One year ago, we launched A-Street with the goal of investing in entrepreneurs and ideas capable of reimagining teaching and learning. We launched at a difficult moment for schools and families, as the full extent of COVID’s impact was not yet in focus but grounded in a spirited determination to find opportunities for breakthrough.

The 2022 NAEP scores now provide a stunning measure of this need and of what is at stake for American public education. Twenty years of progress have been erased in math and reading proficiency. Proficiency in math among Black students declined by 13 points, nearly three times the loss experienced by their White peers. Those for whom the stakes are highest and who could least afford to fall further behind did just that.

To the close observer, these latest facts are a sobering reminder of a simple truth well known and broadly accepted: too many schools have been ill-equipped to truly serve students well. This is not for lack of will, effort, or talent, but for the dearth of truly effective strategies and tools that work at scale. A-Street is built on the promise of finding solutions to this problem – tools that work harder for the educator, envelop the highest-quality content, radiate high-utility and real-time data, and bridge digital functionality into the classroom in the right ways. Doing so will require care and nuance. Doing so is about more than just helping classroom teachers – it is about restoring confidence in schools and their ability to truly meet students’ needs.

As we organize for action and source solutions, we find special resonance in the thinking of Professor Richard Elmore, Harvard’s late and respected professor of education. Professor Elmore teaches us that improving the effectiveness of teaching and learning requires a reconsideration of the essential relationship between student, teacher, and content. It is this relationship that A-Street seeks to fortify as we look for solutions that are coherent. Coherent tools build on the presence of a high-quality core curriculum and leverage technology as an enabler of, not a replacement for, excellent teaching. They are thoughtfully designed, rigorous, and connected holistically such that they create a central user experience for the teacher and the student – one journey that builds from minute to minute, day to day, and unit to unit.

As the new school year launches, as the COVID reality normalizes in classrooms, and as students prepare for life in the information economy, we see an opportunity to address the flaws of an aging system that too often explicitly excludes families and students of color, institutionalizes economic inequity into the education system, and belies America’s essential heterogeneity.  With a portfolio beginning to take shape, this opportunity for renewal will anchor A-Street in the year to come, as several pronounced themes guide our investing:

• Coherence – As noted earlier, coherent PreK-12 solutions build on the presence of high-quality content as a starting point. Grounded in this quality, technology can then enable, not replace, excellent teaching. Performance data captured and presented by these tools provides insight into a student’s mastery of knowledge and skill, and then guides how the educator organizes instructional time. Everything works together to strengthen the relationship between the teacher, student, and content. (Thank you, Professor Elmore!)
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• Time – Would you believe that teachers spend on average 15 hours per week sourcing their own curricular materials from the likes of Pinterest, YouTube, and a maze of web-based destinations? Or that the typical teacher working 54 hours per week spends just 25 hours teaching students? As the stresses and demands on teachers grow more evident, and as the teacher force itself evolves, we need the next generation of high-quality curricula with embedded and aligned digital tools organized around the idea of working harder for the educator, of moving the teacher beyond the role of stringing together DIY content and into the role of facilitating content-rich, data-driven, differentiated instruction.
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• Choices – As investors, we owe it to CEOs and entrepreneurs to give them the runway they need and to align our own incentives and behaviors to enable the creation of the best products and tools for long-term student outcomes. Commercial success should result from the successful deployment of great products that improve teaching and learning. Our thesis is that these successes, often thought to be in tension, are in fact symbiotic if scaffolded by the right timeframes and aligned incentives.

What happens in American classrooms in the coming school years is certain to have long-term implications, not just on learning but on the social mobility we count on schools to enable. In partnership with families, educators, entrepreneurs, and aligned investors, we are here – one year into a journey we know has just begun – to do our part to unlock a generation of opportunity and progress.

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