The GSV Big 10: There's No Place Like Home

Here's your weekly coverage corner for the top 10 stories, insights, and major plays in learning and skilling.

#1 For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching 

At the current growth rate,  there will be 10 million homeschool students by 2030. All these shifts create opportunties for companies providing solutions that allow parents and communities to take more control of their learning. 

The Washington Post

#2 China education: 2 years after tutoring crackdown, parents still find ways to feed their ‘gold-swallowing beasts’

Conventional wisdom is that the Chinese EdTech sector is dead, yet parents will find a way. Demand is higher than ever: Searches for the phrase “study trip” are up 200% year-over-year, and parents still spend more than a third of their annual expenditures on education (15X more than what American families spend on supplemental education).

SCMP

#3 Voters demand school choice for their kids. So why aren't Democrats embracing it?

Democratic voters are unequivocal in their support for choice, but the Democratic party isn’t. Recent polling shows 73% of Democratic voters have a favorable opinion of public charter schools & this strong level of support holds true across various demographics: Blacks, Latinos and parents. 

USA Today

#4 Photos show what Houston ISD 'detention centers' could look like in existing school libraries

Mike Miles was crucified in the NYT over the weekend over the difficult decision to repurpose libraries into “Team Centers.” Critics say that he’s fostering the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The real goal is to create individual learning environments where every kid can thrive – and especially the students who are most disadvantaged.  What’s criminal about that?

Fox Houston

#5 Inside the Decline of Stack Exchange

Stack Exchange is one of the greatest sources of human knowledge on the Internet…and therefore one of the most important sources of training data for AI models. Questions on programming languages have hit their lowest level in over a decade. It's just hard to be in the business of selling information at a time when information is being commoditized (and commandeered) by AI platforms.

The Diff

#6 Millions of Students Went 'Missing' From Classrooms During the Pandemic. Many Haven't Returned.

Where did they go? How do we bring them back? It’s been three and a half years since the start of COVID, and around 230,000 students in 21 states and Washington, D.C. are “missing” from classrooms. Schools dropped the ball on monitoring student engagement at the beginning of the pandemic, and they have serious ground to make up.

Reason

#7 West Virginia University’s unprecedented proposed cuts become clear  

Nearly 10% of majors at WVU are facing the chopping block. Conventional wisdom said that flagship universities would never have to adapt their approaches because they were the only option in town. With different pathways to achieve career readiness, students have forced schools like WVU to make drastic cuts. The downstream impacts will be significant – from state-level “intercultural competencies” to day-to-day administration of courses on campus. 

Inside Higher Ed

#8 The Ready Player One Test: Systems for Personalized Learning 

Choose your own Ed-venture? Immersive technologies (including via the Metaverse) offer opportunities for more personalized, self directed learning that will eradicate the practice of one-size-fits-all teaching. By creating an individually tailored student experience, education can become regenerative, continually growing and improving itself around the learner.

Getting Smart 

#9 We Need to Recalibrate the Parent-Teacher Relationship 

Almost every educator will tell you that schooling is, by its very nature, a partnership between parents and teachers. But just 13 percent of teachers spend more than three hours a week engaging with parents. Parents should be partners, not pariahs, when it comes to the classroom. Platforms like ClassDojo help make that happen.

American Enterprise Institute 

#10 Arco Enters into Agreement to Go Private at a Price of US$14 per Share in Cash | Business Wire 

Arco joins Kahoot! as one of two major EdTech unicorns to return to the private markets, being taken private by General Atlantic and Dragoneer. Arco’s mission is to build the world’s largest operating system for schools…going private could help them take their model from Brazil and beyond.

Business Wire