EdTech’s Saturation Point

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Students, I am your host, Hayley Spau. Welcome back everybody to today's episode. I am so delighted to introduce you today. Abbas Manjee, the co-founder and chief academic officer of Kiddom. Welcome, Abbas. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Hayley. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I have to say, you know what, you know, and I know that we've been meaning to make this episode happen for a long time, and thankfully we have come to the table and are recording what I think will be a really important piece of a national dialogue that's happening today about edtech.

So thank you for joining me this morning. No problem. I'm really looking forward to it, and honestly, I'm so thankful for the opportunity. Thanks again. So Abbas, every superhero has a phenomenal origin story. What is Abbas? The co-founder, chief academic Officer of Kiddom Origin story. Wow. It, it laced in that is the implication that I'm a superhero.

So I appreciate your kind words, . Yeah, I can. I can give you my origin story. I can tie it back to just sort of my roots. So I'm a child of immigrants. My parents came from Pakistan. My dad moved to the Chicago land area and brought my mom over, and there I was growing up. Yeah, it wasn't exactly a great neighborhood.

It wasn't a a tough neighborhood. It was something in between. But we grew up in a low, low, low sec socioeconomic state, and I reacted to that by being a straight A student. And by the time I got to college, I knew that, you know, I just wanted to make a lot of money and make sure that I had opportunities that I didn't have as a young person.

And realized that as a, you know, in college I realized that in the investment banking world, you actually make a lot more money than a computer engineer. This is what I was studying to be. And I exchanged majors and all my friends made fun of me for it. And I moved to New York and got a job in the world of mergers and acquisitions.

And as soon as I got there, I realized, wow, I have made a terrible mistake. I had a mini crisis. It was like, Oh my God, what am I doing? Like, you know, I studied finance in college and, and it was great. Like the, the, the, the theoretical was fun, but at the end of the day, you're working 80 to 90 hours a week crunching numbers to help some company absorb another company.

And what are you doing it for while you're doing it so that you get share shareholder returns, and that really charges people up. It didn't charge me. . And so I quickly realized that as a 20 something year old, I needed to figure out what fulfills me so that I can get up every day and do the work that I need to do.

And I realized that, you know, through some soul searching as a 20 something year old, whatever that means, right? I realized that maybe, maybe teaching is for me. So I got into, to the, the world of education through this program. Called Teach For America, which, you know, as you know, is quite popular and it's so, it's a great way for young people to get into the world of education.

I was a career changer and I got placed in an alternative high school serving overage under credited youth, which means that I was teaching 17 to 22 year olds, 17 to 21 year olds as a 24 year old. Which was a fantastic experience. But ultimately, as you know, with the New York City Department of Ed, given staffing issues and given, just sort of like how things worked, I ended up becoming the math department chair in my first year of, of teaching, which is kind of insane.

That's an, that's an opportunity, if I've ever heard one . Yeah. I mean, it's an opportunity, but coming out of the Teach For America program, you know, that Summer Institute, I would say I was definitely under. And you know, my principal, he was a first year principal. He was a first year school. We hadn't even opened our doors yet, and we had this challenge of taking in students who were coming from, you know, backgrounds where they, you know, they were transient, maybe coming out of shelter homes, formally incarcerated.

Maybe they had children of their own. Maybe they were holding jobs, support their own families. These young people were disservice by the system and they were coming to this school. Move on with their lives, get skilled and get that high school diploma. And honestly, I, Hayley, I was, overwhelmed would be an understatement.

And, and, and in doing this work, I realized if my students aren't gonna come every day to class, but they're motivated, we gotta figure out a way to make learning work for them. And so I built this. Crazy spreadsheet channeling my investment banking powers and put together a website that connected this spreadsheet.

And the spreadsheet basically was a Google sheet. This is before Google Classroom, and it allowed my students to track themselves online, figure out exactly what they needed to get done, watch videos of. Myself that I had recorded of, you know, lessons and also find activities that I had aligned to those lessons from Khan Academy, CK-12, IXL, just so that they could access another way of learning the materials in case the way I had taught it and recorded didn't make sense for them.

