Request for Education Startups
I&#x27;ve been slowly working on an idea in this area for a while and and would love to be able to work on it full-time, part of its a software problem and that&#x27;s the only part I&#x27;ve been working on thus far. I&#x27;m not doing this for monetary reasons at all, and don&#x27;t really see how VC would ever be the right solution and lawmakers probably wouldn&#x27;t allow it to happen either. But anyway I&#x27;ll put the gist of the idea up here. I&#x27;d like to see what everyone thinks. I&#x27;ve been working on it anyway even if it is completely futile, just because I at least want the software for this to exist and maybe somewhere, some government would allow it to happen. So here goes.<p>Basically, number one indicator of success in school (excluding socio-economic factors) is having good teachers and very low student&#x2F;teacher ratios, ideally 1-1 for most tasks (i.e traditional tutoring) and very small groups i.e. 3-5 per teacher for group work. Small groups have tons of benefits from keeping kids focused to dealing with misbehaving kids, etc.<p>Anyway, the idea consist in doing away with the traditional concept of a teacher at the primary school level (but eventually all levels). You can do this by hiring all your teachers on an hourly basis and leveraging college students, stay at home moms&#x2F;dads, or just anyone with a GED and wanting to make a few extra bucks on the side. These teachers can work even just a couple hours a week if they want. Also, you don&#x27;t have to have high standards on anything other than the teachers ability to communicate, being nice and helpful,liking to work with kids, and having a GED. The calculations I&#x27;ve done allow you to cut your student&#x2F;teacher ratios by about a factor 3-4 and additionally allow for special tutoring of kids who need it for a couple hours a week.<p>Another key aspect of the model is that now kids are in smaller groups and can be paired with others who work roughly at their own pace, also I want to note that age no longer plays a role in determining which classes a student is in.<p>The whole time we&#x27;re doing this the teachers and students are using software that has learning algorithms designed to tailor learning materials to the particular student. That student, then has a personalized and adaptive learning pathway through the digital courses at his school. There is also no longer the idea of a particular &quot;year of work&quot;. Students take a comprehensive exam to exit every class and a fully comprehensive end of year exam for the courses they have mastered in that years time frame. All students can move more or less freely to and from groups and take these exams whenever they want, skipping entire courses if they have already mastered the materials and can prove it by passing the exams. 
So its not age but ability which determines where a student is placed. You can think of a school year (or a entire primary through high school curricula) as a graph where the classes are nodes and to go from one class to the next all a student needs to do is pass a particular exam.<p>The only real pedagogical emphasis is that we try to teach students how to teach themselves and provide them the digital materials to do so. Also my dream would be to be able to offer this to kids from the poorest neighborhoods first, because they&#x27;re the ones who would benefit the most from a small group learning environment and 1-1 tutorship.<p>Anyway, that&#x27;s the idea. If anyone is interested in helping out, please ping me up (email in bio). Right now the software is slow going since its just been me and my brother working on this in our spare time. Thanks for the feedback.