Welcome to Season Seven of Edtech insiders, the show where we cover the education technology industry in depth every week, and speak to thought leaders, founders, investors and operators in the Edtech field. I'm Alex Sarlin.
And I'm Ben Kornell. And we're both edtech leaders with experience ranging from startups all the way to big tech. We're passionate about connecting you with what's happening in edtech around the globe. Thanks for listening. And if you like the podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review. For our newsletter events and resources. Go to edtech insiders.org. Here's the show.
John Failla is the CEO and co founder of Pearl, our research based tutoring platform that streamlines operations, reports actionable data and improves outcomes for Pearl's many tutoring partners, Pearl works with states districts and private tutoring companies. John is also a founder and residence at the University of Richmond Robin School of Business, and was the founder and CEO at trilogy mentors. John Failla. Welcome to edtech insiders.
Pleasure to be here, Alex. Thanks for having me.
So John, I'm excited to talk to you because I did not know a lot about Pearl. And I actually learned about it from a previous guest on the podcast. And as I've been digging into it, it's a really fascinating platform and a really interesting story. Can we just start with an overview, tell us a little bit about what Pearl is and how you got to your current model,
I can definitely do that. So today Pearl's a ecosystem for relationship based learning. So we help states districts and communities launched relationship based learning programs that are mainly focused around tutoring right now. But do it in a very data driven and sustainable way. So we help them with the design of the program by bringing key research and proprietary data
points of the conversation. We help them fully implement the program through the Pearl platform that includes plugins around scheduling, content assessment, you know, all the things you really need to do tutoring the right way. And then lastly, we have a bench of researchers including the Stanford education school National Student Support accelerator, as well as Johns Hopkins, who we actually match with the tutoring programs on
our platform. So from day one, we have that efficacy, that third party research going so that when the program does run up, and the funding does dry up, they really have those impact statements to show that their program actually works show that compliance that impact on that return on investment. Although we're here today, it's been a very long story to get here. I started Pearl back in 2015 as a relationship based tutoring
company. So growing up, I had a tutor named Josh, who wasn't just a tutor, but he was more a mentor for me, and it really made me motivated for the first time in my educational journey. So we started by pairing local K 12 Students with college students for what we call an academic mentorship. Yes, it was tutoring but it was so much
more. Because as we now know, you know, the relationship between the student and the learner actually has the largest impact on that educational outcome compared to content assessments, and all of that. So I started Pearl after graduating from University of Richmond did it year one cobbling together solutions, we had some success, but it was through those consumer interviews in 2016, where we learned about the opportunity and online tutoring. There is no purpose built software out there for the
tutoring industry. So we recruited a CTO who came from a data company he architected and built our platform. And with that, we scaled to around a run rate of 8000 hours of annual tutoring. And we were working with nonprofits losing money on every one of those deals. And then we work with private schools and support the scholarship students with tutoring through their endowment. So from day one, we were very focused on accessible relationship based learning.
Well, in 2019, we got approached by two tutoring companies who said hey, we just lost a lot of money trying to build our own system. We heard you have a great one. Can we see it? And after giving them a demo, everyone asked to license the software. So We realized that, you know, yes, another tutoring company would be great in the industry. But fundamentally the largest problem was around infrastructure and data
collection. So in January of 2020, we evolved or pivoted to a SaaS platform supporting the tutoring industry. And then you know, when the lockdowns hit, our virtual classroom jumped from 16,000 minutes of instruction in February of 2020, to over 160,000 minutes of instruction by May of 2020. So that was the moment where like, Okay, we're here. And then, you know, the learning loss reports came out, states and districts started getting billions of dollars to put into tutoring
programs. And we were supporting
for profits. But the place we were really excited about were these community run programs, where a state is using 4000 education majors in the university system to provide tutoring to local districts, bringing that community context to not just self learning loss, but also develop a teacher pipeline, and then really invest in the community and create that social capital that goes so much further than working with an outside vendor who doesn't really reinvest into your backyard.