So this was basically like we're saying in 2022, you know, synchronous and asynchronous and you know, virtual learning and blended. No one was talking about these things in 2009, but we had set up the system for my students and I had over an 80% passing rate on the New York State Regents exam after my first year, which is for students who had passed, who had never, who had failed the exam three, four times before.

That was phenomenal, and we turned this into a i, I actually turned this into a program. And flash forward six more years. You know, I'm talking to my co-founder who has just had just bootstrapped this math game on the iPad and we're looking around the room and realizing no one has connected curriculum instruction assessment in a unified way.

And not every teacher can be like Abbas and just plow through 80 hours a week because they were, they came from the investment banking world. In fact, the best teachers need more time to connect with their student. And so Kiddom was born in 2015 to help solve that. That was a perfect weaving of the Abbas origin story and the Kiddom origin story, which was, excuse me, definitely on my list to talk about as well.

And I think what you're naming here, in addition to your own historical timeline in education and around education is you're naming naming as well the biggest, some of the biggest transitions that have happened in education regarding technology. The invention, the integration, the utilization of tools, and you're also highlighting what Kiddom refers to as the Great Migration.

Can you deep dig a little deeper into that notion and describe what this event was and the impact it had on schools across the country? Please. Yeah, and I think Hayley, you and I were probably, I mean, you and I were definitely teaching through this general migration to digital platforms and education, right?

Like as we were teaching, blended learning started becoming a buzzword, and then there was flipped classroom and there was all these things. But why did these things even rapidly get pushed into the classroom? Well, I think it starts with the fact that most teachers would argue that their core curriculum was not good enough, or certainly did not provide enough materials to help them differentiate for their students, right?

So we had our core curriculum, but then we were also supplementing, and the best way to supplement was to go online, right? Co copy Paster State Standard or Common Core Standard in the Google, and then you land in a bunch of different places. All of which as we find out later, were unvetted and not rigorous and not, and essentially like, you know, when you, when you end up on Teachers Pay Teachers, not everything that's shiny is golden there.

And so you really have to commit extra hours of your day, which you already didn't have. To figure out what's working, what's good and what's gonna fit the needs of my kids. So, you know, as this, like we're seeing this like huge shift in education technology coming into the world of classrooms, right? Pre 2020, we're also seeing teachers asking for more, they're demanding for better quality materials.

And so Kiddom is sitting at the, sort of at the center of the general migration to digital. And the appetite for higher quality instruction materials, which we're calling HQIM these days, right? So we're sitting at the, at the center of these two, cause kiddo happens to now digitize high quality core curriculum in a platform that's designed to help teachers unpack, understand, and utilize curriculum.

And the reason why we even exist today, I would argue, is because we're, we're at this place where teachers are just overwhelmed, right? Like the pandemic. It's destroyed, that destroyed our everything, right? Like we are tired and we were already overworked and underpaid. But now the pandemic created the conditions where we had to basically, we signed up for everything that was free.

And EdTech companies, including Kiddom, put everything up for free because that's what you need to do in a pandemic. However, now we need to figure out how to call these things down because there, there's too much noise and we have a lot of kids in front of us who are asking us for their attention. We do not want to put teachers in a place where they are administratively burdened in front of students who are just hungry for that connection.

Right. And isn't that why, Hayley? How, why did you get into teaching? Yeah. Well, and you're telling, you're talking about this whole situation with the creation of digital resources. And I have an anecdote that relates to why I got into teaching, which is I'm actually preparing for, for a talk on youth with disabilities and if edtech is serving youth, Disabilities right now.

And I myself was a youth with disabilities. And what I had to do growing up was I actually had to have multiple sets of textbooks because it was too heavy for me to carry textbooks through my high school. It hurt my joints, which is like part of my condition. And so I said to my colleague yesterday as we were preparing some slides for this talk, wow, how different when my high school experience have been, if textbooks were digital, right?

