As some of you may have seen on LinkedIn, ETCH was acquired!

I am joining Whiteboard Advisors as a VP in their Strategy & Research practice and Editor of the next evolution of this newsletter, The EdSheet.

Members of the Whiteboard team have been friends, mentors, and collaborators since before I started ETCH and I am excited to join them. We’ve already begun planning the continued growth of the Whiteboard Media newsletter portfolio and research database.

Tactically, here is what the acquisition means for ETCH:

• Newsletter: The back catalog will remain online for referencing, but the site will be mostly dormant. I have one more surprise guest post coming this week(!) and will cross-post the first few editions of The EdSheet here, but I want to stay focused on growing Whiteboard Media after this transition period.

  • Free subscribers: will be auto-migrated to The EdSheet

  • Paid subscribers: your ETCH subscription will be canceled and refunded on a prorated basis. Your ETCH subscriber email address will be auto-migrated to the EdSheet

    • Note: I will send paid subscribers a separate update with details on timing - it may take a couple of weeks to unwind this properly with Substack. I paused subscriptions on May 13, so there should not be any recent renewals/transactions on your account.

• Funding Database and Job Board: will be refreshed under the Whiteboard brand after the July 4th holiday. Current subscriptions will be canceled and refunded.

As a final note, I am grateful to all of you for reading. Especially those of you who have watched this newsletter grow from a group chat among friends to a real business.

But! I don’t want to get too nostalgic here because there is a lot more work to do building this thing and Whiteboard is the best partner in the world to build with.

With that, on to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Speak raises $20M / US, Language Learning / Buckley Startup Fund, OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures

• Pok Pok raises $6M / US, Content Provider / Adjacent, Konvoy Ventures, MetaLab Ventures, Banana Capital

• MEandMine raises $4.5M / US, Mental Health / K5 Global

• Taskbase raises €3.6M / Switzerland, Content Platform / Mediahuis Ventures, Acrobator Ventures, Bloomhaus Ventures AG

• Neople raises €1.5M / Netherlands, Talent Platform / Peak Capital, Curiosity

• Keenious raises €1.3M / Norway, Academic Integrity / Spintop Ventures, Investinor

• Brookfield Asset Management-led consortium invests in GEMS / Dubai, K12 School Provider

• Weatherford Capital invests in BusPatrol / US, School Infrastructure

• Pathify acquires Navengage / US, Extracurricular Activities

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• Learnlaunch announces newest cohort of accelerator investments - including High Five, Reflection Sciences, Thriving Students Collective, Prentus, and Hardskills / via PRNewswire

• Somos Young raises up to $12.6M mixture of equity and credit / via Tekios Magazine

• Niya raises £1.5M / via Sifted

• Brainspark Games raises £1.4M / via PocketGamer

• Quizrr raises $1.4M / via Quizrr

People Moves

• Andrew Rosen joins Coursedog as CEO / via PRNewswire

• John Higginson joins Curriculum Associates as CTO / via Curriculum Associates

• Chegg cuts 23% of workforce, 441 employees / via PRNewswire

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

Subscribe to JOTW

Links

K12

• The EdTech article of the year, so far, belongs to Laurence Holt’s The 5 Percent Problem. While Laurence will humbly deflect credit for this, I am happy to see more people, companies, and news organizations addressing the article’s concerns - that we need more efficacy research in EdTech and that the research we produce has to account for all students, not just those who excel with a given product (often about 5% of study participants). Just this week:

  • Classroom tech outpaces research why that’s a problem. / via Education Week

  • And, the math most kids want to learn. / via

• The education spending debate is heating up as the US election season fires up.

  • On the one hand, you have, education savings accounts (ESAs) continuing to win votes - this week Louisiana became the 12th state to pass legislation embracing school choice. And we saw not one, not two, but three different articles highlighting microschools (sometimes seen as a branch of the school choice movement) / via Wall Street Journal, New York Times, 74Million, & The Hill

    • We also saw some pointed pushback against school choice, be wary of what you read in the school voucher debate / via Brookings

  • On the other hand, the Senate started exploring federal mechanisms for raising teacher salaries to $60K+ per year. This follows the actions of states like Arkansas, which have raised salaries as a means of recruiting and retaining their instructional staff. / via K12 Dive and Hechinger Report

    • Meanwhile, the American Federation of Teachers is off recruiting doctors. / via Bloomberg Law

• More downsizing at ETS. In the links section because it is not yet clear how many jobs will be impacted - the article covers a buyout offered to US employees with 2+ years of service. Of note, the article also breaks the news that ETS will no longer administer the SAT for the College Board (though the two organizations will still do some business together outside of the SAT). / via Inside Higher Ed

• The English-learner student, in charts. / via Education Week

• Two takes on the growth of the special education market over the past ~10 years, covered by the Wall Street Journal and Education Week. / via Wall Street Journal and Education Week

• China wants to export education too. / via the Economist

Higher Ed

• Whither OPMs? Trace Urdan comes out of analyst retirement with a banger on how the OPM industry is shifting. I will reiterate my own position that while fee-for-service makes sense for some schools, the financial risk of both launching and maintaining online programs will end up pushing all but the richest and/or largest schools out of the market. / via Inside Higher Ed

• Arizona proposes state budget with $20M+ in cuts for higher education. Arizona is truly the Wild West of education, leading the charge on Education Savings Accounts (for better or for worse), boasting one of the largest online universities in the world (who received the biggest funding cut here), and the university with (probably) the largest budget deficit in the world. / via Higher Ed Dive

• University of the Arts sudden closure remains shrouded in mystery. If any of you would like to join a University of the Arts conspiracy theory group chat, please let me know. / via Inside Higher Ed

Workforce

• Why I skipped college to be an HVAC tech. Are HVAC techs the new welders? / via Wall Street Journal

• Chick-fil-A’s summer skills camp slammed as child labor. I was preparing to defend Chick-fil-A as I read that the camp’s learning objectives covered soft skills and would help “replace home ec, shop, and basic financial literacy.” Then I read the syllabus, which included learning how to take an order, bag an order, and box nuggets. Which…yeah…sounds a lot like child labor for a camp targeting 5 to 12-year-olds. / via Fox Business

EdTech

• What’s next for the new wave of consolidation in the education market? In a nutshell, “But with a constrained total addressable market, investors question just how much room the K-12 industry has to sustain these organizations’ growth.” / via EdWeek Market Brief

  • One part of the market that does not appear to have the same TAM constraints? College football, which is readying itself for a flood of private investment. / via tucson.com

• The only app that always wins the battle for your attention - Duolingo. While the headline is rather sinister, I will take Duolingo over junky cellphone games and social media feeds 10 out of 10 times. / via Wall Street Journal

  • Related, what science actually says about social media’s effects on mental health. As much as I prefer to be evidence-based, it is hard to look at a kid on a phone and not be a little bit frightened. / via Washington Post

  • Counterpoint, maybe I am just getting old? “It is kind of a social fact of nature that kids will be more experimental and drive a lot of the innovation” in how new tech is used culturally, Mizuko Ito, a longtime researcher of kids and technology at UC Irvine, told me. “It’s also a social fact of nature that grown-ups will kind of panic and judge and try to limit.” / via The Atlantic

  • *throws arms in the air.* I don’t know. I also find the wave of | smartphone bans comical in their approach. The answer to dangerous problems is rarely pretending that they don’t exist. / via New York Times and 74Million

• Pearson’s AI summer reading list. I appreciate that the Pearson team is looking across domains with this reading list, not just focusing on education. / via Pearson

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

A few quick announcements before we get to the news:

• NYC folks: The Future of Higher Ed (FOHE) group and Samvid Ventures are hosting a free(!), in-person(!) event on Thursday (6/20) called “What’s your revenue model? Learn with non-profit and for-profit ventures creating post-secondary pathways.”

• For those headed to Denver next week: Whiteboard Advisors and ISTE are teaming up to host the Solutions Summit on Sunday (6/23). Use code ISTE24SS50 for $50 off your registration

• On a personal note, I usually take a short break from the newsletter around the 4th of July holiday here in the US. I’ll have an update next Sunday on what this year’s break will look like

With that, on to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Learn to Win raises $30M / US, Content Platform / Westly Group, Bull City Venture Partners

• GPTZero raises $10M / US, Cheating Detection / Footwork, Reach Capital, Alt Capital, Uncork Capital, Neo

• Rising Team raises $8M / US, Talent Management / Zeal Capital, Peterson Ventures, Roble Ventures, Female Founders Fund

• Visibly raises €7M / UK, Training Provider (Certification) / Creandum, Seedcamp, Brighteye Ventures, Triple Point

• Amira Learning and iStation merge / US, Early Literacy

• ClearCompany acquires Brainier Solutions / US, Talent Management (LMS)

• Kaplan acquires Azurlingua / US (France), Language Learning

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• CampusAI raises €9.2M / via EU-Startups

• Tahdir raises $270K / via Zawya

• Clapingo raises ~$250K / via Inc42

• Francisco Partners invests in Teachers’ Curriculum Institute / via Berkery Noyes

• Eduport raises undisclosed amount of angel funding / via EdTechReview

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• No major moves landed in my inbox this week; Summer must have started!

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

Subscribe to JOTW

Links

Early Childhood

• Four years after pandemic, a check-in on childcare providers’ journey to rebuild. / via Hechinger Report

K12

• New York’s new social media bill makes it illegal for companies to offer an algorithmic feed and/or to send notifications between 12-6AM to users under the age of 18 without explicit parental consent. State-by-state rules on social media would be a nightmare for social media companies to comply with, I’m curious how quickly we’ll see national legislation develop. / via New York Times

• Public school enrollments in large school districts - including Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Antonio - are declining. / via Axios

• Where did all those teacher vacancies go? / via

• Jay Z(‘s creative agency’s philanthropic arm, Roc Nation Philanthropy) puts support behind Pennsylvania’s school voucher initiative. / via Education Week

• A new, tougher bar of entry for EdTech companies. / via EdWeek Market Brief

• NYC high school reimagines career and technical education for the 21st century. / via 74Million

Higher Ed

• FAFSA fiasco die is cast. Phil Hill becomes the first industry analyst or publication I’ve seen estimate the enrollment impact of the new FAFSA rollout. Phil forecasts an enrollment drop of 5-10%, which would be a more substantial drop in enrollments than was triggered by COVID (and without a federal stimulus package to backstop university revenue declines). / via OnEdTech

• Tyton Partners’ 2024 update to their annual Time for Class survey. / via Globe Newswire

• The impossible college presidency. It feels like we are approaching the end of an era, where the longtime company CEO or college president is harder and harder to find. It gives me some pause that the leaders of institutions that are supposed to have hundred-year+ outlooks have an average tenure of 5.9 years.1 / via Chronicle of Higher Education

  • That is not to say that multi-decade tenures are inherently better. There is something simple and compelling to Bill Walsh’s theory that organizational leadership should turn over every ~10 years. / via Babson University

  • And, there are some real quirks to organizations that hang around for 100+ years. Dozens of colleges award scholarships based on little other than a common last name. / via Wall Street Journal

• Grad programs have been a cash cow; now universities are starting to fret over enrollment. / via Hechinger Report

  • Related, foreign students are coming in droves, but there’s reasons to be cautious. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

Workforce

• The business golf outing is back in a big way. “I know a guy that literally flies around the world in a private jet loaded with French wine, and he golfs and lands hundred-million-dollar deals.” We always knew AI would create demand for new skills, we just didn’t know what skills would be. / via Wall Street Journal

• How Ikea turned around a poor employee retention streak. / via Bloomberg

EdTech

• EdTech funding has not hit rock bottom. A continuation of the trend HolonIQ identified at the end of Q1, it is pretty hard to argue with the data here (though I wish I could). / via Crunchbase

• Inside Barnard’s pyramid approach to AI literacy. Simple but thoughtful. / via Inside Higher Ed

• Coursera launches AI plagiarism detector. Honestly, probably easier to sell to universities than degree programs right now. / via Inside Higher Ed

• Court halts Byju’s second rights issue as $200M fundraise falters. A reminder to be very careful about what you read in the press about Byju’s. That said, one does wonder how the company is financing daily operations, which, historically, operated at a substantial loss. / via Techcrunch

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Tweet of the Week

2 weeks of headlines to get through here, and just two weeks until the 4th of July break in the US when funding announcements tend to slow down. If you’re in the home stretch of putting together a deal or a round, keep pushing!

On to the news.

Funding / M&A

• Zhejiang Jingzhunxue raises $27M / China, Tutoring / Alibaba

• Fizz raises $14M / US, Student Financing / Kleiner Perkins, SV Angel, Y Combinator, New Era Ventures

  • Note: this is Fizz, not Fizz, who raised $25M last summer

• Odyssey raises $10M / US, School Infrastructure Software / Tusk Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Bling Capital, Cubit Capital

• Angel AI raises $4.75M / US, Content Provider / Cortical Ventures, Village Global

• Simpleclub raises €4M / Germany, Corporate Upskilling / 3VC, HV Capital, 10X Founders, Bonsai Partners

• Doowii raises $4.1M / US, Analytics / GSV Ventures, Better Ventures, Avesta Fund, Imagine Learning Ventures, Strada Education Foundation, Reach Capital, Common Sense Growth Fund

• Autovivo raises €3.8M / Germany, Training Provider / Sparkmind, Coparion

• Bain Capital acquires PowerSchool for $5.6B / US, LMS

• Sterling Partners acquires (the rest of) Keypath Education for $190M / Australia, OPM

• Imagine Learning acquires CueThink / US, Content Provider

• Wilson Language Training acquires Acadience Learning / US, Early Literacy

• Next Capital acquires controlling stake in Scentia / Australia, Degree Provider

• L Squared Capital acquires TeachTown / US, Special Education

• Elentra acquires DaVinci Education / US, LMS

• OCLC acquires JJH Consulting / US, Higher Ed Software Infrastructure

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• BCAS raises €17M in a combination of debt and equity

• Aanaab raises an undisclosed amount of funding

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Curtiss Barnes joins 1EdTech as CEO / via 1EdTech

• Brian Shaw promoted to CEO of Discovery Education / via PRNewswire

• Paul Thompson promoted to CEO of KinderCare / via PRNewswire

• Jocasta Williams promoted to GM of APAC and EMEA of Echo360 / via PRNewswire

• Guild lays off ~300 / via Denver Post

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

K12

• The most important topic in US education is the rapidly changing funding model for K12 students. To oversimplify this change, it is going from funding schools to funding students. The ripple effects are emergent but can be felt throughout the K12 ecosystem.

  • School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close. School closures and enrollment declines are not 100% attributable to funding changes, but serve as helpful proxy for watching the impact of changes. / via Politico

    • Similarly, Billions in taxpayer dollars now go to religious schools via vouchers. / via Washington Post

    • And, it is easier for parents to vote with their feet when schools/districts make social or curriculum decisions, like when to teach algebra. / via New York Times

  • For the public schools that remain open, problems still abound. From scorching schoolyards, outdoor play areas that become unusable in the heat, to shell game accounting when new public money comes in. / via 74Million and KQED

    • On a positive note, COVID does seem to have made a major, positive impact on increasing access to school meals. If only we could get Lunchables off the menu… / via New York Times and Washington Post

  • Where does this leave EdTech? It (probably) means a fast-growing cohort of new purchasers from charters, microschools, and other alternative providers. Tight budgets at public schools may also incentivize the creation of new purchasing models, like outcomes-based contracting. / via Hechinger Report

• These parents are shelling out to have someone else pack their kids for camp. Sounded great until I read the subtitle, which highlighted that the price tag for this service could be as high as $15K. / via Wall Street journal

Higher Ed

• University of Tennessee signs $11.5M “collaboration” deal with Arizona State University. From what I can tell, the core component of this deal is a licensing arrangement for ASU’s prettiest gen ed content (including VC darling Dreamscape Learn), with some goodies attached. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

  • The Tennessee < > ASU deal is a great deal for ASU. They get guaranteed revenues (at least insofar as publisher adoptions are guaranteed) while bearing no risk for the growth of Tennessee’s online programs. Tennessee, on the other hand, has boxed itself into a 5-year contract for content on top of, presumably, millions more in planned spending to *attempt to* grow their fledgling online efforts. Tennessee’s online division currently enrolls 2500 students, almost all of whom are in Master’s programs. This means that the target audience for the resources included in this deal are net-new undergraduate students that Tennesse must bear the entire financial burden of recruiting.

  • Revenue-sharing is not the end-all, be-all for online education deals. But it is specifically designed for situations like this, where the investment required to launch quickly runs into the tens of millions and the outcome is highly uncertain. It is crazy to me that universities, and state governments like Minnesota, sprint towards this risk with little-to-no examples of DIY programs scaling successfully in the past 10 years. (Obviously this calculus changes as programs get bigger. I am supportive of at least some capacity-building, just trying to call out that institutions are now shouldering the same financial hole that OPMs have spent the last 15 years trying to climb out of.) / via Whiteboard Advisors

• The man who couldn’t stop going to college. One of the rare instances where the headline sets high expectations and the story clears them. I have so many follow-up questions. / via New York Times

• The dark art of enrollment management. My gut reaction, like many of yours will be, was to think, “how can a business getting more sophisticated about knowing their customer be a bad thing?” And yet, the examples provided show how higher ed may have played itself by getting into a national recruiting (and rankings) rat race instead of sticking to local roots. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

  • One institution that seems to have evolved beyond the rat race? Northeastern University, which is adding a New York City campus via the acquisition of Marymount Manhattan College. The NYC campus joins Arlington (VA), Charlotte (NC), Miami (FL), Portland (ME), Seattle (WA), San Francisco (CA), Toronto (Ontario), and Vancouver (British Columbia) in Northeastern’s satellite campus portfolio. / via Higher Ed Dive

• With college athletes on the cusp of revenue-sharing, there are still Title IX questions to be answered. / via Associated Press

Workforce

• As dual enrollment programs boom, the focus widens to career. / via Workshift

EdTech

• Vista Equity writes value of Pluralsight stake to $0. Of note, this does not mean that the value of Pluralsight’s business is $0, but rather that the business cannot support the amount of debt that Vista piled onto it to complete their 2021 takeover. / via Axios

  • Also valued at zero (by some)? Byju’s. / via Techcrunch

• The math EdTech I let my own kids use. From , just in time for summer travel! / via

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Tweet of the Week

All I want is to live in a world where beating my son in multiplayer Civilization helps him earn credit towards his college degree.

This newsletter comes to you a day later than normal because it is Memorial Day Weekend here in the US. I hope that many of you were able to take some extra time to rest as we head into the summer months!

Speaking of extra rest, there will be no Weekend Reading newsletter next week; I’ll be back in your inbox June 9th.

On to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Zen Educate raises $37M / UK, Recruitment Platform / Round2 Capital, Adjuvo, Brighteye Ventures, FJ Labs, Ascension Ventures

  • Acquires Aquinas Education / UK, Recruitment Platform

• Praktika raises $35.5M / US, Language Learning / Blossom Capital

• Tiney raises £7.2M / UK, Early Childhood Education Software / Mustard Seed Partners, PortfolioLion, Sparkmind, Rubio

• SuperKalam raises $2M / India, Test Prep / Y Combinator, Fundersclub, Goodwater Capital, Nurture Ventures, SuperCapital, Pareto Ventures

• Coda acquires Plato / US (UK) / Mentorship

• Cornerstone acquires SkyHive / US (Canada) / Talent Management

• Times Higher Education acquires Education World Forum / UK, Media

• PowerToFly acquires Skillcrush / US, Talent Management (Upskilling)

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• Gorilla Capital invests in game studio behind Lola Panda

• Edgro raises $25M in debt funding

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Will Zemp steps down as CEO of Project Kitty Hawk / via Business North Carolina

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

K12

• Florida joins the school choice party. / via 74 Million

  • Related, school choice continues to spread. 3 things to know. / via Education Week

• Khanmigo migrates to Azure, will be free for teachers to use (but will still carry a cost to deploy to students). Last week I mentioned how impressed I was that Khan Academy managed to feature in both OpenAI and Google’s end-of-spring AI press conferences. Seems all this commotion may have made Microsoft jealous! (I can’t quite tell from the announcement whether Microsoft won this set of Khan Academy’s infrastructure services from another cloud provider or OpenAI. Either way, it feels notable.) / via VentureBeat

• Oakland’s new, electric school bus fleet will also power homes. / via Bloomberg

Higher Ed

• University of California lecturer quits after learning her TA would be paid more than her. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

• Johns Hopkins says “hold my beer” to the University of Arizona, finding a $1B “discrepancy” in the medical school’s operating budget. / via Times Higher Education

• NCAA to pay $2.8B in damages to former athletes who were not allowed to profit from their name, image, and likeness. Seems like only a matter of time until the elite football and basketball programs break away from everyone else. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

Workforce

• 2U withdraws from government-sponsored bootcamp contract in the UK. Not just a financial move; it sounds like this program was marred by bad outcomes. / via FE News

• When business is just a game. While complicated to do well, video games and simulations remain one of the most exciting parts of the EdTech world. / via Bloomberg

• What entry-level jobs really look like today. / via Wall Street Journal

• Historically, most technology shifts came from the bottom up. The C Suite was often last to embrace tools like Slack and Zoom. The AI adoption curve is happening in reverse. The C Suite has been the early adopter, stressing out the teams underneath them. / via HR Dive

• Pearson says GenAI could save 78 million hours of work a week. The gauntlet has been thrown. Will anyone be brave enough to declare 100 million work hours saved by AI? We’ve officially entered the Liar’s Dice stage of the AI hype cycle. / via PRNewswire

EdTech

• Generative AI is best at something teachers need the least. “The larger issue here is that technologists are building towards generative AI’s strengths rather than teacher and learner needs.” / via Mathworlds

• Further proof that no one knows anything about AI and we’re just making up the rules as we go: 2 Emory students win $10K cash prize *from Emory* for creating AI homework help tool. Emory then suspends students because tool “could be used for cheating.” / via Wall Street Journal

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Xeet of the Week

Before we get to the news, I need one moment of self-indulgence. My wife graduated from medical school AND business school today after 6 years of training (7 if you include a DIY postbaccalaureate program + MCAT study year). I am really proud of her.

Funding / M&A

• Elevate K12 raises $25M from Trinity Capital / US, K12 Curriculum/Services / Trinity Capital

• Anthropos raises $2.7M / US (Switzerland), Corporate Training / Founderful, Eden Ventures, Exor Ventures, Zanichelli Ventures

• Teachino raises €2M / Austria, K12 Curriculum/Services / Klett Group

• Avathon Capital acquires Summit Professional Education / US, Continuing Education

• ETS acquires Mastery Transcript Consortium / US, Assessment (Credentialing)

• Wiser Educação acquires Conquer Busines School / Portugal, Degree Provider

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• CyberNut raises $800K

• Liledu raises €550K

• Battery Future to take Class Over public via SPAC

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Jim Carlson joins Untapped Learing as CEO / via Newswire

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

K12

• Teachers’ unions are starting teacher prep programs. For all the discussion of teacher pipelines, apprenticeship programs, and career pathways it was pretty surprising that Washington state just started the first union-driven teacher apprenticeship program in the US. (I am calling this an apprenticeship program in the spirit of fighting parlance profusion, though that is not its official name.) / via Education Week

  • Related to career pathways in education, Hawaii considers new incentives to build back school administrator workforce. / via EdSurge

• Rapid guessing on tests increases after lunch. There doesn’t seem to be a “right” answer here, because (other) studies have shown early school start times hurting academic performance. Pick your poison. / via K12 Dive

Higher Ed

• For all the complaints about students using technology to cheat, it turns out the professors are cheating too. And cheating in sufficient numbers that it is more practical for Wiley to shut down 19(!) journals and take a $25-40M revenue hit than try to combat the problem. / via Wall Street Journal

• The long, steep fall of an online education giant. A real Rorschach test of an article. To me, the two important details were: / via Wall Street Journal

  • 1) the company seems to be spending less time defending the edX acquisition, which makes me think CAC for degree remains stubbornly high even when you have 50M+ reasonably engaged learned to pitch to

  • 2) UNC, one of 2U’s stronger and more elite clients is at least skittish about the relationship (and has their own $100M investment in online education, though that is not going particularly well either).

• Berea College students vote to form a union. Given Berea’s core value proposition is providing students with work experience, it is a little puzzling to me that 1) they don’t focus on providing an *excellent* work experience and/or 2) embrace the concept of students learning how to advocate for themselves in a professional environment (advocacy doesn’t *have* to come via a union, but it is an obvious choice). / via Chronicle of Higher Education

Workforce

• A new hope for pay-for-success financial models in workforce training? / via New York Times

EdTech

• You may have read something about AI this week. If you’re not all the way caught up, I recommend ‘s overview. I don’t have much to add other than I am impressed that Khan Academy managed to make the cut for OpenAI’s GPT-4o demo and Google’s LearnLM announcement. / via OpenAI and Techcrunch

  • There’s been some discussion of the demise of language learning - Duolingo’s stock price dropped ~10% on Monday after the OpenAI presentation before quickly recovering. And on Wednesday the Defense Department dropped 13 degree programs in languages. I am not yet compelled by this line of thinking. Just because you can speak a language doesn’t mean you understand the culture behind it. There remains great value in understanding how other cultures think, and the process of learning a language is one of the best ways to unlock that value.

    • And, FWIW, Duolingo’s CFO capped last quarter’s earning call by saying customers seem willing to pay more for AI-enabled language learning, not less. / via Inside Higher Ed and Wall Street Journal

• A new type of homework assignment: write an essay that is better than ChatGPT’s answer to the same prompt. I find this super compelling. You have to 1) understand the assignment, 2) are effectively deterred from using ChatGPT because the ChatGPT answer is a given, and 3) have to think about what makes your response “better” than the stock robot answer. / via Inside Higher Ed

• Reach Capital’s EdTech Playbooks. Building a great, impactful company in EdTech is hard. The Reach team went to great lengths to put these resources together for entrepreneurs to make the journey a little easier. / via Reach Capital

• Thoughts on building and leveraging video games for learning. / via Nafez’s Notes

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Happy Mother’s Day! I woke up this morning feeling lucky. I have a wonderful mom and wife. And so many other amazing female mentors, former bosses and colleagues, and mom-like figures who have helped me navigate life. I am grateful for all of you and hope you took a moment today to celebrate a little.

Speaking of people and organizations who have gone out of their way to help me in life, the team at Penn GSE is hosting their annual in-person workshop in Philly on Friday, June 21. The agenda is stacked and I hope many of you will be able to attend.

With that, on to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Futura raises €14M / Italy, Tutoring / Eurazeo, United Ventures, Axon Partners Group

• Prep raises $7M / Vietnam, Test Prep (Language Learning) / Northstar Ventures, Cercano Asset Management, Touchstone Partners, East Ventures, Saison Capital

• UBIQ Education raises $5M from Blackbaud / US, LMS / Blackbaud

• Birdwingo raises €1.2M / US (Czech Republic), Financial Literacy / Bienville Capital

• 95 Percent Group acquires Sortegories / US, Content Provider

• Echo360 acquires Inkling / US, Content Platform

• Rise Up acquires Domoscio / France, Corporate Training

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• K12 Techno Partners raises $27M / via Financial Express

  • Note: this funding is in Other Transactions because it appears that this round is mostly/entirely secondary, so the company itself will not have new capital to deploy

• Peeplcoach raises $1.3M / via Smart Company

• Classplus invests in Gyan Live / via Hindu Businessline

• Dexude raises undisclosed amount / via Arctic Startup

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Chad Stevens joins TinkRworks as CEO / via K12 Dive

• Danielle Press joins EverDriven Technologies as Chief Growth Officer / via K12 Dive

• Laura Thompson Love and Craig Robinson join Strada Education Foundation as SVPs of work-based learning and coaching, respectively / via Strada Education Foundation

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

Early Childhood

• As private equity’s role in child care increases, concerns arise. I have been critical of the fearmongering of private equity’s impact on the Early Childhood market because virtually all PE-owned Early Childhood businesses target high-income parents (and, thus, do not consume public resources). I still generally believe that, but want to give credit where it is due - this article lays out a compelling counter-argument. / via New America

• Schools start offering on-site daycare to keep teachers in the workforce. / via Associate Press

K12

• A plan to get excited about. The Harlem Children’s Zone, a non-profit group that manages to positively surprise me with almost every new detail I learn about them, plans to give each student at their Promise Academy schools (and 5,000 other students around the country) $10,000 to put towards “wealth-building” activities like buying a house, continuing education, and/or investing in a business. This money will accrue interest during their time in school, vesting to as much as $26,000 by the time the students are 25, when the money becomes available to them (if they reach agreed upon milestones like graduating high school and college + take financial literacy courses). / via New York Times

  • Related to interesting moves in education philanthropy, Bowling Green receives $121M donation, with strings attached. The strings? Student recipients will still pay some costs of attendance, attend mentoring sessions, and volunteer 20 hours a year. In a twist that I hope catches on, the school will have to pay for the continuance of each student’s scholarship for every semester they are enrolled after 4 years of studies. / via Bloomberg

• The financial impact of Sold a Story and the Science of Reading wave. American Public Media writes the story we’ve all been waiting for, charting the $176M decline in revenue at Heinemann, one of the more notable publishers of cue-based literacy materials, from 2019 to 2023. / via American Public Media

• Teacher pay is on the rise! Average teacher pay passes $70K. / via Education Week

• Rumors that Bain Capital might buy PowerSchool. I don’t like commenting on rumors like this one because they are, usually, leaked as a negotiation tactic from one side or the other. But this one made the rounds in a lot of group chats this week! / via Reuters

• America has too many schools. I started writing about the literal and metaphorical splintering of America’s public school infrastructure in 2021. Unfortunately, I expect to see more stories like this as systems come to grips with the effect of 850,000 students leaving urban schools over the past 3 years. / via Wall Street Journal

  • Federal spending has helped cover for these losses over the past couple of years, but the bill is coming due quickly. In Texas, Austin faces a $30M budget shortfall, which sounds large until you consider the $250M deficit Houston is staring at. / via K12 Dive and Axios

  • Related, Charter schools might not have a chair when the music stops. As I’ve written about before, school vouchers/education savings accounts are a winning political issue in 2024. It remains to be seen how charters will fare in a world where education funding follows the student in many/most states. / via Eduwonk

Higher Ed

• No one knows what universities are for. A concept I started writing about last summer. I would change this headline to “no one agrees what universities are for” and highlight one of the core points of the article “The modern university now has so many different jobs to do that it can be hard to tell what its priorities are.” However, anytime I read an article built around tenured professors complaining about administrators, I can’t help but think of George Carlin: Their stuff is sh*t, but our sh*t is stuff. / via The Atlantic

  • Speaking of tenured professors frustrated that their specific worldview is not perfectly mirrored by those around them, is this the end of reading? I am tired of the argument that “students can’t focus anymore.” That students choose not to focus is a reflection of the disconnect between what is being taught and what students need to succeed after school. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

  • To be more direct about it, students have implicitly (sometimes explicitly) internalized that the value of a college degree is the piece of paper they get at the end. Departing SNHU president Paul Leblanc said, “There will be those [colleges] who continue because they are not really about education. So Harvard, for example, is as much about the value of its network, of being a Harvard graduate and who you know, being in the club.” (this quote was in the context of how AI will change Higher ed, but it seems applicable here as well.) / via Times Higher Education

• Zombie colleges, run by scammers, taking “admissions applications” to steal identities. This is why we can’t have nice things (and why this space will always need some regulation). / via USA Today

• Liberal Arts microcredentials are on the rise. My only quibble is that these credentials do not have grand enough ambitions. I don’t want a Theoretical Humanities badge, I want a VR bootcamp on Cosmic Sociology!1 / via Inside Higher Ed

Workforce

• Was the 401K a mistake? / via New York Times

• The newest rookie in pro soccer? the 45 year-old finance bro who covered payroll. Turns out there are truly no meritocratic professions. / via Wall Street Journal

EdTech

• Emeritus launches new courses in partnership with Bloomberg. As Axios notes, course partnerships with media companies have not worked particularly well in the past. But media outlets like Bloomberg have a more consistent relationship with the (lucrative) professional class of prospective learners than schools. It stands to reason that one of these media-led course offerings will break through eventually. / via Axios

• Machine Learning aids in discovery of sperm whale alphabet. If anyone at Duolingo or Masterclass is reading this, I will be personally insulted if you do not call Ellen Degeneres and pitch a “Learn to speak whale” class. / via Techcrunch

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Xeet of the Week

No notes this week, straight to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Take2 raises $3M / US, Recruiting Software (Simulations) / Reach Capital, Sempervirens

• Yuna raises $1.6M / Brazil, Content Provider / Canary, Positive Ventures

• Birdwingo raises €1.2M / Slovakia, Financial Literacy / Bienville Capital

• Bluworks raises $1M / Egypt, Talent Management / Khawarizmi Ventures, Camel Ventures, Acasia Ventures

• Happiest Minds acquires Macmillan Learning India / India, Content Provider

• Visma acquires Meebook and Samverka / Denmark & Sweden, School Software Provider

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• Tustawi acquires Castnet Learning / Kenya (US), Content Provider

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Robert Batten joins the Princeton Review as CEO / via PRNewswire

• Brad Baumgartner joins MetaMetrics as CEO / via PRWeb

• Nathan Shultz promoted to CEO of Chegg as Dan Rosensweig steps down / via Businesswire

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

Early Childhood

• Last year ended with concern for the early childhood market as COVID stimulus funds ran out. This year, states appear to be taking the problem seriously. What convinces voters to raise taxes: child care & At least a dozen states are considering free childcare for early educators. / via Hechinger Report and EdSurge

K12

• 5.4M Americans under the age of 18 are caregivers now. The EdTech space has gotten a lot smarter about serving non-traditional college students over the past decade, with adjustments like asynchronous classes, success coaching, and credit for work experience. This article highlights that even traditionally aged students may need to take advantage of this infrastructure in the coming years as they balance work and caregiving of relatives with continuing their education. / via Wall Street Journal

  • Related, what is the right goal for student achievement? / via 74Million

  • And, State takeovers of school districts still happen. New research questions their value. / via EdWeek

• National Math Stars raises $16.5M. I don’t really want to wade into the debate over whether and how advanced coursework is offered at the local level, but I am curious if providing gifted students a national-level option like this one might help reduce the current tensions over the topic. / via PRNewswire

  • Related, > 50% of high school math teachers either don’t have or don’t use their school’s recommended math materials. / via Hechinger Report

Higher Ed

• 3 questions for Evie Cummings on her new role at Johns Hopkins. As Phil Hill noted back in December, Evangeline Cummings is one of very few people to have built a successful DIY online program at a US university (University of Florida) in the past ~10 years. This interview does not give much away on Cummings’ plans for Hopkins, but I will note her choice to move up-market (more traditionally prestigious) and the emphasis she places on a multi-modal strategy. / via Inside Higher Ed

• OpenStax receives $90M grant from NSF for learning R&D. This is an impressively large grant, rivaling Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) for the largest dedicated pool of resources for learning science that I’ve seen. / via InnovationMap

EdTech

• Tyton Partners’ ruminations on ASUGSV. “Parlance profusion” to describe the generally-forward-but-also-kind-of-chaotic progress in the work-based learning category is a term that will stick with me for a long time. “Make sure your CIO/CTO is more futurist than technologist” is another good axiom to chew on. / via Tyton Partners

• 2 weeks ago I highlighted an article called don’t be an education Eeyore. This week was very much an Eeyore week across EdTech. The early results on Q1’s earnings in EdTech were…not great. The stock market slammed Chegg’s new CEO (-25%) and Coursera’s 2 executive sacrifices (-24%). The Education Department made Richard Cordray the scapegoat for their FAFSA turmoil. People lined up to critique LAUSD’s chatbot, Ed, and it hasn’t even fully launched. / via OnEdTech, Inside Higher Ed, EdSurge

  • Yes, some of these are self-inflicted wounds. It is honestly sort of surprising that only one person (thus far) has had to take a fall for the FAFSA given the scale of the problems. And LAUSD might have been better off letting the hype for Ed grow organically - from students and parents - than doing a costumed photoshoot for the media at GSV.

  • My broader point, though, is I don’t think “The Market” - whether that is public equities, mainstream media, or newsletter writers like me - has any idea what it wants. We are in a period where it feels like a lot is changing, but no one has a great framework for what education is supposed to look like. New Chegg CEO Nathan Shultz (see People Moves) has been the heir apparent CEO for years. If there was a concrete reason to slam his appointment, shouldn’t The Market have spoken earlier and gotten someone else installed? Why are we not more excited that a large, diverse public school system is trying to be at the cutting edge of technology?

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

No announcements from me this week, straight to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Anthology raises $250M / US, School Software Infrastructure (LMS) / Veritas Capital, Leeds Equity Partners, Providence Equity Partners1

• GiveButter raises $50M / US, Fundraising Software / Bessemer Venture Partners

• Campus raises $23M / US, Degree Provider / Founders Fund, 8VC

• Edia raises 9.4M / US, Content Provider / Felicis, 8VC, Inspired Capital, Susa Ventures

• Huzzle raises €1.67 / UK, Career Pathways / 10X Founders

• Clueso raises $1.4M / US, Corporate Training / F7, Y Combinator

• Tangent raises €1M / UK, Recruitment Platform / Zinc VC, Google Black Founders Fund, The SyndicateRoom

• Wonderschool acquires ChildcareMatters / US, Early Childhood Education Software

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

• HyperionDev raises $5M

• Vesna Capital invests in MemoryOS

• Prep raises Series A

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Robert Maginn returns as CEO of Jenzabar / via PRNewswire

• Tim Waldron joins Readable English as CEO / via PRNewswire

• Jim Gallagher joins Edcetera as CMO / via Yahoo! Finance

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

Early Childhood

• California is rolling out free preschool. That hasn’t solved childcare challenges. / via ABC News

K12

• Georgia passes school vouchers bill. / via Associated Press

  • While Alaska wrestles with its own education spending rules. / via 74Million

• Snowboarders can still jog on, but Alta does finally have a schoolhouse. A couple of things to follow here - new/old models of schooling (the one room schoolhouse returns) and new strategies for employee retention in vacation towns. / via New York Times and shared from the Summit Express at Solitude, where the glades were in *peak* condition this weekend

  • Speaking of new/old models of schooling, ASU supports the growth of “team teaching” in Arizona high schools. / via Hechinger Report

Higher Ed

• Go to a state school. It is nice to have the New York Times and public intellectuals like Nate Silver and Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz engaging with the debate on the future of post-secondary education. I thought A16Z’s overview of all the different stakeholders that a university serves was excellent. However, I am tired of these folks’ fixation on costs without regard to demand. There are a (small) number of schools who could charge $1M+ for tuition and it would stil be rationale for students to pay it. There are also some schools who might benefit by *paying* students to attend. The weirdest thing about college pricing is not that it is “high,” it is how relatively uniform it is. / via Nate Silver

  • The ROI of attending any university, and even a specific degree program within a university, is an increasingly knowable calculation to make, with organizations like the Georgetown Center on Education and Workforce and NYU professor Liang Zhang routinely publishing research on the topic. / via Higher Ed Dive

  • Also, this isn’t quite paying students, but at least shows a school putting more skin in the game, Curry College launches job guarantee program. A job guarantee doesn’t guarantee university-level success, but shows Curry is trying to control its destiny rather than using endowment money and/or raising new money to pursue the same strategy. / via Inside Higher Ed and Chronicle of Higher Education

• Federal workers are fleeing Washington. Can college students replace them? / via Politico

Workforce

• Most workers not confident they’ll by their mid-60s. They call us millennials because we’re going to have to work for the next thousand years to retire. / via HR Dive

EdTech

• What’s behind the ACT’s for-profit pivot? Today is one of the most exciting times in the assessment industry - COVID pushed ~every major test to prioritize digital formats and AI offers the *potential* to make test creation and validation faster and better. It is conceivable that there will be substantial shifts in market share among the major testing providers and challengers to the incumbents. All of which is to say that it doesn’t seem like a good time to take on financial leverage. ACT’s testing competitors are all investing in R&D while ACT will now spend the next few years paying down debt. / via Inside Higher Ed

  • The main point in favor of ACT’s go-private action is that private companies move faster than non-profits. To that point, I present you ETS. Just in the past few years, the company has revamped several legacy products, beefed up their corporate development team, and, now, are investing in professional skills assessments. / via Inside Higher Ed

    • This isn’t to say that all of ETS’ bets will work out. Some will, some won’t. But, as a non-profit, ETS (and the College Board, another non-profit ACT competitor) can afford to take a longer-term view of the testing market. PE ownership means the ACT is now in a race against the clock (typically 3-5 years) to deliver financial results, not longterm innovation.

• Is AI the final nail in the coffin for modern languages? It has never been easier to learn a new language. At the same time, it has also, arguably, never been less directly valuable to learn a new language - software tools are now capable of translating anything spoken or written to you in real time. / via Times Higher Education

  • Even if that is true, that doesn’t mean language will stop evolving. Software is built, and language models trained, on a global scale. Which means we’ll see local idosyncracies pop in all sorts of unexpected places. Have you noticed that ChatGPT has a penchant for using the world “delve”? How cheap, outsourced labor in Africa is shaping AI English. / via The Guardian

  • AI tangent: ASU student newspaper retracts 24 articles written with generative AI. Almost all of which were written by one reporter. Of note, the paper did not retract the articles for being wrong, just for being written with the help of AI. / via EdScoop

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Xeet of the Week

Programming note: it is Wednesday (and most of you will read this on Thursday), which is a funny day to send a “Weekend Reading” post. But, last week was a busy week with GSV announcements and this week looks to be pretty full as well (see Anthology’s $250M fundraise). So I wanted to give them two separate newsletters (this one, and another on Sunday), even if the timing is off - thank you for bearing with me!

Funding / M&A

• Beyond Odds Technologies raises $11M / India, Staffing Platform / Matrix Partners India, Lightspeed, Alteria Capital, Innoven Capital

• Draftboard raises $4.1M / US, Recruitment Platform / Founder Collective, Twelve Below

• Paraform raises $3.6M / US, Recruitment Platform / A*

• NextWork raises $2.3M / New Zealand, Upskilling / GD1, Blackbird, Icehouse, PhaseOne

• Superintelligent raises $2M / US, Content Provider / Learn Capital

• Adro raises $1.5M / US, Student Financing / Ex Nihilo Ventures, Cornell Tech Syndicate

• Follett acquires MasterLibrary / US, School Software Infrastructure

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• All Seas Capital invests in Reducate

• Kangarootime acquires Clay

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Andy Myers joins eLuma as CEO / via PRNewswire

• Elias Tavarez joins Interplay Learning as Chief Revenue Officer / via PRNewswire

• Byju’s India CEO Arjun Mohan steps down / via Reuters

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Product Demo(s)

• Are you an administrator of a non-profit, school or college advising, counseling, mentoring or coaching program and sick and tired of nobody reading your emails? Or, are you a parent of teens and tired of juggling emails, texts and four apps across three kids? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions and would like to participate in free pilot program to test an app to coordinate messaging across all of a student’s stakeholders, fill out this form

Links

Early Childhood

• Bipartisan bill to expand childcare access for military families. “As a mom and a new grandma, I know it takes a village to raise a child and that our military members need high-quality, affordable child care for their young ones,” she said. “By boosting training and recruitment efforts, this bipartisan bill will ensure military kids are safe and loved while their parents diligently train and prepare to protect our nation.” / via CNBC

K12

• LAUSD’s far-reaching AI experiment. There is a lot riding on LAUSD’s chatbot, Ed. The project sits at the intersection of a high-profile stakeholder (Alberto Carvalho), a high-profile district (LAUSD, the second-biggest school district in the country), and a high-profile category (AI). If the project succeeds, it would be a meaningful win for EdTech. I will be following the results closely, though will be careful not to rush to judgement in what should be a multiyear project. / via Education Week

• Tantrums and turf wars: the school car line is chaos. What I love about school principals in general, and elementary school principals in particular, is their ability to distill complex social problems into words a first grader can understand and embody - “If you find yourself running late, get up earlier.” / via Wall Street Journal

  • Also, to be crass about it, what a great year to have raised $140M for your busing startup. / via PRNewswire (from January)

• Hot market for pencils helps kids turn lead into gold. My only problem with this article is the lack of data. How big is the K12 pencil marketplace economy? How much does a 9 year-old pencil entrepreneur make per school year? What are the average startup costs for pencil brokers? / via Wall Street Journal

• 32 year-old takes ACT as fantasy football punishment. 4 days under private equity ownership and the ACT team is already entering new markets! Can’t wait to see what they cook up next. / via BroBible

Higher Ed

• How the Biden administration messed up FAFSA. I am wary of saying “the sky is falling” but I think we might start hearing about some ugly college enrollment numbers for Summer and Fall in the next couple of weeks. / via The Atlantic

• A betting scandal rocked Iowa sports. Then the case went sideways. One way schools might fill the gap in their budgets? Even more partnerships with gambling companies. Seeing these companies’ ads plastered all over campus and on every sports app, podcast, and website they consume, it is, sadly, no wonder that (still largely unpaid) college athletes are getting caught up in places they shouldn’t be. / via Washington Post

• VA Congressman Don Beyer enrolls in George Mason’s Master’s degree in AI. This is great, more members of congress should do this! / via Associated Press

Workforce

• Crotonville and the death of fun at work. The core premise is interesting - that today’s workers are more disassociated from their employers than anytime in recent memory. However, I reject the author’s notion that this is a “Gen Z” problem. The author’s late husband, Jack Welch, literally had a book written about how he “crushed the soul of corporate America” in the way he financialized General Electric. (He also had nothing to do with Crotonville, which was established two decades before he became CEO.) Companies’ focus on shareholder value ahead of employees provides the grounding for my own thoughts on the prospective emergence of a more modern form of labor union. / via Wall Street Journal

  • Speaking of fun at work, Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to “inject a sense of crisis.” / via the Verge

  • While Singapore leans into the 4-day workweek. / via South China Morning Post

EdTech

• CFPB fines Bloomtech (fka Lambda School) for deceptive marketing practices. It is *really* hard to build a breakout EdTech company without previous Education/EdTech experience and Bloomtech loudly pushed the boundaries of established regulations for a number of years (though seem to have gotten better since rebranding). / via Techcrunch

  • Bloomtech’s individual actions were not great. Even worse, they add to the growing pile of high-profile companies with debatable and/or actively fraudulent practices in the vicinity of student financing. As a result, you will see fewer and fewer investors and entrepreneurs willing to wade in to this part of the EdTech market.

  • That is not a good thing! Student debt remains at all time highs and there is no vision from the public sector for how to remediate this either. (Student loan relief is not a vision for a better system, it is what you do once you have a better system in place.)

• Don’t be an education Eeyore. I think about this with every edition of this newsletter. Eeyores get clicks. But it isn’t that fun being an Eeyore, so I try to find a balance. Sometime more successfully than others. This essay provides a warm reminder that we all should keep a running list of things they are excited about in education. / via Aldeman on Education

  • That said, sometimes the headlines just write themselves…Meta announces future intent to probably launch something in education. As much as I am excited about VR-in-education, I feel obligated to point out that this “announcement” does not actually include details on what the company plans to offer. If anything, the release is notable for its omission of the company’s previous forays into the education world, including the $150M Immersive Learning Fund and “metaversity” project.1 / via Meta

  • To balance out my Meta snark, Are video games coming for the novel? It is amazing how many different tools today’s creatives have at their disposal to build new universes, whether that is through the written word or an immersive video game universe (or both at once). / via Financial Times

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Xeet of the Week

It is GSV week in San Diego. The forecast calls for sunny skies, full calendars, abundant margaritas, and at least one field trip to a Navy vessel. Please feel free to send selfies taken with your favorite EdTech mascot for next week’s newsletter (which may come a day or two late, depending on how exhausting this week is).

On to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Abre raises $24M / US, School Software Infrastructure / PeakSpan Capital, JumpStart Ventures, JobsOhio Growth Capital Fund, Golden Angels Investors

• EarliTech Diagnostics raises $21.5M / US, Special Education / Nexus NeuroTech Ventures, Venture Investors (not a typo, they really named their fund this)

• Summer raises $9M / US, Student Financing / Rebalance Capital, SemperVirens, General Catalyst, QED, Flourish Ventures

• Kokoro Kids raises €2.25M / Spain, Special Education / Lego Foundation

• PETE raises $2M / US, Corporate Upskilling / Cofounders Capital

• Ednition raises $1.35M / US, School Software Infrastructure / Reach Capital, GSV Ventures, Avalanche VC, Long Term Impact

• GoodGist raises $1M / US, Corporate Upskilling / FortyTwo VC, Cedar Ridge Partners, DX Partners

• Nexus Capital Management acquires ACT / US, Assessment

  • Note: Yes, that ACT, the (formerly non-profit) administrator of the eponymous college entrance exam

• EAB acquires Forage / US, College Counseling (Career Pathways)

• Multiverse acquires Searchlight / UK (US), Apprenticeships (Talent Management)

• LMS365 acquires Valuebeat / Denmark, Corporate LMS

• Keystone Education Group acquires Edunation and Asia Exchange / Norway, Study Abroad

• Keystone Partners acquires The Center for Executive Coaching / US, Training Provider

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• Enatom raises €900K

• Aviotron raises $600K

• Ada raises Pre-A round

• Wakelet acquires Bulb

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Jessie Woolley-Wilson joins Owl Ventures as Operating Partner / via PRNewswire

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

K12

• Post-ESSER fallout starts to come into focus. I think it is fair to say that many (most?) folks in the education space are aware that there may be trouble on the horizon for the K12 world when ESSER funding expires in September. However, there are relatively few folks who can detail exactly what that means. Not for lack of competency, but because it is hard to predict! There are any number of federal, state, and/or local funding initiatives that *might* fill ESSER gaps. Furthermore, the big K12 sales season is late winter to late spring; participants in this year’s sales cycle still have access to ESSER dollars. It will be easier to assess the full scale of the impact next summer (2025).

  • That does not mean we should wait until next summer to talk about it! It is good to see Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab and Tyton Partners dipping their toes in the water, opining on the expected average size of funding cuts to be made and surveying district leaders on their funding priorities for the upcoming school year, respectively. / via K12 Dive and Tyton Partners

  • We also heard from Houston’s superintendent, who is preparing many of his schools for substantial budget cuts. These cuts are not purely ESSER-driven - this superintendent has already made headlines shaking up a poor-performing school system - but I think it’s fair to say the end of ESSER played a substantial role. / via 74 Million

• A Brooklyn elementary school changes its hours to 7am - 7pm to help working parents with childcare. I continue to believe that change is coming to the “traditional” school day, whether it is extended-day experiments like this, the year-round schooling on trial in Philadelphia, or the influence/competition of public school alternatives (charters, microschools, etc.). / via New York Times

  • For better or for worse, these scheduling changes are largely being driven by childcare needs, not academics. Employers are taking note of childcare needs too, though their focus, to date, is mostly on the Pre-K children of employees. / via Wall Street Journal

  • Also related, 51% of Americans say the country’s public K12 education is headed in the wrong direction. Not great! / via Pew Research

• Poland’s Prime Minister bans homework (until 3rd grade). And it will be optional through the 8th grade, not counting toward grades. While building a (winning) political platform around “excessive homework” is morbidly entertaining, this feels like a problem better solved by a scalpel (and efficacy research) rather than the sledgehammer of a national policy. / via Associated Press

• The 5% problem. “Imagine a doctor prescribing a sophisticated new drug to 100 patients and finding 95 of them didn’t take it as prescribed. That is the situation with many online math interventions in K–12 education today. They are a solution for the 5 percent. The other 95 percent see minimal gains, if any.” / via Education Next

Higher Ed

• I said my piece on the FAFSA a month ago, so am not going to spend much more time on it. For those tracking the issue, Inside Higher Ed provided a helpful timeline of events and Phil Hill provided an eye-opening visual of the state-by-state impact. / via Inside Higher Ed and PhilOnEdTech

  • Also from the Education Department this week, and definitely not tied to the FAFSA fallout or impending election, President Biden outlines plans for 30 million Americans to receive student loan relief. / via Washington Post

    • To be more specific, the intent behind student loan relief is good. But, it feels like putting the cart before the horse. The horse being college costs continuing to rise at an eye-watering rate while students continue to be spun in circles on how to evaluate which colleges are worth attending (or whether to attend at all). / via New York Times and Bloomberg

• The Army reconsiders its education benefits package. There is some nuance to this topic, it is not just cost-cutting. But it is hard not to question as the military modernizes, with an increasing dependence on software and knowledge work. / via Inside Higher Ed

EdTech

• Kirkbi 2023 Annual Report. Press release here. Kirkbi is a Danish company that has been known mainly for its ownership of Lego, but which spent $875M on Brainpop in 2022 and played a substantial role in the $1.7B go-private deal for Kahoot! last year. This annual report is especially notable because it highlights the changing of the guard from the 3rd-generation of family ownership to the 4th generation. / via Kirkbi

• Duolingo continues to grow in China. It has been easy to forget about China’s EdTech market since 2021’s for-profit tutoring ban, which wiped out most of the sector. Duolingo - and, to a lesser extent, Coursera - provide a helpful reminder that there is still opportunity in the market if you look in the right places. / via ChinaDaily

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Looking forward to seeing many of you in San Diego next week. For those who won’t be there, please feel free to send questions/things to be on the lookout for.

Also, for those who may have missed my earlier notes about the ETCH Growth mini-series, Jeevan is putting on a clinic breaking down EdTech Ads. In 3 posts (so far), he has used 25 different advertisements from EdTech companies to show us how to leverage Texture, Emotional Resonance, and The Hero for growth.

Funding / M&A

• Modal raises $25M / US, Corporate Upskilling / Left Lane Capital, Ensemble VC, Signalfire, Learn Capital

• Goalsetter raises $9.6M / US, Content Provider / MM Catalyst Fund, Fiserv, Webster Bank, Seae Ventures, Astia Fund, Reseda Group, InTouchCU, Partnership Fund for NYC

• Cloverleaf raises $7.3M / US, Corporate Upskilling / Advantage Capital, Conductive Ventures, Origin Ventures, ScOp Venture Capital, JobsOhio, Centrifuse Capital, 1809 Capital

• Home From College raises $5.4M / US, Gig Marketplace / GV

• Lirvana Labs raises $5.3M / US, Early Literacy / Kapor Capital, Transcend Capital Partners, Chingona Ventures

• HAD raises $5M / Saudi Arabia, Language Learning / Dar Al Majed Investment

• StepsConnect raises €1M / Italy, Recruitment Platform / 40Jems Ventures, Eden Ventures, Maggioli Ventures, Moffus Labs, Moonstone Fund, Generas Corporate, KF-Invest, Enzima12

• Amplify acquires Math ANEX / US, Content Provider

• IXL Learning acquires Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com / US, Language Learning

• Axcel Learning acquires KMK Optometry / US, Test Prep (Certification)

• Wonderschool acquires EarlyDay / US, Early Childhood Education Software

• CareerArc acquires Lumina / US, Recruiting Software

• Jobs For the Future (JFF) announces $15M first close of Fund II

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• Nonprofit: Education Design Lab receives $6M grant

• a2zebra raises €500K

• Okta invests in Accredify

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Bijal Shah promoted to CEO of Guild / via Guild

• Sorbrique Grant promoted to CEO of Climb Hire / via LinkedIn

• John Kannapell joins Cypher Learning as President and COO / via PRNewswire

• Andrew Rosen joins the board of Mentor Collective / via PRNewswire

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

ASU GSV AIR SHOW

ASU and GSV are hosting the inaugural AIR Show in San Diego on April 13-15, right before the 14th annual ASU GSV Summit. The AIR Show is a celebration of the AI Revolution (AIR) in Education showcasing 100+ AI startups, the latest AI products from EdTech giants, demos on how educators can use AI in the classroom, and insightful conversations with founders and users about how AI is accelerating the pace of learning for everyone. Attendance is free but space is limited!

Register Here

Links

Early Childhood

• Is early childhood education ready for AI? For the past ~10 years, software for early childhood education (ECE) has focused on back-office operations. In this article, the question at hand is whether advances in hardware (cameras, microphones, etc.) and software (AI) will start enabling more in-the-classroom technology without forcing students onto screens. / via Hechinger Report

K12

• America has legislated itself into competing red, blue versions of education. Sigh... / via Washington Post

• To complement last week’s discussion of rising student absenteeism, Hechinger dives into the pivot away from student suspensions, especially among younger children. / via New York Times and Hechinger Report

Higher Ed

• Business schools going all in on AI. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick says, “You haven’t used AI until you’ve had an existential crisis [about your professional skills compared to the AI’s]. You need three sleepless nights.” Tell me about your AI nightmares is the new how many golf balls can you fit in a 747 interview question. / via Wall Street Journal

• Middle Eastern universities hedge bets between China and the US. “The Chinese science system is moving up fast and gaining increasingly more space from the US science system. This situation does not deny that the US national science system is still strong, but it shows that the global balance is changing.” / via University World News

  • The US and Europe have been at the center of the university-led R&D world for a long time. It may remain so for a long time too. But this status is not a right; it is a function of government-led investment in these institutions. As more countries transition from agricultural/industrial/resource extraction economies to knowledge economies, it makes sense that new coalitions would form, and some won’t involve US/European participants. This is not inherently good or bad, but bears watching. / via PIE News

• Not unrelated to the topic of a globalizing university market, one of the topics I return to frequently is, “What is a modern university?” In short, I believe universities need a differentiated vision to survive. That vision could be, among other things, “Elite” or “Mega” or “Luxury” or “Niche.”

  • However, “Growth” is a strategy, not a vision. As is “Build/Renovate.” This is the lesson an unfortunate number of rural colleges in the Midwest and Southeast are learning as the bills come due on a federal loan program meant to help rural colleges that may be hurting them. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

  • “DIY” is also a strategy, not a vision. It sounds great to own your own online program operations, but why should students care?1 This is the problem with North Carolina’s $100M investment in Project Kitty Hawk, which has dramatically pulled back expectations after 2 years of operations. / via OpenCampus

    • Not covered in any of the Kitty Hawk news? 2U continues to run UNC’s online MBA, the state’s flagship online degree programs. In other 2U news, going direct was a good decision to start resetting the company narrative - Setting the Record Straight. / via 2U

  • To finish this with some less-sour grapes, I enjoyed EdSurge’s write-up of Outer Coast, a fledgling almost-college in Alaska with an “intense” point of view on what college can look like. / via EdSurge

Workforce

• How Gen Z is becoming the toolbelt generation. It is an election year in the US, which means it is high season for tales of the six-figure income welder. Is this because welding is actually high-earning profession? It is not! A 90th-percentile income welder earns only marginally more ($72,970) than the average college graduate ($69,381). The oil field welder making $140K? There are ~600 of them in the entire United States, and most make closer to $88K. / via Wall Street Journal

  • I am happy to see more of a conversation around trades and will not argue that a college degree is the right path for everyone. But it often feels like the headlines and narratives surrounding training in the trades are needlessly divisive and/or hyperbolic.

• There are now 7.3M American “app-based workers”, constituting 4.3% of the national labor force. This number rises as high as 9% of the labor force in Washington DC and 6% in Florida, Nevada, and Georgia. That feels like a lot! / via Axios Boston

EdTech

• Analysis of Coursera’s 2023 Annual Report. As noted by On EdTech’s Glenda Morgan, the number to remember from this analysis is that 32% of Coursera’s revenues come from 5 content partners. One of whom (Google) strong-armed the company into paying higher content fees just last year. / via ClassCentral

• LearnLaunch’s 2023 annual impact report. / via LearnLaunch

Caitlin Clark

• How did Caitlin Clark get so good at basketball? By playing other sports. A reminder that while repetition and specialization can be good, learning can come from all sorts of unexpected places! / via HawkCentral

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Two weeks until this year’s ASU < > GSV conference - if you’ll be in San Diego, send me a note. On to the news!

Funding / M&A

• EdLight raises $4M / US, Instructor Tools / Southern Education Foundation, Charter School Growth Fund, Backstage Capital

• Sprints raises $3M / Egypt, Upskilling / Disruptech Ventures, EdVentures, CFYE

• Joinrs raises €1.7M / Italy, Recuritment Software / Innova Venture Fund, Doorway

• Cornerstone acquires Talespin / US, Upskilling

• Straighterline acquires ProSolutions / US, Content Provider (Early Childhood Education)

• Battery Ventures acquires Mobius Institute / US, Training Provider

• N2Y acquires Texthelp / US, Special Education

• Certus acquires Paulson Training / US, Upskilling

• Manutan acquires Findel / UK, School Infrastructure

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, verifiable institutional investors (and disclose the amount raised), be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• PSG invests in Packback

• GG4L raises $18M

• Edura raises an undisclosed amount of funding

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Rich Preece joins GoGuardian as CEO / via PRNewswire

• Jeff von Rosenberg, Kathryn Green, and Jeanette Wiseman join Unicon in senior roles / via PRWeb

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

K12

• PISA articulates path to using AI in future exams. What I appreciate most about PISA’s plan is that it is focused and logical - solving for a real, present-day problem rather than laying out a grand-but-vague AI vision. “Students would be able to use an AI-powered chatbot to complete their work. They could ask it basic questions about a topic, so that the test could focus on their thinking capability, not whether they possess background knowledge of a particular subject.” / via Education Week

• The rise of education savings accounts (ESAs), part 1. ESAs *could* be one of/the most significant structural change in US K12 education this century. Whether that is good or bad depends on who you ask - both sides have compelling arguments. What isn’t debatable is how quickly adoption of ESAs has grown, which Tyton captures effectively in a chart in this article, the first in a series about the topic. / via Tyton Partners

• Intensive tutoring at school is great for academics. Now there’s evidence it can boost attendance. I have not spent enough real estate covering the post-COVID chronic absenteeism problem in K12 schools. I’m glad to see solutions emerging to help mitigate this problem. / via Chalkbeat

• Teacher pay has been flat for close to 3 decades. More states now working to fix that. / via Wall Street Journal

• Success Academy charter school network plans Florida expansion. / via Chalkbeat

Higher Ed

• The colleges that pay for positive coverage. Further evidence that last week’s article about the University of Wisconsin’s marketing blitz aimed at state legislature was not an exception. I don’t love pay-to-play articles like those covered here, but everyone’s got to eat. The takeaway for you, the reader, is to question everything you read - is this written by humans or AI? Is it paid for explicitly or implicitly? How do the answers to these (and other) questions have the potential to impact the story? / via Chronicle of Higher Education

Workforce

• The global AI talent tracker. Come for the AI headline, stay for the charts on where and how AI talent has shifted from 2019 to today. / via MacroPolo

• Blackrock’s CEO thinks retirement age should be moved later than 65. This is a nascent and, frankly, not very fun topic, but it does sort of pass the sniff test. It led to a reckoning in France last year, and upskilling mid- and late-career professionals have been the subject of upskilling initiatives in Singapore, Australia, and the UK. In China, the Silver Wave also appears to be driving the revival of at least some Chineses EdTech companies’ hopes. / via CBS

EdTech

• Fate of Byju’s founder rests with Indian courts. Notably, the FT reports that Qatar’s soverign wealth fund has joined Prosus, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia’s Indian arm), and CZI in the bid to remove Byju (the founder) from the company. This is a big deal, as 1) this introduces (even more) geopolitical implications and 2) it means Byju alienated the investor that kept the company afloat in 2022. Byju continues to maintain that this year’s $200M rights issue is “fully subscribed,” but I’m not sure what investors are left on the his side of the table at this point. Who is funding this? / via Financial Times

  • In other EdTech unicorn news, Austria’s GoStudent swings from a €220M loss in 2022 to cashflow positive in 2023. That is a wild swing. / via Techcrunch

    • Apropros of questioning everything you read, you can probably guess the connection between this swing to cashflow positive and the number of sources willing to discuss the company’s lavish parties. / via Businessinsider

• Spotify tests video-based courses. I like the idea of this a lot; it helps me transition from thinking of Spotify as a music store to more of a digital library. And, as Spotify representatives point out in the article, many users already come to Spotify to learn via podcasts. Unfortunately, the UX (as described in the article, the feature is only available to users in the UK so I haven’t seen it live) sounds pretty janky right now due to the company’s ongoing battle with Apple over transaction fees. / via the Verge

• The age of average encore. The age of average was the most important article I read in 2023. It highlights how powerful incentives are in shaping even the most “creative” industries. It shapes my opinion on how markets will develop, especially with the rise of AI - which is *built* to optimize for “average.” The encore is shorter and focused on the music industry, but continues to reinforce the overall point. / via Alex Murrell

  • Related, the end of foreign-language education. A logical extension of the “average” argument is to say that at some point - TBD when - human language will converge into one common tongue. Or, maybe we end up with a Babel Fish scenario. / via The Atlantic

    • One more variable to consider in the future of languages: the impact of multi-planetary populations. Accents develop quickly in isolation, and seem likely to happen in any future missions to Mars. / via BBC and LiveScience

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

No announcements from me this week, straight to the news.

Funding / M&A

• UpHill raises €7M / Portugal, Workforce Powertools / Explorer, Redstone, EnjoyVenture, Brighteye Ventures, Maze, Caixa Capital, Grupo Luz Saude

• Uplift acquires TAO Connect / US, Mental Health

• Scholastic ~acquires 9 Story Media / US, Content Provider

• Toprankers acquires Judiciary arm of Coach Up IAS / India, Test Prep

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Kishore Rachapudi joins Andela as Chief Revenue Officer / via PRNewswire

• Gavin Patterson joins Kahoot! as board chairman / via Financial Times

  • “We’re well positioned and have the firepower to really drive the business forward through M&A as opportunities emerge.” 👀

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

Early Childhood

• While I’m not yet ready to say there is a trend of increasing interest in early childhood education (ECE) in the US, I can say that I, personally, have found more ECE content of late. It is a fun topic to explore, as it allows me to straddle my worlds as an education industry analyst and the parent of an 8-month-old.

  • For better or for worse, basically everything you read on ECE is different flavors of “ECE is incredibly expensive for parents” and “ECE workers are paid frighteningly low wages.”

    • One of the best encapsulations of this problem is the discussion around updating the US au pair program, which somehow manages to be an inaccesible luxury, an almost-affordable form of childcare, and a below-minimum-wage job all at once. / via the 19th

    • Also, I maintain my skepticism that private equity (currently) plays a role in driving up the cost of childcare in the lower- and middle-income portions of the ECE market. If anything, the problem with private equity-owned ECE schools is that they have picked off the high-earning parents, which makes cross-subsidization hard for neighborhood schools. / via Hechinger Report

  • However! All is not lost. More states are trying new things to lower the cost of ECE (to parents), such as California’s transitional kindergarten program. (Yes, the headline here is “bumpy rollout.” I am choosing to focus on the positive - that it exists at all.) / via Hechinger Report

  • And! Policy experts are getting more space to build a case for free childcare. / via The Atlantic

K12

• How teachers are using AI in the classroom. I think it is fair to say that there are a lot of…fluffy…write ups on AI usage in the classroom. What I appreciate about this article is the specificity of use cases the author pushes for in his interviews with 7 teachers from both the US and abroad. / via the Markup

  • Related (but higher ed), Universities build their own ChatGPT-like tools. I’m not sure that every university will need their own custom AI tools, but it will be interesting to watch which feature sets emerge in common (or not in common) among these tools. / via Inside Higher Ed

• LAUSD bets big on AI chatbot “Ed.” The vision for Ed is awesome - one place where students and parents can ask virtually any question about their school life. That said, this is a high-profile project with a thin margin for error. History suggests there will be bumps in the road to a high-profile mass rollout like this; it is an open question whether they will be debilitating. / via Education Week

• Parker’s first budget proposal as Philadelphia mayor includes a boost to city schools, push for year-round schools. I’m still not sure who/what is driving this initiative, but Philadelphia has eagerly taken the vanguard position as the first major city to re-consider the traditional school calendar. I am (literally) here for it. / via WHYY

Higher Ed

• Inside the craziest college admissions season ever. So many different nuggets to pick from in this article. One theme that sticks out to me - intense competition led students, and schools, to all look the same. There are outliers are the top, but enrollment yield looks like it is falling at most schools and “the majority of applicants have competitive transcripts..but one consequence of the huge increase in applications is that far fewer of them “knock your socks off.” / via New York Magazine

  • Which makes the schools with true differentiation especially worth watching. HBCUs continue their positive momentum and Hampshire College is back! / via Higher Ed Dive

  • On the negative end of differentiation, young Chinese want to study abroad, just not in the US. / via Washington Post

• UW Madison plans $1M advertising campaign to attract…more funding from state politicians. This is *wild.* This type of lobbying happens indirectly and behind closed doors everywhere, and the Wisconsin education system has been on a roller coaster with the state legislature since at least 2015, but seeing a public marketing RFP for these activities - as opposed to, say, recruiting students - still made me do double-take. / via Inside Higher Ed

• A bluffer’s guide to the Australian Universities Accord. Australia’s post-secondary system has pioneered a number of interesting post-secondary learning initiatives - such as income-contingent loans, lifelong learning accounts, and demand-driven funding. Some were entertainingly disappointed in this year’s system update, but the above-linked piece from wonkhe provides a helpful perspective on both the Australian and UK systems. / via wonkhe

Workforce

• Do less that matters more. Maybe the most important words to think about over the next ~10-15 years of your career. (This article is technically about academic scholarship, which is being overrun with junk article submissions (and publications, but I believe the lesson applies to every job.) / via Inside Higher Ed

  • Related, plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI. A quote to keep in your back pocket if you find yourself in a debate over whether AI will destroy jobs: “We invent new tasks for humans to do over time. In fact, so far, economic history has seen a continuous diversification in the number of tasks humans do. Back in the agricultural age, nearly everyone did the same small set of tasks: farming and maintaining a farm household. Now, even after centuries of automation, our species as a whole performs a much wider variety of different tasks.” / via Noahpinion

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

No announcements this week, straight to the news!

Funding / M&A

• PlanetSpark raises $11M / India, Content Provider / Prime Venture Partners, Innoven Capital, Alteria Capital, myPat, GGT3 Ventures, IAN Investors

• Legends raises $6M / US, Mental Health / Floodgate Capital, Reach Capital

• Ask for the Moon raises €2.5M / France, Corporate Infrastructure / Matterwave Ventures, UI Investissement

• Niyyah raises $2M / UK, Content Provider / Venrex, Cur8 Capital, Active Partners, Emerge, Collective Continuum

• Smartschool raises $1.5M / US, Test Prep / Inovo VC, The Explorer Fund

• Skillshare acquires Superpeer / US, Content Platform

• Classera acquires Expert Solutions / US (Saudi Arabia), School Software Infrastructure

• Avallain acquires Teachermatic / UK, Content Provider

• HCL Group invests $20M in Education Initiatives / India, Content Provider

  • Note: this was a secondary sale, not an equity round

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• Talentware raises €800K

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Celeste Grupman promoted to CEO of Dataquest / via Hypepotamus

• Vishaal Gupta joins Pearson as President of Workforce Skills / via PR Newswire

• Darren Person joins Cengage as Chief Digital Officer / via Cengage

• Yukun Harsono joins Lexia as SVP of Strategy and Operations / via K12 Dive

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

Early Childhood

• A new collaboration between Head Start and the Association of Community College Trustees to support the 4M college students(!) raising children while enrolled. / via NPR

K12

• Everything you need to know about Biden’s FY2025 budget proposal | for the Education Department. / via K12 Dive and 74Million

  • Related, learning shouldn’t take a summer break, White House and Ed Department say. I’m still not sure when this will happen, but I am increasingly convinced that there will be substantial changes to the traditional school calendar in the not too distant future. / via K12 Dive

• College Board declares launch of the digital SAT a success. / via K12 Dive

  • Related to updates to the technology side of the college application system, the Common App helps colleges experiment with asking applicants how home life affects them. This seems like positive, holistic counterweight to the trend back towards using standardized testing in admissions decisions. / via Hechinger Report

• Stride Inc and American Public University partner to provide pathway to more affordable college degrees. After 2+ decades on online education we still haven’t really seen a scaled, vertically-integrated provider of both high school and college degrees. This partnership is not that, but is an interesting experiment in that direction. / via Yahoo! Finance

Higher Ed

• US research funding increasingly reliant on corporate agendas. Most of today’s discourse on US universities, especially on business side of the industry, revolves around student job outcomes. That is not an inherently bad thing; many US universities have a long history of graduating students into low-earning roles. But it ignores the two other core functions pillars that, for better or for worse, we’ve built universities to serve - local/regional employment and research. / via Times Higher Education

  • Related, should sports be included as one of those pillars? Revenues from college sports is, probably, the most anamolous part of US universities compared to the rest of the world. Which makes me think they will detach faster than anyone expects. Don’t be surprised if a name-brand, former-glory school - maybe in Florida? - turns over management of its sports teams to a private equity firm in exchange for a (lucrative and negligible-overhead) brand license. / via Institutional Investor

• How universities can prepare graduates for an AI-driven world. I’m starting a tally of university presidents who strongly endorse or disparage the use of AI in education. Please feel free to send examples my way, I suspect the results will be enlightening. / via Higher Ed Dive

• New Mexico commits $1B to “free college” fund. There was a trend of state disinvestment in public universities from 2008 to 2020. One strategy many public universities took to shore up their finances during this period was to recruit out-of-state students who paid higher tuition prices. This initiative in New Mexico has already boosted enrollments by 10%; I’d love to know whether it is also an effective strategy for keeping students from going out-of-state for college. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

  • Related to state level post-secondary funding strategies, an overview of Hire UP, a program in California that *pays* formerly incarcerated, current/former foster youth, and low-income parents with children for the hours they attend community college. / via Press Democrat

• ASU (via Cintana) signs MOU with Saudi Ministry of Education to establish affiliated school in Riyadh. / via Saudi Press Agency

Workforce

• LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform. LinkedIn says these games will “unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations.” To speculate, hosting games on-platform also seems like a great potential Trojan Horse for large-scale skills assessment and skills-based hiring. / via Techcrunch

EdTech

• A map of Generative AI for education. The second annual update to what should be the starting point for anyone interested in researching / investing / operating in this part of the EdTech space. / via Laurence Holt on Medium

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Xeet of the Week

Next week’s newsletter will come out on Monday instead of Sunday due to a (fun!) family commitment - see you all on the 18th.

On to the news.

Funding / M&A

• Brains and Motion raises ~$18M / US, Extracurricular Activities / New Markets Venture Partners, LearnStart, Sand Hill Angels, Women’s Venture Capital Fund, JFF Ventures, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator

• MyCaptain raises $1.7M / India, Career Pathways / Inflection Point Ventures, MyNavi, Piper Serica, Super Capital, Ankur Capital

• Accenture acquires Udacity / US, Content Platform

• Ellucian acquires Edunav / US, School Software Infrastructure

• B2W Group acquires ECTA / UK, Training Provider

• Kido International acquires Amelio / UK (India), Early Childcare Providers

• Cleverly acquires HeyTimi / Germany, Tutoring

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+.

Other Transactions

• Scholar Education raises $1.5M

• Analytica Ensino raises $800K

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Amy Clark and Lee Potick join D2L as Chief People Officer and Chief Revenue Officer, respectively / via PRNewswire

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

Early Childhood

• Free childcare exits in America - if you cross paths with the right philanthropist. / via Hechinger Report

  • One state working to make sure their free/inexpensive childcare programs are billionaire-agnostic? Massachusetts is investing big in early care and education. It’s paying off. / via EdSurge

K12

• The SAT goes digital. Students will now take the test via an app, reminiscently named BlueBook. It’s curious to me why the College Board, the creators and administrators of the SAT, would not name the app eponymously. Taking the SAT is, obviously, a fraught experience, but I would think there would be some value to featuring the brand on the test. To speculate a little (a lot), does BlueBook become an ~assessment platform~ for use outside of the SAT? / via Inside Higher Ed

• The key to better math education? Explaining money. I don’t love when opinion writers with no experience in math, learning science, or even the education sector publish curriculum ideas with anecdotal evidence and no mention of outcomes in prominent news outlets. That said, from a core principles standpoint, this actually sounds like a good idea. / via New York Times

• Apropros of what is becoming an ongoing theme around school funding, the hardest job in education: convincing parents to send their kids to a San Francisco public school. / via Hechinger Report

  • Meanwhile, Alabama on track to pass $100M education savings account (ESA) bill. / via 1819 News

    • Related, School Choice, but with guard rails. Failed West Virginia microschool fuels state probe - and some soul searching. / via 74 Million

  • And/but Texas pushes back on school choice. / via Hechinger Report

Higher Ed

• Untangling the bungled FAFSA launch.

  • Every stakeholder involved should be disappointed in themselves:

    • Republicans, for turning down requests for additional budget - anyone familiar with building software, especially government software, could have told you that a budget estimate from a lame-duck administration was highly likely to be off the mark.

    • Democrats, for their steadfast resolve to let haphazard student loan relief get in the way of making progress toward actually fixing the US higher ed funding system.

    • The insane person who argued that the new FAFSA could be delivered via an application written in COBOL, for arguing that it is acceptable to deliver literally anything written in COBOL in 2024.

  • We successfully turned a bipartisan agreement to update one of the great engines of social mobility into a partisan dumpster fire and 2 million students are now paying the price.

  • *Takes a deep breath* / via Inside Higher Ed

• Phil Hill’s annual state of higher ed LMS market. Affectionately known as The Squid! / via PhilOnEdTech

• Dartmouth men’s basketball team votes to unionize. This is important for college athletes from revenue-generating college sports (football and basketball), who will (hopefully) start earning commensurately to the revenue they bring in. This is probably…not a lot for the last place, 2-12 Dartmouth Men’s basketball team, but for other teams it will be substantial. / via ESPN

  • However, the knock-on effects of this decision loom large. The funding to pay revenue-generating players will likely come from non-revenue-generating teams. It will also change the dynamics of college sports as an enrollment (Alabama grew by 15,000 students during Nick Saban’s 17-year run as head coach) and alumni donation engine. / via The Ringer

Education Research

• Bloom’s two-sigma is fake news(ish) Causing heart palpitations for EdTech entrepreneurs and investors worldwide as they prepare for the marathon of cocktail parties that surround GSV’s annual assemblage in April. / via Education Next

  • Because? Folks like to use two-sigma in the context of the potential of chatbots in the classroom. There is still potential in 1:1 tutoring (and AI chatbots), just maybe a lower effect size than Professor Bloom led us to believe. Among the experiments putting this to the test are Ann and Fry, Ferris State University’s two chatbots designed to be “data doppelgangers” or “synthetic students” whose outputs Ferris State can then use to improve its curriculum and student experience. / via EdSurge

    • Not a data doppelganger or synthetic student, just a chatbot with Holden Caulfield’s personality. Used to help students develop AI literacy, this is an excellent example of how to teach students to use AI as leverage to improve their thinking, not just to do the work. / via EdSurge

• Also under fire? Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). America’s most popular autism therapy may not work - and may seriously harm patients’ mental health. / via 74Million

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Xeet of the Week

In honor of bitcoin’s new all-time high.

No announcements from me this week, straight to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Inkitt raises $37M / US, Content Provider / Khosla Ventures, NEA, Kleiner Perkins, Redalpine

  • MT Note: While Inkitt is not, strictly, an EdTech company, I expect companies like it to have a substantial impact on EdTech. See also notes on Klarna’s chatbot and Stack Overflow’s Google deal below

• Interview Kickstart raises $10M / US, Training Provider / Blume Ventures

• Heat Geek raises £4M / UK, Training Provider / Transition, Triple Point Ventures

• NativeX raises $2.5M / Vietnam, Language Learning / Ansible Ventures, Blueprint Ventures, Northstar Ventures

• Graide raises £1.6M / UK, Teacher Tools / XTX Ventures, Mercia Ventures, SFC Capital

• MoonHub raises $1.4M / UK, VR / Unconventional Ventures, Pi Labs, Ada Ventures

• Tokidos raises $1.35M CAD / Canada, Gamified Learning / Triptyq Capital, Investissement Québec, Boreal Ventures

• Software Circle acquires ARC Technology for £2M / UK, Software Infrastructure

• Workday acquires HiredScore / US, HR Infrastructure (Recruitment Software)

• HMH acquires Writable / US, Content Provider

  • Launches HMH Labs

• Deel acquires Zavvy / US (Germany), Talent Management Software

• Wayside Publishing acquires Nualang / US, Language Learning

• Erudifi acquires Doyobi / Singapore, Student Financing (Gamified Learning)

• Leeds Equity Partners acquires TouchMath / US, Content Provider

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+.

Other Transactions

• Five Sigma invests in ClassDojo

• ITZA raises £2M

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to Paying subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Robin Wadsworth promoted to CEO of Thought Industries / via PR Newswire

• Dr. Ivory Toldson joins Concentric Education Solutions as Chief of Research / via K12 Dive

• Chris Berry joins Zen Educate as CRO / via PRWeb

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

K12

• The desolation of America’s urban schools. This article is heartbreaking, and reinforces a trend I have been following for more than 2 years. America’s public school infrastructure is crumbling, and there is no plan to fix it. / via The Nation

  • Related, there is a $2B school infrastructure bill making its way through the legislature in the state of Idaho. I’d love for states to prove my thesis wrong; we will see what this bill looks like if/when it gets passed. / via K12 Dive

  • Not really related, but at least showing thoughtfulness about the future of US K12 education, two 2024 trends pieces from Michael Horn and Robin Lake. / via and 74 Million

• NAEP scores were declining long before COVID. Alongside this general trend is a troubling “achievement gap,” which shows that score declines were worse among lower-performing students than higher-performing students. / via 74Million

• Homeschooling appears to be on the rise in England (though the data is not particularly well-kept). / via Education Executive

• Why one school district spent $1M fighting a special education student. Helping students with learning disabilities often requires more resources than the average student without a disability. Public schools have long vascillated between 2 strategies for serving these students, 1) paying for them to go to private school or 2) hiring paraprofessional staff directly to support them. Lawsuits like those mentioned in this article are disticts’ efforts to protect the precedent for whichever strategy they are focused on. / via Wall Street Journal

  • It stands to reason that software for this student population could reduce the cost to serve them while (hopefully) maintaining student outcomes. Anecdotally, I have noticed more PE and VC activity is this segment of the EdTech market, but do not yet have the data to call it a “trend.”

  • Related to district funding choices but not special education, Nevada uses AI to determine school funding. Is this the future or a cautionary tale? / via Education Week

Higher Ed

• $1B donation will provide free tuition at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. This is awesome. Not every college/university can count on a $1B donation to change their financial trajectory, but this is also a reminder that the business of operating - and sustaining - a university is far more complex than “fixing” cost/tuition prices. / via New York Times

  • Additonally, not every college can rely on a $1B donation from former faculty member (as is the case with Einstein), but at least faculty are getting more involved in the business of universities? The rise of faculty budget activists. “Faculty are starting — certainly belatedly, and maybe too late, who knows — to understand that if we don’t also participate in budgetary issues, ultimately faculty governance is meaningless.” / via Chronicle of Higher Education

    • Related, these tenured professors thought their jobs were safe, they were wrong. To be clear, layoffs stink. But, also, it seems fair to say that the employees of an organization should have at least some sense/vested interest in the financial health of their employer. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

      • (One more tab down the rabbit hole, then I’ll stop.) A group of instructors who are less worried about their jobs? The faculty at the University of Florida, who former senator Ben Sasse has won over with moderation and money. A highly entertaining mea culpa: “I don’t like his politics, I don’t agree with some of what I thought he might be doing, and even may still do. But at the same time, there was this reaction to him and to the announcement that was probably overblown to many.” / via Times Higher Education

  • Back to university complexity, acquiring actual education businesses (i.e. scaled online degree providers) has been one of the lowest ROI actions traditional universities have taken in recent years. This complicates the discussion over whether the University of Idaho can complete its acquisition of University of Phoenix - it is almost certainly a bad idea, but who are the stakeholders who get to make that call? / via PhilonEdTech and New York Times

• A thoughtful overview of how various stakeholders in higher ed are thinking about AI, AI will shake up higher ed. Are colleges ready? One statistic that stuck out to me: 5 institutions - Northeastern University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania, Clemson University, and the University of Florida - accounted for ~half of AI job postings at universities. / via Chroncile of Higher Education

Workforce

• Career websites face emerging role as salary transparency cops. I’m not sure I like the principle of holding job board websites liable for the actions of their corporate users, but I get how it would incentivize enforcement of salary transparency laws in a quick and decentralized way. / via Bloomberg Law

EdTech / Tech

• Duolingo daily active users grow 65%. NFA, but if I had to bet on one non-BigTech/AGI company to become *the* catch-all learning app, it would be Duolingo. / via Bloomberg

• Swedish FinTech company Klarna’s AI assistant is “doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents.” I fully expect this story to play out in EdTech and large universities. Those riverfront textile mill offices in Manchester may become residential lofts sooner than we expect. / via Fast Company and Inside Higher Ed

  • Related, Stack Overflow cuts IP licensing deal with Google to supply Gemini’s knowledge base. It remains to be seen how the major publishers will work with AI platforms in the long term. However, this deal, alongside Google’s $60M/year deal to license Reddit content, starts to provide a framework for what publisher relationships might look like. / via Techcrunch

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

I’ve been on a space kick recently. It started this Fall, watching For All Mankind while washing baby bottle parts late at night. It continued over the holidays, when a family member gifted me The Apollo Murders. And it came to a head this week, when the first commercial spacecraft landed on the moon.

The job of sifting through the week’s news is sometimes bleak. It is often easier to find the flaws of new technologies than to predict their impact. It is also, arguably, better for business to highlight negative stories than positive ones - company layoff articles in the People Moves section are routinely my most clicked links.

All the same, sometimes I like swimming against the tide. I like having a sense of wonder in my life, even while acknowledging some of the grim challenges we face in the modern world.

I encourage you to think about where your sense of wonder is right now. It doesn’t have to be in space - it could even be in education! With spring just around the corner, now feels like a good time to tap into it.

With that, onto the news!

Funding / M&A

• Upward raises $21M / US, Early Childcare Software Infrastructure / Alpha Edison, M13, Fika Ventures,

• Loora raises $12M / Israel, Language Learning / QP Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Emerge, Two Lanterns Venture Partners

• Stepful raises $12M / US, Training Provider / AlleyCorp Impact, SemperVirens, Reach Capital, Y Combinator, Company Ventures, Green Sands Equity, 01 Advisors

• Mia Share raises $6.5M / US, Software Infrastructure / TTV Capital

• Ziplines Education raises $6.4M / US, Content Provider / Jackson Square Ventures, Wildcat Venture Partners, WGU Labs

  • Adds Carolyn Wakulchik, Sheryl Friedman, Art Carrier, Clayton Dean, and Sam Nelson to leadership team. / via Linkedin

• MeVitae raises $1.8M / UK, Recruitment Software / Apex Black

• Podium Education acquires Untapped / US, Content Provider (Talent Marketplace)

• Unleashed Brands acquires Sylvan Learning / US, Extracurricular Activities

• NBME acquires MedVR / US, Training Provider (VR)

• CentralReach acquires SILAS / US, Special Education

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+.

Other Fundings

• Echo Labs raises $7.4M

• Mathbrix raises $1M

• AlensiaXR raises Series A

• Shamrock Capital invests in Carnegie

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to Paying subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Erin Mayhood promoted to CEO of Mentor Collective / via PR Newswire

• Huw Williams joins Avantis Education as CEO / via Installation

• Former Noodle CSO Lee Bradshaw launches Rhodes Advisors / via Inside Higher Ed

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

Early Childhood

• Private equity has its eyes on the childcare industry, allegedly awaiting new inflows of government spending. While I think this headline is true and bears watching, I don’t like the assumptions the article uses to drive this narrative. The 4 major brands that the article highlights - KinderCare, Learning Care Group, Goddard School, and Primrose Academy - all target the high-end and corporate-sponsored segments of the early-childcare market (as does Bright Horizons, which is publicly traded, not PE-backed). These segments are the *least* likely to receive benefits from new government spending in the sector, which is almost uniformly targeted at lower-income families. / via The Atlantic

K12

• As some of you may have deduced from past links, I’m starting to build out a framework for understanding the education component of the 2024 US election cycle. I’m confident it will include partisan discussions of school funding/education savings accounts, student loan forgiveness, and the new FAFSA rollout. I’m less certain of where the discussion will go with regard to charter schools, who are adjacent to the funding discussion. Some fodder for thinking about this:

  • When science class is in a former Macy’s. / via New York Times

  • Will Democrats ever embrace charter schools again? / via Bloomberg Opinion

• Also apropos of election season, federal pandemic funds should not disappear just when we need them most / via Hechinger Report

Higher Ed

• A recurring | question asked in this newsletter is: What is a modern university? The question sounds simple but takes a while to unravel.

  • In today’s example, Duke shuts down huge plant collection, causing scientific uproar. Should a university house a large plant collection? Is it “shameful” to shut down a 100-year-old collection? If Duke is the wrong keeper of the plants, who takes over as Johnny Appleseed? / via New York Times

  • Related, is running a top university America’s hardest job? / via The Economist

  • And in Europe, “Professor Lee saw locally focused universities of applied sciences – alongside strong vocational education and institutions that diffuse innovation into the average firm – as a key part of the equation. Such universities are ‘not necessarily [doing] world-leading blue-sky research’, he said, but do help make firms highly innovative via ‘marginal incremental improvements by applying other existing technologies…to their own production processes’, with that local role for universities ‘often crucial in terms of creating good jobs.’” / via Times Higher Education

  • From the private side, Noodle is also working on this definition. Other OPMs, including 2U, Coursera, and Academic Partnership, are working on this too, but Noodle probably has the most wiggle room to make changes right now. / via Inside Higher Ed

  • Also, what are ghost students? A very real cost being added to already-strained college admissions departments - fake applicants who scam schools for financial aid dollars and other resources. These “ghost students” were reported to represent 20% of all applications to California community colleges last year. / via EdTech Magazine

Workforce

• Are games the secret to better company training? Yes! / via Wall Street Journal

• Half of college grads are working in jobs that don’t use their degrees. Lots of concepts to pick from in this article, but the one that struck me was “Thanks to the way online hiring algorithms scan applicants’ work histories, the next role that person is now most likely to be considered for is a store manager position, while a break with a corporate marketing department is even less likely.” / via Wall Street Journal

  • Which matters because employers don’t practice what they preach on skills-based hiring (different article about the same underlying Burning Glass report). These two points illustrate how easy it is for someone to get left behind if they don’t make the “right” choices as a young person, even with all the technology we have at our disposal. / via Higher Ed Dive 

EdTech

• The EdTech Icarus: Byju’s Crashes and Burns. A great summary from the EdTech Insiders folks (I helped a little, but they deserve the lion’s share of the credit for this one) on the Byju’s saga. My only hope here is that we can close the chapter on Byju’s decline soon. / via

  • Of course, that hope did not come true this week…After the company announced a “fully subscribed” $200M rights issue, shareholders representing 60% ownership of the company voted to oust the company’s eponymous founder. / via Techcrunch

    • To clarify, the shareholder vote does not necessarily compel Byju to step down, though it certainly doesn’t help him stay in place.

    • Additionally, I want to highlight how quintessentially Byju’s the “fully subscribed” funding announcement was. It requires a certain suspension of disbelief to square how a “fully subscribed” round still has room for equity owners of 10%+ of the company to participate.1 What was the plan? To give their old major shareholders token equity for token participation? Or to bait-and-switch 10%+ of the company from their new major shareholders so their old shareholders could keep their pro rata?

• Unrelated, what I love about writing consistently is that it encourages you to think about ideas as a living organism rather than something that is set in stone. Less than a month ago, I took this author to task for their jaded perspective on AI, “Arizona State announces plan to give up on education.” Now, I find myself easily nodding in agreement to their new perspective, you’ve gotta have taste. Which highlights the importance - and ambiguity - that tastemaking will play (already plays?) in a world filled with “generated” content. / via Inside Higher Ed

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Xeet of the Week

It is President’s Day Weekend here in the US, which approximately half the country celebrates (I’m not sure which half, but it does include New England). As such, this note comes to you about halfway through the East Coast workday.

This note also contains an invitation to join the EdTech Growth Mini-series, authored by Jeevan Balani.

One of my aspirations for ETCH is for it to grow beyond providing news to a place where professionals come to build careers in EdTech. Everett Reiss helped me kick off this strategy by taking on the Jobs of the Week newsletter (which you should also subscribe to), which highlights roles for folks at all levels of functional experience and seniority.

The Growth Mini-series is more targeted, designed for folks who want to build/maintain competencies for Marketing and/or Growth roles.

I hope to produce several more mini-series in different functional areas, and that readers like you will help turn these “series” into longer-term communities of practice. If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to follow along with one or more of them.

With that, on to the news!

Funding / M&A

Funding

• Amber raises $21M / India, Higher Ed Services / Gaja Capital, Lighthouse Canton, Stride Ventures

• BridgeCare raises $10M / US, Early Childhood Software Infrastructure / Avenue Growth Partners

• AlensiaXR raises $3M / US, VR / Sopris Capital, Healthcare Collaboration Fund, JobsOhio Growth Capital Fund

• SocialCrowd raises $1.6M / US, HR Tools / Bread and Butter Ventures, VC 414, Serac Ventures, Gala Capital Partners

M&A

• SchoolStatus acquires SchoolNow / US, K12 Infrastructure

• Millpond Equity Partners acquires Galileo Education / US, Special Education

• CentralReach acquires Silas / US, Special Education

• 95 Percent Group acquires Morpheme Magic / US, Literacy

Reports

• Reach Capital’s 2023 EdTech Funding Report / via Reach Capital

To be named in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ with verifiable institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to Paying subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Jeff Cassidy joins Prodigy Education as CFO / via Betakit

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Featured Organization - Growth Fraction

“Building” an EdTech product has never been easier, but the path to meaningful growth is harder to crack than ever.  Facebook and Google ads are more expensive, Gen AI is creating powerful learning products for cents on the dollar, and online learning fatigue is palpable in a post-Covid world.

ETCH is partnering with Jeevan Balani of GrowthFraction to create a *free* Growth Mini-Series to explore how different Go-To-Market levers can scale your EdTech business.

Jeevan has worked with several EdTech companies including Masterclass, Emeritus, and Outschool. As a Fractional Head of Growth, he partners with EdTech startups on marketing-led growth (e.g., SEO, performance marketing) and product-led growth (e.g., referral, merchandising).

Subscribe to growth mini-series

Links

Early Childhood

• The case for spending way more on babies. / via The Atlantic

K12

• Why so many kids are priced out of youth sports. Youth sports are not, strictly, education/edtech. But they do play a formative role in the development of at least 50% of children in the US (including myself). Or they did before commercial interests took over, creating a $30-40B industry that costs, on average, $833/child/season ($2,068/child/season for households making $150K+). / via New York Times

• Connecticut seeks to fund teachers’ project proposals with a $4M investment. What I like about this is that it doesn’t let perfect be the enemy of impact. Rather than trying to build their own “portal” for administering these funds, the state is using DonorsChoose. Rather than making up a list of “qualified” items, the state is trusting teachers to make good decisions. A very rewarding read. / via 74Million

• The average age of a public school building in the US is 49 years. This is not necessarily problematic, but does start to become so when you layer in that 1/3 of buildings have not ever undergone a major renovation to update things like HVAC systems. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives our public school buildings a D+ rating. Poor public infrastructure provides a simple and highly visible reference point for school choice advocates. / via K12 Dive

• On paper, teens are thriving. In reality, they’re not. I cannot imagine what it is like being a 16-18-year-old right now, trying to understand what is “real” and what is not. Trying to grasp what the next 80 years on earth might look like. If you have a teen in your life, even peripherally, do something nice for them this week. / via Hechinger Report

  • If you think I’m being hyperbolic, ask an 18-year-old to read this article and break down all the competing interests vying to control the narrative. My bet is the exercise ends with your teen throwing a medium-sized book at you. The plastics industry would like a word with your kids. / via Washington Post

Higher Ed

• Online course provider 2U faces doubts it can continue. I continue to believe bankruptcy is the most likely outcome (to shed as much debt as possible), probably with a subsequent change of control to a PE firm. After that, I think the company will look pretty similar to the way it does today. / via Inside Higher Ed

  • Lots of folks seem eager to dance on 2U’s grave. As a thought exercise, if 2U were to shut down entirely (which, again, is an unlikely outcome), who steps in to pick up the 60K+ students they currently serve? It is not going to be a plucky DIY regional upstart. It will be the Mega and elite universities - further stratifying the online world between the haves and the have-nots. 2U should not be held up on a pedestal, but be careful what you wish for.

• States bet big on career education but struggle to show it works. Proving graduate outcomes is a problem that runs rampant throughout the postsecondary education ecosystem, not just in the career education space. It is a pain for schools and government workforce initiatives, but it is even worse for students, who have to make decisions based on nebulous/missing/false information. / via Washington Post

• In the past, I have tried to unravel what the modern (21st century) university is supposed to be. It is an ongoing process, and looks different to almost anyone you ask. Is a university’s job to be a financial success? Should that financial success be driven by profitably educating students or some other mechanism? How responsible is the university for local job creation - or maintaining local culture? This week, we have some examples of modern university visions being contested:

  • The federal government runs a college. It has had 8 presidents in 6 years. The story of Haskell Indian Nations University, which is run - seemingly poorly - by the Bureau of Indian Education. A fringe case not reflective of any trends in the broader education ecosystem. But a reminder of how the US’ chaotic and, in this case, unsavory history manifests in the modern day. / via Wall Street Journal

  • Even more complex to dissect, Christopher Newport University President Paul Trible transformed the university he led for 26 years. Not everyone is pleased. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

  • Another complicated (in very different ways) mix of financial success and culture clash, Texas A&M decides to shut down Qatar campus. / via Inside Higher Ed

  • A question I hadn’t considered before: is the modern university a globally consistent concept, or will it look different in different geographies? In India, a fierce ideological battle rages at one of the country’s top liberal universities. / via New York Times

• Education Department continues to navigate rocky FAFSA rollout, will ease verification requirements and program reviews. / via Higher Ed Dive

Workforce

• Gensler’s office of the future. I prefer the carrot approach to the “return to office”, which includes thoughtful space design as outlined here. It *might* also include dedicated learning spaces for employees and/or their children, if designed and incentivized correctly. / via Worklife and Foundation for Economic Education

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Image of the Week

Congrats to the Kansas City Chiefs for winning yesterday’s Super Bowl. They Shook Off a halftime deficit and won on a Fearless pass by Patrick Mahomes. We can only hope that their championship rings will be Bejeweled in a way that never goes Out of Style.

On to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Colossyan raises $22M / UK, Corporate Training (Publishing Infrastructure) / Lakestar, Launchub, Day One Capital, Emerge Education

• Harbor raises $3.7M / US, Childcare / Trust Ventures, Morrison Seger, Capital Factory

• Simplify raises $3M / US, Jobs Platform / Craft Ventures, Y Combinator, Hyphen Capital, GFC

• Adventum raises $3M / India, International Student Placement / Brand Capital

• ConveGenius raises $1.8M / India, Chatbot / Searce Inc.

• Leya AI raises €1M / Lithuania, Tutoring / V-Sharp Venture Studio, Inventure, BADideas.fund

• Klas raises $1M / Nigeria, Course Platform / Ingressive Capital, Techstars, HoaQ

• Google acquires Edlyft / US, Tutoring

• Savvas Learning (FKA Pearson K12) acquires Outlier / US, Content Publisher

• Quantum5 acquires Trivie / US, Assessments

• SnapDragon Capital acquires Mathnasium franchisee / US, Tutoring

To be named in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ with verifiable institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to Paying subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Kelly Sia promoted to President of Curriculum Associates / via Curriculum Associates

• David Longo promoted to CFO of Chegg / via Yahoo Finance

• Chris Bondarenko joins 360Learning as Chief Revenue Officer / via businesswire

• Jay Chakrapani, Harris Goodman, and Karin Simelaro join BrainPOP as Chief Product Officer, SVP of Growth and Marketing, and Chief Sales Officer, respectively / via PR Newswire

• Grammarly lays off 230 / via Techcrunch

  • Note: Grammarly is more EdTech-adjacent than pure EdTech, but the company’s AI-focused restructuring narrative is something to keep an eye on. (Caveat that press quotes/releases, especially ones concerning layoffs, always have a degree of “spin” to them.)

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

Early Childhood

• Affordable childcare becoming a bipartisan issue. As the father of a 6-month-old paying more for childcare than I do for rent, this trend is exciting. As an industry analyst, it also provides an insightful view of changing political priorities. From North Dakota Republican Emily O’Brien, who championed a $66M state spending bill focused on childcare investments, “It was definitely not, you know, an easy sell, because this is probably somewhere where you don’t want the government to get involved, but it’s a workforce solution. We have people that are willing and able to work, but finding child care was an obstacle.” / via Associated Press

K12

• Further evidence that school choice is the K12 education topic in this US election year - 70% of parents support implementation of school choice policies. The wrinkle? Teachers’ unions, and those who count on them for contributions and voting support, say school choice “undermines democracy.” / via Real Clear Education

  • To be clear, I am not opining on whether school choice is good or bad. I am showing you the shape of the battle lines for this election cycle, like Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s $100M ESA plan. / via AL.com

  • Higher ed, but also related to this election cycle, FAFSA applications down 57% YoY amid rocky rollout of new technical infrastructure. Education Department allocates $50M and 50+ staffers to help colleges. / via Higher Ed Dive and Inside Higher Ed

• Explaining California’s $2B Pandemic Recovery settlement. / via New York Times

Higher Ed

• Dartmouth reinstates standardized tests for admissions. Dartmouth found that having test scores (SAT/ACT/etc.) *in addition to* other components of a student’s application led to a better admissions process. These tests are not perfect, but they are helpful and available at scale for schools to use. / via Financial Times

  • Like standardized assessments, accreditation is a tricky topic. While accreditation is time-consuming and expensive, today’s accreditors do provide a baseline level of protection for student (and taxpayer) funding. Any attempt to make accreditation “easier” should be met with skepticism.

    • However! I am interested in models that are “different, but still rigorous.” The Postsecondary Commision, profiled here, fits that bill. / via Inside Higher Ed

    • And! Perhaps counterintuitively, I am also interested in models that do not participate in the accreditation system at all (and, thus, do not take Title IV funding). Buildspace, who published their most recent investor update this week, is one of my favorite organizations in this category. / via Buildspace

• AI can’t read. Why pay attention to its feedback on writing? I was previously…unhappy with this author’s post “Arizona State announces a plan to give up on education.” I found this post much more insightful and self-aware in trying to examine the true purpose of providing feedback - whether human or AI-generated. / via Inside Higher Ed

• Rot, from provocateur and professor Scott Galloway. “Administrative bloat,” the subject of the “rot” in this essay, is an easy punching bag. As universities grew in both revenue and stature over the 20th century, they increased non-academic headcount. / via No Mercy, No Malice

  • It is also a naive position, akin to disparaging Google for employing people who don’t work on Search. Galloway and other bloat-accusers fail to acknowledge that education is just a component of today’s universities - they are hospitals, research labs, professional sports franchises, hospitality companies, real estate companies, and, of course, hedge funds. They are non-profit conglomerates.

  • Whether universities should be conglomerates is a fair question. Poor financial management like the $177M budget deficit that the University of Arizona managed to run this year suggests that not all universities are great stewards of capital. But arguing that universities should get rid of non-academic employees misses the forest for the trees. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

    • Some other recent examples of universities operating outside the strict confines of academia (for better or for worse):

      • How and why the University of Michigan built its own Generative AI tools. This is a case study worth reading by both university and corporate leaders. The question to consider while reading: What level of (resource-intensive) customization makes sense for your organization? / via Educause

      • Butler University to build new housing for students and alumni. We often talk about how universities increase the long-term value of their students/alumni by offering online courses, why not also offer housing? / via Butler University

Workforce

• Paul Fain covers the declining labor force participation rate, now down to 62.5%. Something to keep an eye on. / via The Job

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

It is Super Bowl week here in the US, which means most of your US colleagues are debating whether they will be watching 1) “for the commercials” 2) “for Taylor” 3) “for Usher and the halftime show” or 4) “for the football.”

It also means that this newsletter will greet you bright and early Monday morning…Or at least by lunchtime, depending on how the game goes.

On to the news!

Funding / M&A

• Zum raises $140M on $1.3B valuation / US, K12 Infrastructure (Transportation) / GIC, Sequoia Capital, Softbank Vision Fund

• Morressier raises $16.5M / Germany, Research Publishing / Redalpine, Owl Ventures, Cherry Ventures

• Pintar raises $3M / Indonesia, Training Provider (Recruitment) / Havez Capital, SIG Venture Capital

• iStoria raises $1.3M / Saudi Arabia, Language Learning / Nama Ventures, Classera, Flat6Labs, BIM Ventures

• ETS acquires PSI / US, Assessments

• Avathon Capital acquires Magical Beginnings / US, Early Childhood Providers

Report

• Brighteye Venture’s 2024 European EdTech Funding Report

To be named in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ with verifiable institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to Paying subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

Subscribe now

People Moves

• Kristen Fox joins the Business Higher Education Forum (BHEF) as CEO / via LinkedIn

• Kermit Cook joins Penn Foster as CEO / via PR Newswire

• Karlo Young promoted to President of Concentric Education Solutions / via K12 Dive

• GoStudent lays off 100+ / via Business Insider

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

ETCH Jobs Community

Links

Early Childhood

• DC pilots $10,800 cash payments to new mothers. A topic I’ve been waiting to resurface in the AI conversation is Universal Basic Income (UBI), since one possible consequence of the broad adoption of AI is more leisure time and fewer jobs. In fact, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has even put money into researching UBI. / via Washington Post

• Michigan’s “tri-share” early childcare program - where states, employers, and parents each pay 1/3 of childcare costs - to be tested in New York, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Color me intrigued! / via EdSurge

K12

• OpenAI partners with Common Sense Media to build AI safety guidelines. To OpenAI’s credit, they have realized that one of their biggest hurdles to adoption is not a technical feature, but trust. Partnering with a respected non-profit provider like Common Sense is both impactful - I expect these standards will be good! - and business-savvy - the company can point to this partnership anytime someone wants to write a “dangerous hallucination” or “robots replacing teachers” headline. / via Techcrunch

  • Speaking of robots replacing teachers, MIT says “fear not! It is still too expensive for robots to replace teachers.” A highly practical, though also sort of unsatisfying rebuttal to job fears. / via Quartz

  • An inexpensive way to train a robot? Sticking a GoPro on an infant’s head for 1.5 years to watch how they learn. This very real, DARPA-funded project captured 61 hours of video from forehead of a 6 month-old, who was (intermittently) strapped in until his second birthday. / via MIT Technology Review

• “Surprising” progress in student learning loss recovery from pandemic. Lots of work still to be done, but nice to read some positive results. / via New York Times

  • Among the work to be done, helping COVID toddlers (now COVID Kindergartners). / via Washington Post

• New LAUSD policy would prevent charter schools from using public facilities. I cheered when LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho advocated for “winning students back” into the public system. It seemed like the intent was to compete based on learning outcomes and student experience - important goals for a public school leader. This policy, which was written by Carvalho but mandated by the school board (it is not clear whether Carvalho actually supports it), is the polar opposite - its core goal is to prevent change, no matter the student or financial cost. / via 74 Million

• NWEA launches new assessment - Distance Dash - as a game on Roblox, as assessment providers get serious about incorporating gaming elements into tests. I could not be more “in” on this trend - more learning should come from games! / via 74 Million

• How EdTech has fueled the parents’ rights movement. Ryan Craig argues that having our children’s academic standing at our fingertips 24/7 has encouraged parents to desire a more active role in how their child is educated. While this is sort of hard to prove definitively, it was a connection I had not made before and something I will be thinking about. / via Gap Letter

• Road Rules for the Disney+ set: Road Schools. The reality show we didn’t know we needed, where children learn from their family’s RV, stopping all around the country at historic and/or interesting locations. / via 74 Million

  • The transportation vessel whose lunch is being eaten by the RV (and other personal vehicles)? The yellow school bus, which now serves just 33% of US students (don’t tell Sequoia!). 53% of students now get driven to school by private vehicle, an all-time high. / via Washington Post

Higher Ed

• How college consultants invent perfect Ivy League applicants. Business is booming for college consultants, to the point that the 28-year-old CEO of Command Education, featured here, bounces between his $7.5M house in South Beach and $2.3M Manhattan condo. “The real boon came in 2019 when news of Operation Varsity Blues broke and the larger world learned that even celebrities and multimillionaires were so worried about college admissions that they were willing to commit a crime to get their kids into the right school.” / via Intelligencer

• State support for Higher Ed set to grow 10% in 2024. This report felt particularly novel given how dominant the narrative around disinvestment has been for the past ~decade. / via Inside Higher Ed

• The big Shaqtus invests in Campus. Shaq immediately becomes EdTech’s tallest investor, though we will have to wait a few years before we can evaluate where he ranks among the best EdTech investors - his only other EdTech investment that I am aware of is Edsoma’s seed round just 4 months ago. / via Fortune

EdTech

• The Byju’s saga continues. As I have written | about | ad nauseam, the core issue with Byju’s is one of governance. The company rode zero-interest-rate capital for 11 years, prioritizing growth above everything else, including basic financial management. When interest rates started climbing in 2022, everything started unraveling. The company, controlled by the eponymous founder, his wife, and his brother, is now in hand-to-hand combat with its investors - some of the biggest names in venture capital. This week:

  • Byju’s seeks new capital at 99% discount to previous valuation as company faces significant cash crunch. If the bank called you and told you that you needed to produce an additional down payment to keep the house you bought 5-10 years ago, you’d probably be pretty frustrated, right? At a high level, that is sort of what is happening here. / via Techcrunch

  • Byju’s investors seek to remove edtech group’s founder. True to form, Byju’s investors were not happy with the above move, and started exploring legal remedies to remove him. Officially officially pulling the rip cord on any solution that involves Byju remaining as CEO. / via Techcrunch

  • Byju and family strike back by declaring bankruptcy in the US (but not India) and, well, basically giving investors the middle finger by saying, “we would emphasize that the shareholder’s agreement does not give them the right to vote on CEO or management change.” / via Reuters and Techcrunch

• There are so many different takeaways one could have from this saga, which has not yet written its final chapter. For me, it reinforces a lesson KKR’s Richard Sarnoff articulated in 2019, that education is a “get rich slow” industry. There are no cheat codes, magic acquisitions, or fancy go-to-market schemes that change this fact. The companies that have the most long-term impact, both financially and for students, are the ones that keep their heads low and make steady progress every day.

This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

Subscribe now

Xeet of the Week