Tell us about your company and the problem it solves, or its benefit to learners or educators.
Fundamentally, ClassDojo for Districts is about connecting teachers, students and families around what is actually happening in the classroom.
For many families, their window into school has traditionally come at certain points: a report card, a parent-teacher conference, an email or a note home. ClassDojo for Districts creates a much more continuous connection. Teachers and schools can share photos, classroom updates, announcements and messages, with translation helping families participate regardless of the language they speak.
But I think the real benefit is bigger than communication or even what we traditionally call family engagement. It is about relationships and involvement.
Students do better when the people surrounding them feel like they are part of the same team. Families should have a sense of what their child is experiencing at school, teachers should have an easier way to bring families into that experience, and students should know that the important adults in their lives are connected.
That matters even more today. Families have more educational choices, and they understandably want to know what is happening in their child’s school and classroom. Schools can send a tremendous amount of information home without necessarily creating that sense of connection.
The opportunity is to move from simply communicating to families to creating an environment in which families feel involved in their child’s education. That relationship between school and home can influence far more than whether somebody received a message. It can affect trust, attendance, engagement and, ultimately, a student’s experience at school.
That is what I think ClassDojo for Districts does particularly well: it helps bring the people surrounding a student together, so everyone feels more connected and on the same page.
What is the challenge educators face today that is fixable?
We give teachers far too much unnecessary complexity.
Over the past decade or so, educators have accumulated platforms, applications, dashboards, assessments, communication tools and now, AI tools. Nearly every one of those tools was most likely introduced with the promise that it would make a teacher’s job easier. Individually, many of them may. Collectively, they can make the job much harder.
Communication is a good example. A teacher might be expected to use email, an LMS, a texting application, printed materials and several other systems depending on the role he or she plays in the school. The technology to reduce much of that fragmentation already exists. The harder part is making the organizational decision to do it.
I think districts have an opportunity to step back and look at a teacher’s workflow in much the same way a business examines an employee’s workflow. What systems does a teacher have to move between during the day? Where is information duplicated? Which tools are truly essential? Where are we adding steps instead of removing them?
We spend a lot of time in other industries thinking about how to streamline work so people can focus on the things they do best. Districts and schools should apply that same thinking to educators.
That may require making some difficult choices. Districts may need to reduce the number of tools they support and accept that one platform may not do every conceivable thing another specialized tool can do. The better question is whether the overall technology environment does enough of the right things while getting out of the teacher’s way.
Teachers do not need another product promising to save them time. They need us to look honestly at everything we have already put on their plates and start taking some things off.
What is the challenge educators face today that will persist?
Capacity.
Schools are being asked to do more at a time when resources are increasingly constrained. Teachers are responsible for instruction and assessment, administrative requirements, communication with families and the emotional and social needs of students. Technology can make portions of that work more efficient, but no software can manufacture more hours in a teacher’s week.
And there is another reason I think this challenge will persist: education is fundamentally a human enterprise.
Teaching depends on relationships and trust. Parents have to trust teachers. Teachers have to trust school leaders. Students have to trust that the adults in the room understand them and are there to help them. We are entering an era in which AI will be able to perform more tasks, generate more content and automate more processes, but it cannot replace those human relationships.
So, the challenge is not figuring out how to automate teaching. We shouldn’t want to automate teaching. The challenge is figuring out what we can simplify or automate so educators have greater capacity for the work only they can do.
That distinction is going to become increasingly important. If technology handles an administrative task faster, reduces duplicate work or eliminates unnecessary steps, that gives something valuable back to an educator: time. But if we simply add another tool, another dashboard or another expectation, we’ve made the capacity problem worse.
Budget pressures make this even harder. Schools are taking on broader responsibilities for students while having to make increasingly difficult choices about resources.
We are not going to solve educator capacity with one application or one policy. But we can become much more disciplined about protecting teachers’ time and making sure the systems around them support, rather than compete with, the human work at the center of education.
What are the areas of education or training and workforce development that are being overlooked?
One area we need to think much more deeply about is what family involvement looks like as students get older.
We put tremendous emphasis on family engagement in elementary school, and then it often tapers off in middle and high school. Some of that is appropriate; students need increasing independence. But independence shouldn’t mean disconnecting families from their children’s education.
In some cases, involvement may become even more important as students get older and the decisions become more consequential. Families are navigating course choices, graduation requirements, college, career pathways and financial decisions. That can be especially challenging for multilingual families, families sending a child to college for the first time, or parents whose work schedules make traditional school involvement difficult. Technology gives us an opportunity to create different ways for those families to stay connected without requiring them to engage exactly as they did when their children were younger.
I also think we need to broaden the way we think about workforce readiness. We talk about communication, collaboration, adaptability and other so-called soft skills, but workforce preparation can still feel like something added onto the academic program rather than integrated into it.
Not every student is going to follow the same path, nor should they. We should be doing a better job of helping students identify what they are good at and what they care about, then connecting learning to those interests and to meaningful opportunities after high school.
This is one area where AI could ultimately be very useful. We are getting closer to being able to personalize pathways based on a student’s strengths, interests and needs in ways that simply weren’t practical before.
In my opinion, the goal shouldn’t be to lower expectations for any student. It should be to broaden our definition of what a successful educational pathway can look like and give more students a genuine connection between what happens in the classroom, what they are passionate about and where they want to go next.
What do you foresee will be a challenge in education in three to five years?
Separating what is genuinely valuable from the noise.
AI is going to accelerate the development of education technology dramatically. Schools will see more products, more capabilities and more promises coming at them at an incredible rate. At the same time, many districts will be under greater financial pressure and have fewer resources available to evaluate all of those options.
That collision is going to force much greater discipline.
The question can no longer simply be, “Can this technology do something interesting?” Schools will need to ask: What problem does it actually solve? Does it save educators time? Does it improve outcomes? Does it strengthen relationships or weaken them? Will people actually use it? And if we invest in it, what can we stop paying for?
I think we’re headed toward a real reckoning around ROI in edtech. If a technology claims to address chronic absenteeism, student disengagement, educator capacity or family involvement, we should increasingly expect evidence that it is actually doing that—not simply adding another layer of activity.
That’s healthy for the industry.
For years, edtech growth has often been measured by adoption: how many products were purchased, how many licenses were deployed, how many new capabilities were added. I think the next era will be defined much more by the value companies can prove. There is already greater attention being paid to efficacy, and I expect that pressure to increase.
The difficult part is that districts themselves may have less capacity to conduct that evaluation just as the number and sophistication of products explode. That makes clear evidence, disciplined procurement and a strong understanding of the problem a district is trying to solve even more important.
AI will undoubtedly create extraordinary opportunities in education. But “powered by AI” isn’t going to be a sufficient reason to buy something. The winners should be the technologies that can demonstrate that they solve a real problem and make education better for the people actually doing the work.