Hi. I'm Mark Gross, School Loop's founder and CEO. I was a successful (lucky, really) Internet exec, but I chucked it all and became a teacher. You know what? Teaching is hard! I had no time to do what I really wanted to do: get to know each of my students personally, and work with my team to help keep them in school and on track.
To save time, I created a system that allowed other people -- my team -- to help me out. By sharing information with my students, their parents, my colleagues, administrators, counselors, coaches -- everyone -- they were able to help me do my job more effectively. They freed me up, and as a result I had an amazing experience, as did my students. It was all going along great until my district dismantled our learning community. In response, I created School Loop.
School Loop is a Learning Management System for teams that keeps students in school and on track. Founded in 2004, School Loop serves nearly 2000 schools in districts across 25 states. School Loop creates a Learning Management Team for each student that includes all of the adults that have an educational interest in that student's success. We make it easy for that team to notice trends and to act proactively to help that student stay on track.
Time is the scarcest commodity in schools, particularly for teachers. As if the pressures on teachers haven't been enough, today's fiscal reality means fewer support services and more students per instructor. Something has to change, and it's easier to change the code than it is to change culture.
School Loop is a team architecture that changes the way things work in schools without disrupting the way things have to work. We start with the recognition that students are not their test results or anonymous members of some quantitative sub-group;
students are people, and their performance is driven by two variables -- their behavior and whether or not they show up.
Schools are pretty good at tracking showing up, though most ignore
chronic absence in favor of truancy. When it comes to behavior, tracking becomes more difficult. When I say behavior, I do not mean "referrals." Behavior is the underlying actions that prevent learning, and the ecosystem that supports those behaviors. Interventions are more successful with students who know that they matter, and who are known. If we know students, we might understand WHY they are not learning. School Loop is designed around connecting the people most likely to know the student, and to whom the student is most closely associated. If a team is alerted to trouble, and eight people know, one might act, and that one might be able to pull what they need to know from the rest of the team to intervene successfully.
We have a simple method: each student gets a team that changes over time. Teams can take preventative action if the student goes off track because they are alerted in time to act. The whole system works because it is self-reinforcing; when people add content, they save time because other people can help them. This encourages new members to join the network, and for them to add more content, which in turn, saves all members time. The paradigm changes from that of a teacher surrounded by students to that of a student surrounded by caring adults, from teachers working in isolation to teachers getting help from supportive teams.
I was a teacher, so when I designed School Loop, I built a system that supports teachers by giving them back the time they need to do their job. The dynamic today seems to be that we should just fire all teachers and bring in new ones -- hoping that somehow bringing new people into the same system will produce different results. Isn't that the definition of insanity? What is really needed is change to the architecture of the underlying system and a transformation of how we think about time and resources within the operating realities of school systems. Teachers aren't the problem. The system is the problem.
All teachers remember what it was like on their first day -- full of enthusiasm, delight, and excitement about what they could do for their students. And every teacher I know has the same favorite story, and it's not about the time they crunched some data; it's that one day, a student they had many moons ago -- not their favorite student, probably, just a kid -- shows up at their door and tells them that while they probably don't know it, their class changed their life.
I know it seems crazy -- all truly ambitious missions are, right? -- but at School Loop we believe that if we give teachers more time, and give them teams that support them, some will rediscover their first day, and when that kid comes back to find them, they will have to wait in line. Wouldn't that be nice?