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Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Why Personalized Education Hasn’t Happened and How Outschool Aims to Fix It with Amir Nathoo & Justin Dent
Amir Nathoo is CEO of Outschool, a marketplace for live online classes for K-12 learners, and an advocate for expanding education access. Previously, he led product development at Square and co-founded Trigger.io, a platform for creating native mobile apps. Amir holds an MEng in Electrical and Information Sciences from The University of Cambridge and lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.
Justin Dent is the founding Executive Director of Outschool.org. Justin was previously the Founder and Executive Director of Ethos, a nonprofit that provided career education to 18,000 low-income, first generation, or minority students annually. An active voice in the dialogue around education equity, Justin's writing has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and he's appeared on Fox Business, CNBC and Cheddar.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why personalized learning remains elusive in traditional education systems
- The overlooked frictions families face when given more choice
- How Outschool uses a marketplace model to serve diverse learner needs
- The role of community and trust in enabling educational autonomy
- How AI and tech can simplify decision-making for families
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:00] Amir explains how traditional education systems block personalization
[00:06:00] Justin breaks down the real friction points for low-income families
[00:11:00] How Outschool’s variety increases motivation and access
[00:16:00] Why free resources don’t always lead to usage
[00:23:00] Community-driven guidance as a key to family engagement
[00:28:00] Outschool’s approach to neurodivergent learners
[00:34:00] Systemic flaws in standardization and learning lanes
[00:41:00] ESAs and why trusting families is essential
[00:45:00] Preventing marketing dollars from skewing family choices
[00:49:00] How AI can help families navigate education options
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[00:00:00] Amir Nathoo: One of the things I love about this business, and I think it's true for many aspects of alternative education, is just the match of incentives between the teachers, the families, and the platforms like us. It's in our interests to support a tremendous variety of learning
[00:00:20] Justin Dent: needs. I say that to say is I think that there needs to be a lot more focus on how do you actually create a marketplace that is easy for families to navigate where they can see what the supply is in a way that doesn't necessarily privilege the companies that do the most marketing.
Because I think when you're able to provide a like actual and. Where families can actually see and filter and sort and understand what's available to them. It's not just brand recognition that wins.
[00:00:58] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders,
[00:01:00] Ben Kornell: the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it
[00:01:11] Alex Sarlin: all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe. To the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.
And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
Welcome to Ed Tech. We have a couple of terrific guests. Today I'm gonna get into some really deep conversations about the future of education. Amir Nathoo is the CEO of Outschool marketplace for live online classes for K 12 learners, and an advocate for expanding educational access. He serves on the board of Tech for Palestine supporting initiatives that provide remote learning.
For Palestinian students affected by conflict. Previously, he led product development at Square and Co-founded Trigger io, a platform for creating native mobile apps. Amir holds a masters in engineering in Electrical and Information Sciences from the University of Cambridge and lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.
Justin Dent is the founding executive director of Outschool.org. Justin was previously the founder and executive director of ethos, a nonprofit that provides career education to 18,000 low income first generation or minority students annually. An active voice in the dialogue about education equity. Justin's writing has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, and he's appeared on Fox Business, CNBC, and Cheddar Amir Nathoo and Justin Dent.
Welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks, Alex. It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:02:49] Justin Dent: Awesome to be
[00:02:50] Alex Sarlin: with you, Alex. Yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation. You have been pushing the envelope on what EdTech can and should be for a number of years. One of our very first guests on EdTech Insiders in 2021 was from Outschool and talking about how Outschool just provides this totally different vision of what ED education can and should be.
And it's a really exciting vision and continues to be. So before we get into of things, uh, out people who. May still even in the world who may still not know exactly what you do and.
[00:03:25] Amir Nathoo: Absolutely. So OutSchool provides online classes for kids, and we're a marketplace, so teachers are free to teach the classes.
There's, they've always wanted to teach, and what that means is we cover everything from core academics, tutoring to enrichments and supplemental classes of all kinds. We've had over a hundred thousand plus the platform. Thousands of teachers been to a million worldwide, and so delighted
outside.
[00:04:01] Alex Sarlin: Outta school. That makes sense. Let's get into some of what's been going on in at school these days and what's been happening in the EdTech ecosystem. Justin, lemme start with you. You've focused on equity and education. We just talked about the 18,000 low income first generation and minority students annually that were served by your previous nonprofit ethos.
Tell us a little bit about the biggest. Misconceptions that lower income or minority families have about alternative education, the type that Outschool provides. So how do you help people understand that there are alternatives to the traditional public education system?
[00:04:36] Justin Dent: Yeah, you know, I think it's, I. I don't know that there are so many misconceptions about alternative education as there are misconceptions that we have about the way that families who are low income interact with their education.
