k-12-education
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classroom.cloud Turns the School Screen Into a Safeguarding Signal
A British software veteran took three awkward school jobs - teaching, device support and online safety - and put them in one browser tab. The clever part is not watching screens; it is deciding which signals deserve a human response.
John Jorgenson’s Quietly Radical Marketing Idea: Start by Listening
The Cambium Learning CMO built a career turning educational products into legible ideas. His more revealing work is quieter: making room for people to do the work only they can do.
Cambium Bought the Edtech Toolbox. Then It Started Rearranging the Drawers.
The $900 million take-private turned Cambium into a collection of specialist K-12 brands. Its latest move - merging two of the best known - reveals where the house-of-brands strategy bends.
Lucy Zarlengo Has Spent 25 Years Making Complicated Companies Make Sense
Her route from advertising agencies to Panorama Education is a lesson in translating complexity: begin with the customer, connect purpose to performance, and leave the jargon at the door.
Steven Gittleson Learned to Stop Worshipping the Software
He began coding games at 12 and sold software at 15. Decades later, LightSail taught its engineer-founder a harder lesson: in a classroom, technology works best when it listens.
The Homework Camera That Became Indonesia's $27 Million Bet on Better Math
CoLearn turned a familiar after-school problem - a student stuck on one equation - into a mobile funnel for live, small-group tutoring. Its wager is that Indonesia's education gap is not only about access, but confidence, explanation and the quality of the teacher on the other side of the screen.
Jolynn Shuler Built a Career at the Point Where Classrooms Meet Markets
Before she led marketing at McGraw Hill, Jolynn Shuler worked the product demos, district conversations and platform sales that make education technology real. Her career is a study in how fluency across functions becomes a leadership advantage.
The Charter Network That Beat the Odds - and the Rankings
A single Harlem school that opened with 165 kids in 2006 now tops New York State's math rankings and expands into Florida. Here is how Success Academy built it, and who is paying for it.
The Company Running Public Schools Like a Network - and Teaching Courage on Tuesdays
National Heritage Academies has spent three decades turning a Grand Rapids experiment into a 103-school operating system. Its pitch is consistency: centralized support, measurable academics and a character curriculum built around one virtue at a time.
HMH
It started as a Boston book publisher in 1832. Today HMH wants to be the software layer between the test a student takes and the lesson they get next.
LiveSchool
LiveSchool is a K-12 behavior tracking and rewards platform built to make Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) simple to run at scale. Teachers award or deduct points in seconds from a phone or browser, students redeem points in a paperless school rewards store, and administrators watch school culture data update in real time. Founded in Nashville in 2011 by former middle-school teacher Matt Rubinstein, the company helps roughly 1,200+ schools shift the focus from punishment to recognition, sending families a weekly behavior recap so students, teachers, and parents stay on the same team.
Uncommon Schools
Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit charter management organization that starts and runs outstanding urban public charter schools designed to close the achievement gap and prepare students from low-income communities to graduate from college. Founded around North Star Academy in Newark in 1997 and relaunched as a multi-state network in 2005, Uncommon operates roughly 53 K-12 schools serving about 20,000 students across New York City, Newark, Camden, Rochester, Troy, and Boston. Beyond running schools, it is a national force in teacher development - home to Doug Lemov's 'Teach Like a Champion' methodology - and pairs rigorous, data-driven instruction with long-term alumni college coaching.
Julie Jackson
Julie Jackson is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Uncommon Schools, a nonprofit network of high-performing public charter schools serving roughly 20,000 students across New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The first Black Co-CEO in the organization's history, she has spent three decades in education, starting as a Teach For America corps member in Paterson, New Jersey in 1994 and rising from founding teacher and principal to President and now Co-CEO. She oversees all 53 K-12 Uncommon Schools and has trained more than 25,000 teachers and leaders across the United States and abroad. Known for her belief that schools should be places of both joy and rigor, she is a recognized voice on teacher development, college completion, and equity in urban public education.
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.
