Since our inception three years ago, A-Street’s mission has been to invest in companies that drive coherent, differentially effective, and equitable solutions to transform the future of PK-12 learning. Over the last three years, we have invested in 11 companies that are aligned with this objective and we are proud to partner with the extraordinary teams and the entrepreneurs who lead them. A-Street’s goal is for our portfolio of companies to contribute to measurable improvements in student outcomes at meaningful scale and deliver strong long-term financial returns. Now, more than ever, we believe in the need for a new model for how capital should be put to work across PK-12 investing. We hope to demonstrate a new way of investing in PK-12 solutions that motivates greater focus on quality and evidence, and better alignment of capital to support transforming the future of PK-12 learning.
At the time of our launch, the realities of the pandemic were just setting in. Grounded in our decades of work in schools and classrooms, we saw that COVID’s disruption of student learning would be profound and lasting. Three years later, the extent of the disruption is clear. 2023 NAEP data shows that reading and math performance of 13-year-olds in the United States has hit the lowest level since 2004 and 1990, respectively. The data also continues to demonstrate that our most vulnerable children are experiencing even bigger declines. Compounding this problem, the educator workforce is in crisis: the state of the profession is at or near its lowest levels in fifty years. While we know progress will take time, and that silver bullets are not a thing in this line of work, these trends make one thing clear: we must do anything we can do to better equip educators to support their students’ learning and growth.
We are clear-eyed about the fact that as the for-profit education industry has grown, student achievement has not. While more for-profit investment has flowed into US K12 education in recent years, only nine out of the top one hundred most popular EdTech products in the US in 2023 had at least promising research evidence. The “high-quality instructional materials” market category is where many of our portfolio companies operate and is where we think better research evidence of quality implementation at scale can lead to improved student outcomes. We have been pleased by the market momentum towards high quality curriculum, as validated by EdReports. Increasingly, states are prioritizing ensuring that their students have access to high quality curriculum, and more and more districts are purchasing these materials: the Center for Education Market Dynamics, for example, estimates that 55% of the districts in their dataset, which includes nearly 1,000 of the largest U.S. districts, report having selected a high quality core material in K-5 mathematics. This has all translated into meaningful progress related to teachers’ use of better materials: according to RAND’s American Instructional Resources Survey (AIRS) project, in the 2023-24 school year, 55% of math and 44% of ELA teachers nationwide report that they are using core curricula that are aligned to grade level standards according to EdReports -- up from 29% and 14% respectively, only five years ago.
This positive development has the potential to point towards commensurate progress in student outcomes. And yet, those gains remain elusive. That is because we know that a better core curriculum is not enough – necessary but not sufficient. It must be in service of a coherent instructional system – one that includes content-based professional learning, actionable curriculum-aligned assessments, and coherent supplemental instructional tools to support acceleration. This instructional system must be implemented well across diverse classroom contexts and at scale, equipping teachers to facilitate excellent instruction that leads to clear evidence of meaningful improvement in student learning outcomes.
We are encouraged by efforts across the field that are laying the groundwork to shift the market to increasingly prioritize and value evidence. For starters, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act outlines four levels of promising evidence that solution providers must demonstrate to be eligible for various federal funding programs – and several large districts have started using this framework for purchasing decisions. The Jacobs Foundation has organized EdFIRST, an international group of education-focused principal investors that A-Street is a part of, to elevate the expectation that EdTech investment funds and companies prioritize evidence-building in their solutions. The Southern Education Foundation has advanced efforts for districts and vendors to execute outcomes-based contracts. There is a growing category of organizations, pioneered by Learn Platform, and including Leanlab Education, that offer “evidence services” to help make it much easier for districts and companies to generate evidence. And a new class of organizations, including Ed Research for Action and Evidence for ESSA, offer objective, user-friendly information for schools and districts to understand the evidence base of various solutions to the problems they are trying to solve.
We believe this activity has the potential to increasingly motivate more companies to prioritize evidence, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the commercially smart approach. At a time of tightening school budgets and in a crowded market of solutions, we believe that evidence will increasingly be a lens for buyers as they decide what to adopt, what to keep, and what to let go of. They’ll grow savvier and more capable of discerning the difference between marketing and substance, between research that only proves impact for a small percentage of the most self-motivated students, or research that a solution works really well -- but not so much at greater scale. Instead, they’ll focus on asking for compelling evidence about what can work in their context, for all of their students.
So where does a company start? A foundational element for any company that is serious about building an evidence base is to document its “logic model” - an articulation of how what you do leads to the change you are claiming will happen for your buyer and user, from input to output to outcome to impact. With a logic model in hand, ongoing research efforts grow more focused and organized on testing the hypotheses, gaining new insights, feeding information back to improve the solutions, and ultimately grow the evidence base of what works and can work in various contexts and settings.
A-Street looks for companies to invest in whose leadership demonstrates an understanding of what it takes to improve teaching and student outcomes at scale. We seek to partner with those who examine how their solutions can lead to that change, and who are prepared to interrogate what they need to do differently to increase impact based on evidence from feedback loops and research. We seek partners who, like us, believe that over the long run, winning financially is fueled by helping schools achieve better outcomes for students. That long-term outlook is necessary to make courageous decisions in the face of pressure to grow the top and bottom line and a myriad of competing priorities that any growing company faces.
At A-Street, we are rolling up our sleeves to continually refine our own theory of change, a living document that captures the impact we are seeking to make. We are hard at work on our own logic model with metrics to allow us to interrogate our progress and continually improve. We have also been working with a few portfolio companies on various impact-focused projects, including articulating their logic model, engaging the board on their research evidence priorities, and sharpening their overall impact strategy. We have been grateful to these leaders and their incredible teams for the trust, partnership, and shared learning that has resulted.
Our team is motivated to continue this research evidence journey alongside our portfolio, our co-investors, education entrepreneurs, and our collaborators in the field. We hope our efforts will lead to new collaborators on this journey – please reach out! Finally, we commit to continuing to share what we are learning as we go forward.
Here's to more and better evidence of impact!
