college-and-career-readiness
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The High School Built for the Student Who Needs a Second Draft
In Santa Paula, an 86-student continuation school treats a missing credit as a solvable problem - and a teenager's past as something other than a verdict.
SchooLinks
SchooLinks is an Austin-based edtech company that builds an all-in-one college and career readiness (CCR) platform for K-12 school districts. It replaces the patchwork of separate counseling, course-planning, career-exploration, work-based-learning and compliance tools with a single student-first system, using behavioral data and machine learning to personalize each student's postsecondary path while giving administrators the accountability and state-reporting tools they need. Founded by Katie Fang in 2015, the company operates across 40 states and raised an $80 million Series B in October 2024 - the largest U.S. edtech deal of that year.
Katie Fang
Katie Fang is the founder and CEO of SchooLinks, an Austin-based education technology company whose college and career readiness platform serves millions of K-12 students across U.S. school districts. Born in Shanghai and educated across four countries, she taught herself to code and built the first version of the product with $5,000 in savings, then grew it from a student-facing app into an enterprise SaaS platform that school districts use to track and improve student outcomes. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, she has taken SchooLinks onto the Inc. 5000 list three years running and raised roughly $90 million in venture funding through a 2024 Series B.
Paper
Paper is a Montreal-based education technology company that contracts with K-12 public school districts to give students unlimited, 24/7 access to live online tutoring, writing feedback, and college-and-career planning tools at no cost to families. Founded in 2014 as GradeSlam, it scaled to serve millions of students across hundreds of districts, reached unicorn status with a 2022 Series D, then weathered a sharp contraction in 2024 as pandemic-era school funding dried up.