This Week in Edtech with Ben Kornell, 5/27/22

Alexander Sarlin  0:04  
Welcome to Ed Tech insiders. In this podcast, we talk to educators and educational technology investors, thought leaders, founders and operators about the most interesting and exciting trends in the field. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an educational technology veteran with over a decade of work at leading edtech companies.

Ben Kornell  0:28  
Hello, everyone, it is the week of May 25. Another week in ed tech for you. I'm Ben Cornell, with my co host, Alex Sarlin. We start this week, with a note about the shooting in Texas, we felt like we couldn't jump into the headlines without giving our listeners a chance to process with us, Alex, how are you processing this news?

Alexander Sarlin  0:51  
It's just so sad that our school system in the US continues to be the victim of our political system in the US. And I think in some ways, school is really a microcosm of society at large. And you know, I hate to say it, but I just feel like you know, educators have been trying incredibly hard working incredibly hard, especially in the last few years. But despite their hard work, we are seeing schools just fail our students and families. I think, in large part, they failed them through the COVID pandemic. And we've seen huge learning loss and isolation. We've seen mental health crises, we know that they've been failing academically in a lot of ways. And in a lot of regions, especially, you know, underperforming schools that don't have a lot of tax money to keep them up. And now we're failing to keep them even safe, which is the sort of primary basic function of government. I just think that, you know, if I were a parent, right now with a child in a district where shootings like this could happen, and after all this COVID Nonsense, I would just really be thinking about what the future of schooling should look like, because it feels like it's not working right now. What what do you think, Ben,

Ben Kornell  2:07  
for me, I wear three hats. The first hat is as a father, and when I kiss my kids, in the morning, goodbye, you know, the thought goes into your head? Am I going to see my children again, and I know that sounds a little bit overdramatic, but no longer is school, that safe place where you send them. And to be honest, since Newtown, I've always had that in my mind. You know, I was a teacher at that time. And it really struck me as, like mindblowingly horrific that tragedy. And then to see, you know, decades later, the same thing happening again, and again, it is really tough. As a parent, as an educator, I think we really have to understand what we're asking teachers to take on not only all those challenges that you just mentioned, with, you know, learning loss and, you know, differentiating for different learners and all of the kinds of outcomes attached to systemic racism and, you know, inequitable opportunities. On top of that, we have to have them work in a hostile zone. And this is just another blow to the teaching profession, because we can't keep our schools safe. And then third, as a school board member, wearing that hat, I think, you know, learning is nice, but if the school campuses aren't safe, what are you for? And this is where, like, as a school board member, you think, Okay, do I overreact if I put you know, security on every campus? Where do the resources come from in our already resource strapped school? And how do you empower students and parents to make decisions that will keep them safe? But ultimately, I think there has to be a long hard look at prevention, early detection and mental health. And so I think that as much as the solution lies in some legislative tools to make gun safety a reality. I think there's also a moment for our education space, to really see schools as that hub for not just learning but also mental health support and resources. And it's got to be more than just talk. It's got to be active. So we really appreciate your listeners. If you have thoughts about what's going on in Texas, the aftermath and where things are headed. Please feel free to send us an email or put in your comments on the our LinkedIn posts or Twitter. I'm going to transition to headlines there's no good transition with stuff like this. So we're going to start at the top. Alex, tell us a little bit about class technologies acquiring Blackboard cloud Right. Yeah, so

Alexander Sarlin  5:01  
class Technologies is a web conferencing tool that's built inside or basically on top of the Zoom teleconferencing platform basically allows people to do fully featured classes on Zoom. And it was founded by Michael chasen, who was a one of the founders of Blackboard. And he just acquired Blackboard Collaborate tool, which is sort of the web conferencing section of Blackboard which had, I believe spun off, it was their in house web conferencing tool, but I think it's sort of had spun off as a different product. So it's an interesting idea that they're sort of trying to consolidate a little class Technologies has done very well in last couple of years has it since it started, because it's building on top of a technology that everybody's already using. And it looks like Michael Chaisson is looking to sort of double down and pull features in that he has worked on in the past. What do you think, Ben,

Ben Kornell  5:54  
part of why we had this one, as our top headline in the show is one business models that are built on top of high penetration scale platforms grow really quickly, at a relatively low burn or low, low upfront cost. And so what we're seeing is class, which, you know, took a risky strategy, we're gonna go all in on Zoom, you know, if zoom wants to end class, like, boom, it's over. But they got a partnership with Zoom. They've scaled incredibly well. And now you have the founder Michael chasen, who's already been quite successful with Blackboard, essentially buying technology from a old school. It's not really like web two or web three here. But it's, you know, essentially a generational old company. And now this new generation is acquiring assets off of that. It also goes to show that higher ed is a place where the virtual learning is really showing sticking, staying power, and class sells to institutions. So this is not a b2c sale. So these customers are wanting more robust web conferencing tools. So I think it's just an important signal on where the market is going. And a positive one in a sea of a lot of down.

Alexander Sarlin  7:16  
The last thing you know, this is from an excellent article from a tech journalist extraordinaire, Phil Hill, basically, one of the big things that class gets out of this acquisition is, is market share. Blackboard has been around a long time, and has been sort of working with large institutions through a b2b and sort of beta you models for many years. And basically, class is has about 350 clients, and now is expanding to 700 plus clients. So it's like a 6x Instant increase in its market share and obviously trying to consolidate the market around being the place to go for online educational teleconferencing. It's a, I think it's a smart acquisition, especially because Blackboard has sort of lost over the years, its reputation, you know, pretty heavily as a innovator. It's been an incumbent for a long time. So now class can take those customers and say, and now we're going to innovate and really keep shipping new features and get you what you actually want on our roadmap and change that relationship and keep those clients.

Ben Kornell  8:17  
Yeah, on the innovation front. Our second headline is really about the metaverse the metaverse popped this week, we had a couple articles Mercedes Benz on why the metaverse isn't overhyped. We also saw in the Wall Street Journal virtual is the new reality for MBA students. And at the same time, we had former podcast guests, in fact, meta versity announcing that they're at a crossroads and planning to wind things down in one way or the other. So this kind of big picture, Metaverse is going to grow. It's going to be huge in education, as well as some of the early entrance in that race, stumbling. How do you make sense of it, Alex?

Alexander Sarlin  8:57  
So the way I make sense of the metaverse, I think it's actually a great segue from class and zoom is that you're not going to have individual, relatively small companies building the metaverse. The whole point of the metaverse is that it's a single online world in which everything happens. It's not meant to be a subject specific online world. It's supposed to be low world. So to get to anything near that vision, you're going to need a very large incumbent company to build it. That's why meta has been trying to build it. It's why unity is trying to build it. So I think we're sort of seeing happen at the same time here is that smaller startups that are trying to build their own, you know, Metaverse is quote, unquote, or their own sort of virtual worlds are struggling in wrestling and trying to get more users and it's very expensive to build. But the big dogs that Microsoft's Facebook's are building slowly, and you know, basically building up to a big suite of products and features that are going way to launch and hopefully be in their minds hopefully be the metaverse. So you saw Mercedes Benz has this amazing thought leader VC from Lightspeed capital, saying, Look, don't give up on the metaverse, yet. There's, it's coming. I think it will come. But I think it'll come from much bigger companies, probably gaming, or potentially social media companies, not startups.

Ben Kornell  10:21  
Yeah. I totally agree with that perspective. And the question then is, what is the entry point into education? Are there bridge companies, and persone has a great talk on YouTube around islands versus bridges. And what he talks about is, if you're really innovative, you are probably building an island. And it's this amazing place, and you want people to come. But you also need to find others who can build the bridge to the island. And so maybe that work in edtech, is what's that bridge that connects the learners and the learning experiences with the metaverse. I would also say, for those of you who haven't googled it and read the article, we'll we'll provide the link. But it's probably the most candid founder comments I've ever seen online, around the decision to stop what they were doing, you know, they had raised $5 million, they had only, you know, spent down something like 500k, they realize the path we're on is not going to get us to this ultimate vision, we need to stop and come up with a new plan, one of the options of which includes just giving the money back to investors. And I would just say, that thought process and those conversations, one probably don't happen enough to when they do they happen behind closed doors. And, you know, the public is often not aware of the burden that the founding teams hold as they're thinking about these multiple paths forward, including, you know, existential paths. But third, I think the vulnerability and sharing that out also is really opening possibilities for investment diversity and could be a good model for others to follow. So applaud money's over there. And then you know, really the biggest question for Metaverse is on what timeline? And will big tech really want to play in the education space? So that actually leads right into our third headline, big tech and education?

Alexander Sarlin  12:37  
Absolutely, so this week in big tech and education news, class central called out that Facebook, aka meta, has been working on a pilot to basically create Facebook classes, and they had launched this in the UK, but they just expanded to the US. And they're looking for 5000 instructors to basically teach and create and teach their own classes on Facebook. Class Central's take is that this is sort of a Udemy competitor, it's moving into some of the other open market spaces. But it is definitely an interesting moment to see one of the largest tech companies in the world start to turn towards education in a relatively casual and informal but could be a very important way. What are your first thoughts on hearing Facebook, jump into the education realm in this way,

Ben Kornell  13:29  
I think it's important to look at this from two angles, one from the education and edtech space angle and one from the big tech angle. So on the Ed Tech angle, this is yet another example of a big tech company coming in and trying to win share. And what often happens is that these like well meaning initiatives, ultimately don't move the needle for the big business. And so we get kind of the runoff of whatever the company can deign to dedicate to its education business. And a couple outcomes of that is one, it creates market distortions. So you have this company that never needs to make any money from this product, essentially giving it away for free, too, you end up having decisions driven often more by politics than by business decisions. So it makes for a really unpredictable player in the space. And then third, you often get products or services that don't really solve the deep problem in that tech space that is trying to solve so some examples tick tock for education, I got to go to bite dance, the parent company in China, they were planning to take over education and transformed the world. And ultimately they ended up with a side by side reading app that was born and died within like 12 months. You also have Seen Amazon make a lot of starts and stops in the education space. That's it on the big tech side. Education hasn't been too bad for Google. I mean, it is the largest edtech company in the world. And they are getting all of their users acclimated to the Google suite as well as Chromebooks. Microsoft is just using their business and enterprise machine to just churn through districts selling. What is a god awful product, from my opinion, Microsoft Teams, you know, whenever I have a school district talk call, and it's like, here's your Microsoft team's like, I'm like, Ah, and then, you know, tick tock is actually winning the eyeball or, you know, outside, I actually looked at some of the teacher tiktoks. And it's incredible. I mean, it is taking off with kids, it's definitely getting a lot of mindshare. But left out of that conversation is Facebook and Instagram, like, what are they going to do? And if you're looking at Facebook, and Instagram, what do they have, they have a bunch of engaged users, they have the demand side, but they need to find supply side things to connect that demand side with and now that the apple privacy issues are they're kind of ruining Facebook's advertising business, they've got to find other kind of supply side paths to connect with their demand. And outside of the US, you actually see Facebook marketplace being a real winner for them. Here, maybe this bet is that, you know, teachers teaching classes online is the solution. I'm pretty skeptical. What about you, Alex?

Alexander Sarlin  16:33  
So that's a great analysis. And I really think you're spot on with the idea that, you know, Facebook has is still in many ways, the town square of the world, it has been sort of losing young users for quite a while, but it is still an enormous multi billion person, place. And I think they're looking for ways to add value to the learners who are there go beyond, you know, news go beyond the original social media offering and education and the ability to teach to sort of make anybody into a teacher or learner is intriguing. I will, you know, full disclosure, I've worked at Skillshare, and also consulted with Facebook, on some similar projects. To this, I have a little bit of insider knowledge here, which I definitely cannot share. But I think overall, the idea of these open marketplaces, I mean, when you look at what Udemy really did in education is really substantially different than what a Coursera or edX or power school or, you know, some of the other really big companies do, it basically changed the definition of education. And I think you could say the same thing about YouTube. You know, it made knowledge into an asset that is shareable. And I think that Facebook is looking at probably, you know, at YouTube at Udemy, perhaps, and Skillshare, other open marketplaces and saying, you know, there are so many people out there who are incredibly good at making online content, incredibly good. And making online video, very good at communicating. And using all of this energy. And using all of this tech know how, and using all of this marketing know how, basically just to draw attention to themselves with no, there's a really sort of nothing there. And I think the positive view of a company like Facebook, trying, at least to step into the education space in this way, is that they're trying to sort of potentially uplevel the conversation of you know, what you do when you go on a social media platform, maybe you're going to learn, you know, Roman history, maybe you're going to learn how to do a new dance, maybe you're going to learn how to cook, maybe you're going to learn how to learn a language from people who are speaking that language in a native way. That's a pretty different vision than what people go to social media for now, which has been, you know, not the best in terms of outcomes, especially for teenagers. So I'm gonna, you know, be a little positive here. I think, you know, Facebook betta has been finding there. I've also worked at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. So I've sort of been in and out of the Facebook meta ecosystem for a number of years. And I think they mean, well, and they're trying to find a place where they can add positive educational value. And I think it's been, there'd been a number of starts there. I don't know how many assets, you know, how much resources they'll put into a product like this. But I think it'd be pretty silly for companies, especially companies like Udemy and Skillshare. Not to take note that Facebook is moving into their space with a enormous crowd of potential teachers. So I think it's definitely a space to watch. And I agree that you know, I think, compared to some of the other big tech companies, especially Google, I think Facebook has just not yet found a strategy that really works. They've tried some things with Oculus XYZ, but they're trying on the metaverse, they're trying with this Facebook classes and all we can do is wait and See and see if any of them sort of catch fire or if they create political backlash and chaos as sometimes they have in the past.

Ben Kornell  20:07  
My two thoughts, hearing your analysis are one, the path to hell is paved with good intentions to is also, there's all of these externalities that often get lost in the conversation. And so, you know, when LinkedIn, you know, pretty successfully goes into professional learning and upskilling, with the idea of getting more people engaged on their platform selling advertising, and also being a recruiting resource. They can really ruin businesses like masterclass, because the kind of competitive dynamic is flipped on its head. And I think this is what people mean, in Washington, when they talk about, you know, antitrust, in big tech in that. It's not that there's a lack of competition in remaining in that industry. It's just that the rules are sufficiently changed are shaped by a company that doesn't need to actually create profitable business, to thrive in whatever that vertical is. So it will be something for us to watch for sure.

Alexander Sarlin  21:18  
So last comment on this, because I think your points about market distortions are very, very important when it comes to companies of this size and scale, stepping into stepping into war with much, much, much, much smaller companies. You know, when Microsoft bought LinkedIn, which had bought lynda.com, and incorporated it, it did feel like there was going to be a moment where, okay, well, LinkedIn owns the entire economic graph. It knows where everybody works, it knows where everybody wants to work and knows where that what jobs they're looking at. And then it has this huge catalog of online courses a sync, it felt like, okay, that is a very strategic move, and a very interesting move. And it might sort of be game over that said, it was not GAME OVER LinkedIn learning has not been the juggernaut that it perhaps could have been. And we've seen Amazon by 10 marks and shut it down. We've seen big companies try to come into the education space, as you say, with like, with tick tock, and surprisingly, just sort of fall on their face. And I think that when they fall apart in that way, the market does not get as distorted as you might think, right? Because if these big companies can't actually succeed in the education space, for whatever reason, or you think about Rupert Murdoch with News Corp buying amplified, you remember that moment, where it's like, oh, my gosh, what a crazy moment in edtech. But they don't always make it work. In fact, I think they have a pretty bad batting average, when

Ben Kornell  22:50  
you get none of the upside, often, and all the externalities because ultimately, like if Rupert Murdoch's business was to make amplify work, it would have worked, but his business was Newscorp. And the same with meta their business is meta, it is not trying to do you know, instruction online. So it do you think big tech is just playing in all pawns. And the idea that we would have our education pond to ourselves is so naive. But it would be ideal to find ways for more partnerships and for humble collaboration there, you would think that Mina would have learned that lesson over the last, you know, 10 years,

Alexander Sarlin  23:35  
you could argue that social media for a company like betta, their business is user generated content. And this is just another flavor of user generated content. That's

Ben Kornell  23:45  
probably how they see it. Alex, how's that gonna go for learning? You're also learning designer. So yeah,

Alexander Sarlin  23:51  
let's see. So what is happening in the K 12? World, we've been up in universities, we've been around in big tech, what's going on in K 12. This week, then,

Ben Kornell  24:02  
this week, of course, everyone's talking about what's going on in Texas. We're also seeing some incredible reports about drops in enrollment. And this idea around what is going to be staying with us post COVID. And what is just going to kind of come back to normal, and it's on the magnitude of a million to a million and a half students not coming back to public schools. And the take is with plunging enrollment, a seismic kit to public schools. And there's two elements of the article one I think is really worth paying attention to, which is that you know, families are opting out of public school. The second take is that that is going to mean disaster for the funding of schools. The challenge that I have with that is it is not taking into account the macro effect that if enrollment goes down everywhere, and taxes remain the same. Do you actually have fewer students splitting a pot that is of the same size. And so we have a little bit of an inflammatory press right now, where, you know, a school district is down 50,000 students, but if you actually look at the total revenue in, its flat, and so there's actually more money per student than there has ever been. Now let's, you know, be real, like, you know, cost of living is going up, inflation is real, you've got to pay teachers more. But actually, this might be a really incredible time to innovate around the learners who are still coming and accepting the fact that many, many families are opting out in search of something new and different. As you know, I'm on the school board. And I'm a big believer in public education, I do think schools should be a place where every parent feels like they can get a great education for their child. But we've kind of crossed the you know, this articles basically pointed out, we've crossed the line where these families 1.2 million are never coming back. And the trends suggest even lower enrollment as a proportion going forward. And so, you know, the burden now that schools and districts have had this year, which I wouldn't even call a recovery year, I mean, it's been insane. But over the summer, thinking about what you're going to do with either smaller class sizes, or a smaller teaching force, or a smaller physical footprint, you can look at that as a downside, but you can also look at the opportunity. And ultimately, it does not inherently translate to less money. The only states where it doesn't translate to less money is voucher states. So that would be like Florida, where the money does follow the child and goes to the alternative school method. But most of this article was about California, where the surplus is actually huge. And districts should all across the board be getting the same or more money despite lower enrollment.

Alexander Sarlin  27:02  
I think that's a phenomenal take Ben, very comprehensive overview of what's going on with the enrollment and how it affects student funding with different funding models. The only small thing I might add to that is I think that the this plunging enrollment story and teacher shortage story, which has been happening for, you know, a couple of years and this sort of disillusionment with public schooling and just with, even in person schooling, I think is going to be exacerbated by the shootings. And by the press around, just the idea that if school is continued to be, you know, a place that more and more people opt out of, it feels more and more viable to homeschool or to use hybrid school or pod schooling, all of these different models are coming up, we've talked to people on the podcast, about micro schools, all of these different models. And at the same time, public schools can't spend their SR funding, and are just trying to figure out, you know what to do. They're really in a competitive landscape, I think if they want to bring people back to the schools, or if they want the families and students who are staying in despite everything, to really have a great education and love their school, they have a really interesting opportunity right now, because they do have, as you say, more money. And they have almost like the survivors. I don't mean that in a violent way, of course, but you know, the survivors, the people whose families have opted to stay with public school, despite everything, there's a really interesting opportunity to innovate, they can use some of the money they can use the smaller teaching force, the teachers who have not burned out, and try something really new. I'm really hoping that is how people see it. And not as this article sort of implies that it's like this just chase for, you know, students equals money, so less students equals less money, which is really illogical and not, and not what's happening.

Ben Kornell  28:57  
Totally. And with these opportunities, that leads us well into our fifth headline where we cover funding and m&a. Alex, do you want to cover the funding?

Alexander Sarlin  29:08  
Sure. So you know, as we jump into some of the funding, one thing I think is worth mentioning this week is that our friends in the European venture capital world had a couple of really interesting events and sort of outputs this week, bright eye ventures, which is one of the large European VCs put out a really fascinating document about fundraising in a down market, with really very specific and useful information for people about how they might think about what it looks like as the funding rounds start getting smaller people start getting nervous, what do you do as a startup? So we're gonna put a link to that. And it's a really interesting, interesting article. And then the eMERGE education folks, also out of Europe held a summit this week with over 100 startups, including, I believe, 70 of their own investments, and their whole thing is about bringing together Ed Tech into a community. And it's really interesting to see we read some coverage about what was going on with the summit. And it's just exciting to see these nascent communities. So we'll add links to those. But those are really interesting things happening in the funding world. You also saw Israeli online education startup master school, that's master school, not master class, Master school raised $100 million seed round. This may be the last 100 million dollar round we might see for a while. This is a group that operates 30 career training schools right now and is looking to open 70 more, so they're obviously doing well enough. They want to double triple their impact and this 100 million dollar seed round. It's pretty amazing. We'll help them do that. We also saw torch raise 40 million in a Series C led by 137 Ventures. Torch is a people development platform about coaching, mentoring and collaborative learning. It's organizational b2b. We saw parallel learning, which does remote special education, assessment and tutoring, raise $20 million. We've talked on this show a lot about how special ed and neurodiversity is very underserved right now, because there are just not enough people serving it. So a remote special education, assessment and tutoring company makes a lot of sense that's also relevant to our guests today. We saw a company called foond mate out of South Africa raised $2 million. Their goal is to use WhatsApp and Facebook based learning as a sort of chatbots within social media for learning around the globe. So that's a really interesting model. So sort of meeting students where they are on Whatsapp and Facebook, and then turning that into a learning experience from the outside. We saw a British company called six bit education, raise 800,000 pounds to help automate grading, and to build out that structure and add features. And German Berlin based no unity, raised 10 million euros for building a global learning platform for Gen Z students. That's a Series A round and we're seeing more and more companies focus on Gen Z. So interesting stuff happening in multiple continents. And that's our funding. Ben, how about mergers and acquisitions?

Ben Kornell  32:25  
Well, the big merger and acquisition came out just as we were releasing last week's podcast, amplify acquiring Desmos. As mentioned before, amplify is a huge next generation publisher of curriculum and content that was previously owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. And now, I believe is is owned primarily by Emerson Collective, yes. And they serve 10 million students in all 50 states. So one in five learners in education use and amplify a product. For Desmos. They get the incredible scale of amplify, what amplify gets is Desmos is incredible quality math instruction. They are famous for this math calculator that everyone started using, like 100 million 200 million users, using, you know, their kind of online, Texas Instruments for replacement. And then they parlayed that into a pretty incredible, engaging, multimedia curriculum, the calculators still free, don't fret teenagers out there. But if you want your cosine or your sign, you know where to go. But I am just fascinated by this move, because it really is an example of a niche, super high quality content provider teaming up with a big platform and blasting their products across the edge. Uverse. Also, you know, we're seeing a lot of activity abroad. And in South Africa, e squared, which is a vocational college and primary and secondary school. It's basically focused on developing entrepreneurship. It was acquired by genius group. And their genius group's mission is to disrupt current education model with students centered, lifelong learning curriculum. We love these combinations that are essentially founders who've kind of created that proof of concept. They merge with a bigger group to amplify that. And in South Africa, and particularly thinking about a market that's primed for disruption with new models. It is just a really compelling space to watch and hopefully inspires more m&a, and innovation in the US market. I find our m&a tends to be more around conservative bets, and what we're finding in both Africa and South America as developing, you know, continents, that there's a lot more big bets on innovation. All right, that wraps up our headlines. It's been a crazy week.

Hi, everyone, we're excited to have Jeff Cohen, CEO of full bloom. Join us today. Great to have you here, Jeff.

Jeffrey Cohen  35:33  
Thanks. Great to be here.

Ben Kornell  35:35  
Before we jump in Jeff, maybe you can tell our audience a little bit about what full bloom does and what your mission is. Sure,

Jeffrey Cohen  35:42  
full bloom is an education and health care services provider primarily focusing on providing supplemental instruction, as well as special ed services for kids with behavioral challenges or kids with autism serving all ages, we run supplemental programs in partnership with schools, as well as operate 90 of our own special ed schools that partner with their local school systems,

Ben Kornell  36:14  
and about how many students total do you serve?

Jeffrey Cohen  36:17  
Over the course of the year, we will serve about 150,000 students. And I always like to emphasize, when I say we serve student, those aren't students that come into contact with a full blown product or C software. When I say we're serving students, that means that's 150,000 students that are sitting down across the table, from a full bloom professional, whether that's a teacher or a therapist, or a teacher's aide or a counselor, that's direct services.

Ben Kornell  36:50  
Two things that we've talked about on this podcast are this convergence of learning and health. And second, the kind of hybrid in person and, you know, software enablement of education businesses, let's start with the first, do you see yourself as a healthcare company? Or as an education company? Or a little of both? And how is that evolving?

Jeffrey Cohen  37:14  
Look, I think we're both our focus is on vulnerable kids. And when we think about the development of children, we think about it along three domains, the academic, the behavioral, and the emotional, or the mental health of the child. And when we're looking at the needs of particular kids, unfortunately, historically, we looked as a system in isolation at one of those three is instead of looking at a child's needs along all three and trying to build integrated service sets that will accelerate positive outcomes, and bring down the total cost of providing service to that child. So if we want to get this right, we have to consider simultaneously the educational needs as well as the healthcare needs health care being behavioral health, as well as mental health.

Alexander Sarlin  38:11  
So fascinating answer. And then, in terms of the combining in person and online service, you were coming out of a two year long pandemic in which many special needs students have been really left behind in terms of being able to access service providers, how do you see the combination of in person and digital communications in education and health?

Jeffrey Cohen  38:35  
If you think that the best way to provide these services is through an integrated set? Right, then the optimal modality is a hybrid modality, right? There are times when we have to be in front of a student. I mean, for us, we don't ask ourselves, how can we use software? Or where do we implement digital services? We start with what is the best product set service set to address a particular child's needs? Right? What's really interesting is when you introduce sort of the healthcare services into the equation, right? you necessarily have to invite virtual or digital solutions, because today in our country, we don't have enough therapists, school counselors, school psychologists, social workers, in every community, capable of addressing the needs of the children in that community. So by nature, we have to find virtual or digital solutions. The good news with that what we're really excited about is children today gravitate towards those digital solutions, right. You know, I think of myself as an old person if I envision myself good Getting therapy, the picture I think of as myself sitting in a chair next to a therapist. But children today think of therapy as getting a text and a prompt to watch a video or set of questions for them to consider right, or doing a zoom session or, you know, with a therapist that could be 1000 miles away, which is the really the optimal way of trying to address the massive need that we're seeing in the country today. Let's talk a

Ben Kornell  40:28  
little bit about business models. You know, the world is in a tough place right now. We're seeing financial markets tighten. Of course, labor costs are spiraling. And as you mentioned, there's a real shortage. How do you see the future of your business growing? How does the economic macro trends affect you, but also some of the trends going on in the education space?

Jeffrey Cohen  40:52  
Well, look, you mentioned the big one end, I'm really concerned about the labor markets relative to the needs of our children. Right, the fact of the matter is, let's set aside wage inflation and how that enters into business models. But you got to start with the availability of professionals. And we have created a situation in this country where quite frankly, not enough people want to be teachers. And then when we talk about the children that full bloom serves vulnerable kids, kids with special needs, you know, basically, you've got two lines, you have a line of kids with special needs, and that line is going vertically up into the right. As far as we can see, unfortunately, the line of people that want to become special ed teachers is going in the other direction, down, right and to the right. So we have to solve for that. And no software solution is going to replace all of our teachers, right? We can't think that right? We're going to automate all of education and health care provision for K 12 students. So we've got to make it more attractive in this country, for people to want to come work with children. And that is all around professionalizing. Teaching, treating teachers as the professionals, they are thinking about more residency programs. I mean, what think about the path that a health care professional takes it allied health or nurses or doctors, right, we should think about teaching the same way. It's just a wholesale rethink about the teaching profession.

Ben Kornell  42:37  
It's so fascinating. You know, I spent four years in healthcare and learned a lot about how do you innovate in that space where you pair technical and adaptive change together, and hospital systems and clinics get better. But also many of the foundational challenges, there's a huge nursing shortage as well. They've been experiencing for 20 years. And so there's opportunities to learn from the business model and that blend.

Jeffrey Cohen  43:04  
Absolutely. Right. I mean, look, what's interesting is this is a longer conversation, but I will tell you, it feels to me, like education is following an arc, that healthcare, you know, sort of the path of healthcare, but decades ago, right, so what we're seeing in education today is what I call the consumerization of education. If you go back to when I was a kid, you go back 25 years ago, think about health care, you didn't see on television, paid advertisements for prescription medicine, right? There were certain times of the week you couldn't see a doctor, right? But today, you can see a doctor whenever you want. There's Minute Clinics on demand virtual watch this evening news and 90% of the commercials are for pharmaceuticals, that are not available over the counter. They're telling you go get smart about what you need for yourself and your own health care. That's happening slowly. But it's happening in education today. Right? where parents are becoming better consumers for their kids. I think the pandemic will have accelerated that are that's a good thing that's going to drive more choice, right, that's going to drive more innovation, that's going to drive more variability. Right. All things that are good. Yeah. From a consumer perspective.

Alexander Sarlin  44:32  
So you have an amazing career in education. You have previously been the president and CEO of Sylvan Learning, which is one of the world's largest networks of tutoring centers, and I'd love to just hear you talk about, you know, between tutors, and special needs teachers and healthcare professionals. How can we change a society to actually as you say, value those professions more and really convert Are young people to moving into professions like that as their sort of core goal?

Jeffrey Cohen  45:04  
Yeah, I think we have to invest in them. It's all about priorities, right? I mean, we invest in health care where arguably, we invest too much in health care. Think about how much money we waste in our health care system today. So it's not about the availability of funds. It's about the will. And it's about priorities. Right? It's about making sure you're deciding that we want to invest in the teaching profession, and we want to address it the way we address the health care profession. And then what you'll attract more folks into it, yes, the money will, should be there, but it's available. Look what just happened. In the last two years, the federal government just pumped What $200 billion into the education system, by the way on an emergency basis. Yet, I think something like 60 70% of those funds haven't been spent yet. So you know, how much of the emergency was there. And we all know the emergency was there. And the reason the money didn't get spent is because of bureaucracy and layers of administrative, you know, unnecessary bureaucracy, we need to decide what the priority is, in this country, the money is clearly available, we just made $200 billion available almost overnight, to address a big problem is facing our K 12. system. To me, it's all about will and priorities.

Ben Kornell  46:34  
I so appreciate that point. And coming back to the healthcare system. What we've also seen is that consolidation has had an effect of raising the level of quality and efficiency in the healthcare sector. And the common model in education to grow is organic growth, opening new locations, if you're tutoring, you know, if you're Sylvan or finding new users online if you're some online learning platform, but Alex and I are just observing a marketplace now that is primed for mergers and acquisitions and in organic growth. You've had some experience in bringing together teams from very different backgrounds and very different geographies and so on together through the m&a process. How do you see m&a as a force for good in education and rolling up some of the efficiency but also the quality? And where can it go wrong? How do you balance that?

Jeffrey Cohen  47:34  
Let's start where where it can go wrong. I think m&a or roll ups simply for m&a sake, is where you go wrong. Right? When it's simply pursued as a function of financial engineering, right to engineer a better bottom line, financial bottom line result, you run the risk of it going wrong, when you use m&a to enhance your strategy around driving quality, right? That's where it's a force multiplier. That's how we think about m&a. We're constantly looking for organizations that are better at aspects of our service than we are right. But by virtue of m&a, we can bring that quality into our organization very quickly. We've learned over the years how to integrate quickly, because sometimes that can slow you down. And then you get the benefit, right of that acquisition. So for us, it's all about strategy, right? What is it that we're missing today? Where do we need to do better? Where do we need to expand our reach? And where can we find folks that can get us there quickly, but who either add value to what we're doing, or simply fit culturally and strategically with what we're doing, and therefore allow us to just expand our scale. One of the things I should add is, we believe that as we're having this conversation, right, it's something that sort of that should run through this whole conversation is scale. Right? scale matters, right? We have such dire challenges across our education system today, that, you know, small one off, solutions aren't going to get us there. So we spend a lot of time thinking about outcomes first, but then how can we scale those outcomes? m&a becomes an incredible tool to be able to drive that scale.

Ben Kornell  49:40  
It's such a pleasure to talk to you and have you on the podcast today. Jeff, when I think about the 150,000 students that you serve, you know, you're a top 50 School District in America on your own, all with learners who have learning differences and unique needs and it's just so clear and compelling, not only that you're building a large, scalable, sustainable business around it, but also bringing a team together that's really supporting those learners. If folks on the podcast have a chance, go to full bloom.org. Check it out. And thank you so much for being on the show.

Jeffrey Cohen  50:19  
Thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure to talk to you guys in love talking about these topics.

Ben Kornell  50:32  
Who would you have in the offing? Who would you nominate? So we put the challenge out to your listeners, put it in our show notes, or you can put it in the comments on LinkedIn or tweet us? Who would you nominate and also include the category you would nominate them for extra bonus points for creative categories. So we've got a couple of example. Let's start with top YouTube educator. If you were going to nominate somebody for the Hall of Fame in the YouTube educator category, who comes to mind for you, Alex, for me,

Alexander Sarlin  51:07  
the sort of quintessential YouTube educator that I always hold up as really one of the masters of the craft is a guy named destin Sandlin. He is an Alabama I think rocket scientist by trade, who creates these incredible educational videos under the handle Smarter Every Day. And they basically ask these questions, these sort of intriguing questions and then explore it's a little bit of almost like a Mythbusters. They sort of try to explore mostly scientific topics through experiments and video and he's just a master at storytelling. It's very hard to turn away from one of his videos. It's almost like a one man, you know, science show. He's been recognized a lot. He has actually got to meet President Obama in his last year in office. Because he's just reached he has over a billion views in his catalogue of videos. So I've shown his videos to university instructors as they're learning how to teach online to just show what great storytelling looks like how to capture an audience through video. And I can't speak highly enough about his work. So I would say Smarter Every Day is destin Sandlin. What about you, man who's your YouTube educator nominee?

Ben Kornell  52:25  
Well, first top of my income, Sal Khan, who's kind of the OG in building the kind of YouTube to Empire path. And, you know, Sal basically started by putting YouTube videos of himself teaching his nephew math. And then basically, people started subscribing and people started looking, and it was pretty incredible. I will say that COVID has actually seen a lot of really great educators, there's a woman who has founded something called draw together, her name is Windy. And I don't even know her last name, because she doesn't share on the website. But Wendy basically does an art class in 30 minutes or less. And basically, kids are able to, you know, connect with social emotional learning, but also do an art project. And I remember when I was in middle school, I had to choose between band, choir or art. And unfortunately, art got the short end of the stick. And I would have loved to have had something like this. So I put Wendy from draw together up on my YouTube Hall of Fame. Let's do two more as examples. But of course, we want to hear from you. Why don't you do a higher ed one and I'll do a K 12. One. Who would you nominate for higher ed?

Alexander Sarlin  53:45  
Sure thing. So for higher ed, this is maybe a little bit of a gimme. It's somebody who has had a lot of accolades and honors in the space but I would nominate for a innovative higher ed leader, Michael Serral, from Paul Quinn College. He's, you know, known for many things, but basically for turning around a small historically black college and university and HBCU being called Paul Quinn, from basically you know, struggling to survive to a real model of innovation throughout the country through a variety of different really interesting initiatives, including what he calls the new urban college model, which basically uses on campus work programs and open source textbooks to decrease student loan debt so that students can graduate with multiple years of real world experience and less than $10,000 in debt extremely important. He's, you know, worked with students to change the campus and sort of transform the football field into a farm to demolish abandoned buildings using students and work study. He's just an incredibly innovative and interesting things around you know what college is and Paul Quinn is called an urban Work college, because it really sort of incorporates both real world work and academics in a incredibly interesting model. So, Michael Saarela is sort of a fixture of edtech and education conferences. He's talked for about almost 10 years about some of these models. So it's a little bit of a gimme, but it's still really interesting to see somebody sort of swoop in and make that kind of incredible innovation. How about you in the K 12? Side, Ben, who would you nominate?

Ben Kornell  55:28  
Gosh, so many great people to nominate. Of course, I would also nominate my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Kurtz, Game Changer educator for me. But I'd probably say chi Henderson who was the Chancellor of DC public schools from 2010 to 2016. Many people look at the Michelle Rhee era as the kind of innovation era and there was a degree to which Michelle Rhee really created a precedent, were essentially kind of burn things down so that it could be rebuilt. But what I really love about chi Henderson's tenure, there was this, she was kind of that bridge Chancellor that moved from high stakes testing is everything, to combining rigor and testing with real world project based learning, and understanding that there's a diverse set of needs in a community and that multiple school models could really work. So she's kind of the master of the portfolio model among superintendents, and kind of creating asset based and competency based learning. And now she's doing reconstruction us, which is really around finding new narratives of History that can really center around African American experience. And she's doing in ways that are both like, really, really thoughtful and artfully done, but also ways in which educators don't have to be experts to teach it in their class. And I think that's one of the you know, we're we're in a moment where we need to be having tough conversations in class, but many of our educators don't feel comfortable or prepared to lead those discussions. So my nominee would be Kaya Henderson. And with that, we're starting to get those plaques hung in the Hall of Fame, the educational fame, who would you nominate? We'll share some of them on the air, please send it out. And we also thank everyone for tuning in to today's episode. Special thanks to Jeff bloom, our guests, and we appreciate all the educators who decided to wake up this morning, get out there and head back to school despite everything we know that is challenging at schools, including safe and healthy. So with that, we're going to wrap up this weekend ed tech may 26. We will see you in June.

Alexander Sarlin  57:49  
Thanks for listening to this episode of the EdTech insiders podcast. If you liked the episode, remember to subscribe on Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple, please leave a rating and review so others can find the podcast. For more ed tech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at edtech insiders.substack.com