Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
The Fintech Behind School Choice: How ClassWallet Moves $1.5B to Families and Schools with Jamie Rosenberg
Jamie Rosenberg is the Founder and Executive Chairman of ClassWallet, a fintech platform modernizing how public education funds are distributed to schools and families. A longtime social impact entrepreneur, he previously founded AdoptAClassroom.org and has spent over two decades focused on getting dollars closer to students.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Why education funding breakdowns are often about infrastructure, not intent
- How ClassWallet replaced reimbursement with real-time, compliant digital wallets
- What it takes to run ESA and school choice programs at scale
- How empowering teachers and families unlocks creativity and efficiency
- Where AI and data can maximize the impact of every education dollar
✨ Episode Highlights
[00:02:31] Jamie’s journey from AdoptAClassroom to building ClassWallet
[00:09:07] Why reimbursement systems create massive friction in education funding
[00:13:55] How simple purchases (like pencil sharpeners) can unlock learning time
[00:22:35] ClassWallet’s role in scaling ESAs and the modern school choice movement
[00:33:01] What edtech founders need to know about accessing ESA-funded markets
[00:41:58] Why supplemental funding is critical for students with special needs
[00:47:12] How AI will shape compliance, recommendations, and impact measurement
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[00:00:00] Jamie Rosenberg: Leaders of the School Choice Movement approach ClassWallet having observed the efficiencies and compliance we were able to solve for inside the system to see whether ClassWallet could in turn be used for families. And the truth of the matter is it's the same exact issue. In the same exact problem.
And that's exactly what we did. We responded to that call and that's why we've became this market leader in school choice and helped catalyze a lot of the school choice expansion that we're seeing today. Today ClassWallet is the software for eight ESA programs in America, and we process and manage about one and a half billion dollars a year.
And that's set to close to Double For Money to Families.
[00:00:54] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, 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 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.
For this week's interview on Ed Tech Insiders, we're speaking with Jamie Rosenberg, the founder and executive chairman of ClassWallet, a financial technology platform, modernizing how public funds are distributed, a social impact entrepreneur. Jamie also founded AdoptAClassroom.org, and has dedicated his career to using technology to expand opportunity and reduce inequality.
Jamie Rosenberg, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:02:01] Jamie Rosenberg: It's great to be here, Alex, pleasure to meet you.
[00:02:04] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. A pleasure to meet you as well. You know, we don't talk to a lot of financial technology platforms that are also very clearly EdTech platforms, so I really am very, very curious about how ClassWallet works and how it is operating at this really interesting moment in in public funding.
But let's start with the origins of ClassWallet. Can you share your background, how you decided to start AdoptAClassroom.org, and how that journey sort of led to ClassWallet?
[00:02:31] Jamie Rosenberg: Sure, and just to double click on, you know, financial technology and education. My mission really since the beginning is to ultimately try to find ways where the dollar can get as close to the student as possible.
'cause ultimately, the money is really where it empowers the people that can make the most difference in a child and a student's life. And so that's the intersection between financial technology and education. It started in 1998. I was a corporate attorney at the time. I was mentoring a student at a nearby school in Miami for mentally and physically delayed pre-kindergarten age children.
[00:03:13] Alex Sarlin: Hmm.
[00:03:13] Jamie Rosenberg: And that experience I had with that mentee and in that classroom, I really changed my life. I wanted to be more closely connected to. Helping students, helping those that are helping students and, and how could I do that? And so that was the beginning. AdoptAClassroom. I started because at the time there was no easy way to give a donation to a classroom teacher.
You could donate to A PTA, you could donate to a school or a foundation, but I believe teachers were the ones that needed the most help. And ultimately could impact the most number of students. So I started AdoptAClassroom as a way to streamline how I could crowdfund donations, give them directly to teachers, and empower them to help students.
In doing that, I developed a technology. While I wasn't calling it as such, I developed a wallet infrastructure technology.
[00:04:14] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:15] Jamie Rosenberg: Alex could donate $500 to a teacher in Philadelphia. No money ever changed hands. I never collected your money physically. I never gave the money to the teacher. I gave the teacher a wallet.
The teacher would get credited that money. They could use that money to buy resources. Alex would get full transparency to the penny, exactly how it was spent. So adopted classroom grew to be, you know, an impactful organization. You know, I ended up raising and distributing about $25 million to teachers.
In 30% of US public schools never had a staff greater than two people. Wow. Just the power of technology, financial technology ultimately translating to impact. Wow. And then around 2010, I realized there's probably a greater, I wasn't the only person in the world trying to get a dollar into a school system to change and impact a student's life.
