Edtech Insiders

For over two decades, Chicago Scholars, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit leadership development organization, has empowered nearly 6,000 high-performing, under-resourced students to overcome systemic barriers to success in college. Chicago Scholars is the largest education nonprofit in Chicago, a city of over 2.5 million. In addition to its wraparound support for Chicago-based students, Chicago Scholars has created REACH Pathways, a first-of-its-kind app designed to connect top talent with professional opportunities in ways that feel less like homework and more like a video game. 

Jeffery Beckham, Jr. is the Chief Executive Officer at Chicago Scholars and co-CEO of Reach Pathways. Jeffery is a community leader, artist and tech-entrepreneur known for advancing the fight for equity for youth and marginalized communities throughout the United States. Jeffery lives by the quote: “To whom much is given, much is required.” He strives to support traditionally underserved youth, working as a mentor with the 100 Black Men of Chicago, Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity INC. and other Chicago programs. Jeffery is also a self-taught painter and uses his art to advocate for social and economic justice.  His work has been on display around the world.

Brooke McKean, the President at Chicago Scholars and co-CEO of Reach Pathways, has over a decade of executive-level experience in fast-paced and start-up environments, in addition to experience managing teams in 12+ countries. Brooke is an expert in change management and has developed dozens of systems, policies, and infrastructure across all areas of operations, including IT, HR, finance, data systems, and beyond. Brooke believes in service-oriented and values-based leadership to ensure that Chicago Scholars embodies the values that define its programs to “be the change.”

Recommended Resources:
TED-Ed
Twitter spaces
Youtube
Storybird
Finding Nonprofit Sustainability by Brooke Mckean
Dr. Raj Chetty's Research

Clay Colarusso is the CMO and SVP of Digital Strategy at American Student Assistance, a national non-profit changing the way kids learn about careers and navigate a path to postsecondary education and career success. 

Clay and his team focus on creating transformational digital experiences to support today’s youth in the development of their post-high school education and career plans. They recently launched ASA’s latest digital resource, EvolveMe™, which helps teens in middle and high school gain critical life and career skills and earn rewards along the way.

Recommended Resources:
Gen Z is Struggling: 5 Things They Need For A Bright Future by Tracy Brower, PhD

In this final Week In Edtech until August, we cover:

London EdtechX  and ISTE

Reading/Math Crisis :

• NAEP Results, Times
  • “Achievement declined across lines of race, class and geography. But in math, especially, vulnerable children — including Black, Native American and low-income students — experienced bigger drops.”
  • “The percentage of 13-year-olds who reported reading for fun has also declined. Last fall, 31 percent said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, compared to 22 percent in 2012.”
• Post: National test scores plunge, with still no sign of pandemic recovery
  • “The average math score is now the same as it was in 1990, while the average reading score is the same as it was in 2004.”
• 74: NAEP Scores ‘Flashing Red’ After a Lost Generation of Learning for 13-Year-Olds
• U.S. history scores hit all-time low among 8th graders

Byju’s:

• Byju's auditor Deloitte, three board members sever ties with embattled edtech startup
• Deloitte, three board members quit edtech giant Byju’s

AI (Alex and Ben)

• Workera launches Generative AI and ChatGPT assessments
• Online Learning Firm Nerdy Says Ai Is Writing 30% Of Its Software Code The Business Journals
• CreatorUp Launches its Redesigned Learning Store with Courses for Creators, Upskilling them for New Job Opportunities, including in Generative AI

Dan White is founder and CEO of Filament Games, an educational game company that’s been breaking ground in game-based learning for 18 years. 

Dan believes that good gameplay and good learning are complementary rather than oppositional forces. An alumnus of Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Dan earned an M.S. in Education Technology under seminal learning game scholars Drs. Kurt Squire and James Paul Gee. Prior to founding Filament in 2005, Dan worked as a teacher, an instructional designer, and a game developer. Dan’s passions include learning games, sustainability, mindfulness, and modernizing institutional education.

Recommended Resources:
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee
Ai Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee
Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers by Steven Pinker

Bridgette Leslie is the Co-Founder, CEO of IEP&Me, Inc. Bridgette had spent her career as a special educator, focusing on creating inclusive classrooms, fostering self-awareness advocacy with her students, and triggering innovation in several school settings. As an entrepreneur, she's been accepted into the ODX Accelerator, achieved a NewSchools Venture Fund grant, and recently completed the Techstars JP Morgan Chase Female Founders Catalyst program.