I think we all know that making education choices even within the traditional school system is hard. And then when you expand that level of choice outside of the traditional public school system, it's even harder. And I think the conception is right and the, and the lived experience of it is that it's hard to navigate and to make educational decisions for your children.
And that is not a misconception. And I think that is a shared experience by all families. And I think it just becomes harder, the less resources that you have, because so often we see the friction and the pain points. That families have as they navigate the education system with resources, right? Families of affluence pay coaches to help them decide which private schools or even which public schools to send their children.
They talk to their realtor about what the quality of schools in a certain district are. If they wanna send their kid to public school, they pay for tutors. If the school is not meeting their kids' objectives or their needs, they pay for extracurricular activities. So those are all.
Education is a difficult endeavor and requires a many different approaches. And it's not just the school that you send your kids to that matters. It's everything else. And I think that the lived experience of it for many families who kind of exist at the margins is just that as we expand the conversation to alternative education, that's something that has been without of reach for many of those families, somewhat by design.
And so I think it's more about what are the actual like lived pain points and the lived frictions of these families, more so than what are their misconceptions, I think. I think we do often hear that sometimes a lot of families thinks that that homeschooling or particular alternative education approaches might not be for them.
Right, and again, I don't consider that a misconception because we've actually seen instances where many of these families are overcoming hurdles in the way of policy and regulatory burdens that other families who are. Perhaps white who are perhaps more affluent, don't experience. I think, for instance, we worked with a homeschooling co-op in Detroit named Engaged Detroit, where families who were just a few miles away in a wider, more affluent area had no problem homeschooling their children.
But the moment the families in Detroit wanted to homeschool, there was an uproar. And all of a, there were many logistical and legislative, not legislative, but, but you know, burdens put in their way. And so this sentiment that education might not be for. Isn't so much a misconception as like a lived reality of a lot of families.
And so I think that part of what we do, and part of what we have to do as folks involved in alternative education is actually think through how do we help those lived experiences and not be true, right? How do we change the lived experience of these families and how do we change the, the education ecosystem permissive.
When we do the work to say, this can be for you, that this can be for your family. That is.
[00:08:05] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I mean traditionally there used to be, it was only public education or private. Then the charter movement came along and introduced this sort of twist, these, all these charter schools, often lottery based, then a homeschooling, which has grown in lots of ways.
And as you mentioned, it used to sort of be considered really a very specific type of family that would homeschool. And it traditionally was. And that's expanded enormously over the years. And now we have micro schools. School and other completely alternative, you could call 'em alternative providers, but it's just ways to deliver and get both core and supplemental content without needing to be in the school building at all and being able to sort of put the pieces together in your own way.
So I appreciate what you're saying that, you know, there's a handoff of autonomy when you move away from traditional education systems and I think maybe there's almost like a. Paternalistic approach that people come at it where they say, oh, we're used to certain populations homeschooling, but when others wanna homeschool, people panic a little bit.
We're also seeing this rise in ESAs in Education savings accounts, which is giving, in many states, even more autonomy to families. So I feel like. With all the options on the table. Maybe you're right. Maybe it's not about misconceptions, but with all the options on the table, it just becomes a much more complex choice and not even just a choice, a sort of set of choices about how you put together an educational experience for your family that makes sense.
And at school, I think could be a really big part of that. So let me, let me, let me pass it to you and ask you about. How do you think about making sure that Outschool's offerings are accessible, available, are even known by as many students as possible, and who may or may not see themselves as part of the.
[00:09:44] Amir Nathoo: Well, I, I think about it a lot and it, it basically boils down to two core things. One is increasing the motivation of more and more families to engage with our product and with, with education in general. And secondly, it's about reducing barriers. To enable that because even if you have the motivation to, you know, as Justin was talking about, there's lots of barriers across the board and then there's also differential barriers for different groups.
On the first point of, of motivation, the key thing is providing tremendous variety that would not otherwise be available to meet underserved needs. And when you talk about underserved needs, people tend to go to the edges. But you know, there's huge underserved needs in core learning. What if you are sending your kid to a school and they resonated with their last math teacher, but then they change grades and they do not resonate with a new math teacher.
Now they think they're bad at math. They think they don't like math. You have a choice. You have an option. It is possible to get math teachers outside school. Or if your kid is, let's say, struggling a bit with, with reading and you're trying to get them motivated, but they're not resonating with kind of usual methods.
What about if you could find a teacher that can teach reading through Minecraft? That's certainly motivating my son to learn how to do the commands and learn how to, how to figure out what was going on. Well, guess what? You could. You could find that through Outschool, these teachers exist. They're often not available in your local area.
Learning groups exist with other kids who are just like yours. If they have learning differences and it's a single school cannot. Satisfy all the needs of even one kid, let alone all the needs of all kids. And so our goal is to increase the motivation to engage with our platform and the motivation to engage in education generally by providing that really personalized, unique variety.