It's so interesting to hear you use the framing of relationship based tutoring, that's how you were founded. And then if that was baked into the platform, that idea of building relationships, and that is one model of tutoring that has in many ways what many people consider, you know, really, really effective tutoring, you build the relationship over time, but not always the type of tutoring that is being done, especially as you know, more different models
appear. You obviously were in the right place at the right time in January of 2020. In many ways, in that you instead of being competitive with other tutoring companies became the sort of infrastructure to fuel all of these tutoring companies and tutoring programs. One of the things that's interesting about that model is platform is customizable. And that's part of why I can work for many different use cases. Tell us a little bit about how Pearl is
flexible? How does the flexibility benefit the different types of tutors and use cases that you offer it to? And what how does it really make sure that it can meet their goals? Yeah, so
to assume that one model of tutoring is the best type of tutoring for every community, whether you're a rural community in Southern Illinois, or in the city of Chicago, like, that's just not the case. So instead of trying to say, Hey, this is the best model, everybody should fall into it, what we really focus on is creating a flexible, configurable platform that is able to mold around the community you're trying to
support. And one of the unique things about Pearl is that because we are in a tutoring provider, and we have all these different programs configured in different ways, the data set we're collecting at Pearl, about demographic data, instructional data, SEL data and outcome data is the most diverse data set in
the industry by far. So we're now able to glisten some of these proprietary data points to help decision makers at the state and district level be like, Hey, if you're really trying to support this group of students, you can't just set them up with an AI tutor for them to ask questions to because those kids aren't going to be
motivated to do it. What we've seen is that, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, within the school hours with a human sitting next to them is driving the best outcomes for that specific type of student. So why don't we design your program this way, with the research and data, we already have to really give ourselves the greatest
probability of success here. So you know, the thing I like to point to about the real configurability is around scheduling, you can have tutors scheduling our system, you can have parents scheduling our system, you can have students schedule in our system, admins can do one on one scheduling, they can do an entire semester scheduling for a school. So we've built all those different approaches to kind of the key
logistical areas of programs. So that however you want to run it, or whatever the research shows would be the most optimal experience for your community. Were able to configure not just the tools, but also the data points. So you can choose what data points you want to collect not just about students, but also about tutors to see does a Education major lead to better
outcomes for the students? Or does a general undergraduate or does a community member who signed up for this program to make a little extra money do it, that's, you know, how we kind of configure around the community and really build with them, you know, give them a sandbox to build their own sandcastle as opposed to just giving them a sandcastle and saying, Hey, I hope you like it.
It seems like you know, that leads to that consultative approach as well. You can work with a pro customer and say, in your use case with your type of student with your model of tutoring or whatever you're trying to do. Here's the customizations we recommend. Here's what we've seen work in the past. It strikes me as I hear you talk about this. We've come to think of tutoring as as something that where there's real metrics inside him, but that's a very recent idea.
tutoring in the past has been Yes, it's a students sitting in a room with a tutor, they talk and then that's it. There's almost no data involved. They it may be at the end of the year they see if the If the student did better, and we're getting to a much more data driven quantifiable world of tutoring, which I think is a really good thing, obviously Pearl is very deep into it as configurable data points, as you said, diverse data set, because you underlie lots of different
tutoring. Tell us a little bit about that sort of that rise of data driven tutoring, compared to probably when you had your sessions with Josh years ago, there was no data hidden numbers coming out of it, I'm assuming. But now, there really is. I'm curious how you've seen that change over the years.
Yeah. So you know, I was very fortunate a lot of our investors and key supporters were executives at Sylvan Learning Center, when all this money first came into tutoring way back when you know, around that No Child Left Behind time. So Peter Cohen, who was the you know, CEO of it drilled into me from day one, John, don't get blinded by the dollars entering it stimulus, focus on efficacy and focus on your partner's proving efficacy, because this stimulus money is going to dry
up. And it's the people who show their programs really worked, who are going to be the ones who succeed. So fundamentally, the biggest upstream problem, in my opinion, or the biggest problem in tutoring is a fragmented data set, you have all these different data points living in silos not converging through
individual systems. So it's nearly impossible to bring these datasets together to actually drive informed decisions, not just from the decision makers perspective, who's judging impact and ROI or what we should launch, but even from the administrators perspective, so one of the areas where we really focus is giving our administrators dynamic live data
insights into their program. So if something isn't going right at the end of month one, or if they're starting to stray away from the TQ is standard, you know, the National Student Support Accelerator has, you know, really established, they're able to identify it right away, solve the problem and iterate on to it into that next week, month or semester, so that they don't get to the end of the year, collect all these paper Data Reports, and then realize like, oh, this thing
actually wasn't working since December. Good thing, we put another $5 million into it the second semester. So it's that yes, like, on the back end, we want to be able to give them data points to judge compliance, because like background checks, we want to make sure that's getting done impact what tutoring actually happened, and then ROI. And that's one of the reasons why I really love our community programs. Because if you give $1 to a for profit
company, it's $1. of impact. If you invest in one of these community programs focused on the teacher pipeline, student learning and community capital, every $1, you're investing is $1 towards learning loss $1 towards the teacher pipeline from that
university to that district. And then also $1 invested in the social capital, that community, Virginia is an amazing example, the governor's office has brought together Urban League's HBCUs, and the highest need districts across the state to create this very culturally focused tutoring and mentoring program that brings all those organizations together, really helps those students, those k 12, students with learning loss, also lets them know like, Hey, you can make it to Virginia
Union University that's right in your backyard. And if it also develops that pipeline from V UU, into Petersburg schools or the city of Richmond schools, it's a no brainer. So when it comes to that sustainable funding, it's like how does this $1 make the greatest impact? These community programs, you know, are really putting something special together there.
