Why I started Abl
I dropped out of high school after 11th grade. I had decent grades and zero disciplinary problems, but for the majority of my schooling, I was bored, unmotivated, and disengaged. By American public school standards, my school wasn’t bad. It was an average, district school, in a safe, suburban neighborhood. I loved to learn but my school failed to engage students like me. And it mostly failed the rest, too.
Lucky for me, it was the mid-90s, and the web opened up an entire world of opportunity for driven but disaffected young people like me. I had countless advantages: I was born into a stable home with educated parents, I benefited from being both white and male in a society that unfairly privileges those attributes, and I came into an industry with tremendous opportunities and low start-up costs at a time when there were no incumbents. Despite my lack of higher education, I went on to achieve success professionally. Had I been born somewhere else, or looked like someone else, I likely wouldn’t have had the opportunity to use my talents in the same way.
Twenty years later I would go on to co-found Yammer, the first enterprise social network, which was eventually acquired by Microsoft in 2012. After 7 incredible (and challenging) years spent growing Yammer, I wanted to apply what I’d learned about technology, culture, and scale to help improve education for students around the country. Specifically, I felt the need to better understand why school failed me and continues to fail so many others. I left Microsoft in the fall of 2014 and spent a year researching education in America. I spoke with teachers, school leaders, EdTech startup founders, policy makers, funders, and many other people who have dedicated their time and energy to educating our children.
I was struck by the similarities between some of the core issues in education and those we tackled at Yammer. We built Yammer to help companies become more open and transparent, but found their real challenges were ultimately cultural. Management was uncomfortable empowering employees with open communication. Historically, companies have viewed their employees as mere doers of tasks, not as unique individuals who can think for themselves and collaborate creatively. The leaders of these command-and-control style companies viewed direct communication between employees as a distraction from the tasks they were assigned. This was a management style born out of, and optimized for, the industrial era.
In its basic structure, our school system was designed to churn out lightly educated, obedient employees for exactly these sorts of businesses.
“Our current model of schools is a legacy of a historical system, which was created to address the shift from an agrarian society to an industrial one. This model was designed to take students from diverse backgrounds (many immigrants) and efficiently give them basic knowledge and skills, while also showing them what it means to be an American. Many call this model of schooling the “factory model” because it was codified during the industrial revolution and follows the contours of a factory — blocks of students going down the conveyor belt of standardized subjects and grade levels to produce industrial workers. While the separation and sorting of the industrial model worked for some students, it has consistently left behind many others — especially students of color, low-income students, and students with learning differences.” — Dissatisfied Yet Optimistic
Most educators are passionate, dedicated, and interested in the intellectual development of our kids. They want the best for their students. The problem is the system they work in is outdated and in need of fundamental change. Replacing textbooks with tablets won’t be enough. We need to rethink the structures and purpose of school if we are going to truly prepare our kids for the 21st century.
The good news is that we no longer have to wonder what the future of school might look like. There are a growing number of innovative schools pioneering new educational models with promising success. Schools like Summit Public Schools, Lindsay Unified, AF Greenfield, d.Tech High, Roots Elementary, and High Tech High, along with organizations like Transcend Education and the XQ: Super School Project are showing what’s possible when we set broad interdisciplinary academic goals, empower students to own their own learning, and foster a diverse student, teacher and parent community.
While visiting these schools I could see myself in many of the students. Young, curious and quick to question the status quo. However, instead of looking hopelessly bored, these kids seemed engaged and challenged. They were also learning more than facts and figures — they were learning non-cognitive skills and important life skills like how to collaborate and how to manage their emotions. Still, I kept wondering about the 50 million other kids in the 130,000 schools around the country. When would they benefit from these new models? Especially when most of those schools are underfunded and dealing with serious issues such as poverty, violence, and apathy.
I started Abl because I want to help all schools move beyond the factory model. Whether it’s an underfunded district school in Chicago, or a progressive charter school in Denver, we want to meet schools where they are today and help them move forward. This is a large and lofty goal that is too big to bite off all at once. So we’re starting with a problem that every school faces and one that stands directly in the way of progress: scheduling.
We’re starting here because a school’s master schedule is a window into the soul of the school. It’s a reflection of that school’s priorities and student needs. It defines what types of classes will be offered, how much time students will spend learning different things, how those students will be grouped, how often they will be regrouped, and how teachers will collaborate when planning or teaching.
The school schedule is an incredible lever for change.
Through creative scheduling, schools can personalize learning, group the right students together and support teacher professional development and collaboration. Yet the complexity of the current process dramatically impedes progress. Starting in January almost every school in the U.S. will spend 3–6 months moving magnets around on white boards with little data to inform the trade-offs they’re making. It’s an incredibly manual and arduous process that fails to capture unique student needs and leaves little room for innovation.
Abl is digitizing the process of creating and iterating on a school’s master schedule. In a way that’s never been done before, we’re helping school leaders visualize the impact of their decisions, implement changes, and collaborate with stakeholders within and across schools. Plus, when we combine formative student assessment with data on what students are doing, for how long and with whom, it becomes possible for educators to more rapidly try and learn the impact of new ideas. Creating software that can model the complex intricacies of schools and enable educators to openly share new models will be an extremely difficult challenge. But if we’re successful, we will dramatically accelerate innovation across schools.
Helping spread new models to every school won’t be easy. It will take a special group of people who have similar values and care deeply about helping all schools. That means valuing diversity of background and thought. It means creating a safe and supportive environment where trust, communication, creativity, and humility are valued as highly as technical skills. My goal isn’t just to build software. It’s also to build a company which is a reflection of the values that led me to want to help schools in the first place.
Our path will be hard and often counter-intuitive. We will need the confidence to work closely with our schools and partners to try bold new ideas, but we’ll also need the humility to realize we’re often wrong. We must seek to constantly improve. Our company name is also our core belief — Always Be Learning.
We’d love to hear from you!
Abl is just getting started, and we raised a small amount of venture funding from top-tier firms earlier this year. If you’re interested in joining us in our mission to transform schools, we encourage you to check out our current openings. Still have questions or feedback? Send a note to info@ablschools.com and we’ll be in touch.
-Adam & the Abl Team