But then of course, you know, as Justin was talking about, it's incredibly complex when you have all this choice and you have all this variety. How do you navigate it? How do you, how do you find it? And multiple barriers, one of which is just simply the. And that's what our marketplace model, search and discovery tools, recommendations, AI assistance, are all designed to, to help with from a technology and a product perspective.
Then there's additional services that you layer on top to provide a human touch in order to personalize the offerings for families. And then of course, there's other logistical hurdles such as. Funding, how do you pay for these classes? And that's why it's particularly exciting to see the trends of increased public funding for alternatives, which I think we'll get into and, you know, a whole host of other friction points.
You know, our, our product team at Outschool has collected like 35 friction point categories of friction points, like one of those categories of friction points.
You, you need to get through. You know, it's just amazing. I think that millions of families growing in the United States engage with alternative education when it takes them months and months and months in order to, in order to go through all those friction points, it, it just shows the incredible demand for something different, something new than traditional education.
[00:13:04] Alex Sarlin: That's a great point. People vote with their feet, right? I mean, even if there are barriers to entry to do things, you know, outside of the normal system, people are still finding their ways to get there. We saw post pandemic, a million students leave the public school system. We've seen increasing numbers of.
All sorts of versions of, uh, alternative education. Even though often the currents are coming the opposite direction, they sort of have to swim upstream to make that happen. Your point about the, uh, core curriculum, it stands out to me and I just related to what you said, uh, Justin, about affluent families.
I used to be a tutor. That was my first sort of education role and it.
May have liked a subject in the past, but now their teacher hates them, quote unquote, or they don't like the teacher, they don't like the subject, or they're confused and there's a cultural capital. There's money around. There's all of these tools that allow affluent families to say, oh, they don't like math this year.
Let's get a tutor. Let's pay for a tutor. Let's bring them in. And then they have to find a tutor who's often not a certified teacher. That Tudor could be amazing. They might be expensive, they might not be amazing, who knows? But it's, there's still a, a whole robust sort of ecosystem for that sort of supplemental support for affluent families.
But that traditionally has not been particularly available to low-income families and Outschool lowers the cost enormously to get that kind of support. It also has certified teachers on the other side of the marketplace and creates interest, you know, and they can adapt to different. Interests like Minecraft, it can adapt to different learning needs.
It can adapt to different time schedules. You know, there's really, I think, such a deep need for what you in Outschool sort of. Even the playing field so that people who are stuck in any kind of bad situation, maybe they want to take a language that isn't offered by their school. Maybe they wanna do computer science, but the school only has one elective and it's only for seniors.
And you want your, your ninth grader wants to do it. I mean, this just endless permutations of needs in the education system and you've created this huge marketplace to address them. So, Justin, back to on this, you know, given that there is this huge marketplace. I think awareness is probably of the 35 barriers you're mentioning, Amir, probably the, the first one is just knowing that options like Outschool even exist because they're not the kind of thing that traditional schools will tell parents about.
Maybe, maybe they do at this point, but originally I don't think that you tell me it was sort of out of the purview to be like, oh, you're. Son or daughter wants to take X, we don't offer it, but you might wanna check out Outschool. It makes a lot of sense, but I, I don't know if that happens through schools.
What other outreach strategies or what types of partnerships do the two of you work on to make sure that people are aware, especially low income families are aware that this type of experience exists. It's there, it's available, you know, every week. It could be interest based. How do you, how do you make people understand that it.
[00:15:54] Justin Dent: I mean, we spend a lot of time thinking about this. I think, you know, I'll share an early anecdote of out experiences because. We put a lot of effort into awareness In the early days of the pandemic in terms of essentially Outschool.org was created in order to provide an opportunity for low-income families to take classes on Outschool during the pandemic because we knew that a lot of families were struggling and wanna be able to afford it.
And so we put a lot of effort into making sure that families in this moment of time knew that there was a resource there for them in the way of Outschool and Outschool. We had over 30,000 families in.
However, we were very surprised when that awareness did not, and that access did not actually equate to usage, right? And so of that $9 million that we made available in scholarships, we only dispersed and families only used about 4 million of it. And so there was a big question mark for us in terms of what are the frictions that were preventing that, right?
So we knew that we had been able to get families to enroll in the program and enroll in the scholarship. We knew that they had now had up to $300 per kid for that, but there was a big delta between. Awareness and like the ability to, to like actualize that even on a container like Outschool where you have search, you have discovery.
And so as we spoke to families, right? One of the main things that we heard is, well, I just don't want to make a mistake. I don't wanna mess this up. So even the availability of the resources was not enough to necessarily make families feel confident enough in making the right decision for their learner.
And for them, that was more expensive than. Than the actual like usage of the funds themselves. And that is an experience that we've seen translated across even public policy environments where we now look at the rise of Microgrants and DSAs. We translated that experience that we had with our own scholarship program into supporting a program that Virginia was doing grants.
