New York City schools have been among the most innovative in the country as discussed last week. NYC is home to the most education
industry leaders and the second most prolific tech startup and EdTech hotspot on the planet (after the Bay Area).
Education Industry.
The following are the larger and more notable education companies in NYC:
Pearson
‘s U.S. headquarters is in New York. North American K-12 and professional revenues are about $5 billion. A big part of the curriculum team across the
river in Upper Saddle River is moving to Hoboken.
McGraw Hill Education
is spinning out and may be
acquired by Apollo
.
Scholastic
is the fourth largest publisher with widely used titles like Read180.
Building on NewsCorps’ WirelessGeneration acquisition, Joel
Klein and Diana Rhoten are building out a cool tablet bundle at Amplify.
Knewton
, the adaptive learning folks (see blog about developmental math at ASU).
Edison Learning
has pivoted from school management to improvement and digital learning services.
Mosaica Education
, one of the larger charter management organizations, has a growing online learning operation, and an
integrated elementary humanities curriculum, Paragon.
Tutor.com
has been tutoring online since 1998.
BrainPop
creates animated content used at school and at home. It recently launched a cool game portal and have been working with the great game-based school Quest To Learn to test the efficacy of the games.
EdTech Startups.
Below are a few notable NYC edtech startups:
Socratic Labs
is an edtech accelerator embracing lean startup practices and supporting a collaborative coworking community.
Late Nite Labs
provides science lab simulations for online blended learning. This is dramatically increasing access for students in schools without formal science
labs both K-12 and Higher Ed.
Chalkable
aims to be the best web app store for education. If they pull it off and add rating features, this could be pretty innovative.
Knowledge Delivery Systems
provides teacher professional development.
Unbound Concepts
is building a proprietary natural language processing algorithm that can understand authored content in a deep ontological fashion. Their first app,
BookLeveler is an iOS-based App that provides a format for educators to share real-time, first-hand input on books and content used in the learning
environment.
Learn Bop
provides a one-on-one tutoring experience that is completely personalized. It guides students step-by-step through solutions so that they can
immediately learn from their mistakes. Teachers can author content, choose from a wide variety of user-generated content, and get immediate feedback
and data about their students performance.
Kinvolved
is a simple automated mobile platform, which allows teachers to inform parents and guardians of student absenteeism in real time. Through immediate
communication of attendance information, Kinvolved aims to increase student attendance and family engagement in education, especially in disadvantaged
or underserved communities.
Skillshare
allows anyone to teach anything anytime for free.
eduClipper
is a well-executed Pinterest clone for education.
Avenues
is Chris Whittle’s global private school network. Here is NY Magazine feature.
General Assembly
is a cool coworking space with collaborative learning in tech, business, and design.
ShowMe
offers an elegant iPad authoring tool that enables the development and publishing of user-generated lessons.
HireArt
helps companies gain a deeper understanding of applicant skills with work samples and video interviews.
Storybirds
are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print.
Investors & Bankers.
Hundreds of investors and bankers make New York hum; here’s a few active in EdTech:
Expansion Venture Capital
is an active seed stage edtech investor.
Rethink Education
is a new edu venture capital firm formed by a couple early Wireless Generation investors.
Spark Capital
has invested in a couple education deals including Academia.edu, Altius Education, DIY, and Skillshare.
City Light
is an impact investor and backer of 2U.
EastWind
is a boutique investment bank focused on education.
BerkeryNoyes
and Atwood (formerly QuayleMunro) represents a lot of education sales.
Education Growth Advisors
, Stamford, held the recent EdGrowth Summit in NYC.
Quad Partners
invests in vocational colleges.
Foundations are plentiful in New York. Carnegie has been a partner with Gates on school turnaround, new school
development and the Shared Learning Collaborative. Robertson, Tiger, and Robin Hood have been a big
supporters of charter schools and youth and family services. The Ford Foundation supports innovative secondary school developers in
NYC including Steve Barr’s Future is Now and Generation Schools.
Higher Ed.
The EdLab at Columbia Teachers College is an R&D center for an “education sector that is attuned to the
emerging post-industrial, information-based world.” Projects that will have a broad impact include theirVialogue series ,Launch Pad, and New Learning Times.
City University, NYC College of Tech, and IBM supported the design of an innovative 9-14 STEM school first deployed at a school called P-TECH and now is serving as the basis for additional schools throughout the city, state, and nation.
NYU’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation holds three annual
venture competitions
.
Bank Street College
has a well regarded teacher preparation program.
Council for Aid to Education
administers an innovative value-added college assessment and announced last week that it will be reviewing Coursera courses for credit.
Smart City.
New York is the financial capital of the world and the largest school district in the country; until recently education and finance had little to do with
each other. The high profile launch of Edison almost 20 years ago proved to be a false start but did lead to a wave of innovative school developers ( discussed last week). The edtech boom that fired up in 2010
doesn’t rely on top down decision making; it’s powered by viral adoption by teachers and students.
Despite state barriers to online learning, young people in NYC are taking advantage of anywhere, anytime learning. The NYC Department of Education (DOE)
has been slow to improve student access to technology, but the iZone project may represent the largest blended learning initiative in the country. The
confluence of money, talent, culture, and growing demand for learning will ensure that NYC will remain a edtech hotspot.
Steven Hodas, an entrepreneur working at the DOE said New York has “a faith in diverse human capital and the creation of levers, fulcrums, and conduits to
harness its relentless drive to bring new things into the world--are the essence of creative cities in any domain.”
Thanks to Marshall Buxton at Socratic Labs, Jason Weeby at EdPioneers, for their contributions to this post. General Assembly, ShowMe, HireArt and
Storybirds are Learn Capital companies where Tom Vander Ark is a partner.