Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed (2011)
&gt; The average, middle class person thinks about education as an expenditure, not an investment.<p>The way I remember it, middle class folks in Kansas City suburbs really, really care about the quality of their schools and levy property and sales taxes to fund it. Rural Ohio townships where dual earners are making 17k less than the national median for such households may not have a lot of middle class to speak of.<p>Cost and outcomes have always been a tradeoff. 1:1 tutoring is the gold standard for educational outcomes. We know that from there, outcomes fall as teacher:student ratios rise.  This fundamentally puts a cap on returns to improved quality -- if your improved school outcome is comparable to adding one additional teacher per grade level, well, you better be cheaper than those teacher&#x27;s salaries. And good luck finding that data in the first place. It&#x27;s not easy to convince folks to run the experimental treatment on their children to get that data.