Ed-tech company Clever has made its way into 60,000 U.S. schools by keeping things simple, offering free solutions to often-mundane problems, and mostly managing to avoid controversy.
Now, though, is pushing against those guardrails, launching a new service that takes aim at one of the most vexing technology challenges schools face: keeping track of how students are using all the technology in their classrooms.
The idea of Clever Goals, CEO Tyler Bosmeny said in an interview, is to give overwhelmed teachers and administrators a single dashboard where they can quickly get a snapshot of every student鈥檚 activity on a wide range of learning programs and applications.
鈥淓ducators around the country have told us they鈥檝e never had more data to work with, but that it鈥檚 never been more difficult to access and understand,鈥� Bosmeny said. 鈥淥ur aim is to help them make sense of the data they already have, in a way that鈥檚 safe, easy, and smart.鈥�
Experts in the K-12 and ed-tech arenas say there鈥檚 a glaring need for such a service. Many districts have invested considerable money in technology, but remain unable to answer basic questions about whether the tools they鈥檝e purchased are being properly utilized, if they鈥檙e improving student learning, and whether taxpayer dollars might be better spent elsewhere.
It remains to be seen, though, whether Clever Goals can make a dent in those problems. This will be the first time the company is asking schools to pay directly for one of its services. Other companies have offered analogous solutions, but none have yet taken widespread root. And the most high-profile effort to date to use data to better connect schools and vendors, a Gates Foundation-funded nonprofit known as inBloom, from parents and privacy advocates. (Education Week receives financial support from the Gates Foundation for coverage of continuous improvement strategies in education. Education Week retains sole editorial control.)
Given the stakes, and given Clever鈥檚 track record to date, this new effort will be important to watch, said Jennifer Carolan, a partner at Reach Capital, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that is not invested in Clever.
鈥淭here is a huge need,鈥� Carolan said. 鈥淎nd Clever is in a unique position to offer this product because they have such a large footprint.鈥�
Addressing Aggravating Challenges
Clever initially made its mark in K-12 by helping schools solve a banal but aggravating challenge: getting class rosters and student accounts set up correctly in ed-tech programs and apps. Half of U.S. K-12 schools now use that service, Bosmeny said.
In 2014, the company also began offering a 鈥渟ingle sign-on鈥� service that makes it easier for students to log in to roughly 300 different programs and apps.
Now, after an extensive pilot involving 20 school districts and 30 third-party vendor partners, Clever is launching Goals.
Nikolaus Namba, the director of 21st century learning at one of those partners, California鈥檚 4,200-student Lindsay Unified schools, described the challenge his district hopes the new product might help address.
Lindsay Unified currently makes district-wide use of five online learning programs, Namba said. For years, principals and teachers who wanted to see how students were using those tools have had to spend hours logging in to each program, downloading data from each, and manually merging the results.
As a result of that tedious process, he said, 鈥渋t鈥檚 hard to know who鈥檚 doing what, hard to know the quality of the data you鈥檙e getting out [of the different systems], and you can鈥檛 ever keep up.鈥�
With Clever Goals, though, Lindsay Unified educators and administrators can now quickly access a snapshot showing how many minutes each student spent on each of those five programs, Namba said. For each program, there鈥檚 also an indicator of student progress on a specific learning activity鈥攆or example, how many texts each child has read in an application called 69传媒 Plus.
Teachers can also set usage and progress targets for individual students, and they can see on their dashboard how students are progressing towards those goals.
The service will initially work with the 30 vendor partners Clever has already lined up, including the developers of such widely used digital and online tools as Lexia, Newsela, and ST Math. Clever hopes that dozens of other companies with whom it already partners for its other services will soon take part in Goals, also.
Why are such functionalities significant?
One of the biggest problems in education technology, said Hal Friedlander, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit , is that many schools end up using digital and online learning tools for far less time, and far less strategically, than the companies behind the tools say is necessary for students to actually learn.
The result has been an increasingly fraught debate over whether ed tech is failing, or whether it鈥檚 just being implemented incorrectly.
