Silicon Valley Billionaires and Education
If there’s one thing U.S. public schools can always use more of it’s attention from people who want to make an impact — and, of course, more money. The New York Times’ recent overview of how Silicon Valley billionaires Marc Benioff, Reed Hastings, and Mark Zuckerberg have turned their respective attentions and philanthropic giving to education should be lauded. At the same time, as a CEO in the “edtech” space, I’ve come to deeply appreciate the important interpersonal dynamics that will ultimately drive the outcomes we all strive for in education.
Each of the aforementioned Silicon Valley leaders have picked specific paths to move technology more front and center in education. For Benioff (founder and CEO of Salesforce.com) the path is a locally focused giving strategy geared towards the San Francisco Unified School District. Specifically, Benioff (through Salesforce.org, the giving arm of Salesforce) has committed $100 million over the next decade to help SFUSD’s principals deploy innovative strategies to advance how technology accelerates learning. For Hastings (CEO of Netflix) the focus has been a personal investment to help advance the use of a leading edge, algorithm driven math learning software called Dreambox Learning. And for Zuckerberg (Facebook founder and CEO), the focus has been to support the digital development of a personalized learning software experience that originated out of Summit Public Schools so that it can now be distributed more broadly to schools in the U.S. and beyond.
In reading more about the nature of how these tech titans think about marrying technology with our current education system, it appears that there will be much to do in order to fill some noticeable “gaps” that invariably result when a “if you give it, they will come” approach to edtech.
The first major question that looms behind these philanthropic investments is the belief that teaching as we have viewed it for decades needs to change. In the NYT story, high school teacher Arienne Adamcikova highlights this concern, “What you are seeing right now is a heavy push to disrupt and diminish the role of teachers as experts”. One of our core values at Remind is to “Be Teacher Obsessed”. Teaching as a profession will continue to evolve, as it always has, given technologies that continually emerge. Teachers today use their mobile devices to communicate with parents and students, and they create and distribute curriculum almost exclusively in digital formats. But the essence of teaching is about the power of building relationships with students and parents, not simply deploying learning technologies in a self-serve format. The gap that must be addressed here is to support the unique and important role of relationship building that teachers provide as edtech investments proliferate.
Another important gap that must be addressed as technology investments increase in schools is how educators who oversee whole districts as well as individual schools are supported. Superintendents and principals are truly in the eye of the storm here. They work closely with teachers and teacher unions who care deeply about how teachers are supported in this digital transition (per the point above). They are also accountable to parents who care deeply about student outcomes and who have zero tolerance for “beta testing” at their kids’ expense. Finally, school and district leaders operate in an environment that combines lofty goals with tight budgets, and in parallel they are constantly being approached by technology solutions, board members, and civic leaders all offering a small piece of the massive puzzle these educators are trying to solve. The gap that must be addressed here is to support school administrators so they can achieve their most important goals tied to student outcomes for all students in their communities while education technologies become more omnipresent in their buildings.
Perhaps the biggest question we need to answer as we read stories like the one about Benioff, Hastings, and Zuckerberg giving so generously to education is whether this giving will truly reach every student? SFUSD is but one of the 15,000 plus school districts in the U.S. Dreambox Learning is for sure an engaging and compelling approach to math learning, but even at the 2 million student users quoted in the Times piece that’s less than 4% of K-12 students in the U.S. As for the Summit Schools software expansion, the NYT piece says that this school year “more than 100 schools use it” out of the 130,000 K-12 schools in the U.S. More importantly, when it comes to access, it is very likely that these promising investments will make their way to a subset of students and families in more affluent public school districts, or charter and independent schools, who are more capable of adopting high end software solutions. The gap that must be addressed here is to ensure that we make the most innovative and effective learning technologies available to all families in the U.S. (Note: The important point of access is why at Remind we remain focused on delivering a valuable communication platform that can be used by every teacher, student, parent, and administrator in a school community regardless of the mobile phone model they use.)
I truly commend the commitment to education demonstrated by Benioff, Hastings, and Zuckerberg. It no doubt comes from their heart and is an authentic effort to help solve perhaps the most important challenge ahead of us in the next century: To give every student an opportunity to succeed. (By the way, if that last line sounds familiar to some of you, it should. It’s Remind’s vision statement.)
What I would recommend of these three notable philanthropists, and anyone who invests in education at any level, is that they focus on filling the “gaps” that exist between education technology investments and the people that might benefit from these technologies. This means more than writing checks, it means really digging in and spending time with teachers, district and school leaders (e.g. superintendents, CTOs, chief academic officers, family engagement directors, principals, and others), parents, and for sure students. Listen to what you hear. What will really deliver the outcomes we all want? Will it simply happen by making more technology available in our schools, or will the outcomes come as we bridge the “gaps” by enabling teachers, administrators, parents, and students to take advantage of amazing technologies to build even more amazing relationships that foster the learning experiences and outcomes that every student deserves?
As Reed Hastings says in the NYT piece: “I’ve always been a little cynical and jaundiced about technology,” Mr. Hastings said. “The tech can help, but it is often oversold.” Perhaps what Hastings means by “oversold” is that the technology only gets us where we want to go in education when it’s part of deep and meaningful relationships. It’s definitely important that we continue testing this hypothesis.
Originally published on Medium on June 12, 2017. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.