Podcast: Larry Berger on EdTech Past and Future

We’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. Where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and today we’re talking about EdTech Pass in Future with Larry Berger. After his Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, Larry Berger served as a White House Fellow working on educational technology at NASA.

In 2000, he co-founded Wireless Generation, an early leader in reading assessment. After being acquired in 2010, the company became Amplify. Five years ago, after a spin-out, the independent company became a leader in digital K-8 English, math and science curriculum. Let’s listen in as Larry describes the history and the future of education technology.

Larry Berger, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Delighted to be here. Larry, I didn’t remember this, but you’re like an English lit guy. Why did you study English at Yale? You know, I was always interested in things literary and I think at certain points in my life,

I thought maybe I would be an academic in that field. But then I kept also being interested in computers and where they were headed. And I let those two forces fight it out. Are you still involved in poetry in some way? You know, I am.

What’s that about? I don’t have a lot of time to write it, but I certainly use every excuse to sneak it into the curriculum products that we build. And then I do serve on the board of the Academy of American Poets. I saw that.

Yeah, that produces the website poets.org, which is one of those top 50 websites for K-12 teachers. No, I love it. And I hadn’t made that connection till before. And so what poets or period do you most enjoy? You know, I’m pretty Catholic in the non-religious sense of that word in my taste.

But I worked a lot on modern American poets. So Elizabeth Bush, James Merrill, John Ashbury, sort of that crowd. And then when I studied at Oxford, obviously spent a lot of time on Shakespeare, Milton, Spencer, and mathematics. Fast forward to the origin story of wireless generation.

After Oxford, you did a White House fellowship at NASA. And that sounds like it may have been the inspiration for your career in ed tech, is it right? In many ways. I mean, I had always toyed with technology as avocation, but was always busy majoring in

things like English. And then when I got this White House fellowship, I thought I was going to do education policy work because that was when Vice President Gore had just invented the internet. And we were all going to figure out how to use it for education. And instead, Dan Golden, who was then running NASA, read my little application that was called

Children’s Lanes on the Information Superhighway. Because that was the name for the not yet World Wide Web at the time. And he said, you know, if you go to education or the Vice President’s office, they’ll let you talk about these things. But if you come to NASA, I will give you $5 million and let you build them.

And so I said yes. And in the end, we built a little something that I learned a lot from. I’m not sure the taxpayers got their money worth, but it certainly was my trial by fire on how to build software for education. And I was hooked.

So let’s try to set the stage for especially for younger listeners that might not remember the dark ages of like 2000, the late 90s. So Apple classroom of tomorrow had been around for more than a decade. There were a lot of big desktop computers sitting in the back of most American classrooms, a couple of laptops around a bunch of shrink wrapped games.

And online learning was sort of the new brave frontier. Little bit of adaptive learning. What else would you add to the picture kind of circa 2000 when you guys started your company? Yeah, I guess I would say people are also trying to figure out how to build some databases for schools, like schools had gotten started.

But for the most part, it was still the land of the desktop computer. And very often there were a few desktops that were brand new and had been bought with some grant money the school district received. And then there were another 40 or 50 that had been donated from some local corporation. So we’re actually computers from 1991 or two.

And the whole thing didn’t quite work, but schools were eager to show kids on computers, even if they hadn’t figured out why those computers were actually going to produce results. So what was the kernel of the big idea that formed wireless? So there were two. The first was, it’s funny that what you did, what we were just recapping,

reminds me of what my co-founder, Greg Gunn and I sometimes talked about as an origin moment, which was we were doing some work for as a consulting stuff for a publisher who pounded the table and said, we need to figure out how to own the teacher’s desktop. And I think it was Greg who passed me a note saying, do teachers have a desktop? Question mark?

And what he was getting at there was teachers weren’t necessarily thinking of computers as being a part of their daily life. Computers were things that people who work in offices had. Teachers had other ways of doing stuff. They had notebooks, they had file cabinets, they weren’t thinking of their life as being run at a desktop. And then also lurking behind that question was the implicit fact that teachers

aren’t sitting at a desk. They’re up and about teaching. And so the two founding ideas that got us going were number one, that we were going to try to build educational technology that wasn’t about putting the curriculum inside the screen. We were instead going to try to build things that automated teacher workflow. That was our term at the time. Like how do we take the things that teachers are complaining about in terms of paperwork and hassle and make those go away

or make them more efficient? That was number one. And then I think the only other idea was that we were not going to allow ourselves the excuse that a lot of the educational technology projects of our time had, which is teachers just aren’t good at technology. We’ve built something great, but it’s the teachers who are bad at it. And our sort of watch word at the time was it’s not that teachers aren’t good at technology, it’s that technology isn’t good at teachers.