鈥淚f an app says it requires two hours a week, and kids are only getting 20 minutes, it鈥檚 hard to say the app doesn鈥檛 work,鈥� Friedlander said. 鈥淚t sort of pulls the rug out from under everybody.鈥�
Competitor Critiques Strategy
Still, there are many questions about how big a difference Clever鈥檚 new dashboard might actually make for most schools.
Clever competitor BrightBytes, for example, offers an analogous service that is currently used in about 2,800 districts across 47 states. In an email, BrightBytes Chief Revenue Officer Ken Goldstein said the limited data Clever will offer through Goals鈥攗sage data, plus a single progress metric per program鈥攁re just 鈥渙ne piece of the puzzle.鈥�
In order to really understand the impact of ed tech, Goldstein argued, educators also need data on how technology usage affects academic achievement, how that relates to the amount that was invested in the technology, and even how students perceive the tools being used in their classrooms.
鈥淥ur approach is about creating a more complete picture,鈥� he said.
On the flip side, Paige Kowalski, a prominent proponent of effective data use in schools, worries that many educators will require extensive training before they can make effective use of even the comparatively limited data Clever offers.
鈥淭eachers need help understanding what they can do with this information once they have access to it,鈥� said Kowalski, the executive vice president of the nonprofit . 鈥淚f there鈥檚 not a conversation about how to make change in the classroom to help students, this is all for naught.鈥�
Indeed, for all its excitement about Clever Goals, even Lindsay Unified鈥檚 experience piloting the product highlights some of its potential limitations.
As a national leader in the personalized-learning movement, Lindsay Unified has two things many more-typical districts lack: an extensive, thoughtful process for vetting the research behind any new software or app before it can be used in the classroom, and a culture in which administrators and teachers regularly use student data to drive classroom decisions.
As a result, Namba said, Clever Goals 鈥渉as been overwhelmingly beneficial in terms of giving us additional data points to see whether we鈥檙e sticking to the tools we鈥檝e committed to and done research on,鈥� but 鈥渨e don鈥檛 use it to tell us which programs are effective or not effective.鈥�
鈥淭hat would be oversimplified,鈥� he said.
Impact Yet to Be Seen
For his part, Clever CEO Bosmeny acknowledges that his company is trying to thread multiple needles with its new product.
He hopes Goals will ultimately help the field gain a clearer picture of the impact that various ed-tech tools can have鈥攂ut downplayed the idea that Clever will help determine which products are effective and which are not.
Bosmeny also said he believes everyone can benefit from Goals鈥攂ut acknowledged that some districts will inevitably be better than others at using the product to make decisions about buying and deploying technology.
And as Clever positions itself as an intermediary that controls an expanding universe of student data, some districts and parents are likely to have big questions about privacy and security protections.
鈥淚t鈥檚 one thing to collect a little bit of data from each app, but as you push all that information together, you can build pretty complete profiles of individual students,鈥� said Friedlander of the Technology for Education Consortium. 鈥淐lever is going to get asked questions about that by any reasonably sized district.鈥�
When asked how much data is the right amount for a third-party intermediary to collect, store, and feed back to schools, Bosmeny trod carefully.
Since its early days, Clever has shied away from the kind of extensive data collection that other efforts have embraced. Bosmeny touted his company鈥檚 privacy policy and terms of service, and he said that the trust Clever has built up with districts should help allay privacy-related fears. In addition, he said, the company will still refrain from collecting the types of student behavior or discipline records that were to be part of inBloom, or the types of open-ended clickstream data that some ed-tech companies seek to use.
At the same time, though, Bosmeny acknowledged that tracking how much time students spend using technology can only tell schools so much鈥攁nd carries some risks of its own.
Using technology should never be seen as a goal in and of itself, he said.
鈥淏ut on the district side and the vendor side, everyone in education is hoping to see more consistent implementation and utilization of ed-tech products,鈥� Bosmeny said. 鈥淲e think we have a role to play in that.鈥�
