Today's discussion features Ian Connell. Ian is an Investment Principal at Charter School Growth Fund, a non-profit focusing on making multi-year philanthropic investments in public charter school networks. Charter School Growth Fund supports nearly 480,000 students, around 90% are students of color, and around 75% come from economically disadvantaged families. Charter School Growth Fund uses an approach similar to the venture funding model, to identify the country's best public charter schools, and to fund their expansion with the specific goal of increasing the school's vision and educational impact.

Over the past 6 years at Charter School Growth Fund, Ian has focused his efforts on ed-tech and innovation in K-12 schools, and while on the investment team leading an innovation and technology strategy, Ian spends his time visiting schools, and talking to founders and partners to try to understand and identify, which school systems are developing the most novel and impactful approach to education, with the end of goal of taking the most robust and proven education designs, and scaling them to other schools to ultimately impact as many children as possible. Ian brings with him an MBA from the University of Chicago, The Booth School of Business, typically a top 3 business school globally year over year according to US News, and we find some time in the talk to visit how Ian was able to completely shift his career trajectory through the aid of a non-profit fellowship called Management Leadership for Tomorrow, an organization focused on equipping and empowering high achieving men and women from underrepresented communities. The talk today visits all of these cohesive ideas around the provision of opportunities and programming to populations that normally wouldn't have access to them.

Additional Items Discussed:

-Organizational inertia, and why it is so hard for big systems and organizations to effectively tackle dynamically changing challenges - whether in education or in commercial applications, how the size and age of organizations can impact their ability to change strategy and direction

-Effective teaching models, and the difference between teaching 5th grade math, and teaching 5th graders math, the disparity curve across different levels of learning maturity in the average classroom, and some trends and evolutions of thinking to tackle these types of typical educational challenges.

-How technology can be used to target specific educational outcomes, frameworks that support specific outcomes, megatrends in ed-tech, and big ideas on what school models may look like during COVID this coming fall.

-Ideas around how to make ed-tech more interesting to institutional capital, and why the current model of venture funding in ed-tech has some addressable gaps that could change the future of education for our youth.

Thank you for listening!

How to Contact Ian:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianconnell/

Resources:

Charter School Growth Fund: https://chartergrowthfund.org/

Management Leadership for tomorrow: https://mlt.org/

MBA Prep Program: https://mlt.org/mba-prep/

Data & Sources:

Chicago Ideas: https://www.chicagoideas.com/

Microsoft K12 Education Transformation Framework: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/school-leaders/k-12-microsoft-education-transformation-framework/default.aspx

National Center for Children in Poverty: http://www.nccp.org/profiles/US_profile_6.html

United Negro College Fund: https://uncf.org/pages/K-12-Disparity-Facts-and-Stats

Department of Education Office for Civil Rights: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/2013-14-first-look.pdf

Books Mentioned:

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-Walker/9781501144325

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