ETCH Weekend Reading 4/28/24
California rolls out free preschool, Go to a state school, the ACT's for-profit pivot, the end of languages?
Hello!
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+
ETCH Funding Database
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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
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Links
Early Childhood
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!
Xeet of the Week
This is an assumption. The press release for this funding round only says “its stakeholders” which I assume to be the 3 major private equity funds that own the company.