Education Week - February 7, 2018 - 11

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > TRACKING NEWS AND IDEAS IN EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
www.digitaldirections.org

Clever to Help Schools
Track Ed-Tech Usage
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, the six-year old San
Francisco-based company 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's activity on a
wide range of learning programs and
applications.

If there's not a
conversation about
how to make change
in the classroom to
help students, this
is all for naught."
PAIGE KOWALSKI
Data Quality Campaign

"Educators around the country
have told us they've never had more
data to work with, but that it's never
been more difficult to access and
understand," Bosmeny said. "Our
aim is to help them make sense of
the data they already have, in a way
that's safe, easy, and smart."
Experts in the K-12 and ed-tech
arenas say there's 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've purchased are being properly utilized,
if they're 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, crashed and burned after

fierce backlash from parents and
privacy advocates.
Given the stakes, and given Clever's 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.
"There is a huge need," Carolan
said. "And Clever is in a unique position to offer this product because
they have such a large footprint."

Addressing 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 "single sign-on" 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's 4,200-student
Lindsay Unified schools, described
the challenge his district hopes the
new product might help address.
Lindsay Unified currently makes
districtwide 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, "it's hard to know who's
doing what, hard to know the quality of the data you're getting out [of
the different systems], and you can't
ever keep up."
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's also an indicator of student progress on a specific
learning activity-for example, how
many texts each child has read in an
application called Reading 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.

Mitch Tobias photo

By Benjamin Herold

Tyler Bosmeny, CEO of ed-tech
company Clever, is launching a
new service that aims to track
how students are using all the
technologies in their classrooms.
But one of Clever's competitors,
BrightBytes, suggests Clever
does not have all the pieces of
the puzzle to make this work.

Why are such functionalities significant?
One of the biggest problems in education technology, said Hal Friedlander, the founder and CEO of the
nonprofit Technology for Education
Consortium, 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's just
being implemented incorrectly.
"If an app says it requires two
hours a week, and kids are only
getting 20 minutes, it's hard to say
the app doesn't work," Friedlander
said. "It sort of pulls the rug out
from under everybody."

Competitor Critiques Strategy
Still, there are many questions
about how big a difference Clever's
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-usage data, plus a single
progress metric per program-are
just "one piece of the puzzle."
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 stu-

dents perceive the tools being used
in their classrooms.
"Our approach is about creating a
more complete picture," 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.
"Teachers need help understanding what they can do with this information once they have access
to it," said Kowalski, the executive
vice president of the nonprofit Data
Quality Campaign. "If there's not
a conversation about how to make
change in the classroom to help students, this is all for naught."
Indeed, for all its excitement
about Clever Goals, even Lindsay
Unified's 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 moretypical 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 "has been overwhelmingly
beneficial in terms of giving us additional data points to see whether
we're sticking to the tools we've committed to and done research on," but
"we don't use it to tell us which programs are effective or not effective."
"That would be oversimplified,"
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-but downplayed
the idea that Clever will help deter-

mine which products are effective
and which are not.
Bosmeny also said he believes everyone can benefit from Goals-but
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.
"It's 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," said Friedlander
of the Technology for Education Consortium. "Clever is going to get asked
questions about that by any reasonably sized district."
When asked how much data is the
right amount for a third-party intermediary to collect, store, and feed
back to schools, Bosmeny responded
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's 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-
and carries some risks of its own.
Using technology should never be
seen as a goal in and of itself, he said.
"But on the district side and the
vendor side, everyone in education
is hoping to see more consistent
implementation and utilization of
ed-tech products," Bosmeny said.
"We think we have a role to play
in that."

EDUCATION WEEK | February 7, 2018 | www.edweek.org | 11

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Education Week - February 7, 2018

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