Per kid. Kid for tutoring, right? I mean, that's an incredible opportunity. So you have three kids, you now have $9,000 to spend on tutoring that you've never had before. But the problem that they were having is that families, particularly from the low income communities that they were serving, were not using it.
So again, similar parallel. They'd enrolled but weren't using it. And when we spoke to families, sometimes they didn't even realize that they were actually successfully enrolled in this program. Right. And so they needed the phone call to say, Hey, you have access to this and now let's start a conversation on how you use this.
So I say all this to say is, yes, there, there is, there has to be a huge, you know, focus on allowing families to understand that the opportunity exists. But even that and like, and putting funding on the table that families can use. But I say all this to say is like that in of itself is not sufficient to ensuring that families actually are able to like, utilize and actualize the promise of self-directed education.
[00:19:21] Amir Nathoo: And I'd add, uh, I'd add to that and zoom out a bit and say that these kind of insights that Justin is. About this idea that even when Outschool level provides free classes for kids and even when there's public funding available for kids, that there are all these barriers in place and then the experience Outschool level with that community outreach to actually start removing the other barriers is, is part of the insights that drive Outschool, the for-profit.
A whole, obviously we as humans, and you know, part of why we're we're doing all this is with a philanthropic and impact orientation and, you know, that's why we found it out. It's called all During the Pandemic and, and it continues as a, as an independent organization, but from the point of view of the for-profit, this is also innovation.
Helping drive our product strategy and, and provide, uh, drive our business strategy. And we've seen it play out ourselves in terms of the user research we've done about the barriers and then the, the idea of, uh, engaging with communities directly from phone calls in the highest such method, but in the other more scaled, scaled ways that we do on the Outschool side is critical for.
Organic. It often comes grassroots, bottoms up. It's all these Facebook groups of parents that they're solving their problems by sharing information. So that community oriented marketing approach is how we got started and we see time and time again as necessary. 'cause it comes back to another friction point, which is a little bit more subtle then the obvious practical ones or the more obvious practical ones that we might talk about, which is the psychological barrier.
The sense of not wanting to make a mistake and it feels societally like a very big risk to take yourself outside of. Traditional education system, which is so embedded in our society and our history. Even when everything you're looking at as a parent might be pointing you to that decision, it's still an enormous risk.
And people look for reassurance from others in order to be able to make those kind of decisions for their kids. And that's why, you know, parents often form as these community groups parents
in.
Incredibly, incredibly important. That's what we've learned time and time again through our own trajectory on the for profit side, as well as the through the innovation and learnings from Outschool.org.
[00:21:53] Alex Sarlin: Incredibly interesting. I, I appreciate both of your focus on the sort of psychological aspects of this.
You know, there's the, the hardcore economic decision. Where do we get the money or is there funding or where do we spend our money? But it's not really pure economics at all. I think, you know, the psychology, the idea of. I am now responsible or responsible is probably how people feel. I'm now responsible.
I have some, some I have access to a program or I have access to funds. And this is obviously, this whole dynamic you're saying is gonna play out at scale with ESAs, right? I have access to a pool of money to support my kids, my children as a parent. That should feel exciting, but it doesn't. It feel, I'm sure for many parents it feels like a burden.
They're used to saying, Hey, I have a school, and the school is the one that makes the decisions. They're the ones who, who have to figure out, you know, what curriculum to use and what technology to use and who the teachers are. But suddenly. I have some options. I have autonomy. I can choose a class, I can choose a provider.
And people don't have the mental framework to have to think about that 'cause they often haven't had to. With the exception I think of certain communities, you know, again, affluent communities that are used to supplementing education with cadres of. College coaches and tutors and anything you could imagine there and extracurricular activities they are used to seeing of educational.
Right. Another
of of divergent students of gifted. Students or students who in for various reasons would are not always perfectly served by the existing system. I imagine they are often on online forums and on Reddit and on all sorts of places saying my student has these characteristics. What would, what's the best program?
Where can I find the best tutor? Where can I find the best online classes? And I think this is something that I'm sure has resonated pockets of people of. Ways to not fall through the cracks. Amir, lemme lemme ask you first, but Justin, I know you have a, I'm sure you have a lot to say about this. How does Outschool address learning differences and classes for autistic students or any learning difference you can possibly
[00:24:01] Amir Nathoo: imagine?
It's a very important community for us because, you know, many families with neurodivergent kids are forced to look at alternative choices because traditional methods just simply don't work. Or there's just the resources available locally or within their traditional system to. And the core pieces of how we we serve this community is with, uh, ability to access teachers who have extensive experience working with Neurodivergence.
A large chunk of our teacher base has that experience. There are classes and affinity groups specifically for different kinds of neurodivergence as.
