ETCH Weekend Reading 8/20
Week of 8/14-8/20
Hello!
No announcements this week, straight to the links!
Funding / M&A
ClassWallet raises $95M / US, K12 SAAS Infrastructure / Guidepost Growth Equity, Education Growth Partners, Lazard Family Office Partners
Zeelo raises $14M / US, K12 SAAS Infrastructure / FlatzHoffman, IREON Ventures
Braid raises $6.8M / US, Gig Economy Infrastructure / A16Z, Initialized Capital
Mable Therapy raises $3.95M / UK, Special Education / Gresham House Ventures
Coachbetter raises €2.7M / Switzerland, Corporate Training / Brighteye Ventures, Zen11Holding
Shaktimaan.ai raises $2M / India, Tutoring / YCombinator, Fundersclub, Goodwater Capital
LanguifyAI raises $250K / Sweden, Classroom SAAS / Norrsken VC
Archipel Academy acquires Springest / Netherlands, Enterprise LMS
Trive Capital and Epic Partners buy out Pryor Learning / US, Corportate Training
SchoolStatus acquires ClassTag / US, K12 SAAS Infrastructure
Arco agrees to be taken private / Brazil, K12 School Operator
People Moves
Bruce Dahlgren joins Anthology as CEO / via FE News
Beth Polcari and Ken Clearly change leadership roles at Scholastic / via PRNewswire
Paul Brown, Krystal Ferguson, Laura Thorn, and Keith Womack join LINQ in executive roles / via businesswire
Anurag Tiwari joins Unacademy as National Academic Director / via Inc42
David Willis joins the board of LMS365 / via PRNewswire
FourthRev lays off an undisclosed number of employees / via PIENews
Are you hiring? I am building a ETCH jobs community and looking for companies interested in being pilot customers. Please let me know if you’re open to chatting about it.
Links
Early Childhood
Why childcare prices are rising at nearly twice the overall inflation rate. / via Wall Street Journal
K12
For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching. One of the most interesting questions in US education is at what % of the K12 population alternative schooling (including, but not limited to homeschooling) will reach steady state. Fun to theorize, impossible to answer definitively. / via Washington Post
Related, Age of Learning expands product portfolio to include homeschool curriculum. / via businesswire
Why schools across America are building teacher housing. / via Axios
This year started with a lot of content about the science of reading. Here come the response pieces. / via Edsource and Vox
Related to Zeelo’s fundraising (see above), the shortage in school bus drivers is getting worse. / via New York Times
A fun look at the best apps for back to school from a student’s perspective. / via Techcrunch
Texas revamps Houston schools, closes libraries to turn the spaces into detention centers. / via New York Times
Related, Brooklyn, choosing more of a carrot approach, turns its libraries into packed cultural hubs by making library cards collectible. / via New York Times
Higher Ed
Education Department readies latest tranche of student debt relief. / via Politico
Related, Arnold Ventures’ CEO comes out against Biden administration’s continued pursuit of student debt relief. Debt relief has the most political cachet, but getting it over the finish line has, arguably, impeded progress on other Education Department priorities. / via CNN Opinion
Meanwhile, House Republicans aim to freeze Education Department hiring. Unlikely to pass, but there is a sad symbolism in that this would be proposed right before ED embarks on the herculean task of turning the student loan collection apparatus back on. / via Higher Ed Dive
Lest we forget, ED is also trying to help institutions sort through the implications of last month’s Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. / via Associated Press
….And deliver a new FAFSA by end of year. / via New York Times
The August content we didn’t know we needed - The college presidential fitness test, where a reporter attempts the (actually really rigorous) workouts of various college leaders. If any company leaders are interested, I would be delighted to write a companion piece. / via Chronicle of Higher Education
The college that refused to die. A helpful deep dive on the lengths universities are going to survive. While the details vary from school-to-school, I suspect this narrative is far more common than we can currently see. / via The Assembly
While these issues are most dire at small institutions, they also affect Higher Ed’s major players: Amid changes to merger agreement with Arizona State University, LA Fashion Institute students left in a lurch. / via LA Times
Synopsis of the 8th annual CHLOE Report. / via Inside Higher Ed
First-year study abroad gains popularity in the US. / via Times Higher Education
Chaos at New College of Florida. Turns out using a public university for political gain is not helpful for the university or your presidential aspirations. / via Inside Higher Ed
Desantis’ real problem though? That he forgot to secure the bag before making the changes. Unlike McPherson College, which just raised $1B for its endowment. “I set off with a very bold goal to build a $1 billion endowment. A lot of people laughed at me at first, but no one is laughing now.” / via Inside Higher Ed
Don’t have a billion dollars gathering dust in your couch cushions? Not to worry, an endowed chair at UCLA will only run you $5M. Price sheet here. / Shoutout and
Social Finance expands graduate loan program to all DACA and TPS students. / via PRNewswire
When the students run the local coffee shop. I am biased from personal experience, but student-run businesses are one of my favorite models for teaching young folks about business. / via Fast Company
Related, Boomers complain Gen Z has no skills or work ethic. Gen Z reports a desire to learn skills, but with no one willing to teach them. Millenials sigh and go back to looking at unaffordable houses on Redfin. / via Higher Ed Dive and the 74Million
How Travis Kalanick’s sales bootcamp went off the rails. The details here are almost too consistent with the Uber narrative, with very few sources to corroborate them. Sales training programs are historically brutal, no matter who is running them. / via Business Insider
EdTech
First came ChatGPT, then came the over the top sales pitches. Ostensibly about higher ed, but applicable to all of EdTech. I empathize with the folks in this article; it is really hard to tell signal from noise in AI pitches. / via Chronicle of Education
The decline of Stack Exchange. It still makes more sense to me that companies like Stack Exchange and Chegg end up signing lucrative licensing deals with the major LLMs, but there is probably an intervening period when these companies figure out how to protect their IP without hurting their customer acquisition funnels. / via the Diff
This email, EdTech Thoughts Weekend Reading, is the free sister publication of the EdTech Thoughts Weekly Update. It provides 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!
