A Little About Us ...

Prior to Educate, the three founders of the company all worked in data analysis within the oil industry. On the oil field everything had a meter. Lights, engines, pipes, even people, all had some sort of meter. At that time the main job was to collect massive amounts of data and be able to clearly communicate problem areas and suggest improvements and optimizations. The data would tell us the best interval for maintenance on trucks, most productive schedule for various workers, usage of equipment so we could be sure to order only what was needed and budget ahead for future expenditures and many other similar indicators.

At the same time the founders were working on the oil fields they each were also home schooling their children. In Anchorage Alaska there was a charter school that teamed up certified teachers with parents to customize learning for each child. In the early days there were a lot of challenges to managing diverse needs across a school of over 500 students. Being involved parents, the founders took a deep look at the needs and started to see that concepts behind finding and making optimizations with the oil industry were also applicable to education, with one major difference, the moral purpose behind enriching education verses enriching the wallets of the oil companies.

It wasn't long before the founders teamed up with a new charter school called 'Highland Tech High' in Anchorage Alaska. Highland was just starting and was using an innovative approach to education called 'Performance Based Learning' that employed the best thinking from many reformers including Dr. Robert Marzano and Re-Inventing Schools Coalition. This entire model is built on top of standards, individual skills that students must master in order to move on in their learning. Each standard had a scoring guide or 'rubric' which communicated exactly where in the learning the student was. This was a bit of heaven to the founders. These standards were the meters they were used to. You can put these 'meters' on worksheets, tests, projects, classrooms and associate them with students and teachers creating this wonderful ability to be able to analyze the data to identify issues and optimize learning.

It's been over a decade since the start and now Educate is in schools all around the nation. Each school has helped to refine and strengthen the software providing a very strong tool set for schools embarking on the same journey.