary planning?

To be perfectly honest, I don't see how a speech writer could possibly construct a narrative of the health of a nation and not lead off with education. To assess how we are improving, we necessarily must first address how we are learning. The entire speech itself is simply a lecture from our Professor in Chief to his 300 million students/citizens, plus countless international viewers. It's the ultimate MOOC, really.

The point in all of this is that "Education" as a sector is about so much more than just "education." It touches everything from Health to Economics to Defense. In other words, education spurs development and progress across the board. Investing in education by definition means investing in pretty much everything else. As the world exists in 2013, individuals are no longer simply individual--everyone is connected.

You would not believe the impact that a single failing student has on the population at large. So let me show you, via the following infographic created by my company Rethink Education.

Every 26 seconds, an American student will drop out of high school. What then...

Posted by Tom Segal at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend