ETCH Weekend Reading 6/23/24
ETCH was acquired! And other news and notes
Hello!
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!
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!
Wow! Such exciting news! Congrats to Whiteboard for scooping you up!!! Looking forward to what that means for the future!
Congratulations on the acquisition and joining Whiteboard!