10 Important Points From an Exiting Education Company CEO

A few weeks ago we announced that Deborah Quazzo from GSV has joined our board. Following that news, I had the opportunity earlier this week to be a part of a CEO Summit organized by the team at GSV in Park City, Utah. GSV gathered a great group of education sector leaders — CEOs, advisors, and investors — to network and talk about the exciting opportunities and challenges we collectively face in the industry.

Mike Feinberg, founder of the national charter school network KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) gave a great presentation about the huge gap that still exists in college graduation rates across the socioeconomic spectrum. Jessie Woolley-Wilson, CEO of Dreambox Learning did a great job eliciting powerful insights and emotion from former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, particularly about his current work in Chicago. But David Levin, the outgoing CEO of McGraw-Hill Education delivered perhaps the most poignant talk of the summit when he shared ten important personal learnings from his three plus years as a leader in the education business. As I listened to David’s reflections, I did my best to scribble down notes so that I might share them out here on behalf of David:

1. Empathy

Those of us in education must continue to put ourselves in the shoes of students and families struggling to keep up in the U.S. today. It’s critical that we do our best to understand how hard it is for many families to keep up with the rising bar that confronts children as the progress from kindergarten through high school — and beyond. Visit Title I schools both in urban and rural settings, and talk to teachers, students, and parents about the very personal challenges they face navigating our educational system everyday.

2. Leadership

Levin cited the startling statistic that the average tenure of a public school superintendent in the U.S. is 3.2 years. Based on that math, just as a district leader has mapped out a vision and plan, and is just getting started on seeing that plan evolve, they’re gone! The most important customers of education — most notably students, teachers, and parents — need continuity and long-term investment to support their growth. We need to give leaders a sufficient runway so that they can help guide the change that’s needed in every district, school, and classroom. Frankly, we need this commitment to long-term leadership in every corner of education — including the for-profit businesses that provide important services to the education sector.

3. Reality of Learning Science

On this point Levin emphasized the importance not just of widespread learning and understanding of science, but the reality that so many of us “opt out” of science education because of the traditional belief that you either “get it or you don’t”. He shared the value of Benjamin Bloom’s educational philosophy “mastery learning” and cited a university chemistry professor who dramatically increased the success rate of students excelling in organic chemistry to a level well above the historically assumed rate of roughly 15%. Both of these examples underpinned Levin’s observation that society will benefit on many dimensions if we open our eyes to not just the importance of science learning, but the true potential that lies within all of us to become science learners.

4. Low Understanding of Education

From Levin’s perspective, one of the significant challenges we face in improving education for all is the fact that the problems in education aren’t widely known or understood. Those of us working in education have graduated from college and are gainfully employed, so we all suffer to a certain extent from a proximity bias that assumes everyone is going to college, graduating, and then getting a great job. When Mike Feinberg from KIPP shared the data that today, in families from the bottom income quartile, less than 1 out of 10 learners graduate from college, I gained an even deeper understanding of how far away we really are when it comes to giving every student an opportunity to succeed.

5. Technology as a Panacea

This is a point we make everyday at Remind: technology doesn’t teach our kids, teachers do. Yet all around us we see technology being cited as the surest, quickest — and even the cheapest — way to closing the education gap. Levin’s point, which I think is right, is that it’s the data — or actionable information as I like to think of it — that we can use to make decisions that change people’s lives. Of course cynics will say that data and information are open to interpretation, but if we apply the right focus to the information that we gather via technology I am optimistic those of us in the education sector will work hard to use these insights in a way that optimizes for student success, because if we don’t, the results will be painfully obvious.

6. The Definition of Technology

On a related note to the point above, Levin observed that those of us working in education don’t do a precise job of defining what technology really means. He cited the infatuation with shiny objects like tablets or laptops being disbursed throughout classrooms as an insufficient definition. Likewise, he referenced how often new technologies like virtual reality miss the mark in terms of cost of ownership for districts and schools. Here again, simpler is better. Simply getting everyone connected and communicating through digital services should be the focus. From there every student will have the opportunity to access educational services and experiences that meet their personal needs.

7. Interoperability

I recall meeting Levin in his New York office a year ago when I was barely two months into my own journey as an education industry CEO. At the end of our hour long conversation, his parting recommendation (plea really) was that Remind help in whatever way possible to solve the “interoperability problem” that makes it so difficult for digital services to flow seamlessly in and out of schools. Now, well more than a year into this job at Remind, I know even more of what Levin speaks on this topic. His lofty goal that we all arrive at an open standard led by the IMS Global Learning Consortium may or may not happen, but our student, teacher, and parent customers would no doubt benefit from a more standards-driven approach to how technologies connect with each other in education.

8. The Ecosystem

Levin spoke about the “ecosystem” in a way that hinted as part frustration, part mysticism, and part befuddlement. I can relate. His simple definition of the ecosystem consisting of philanthropists, publishers (e.g. a proxy for all educational services, analog and digital alike), and districts (e.g a proxy for all educators) is simple yet robust enough to highlight the diverse goals and priorities that can often conflict with one another in education. Philanthropists want impact from the money they donate, publishers want impact but also profitable and sustainable businesses, and districts want success for their students — which may or may not be defined exactly how philanthropists and publishers see it. And while the educational ecosystem may never come into blissful alignment amongst these three parties, I dare say that in education there exists a much higher level of shared belief around what success looks like than I experienced in my previous professional life in the media world.

9. Math

As Levin squarely put it: “…math is where college dreams go to die”. Ah, so that’s why I didn’t become an astronaut! How many would be engineers, architects, or accountants are out there if not for the plague of Algebra II or Calculus? And while he gave a plug for ALEKS, McGraw-Hill’s AI-based assessment and learning system, as a potential solution, the meta-point is that roughly 3/4 of the population fails at math. But, in most cases they fail before they even have a chance because it’s ingrained in all of us that you’re either good at math or you suck at it. This is bull-%&$! (And see point #3 above.) We have to find routes to universally improve mathematics education for it — alongside the fundamental ability to read and write proficiently — will be foundational for all post-secondary school opportunities students might wish to ever pursue.

10. Action Not Talk

In closing his remarks (which, remarkably, ended right at the top of the hour, almost as though he had rehearsed the speech’s timing down to the last word), Levin made perhaps the most important point of all. He left us with poignant reminders that “perfect is the enemy of good” and that the “problem with stagnation is that you get used to the stink”. For sure the stakes in education are higher than in just about any industry, but that shouldn’t create a terror to move forward for fear of being wrong or making mistakes. We implore our students to take risks, fail, and learn from there the next time — and we should absolutely be modeling that behavior as leaders in education.

I was glad to be there for Levin’s talk. His points all resonated with me, particularly given my role in education. Perhaps there were another ten or more points he could have shared as he reflected on his time at M-H — it sure seemed he had reflected deeply and refined his list in a thoughtful way. Most importantly, I sensed that for David this exercise and his presentation was a helpful framing for how he might assess what’s next for him in education for it certainly frames many surfaces from which one could identify an opportunity / challenge to engage with deeply in this important industry.