Waiting for Superman...

How many superheroes will it take to fix our nation’s public education system? Superman, Spiderman, Batman and the whole Justice League?

Actually the number is 3,500,000. This is roughly how many teachers we need to educate all children currently enrolled in K-12 public education. The task of every teacher – create engaging lessons that speak to the diversity of learners in a given class – is a heroic one. But we don’t have enough of these superheroes.

A Problem of Scale

So the real question is how do we create a scalable superhero-making machine that can leap over the excessively tall buildings of education mediocrity and speeding bullets of international competition our children face daily? We can’t.

As Davis Guggenheim’s award-winning education documentary “Waiting for Superman” illustrates, no human capital strategy in any sphere of society can rapidly scale excellence. At least not the kind of excellence our children deserve to the level of 3,500,000 teachers across the country. Think about how hard it would be for any business in America to recruit, retain and reward 3,500,000 leaders who each manage a different set of 25 individuals every year, much less requiring them to deliver the consistent results regardless of where they live or who they manage?

Empowering Teachers

But there is hope. The DNA of any great teacher is their ability to personally engage each student where they are and move them along a learning trajectory that taps into the student’s intrinsic motivation, learning style and capacity. This kind of x-ray vision into the unique learning strengths of a student becomes increasingly difficult to manage and track as you add more students and impossible for a single teacher in charge of 20+ students. Learn about our process.

However, we can bring the powerful attributes of our learning management systems that engage learning online, one student at a time. Additionally, we’ll equip teachers with data on how their students best learn so that they can focus more on the magic that only their physical presence can provide. Learn about our model.

By leveraging technology in the classroom, we can finally realize the ideals of an egalitarian education system wherein every student excels because every teacher is properly equipped with the tools he or she needs to advance student achievement. Our Spark technology, when placed in the hands of willing teachers, helps to facilitate students’ learning by moving solely from up-front lecturing to include more side-by-side facilitation. Learn more about Spark.

Let's Learn to Fly

This shift can stimulate the kinds of exponential leaps in student achievement that we have longed believed possible but have not been able to achieve. The country that incubated Apple, Google and Facebook must now apply those same scaling talents and technology in the classroom. It is time to help the 3,500,000 Clark Kents already out there learn how to fly. Learn about our methodology.