And that was, you know what incubated ultimately the launch of ClassWallet in 2014 where I took that same technology, which was really bespoke to AdoptAClassroom, and I built a much more commercial enterprise grade version of it and started selling it to school districts in states. And just to conclude, today, we've distributed about $6 billion Wow.
Through ClassWallet to teachers and families in 33 states around the country. And I would say collectively between adopted classroom and ClassWallet, we've positively impacted the lives of over 15 million children.
[00:05:51] Alex Sarlin: No question. It's, uh, really incredible and through that journey, you know, you, we mentioned in your bio you're a social impact entrepreneur.
Obviously you have been thinking for a very long time about how to, I love the way you put it. You know, get the dollar as close to the student as possible, whether that's to the student themselves, to the teachers or parents around them, but, you know, through the bureaucracy of these complex public systems and close to the end user, in this case, the student, I, I'm curious.
When you made that decision to be a social impact entrepreneur to go into education, after doing that mentoring, how did you sort of identify that the financial flows were one of the major bottlenecks? Basically, one of the major problems in education was how the money flowed through. How did that light bulb go on?
And, and, and then obviously you've been on a 20 year journey in figuring out how to make it work even better.
[00:06:40] Jamie Rosenberg: I tell you, it was very, very clear it couldn't be any more black and white. When I started AdoptAClassroom in 1998, I started approaching local organizations and foundations, and one of them actually was the Florida Marlins Education Foundation, and they said, we've been trying to give $15,000 to the school district for the last three years, and we cannot get them to take this money If you can.
Somehow get the school district to accept our $15,000 donation. You will have a partner in us. So it was very, very clear. There was a lot of bureaucratic rules and processes that were inhibiting community in philanthropy support. And I was able to do it and they became a longtime partner of mine. But the short answer, the sort of in the 20 years since I've been doing it, really where the friction is, is there's a lot of processes that really try to manage compliance, right?
And everyone's trying to do the right thing, but ultimately compliance. Can Trump outcomes, right? There was just all sorts of friction to accept this money and get into the school system and make sure everything was done properly. What I was able to do was create technology that satisfied the compliance requirements that the.
Administration rightfully is sensitive to, but ultimately get through the gridlock and break through all of that friction and allow the dollars to flow much more fluidly so they can have the impact that they're intended to have.
[00:08:22] Alex Sarlin: It's a key insight and it's interesting that the pain point you originally noticed was actually from the donation, the donors, right?
That they literally couldn't get money into the system. It wasn't the schools complaining that, oh, if only we had this $15,000 from the Marlins, we'd be able to do so much more. It's like we're trying to give them money in this whole system is sort of locked up. So the compliance is a huge part of it.
And maybe you can explain a little bit how ClassWallet handles compliance as well as sort of, you know, pre-registering possible purchases so that if you know a teacher has a stipend, there's a particular set of things they can spend them on that are sort of pre-vetted or compliant in various ways.
Tell us a little bit more about how you use ClassWallet to smooth out some of the friction that is in the system. Sure.
[00:09:07] Jamie Rosenberg: And I think to frame the context for you and the audience to understand. What ClassWallet mostly is replacing is a reimbursement process. Okay? So imagine prior to ClassWallet, either the intended beneficiary spending their own money, that could be a school or a teacher or a family, submitting paper receipts, reviewing paper receipts, ensuring that.
What was purchased was compliant. Just imagine how complicated and cumbersome that could be for billions of dollars. Yeah. Or requiring the school or the family, the provider, to provide services out of pocket, submitting paperwork, and then retroactively getting compensated for that. So I'm sure everyone's imagination can fill in the blank of just how labor intensive, bureaucratic, and inefficient that is.
Okay. What ClassWallet is, is we are a digital wallet. Okay. Where the beneficiary, that could be a school principal, a teacher, a parent gets access to a balance of funds, let's just call it $10,000. Mm-hmm. All the rules and parameters around how that money can be used is pre-programmed into the wallet.
Right? Right. I could use it for tutoring. I can't use it for tutoring. I could use it for school supplies. I can't use it for field trips. All of those, yes, nos rules are built in to how the money can be spent. Then what we've done is we've integrated all the ability to spend the money, so about 400 of the leading education vendors in America except Class Wallace form for payment.
From Amazon, office Depot, staples, Scholastic, Lakeshore, brands like that. Yep. To smaller Melissa and Doug puzzles, and hundreds and hundreds of every popular Best Buy technology. Every possible popular vendor that a parent or an educator would want to buy supplies from can buy what they need through Klau Wallet.
We also have a direct pay module, which operates a lot like Zelle or Venmo. Mm-hmm. Where service providers, whether they be busing companies or tutors or therapists, can link to ClassWallet and get paid by a CH through ClassWallet. And then we also have a reimbursement module. We also have a debit card module.