The accommodation my school made for me was to allow me to carry two sets of textbooks, but it had there been an option when I was growing up for digital curriculum that would've benefited me as a student with disabilities. But that connects to the other thing which made me want to be a teacher, which was the other types of accommodations I received were a heck of a lot of empathy.

From the teachers around me who cared about me as a learner, but really cared about me as a person. I went through a lot while I was in high school and nobody batted an eye when I had to miss half a day cuz I was in the city for a doctor's appointment. So I knew that. Human connection in the classroom was what made me wanna be there.

So to answer your question long-winded way, , I really felt like I wanted to be able to be that teacher for the children that were gonna be in my classroom was create a space where they could be a, that their authentic selves y same, right? I, some of my best moments with my students were when I could connect what was going on in their.

And their lives were, you know, not ex, not exactly cookie cutter, like some of the traditional schools, right? They had a lot of stuff going on, and if I was able to connect what was going on in their lives to some kind of content, I taught high school algebra. So, you know, for, for me, it was all about connecting, making mathematical connections to their daily lives.

If I could do that, that's when you see the, the sort of light bulb go off in the aha moment. But you, you can, You can't do that in a scalable way as a teacher. If you're bogged down in paperwork, if you're bogged down spending most of your hours offline, copy pasting materials from one place to another, and essentially being a data wizard, you don't,teachers should not be data wizards.

We should not be spending. Committing one day to doing data day, quote unquote, right? Data day should be easy. Data day should be every day. Every, and the technology should make it such that we are utilizing data to make, you know, in incredibly intentional choices in the classroom. And when we call on students and when we talk to students, and when we frame questions to our students in a whole class environment, group setting, individual setting, and what I'm, I guess what I'm trying to say is, We've, we're starting to come to a head, right, because we have this one sort of factor, which is there's a lack of high quality core materials, and so teachers have been supplementing, and the BA basic easiest way to supplement has been to go online.

Find tools, sign up for tools, and then create stations in your classroom and send students to those stations when they either require more help or require enrichment. Right. The second thing is now there's such a burst of ed edtech in the marketplace because of the pandemic. There's just so much noise and we can't figure out what to use.

And then the third thing, of course, is that there is actually. Through the HQIM movement, there are actually players in the marketplace and from corner curriculum that aren't the big three, right, that aren't HMH, McGraw, Savvas, or Pearson. There are actually authors and publishers out there producing high quality instructional materials that are comprehensive, rigorous, and have embedded supports for students with special needs, embedded supports for English language learners, et cetera, et cetera.

All the stuff that you would. Up to go fine and commit hours to finding online. A lot of these HQIM right are coming embedded with these supports and it's, look, it's no surprise that, you know, a, a couple weeks ago on EdWeek, there was a, a, a piece that came out saying that the number of EdTech tools that school districts ha ha are using has almost tripled.

And that's a problem, right? Features are overwhelmed. They need, districts are actively looking to call down. What we're seeing is sort of this merger happening between curriculum and technology, and I would argue from my vantage point, of course I'm biased. I work at Kiddom, but I would argue that the technology needs to support or be aligned with the core curriculum, curriculum that has been adopted and implemented because that is what the teacher is spending most of their time on in the day to day.

There's a center at the heart, there's a heart at the center of all you're talking about here, which is the teacher and their exhaustion and their capacity. Yes. So I, I wanna talk about a, a little bit how teachers today, what you would say would be a good framework for cuing the tools that teachers are using so that they can, or schools are using in order to prioritize what gives you the biggest bang for your.

Great question. There's a piece on education next called the Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar, and it basically outlines all the materials that are out there, and they basically come to the conclusion that a lot of the free stuff that's out there, alignment is weak. The assessments fall short and the materials are not cognitively demanding.