And we were going to try to build stuff that worked for them. And that led very quickly to the idea of putting technology on a mobile device. There weren’t any iPhones, there weren’t even any iPods, but the mobile device of choice at the time was a Palm Pilot, which for our younger listeners is an iPhone without the phone or the music and where the total number of pixels was 160 by 160, which is about a quarter of what it is. In the late 90s, you could remember you could bump those

things and you’d contact would jump from one to the other. Yeah, yeah, it was so cool. And we still don’t really have that between it. I know. It was very intimate. It was. We all had my leadership team when I was a superintendent all had Palm Pilots. We were bleeding edge. Yeah. And you know, at the time, one of the giants in the field, you’ll remember this, because it was sort of the first piece of educational software to scale with teacher

enthusiasm was accelerated reader. And I remember Judy Paul was sort of the creator of that. And when I met her and I told her that I built things on Palm Pilots, she said she loves Palm Pilots because she keeps her recipes on them. And she beamed me her recipe for salmon cakes, which I have kept every since as one of the important part of that. That’s awesome. Technology. How did you finance the growth of this company? Because this

what people also may not remember is there really was no venture capital flowing to edtech 20 years ago. So how did you guys get this thing off the ground? Yeah, they’re really, I mean, they’re, you know, what there were were some some VCs who would who funded other things. And we’re hoping that edtech fit the model of those other things. And then as soon as they realized that education didn’t, they were they were very often unhappy with the investments they’d made at the time. And

there wasn’t really anyone who was trying to figure out, well, what is the opportunity in edtech? And so so we by necessity, but in retrospect, I think we were really lucky. And it was fundamental to how we got some staying power, power really funded it through angel investors. So, you know, we would when we met someone who was, you know, an executive who’d been successful in some other sector and gave a speech about education, we were sort of on their doorstep the next morning with

our business plan saying, you don’t know us, but you gave us speech that was pretty great. And here’s what we’d like to do about it. And the first one of those that that we we did when Greg and I were cooking up this idea, ended up being the one who wrote the first check. So Erwin Jacobs, who was the CEO of Alcom, at the time, I heard heard me out. And then he got rushed out of the room for something. And I thought, Oh, I think I didn’t close my elevator pitch before he got off

the elevator. But a few days later, there was a check in the mail for $250,000 and a post it note saying, let me know what percent of your company I’ve bought. Good luck, Erwin. And at that point, Greg and I were like, working somewhere else and cooking up our business plan. And we thought, this means we got to put our day job, get this thing started. And that’s how it happened. And then we just kept adding, you know, investors who were investing a million dollars or less,

pretty much through the whole life of the company. And, and we really had raised in the initial seven years of its growth, probably under $10 million. And then in the final three years before it was acquired, we, we raised another five. But compared to the way that lots of companies raise their money these days, where they can sometimes go, you know, straight into a series A of $10 or $15 million, it was a slow and you guys quickly became a leader in informative assessment. I

seemed to recall in the early 2000s, that wireless was really the clear leader in this new field of digital formative assessment. Is that right? Yeah, I think assessment was a really interesting place to play at that time, in part because the computers and the networks just weren’t reliable enough to try to use them day in and day out for teaching. But if you had a assessment window beginning, middle and end of year for doing interim assessments of different kinds, if the

networks weren’t working on Monday, you could do your assessments on Wednesday. And it wasn’t that your whole lesson plan fell apart. So it was a, it was a good entry point that in our case was made even better by the fact that we decided to work at first in this part of the interim or formative assessment market called informal reading inventory. That’s when kids aren’t yet old enough to take multiple choice tests, the teacher sits down with them and observes, do they know their letters?