So we have every possible flavor of spend that the client can configure. And oftentimes they only turn two on, you know, e-commerce and indirect pay and not reimbursement or card. And then the compliance is before any vendor is allowed into the system. Invisible to the wallet holder must be vetted. Okay, so we can take all the rules of the program and we can vet, so for example, for a family that might wanna pay tutoring, a tutor in some states might be required to have a college degree.
Right? Okay. Or might be required to be certified teacher, we will vet. So no, it's not that any tutor can sign up on ClassWallet. They must fit the rules of the client. So the client knows that no one is getting paid. That's not supposed to get paid. Yep. Is that allowed? Then at the transaction level, we have all sorts of systems and automation in place that before the payment even leaves the system, we ensure that what was being bought or the service that's being provided is also according to the rules.
Mm. Right. You're allowed to buy a technology device, but you're not allowed to buy sunglasses. We can determine on that transaction that nothing. In that transaction is ineligible. Hmm. And then the last piece is we automate the payment, the reconciliation, the tracking, the reporting so that the client really doesn't have to do a whole lot and gets real time reporting for all their compliance and auditing purposes.
So it's all done digitally. It's all done in an automated way. All sorts of checks and balances at every step of the process are in place to ensure the dollars used as intended, and then ultimately, because we removed all that bureaucratic friction, the beneficiary can get that dollar quickly. Can use the dollar with agency in nimbleness and in a way that's easy for them, and ultimately maximize the impact of that dollar by reducing costs and maximizing efficiency.
[00:13:55] Alex Sarlin: It's quite incredible and it's interesting, as I hear you talk about the different modules, the reconciliation, the reimbursement, the debit card. I mean, it is truly a full financial system. It sounds like a very commercial financial system. It sounds like. I, I hear, you know, lots of echoes of companies like Stripe or, or Zelle or all the ones you're mentioning in there, because it, you know, to get all this money flowing, all the compliance baked in, all the different configurations by which these different types of users can manage the funding, it's quite complex, but it also, I can imagine.
It's complex and it's complexity that would fall to those end users, fall to those, those families, those teachers, those principals having to go through all the paperwork. It's really amazing to hear all the different pieces of this. So, you know, when you mention schools, individual teachers and educators, families, those are all very different and I think very interesting use cases.
I wanna dig in first on the school one. Just because I think, you know, in the 10 plus years since you founded ClassWallet, I'm sure you have seen so many transformational stories about schools that wouldn't do certain things because they didn't know how to let the money flow through the complexity of what was eligible, what was compliant, what parameters needed to be set.
I'm curious if you have sort of top of your head stories about some school programs or transformations or purchases that you feel like. ClassWallet was like, you know, the archetypal benefits that ClassWallet offers to a school. It's a great question.
[00:15:25] Jamie Rosenberg: I think I'm going to answer it, not necessarily in the examples of tangible goods, but who and how, what stakeholders we've been able to empower Sure.
In different ways by financial technology, so. I am a believer that education, at least within the school system, we could talk about school choice, but even in school choice, ultimately education intersects with a child. In the classroom with the teacher and that I would say, you know, obviously there's some carve out exemptions for home schools and things of that nature, right?
But for the most part, 99% of students receive their education. In front of a teacher. Yep. And the K 12 market is about a trillion dollars a year. Okay. And that ultimately goes into the system and trickles through all the different nooks and crannies. And yet teachers will spend 800 to $2,000, have their own pocket that That's right.
Every year. Okay. So there's very clear data that shows the dollar. The trillion dollars is ultimately not reaching that most critical intersection of the delivery of the product. Yeah. Which is education to the customer. It reaches it obviously to some degree, but obviously insufficiently, right? And so what ClassWallet's been able to do is really empower key stakeholders that are closest to the solution, the problem, the customer as possible.
And oftentimes that's a teacher. It could also be a school counselor. Even a principal who's tasked to do so many things of managing, you know, yet might have to, at the end of the day, look at 40 to 300 purchase orders to approve, which is just outside the core responsibilities of, of what we're trying to do.
So there's millions and millions of examples I could show you and talk about, but it's really about who we're empowering. And that is those that are closest to the student. I will say there are two examples. I will, I will say, just to take the liberty of sharing, please. One, when I was first starting out, we would fund classrooms and one of my funders was a very prominent foundation and they wanted to do some site visits.
And one teacher spent a significant amount of money on on Post-it notes. Okay. And I was dreading this because Post-it notes doesn't feel like a big educational impact, right? Yet this stoner was gonna visit with this teacher. Sure enough, this teacher gave every student a stack of post-it notes and she used them like Scrabble tiles.
You know, write your vowels down here, write your consonants down here, and post it on your, on your desk, and then you can start shuffling vowels and consonants together. And it was a very cost effective way of replicating, sort of like a Scrabble tile experience for her students. You know, just create creativity.