Means that your neurodivergent kid can find their people and find their interests much more so than within the confines of, of traditional education. And for all those reasons, our community and user base, uh, skews neurodivergent. It's not surprising that a platform that focuses on choice. And variety and personalization would attract neurodivergent kids, but here's where the massive societal value is comes from.
You know, we talk about neurodivergence from a diagnosed point of view, but every kid is different. Every human is neurodivergent. And so by addressing kind of the extreme cases or the diagnosed cases and making sure that you serve that group, you actually help everyone. And that's a principle actually, I think can apply more widely than even in education, in human development and society in general.
But those are some of the ways in which, in which we.
[00:25:41] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I'm sure it's, it's been incredibly powerful to see some of these stories of students just finding their people, finding their classes, finding their interests through Outschool, because there was really no way for them to find them in traditional situations.
Justin, I'm curious how you see these communities, these various communities of, of parents, uh, who are trying to figure out how to put together the right education for their students and not, you know, make a mistake and misspend the money or do something that. Done wrong by their their kids. It's the last thing they wanna do.
[00:26:13] Justin Dent: Yeah. One of my favorite parts about the work that we've gotten to do@outschool.org, you know, and this goes to the earlier question that you asked around like how do you get families to engage with these programs, right? Is that we've really just invested in communities as our kind of primary agent of change.
And so a lot of the work that we've done is how do we help communities who are on the ground in places like Michigan or Arizona or Virginia have conversations among themselves around what's working, what's not working, what's my kid going through and developing really what are like communities of practice among parents so that they can help one another.
And we've developed. Similar to what Amir said. A lot of these conversations are already happening on Facebook, but we've also developed kind of private social networks, you know, or white labeled kind of tools that just allow families who are part of a particular community to talk among themselves in a way that we can also chime in when necessary.
If somebody's. You know, asking a question that can't be answered. And I think all of that to say is out of that, what we've seen is both like parents of neurodivergent or diagnosed neurodivergence and just every, you know, and every other child, every other parent, I. Part of the same community having similar conversations and not necessarily isolating them into a particular community because of, because of the fact that their child may be neurodivergent, but also able to talk to other parents about what's working and what's not, to get the feedback on resources and tutors and therapies that other families have used.
And I think that has been, I think not surprisingly, one of the main challenges that we see families face, which is. How do I surface the supply right of, of people in my community who are trained and to support my child through their particular diagnosis. And similar to what Amir said, that's one of the reasons Outschool is great because it's easy to find, but there are also a lot of families who want kids to develop relationships in the real world, right?
And with providers who are on the ground, if that's accessible to them. One of the things that we've seen community be so important is surfacing who are the really great and who are the really standout providers, and we've gotten to do that work as well as we have worked with publicly funded programs, you know, and families who do have access to additional resources as a result of their child's diagnosis.
One of the key problems has still been how do I find the right person for my child? And I think what we've been able to help families do is surface some options that families can use. We don't necessarily know who's right, but we, we can call and we can, we can try to understand what their child needs, what their child likes, who their child responds well to, and do our best to create a match.
But what we also do is create an try to create an environment. Where it's not a high stakes decision, right? I think one of the questions that we get, particularly with the publicly funded programs is, well, what happens if I don't like them? Right? Am I stuck with that decision? You know, what we say is no.
I mean, it is a market like any other decision. If you don't like that vendor, if you don't like that tutor, if you don't like that therapy leave, and so we've, we've worked with many families to just, to figure out what's not working, what is working, and, and they can kind of arrange their decisions accordingly.
[00:29:35] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. There's not necessarily a mental model for, you know, buying educational experiences the same way there is for, you know, buying shoes online where it's like, what do I do if I don't like the shoes? Well, there's a return label and you have a whole thing. People just don't know how these systems work because they're relatively new.
Just having that much choice. I have a follow up question on what you're saying there about finding the right provider. Obviously the right provider can mean a lot of different things. It. Whole tutoring company or, or various things. But it also can mean the right individual. And one of the things that I just find so fascinating about Outschool is that it's a two-sided marketplace.
I mean, you have parents and students looking for educational experiences and this huge community of providers, of teachers who are creating about Minecraft and Fortnite. They're creating about core topics. They're creating about niche topics they're creating. Also, you know, put up these videos about what they're doing.
They have the ability to sort of market themselves and their offerings even outside of the, you know, Outschool platform. And some of, you know, I've worked in a few different educational marketplaces and what you often see is the most successful classes are the ones where the providers are doing a lot of behind the scenes hustling there.
They're basically, they're influencing, they're on, they're on social media. They're putting out, you know, all sorts of things about their, about what they do and why. And it, it draws attention. And I'm curious if that plays any role in this. If you have a super star educator on Outschool who's a specialist at neurodivergent classes for neurodivergent learners, I imagine they themselves, even outside of Outschool, might be out there trying to let everybody in the community know might be on those Facebook forums saying, Hey, if you want a great class, check this out.
Do you see that dynamic happening? Amir, I got a question for you. Please.