ComputerLand of Silicon Valley
ComputerLand of Silicon Valley (legally CCT Technologies Inc.) is a San Jose-based technology solutions provider and value-added reseller founded in 1991. Over three decades it grew from a storefront computer sales-and-service shop into a full-service IT partner delivering cloud, cybersecurity, managed services, network infrastructure, virtualization, unified communications and IT logistics to government agencies, K-12 and higher-education institutions, and commercial businesses across California and beyond. A longtime approved E-Rate and NASPO ValuePoint reseller and Microsoft authorized education reseller, the company was acquired by cloud and cybersecurity firm ISSQUARED Inc. on May 1, 2024.
NoRedInk
NoRedInk is a K-12 writing platform used in more than 10,000 schools that helps students in grades 3-12 become stronger writers through adaptive, interest-based exercises, scaffolded composition tools, and an AI-powered Grading Assistant that cuts teacher grading time roughly in half. Founded in 2012 by former Chicago English teacher Jeff Scheur, the company builds around a taxonomy of common student writing errors and personalizes practice using topics students actually care about. Students have completed billions of exercises on the platform.
Classkick
Classkick is a Chicago-based education technology company that makes a digital formative-assessment platform where teachers watch students work in real time and give instant feedback. Founded by former Teach for America math teacher and ex-Google/YouTube engineer Andrew Rowland, the tool lets teachers build or import interactive assignments, draw directly on each student's canvas, drop reusable feedback stickers, and auto-grade multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank answers. Students can raise a virtual hand for help - even anonymously - and ask peers. Used by more than 10 million users across all 50 U.S. states and dozens of countries, Classkick's pitch is simple: more tries for kids every day, and less grading busywork for teachers.
CodeHS
CodeHS is a K-12 computer science education platform that gives schools everything they need to teach coding: a browser-based coding environment, a full standards-aligned curriculum spanning elementary through AP, teacher tools for grading and progress tracking, professional development, and industry certifications. Founded in 2012 by two Stanford CS section leaders, Jeremy Keeshin and Zach Galant, it now reaches millions of students and thousands of schools, and in 2025 acquired the K-8 creative coding platform Tynker.
EdConnective
EdConnective is a Richmond, Virginia edtech company that delivers virtual-first, one-to-one instructional coaching for teachers, coaches, and school leaders. Founded by Will Morris, it records classroom instruction, has expert coaches analyze the footage, and returns bite-sized, actionable video feedback within about 48 hours - turning district priorities into everyday classroom practice. The company reports roughly 35-40% gains in student engagement, rigor, and content mastery, and pairs its coaching with interactive workshops and PLC facilitation for educator teams.
Generation Citizen
Generation Citizen is a national nonprofit that brings action-oriented civics education into middle and high school classrooms. Founded as a 2008 student project at Brown University, it partners with schools and districts to run a project-based curriculum in which students identify a local issue, research it, and take real civic action - then present their work at community 'Civics Day' showcases. The organization also advocates for state and federal policy that funds equitable civic learning. It has reached more than 250,000 students and, in recent years, serves roughly 25,000 students annually across 150+ schools in eight states.
Reportwell
Reportwell is a Detroit-based, AI-powered compliance and reporting platform built for the K-12 education world - charter school authorizers, districts, agencies, and the schools they oversee. Founded in 2023 by a team of former education agency and school leaders, it scans for new laws, board decisions, and regulatory shifts, keeps policy documents current automatically, and answers plain-language legal questions through an AI chat. The goal is simple: turn the dreaded audit scramble into a routine, so educators can spend less time on paperwork and more time on students.
Super Teacher
Super Teacher is a New York-based edtech company building an AI-powered tutoring app for elementary school students. Founded in 2022 by former Google product manager and NYC math teacher Tim Novikoff, it delivers unlimited, conversational one-on-one tutoring in reading and math for roughly $15 a month - a fraction of the cost of a human tutor. Unlike most AI education tools, Super Teacher avoids large language model guesswork in favor of a deterministic content system designed to always give correct answers. Around 20,000 families have signed up, and public schools in New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii now use the app in classrooms.