Another teacher, and I would say invariably, most kindergarten teachers purchased an electric pencil sharpener, one of the very first purchases they would buy with the funding. And again, on the surface, that doesn't seem like a very educational, impactful purchase. Right? But once we went in and we spoke to the teachers.
The number one behavioral management issue that kindergarten teachers have with their students are kids needing to sharpen their pencils. Right. Okay. And if you remember those wall-mounted Yep. Manual. And oftentimes these kids use fat pencils, right? Because they're learning dexterity skills and the wall mounted ones often didn't have the size.
So they would say they could average about 15 minutes a day that their teacher's aide would spend. Managing the students who needed. And if you compounded 15 minutes a day times five days a week, times in the, it was a significant amount of time. Yeah, that was being opportunity cost of sharpening pencils versus learning.
So what that says is empowering and trusting those who are responsible. While giving the requisite number of compliance allowed, the freedom in the agency and creativity of the beneficiaries to use the money as they intended for their particular student needs. Is a post-it note, the right purchase for every class.
Of course not. But for this teacher, for her students, it was right, right. Whereas a compliance process would've probably just nixed that somewhere and she never would, or he never would've even had the opportunity to, to buy. What would look like, such a non-educational item, but in fact had big education impact.
So anyways,
[00:20:34] Alex Sarlin: that's, that's the, yeah,
[00:20:35] Jamie Rosenberg: that's, that's,
[00:20:36] Alex Sarlin: I like the calling out of the creativity on one side, the sort of knowing your own educators, knowing their own teaching style, knowing how they wanna teach certain concepts like. Writing letters in this case, and I'm sure that happens in so many different contexts.
Teach educators are so creative, they have so many ideas of how to do things. That's where those, you know, those 800 plus dollars coming outta their pockets come from. They say, oh, I have something I really cool that I wanna do, but it's gonna be so much of a pain to get approved for this supply. I'm just gonna go buy it myself out of the, you know, a supply store or down at, you know, home Depot, whatever it is.
I mean, it's a huge change to be able to unlock all that creativity. And then to your point about the efficiency, the idea of the pencil sharpener, I think is a perfect, a perfect example like of the kind of thing where a bureaucratic system, a large bureaucratic school system going to the district and to the state, and to the federal government, you know, just all of these layers of funding.
Just don't know that there's 15 minutes a day spent. Right on pencil sharpening and the idea of having to communicate the complexities and the nuances of what's happening in the classroom all the way up and down the chain or to, to various points on the chain, I can easily see how ClassWallet drives all of these efficiencies in different ways because it allows the people closest to the students to really make the decisions.
And you know, you, you mentioned school choice, and I feel like I have to ask about this because this is such a. Interesting and sort of wild moment for public funding and education. You know, every listeners in this podcast are very aware of that. We've seen this massive sort of school choice ESA movement pick up over the last few years and a lot of the public funding that was once sort of locked into the system is now being freed out, sort of unbundled and often given to families and gi.
Given that, you know, the ClassWallet is designed for different stakeholders, including families, uh, ESAs are one of your use cases, I'd love to hear first just. From a 10,000 foot view, your perception of this moment when it comes to public funding and then I think we can dive down into what it actually looks like for families.
[00:22:35] Jamie Rosenberg: Sure. The problems that the school choice industry had were very analogous and, and it was for that very reason that thought leaders in the school choice space approached me, uh, around 2016 and explored whether ClassWallet could. Help in the school choice and in their agenda. At the time, there were very limited school choice programs, and the largest at the time was using debit cards.
You know, and there was a lot of compliance issues, as you can imagine, right? Giving debit cards to families and letting them spend wherever they want. So leaders of the School Choice Movement approached ClassWallet. Having observed the efficiencies and compliance we were able to solve for inside the system to see whether ClassWallet could in turn be used for families.
And the truth of the matter is, it's the same exact. Issue in the same exact problem. And that's exactly what we did. We responded to that call, and that's why we became this market leader in school choice and helped catalyze a lot of the school choice expansion that we're seeing today. Today ClassWallet is the software for eight ESA programs in America and we process and manage about one and a half billion dollars a year, and that's set to close to double for money to families.
To answer your question, what we've seen obviously is a lot of friction within the school system and students not being able to access all the goods and services that meet their particular inter personalized learning needs. Mm-hmm. Right. And empowering families with opportunities. To either compliment that with additional funding, there are programs like one we run in Texas where the students remain in public school, but get funding from the state to supplement that with therapy, tutoring technology, or to seek alternative options, obviously is becoming attractive across America.
