All the people at the forefront of AI really loved and thrived in highly academic settings from kindergarden to PhDs, their own lived experience doesn't match up with this product at all. Why are they making it?

EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?

There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven experiences like Khan Academy and Scratch are universally liked. Why?

When you look at Scratch, which I know a lot about, one thing they never do is allege that it improves test scores. They never, ever evaluate it quantitatively like that. And yet it is beloved.

Khan Academy: it is falling into the same trap as e.g. the Snoo. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's about, who pays? Who is the customer? Khan Academy did a study that showed a thing. Kids are not choosing to watch educational YouTube videos because of a study. It is cozy learning.

But why does Khan Academy need studies for a test score thing? Why does Google? This is the problem with Ed Tech: the only model is to sell to districts, and when you sell to districts, you are doing Enterprise Sales. You can sometimes give them a thing that does something, but you are always giving them exactly what they ask for. Do you see the difference?

It doesn't matter if it's technology or if it is X or Y or Z: if the district asks for something that makes sense, great, and if it asks for something that doesn't make sense, or doesn't readily have the expertise to know what does and doesn't make sense, like with technology, tough cookie. Google will make something that doesn't make sense, if it feels that districts will adopt it.

We can go and try the merits of Learn Your Way, thankfully they provide a demo. All I'll say is, people have been saying, "more reading" is the answer, and there is a lot of fucking reading in this experience, but maybe the problem isn't that there isn't enough text to read. The problem is that kids do not want to read, so...

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politician 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Absolutely, the obvious best use-case for this technology -- from the ROI perspective -- is corporate HR training modules.

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janalsncm 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?

I think this one is fairly simple. Half of consumer spending comes from the top 10% of earners, whose kids we can assume have generally pretty decent educations already. The people who need education help the most don’t have money to spend on it.

The parents who do have money to spend want to invest in tailored education from a human teacher, not cheap, generic scalable technology. So margins will be low.

So if you want to make money, you need to focus on things like enrichment and test/college prep for the top 10%. Helping inner city kids who are 3 grades behind in reading doesn’t print money and VCs don’t want anything to do with that.

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Ray20 4 days ago | parent [-]

> So if you want to make money, you need to focus on things like enrichment and test/college prep for the top 10%

But there's no potential market in the top 10%. I mean, these people just hire a good teacher and that's it. There's no room for improvement; there's nothing that can beat a good teacher.

> Helping inner city kids who are 3 grades behind in reading doesn’t print money

This is a political problem. Political problems cannot be solved by technological means. So there is no market here either.

	▲	doctorpangloss 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> This is a political problem. Political problems cannot be solved by technological means. So there is no market here either. Another POV is: pick your disruption. AI stuff has definitely disrupted education... for the worse. It happened within a political and economic status quo. The AI stuff did not need to wait for the movement of any levers of power to happen at all. If you are seeking a way to fix low returns in ed tech (and for that matter, Health IT, which is like, #2 worst performing sector): attack Enterprise Sales. Destroy it. Make stuff that destroys the monetization system where districts buy exactly what they ask for. It isn't complicated. Scratch and early Khan Academy provide a template for good ed tech targeting the learner directly. Whether you make $1 million or $1 billion doing this, I don't know. Chegg got to, and fell from, great heights by delivering cheating, which ChatGPT does for free now. Cheating ALSO worked within a political and economic status quo, that 30% of students cheat, and that the cheating is a necessity, apparently, for the survival and thriving of a vast number of people, all around the world. There are markets. Lots of them. You can do good or bad. Paul Graham doesn't invest in Cluely, even if it makes money, it's kind of evil (A16z doesn't care about cheating, the people who run it are the ones who cheated in school). So there are even opportunities that are missed by the very best seed fund. To me, a big opportunity lies in things the government education cannot do. Some things good, some evil, some complicated. For example, no matter how hard it seems to try, the government cannot functionally collect on a trillion bucks of student loans. What does that mean for education? I don't know, but I think if you are looking for $1b+ opportunities, they're there.
	▲	janalsncm 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Getting into an elite college is an arms race. Anything you can sell to a parent which will give them a leg up over other parents is a viable product. To put a finer point on it, a teacher + your product beats a teacher. > Helping inner city kids who are 3 grades behind in reading doesn’t print money 100% and this is broadly why ed tech doesn’t move the needle.

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ares623 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You know what really motivates studying though? The promise of being completely useless when you finish studying since everything will be done by AI! What a motivator!

	▲	doctorpangloss 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's tough because the problems in education are so vast. Not that I'm saying you're wrong, but: everyone wants a stylistic answer to the question, "What is the problem with education?" Sometimes the style of that answer is malaise (you). Sometimes it is, some racist drivel. Which is pretty common on this forum, unfortunately. Everywhere you look in education there are problems. There isn't going to be some stylized answer. These Google guys - and a lot of other people who write comments online - go and promote something they think is a world view or theory, and is really just a bunch of stereotypes and projections of their own college-aged vengances. VC likes these kind of people! These Google guys fit that mold. I can agree with the broad strokes of techno-utopia, but that also means you need space to say that your app is bad, your art is ugly, and your text is long and boring. These Google guys do not have space for criticism. They are Enterprise Sales. If the district asks for tasteless Corporate Memphis art, that's the art they're going to get - I'm going to focus on the art because I know something about art, and the text that appeared in the demo was so horrifically boring that I didn't read it. Have you opened a children's book? None of it looks like fucking Corporate Memphis! One thing I am certain of is that these Google guys do have taste, they are smart people. Their problem is Enterprise Sales. Don't get me wrong. If you are narrowly focused on giving people what they want, your creative product will fail.

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Workaccount2 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's like exercise equipment.

If you have free weights, a bench, and a place to run, you are already 98% of the way to being a healthy fit human. There is ample information available on how to use those tools.

You don't need a trainer, a $10,000 gym machine, and a $5,000 stationary bike.

Education has gotten so insane with per-student spend, and the results are the same as the kids who had pencils and 10 year old text books.