When Shaily Baranwal first encountered the United States education system as a teacher in 2005, she was surprised by the lack of opportunities for academic enrichment outside of the classroom.
Having grown up in India, she was used to a culture where children spent hours in the afternoon at cram schools, coaching centers and learning centers to stay ahead of the game.
“I would come back home at 9 p.m. right until I finished undergrad. I’m not saying that’s the best way for a child to learn, but that’s the culture there,” said Baranwal. “So when I came here, I realized that failing children in the school districts and schools had no option to learn outside school in a very structured format.”
An engineer by training, Baranwal had been a teacher in India before moving stateside for business school at the University of Michigan. While there, she got a grant to build an education startup, Elevate K-12, that worked with failing school districts to provide online instruction to small groups of struggling students.
“Think of it as being an online intervention school inside an actual school,” Baranwal said.
Elevate’s digital classrooms have four students assigned to each teacher, compared with regular classrooms where the student-to-teacher ratio is typically more than 20 to one. The decreased classroom size gives teachers more time to focus on each student’s individual needs, making it easier for students to let teachers know what those needs are.
“[Kids] love the fact that they can ask a question and not feel stupid,” said Baranwal, adding that participating schools have seen a 35 percent boost to test scores on average.
After bootstrapping the company since its founding in 2010, Baranwal closed its first round of funding just over two months ago and is taking its instruction model to the consumer market.
Classblox — the name Elevate has chosen for its direct-to-consumer arm — lets parents buy the same kind of small-classroom instruction for their children for $249 and up.
Beyond giving students an opportunity to interact with instructors more closely, Baranwal said the online instruction model gives students an opportunity to study subjects that may not be offered in their school districts, like computer science or Mandarin. Moreover, by recruiting teachers from all over the country, the company can offer the cream of the crop to students regardless of where they live.
Baranwal is currently preparing to raise another round, building up to a national launch in 2017. But the company has no plans to move its headquarters out of Chicago.
“I love it here. I did contemplate moving to Silicon Valley when the company was growing, but I just didn’t like it there,” she said. “We all know Chicago has been a testing market for any service or human-based product for a very long time…. And for a company that’s service-based, all of your margins would be absorbed in higher costs of talent and offices in Silicon Valley.”
The company currently has 50 employees between its offices in India and the United States, and plans to hire between 10 and 15 people in Chicago over the next three months. Baranwal said the hiring will primarily focus on building out the company’s tech team. One of the projects they’ll be working on will use artificial intelligence to guide the learning process.
“We are the kind of company that’s not just going to create one product and sell it off,” she said. “I believe a lot in the experimentation of creating a lot of different products. If we create a hundred, one will be a blockbuster.”
Photos via Classblox.
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