We feel proud about is that technology is that we created has really been able to catalyze that. Right? I can imagine. And so to give you an idea of personalized learning needs in the school choice movement, I can tell you that. Since 2017 where we helped launch the first school ESA program in sort of the modern era, which is in North Carolina to today, parents have purchased close to 1.8 million unique individual items.
Wow. Through ClassWallet for their students, for their children. That's independent of the therapy and the tutoring and the services and tuition obviously. So every child is incredibly unique. I think that's, everyone can coalesce around that perspective. Every child and student has very personalized learning needs.
I don't think there's any debate around that. Whether that child is in front of a teacher and therefore the teacher can be empowered to meet that personalized learning need, whether that be in a public school or private school or homeschool and or whether that child has needs outside of the school day, right?
That can compliment their learning journey, whether it be a device, whether it be. Puzzles, whether it be books, whether it be other learning devices that compliment their lesson plans, that families either with means have the means to do it themselves or without means now have the ability to access state funding to do that.
We are purpose built to create that impact. That's exactly what we do. And to your point, Alex. It's very complicated because you can't give them cards, right? And let them spend everywhere and you can't give them cash and you can't expect them to go out of pocket reimburse, right? But we wanna empower them with maximum agency within the rules that provide the administrators the data they need to meet their audit and reporting needs.
And we have been able to strike that balance and are very proud and fulfilled by the impact our technology has been able to have on, on. Millions, uh, uh, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of families. And millions and millions of students.
[00:27:17] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. And let's talk a little bit about the reporting function when it comes to families.
'cause I think that's an interesting aspect of this and related to what you're saying there, when a school or an individual educator uses ClassWallet and they get the administrative reporting, what did I spend the money on? How, what, how did it match all the different compliance needs? It's a paper trail and, and very auditable and transparent.
I assume that's also true for families. So if you have a family, uh, in an ESA program, choosing some of those 1.8 million items, buying technology, buying tutoring services, buying all the different things that are eligible, I imagine they would also get a interesting reporting trail that could potentially be.
Insightful in terms of figuring out what's working. 'cause parents don't have, you know, a hundred years of experience doing educational purchasing. I'm curious what role you see ClassWallet playing in, in sort of accelerating that learning curve where people can learn how to spend the money most effectively in a school choice or ESA context.
[00:28:18] Jamie Rosenberg: Sure. I think I can answer that with three examples. Great. And most paramount is ultimately as easy for the family as possible. Right. We wanna make it, and we have made it as easy for a family to use school choice funds, as you might use Venmo to pay a dog walker or babysitter. Right. It it's, it's that easy.
Right. So I'll just use three examples. So a common use of school choice money, as you can imagine, is tuition. Yep. Anywhere between 55 to 70% of, depending on the program parameters are spent on tuition. And literally a, a family just logs in, finds their school clicks pay, and, and it's, it's that easy, it's like paying a bill, you know, just, um, as you would imagine paying your cable bill for example.
So that's it. We can capture the tuition amount, and that's just all automated. And right up to the administrator as it gets a little more complex, they wanna buy a laptop on Best Buy, for example. Yep. Or a Magic book series on Scholastic. They can log into ClassWallet and they can immediately go to the Scholastic store.
Right. And when they check out a scholastic. Or any vendor, it's automated that Scholastic or the vendor sends the SKU level data into the ClassWallet system.
[00:29:42] Alex Sarlin: Hmm.
[00:29:43] Jamie Rosenberg: So the parent ultimately is checking out of ClassWallet.
[00:29:46] Alex Sarlin: Hmm. Right.
[00:29:47] Jamie Rosenberg: And because we have that SKU level data. They don't have to get a receipt.
They don't have to submit any paperwork, they don't have to do anything. They just check out as you would in in a normal e-commerce experience. But because we've been integrated, we have the SKU level data and therefore can put that into reporting an automated way and the administrator can see exactly what was purchased.
We, of course, have checked, done all the checks and balances. Toho, the Magic Bus series. Was an eligible purchase. Yep. The parent doesn't have to do anything other than checkout, as they normally would, and no paperwork is needed, and the administrator gets full transparency in real time to the sku, to the penny, to the user, exactly what was bought.
Then when it comes to services like tutors and therapy, the parents simply just once they get their invoice, here you go. Here's an hour of tutoring for a hundred dollars. They can just take their phone, take a picture of the receipt, that's it. We have all sorts of technology that extrapolates the data from that paper, turns it into actionable data, and again, can feed that data right into the reporting engine.
The parent doesn't have to do anything. All they have to do is just take a picture of the invoice and that's it.
[00:31:02] Alex Sarlin: And hearing all of these user experiences and how they flow into the reporting, how they are incredibly, you know, seamless, the picture taking or traditional e-commerce. It feels like you are incredibly, I mean, I don't know how to put this incredibly well positioned to be.
