Everyone, who can, is starting an education pod
People have wanted to make micro-schools happen for a while. And they have been happening, from the Khan Lab School to Astra Nova, the Elon Musk School, for the wealthy. A micro-school for all! Particularly with Covid-19, the logic makes sense. Tutoring and homeschooling is the oldest form of education dating back to Aristotle. Nothing wrong with it. But for everyone? Let's see.
There are several companies popping up with variations of resources to help parents and educators. It's not even worth describing each organization's model because it's apparent they are in the early stages of settling on a product vision, let alone a scalable business model. But here are a few notables that have raised angel and venture funding:
Many others, including non-profit, non-startup players like All Our Kin
If you're getting excited because you think that there might be a big market opportunity here, I'd be cautious. Why?
Education Market Dynamics
As you can see, there is a limited barrier to entry. There is a lot of curriculum and content out there (see Khan Lab, Nova Astra) that you can bundle. Plus, now with no-code and other enterprise SaaS tools, it's not too complicated for a lay-person/educator to put together the pieces. Particularly if...
...you're shopping for cost. Every bit of cost eats into parents' pay and/or the take-home salary of the teacher(s). So, costs matter in this sector. A lot.
Quality of the teacher, the human, will be the biggest driver of quality for the micro-school or any school. As Arvind points out: The argument from School House: 'Would you rather have one-thirtieth of a teacher’s attention or one fifth? At SchoolHouse, we keep class sizes small not just because learning in small “pods” is necessary during a pandemic, but because it’s a better way to give students the level of attention they need from a teacher to achieve their full potential' is seductive but wrong.
Education Research from John Hattie
He's referencing the work of John Hattie of Visible Learning on the ranking of 252 research-backed influences on learning with their effect size. There is a lot of education academy jargon but what's clear is the quality of the teacher (#1) is the most important compared with school size (#106) and technology at the elementary level (#103).
Bottom line: Build your pod with care. Lever up on the hiring of a great educator. Think about how you can build in diversity and inclusion. Education investments are rarely power-law companies, so if you are investing, think about the right return expectations and capital structure.