A search result is a peculiar kind of promise. It says the answer is somewhere in here. The person clicking still has to do the rest. Todd Schwartz had spent years in the business of helping people find things online when he helped launch a company whose customers had little time for the rest: parents trying to help their children learn.
Education.com arrived publicly on June 21, 2007, offering more than 4,000 reference articles, editorial material and online communities. Schwartz was its vice president of marketing. Ron Fortune was CEO. The proposition was straightforward: gather useful educational information in one place, so a parent could spend less time hunting through the web.
Over the following years, the company would become a library of worksheets, games and lessons, then a subscription business, then an acquisition for IXL Learning. Schwartz would become co-CEO alongside Rich Yang. But the early problem was already there, hiding behind the search box. Finding a page and knowing what to do next are separate accomplishments.
The search marketer meets the homework problem
Schwartz came to this work through advertising and sales. His earlier roles included directing sales for Ask.com in New York and co-founding directMASS, an online media and search-marketing agency. In November 2005, he joined Wahlstrom Group as executive vice president, interactive. His responsibilities at directMASS had included sales, marketing and client services.
At IPG Media, he worked on bringing search-marketing services together across the group’s agencies. That was an operating problem as well as a marketing one: organize people, tools and services so that a customer could get something done. Education.com would give those skills a different audience.
By January 2008, Schwartz was discussing how visitors could help shape the material other people encountered on the site. Education.com used the research paths of its users to make relevant content easier to discover. A search query alone could miss the context that made one article useful beside another.
“Strict search wasn't doing it for us.”
Todd Schwartz, 2008
There is a pleasing complication in hearing that from someone with his background. Search had been part of his trade. Now he was describing its limits. The visitor needed a useful surrounding experience, rather than a fresh expedition every time another question arose.
A business measured in return visits
By June 2015, Education.com had passed six million members, up from five million six months earlier. Its offering included more than 15,000 worksheets, the Brainzy math and reading program, online games and a do-it-yourself summer camp. The camp supplied fourteen weeks of themed activities, with excursions into sea creatures, animals and superheroes.
The superhero had a modest assignment: make another day’s learning easier to begin. These were resources for the gaps between formal instruction and family life, useful to adults with different schedules and responsibilities. A teacher might arrive for a classroom activity; a parent might need something for an afternoon at home.
For Schwartz, 2015 also marked a financial turning point. He helped build the subscription business that brought Education.com to first-time profitability that year. The company remained profitable through its 2019 acquisition. That gives the story a measure beyond how many people registered: the business had developed a way to support its continuing operation.
In October 2016, Education.com reported more than ten million members and subscription revenue growing by over seventy percent year over year. Audience and revenue were moving together. Those figures describe a business gaining traction; they do not, by themselves, tell us what any particular child learned.
The distinction matters in a company serving several people at once. The adult chooses a resource, the child uses it, and the subscription must earn its renewal. Each has a claim on the product’s attention. A cheerful game can help open the door. The lesson still has to go somewhere.
Give the library a map
Education.com’s August 2016 guided curriculum addressed that next step. It connected a collection of 30,000 resources with sequenced lessons in math and language arts. Skills built on one another. Adults could choose a particular area or follow a broader progression, with reporting to help them see where support was needed.
This was a change in the job the company was doing. A library offers choices. A curriculum also offers an order. The difference becomes practical when an adult has found three promising activities and still needs to decide which one should come first.
Games, songs, printable work and digital exercises gave the company several ways to approach a skill. The variety was useful because the underlying task stayed specific. A child practicing reading or mathematics did not need to admire the size of a catalogue. Someone needed to select a sensible place to begin.
Schwartz’s marketing background belongs in that story. Explaining a service, helping people find it and making it usable are connected responsibilities. At Education.com, the company’s development brought them closer together. The promise made before the click had to survive the experience afterward.
The work between the worksheet and the child
As co-CEO, Schwartz also spoke for the business as it widened its reach. In October 2018, Education.com acquired the KidsKnowIt Network, which Utah elementary-school teacher Hiram Bertoch had founded in 1998. Its websites and activities had grown from a classroom project into a collection attracting millions of annual visitors.
Schwartz described a fit between the two organizations’ audiences and educational purposes. The acquisition brought additional learning materials into a company already serving parents, teachers and homeschoolers. It also connected an operator’s growth plans with work that had begun in an individual teacher’s classroom.
In March 2019, another announcement concerned the distance between a resource and a student’s desk. Education.com integrated with Google Classroom. Teachers could assign materials, bring in their class rosters and use Google tools to sign in or save content. Each feature shortened a small part of the route from choosing something to teaching with it.
“To make the classroom experience for educators as easy as possible.”
Schwartz’s stated goal, March 2019
The shared CEO title matters here. Schwartz and Rich Yang led together during this period, with Yang also explaining the company’s curriculum and product direction publicly. Education.com’s growth was the work of a team of educators, designers and operators. Schwartz’s chapter sits inside that collaboration, rather than turning every company milestone into one person’s achievement.
The same year, Education.com’s scholarship program committed $45,000 annually to students pursuing education-related degrees. Schwartz spoke about helping future teachers overcome barriers to entering the profession. Alongside materials for the classroom, the company was supporting some of the people preparing to stand in front of it.
One award supported graduate or undergraduate study in early education; another supported undergraduates from low-income or minority backgrounds. A new scholarship opened the program to high-school seniors planning an education degree. The recipients were at different stages of the same journey, preparing to do the work that gave the company’s resources their purpose.
On November 18, 2019, IXL Learning announced its acquisition of Education.com. The platform then served more than twenty-three million teachers, parents and homeschoolers. Its collection included over 30,000 digital and printable resources. The site that had opened with educational information had become a place where adults could select, organize and deliver learning activities.
A different kind of hook
Schwartz later became CEO of Hooked & Company, home of Hooked on Phonics. By May 2024, he was appearing in that role in a twenty-minute business interview. The audience was familiar: adults looking for ways to help children develop foundational skills. The brand, however, had a history reaching back to the 1980s.
Hooked on Phonics had moved through physical learning sets and into apps, retaining printed materials alongside digital activities. Its products made room for both the device and the book. For an executive who had helped build a business around printable and online resources, that combination offered familiar practical territory.
Schwartz earned a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Maryland and has served as an adjunct lecturer at Columbia University. The lecturer’s role adds another setting to a career spent around education: alongside building and marketing products, he has had a place at the front of a room himself.
There is also a quieter personal detail in Schwartz’s own introduction: he describes himself as a father, a husband and an enthusiastic consumer of music. The musical preferences remain his business. The appetite suggests a life with interests outside the next membership report.
Colleagues describe another side of his working life. Recommendations emphasize encouragement, empathy and attention to team culture. Those are personal judgments, but they add a useful human dimension to a career otherwise easy to reduce to titles and transactions. He has also taken operating experience into startup mentoring networks, including Dreamit and SuperCharger Ventures.
The next room is virtual
Today, Axon Park lists Schwartz as COO. The company builds learning environments using virtual worlds and AI. It is a different setting from Education.com’s early collection of articles, though the relationship between people, content and the next useful action remains part of the work.
A career can look tidier from a distance than it felt while being lived. Schwartz’s includes advertising sales, search marketing, company building, shared leadership and another turn through children’s learning products. The connection is clearest in the tasks: find an audience, organize an offering, help a team deliver it, make it worth returning to.
For all the changes in format, a parent or teacher still has to begin somewhere. A useful product respects that moment. It offers a manageable task, a reason to continue and a way to see what comes next. Schwartz has spent much of his career working close to that ordinary, demanding promise.
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