Absolutely central. And it sounds like you've been, as you said, catalytic to the expansion of the ESAs and school choice sort of movement in the, the modern version of it. Because every parent, every adult in, in the United States is used to doing e-commerce. They're used to doing Venmo or you know, all of the different metaphors you're using are things that people are very, very comfortable with.
And these would be things that would be very difficult, I think homeschooling parents. Years ago, or people who were trying to do things in different ways, having to keep every receipt and get reimbursed and go huge amounts out of pocket and just assume that you weren't gonna get reimbursed for certain types of things because you didn't know the compliance.
It's removing so much friction. It's really exciting to hear. So I have to ask, from an ed tech perspective, you know, you, you've mentioned buying books from Scholastic or buying tutoring services. Technology. You know, this is an EdTech podcast. We have a lot of listeners who are founders of EdTech companies who run their own, you know, math game company or all sorts of, you know, every different combination you can imagine.
Incumbents and, and new, new founders are founders of startups. Tell us what that process looks like. If you're an ed tech company and you want to access this ESA market, you think you have an amazing product. It's really effective. It's really engaging and fun and interesting for students. You want those families that now have the ability to spend public money to know about you and to be able to buy you very easily and you wanna be compliant.
Of course, you wanna be pre-vetted. You wanna be somebody who is approved for purchases from that type of funds. What does that look like? Now, I'm sure that you already have many ed tech companies in your portfolio or in, in your, sort of within your parameters. If you're a founder listening to this and you say, I really want to be part of this class, quality SA ecosystem, what, what would that look like?
[00:33:01] Jamie Rosenberg: It's a great question, and that's what's most exciting about the impact is it's really the power of the two-sided marketplace because. Prior, an educator family might only go to what they're comfortable with or what the administrators already pre-negotiated relationship with, and therefore you require just a very small cohort of vendors, whereas on ClassWallet.
The power of the two-sided marketplace and exposing the beneficiaries, a whole host of new and interesting and impactful products and services is something we're very, very excited about.
[00:33:39] Alex Sarlin: Me too.
[00:33:40] Jamie Rosenberg: So, for your audience that has an e-commerce interface integrated class wall, it is is very, very easy. I can follow up with you, Alex, to give you an email address that maybe you could share with your audience of how they could contact ClassWallet with an interest of participating.
But I can tell you that we have already integrated with every major. E-commerce platform out there, and even if you had your own bests Stoke proprietary e-commerce checkout experience that you have built yourself, we have a very lightweight web call, web service that you can integrate and, and immediately link into ClassWallets, you know, takes less than six hours of time to do it between the integration and the testing.
So it's very, very simple. And we've created the platform, so to onboard, you know, hundreds of thousands of vendors and make them available to educators and families, and we can follow up, give you proper ways to guide your audience on how to follow up with that.
[00:34:47] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. And just one more, one more question about this, and yes, we will definitely get the email.
We can put it in the show notes for the episode or, or, or elsewhere where people could definitely find it as well. But what about the compliance side? So if you're an EdTech company or a vendor right now and you wanna make sure that you are meeting the needs, the meeting the compliance needs of North Carolina or Florida or, or Texas, you know, ClassWallet is being this amazing veteran platform that's been doing this for over 10 years, knows exactly what all the compliance mechanisms look like.
How might a, you know, a startup say, come to a platform like ClassWallet and say, well, I wanna make sure that what I'm doing is available to as many students as possible, as many families as possible. So I wanna make sure that I'm meeting the compliance needs of different states. How might ClassWallet support that kind of decision or that kind of, that kind of need?
[00:35:39] Jamie Rosenberg: We have a very robust vendor. Team's been working with dozens of states, and like I said, billions of dollars of transactions and very well versed in the nuances. Of program rules, et cetera. So the vendor team would, is very, very supportive of that process and can guide the interested vendor, uh, along the way.
[00:36:01] Alex Sarlin: Gotcha. Yeah, I completely agree. I'm really excited about this moment just because. As you say, even with amazing platforms like Class, well, public funding has a lot of nooks and crannies has a lot of, it flows in some funny directions. You know, I think sometimes people dig into the decisions that are made at the district level, the administration level.
It's often people copying each other from what other districts are doing, or, or, you know, it's, it's not always clear exactly how the procurement and purchasing decisions are made, and it feels like this. Opening up of the market where, you know, EdTech vendors rather than having to sell only and directly to districts and schools might be able to sell to a wide variety of educational stakeholders, individual educators, that bottoms up movement, being able to sell to homeschool families or to ESA or to small schools.
The micro schools that are, that are getting the tuition from all of these school choice movements. The market is just opening up in this way that I think everybody's excited about it. Nobody quite knows what it's gonna look like. I, I, if you look at that and, and to
[00:37:04] Jamie Rosenberg: go and to go back to your very, very first curiosity, please.
In my home opinion, it's the financial technology that's the linchpin to it all, because I can see that without it, it's fragmented and it's chaotic and it's opaque. But ClassWallet is in the middle of all of those and provides that layer in which can synthesize all of that information to create more efficiency.
[00:37:32] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. I do wanna follow up, I know this is a complex topic, but it's something I'm very curious about and I I, I'm sure you've thought a lot about it. You have this market that was previously fragmented. Now it is more cohesive, more coherent. There's certainly much more tracking of who's spending what on what from the school level, the district level, the individual educator, the family, which is just really, really interesting.
I'm curious if you see there being an interesting role for ClassWallet and sort of providing. All of this amazing financial data about what is being used in educational context all over the country, to then sort of marry with outcome data so that we can start to put together, you know, what is being purchased by the most effective homeschool families, or the most effective ESA families, what's being purchased by the districts that are getting really amazing outcomes for.
Their particular, uh, classrooms, what is being purchased by the individual educators. If there's a, you know, the teachers of the year, the teachers who are getting outstanding outcomes in their classroom, you have amazing information about what it is they're actually spending their money on. I'm just curious if you see there being some interesting role in sort of putting together the, where is the money spent with the, what is working, which has been obviously the sort of holy grail of education and education technology for a long time.
[00:38:50] Jamie Rosenberg: Sure. So I look at the person data, kind of front end and back end. So on the front end, where we are investing a lot in is using data to help the beneficiary make the most informed decision.
[00:39:07] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:39:08] Jamie Rosenberg: So I'm a family. I've got a second grade student that struggles in reading comprehension. What are other similar situated parents with similar situated students, what have they bought?
And being able to use the marketplace to exchange data where it's peer to peer and or just the sheer data, the, you know, providing here is the most popular items, you know, with the most popular, you know, the best reviews, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one layer we're investing in. Yeah. The second is.
Using that data in the marketplace to then curate products in a way that, again, makes it easier for the end user, the beneficiary, to find the best products in the most informed way that at least in the ecosystem data's been shared to have. Impact.
[00:40:02] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:03] Jamie Rosenberg: And then sort of holy gra of course is on the backend, you know, the outcome of it all.
Right? Right. I tread lightly there as, as somebody who's been in education, you know, that is. What's causation and what's not. Yeah, so we are really focusing on, on, on empowering to make that dollar have the best, biggest impact. Leveraging as much data as we can to provide that end user beneficiary with the, to help them make the most informed decision with that particular dollar.
And then working with our partners and our clients to provide data, which is, are certainly as part of other input factors that could help. Analyze, you know, the outcome makes sense and we, we wouldn't, we wouldn't purport to say we're the sole data holder of singular causation between this dollar that purchase and that outcome.
But we certainly have been investing in working with our clients to provide that data into their systems for a a greater outcome conversation.
[00:41:04] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, very, very sensible. The correlation, causation piece is, is huge there, but as you say, there's still a huge amount of value in the data across families, across peers, across schools, and in even beginning to sort of find mappings, even if the causation is still down the road.
But I, I, I, I totally agree with that. I wanted to ask about special needs and neurodivergence because you know, this is something we've seen a significant rise, especially post pandemic in families opting out of the existing public school system if they have children with special needs with Neurodivergence autism, A DHD wide variety of, you know, disabilities or learning disabilities in different ways.
I'm sure that a lot of people, especially early adopters of ClassWallet come from that world. I'm curious how you think about. The special needs and neurodivergence world and how you think about it again from that two-sided marketplace perspective.
[00:41:58] Jamie Rosenberg: So first, you know, special needs children really were the genesis of school choice, right?
Yeah. I mean, so the early school choice programs and many that exist today, either were exclusively for families with special needs children, or prioritize families with special needs children. I look at special needs, really at the lens of the new cca, the new federal program. Okay, and I'll give you a couple real life examples of why I think that federal program is particularly exciting, not only for many reasons and choices, but particularly for children with special needs.
So first and foremost. Everyone should understand the ECA federal program enables funding to reach children, whether they stay in the public school or they don't, and they use for, for reasons of going outside the public school. That's number one. Number two, there's a very, very successful program in Texas that class wall is the technology partner for.
And to date has distributed $250 million to families with children of special needs whose children remain in the public school system.
[00:43:13] Alex Sarlin: Hmm.
[00:43:14] Jamie Rosenberg: Okay. And the point of that is that. It can be agreed upon that trying to meet the needs of a special needs child between 8 32 30 of a school day can be challenging.