Can they put letters together into sounds? Do they know how to read short passages? How fluently and accurately can they do that? And there were a whole set of paper-based protocols for doing that, that teachers would fill notebooks of these observations that they would take in a particular shorthand for recording what was going on as kids read. And we just figured out a way to put those protocols into a palm pilot, this mobile computer, and in doing so save the teachers a

whole bunch of time and then captured the data in much greater detail and with much greater precision. And that hit in its own right with teachers, like the ones who started using it loved it. But then I don’t want to underestimate the importance of a policy wind that that filled our sales, which is that the no child left behind law came out and within it was something called Reading First, which was a ton of money, about a billion dollars a year for early reading. And a couple

hundred million of it was targeted to making sure that each state had in place systems for doing scientific observational reading assessment. And by that time, that was what we were doing. And we were able to rapidly scale because we were serving those state needs. I say that because we are right now in a bit of a dark age in terms of federal policy, driving the landscape of education in any interesting direction. But it’s possible as we come upon another election

that we could be back again in the game of trying to figure out what policies help American education be great. And it would be nice if the ed tech world got behind that this time. So if we fast forward to about 2010, we’re still pre Chromebooks because they didn’t really debut until 2012, but access was expanding really rapidly. Blended learning models were begin to mature nationwide. You guys were expanding really rapidly and

a company made you an offer that you couldn’t refuse at that point. You became a private company? Yeah, it was sort of a fascinating moment. We were not looking to sell the company. Our board was pretty patient. As I said, they were these angel investors. But first, one of the big publishers knocked on our door and said, you know, we just sold the company. And we have a lot of liquidity and you’re top on our shopping list. Is there any chance you would sell the company? And I said,

no, we’re having too much fun working independently, but let’s figure out some things to collaborate on. And then they they named a price. And I said, no, no, no, don’t tell me with the price. And they said, no, no, no, when we name a price, that means you actually have to tell your board like someone has made an offer for the price of your shares. And I said, ah, okay, I guess they have. And so that started a conversation with the board where they said, look, if these guys are really serious

and they they might make a genuinely remarkable offer, then maybe you should consider it. And then right at that time, we also got an inbound query from what ended up being News Corporation. And after a bit of an auction dynamic kicked in, News Corp ended up the high bidder and we were we were suddenly part of a big media empire. And folks will remember that Joel Klein had joined them just before this acquisition. Yes, we had been doing a bunch of the reading assessment work in

New York City. We were aware of Joel’s work there. And so News Corp was trying to do something bold, and they they hired Joel and they they bought wireless generation. So I imagine that afforded you some interesting research and development probably at a different kind of level than you had been able to cobbling together angel investors. Is that fair? Absolutely. Yeah, no, we we had been funding each bit of innovation out of operations or sometimes getting a contract

that enabled us to create something for a foundation or a school district that we couldn’t have otherwise afforded. But suddenly News Corp was saying, we’re ready to make a big bet in education. We want to do ambitious things. And we have real resources to spend on where education is going. And I think when it all got started, the goal they were articulating is where will education be in 10 years? And maybe if we make a set of large scale investments, education could

get there in seven or eight years instead, because we would we would help it along. And and we believe that there will be more technology, more systems supporting education than today. And we’ve watched that happen in other parts of media. And we’d like to see if it if it will happen in education. And to a large extent, here are resources, you guys go figure it out. There wasn’t a big corporate agenda. There certainly wasn’t a political or editorial agenda.

There was just, let’s go figure out the future. And they were willing to to put a kind of capital against it that is rare in our field. It’s also worth noting that around the same time, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin and McGraw were all desperately trying to make the pivot to digital. And and venture investing was picking up rapidly year by year. So it became the ed tech was was pretty hot at that point, right?

Absolutely. And I think it was like heating up already. And then the fact that we got acquired by one company and that triggered the publishers to acquire some other ones suddenly showed investors that there were some healthy exits that could happen in K12. And I think that caused a build up in this supply of resources to invest in education startups. And and therefore growing number of education startups. So in the second half of the decade,

I think the three publishers found that making the pivot was was challenging. I suspect that the news corp at some point had decided against going long on ed tech. And you had a chance to lead a spin out of the company of what became Amplify. Was that about four years ago? Yeah, that was five by now five years ago. And yeah, essentially, they realized that education moves at its own pace. And I think those of us who were veterans of it had had

more than that might be the case. And that it probably wasn’t a sector for them to stay in. And so they they said, we probably are going to going to get out. And the management of what by then was now called Amplify said, well, give us a chance to just do a management buy out and take the company so that it’s a private company again. And they gave us a little bit of time. And the remarkable thing for us was that Emerson Collective, which is Lorraine Powell’s organization,

was interested in helping provide the capital to do that. We were helping them at the time with the XQ project. And and so they they provided some resources and some of the executive team of Amplify provided some resources. And suddenly we were a private company again. Once again, having to live by some of the laws of gravity in terms of how we invested in products and how we grew the business. And by then that was kind of welcome. It’s, you know, when you try to play