I want to double click on this community program idea, because this is something that we follow ed tech, you know, pretty closely, but the tutoring dollars that have been going into the field for the last few years pandemic based sort of emergency funding, we've been following sort of where it's been going to which companies and various things, you've been keeping your eye on the ground and all of these different initiatives that are happening and sounds like you mentioned already, Virginia, and
I think Illinois, give us a little bit of a tour of some of the states that are doing these really interesting sort of collaborative community based programs where they're connecting universities and high schools. You just mentioned that, you know, one of them, but I'd love you to talk about it sort of broadly, because it's something I think I don't know a lot about it. I bet a lot of our listeners didn't realize what's happening either. Yeah. So
you know, we've been very fortunate to be able to be the infrastructure and data partner to the nation's
largest community programs. Now the first one that really blazed the path here was an Illinois with Illinois tutoring initiative where Christy borders brought together the entire state and is leveraging you know, 4000 education majors at Illinois State University as well as other universities to provide this community relevant tutoring across the state to the highest need districts that aren't in Chicago and don't get so much funding sent to them.
The New Jersey tutoring core is an amazing program that has been pulled out of stimulus funding and is now fully funded through the state budget. And just this year, they had across all grade levels and math students at grade level went from 16% in the beginning of the semester to 40% by the end of the semester. And when you look at the literacy side of the program, it went from 23% at grade level in the beginning to 40% at grade level
by the end of it. So you're hearing these programs that have made no impact barely even met with any students. And they're the ones getting all the news, all the shine, when there's these community programs that
are really driving impact. In Michigan, Grand Valley State University last year was doing a program just across the state, they have seen so much success that they are actually creating a management group now that can go to different universities and go to different states and actually provide management as a service to help them get these programs stood up, help them leverage federal work study funding, so it can be actually a free program to the district and really help drive that community
impact. So we got some partners in Arkansas with Arkansas tutoring core doing amazing work on South Dakota with Dakota dreams, Ohio has recently announced a lot of you know, yes, vendor initiatives, but also, I believe 25 million in grants and went to universities across the state to build this
up. And then you know, the National Partnership for student success is actually an organization or a partnership that the DoD put together to kind of be the people leading the rallying cry around, hey, let's use these university students get them into local districts to provide this
tutoring support. And something they've done on their end is actually increase the Federal Work Study funding that was at 7% for community focused programs to now over 15%, with the feds willing to pay 100% of that tutors costs, if it's in a community programs, specifically around tutoring and teacher prep, as opposed to you know, paying a kid to go work at the library or sit behind a desk in the school's office.
These stories sort of illustrate how both the state government and in some ways the federal government, with this work study are doing these really interesting collaborative approaches, bringing the universities and schools and nonprofits and HBCUs all together to really move the needle. And this I think goes really under the radar. Some of us who, you know, looking at that flashy companies that you're talking about a whole lot. Can we talk about the
results a little bit? You mentioned that Illinois, it was the first one to do this. And now it's been spreading and other people have been doing it? What are some of the I assume, because it's been going for a few years now. And it's data driven? And you're collecting lots of data for them? What have you seen as some of the impact?
Yeah, so I have to check with the partners to see what I can share versus what they're going to be announcing this fall. So got a little blinders kind of put on here. But one in New Jersey, you know, they've seen amazing success across both reading and math through their state. In Illinois, I know that 70% of students who participate in the tutoring, saw growth across both
literacy and math as well. And then you know, we have another community partner who's in the state, but they're more a nonprofit that's focused on bringing really relationship first education, their name is on your mark learning led by Mindy, who's a rock star, and their students, you know, they did their end of semester report, they grew two to six times faster than students in the school that weren't participating in the tutoring
program. So we're starting to see a lot of that student learning loss impact, which is the first thing we need to do.
What's going to be really exciting now is as we start to see the teacher pipeline impact, I know Illinois has a few anecdotal stories around, tutor seeing their hometown district, sign up for the tutoring program, apply for the tutoring program, be a math major, then start doing it and actually change their major education because of the experience they felt there, which is, you know, what we really want to be able to prove out on that and, and then when it comes to that
community capital side, you know, the Virginia program has made such waves across, you know, the country, especially with the Urban League's in the HBCU community that we've been approached now by two other states who were actually Urban League saying sounds like an amazing program, like, can we kind of be the catalyst to bringing all these relationships together. So I believe that can be a model that can be very repetitive and kind of replicated across the country.
Because at the end of the day, in my opinion, every university I mean, quite frankly, not just in this country in the world should be doing one of these community tutoring and mentoring programs, what the feds are doing with work study is making that a little easier from the logistics perspective. So it's exciting to start to see some of the tension shift to it. But at the end of the day, these folks don't have giant marketing
budgets. So Pearl has taken some of this on us to kind of go out there and really scream, the success stories and the good work that all these folks have been doing.
Yeah, we're very happy to amplify that. And if any of the listeners are, you know, working within any of these types of organizations and find this kind of community approach, interesting, you know, please pursue it and look at how it might work. One thing I think you mentioned just very quickly in passing, but when you have all of these you have education majors Doing the tutoring people who are already interested in
education. But you also have a lot of college students who may not be education majors, doing the tutoring, maybe for work study or community support all sorts of reasons. And that may have a really positive impact on the other giant problem. All right now, the teacher shortage. Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah. So you know, there's an organization Dean's for impact, who's one of our ecosystem partners who creates amazing training for future educators who are getting into the tutoring space. And they've actually created a coalition or partnership called a future tutors, as teachers where they have a group of 20, something 30 Something universities that are all working with them to build the sustainable teacher pipeline. So we're seeing certain organizations kind of take more of a notice to it or a
liking to it. And we're starting to see a lot of the resources get put in place so that if you are a university who wants to be able to launch these programs, the National students support accelerator Pearl, the National Partnership for students success, we all have playbooks guides, best practices to really help you learn from the people who came before you, which I think is one of the neat things, so many of these states are doing things that have never
been done before. They're really operating like a startup, which as you know, state, DOD isn't the most startup B type environment. So um, being able to support them and kind of be that partner, there has been a lot of fun watching them grow.
Yeah, so speaking of acting like a startup, one thing that the entire education world has had to do in the last few years is pivot very quickly from in person to hybrid, or fully online, especially, you know, fully online was the only choice during, you know, 2020 and 2021. That's a big change, especially for tutoring. I think, you know, before the idea of online tutoring fully online tutoring wasn't that people were doing it. And there were some really interesting and very good
results. But I still think it wasn't sort of mainstreamed in the way it is. Now, the idea that tutoring should your it's very natural to tap either online or hybrid tutoring. Tell us about your approach to hybrid tutoring, which you know, combining online and in person. And you know, how you sort of see the different types of tutoring being different than in person, the hybrid and the fully online?
Yeah, so there's tons of like pros and cons to each one of the models. And it really depends on what are the resources you have on hand. Because, once again, you know, virtual has been able to be successful, it's been able to prove efficacy, it's been able to be very scalable. If you have a program in California, New York and Texas, you have one tutor in Illinois, and they're able to serve every one of those states. So Pearl started as an in person company, we added the
online aspect. And actually during COVID, we did a really interesting research study across 2000 tutoring organizations. And what we learned was that 35% of them are doing tutoring in some way before COVID Hit 100% of them, were doing it once COVID was there, only 55% playing to maintain some form of online instruction when everything
returned to normal. So we knew that from an infrastructure perspective, we're going to need to provide a ubiquitous form of data collection that wherever you're learning, the data points are able to passively be collected, so that you can really focus on the instruction, what we've seen are that states and districts have a big demand for in person instruction.
They're saying we want to do this in person, once they launched the program, they start to realize like, hey, providing higher level math support to students in this corner of the state just isn't going to be doable. So we're really starting to see a blended or more hybrid approach, I see a lot of value in a model where maybe it's, you know, on Monday, there's a small group instruction, one tutor
working with five students. And then throughout the rest of the week, that tutor has one on ones virtually with each one of the students. So it's able to kind of meet that tutor schedule meet the logistical demand that they
may be experiencing. But at the end of the day, you know, virtual is what will provide the greatest level of scale, unless we can kind of hack it with this hyper local scale approach, where it's like, yes, we're focused on leveraging universities that if you look at it nationally, that is massive scale, but from an operational perspective, it's more focused hyper locally on making it happen.
I think one thing that has been a real sort of wrestling match pendulum swing, whatever metaphor you want to use, you know, between the online and in person education, especially when it comes to things like relation based tutoring, which I'm sure many people feel like the relationship part demands in person, which I don't think is true, but I'm seeing that as a common belief. There's this feeling of we all got this experiment, who was going fully online, some people had great
experiences. Some people had really miserable experiences with that sort of emergency work. But as we come out of it, it's really interesting to see sort of where everybody falls
back to. And the use case you mentioned about they tried to fall back To fully in person, but then they realized they don't have the staff they don't have people and, you know, local people who can teach the topics that are needed like, that is the kind of use case that us all as ad tech people have been saying Forever Is that you, you know, the big benefit of online is you get you completely remove any distance, and you can have people access from anywhere. Yeah,
and I completely agree with you from the accessibility side. And you know, at the end of the day, John Hattie was the individual who did the meta analysis across 800 studies and saw the relationship has a point 72 effect size. So like you, I believe relationships can be fostered online. The issue is, there are some tutoring providers who don't provide a video feed in their online session, they have it where one tutor is actually working in five different classrooms at once, as opposed to just
focusing on one classroom. So we've seen a lot of online organizations be able to develop very strong relationships, they're just a little more thoughtful about it of like, hey, let's make sure it's the same tutor they're meeting with, let's make sure they can see each other, let's build in three minutes where they just talk about how the week has gone, instead of immediately get them to solve a problem so that the next student can get in, and
that student can get out. So I agree with you like you can build relationships online, you just need to be thoughtful about the technology to really enhance it, not try to replace it.
Yeah, I'd love to actually learn a little bit more about that, you know, you mentioned how Pearl started. Its DNA was relationship based tutoring from the very beginning, you built that into your platform that you're using internally. And obviously, it's built into the platform that you're using, that you're licensing out, what types of things are in the platform that support that kind of relationship building?
Yeah. So one of the great areas to look at here is around our matching algorithm. So we actually have a research collaboration agreement with the National students support accelerator where they'll come in and do research for some of our partners. But we also have standing meetings with them every month, where we'll show them our product roadmap, and they'll actually bring research to the table or PhDs to help us build from a very research oriented research based
perspective. So we knew a lot of partners need to collect Social emotional learning, we knew we had to build a system to do it in the platform, they came to us and helped us design our pulse check engine to be able to ask, you know, very research oriented questions to track the engagement or the confidence or really, the belonging, the student is feeling between them
and the tutor. So that would be one example of very thoughtfully developing the data points in the system to make it easy for an administrator to see if something's working. But the other really neat ones around are matching algorithm. So in our matching algorithm, we have mandatory criteria, and we have preferential criteria. And all of this is giving you a sandbox not giving you a sandcastle, so our partner organizations are able to work with us and say we
want this to be mandatory. But let's use these other data points as preferential. So once all the mandatory criteria meet, it then starts to go through preferential criteria like location, like for virtual providers, like hobbies, interests, you know, those other data points that we believe feed into a relationship. But folks may not be thinking about, you know, out of the gate, because they're just so focused on time
and subject. Once you get those two things, it's nice to kind of bring in that extra layer, which allows us to be malleable with our partners about what are those preferential and mandatory roles. And then when we say relationships, it's not just the relationship between the student and the tutor, it's the relationship between the parent and the tutor between the tutor and their coach between the tutor and the administrator, all of those relationships really go into relationship based
learning. So with Pearl, you can configure every user's portal in the system. So parents have their own login, where they can message tutors, they can message administrators that coaches can message, the tutors message the parents for feedback, that communication portal really allows for frictionless communication between all parties, which just leads to very succinct and iterative
feedback loops. So once again, so you can iterate at the end of a week not having to wait to iterate at the end of the year.
Yeah, that collection of formative data points that can actually be made actionable. And that research partnership, you mentioned with the National Student Support accelerator is so interesting. You're actually bringing the education research and the psychological research about things like belonging into the design of the platform. And I, you know, I imagine some of the listeners are saying, how does that work? What is all that, you know, National Student Support accelerator is at heart is out
of Stanford. And the idea that it is so well embedded inside, you know, the Platform Developers that the platform is being developed with research at its core that's actually very rare as somebody who's been in edtech. For a long time. I always wish that were true, but it often isn't. So I'd love to hear you talk about the National Student Support accelerator and how that model of research and evidence based product building could They've up scaled to others in the industry.
Yeah. So you know, Suzanne and her team over there are I mean, they're almost like patron saints of tutoring, like the work they are doing is really the only thing giving the tutoring industry a chance right now. It's bringing all the research together, it's creating those playbooks, it's really showing, hey, this is the right way to do it. So we got connected with them very early on, once again, it was from, you know, some of our advisors and put up like really focused on
the efficacy side. But at the end of the day, all of their research is available on their website. So as a tutoring organization, or as an education organization that's looking to build, you can send your product managers to the website, have them start reading the research and start to see what's actually out there and has already been developed. We're very fortunate in that we have a pretty tight
relationship with them. So we're able to actually meet with them and show them the roadmap and let them go and bring in some of the research that they're doing that may be active, maybe completed into the product development process. But at the end of the day, you know, whether it's a student's learning experience, whether it's you starting a business, or you're trying to achieve anything, everything's about increasing your probability of success, nothing is guaranteed
to be successful. So if you can be thoughtful about all the decisions you make, and focus on increasing your probability of success point, 1% here, 1%, there, point 2%. There, all of those tiny iterations and tiny decisions lead up to your greatest probability of success. So we take that approach when it comes to building out our
platform to get that impact. And then also designing the program IN THE BEGINNING with our partners to make sure we're giving ourselves the greatest probability of success here.
Yeah, it's a really admirable model. And I wonder if there are organizations that are sort of corollaries to the National Student Support accelerator, which is all about tutoring for other areas of edtech? I'm sure there are.
And if they're not, I'd might have the next business idea once you get thoroughly there.
Exactly. So you know, one of the big discussions in the tutoring world right now and in the tech world, and in the world, in general is what is AI going to do to us to the industries, you're in a particularly interesting relationship with this, because you're all about relationship based tutoring, which is obviously very human connection based. But you also have matching algorithms, and you have a lot of data coming in
that could be crunched. And I'm sure there are a lot of different use cases for AI inside Pearl, how it might, you know, enhance the personalized learning experience or catch issues in real time. Tell us a little bit about how you're using AI.
Yeah, so this gets me very excited, because I believe Pearl is in the most unique position out of anyone in the tutoring space to really create industry defining tools here. The thing that terrified me at first, when all the AI conversation came to tutoring is they're replacing the tutor, they're taking the relationship out of tutoring, AI super scalable, it doesn't have to sleep it can do whatever you need it to do. Like, yes, that
could be a use case. But let's not forget that relationship is the most important factor here. And our partners definitely don't want to replace their tutors with AI because it takes away the teacher pipeline and takes away that social capital. It takes all of that away. So we're working on a project that we're naming Plato, one of the first tutors in ancient Greece, Plato, the toilet, very
malleable. And at the end of the day, we're developing Plato not to replace relationships, but enhance relationships across the entire ecosystem we've developed. So depending on the stage of the lifecycle for the tutoring program, Plato has different personas for each user
in the tutoring journey. So it has personas for the decision maker, the administrator, the parent, the student, the coach, and based on where the program is in its lifecycle, it has different jobs to be done for different users in the system. So in the beginning, it's about helping decision makers identify what is the research showing to really, you know, increase our probability of success for this program. When it comes to
implementation. It's a lot about helping admins with the scheduling and the matching helping tutors be trained in the right way to teach. And then also helping students and parents learn how to adopt technology. Like, you know, we're pretty technically literate people here. But when you're supporting the entire nation, you don't really have that. So in that implementation, making sure everyone really gets
comfortable with it. Then as these programs start to scale, it's all about you know, allowing like a tutor coach to manage 1000 tutors, not 100 tutors, because that's what we needed to be able to do. So being able to look at the data, look at the tutor scores and really help the coaches focus on the tutors that need the most
help. The other aspect is as this is scaling, these are university students who may not know how to create a 10 session tutoring lesson plan adhering to state standards, matching the tier one curriculum being taught in the classroom. So being able to support those tutors and not just teaching better, but in helping create a sustainable and strong pipeline of future teachers also, so not giving them the answers but really guiding them to Learn how to create those lesson plans and
learn how to be successful. And then for students, you know, the relationships always important, but I was one of the kids who would cram the night before tests and have a question at midnight and be like, Okay, I can't call my tutor right now. So still having some of that AI tutor features and functionality to answer that students question. But imagine if you know little Joey goes to play doh asks him two questions about
word problems. Playdough then sends a note to the parent and says, Hey, Joey was struggling with this, here are two activities you can do with him to reinforce his learning sends an assessment to the tutor saying Joey had these questions, given these three exercises in the beginning to see if anything stuck, and then sends a code a note to the coach saying, hey, three of your tutor students didn't know how to do this problem. Here's a worksheet you can work with your tutors on on
how to teach better. So you're seeing a lot of AI copilots AI tools, we built an individual verticals, which is good, but it limits their, you know, explosive or multiplicative capability. Because we have this very diverse, very large dataset. Playdough is built on that data set, and then has unique personas coming through the UI based on what that user really needs to do to be able to take the friction out of that educational journey for that student.
That's a really fascinating and very interesting model of AI picture, as you're talking about it sort of the idea of this Plato AI, really well trained bot in the middle of this whole ecosystem of tutors of tutor trainers, parents, of teachers of students, and the idea that it doesn't act the same, not only to each person, you know, each constituent there, each stakeholder, but it's different based on the life cycle changes over the life cycle, and it changes based on who it's
talking to. But it's connected to everyone. So it can facilitate information transfer between anyone's like the example of the Midnight call. Yeah, I've not heard that model of AI is sort of like almost like a switchboard operator, it's sort of like right in the middle, making sure everybody is doing the right thing that the data is being surfaced at the right time. Really, really interesting. So, you know, your worth is really interesting moment in the tutoring world.
And we've covered this on the show a few times. And you've mentioned it as well, which is that there has been tons of money coming into the tutoring world from the government over the last few years. And there's this what we are calling the SR cliff, that is here, basically.
And that's the emergency relief funding falling off, you have been thinking in this model of hey, the money dries up, and then you have to have your efficacy data, it sounds like you've been thinking about that since the beginning of the company. It's sure coming around again, tell us about what you picture, post Esser tutoring is going to look like and how efficacy is going to play a role in helping schools and education systems make decisions about what to do.
Yeah. So you know, we've been in a lot of conversations recently with large districts and states who are saying, Hey, we've given out millions of dollars in tutoring over the last year or two. And we don't know the compliance of those programs. We don't know the impact of the programs. And we sure as hell don't know the
ROI of those programs. So we're now kind of working with some states and districts almost on the tail end of hey, what can we give you to help you judge the efficacy of those vendors who have been in your city, but what I know is one very large district who said we will end every s or contract unless they give us an efficacy report. And unless they come to us, so they're not assuming like default continue this program, they're assuming default cancel this program, unless that data
is brought to us. And I expect that to quite frankly, be blanket across the entire country, people made a lot of money over the last two years. And now with all the attention on it, they're really going to have to show the impact they were able to make to those communities where they were able to you know, when very large
Deal's off of. So in my opinion, I think, fundamentally, the US school system is going to start to evolve for more of a, here's a contract, here's the money to here's a quarter of the money, you'll get another quarter of the money halfway through the year, and then the last 50% will actually pay you more, but it's gonna be based on you providing
us with these data results. And really, the studies showing the money we gave, you actually went to what you said it was going to do, you know, in pretty much every business industry, when someone pays you for something, they expect you to show the outcomes of what they're paying for, and I think in education may have just taken a little time to get here. But we're seeing a lot of push for these outcomes based contracts. And quite frankly, I think it's needed, like this is how this
industry should operate. Because at the end of the day, if you point to a technicality where it's like, well, we technically did what we said we would do. The impact isn't on you. It's on the students that entire grade that entire community that entire generation who didn't get what they got because of a technicality that you're going to argue around.
Yes. Could Couldn't agree more outcomes based contracting is not a term that I was familiar with. But it makes so much sense. You know, one thing haven't been in the field for a while, I think one thing that has been this sort of out for edtech companies for quite a while is this implementation fidelity concept. It's like, which I think is what you're really talking about
here. It's like we gave you the tools, but you didn't use them, right, you didn't do them in the recommended way, or you didn't do it often enough for you. And so therefore, didn't work. And like, it's not our fault. And I think what I'm hearing you say, and I think this is really accurate, is, it's actually, you know, the vendor really needs them to be doing it in a way
that works. And they should be financially tied to that, because otherwise, incentives are all misaligned, you can see it, it's like, they bought our five form we're seeing from our data dashboards, they're not really using it, that probably means it's not going to work that well. All we can do is send them emails and remind them to use it. But it doesn't really matter to us at the end of the day, because we already got paid. And it is such a different model of that. It's really
exciting. I hope that the field does move that way. Yeah.
So there's definitely going to be pushback from the vendor side of it, because that adds a whole nother
layer. And you know, some people have the perspective of hey, if that's the case, then just go send boots on the ground and literally have people in the hallways go into classes, being able to talk about it, what's not scalable, which I think is also where the tech world specifically kinds of finds itself in problems, because from investors you hear scalable, scalable, scalable, scalable, well, sometimes the thing that scalable doesn't actually work.
And sometimes people choose that side instead of the efficacy side. So you know, it's a problem that has always been around, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. And you know, a little bit to your point, districts, though, can't just be saying, like, hey, you need to make all of this happen without us lifting a finger, because at the end of the day, they are businesses, so they do need to figure out how to make the financial model work. So I think it's a little back and forth.
And I think the way to do that is saying like, Hey, if you were going to make $100,000, on this contract, we'll give you $150,000 On this contract, if you do X, Y, and Z, it kind of you know, meets them halfway there.
Right? The extra money can be used for extra services, extra training. Yeah, it does make sense. It's a it's an interesting vision of the future of edtech. And I think it's really promising it should outcomes at the end of the day, are really the only
thing that really matters. And I think we have somehow created a system where they often take our second or third priority, which is you know, and I've been, I've been guilty of this myself, I mean, you, it's just how the industry is sort of built, I've been an Instructional Designer for many years at instructional designers main role is to improve outcomes, improve education, you know, make there be a difference between where the person started and where
they went. And yet, I mean, for three, I've just had layoffs this week. And from the wording I've seen, it's a lot of the instructional designers, it's like, it's always the first people to go because those outcomes are not tied to the bottom line of the company. And this sort of never happened. So it's really interesting to hear it, or a vision in which it would be and that kind of instructional expertise could be really valued and an actual monetary way.
Yeah. And you know, that's one of the things we've started to develop where, you know, we know, in order to do tutoring the right way, you need training, you need content, you need assessments, you need PD, you need research, you need all these aspects that aren't like traditional tutoring, quote, unquote, but needed to do tutoring the right way. So we ended up serving as this role where if you need a researcher, we would introduce you to the content, we would introduce you.
So what we're now launching in September of this year, is a ecosystem surrounding the Pearl platform, where as you come on, if you need training, we learn about your need, and connect you with some of the nation's leading training providers like Dean's for impact whose system would be able to be module
alized, into your platform. So across that across funding across assessments across content, it is the company's job to make it as easy as possible for them so that they don't need to spend six months trying to find the right training for them when they were supposed to launch their programs six months ago, because as we've seen, even from the recent reports, there's not as much learning recovery. I think, as a lot of people were hoping there'll be by this time,
right? It feels like a theme of the whole conversation is sort of bringing disparate parties together in service of a greater goal. That's true of these community partnerships. It's true of the AI that you just mentioned to Plato. And it's true in this model where you know, Pearl itself can bring together and you know, point solutions to what people need to make something actually work powerful. And then
that dataset is even even more all of those different features, all feeding into one data that you then have that co pilot training on. So that's why we're really excited about our positioning and what we think Plato will be able to do over the next few years.
It's fantastic. So I am curious to hear Are you know, given your very close eye on how everything has been evolving in the tutoring world? You know, what's the most exciting and interesting trend that you see coming in the tech landscape? Could be specific with tutoring or not, that our listeners should keep an eye on?
Yeah. So I mean, from my seat, it is very tutoring oriented. That's all right. Yeah, one of the things I'm finding fascinating is how some of these tutoring programs are also trying to diversify their revenue streams, because even with s are funding and everything, like you still don't want to be 100% dependent on one district contract because if that goes away, guess what your
program goes away. So as I mentioned, in that ecosystem, what we're starting to see are tutoring organizations start to spin off their curriculum, and start to sell it to other tutoring providers spin off their training, start to sell it to other tutoring providers, or as I mentioned, the GVSU spin off an entire management team that can go in and pretty much white label the management and program manage the entire program from start all the way
through. So everyone jumped into tutoring when the money first came because there were so much there. I'd say about one year in was when some people started take their hat out of the ring. And we're like, Okay, this isn't going to be a long term thing for us. What we're really seeing now are almost, you know, a renaissance of tutoring and materials that can support these tutors and really help any program who may not have PhDs who can create training for
them. Any program be able to put forward a very data driven research oriented, holistic program design. Really interesting.
What is a resource that you would recommend to people who want to dive deeper into these topics we've discussed, you know, all of this community building tutoring, you know, Ed Tech, AI, what would you recommend?
So I mean, shameless plug here, I think Pearl has a great blog and information session on everything that's going on. We host webinars that are always focused on these community programs, these programs that are doing tutoring the right way. And we actually hosted a virtual summit last year where we had something like 40 different universities attend for a full five hours. And it
was just one day of learning. It was around recruiting, it was around training, it was around scheduling, it was there on district relationships, and that entire day's videos are all available on our website. So I think we're producing pretty awesome content related to the community side. But if you're really looking to geek out on what's happening in the tutoring industry, go to the NSA website, National Student Support accelerator.com. They have every research study they've done
listed there. They have program profiles that show programs that are really making amazing stuff. They have like program calculators that show what the cost would be for a program are trying to launch. They've really done an amazing team across Suzanna Carly, and the rest of them of bringing all this together, and kind of making that single source of truth, which I think is always needed. Whenever an industry is growing
this fast. You need a front door that everyone can go knock on and go in and find what they need there. So major plug to the National Student Support accelerator and everything they're putting together on that side.
Yeah, fantastic. And as always, we will put the links to these resources in the show notes for this episode. That's a pro blog and the site of Stanford's National Student Success accelerator.
Accelerator. Yeah. There's national students support accelerate the National Partnership for student success. acronyms and tutoring again, a little
similar. Yes, right. So the national students support accelerators website, I think will also probably put a link or to to some of these really interesting state initiatives that I think are really can be very informative, what's happening in Illinois, Virginia, Arkansas, things like
that. I think those are something that for many edtech people are out of their scope, I think, and could be really interesting to really understand better so Yeah, John Failla, this has been a super interesting conversation about everything, tutoring and congratulations on all the success you've had in this pivot to becoming a, you know, a tutoring makeup platform. Thank you so much for being here with us today on edtech insiders.
Thanks for having me, Alex. It was a pleasure.
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