I would argue, in order to figure out as a school district, as a school, or as a teacher, what do I need? Well, first start with the basics. What is your core? Is it good enough? What? What is, how does it rate on EdReports? EdReports.org is an independent auditor of all curricula in the marketplace, and they actually produce an annual report every year, the results of which are quite sad every year.

It's just so sad that, you know, it's shock's so shocking. Some of these, these very highly well adopted curricula are rated. Yes, yes. It, it's shocking because it's not like high quality, materials are more expensive than, than their counterparts. That is not true. High quality curriculum is the same cost of the same amount for students as some of these other curricula that are in adoption and are rated low.

I think the best place for a teacher to start is go look. Textbooks, go look at your PDFs. Go look at that brand name and punch that brand name into EdReports. They have a incredibly rigorous dis uh, criteria for review. There are three gateways that they audit for all curricula. I, I can tell you just as a mathematics teacher, the first gateway is focus and coherence.

The second gateway is rigor in mathematical practices, and the third is usability. And if you're an ELA teacher, I think it's like text quality is the first gateway. Strategy and purpose is the second gateway. And structural supports is the third gate I got. I got them all. I'm actually proud of myself.

Done. Yeah. Here Googling like for three gateways. I didn't even need to need to I question though, because EdReports has had some controversy in the past. Right? There has been of course, debate about whether or not we should be embracing Ed. Yes. Why do you think there's been such controversy and do you think EdReports has moved past the debate that occurred a couple years back?

So I think there should always be a debate on auditors in the marketplace. The fact of the matter is there was no auditor before EdReports. So I, if you're a teacher right now, think back to when you were in the classroom as a student. Could you have looked up how rigorous your textbook was that the teacher was using in front of you?

I don't think so. These. Yeah, right. Like these major publishers have a massive grip on school districts and they have an amazing renewal team that has an awesome superpower of renewing for five years and coming back five years later and renewing for five more years, and, Unfortunately, I think we are ignoring the results, right?

We are so overly focused on teacher quality, but I would argue and studies prove, you know, there was a write up in the, in The 74 a couple years back that basically outlined that new studies suggest that the choice of curriculum and textbooks can make a big difference for students even more of a difference than the quality of a teacher.

We are so focused on teacher quality that we're forgetting, like what are, what is actually the content in front of them, right? And because there's so much content in front of teachers, we just think, okay, as long as we can figure out how to make a great teacher, they can go do the work of deciphering content, which I think is completely backwards.

You gotta give teachers a head, start with great content, and then coach them on classroom management, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So going back to your question, Hayley, right? First thing. Look at the core curriculum. Is it, is it offering you enough supports, to prevent you from going out and sourcing other material?

If it's, if it's not giving you enough materials, that's the first place to start. I guarantee most of the problems are gonna be solved there. The second question is, okay, great. What about differentiation opportunities? What about engagement? What about getting students to create, you know, build something, get, get, get their creative juices going?

That's great. There are tons of tools out there that merge core curriculum, right? And the topics in the core curriculum align with opportunities to engage, right? Like, you know, Kiddom has interactives built into it. There's Desmos that has interactives built into it. You know, Newsela has some amazing tech sets, right?

But these are again, like level two, right? Like we're talking, once you've got your hor, your high quality instructional material, On point, then you could start thinking about, okay, how am I gonna pick and choose some of these additional sort of resources to make my classroom a more engaging experience?

Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I, I, I'm gonna go back to the like original kind of response you had when I asked about the controversies surrounding EdReports, which I think is a, a really cool one and speaks to the type of critique we should be having. Debate is natural and it is healthy.

Right. Like we wanna be able to have a dialogue about what it is we're using. If we really value it. Only having one opinion leaves no space for diversity of thought, which is important and that's important in our classrooms. It's important as we talk about tools, and yet we still need to have some sort of system that allows us to rate the quality of the materials we're putting in front of kids.

