Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Swing Education Raises $38 Million in Series C Funding

SAN FRANCISCO  – Swing Education, an online marketplace that connects schools and substitute teachers, announced today $38 million in Series C funding. The funding round was led by funds advised by Apax Partners LLP (“Apax”), a leading global private equity advisory firm, and by edtech investment firm Reach Capital. The funding enables Swing Education to invest in its growth and better address the nation-wide substitute teacher shortage.

This financing follows a 2018 Series B funding co-led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Owl Ventures and a seed round from a consortium that included Social Capital, Kapor Capital, Moment Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Red House Education, and Edovate Capital.

Swing believes that every classroom deserves a teacher, and every student deserves to learn without disruption. Since its founding in 2015, Swing has worked to improve the experience of being a substitute teacher and made it easier for K-12 schools to grow and manage their substitute teacher pools. Swing currently works with over 2,800 school partners and in the 2022-23 school year has supported these schools in filling over one million instructional hours with substitute teachers. …Read More

Funding an assistive listening system in your school

Untreated hearing loss can have lasting effects on students’ academic achievement, social relationships, and self-esteem. The Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA) reports that even mild hearing loss can cause a child to miss as much as 50 percent of classroom discussion. Without appropriate management and support, children with mild to moderate hearing loss achieve one to four grade levels lower, on average, than students with typical hearing, according to American Speech Language Hearing Association.

The CDC reports that nearly 15 percent of children ages 6 to 19 have low- or high-frequency hearing loss of at least 16-decibel hearing level in one or both ears. Noise-induced hearing loss also is on the rise among young people. This is largely attributed to listening to music through earbuds at high volume. And hearing loss isn’t just affecting students. Nearly 48 million American adults have hearing loss. Assistive listening technology can help everyone in school environments, with and without hearing loss, hear more clearly.

An assistive listening system (ALS) is a wireless system with a transmitter and one or more receivers that send audio – from a teacher’s microphone, TV, or other sound sources – directly to headphones, hearing aids, or cochlear implants without amplifying ambient noise. Assistive listening systems provide a vastly improved experience for those with hearing loss.…Read More

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Federal COVID relief funding will dry up soon. Are districts ready?

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

For the past couple of years, the Detroit Public Schools Community District has been able to tap its share of federal COVID relief aid to fund after-school enrichment programs that help students recover from learning lost during the pandemic.

But those funds will soon run out, and Detroit and other districts face some tough decisions about which programs and employees they can afford to keep once federal support is gone. …Read More

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Balancing sustainability and innovation in education

As recipients of public funding and taxpayer dollars, K-12 school budgets and spending expenditures are under a microscope. Relief funds stemming from the pandemic have only sharpened the focus, particularly on infrastructure and technology investments. In my role as Chief Technology Officer at one of the nation’s largest school districts, Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS), being accountable and ensuring we are making prudent financial decisions is a top priority for my team.

Striking a balance between innovation and sustainability is a challenge most school districts are facing. At HCPS, we have adopted three guiding principles that serve as the driving force and framework behind every IT decision—equity, efficiency, and excellence.

Equity…Read More

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How administrators can keep funding in their district

One challenge school administrators face is how to keep funding in their districts, especially as enrollment in public schools continues to decline. As public school funding is often directly tied to student enrollment, administrators around the country are having to make difficult decisions to ensure there is no delay in student learning like combining classrooms, laying off staff, and in some instances, closing schools entirely.

As someone who has worked in a variety of administrator roles from a principal in Miami-Dade County Public Schools to the President and Chief Executive Officer of Florida Virtual School (FLVS), I know what that pressure feels like, especially when our ultimate goal is to do what is best for our students and staff.

While there were certainly enrollment declines pre-pandemic, COVID-19 has continued to exacerbate the issue, as more than half of all parents considered or are considering choosing a new school for their children, with 17 percent of parents indicating they chose a new school for their children within the past year, 11 percent considered new schools, and 26 percent are currently considering new schools. Additionally, 48 percent of parents said their community does not offer enough education options for them.…Read More

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Millwood Public Schools receives $116,000 from Paycom, benefitting marching band, music program

OKLAHOMA CITY –  Paycom Software Inc. (NYSE:PAYC),  a leading provider of HR software, gave $116,000 to the Millwood Enrichment Foundation as part of a two-year commitment to the school district. The donation is an investment in the future of Millwood Public Schools and brings new resources that support ongoing and new educational programming. One specific area the funding will impact is Millwood’s expanding marching band program. 

