Essays
Systems
Why Bottom-Up Education Reform Is Capped
A teacher can change a classroom, but a classroom cannot change a district. Here is why.
For the past several years, as we were building Schoolze and later 21CS, I believed in a specific kind of magic.. I believed that if we could just find enough "Hero Teachers," we could change education from the bottom up. I thought that if we gave the most innovative educators th...more
Why Real Change Can't Grow Inside Schools
Real change cannot grow inside a system whose survival depends on the old model.
Most people believe that big crises lead to big changes. We think that when a system is shocked, it will finally be forced to fix its long rooted problems. When the world stopped in early 2020, I was one of those believers. I thought the pandemic was the "great reset" for educati...more
Better Ed-Tech Tools Don’t Make Better Schools
Technology doesn't change systems; the rules of the game do. Here is why the "immune system" of education absorbs every innovation.
Most people believe that if you give a school better tools, you get a better school. We often hope that a new app or a better curriculum will be the key to helping children learn more. But after building tools for hundreds of schools over the last three years, I have found a mism...more
K-12 School Success, 7 things we learned started Schoolze
A deep dive into how Schoolze's current mission evolved over past 4 years!
Why am I writing this? Few months ago, I wrote about how a product demo to a group of international customers transformed Schoolze’s mission into a K-12 School Success Platform . Since then, I’ve been sleeping, eating, drinking, and dreaming about one question: What actually make...more
The demo that transformed Schoolze’s mission
How I presented a Schoolze demo to a chain of preschools - a dream come true opportunity and a not so dreamy outcome.
A while back, I got invited to demo Schoolze to an international chain of preschools. One of those rare moments that, at the time, just feels exciting, but later you realize it quietly changed everything (even thought it didn't have a happy outcome back then). April 2016 The asso...more