[00:31:22] Amir Nathoo: We absolutely do see that dynamic happening. And it's good for the teachers, right? Because they also want to make clear their expertise. One thing though, when teachers go out there and practically share their knowledge with these community groups and maybe even refer to rather communities to their classes, it doesn't just benefit that teacher.
Because what we see is that when parents come and take that teacher's classes, then they also discover the tremendous varieties. Like, oh, actually there's a ton of classes here for my neurodivergent kid that are very relevant to them. So these very positive feedback cycles. And one of the things I love about this business, and I think it's true for many aspects of alternative education, is just the match of incentives between the teachers, the families, and the platforms like us.
It's in our interests to support a tremendous variety of learning needs. Whereas in traditional education, it is the interests financially and structurally to try and funnel people into lanes so that you can get the, the benefits of scale. The way we scale and our economics and our incentives are completely different and we benefit from that variety, we benefit from that personalization.
And I think that's a big, uh, through some of the dynamics, like that referral loop that we just discussed. And I think that's, uh, actually, uh, a key unappreciated barrier about why we'll be talking about personalized and. Education for decades, and it hasn't actually happened. It's because of structural barriers and mismatched incentives between the system that we've designed and what we're actually believe we now need to deliver for the future.
[00:33:01] Alex Sarlin: Uh, interesting. I wanna unpack that last sentence. Can I ask you to just follow up on it a little bit before we, uh, we, I wanna talk about ESAs and homeschooling, but tell me more about why personalized learning is held back by systemic, you sort of the nature of misaligned incentives within education.
[00:33:18] Amir Nathoo: Well, if you, uh, think about how we've designed an education system with essentially a top-down centralized curriculum where we set standards, we define a set of core subjects, we test according to those core subjects, and then we group people together in these institutions that we call schools with a.
What you're setting up are lanes. You cannot operate the system without lanes. You've already started by setting up lanes. By defining what subjects are, rather than being comfortable the at the boundaries, you've then superpowered those lanes by making 'em high stakes. Like we need to, we're gonna measure.
At every point we're gonna measure with increasing levels of granularity and increasing rigor, and we're gonna create this whole industry around the scientific approach to education about how we, how we can deliver the best outcomes against those measures without ever questioning whether what the, what the fact, the, the measures of the lanes of created, what they're doing to kids.
And then you are asking a school to serve thousands of kids and deliver according to these lanes with limited teacher base. How are they gonna do that? Well, they're gonna have to group them in some way. They're gonna group them by age, they're group them by ability, and they'll try and help at the edges by saying, ah, if kids are running into difficulties or they're particularly gifted, we're gonna try within the constraints of our budget to do the best we can to serve them.
But you're not. They're not gonna be able to. The task system is structured to play to the average and to play to the standard. And how do we expect. To be able to create generations of kids who are differentiated and creative, which is what the future's gonna need, but the standard's gonna be killed by ai.
How on earth do we expect that to happen? It, it won't. And even if people can't articulate the why of the systemic effects like I just described, they can feel it. That's what's driving parent anxiety up. That's why no one believes anymore like they did 20 years ago when I was growing up. Follow the.
[00:35:35] Alex Sarlin: I feel like enlightened hearing that description, very, very concise and clear condemnation. But you know, you didn't use the word factory model or some of the, some, some of the things that education reformers sometimes use, but I think that's an extremely well articulated way to showcase some problems.
That's my slightly
[00:35:52] Amir Nathoo: nonviolent communication way of doing it. I can give you a.
[00:35:56] Alex Sarlin: Right. Well, the two of you have a podcast called Outspoken. I'll make a little pitch for that now, where you're, you're, you're Outschool outspoken, where you try to talk about some of the things that are really important in the education system like that.
It's a controversial take, but I think one that increasingly is becoming the, it's, it's becoming the common feeling, at least as you mentioned. If not they. People's true, deep understanding that, you know, every student is different, but the systems are incentivized to be as standardized, for lack of a better word, right?
They're as standardized as possible and, and it really pushes people out out of the side. It's very interesting. So I think it's a good segue to, you mentioned earlier, Amir, we're going to a place in education in the US especially where there is increasingly more autonomy, there's more thinking about how might we.
Remove the funds from the public education system. Instead, give them directly to families through the form of ESAs. This is one of the priorities of the current federal government. And give people more choice. School choice, right? More choice in how they spend their education dollars. And that comes with a lot of power.
And it comes, I'm sure, with a lot of fear and a lot of, how do I not make the wrong choice? So Justin, let me, let me pass it to you on that. We've seen a growing movement around homeschooling for black families in the us. We've seen a growing movement of ESAs in many, many states. We've seen sort of the concept of school choice go from something that was once considered a little bit on the political fringes to becoming almost commonly accepted as a sort of a, a middle ground.