“We greatly appreciate this generous donation from Paycom,” said Milo Wilson, president of Millwood Enrichment Foundation. “The funding will help to provide ongoing support for programs at the district and further improve the quality of education in our schools, specifically to improve our music education programs and provide new instruments for students who participate in band.” 

Millwood’s marching band has grown from around a dozen students in 2019 to over 70 students from grades 6-12 today. The first installment of the two-year financial gift from Paycom of $54,000 will directly support this important program. …Read More

IGNITE! Reading Announces $10m Series A Financing To Meet Accelerating School Demand For Its Virtual 1:1 Literacy Tutoring Program

SAN FRANCISCO – Ignite! Reading, a rapidly growing provider of virtual tutoring services that enable K-12 schools to dramatically accelerate student reading progress, closed a $10 Million Series A round of financing, led by Rethink Education. Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin and founding or current partners from Comcast Ventures, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Hellman & Friedman and Wing Venture Capital also participated in the financing as individual investors. The funding will be used to add more world-class professionals to Ignite’s leadership team, invest in its technology platform, and enable the company to scale its program to meet accelerating demand from schools and districts nationwide. 

Ignite is helping K-12 schools reverse pandemic-related learning losses by providing struggling readers with 15 minutes a day of one-on-one virtual instruction by tutors trained in the Science of Reading. Ignite’s easy-to-implement program teaches foundational reading skills, and students recorded an average of 2.4 weeks of reading progress for every week in the program during the 2021-2022 school year. The company is now teaching students to read in over 35 schools across seven states with no achievement gap for students of color, students with IEPs, multilingual learners or students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.

“With students learning to read at twice the rate that would be expected in a traditional classroom setting, Ignite! Reading’s one-on-one, high-dosage tutoring model is not just transforming how kids are taught to read, but how literacy instruction is being operationalized in schools. Teachers love the academic results Ignite is delivering and are equally excited by the significant positive impact on students’ social emotional learning,” said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, Co-Founder and CEO of Ignite! Reading.…Read More

Online learning can help schools retain students

There were 1.3 million fewer students enrolled in U.S. public schools in fall 2021 than there were before the pandemic began–a drop of nearly 3 percent. Given that educational funding is tied to enrollment, this development has serious implications for the availability of resources in our schools.

Some of this decline may be the result of changing demographics. But much of it can be attributed to families who have opted out of public schools during the pandemic, choosing private schools or homeschooling for their children instead.

On top of these losses, traditional school districts also have lost about a quarter of a million students to charter schools since the emergence of COVID. An analysis by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found that charter school enrollment increased by more than 7 percent from fall 2019 to fall 2020 as families found other alternatives for their children’s education.…Read More

Utah STEM Action Center Adds IXL Math to K-12 Personalized Learning Grant List

SAN MATEO, Calif.  — IXL, the personalized learning platform used by more than 14 million students, announced that it has been added to Utah’s K-12 Math Personalized Learning Software Grant list by the state’s STEM Action Center. The approval signals to educators that IXL Math is backed by rigorous research to support its effectiveness in Utah and opens up grant funding for schools and districts to adopt the platform.

The Action Center promotes STEM education in Utah by identifying and providing funding for resources that are proven to help learners grow. Before adding IXL Math to the state’s grant list, the Action Center and Utah Education Policy Center (UEPC) rigorously evaluated the platform to determine its efficacy. 

The UEPC’s research, Associations Between IXL Personalized Learning Software Use and Student Mathematics Achievement in Utah: 2020-2021, found a statistically significant relationship between IXL usage and an improvement in math outcomes, writing: “…on average [Utah students that] use IXL for 20 minutes or more per week perform better on statewide math assessments than students who do not use IXL.” …Read More