Five years ago, at the grizzled old age of 22, William Zhou was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list in education. Zhou had an education company, Chalk, he said would help teachers make and monitor their teaching plans and curricula. At the time, Forbes noted that 100,000 teachers were using the system.
Two years ago, the number of teachers on Chalk flipped past 250,000. Now, Zhou says, half a million teachers use his lesson plan platform.
When the company started, Zhou says, he was focused on helping teachers plan their lessons. Seeing his own high school – high school! – teachers struggle with lesson planning, Zhou had the stereotypical entrepreneurial reaction. “There has to be a better way,” he said.
“For teachers,” Zhou says, his product “is a lesson planner. But really the kicker, the lightbulb is that it’s not siloed off from the curriculum, it’s something that teachers can pull directly from the curriculum they use to make their plan.”
And now, he says, the focus has grown. “We’re not just the teacher side,” he said. “We’re really looking at the entire district, the curriculum as a whole.”
The link between teacher lesson planning and actual curriculum – what’s being taught – is increasingly important for districts, most of which are required to show that their teachers are delivering the lessons, programs and activities that align with set standards and that those classroom deliverables align with one another. Designing that alignment, being able to visualize it, is called curriculum mapping. And, according to Zhou, that’s what Chalk really does.
“It’s a process almost every district has to undertake, to plan exactly what we are teaching to our kids – going from grade level to grade level ensuring we’re teaching the right standards, making sure that ultimately we’re delivering the right information,” Zhou said. “I equate it to very much like a business plan for the schools – here’s how we’re going to tackle what we teach.”
But, Zhou says, many, even most districts are not doing that – or at least not doing it as well as they’d like to. “Everyone wants to get to the level where curriculum is unique to their learners,” he said. “But most of the districts don’t have that ability yet.” In fact, he says, there are a, “large number of districts where teachers aren’t even planning at all.”
That’s the opportunity. And it’s showing up. Chalk’s district growth mirrors its teacher acquisition. “Three or four years ago we were in four states, now we’re in 27,” Zhou said, noting that his company is, “on track to hit profit this year.”
The growth is impressive, and the business model is familiar – design a good product that teachers want to use, make it free to them then sell to districts. Familiar is not a criticism; it’s familiar because it works.
Even though the company bootstrapped to start, it now has VC backing. “Mostly impact investing folks,” Zhou says – Amplify Capital, John Baker, CEO of D2L, and investor Randall Howard have all gone in.
“Today it’s all about growth,” Zhou said, citing Chalk’s emerging work with Chicago Public Schools as an example. But he also noted that the company is looking ahead – considering “a more premium offering” for teachers using the planning tools and perhaps moving beyond providing technology only. “We tend to be a technology partner today, but that does not mean we don’t want to play [a different] role going forward.”
For now, Chalk is on a vital and under-served side of education technology – planning and mapping. “There are a ton of people out there measuring assessment, but that’s outcomes,” Zhou said. “We’ve seen so many other ed tech companies do that, ask what happened. We want to not just ask what happened, but why did it happen? The only way to do that is to look at the plan, to ask what’s your plan?”
“Curriculum,” Zhou said, “impacts everything – it drives everything in a school including their culture.” Helping teachers and districts get that right, or at least to do it better, in a planned, accessible and modern way is unquestionably important. Based on what’s happening at Chalk – what’s happed in the past five years – it looks like good business too.