So I'm here for that. Yeah, I think that's an important part of the discussion. Yes. And I think teachers need to be more involved in that discussion because they are the implementers of said curriculum. Right. So, I think you mentioned controversy on edited reports. There was a controversy last year, I think right around this time about, a very popular reading program.

I got basically got a failure. Uh, a failing mark on EdReports. It was Fountas and Pinnell, right? Or or? Yeah, I think it was Fountas and Pinnell. And they got basically a failing rating. And it happens to be one of the most popular reading programs across the us right? It's everywhere. Major cities, high adoption rates there.

Yeah. So, so you remember this, right? So like, how did the publisher react? Do you remember? I don't . So they were like, well, you know, the criteria isn't aligned with, you know, our units of study and how we, how we actually think about the science of reading. And, you know, there was, they got into this battle that basically highlighted that we are still in 2020.

Still talking about the science of reading, although there are not many curricula out there that have truly adopted and implemented the science or reading, right? Like we're still talking battleground between balanced literacy and science of reading. The science of reading has came out 20, 30 years ago and, and the science hasn't changed.

And there are very popular programs that are demonstrating excellent results based on the science of reading, right? I'm talking about, you know, Core Knowledge, EL Education, Wit & Wisdom, right? Like these are all great ELA programs that are based on the science of reading. And then you have, you know, your.

Let's just say the big three that are still pushing these programs and they, again, they have excellent sales professionals, they have excellent renewal teams, and they are just so good at getting districts to commit to five more years. So there's a concern that is. You know, widespread in pretty much every issue that comes up in education, that some schools have the ability to access the most current, the most recent, and by have the ability, I more me, are well-funded, well-resourced, have a lot more agency in, in just debating some of these issues and kind of adopting quickly and implementing quickly due to financial capacity.

How much variation are you seeing across schools right now and what are some of the ways that you see schools being creative in their adoption of high quality instructional materials? So, that's a great question, Hayley. So I think the first and most important thing to name is that these conversations cannot happen without teachers being in the room.

If you are a teacher listening right now, you gotta figure out who's on your adoption committee, right? Who, who are the people. Who are looking at the textbook, publishers and the authors, and what is their review criteria, right? And how are they actually reviewing these materials and who are, is there a teacher committee?

Do you wanna be on that teacher committee? Because this is basically gonna set you up for the next five to six years, right? Like so for example, Tennessee has a six year adoption. , that means, and and Tennessee is a centralized adoption state, right? So that means every single district in Tennessee next year, I think 2023, yes, is gonna adopt math.

So that means that every single district needs to figure out and vet what is the math curricula that best reflects. Their pedagogical, structure and needs and philosophy and align that with how that matches and mirrors and offers mirrors and windows to their students. Right? That's, that's pretty, there's, there's a lot writing on this.

So as a teacher, you have to figure out what is that process? What are the brands and the logo. And how do you figure out if you can influence that? Right? And if, if there's a budgetary issue, again, I, I cannot emphasize, emphasize this enough, high quality materials are not more expensive and low quality materials.

In fact, the high quality materials, many of them are OER, which stands for Open Educational Resource, and they are freely a. So guess what? You can actually go on to openupresources.org or illustrativemathematics.org or eleducation.org. You can go to these websites and I'm naming these brands because these brands consistently get all greens on EdReports.

you can go to their website if you're science, sorry, I'm leaving, leaving out, you know, some of the other content areas. Math and ELA has gotten a lot of love OpenSciEd for science teachers, right? And that's a fantastic new curriculum. It. Authored using the EQuIP Rubric, which you, if you haven't heard of that, it's one of the most rigorous, rubrics in the market used to design curriculum.

And what you should do is go online to those websites, go download a unit or two, and literally compare and contrast the unit that you have in front of you that your school district has adopted, and the unit that these high quality materials offer to your c. And you'll be able to see the difference through with quick skin.