It's like, we know we need some version of school choice. It feels like that's become accepted. What are we. Going to do, I mean, as an EdTech community, how do we make the most of this moment and help people find the type of learning experiences that are really gonna fit their children's needs and not have this be something where the public school system says, Hey, we told you so, you know, only they only spent 40% of the money that we gave them.
Would
[00:37:50] Justin Dent: nobody wants that? What do you think Justin? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna back up for a second and think about where kind of education choice comes from to a certain degree. I, you know, I think is, as I look at kind of our history as a country, I think it's actually quite clear that black people in particular we're often on the forefront of education choice.
When our children could not go to schools in the United States, it was our churches that were schoolhouses and our community members that were the teachers, and those were the first micro schools. Right? And so black people have pioneered this approach to education long before we could even go to public schools, right?
Long before Ruby Bridges walked, had to go through what she did, went through to help desegregate schools. I think in some ways, right, this has always been. Within our community, right? Because unfortunately, the system, right, quote unquote in some ways was very much designed to ensure that black families and low income families had less ideal, right?
Outcomes. I mean, if we think about the way that even our public schools today are funded is real estate taxes still play a determining factor in what your per pupil funding is. Right. So to Amir's point, we might have this idea that we kind of want standardized outcomes. Even those are wrong, but we're, we're kind of, we have a standardized expectation without giving equal and sufficient resources to each and every family, still within the confines of the public school system.
And so I think that. It's not surprising. I think for a lot of, uh, for a lot of people who, who kind of take a long-term historical view of education in this country, that given the opportunity to exit the kind of the part of the public school system that has not really been serving a lot of families, a lot of families will take the opportunity, given the sufficient guidance to, to design an one.
That there have for many generations of families, right? Public school has been the only resource available. And that's not a slight on public schools. That's also, um, a societal mistake in that we've put the entire burden on the school to serve all factors of a child's life in the event or all factors of a child's education in the event that the family can't afford a resources to.
What do.
Community and the education community is helping families appropriately. Chiefly listen. Right? I think that there are a lot of, I think that there's a tendency to sometimes assume, right? The funds are available. So that means if the demand is there, then families are going to take it. And then if the demand is not there, that means families don't want it.
That's not how behavior change works, right? I think.
If we want to, to really allow families to activate and to seize on the opportunity in front of them, there also have to be sufficient resources to help families navigate that. And there also has to be the supply of tools and providers and vendors that families want to see, right? Because yes, we give families money, but are there a sufficient number of vendors and schools and micro schools and that meet what families actually want to see?
Because. Even the supply for so long has been constrained to meet what the, what the kind of traditional education market has deemed appropriate and valuable, which is why things like Sullivan Learning and Kuman and all of these, you know, tutoring companies are so focused on college access. That's because that's where we as a society placed our focus.
Right. And. So I think that there's also this question of like, how is supply going to meet the demand of families that all of a sudden didn't have a voice or opportunity to speak to what they wanted and to purchase what they wanted and now they do. So I think a lot of our work comes down to like listening chiefly.
And so I think. The ed tech community, even though I think there's sometimes a, a desire to like rush in to see the market opportunity and to build something. I think our kind of chief, our chief guidance is talk to families. Listen to families, because ultimately I think what the opportunity here is, is to trust families.
Right? And I think in a lot of ways the traditional education system has. Not trusted families. We've put trust in systems over trust in families, and so I think that we have an opportunity to flip that on its head, and I think it's, we shouldn't trust the tech or.
[00:42:43] Alex Sarlin: I think that's a very reasonable way to look at it, and it sort of feels, it feeds into this idea of, of co-design, of actually, you know, understanding the, the pain points, understanding what people are looking for in their education, evocation of sort of college as the core outcome of. Of schooling as one way to conceive of what schooling is about, right.
You, you get the best grades. You can get the, your best college application, so you can get into a selective school because that's going to be a guarantor of your, of your future. That sort of to the standard, or it's not even standard, but you know, 40% of the, the US like that. That pathway, even that pathway, which is probably the most.
Well tro and understood one, you know, I mean, over the last years it, it was something like 90% of parents said they wanted their, their children to go to, to college across any kind of lines. But that's just changing. Even that is changing the standard pathway of, oh, if, if my student goes to a school and does well in an opt in school to get into a college and then finishes college, well they're, they're really set.
So. There's this questioning of even the sort of baselines of what education is for how it's supposed to work. So I think talking to families makes a ton of sense. That said, I'm gonna play devil's advocate for a moment and, and Amir, I'll pass this to you as well, but maybe just you can respond first. You are also in a situation, I mean, look, we're, we all know the ed tech field, right?
There are going to be providers when there's money. Out there when every family has X thousands of dollars, like to spend on each student, marketing suddenly matters a lot. Right? And this is a, maybe a silly example, but imagine, you know, Duolingo of the world. People already has great brand recognition, people already associated with education.