tennis without a net, I see that even Jade in the background, object to businesses that have started too much capital such that they’re there maybe placing too many bets at once. And so once once we were a private company, we had to focus our resources on what was really essential. And we got focused on what does it take to make a next generation of curriculum product work for teachers. And we became that was sort of the laser focus. Whereas before we’d had a lot of different

areas we were pursuing. And Emerson was generous with the resources to pursue that strategy. So I want to come back to Amplify, but let’s spend a couple minutes just trying to make sense of the the ed tech landscape today. We and we’ve seen over the last 10 years this really historic shift from print as primary to digital as primary. I for a long time said that it would be the most important shift in how human beings learned. I would say it hasn’t worked out quite as well as I had

hoped. But we’ve also seen a shift from a print core curriculum to to a bit of a hodgepodge of adopted and supplemental digital content. So it feels a bit paradoxical, sort of wonderful array of options, but also pretty confusing for teachers and schools. How do you think about this shift that we’ve gone through from print to digital and sort of core adoption to to amalgamation? Yeah. So my ideas about that have changed a lot. I would say even in the last two

or three years. So but maybe to back up a little a little bit, I think we all predicted sooner than it happened that there’d be a print to digital transformation. And I think in the same way that technologies go through waves and and vinyl records are the state of the art right now. I think we’re going to find that print and digital will coexist for much longer than we might have imagined 20 years ago. Yeah, print definitely has a much longer tail than I suspected. And I think

some of that has to do with the shift to digital instead of focusing on all the things that I remember reading, Tom Vander Arc articles about what what that shift would be about. And I believe them wrote some of my own and it was a bunch of affordances around personalization and feedback and support and data. I think a lot of the shift to digital in the consumer world ended up being about distracting kids, finding ways to grab their attention and and steer it towards things that were

good for the businesses that were getting hold of their attention. And the education world has had to step back and say, wait, that’s that’s not exactly what we had in mind. And one of the antidotes to that can be print, which doesn’t distract and it invites a kind of sustained attention that digital can sometimes work against. And so I think, you know, there’s a wave right now of keeping print in the classroom because it does some things really well and trying to invent the

type of digital product that is about supporting kids’ attention, supporting their engagement with materials, helping them focus. But that’s that’s that’s work we’re still figuring out how to do. And so I think, first of all, the print digital will continue to be a blend, like so many things in education that people want to be on one side or another of. And it ends up that some heterogeneous combination is what the schools actually want. But I would also stay and I’m really curious what

you think about this, because I feel like you and I have sometimes talked about these things and over and sketch things on napkins and, you know, at the bar. But I think for a long time, a lot of us, and I think you and I are both of this camp, but then sometimes I read stuff you wrote and I realized you were actually thinking clearly about it and the rest of us weren’t. And we just we read what we thought into it. But I was pretty focused back when I wasn’t creating

curriculum content on the idea that if the software tools and the personalization tools got good enough, then we would inevitably unlock all the content that was all bound up in textbooks. We’d flow it into platforms for content delivery and software and education would finally meet. And and but that content was certainly something that was in search of a platform that could deliver it better. And I think now that I actually make a lot of core curriculum, my opinions about that have changed.

And I don’t think I’m alone, meaning I think a lot of people are starting to tip back towards another view, which is that content ends up being an organizing principle for software. So it’s not, the software is out there and the content just has to get into it properly tagged and organized, so that teachers and learners can string it together in some algorithmic way. But that in fact, if you create really good, coherent content, that then software ends up migrating towards

that content to help teachers teach it to help them grade, give feedback, assess, and that instead of the software being the organizing principle and the content going to wherever the algorithm told it to, it’s actually the content that’s becoming the organizing principle. And it’s the software that’s migrating toward that. How would you square that with with those of us that have become pretty obsessed about learner experience and less so about content, but about trying to develop,

inspire, provoke a set of experiences that might aim less at academic outcomes and more at what we might call success skills, that agency, collaboration, critical thinking. So this obsession with learner experience as being the core design principle, how does that fit into your equation? Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I mean, my hunch would be that this is another one of those dichotomies that it’s not going to tip one way or the other,

and that schools figuring out how to blend those two ideas are probably going to be the answer. But I would say that I think the outlines of that answer might be implicit in what we both see when we go to visit some of these places that have maybe over-rotated towards one side or another. I guess it’s how we do both of those, how schools do both powerful experiences and thoughtful learning progressions. Back to Amplify, how would you tell people what you do these days?