Mario Vasilescu is co-founder of Readocracy, an online learning platform that makes all the content you consume count. Readocracy includes a knowledge profile that quantifies and showcases your passions, private insights like a “Fitbit for your information diet”, and social features that reward people for being well-informed. With his team, they are on a mission to create a future where how we feed our minds matters just as much as how we feed our bodies.

Mario is a robotics engineer turned designer, digital strategist, and now founder obsessed with media ecology. Prior to entering the world of startups, he led digital innovation projects and digital literacy campaigns for national organizations in Canada and France. He is based in Toronto.

Melda Akin is the CEO and founder of D14.AI and STEM training organization Sirius Labs.

D14.AI provides an AI-driven software platform for healthcare clinics, gyms, and logistics companies to optimize their workforce and manage business operations in an easy, secure and affordable way.  Before launching D14.AI into Dubai’s burgeoning tech start-up scene, Akin was a software developer, system analyst, lecturer in computer and software engineering departments, project manager and the youngest director of an international tech company.

Melda Akin graduated from BSc Computer Engineering, and MSc in Intelligent Engineering Systems, focusing on Artificial Intelligence. Akin is the first woman in the world to organize and conduct AI and machine learning training for women in the MENA region. collaborating with the Cyber Defense and Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Akin has won many awards for her work: she was selected among 200 candidates as one of the eight best female-founded start-ups in the Middle East and Africa region by Standard Chartered Bank, as well as a  ‘New Entrepreneur of the year 2020’ by Gulf Capital, one of the Top 10 Women Behind Middle Eastern Tech Brands list by Forbes Middle East in both 2021 and 2022, and as one of the best seven women in tech entrepreneurship in Turkey by Microsoft.

Finally, Melda Akin serves as a mentor for the United Nations & for the UAE's NAMA Women Advancement organization.

Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer

Kim Smith is the founder of LearnerStudio, an equity-focused education investment studio being incubated inside Cambiar Education. 

She is also the founder and CEO of the Pahara Institute, a national nonprofit that aims to identify, strengthen, and sustain diverse high-potential leaders who are transforming public education. 

Immediately prior, she was co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners. Earlier in her career she was a founding team member at Teach For America, created an AmeriCorps program serving community-based leaders in youth development, led a trade show start-up, and did a stint in online learning at Silicon Graphics. 

After completing her MBA at Stanford, she co-founded the NewSchools Venture Fund, a philanthropy focused on catalyzing a bipartisan, cross-sector community of entrepreneurial change agents for public education.

Kim was featured in Newsweek’s report on the “Women of the 21st Century” as “the kind of woman who will shape America’s new century.”

Recommended Resources:
The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Girardharas
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

Anada Lakra is the co-founder and CEO of BoldVoice. Her mission is to empower every non-native English speaker to fulfill their potential through confident English. . BoldVoice is an app that helps learners to improve their English speaking clarity and confidence through videos from Hollywood accent coaches and instant feedback from speech artificial intelligence.

Previously, Anada built and launched 5 products (1 IPO, 1 exit via acquisition) in both enterprise and consumer, across verticals including retail, entertainment, and recruiting. She was recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, and holds a BA from Yale and MBA from Harvard Business School.

Recommended Resources:
How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do―And What It Says About You by Katherine D. Kinzler
Atomic Habits by James Clear

Ryan Craig is a Managing Director at Achieve Partners and was formerly an MD at University Ventures. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in education and workforce regularly appears in the biweekly Gap Letter, Forbes, and Inside Higher Education. He is the author of the upcoming book Apprentice Nation: How the "Earn and Learn" Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America (November 2023). He is also author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. Ryan’s first book was College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring. Ryan is a co-founder of Apprenticeships for America, a national nonprofit dedicated to scaling apprenticeships across the U.S. economy.

Previously, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus. His prior experience in higher education was at Columbia University. Ryan also founded and built Wellspring, a national network of boarding schools and summer camps for overweight and obese children, adolescents, and young adults. He began his career at McKinsey & Co.

Ryan received bachelor's degrees summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and his law degree from the Yale Law School.