Jeremy Keeshin
Jeremy Keeshin is the CEO and co-founder of CodeHS, the online platform that teaches computer science to millions of middle and high school students. A Stanford computer science graduate who cut his teeth as a section leader for the university's legendary intro programming courses, he launched CodeHS in 2012 with classmate Zach Galant to bring coding to schools that had never offered it. He wrote 'Read Write Code,' a friendly primer arguing that coding is the new literacy, and he still finds time to juggle, chase crosswords, and crack jokes rooted in his college days running the satirical paper The Stanford Flipside.
Andrew Rowland
Andrew Rowland is the founder and CEO of Classkick, a Chicago-based education technology company whose real-time digital notebook lets teachers see every student's work as it happens and respond instantly with notes, audio, or chat. A former Chicago high-school math teacher known to his students as 'Mr. Roro,' Rowland taught through Teach for America and started a school robotics program before retraining in computer science and working at Google and YouTube. He built Classkick to scale the thing he loved most about teaching: the 'aha' moment and the fast feedback loop. The platform now reaches more than half of U.S. schools and students in 180-plus countries, running on Firebase infrastructure.
Jacob Allen
Jacob Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Reportwell, a software startup that turns the slow, paperwork-heavy work of regulatory compliance reporting into a clean, AI-assisted portal, starting with K-12 schools and the agencies that oversee them. He came to the problem the hard way: as the co-founder and CEO of pilotED Schools, a charter network built around identity and sociology, he drowned in state and city compliance reports and decided to build the tool he wished he had. A Teach For America alum, Echoing Green Fellow, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education honoree, Allen has spent his career on the conviction that students do better when they understand who they are, and that the adults serving them deserve software that does not get in the way.
Will Morris
Will Morris is the founder and CEO of EdConnective, a Richmond, Virginia company that delivers one-to-one virtual instructional coaching to teachers, instructional coaches, and K-12 leaders. After a year mentoring African American freshmen in a Chicago charter school and graduate research at the University of Pennsylvania on coaching as a lever of teacher quality, he built a platform that pairs educators with coaches the way a dating site pairs partners, then feeds them timely, non-evaluative video feedback. EdConnective operates across more than a dozen states, has delivered thousands of coaching sessions, and reports double-digit gains in student engagement and mastery.
Scientific Learning, a Carnegie Learning Company
Scientific Learning, now part of Carnegie Learning, builds neuroscience-based reading and language software that rewires how struggling readers process language. Its flagship Fast ForWord program treats reading difficulty at its root - the brain's ability to process sound and sequence information - rather than drilling worksheets. Born from lab research by four scientists in 1996 and acquired by Carnegie Learning in 2020, the company has delivered cognitive-skills and reading interventions to students in more than 40 countries, backed by decades of peer-reviewed research.
Amplify
Amplify is a New York-based K-12 education company that builds core and supplemental curriculum and assessments in literacy, math, and science, all grounded in the science of reading and used to turn student data into instructional support for teachers. Born as Wireless Generation in 2000 and now backed by Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective, its programs - including Amplify CKLA, Amplify Science, Amplify Desmos Math, Boost Reading, and mCLASS - reach more than 18 million students and teachers across all 50 states.
zSpace, Inc.
zSpace builds headset-free augmented and virtual reality learning systems that let students hold and manipulate lifelike 3D objects on a laptop or all-in-one screen using a stylus and head-tracking glasses. The platform powers STEM and career-and-technical-education programs - from dissecting a virtual frog to wiring a circuit or exploring human anatomy - in thousands of U.S. school districts and 50-plus countries. Founded in 2007 as Infinite Z and renamed zSpace in 2013, the San Jose company went public on the Nasdaq in December 2024 under the ticker ZSPC.
Larry Berger
Larry Berger is the co-founder and CEO of Amplify, the Brooklyn-based education company he started in 2000 as Wireless Generation. A Yale-trained English major, Rhodes Scholar, and former White House Fellow at NASA, he built mobile assessment tools that put data in teachers' hands, then steered the company through a $360M News Corp acquisition and a 2015 spinout backed by Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective. Today Amplify's curricula reach millions of students across all 50 states. Berger is also a published poet and the rare edtech CEO who wrote a public 'confession' questioning the hype around the very personalized-learning future he once championed.