We’re doing a lot, but at the heart of it remains that question that we started with two decades ago, which is we are focused on what do teachers need first and foremost. So we have three things that we always bring our product design back to, which is how are we saving teacher time, how are we deepening teacher understanding, and how are we extending teacher reach. And right now we tend to do that both in that territory of formative assessment where the

company got started. We still do a ton of work in early reading. It’s expanded to tackle issues that are kind of burning right now around dyslexia. So we are helping states and districts with screening and intervention around reading disability of different sorts. But there it’s still that idea of like how do we make it easier for teachers to do really high quality scientific assessments and use the results to meet each kid where they have needs. And then we also now do curriculum. We do

core curriculum in science and English language arts. And we have begun a big effort to do that in math. And then we’re also doing supplemental in math and reading. So digital supplemental products that are used by kids or groups of kids independently to work on key skills when they’re not in a whole class experience. Is that mostly K8? So far it’s mostly K8, although this math product that we’re building is going to be our first one where we’re doing high school as well.

We’ll talk more about that offline. I just did a terrific podcast with Joe Bowler and both of us would encourage you to skinny down the ridiculous amount of symbolic manipulation we do with kids and add a lot more data science. So hope you listen to that podcast before you roll that product out. Yeah, I think that’s going to be pretty front and central to the way we are designing. But I can’t wait to hear what the two of you have to say.

Let’s, I want to do a quick lightning round on EdTech. But any other thoughts on the roadmap for Amplify? What’s coming up in the next year or two? Well, interestingly, you mentioned, and I never quite picked up the thread of, you know, is it supplemental or is it core? Are people going to be stringing things together? And I guess part of when I was not yet involved with core curriculum adoptions, it was a little bit of a black box. And I assumed it was a black box that was not long

for this world. It was caused by when textbooks were the best way of structuring lots of information and delivering them to kids. And surely we were going to move beyond that. But over time, as we now participate in those core adoptions, I have come to be quite fond of the problem that they are trying to solve and the way that they do business over on the core side. The most important distinction is that the purchasing is done by teachers. I say that because a lot of what happens in the world

of EdTech right now is two things. It’s like trying to find free teacher users and maybe upsell them something or get to their district somehow. Or it’s a central office sale that you’re doing where you’re going and hoping that someone in the central office will buy your digital solution. When you build core curriculum, the central office isn’t as important. The real question is what will teachers who are going to have to teach from this program for the

next eight years, what will they think of it? And they form committees that are sometimes quite large, representing teachers from all the schools in the district. And in some states and districts, they pilot the finalists for weeks or even months before deciding. So there’s a real meritocracy involved in the places that choose their curriculum that way. And it’s actually quite empowering to teachers. They get to decide. In my old world, it helped a lot if I knew the superintendent and could

get a meeting and show them what I was working on and why it might be a good solution for them. In the curriculum world, that matters not at all. It’s the teacher committee and the superintendent wouldn’t presume to get in the way. So I like the democraticness of it. I like that it’s about winning hearts and minds of teachers instead of winning hearts and minds in the central office. Because finally, it unites who the user is with who the decider is. And that purifies the art of

building products for them. I’m not saying that the world of textbook publishing has been a very innovative or pure endeavor, but we’re trying to bring the energy of software development to that problem of what is core curriculum and how do we build something that teachers will fall in love with and want to use. All right. I’m going to suggest we try to wrap this up with some impossibly difficult questions. So try, see if you can give me a quick answer to very

difficult questions. All right. The EdTech, this may not be a lightning round, but headline, try headlines. What are the big barriers for EdTech today? I think it is still the disconnect between the buyers and the users. Teachers are now technically savvy. They know what they like. And yet the dollars are still often locked in a central office decision making. And I think that we still haven’t built enough stuff that saves teachers

time. So those are the two big barriers. That’s a great answer. Should we be excited about 5G? I think 5G is going to be a step forward. I might be even more excited about the next generation of Wi-Fi. I’ll tell you why. The next generation of Wi-Fi is going to once and for all end the can it get through the cinder blocks in your school? The answer will be yes. But it also will do a bunch of smart stuff with sensors in the school building. So the location of where is the

device and how are kids working together. Finally, that awareness of which group of kids is working together in what way, which has always been a bit of a black box to the software. You can’t tell where the kids are and we’ll have to put in place all kinds of privacy protections. But if four kids are working together in a corner of the library to solve the problem, I want to know that they’re together so that I can design software that serves them. I don’t know if 5G will do that too,

but I’m told that the next generation of Wi-Fi is going to have all of that kind of edge computing capability and sensors close to the learner. You optimistic about artificial intelligence, machine learning, specifically making ed tech products smarter? Yes, but I want to make sure we don’t overplay it. I think sometimes to do that people assume a human teacher out of the equation and I think the kinds of machine learning and the kinds of AI

that are going to make a real difference are those that extend the reach of teachers, not those that route around teachers to just try to do the teaching straight from the screen. Is AR and VR ever going to live up to the hype, at least in K-12? I don’t think so. I think in general, each new generation of multimedia, we’ve imagined that it’s going to be the thing that motivates and inspires kids and then it just becomes part of the culture. So teachers, kids are no longer wowed that there

are moving images on a screen. The hope in the days of the early invention of the television was that that was it. That was going to, once and for all, make kids excited about learning. I think it’ll probably be the same thing around AR and VR, that it will become a thing that kids have experienced in their media entertainment culture and it won’t make as much of a difference as we thought. A couple questions on learner profiles. How do we keep

collecting and developing learner profiles that inform learning but guard privacy? That is a hard one. I think that to some extent the will to do one depends on progress on the other, which is to say as people understand the power of a learner profile that accumulates over time and becomes deeper and deeper in its understanding of who you are and how you learn and what you want to learn, then we will find ways to solve for privacy because we’ll care about it in terms of the

amount of educational impact that it will have. But of course, the privacy controls and processes and systems have to be really robust so that people can trust it. I think it’ll happen. I think ed tech companies are suddenly all, it used to be that only some of us were privacy obsessed. I think now almost everybody is and the school systems would make us be even if we weren’t. And it’s going to be like lots of fields where I don’t love the fact that my bank knows as much as

it does about me but I need to have digital finance and I’m not going to give that up. So I think we’re in a good place where people understand that trade-off and are willing to make some sacrifices for educational effectiveness. But we have to deliver the educational effectiveness because people aren’t going to give up their privacy for something that isn’t working. Is interoperability going to get better?

I think so. It’s interesting. There have been a lot of ideas about interoperability. You and I have lived through things like SIF, that school’s interoperability framework that seemed like the best idea at the time and then a next generation of technology and a next generation of ways that systems work together comes along and the previous one seems obsolete. But I think right now we are, the standards are becoming mature, the importance of interoperability is becoming clear,

and there are some emerging dominant platforms that are part of the day of the school day for everyone like Google Classroom and sometimes it takes a dominant platform to organize the field around some shared standards. Is that formative assessment good enough to replace or dramatically curtail summative? I mean can we kill big end of year tests in the not to distant future?

Yes, we can kill them, but I don’t think it’ll be the current generation of formative assessments, which is to say a lot of the most widely used formative assessments are about providing a scaled score level that can travel with kids from year to year and from even from month to month to understand are we making a year’s growth in a year? But they are trying to take all of the complexity of education and or at least of math or English language arts, math or literacy,

and distill it into one number and they’re actually good at that, like the science and statistics of that is good in terms of if what you want to know is did growth happen. But all the other things you want to know educationally about what standards did kids master is not in that test score. And so the thing that will kill summative testing as we know it is embedded assessment. So a curriculum that is measuring

your progress every step of the way and can do both things can say how much growth has happened since last quarter or last year and has enough data points about what you’ve mastered and what you haven’t that it can also report on standards level learning so that it’s got educational utility as well. I could do this for another hour. Super interesting answers. Great to hear about the progress at Amplify. You guys are doing great work, fun to see you move into the core space.

Really appreciate your leadership in the sector over the last 20 years. Larry, thanks for joining us on the podcast. Tom, it’s really a pleasure. You’ve been both the most astute commenter on this but I think some of what makes you astute is you set a lot of the currents in motion that you later come around and say wise things about. So you have a head start on the rest of us. Well, I’m glad we’ve both had the opportunity to change our mind about a few things over the

years, Larry. Thanks for being on the podcast. It’s great to talk to you, Tom. Thanks. A big thanks to Larry for joining us on today’s episode. We appreciate his leadership in EdTech over the last 20 years. And listeners, don’t forget to rate, review, and recommend the show. If you appreciated what you heard or what you learned, take a minute and email it to a friend or share it on your favorite social media channel. That’s it for today, listeners. For the Getting

Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.