I guarantee. As a former math teacher, I wish I had opened up math or illustrative mathematics in front of me. I wrote my, my curriculum all six years that I taught because I just didn't trust anything that was out there. Of course, that was back then, and I spent a lot of time writing, drafting, building technology to make sure that my students can access these materials synchronously and asynchronously, and that is why I almost burned.

Well, we don't want that for teachers, right? Like . Exactly. We're learning very quickly that burnt out. Teachers make for, you know, a d what, what is also a debate right now, teacher shortages in pockets of the country, geographically di diverse, teacher shortages. And so at this point, as much as we care about the mental health of our students, we also have to care about the mental health of our teachers.

And so anything that makes work easier. Is good. Yes. Yes. And that's where I simplify a little bit. Thumbs up thumb. Yeah, I think that's, yeah. No, I mean, I, it's not an oversimplification because I mean, if you look at, like I'm talking, we at Kiddom we talk to districts all the time. I'm visiting all our customers, right?

Teach teacher, the teacher shortage problem while not. Equitably, you know, true across the board, there are pockets of this country that have classrooms that are just totally empty, waiting to be staffed. There are staffing agencies cropping up, seeing this as a market opportunity to go build a business.

Unfortunately, you know, that's the private sector responding to public sector needs and that's just what happens in this country for the those folks who are in the classroom today. Right. They are seeing. An incredible amount of stress. There are seeing students who still, you know, they missed so much time being socialized and learning how to talk, right?

So it's not just an academic problem in front of them anymore. That's a social problem and it's real. And you know, there's also a debate about social emotional learning and I, I will just say that, you know, a great classroom environment and culture is one of the founding, you know, one of the found. Of social emotional learning.

And I think to get to that place you have to call all these crazy, you know, one-off tools that you put onto your tool belt because now they're heavy and. The supplemental curriculum flourishing via tech is what's holding some of these teachers down today. There is high quality instructional material.

There are, there is high quality core curriculum available that could help teachers get more time back in their day instead of finding, sourcing, edit, like creating lesson plans. And they're already digitized. And that is why that that is exactly why Kiddom is alive today. Thriving is because we are hell.

On a mission to basically offer the on only the best curriculum inside a single unified platform that offers flexibility and simplicity teachers, because that's what they deserve. So Abbas, we are nearing the end of our time together and you have kind of. I, there's a sports reference here, like prepared me for a layup.

I don't know. , to ask the final question that I often ask guests, which is what advice would you give a teacher starting their career? Yeah. That's a, you know, that's a tough question. I, I would say, you know, teaching, especially your first year is gonna be like a roller coaster. And you probably, in your training, got a lot of great, you, you learned a lot about the theoretical, the theor, the theory behind teaching.

Right. And you learned about, you know, pedagogy of the oppressed. I mean, probably read a lot of. And that's great stuff, but that's basically holding a so a, a beverage. As you're about to ride a rollercoaster, what you need to be given is a seatbelt because this thing is gonna take off. And so if you are a teacher starting your career, you're gonna spend all of your career in teaching focused on curriculum.

So you might as well start researching now, what is the best curriculum out there for my grade? For my subject, because that work is gonna do you a lot good, and it's gonna give you that time to revisit the theoretical when you actually have the time to do it later in your career.So look for the seatbelt and buckle it right away.

Buckle up. Buckle up. Buckle up. Abbas, this has been an absolute pleasure talking to you about a topic that I think is really, really important, and I know that a lot of folks are thinking about, especially as the school year is now underway. Except for in New York City, which starts officially tomorrow.

We're recording this at the beginning of tomorrow, September, so we're almost full in the United States with a start, a start, but really relevant conversation. I'm grateful for you sharing your thoughts with, with all of us today. Thank you for being here, Hayley. Thank you so much for having me here and, and just thank you so much for the passion that you exude.

It's just truly an honor to talk to you. Well, the feeling is quite mutual. Abbas. Appreciate you being here, and thank you to all who tuned in to listen today.

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