If Duolingo says, Hey, we have math now. You know, so everybody should be subscribing their students to Duolingo Math because that's what will handle your math requirements. Like we know that's a absurd proposition, but I wouldn't know that as a parent. I've heard of Duolingo, so how do we, I. Create a scenario where it's not the biggest marketing spend, the best brand recognition, the loudest voices start absorbing all the money that goes into these ESAs, and instead it goes to high quality providers, it goes to marketplaces, it goes to tutor, you know, proven tutoring solutions.
Like how do we address that? Justin, I'll throw that back to you 'cause I know. This is responding to your point, but Amir, I'd love to hear your take as well as, as a company that has to advertise, right? You also market yourselves, but you also have this huge offering of thousands of teachers. How do you stand out?
What's it gonna look like when this is a market, a market decision?
[00:45:14] Justin Dent: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the early friction points and pain points, I do think that we see in states that have these policies is that there is more of a focus on accountability of like the funds. So very much in the paternalistic mindset, like making sure that families don't misuse funds because states are, at this point, I think.
Personally, the way that I perceive it, and I think the way that a lot of families perceive it are more interested in counteracting fraud than they are like supporting, you know, as they make these programs available, trying to minimize incidences of fraud or like purchasing the wrong thing than they are helping families to make an education decision that aligns with their vision for their kids' education.
I say that to say is I think that. There needs to be a lot more focus on how do you actually create a marketplace that is easy for families to navigate where they can see what the supply is in a way that doesn't necessarily privilege the companies that do the most marketing. Because I think when you're able to provide a like.
Where families can actually see and filter and sort and understand what's available to them. It's not just brand recognition that wins. That's not to say brand recognition won't always win, but truthfully, what we hear when we talk to most families is they want someone in their community, they want to go see someone in person, and they will look for other opportunities online with companies like Outschool if they're not able to find that.
But their desire is to stay within the community, right. I think community is key and education has always been a community experience, and I don't think that families are trying to change that, but I think to your point, it is, okay, now we are creating a new marketplace. How do we ensure that the marketplace meets that desire and that demand?
Doesn't privilege, just like companies that can spend the most, and I think also creating the, the opportunity for families to like give the feedback on like who's good and who's not and who's, what's not working. I think, I think the good thing right about these options is that I. To the point that we were making earlier, if you don't like it, you can leave.
Right. If, I mean, if I take a class and I don't like it, I don't need to take it again. Right. Whether that's in person or online, and I think that that is also a be like, to our earlier point, that's a mindset shift that you can't do that with your public school. Right. If you have a bad, if you have a teacher that your student doesn't resonate with one year.
Most families are just gonna stick it out and hope that next year it's a better experience for their kid. And so I think that, I would hope that that level of autonomy and choice helps to preclude this like scenario where only the, only the, the biggest companies with the biggest marketing spends are the ones who corner the market.
[00:48:03] Alex Sarlin: Amir, how do you plan to make sure that the best providers rise to the top rather than the loudest voices or the biggest marketing?
[00:48:11] Amir Nathoo: Well, you've gotta make education customer centric. So I very much enjoy hugging Outschool customers like the one I have here. But, uh, in, in all seriousness to, to the point you need to make, you need to make education customer centric, but to the point that you are alluding to, you also need to make sure that customers not deceit.
And so there are solutions for that. There are consumer protection in all kinds of other fields. I think the difficulty is that education regulation has gone far beyond the notion of consumer protection and has become far too focused on trying to drive in, uh, single societal outcomes, rather individual family outcomes.
Out in the school choice field to advocate for, for nothing. But the reality is there is some currently, and there should be some, and it's just a matter of the specifics of how do we, how do we handle consumer protection? Because you know, what we want for our kids right here is for them to get personalized education, to enable 'em to thrive and for them to be safe and.
[00:49:22] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's so interesting. We are hitting our time here, which I'm very sad about because we have so much more that we could talk about, including ai, uh, which we, you know, could play a lot of roles in, in many of the different things we talked about today, choice of ed, tech provider, personalization. But we're out of time right now, so we'll have to find some more time to talk about those things.
And just between you and me, if wanted to find another 15 minutes to do. We could do another episode of Follow Up in the, in the future, but I, I'd love to do a few more minutes. I just, we have another guest about to come in, but this has been incredibly interesting. I, I feel like I just have a huge amount to chew on, and I appreciate both of your really sociological takes on how education works, how it should work, and how alternative providers could really change the equation.
So Amir Nathoo is CEO of Outschool Marketplace for live online classes for K12 learners. It's a really fantastic platform I recommended to many, many parents. And Justin Dent is the founding executive director of Outschool.org. Thank you so much for being here with me on EdTech Insiders.
[00:50:28] Justin Dent: Thanks for having
[00:50:29] Ben Kornell: us, Alex.
Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on Substack.
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