[00:43:28] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:43:28] Jamie Rosenberg: Okay. And at least in this, what this Texas program has been able to show by providing supplemental funding so they can access goods and services outside the school day is incredibly impactful. Okay. Tutoring, therapy devices, product, and with cca. I see a very interesting opportunity. There's a lot of focus on cca.
Really on how it can empower families to pursue private school options. But also I've had a lot of conversations with leaders on, on both sides of the political fence to be quite honest, that see as an opportunity of empowering families with choice and with means. To supplement their child's needs, which are clearly greatest for children with special needs.
And if they so choose to stay in the public school system, it's not a zero sum game.
[00:44:32] Alex Sarlin: Mm.
[00:44:33] Jamie Rosenberg: That if I stay here, my opportunity costs of trying to find everything and all things for my child is now zero. It's actually, if I stay here in this school. I now can access funds that allow me to supplement what my child's getting during the school day with goods and services outside the school day.
And just to reiterate, again, it's been shown and proven with fantastic results of this program in Texas. And so my lens is that families with children of special needs are going to be able to access choices. That are broad. I want to go to a public school where I think they're gonna get a better quality experience, or I wanna stay in the public school and I want to compliment that and supplement that with additional resources outside the school day.
And we're gonna see a much more hybrid blended funding and experience, I think in the next five to 10 years that's gonna look and your options and choice are gonna look something like that.
[00:45:43] Alex Sarlin: Yep. Great point and I think, you know, I was framing it as a sort of either or people in or out of the public school system, but you're a hundred percent right.
I think there's a sort of both and there's a lot of hybrid or sort of blurred line options that are starting to pop up in all sorts of states where people can be in the public school system but compliment with additional services. Or they can be in an a SA, but be commissioning services from the public school system that are, I mean, the number of different.
Permutations of funding are getting really interesting and I think it's giving even more choice to families in terms of thinking about exactly how they piece together and sort of put together the options that in the optimal way, especially for, uh, families with special needs, neurodivergence and various additional supports needed.
It's really, really interesting. So, you know, we're getting towards the end of our time. I have to ask you about ai. It's obviously been sort of the theme of the year for a long time, or the theme of EdTech, in my opinion, for a long time, for more than a year being a financial services as sort of a FinTech platform that works in the education sector.
You're sort of bridge the EdTech and FinTech world. Both of which have been really embracing ai, trying to figure out how to use it to enhance their data analysis, enhance their recommendation engines, enhance the ability to converse or you know, have a conversation about what is actually right for your family to analyze financial data, all sorts of things.
You know, I'm so curious how you are seeing AI accelerating your work at ClassWallet, you know, today and in years to come.
[00:47:12] Jamie Rosenberg: So it's in two areas. One, the ease of user experience for the family, the educator. Yeah. And two, maximizing the impact of that dollar. So it's, it's those two areas. So one, leveraging AI to streamline, create efficiency in which transaction data can be translated into reporting and auditing processes.
Is going to be incredibly impactful and will expand the options even of how that money can be spent and where just that bridge between a point of sale transaction, either at a retail or online to compliance to reporting AI is gonna be a huge factor there, and we're investing heavily in that. So just expansion and ease of use for the beneficiary.
Second is maximize the impact of that dollar. And you know, another way you've said, as you stated, sort of recommendation engine. You know, imagine a family coming in, they're accessing $7,000, $10,000. We have the data of who that family is, who the student is. We might even have other data about that student.
And being able to marry the user data with the two-sided marketplace data and availability. Data history, purchasing history of all users and ai. Being able to ingest all of that and ultimately giving that beneficiary the opportunity and access of information that's gonna help them make the most informed decision with that dollar.
Which is the ultimate mission we all have and spend. The mission of my career, which I started with with when we started this podcast, which is the mission of ClassWallet, is how ultimately that dollar can have the biggest impact for that child.
[00:49:06] Alex Sarlin: Phenomenal. I think that's an amazing note to end on. It's really, really exciting what you're doing in this space and I, I think that as we continue to see the sort of funding streams go in all sorts of different directions, in and out of the public school system, it services technology, tuition to different types of schools.
ClassWallet is obviously. At the forefront Absolutely. Sort of carving the path to make this all possible and, and not only possible, but, but frictionless and easy and comfortable for families who are moving into a type of educational purchasing they've just never had to think about before. Right? It's, it's always been send my student to the school and they do all the buying.
Now it's a million choices and how do I put together the right combination for my particular child? I think you're an incredibly interesting, uh, role in this incredibly interesting movement. Jamie Rosenberg is the founder and executive chairman of ClassWallet Financial Technology Platform, modernizing how public funds are distributed.
Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[00:50:05] Jamie Rosenberg: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[00:50:07] Alex Sarlin: 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.
