Cracking An Educating Impasse

By Elizabeth Corcoran 10.28.09, 12:01 AM EDT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.--

In 2005, Bronx middle school IS 339 was a wreck. A slim 9% of the students could do math at their grade level. Classes were regularly locked down to dampen conflicts. Ambulances and police cars frequently vied for parking spots with school buses.

Four years later, IS 339 is a very different school from the one principal Jason Levy inherited several years earlier: 62% of the students are at grade level in math now. Teachers share lesson plans with one another and are inspiring students to take on complex challenges, including interviewing city planners about what it would take to create something like Times Square in the Bronx.

What did Levy do?

Turning around IS 339 took tremendous--and in some instances, radical--efforts that included changing more than half the teaching staff. From Levy's vantage, however, he couldn't have done it without an infusion of technology--including giving laptops to every student and training teachers to use Google docs to share lesson plans, put out assignments and stay in touch with their students. ''We don't see laptops as toys or tools but as megaphones,'' Levy said. ''The internet is just another language that we need to speak.''

Levy shared his story at a day-and-half conference, ''Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age,'' hosted at Google's headquarters and sponsored by a trio of organizations long involved in education: the MacArthur Foundation, Joan Gantz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the San Francisco-based Common Sense Media organization. Questions were also moderated online. ''We have the leaders of industry, education and philanthropy in the room. This is our moment,'' declared James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media.

The undercurrent of the meeting: The Internet has changed most of the business world and lives--but for the most part, it hasn't touched public education. That means the chasm between what students experience in and outside the classroom is widening--so much so that 1.2 million teenagers quit school every year, a rate that translates to one kid dropping out every 26 seconds.

Apart from agreeing that education is fraught with problems, educators have long argued about where to start: Improve teacher pay? Get rid of tenure? Get rid of school boards? Add more standards or set schools and teachers free to experiment with novel teaching techniques? Add computers? Get the parents more involved?

Even as policymakers, educators and philanthropists debated the different approaches, a handful of speakers shared inspiring stories about individual projects that are working, much like Levy's school in the Bronx. A number are bubbling up in New York City: Geoff Canada, who runs the Harlem Children's Zone, described how his project offers educational, social and medical services to thousands of children--and has turned out nationally ranked teams of chess champions. There are plans to try to build similar projects elsewhere around the U.S. Last summer, New York also sponsored a unique experiment called School of One (see "Tools For Learning") that used computers to create personalized learning programs for individual students. Test scores jumped; New York hopes to expand that program too.

In Chicago, Nichole Pinkart, who founded the Digital Youth Network, described how her team has created a space where urban kids can experiment with digital media tools as well as become experts in constructing multimedia projects that tie into school curriculum.

And in Maine, Susan Gendron, commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, discussed how all middle school students in her state are given laptops. The students ''are networking and doing research all over the world,'' Gendron said. ''The ways they're presenting what they learn is much like how people present information in companies every day.''

There were also hints of projects to come: Slated for released in 2010 is Waiting For Superman, a movie that lays out the heartbreaking frustration of bright, economically disadvantaged kids struggling to get a good education. The film is produced by Internet executive Jeff Skoll's movie production company, which also sponsored An Inconvenient Truth. Former chief of Lotus Development Corp., Mitch Kapor, who now runs the Level Playing Field Institute in San Francisco, suggested that he's seen prototypes of a new class of low-cost, handheld devices like netbook computers that will debut in 2010.

Yet as educators and teachers shared their stories, one thread ran through many of the comments: In spite of the spread of Internet technology, few teachers, administrators or even parents have found easy ways to share the technologies and best teaching practices that have worked in classrooms. ''I'm a little unhappy because we're not addressing the issue of how you scale what kids need,'' said Mike S. Smith, a senior counsel at the U.S. Department of Education.

Twenty years ago, when the National Writing Project began offering teachers workshops on how to teach writing, ''we'd see innovations in teaching practices that would spread,'' noted Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, who directs national programs and site development for the NWP. ''I'd say in the last 10 years, it has been harder to do that.''

Exactly how to get the best ideas to spread hasn't been worked out yet. But the need has never been stronger. ''In every other sector, technology has been an essential part of how to do more with less,'' noted James H. Shelton III, an assistant deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Education. ''Pressure, relentlessly applied, causes change.''

Elizabeth Corcoran was an editor and writer for Forbes for 10 years. She left recently to create a start-up devoted to sharing best practices for technology in education.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/27/google-computers-internet-technology-personal-education.html

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Playing For Real Money

Start-up kaChing wants to rip the covers off the mutual fund business.

By Elizabeth Corcoran, 10.19.09, 12:00 AM EDT

BURLINGAME, Calif. -

For the past 14 years, Andrew F. Mathieson has run Fairview Capital Management in Greenbrae, Calif., a $400 million investment fund. It's been a nice investment opportunity for those well-heeled enough to get in Fairview's front door: Mathieson has insisted that anyone who wants to become a client plunk down $1 million for the privilege.

Mathieson is now one of the "genius" investors using a start-up Web site called kaChing to chronicle some of his trades. Starting Monday, adults with $3,000 (and adequate net worth) can now register an account that will "mirror" the trades that Mathieson will make. Past performance is no guarantee that a trader will make money in the future, of course. But along with other investors, Mathieson plans to share some of his investing research and rational--all of which should give even modest-size investors a detailed picture of what is happening to their money.

The devil may truly reside in those kinds of details. The burning ambition of the people behind kaChing is a radical one: The company wants to use Internet technology to upend the $3.7 trillion mutual fund business. What was once adequate disclosure--say, quarterly mutual fund reports--now seems as antiquated as smoke signals, suggests Andy Rachleff, chief executive kaChing and a co-founder of venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. "You have no idea what you're buying when you buy mutual funds," he declares. Instead, Rachleff and kaChing propose to use Internet technology to let small-dollar investors perch on the shoulder of their investment gurus and not only watch where every penny goes but assess whether those choices were thoughtful or simply lucky.

Like many newly hatched start-ups, kaChing got its start in 2007 as a game-like application on Facebook. Founder Daniel Carroll created the virtual investing site. Those who wanted to play got $10 million in virtual dollars to invest in whatever equities caught their fancy. The site tracked their performance and asked them to share their reasons for making investments. Carroll himself began investing under the watchful eye of his mother at age 15; he says he eventually made enough money to help pay his college bills.

Carroll connected with long-time venture capitalist Rachleff, wooed $3 million in funding from investment heavyweights including Internet guru Marc Andreessen and OpenTable Chief Executive Jeff Jordan. With Rachleff as CEO, the kaChing team built a stand-alone site that started letting people manage fantasy accounts online last December. Altogether, there are 400,000 registered users and about 150,000 active accounts.

It's hardly the first online investing site. In early 2000, Ken Kam, a portfolio manager with Firsthand Fund, created Marketocracy.com, a site that gives registrants $1 million in "virtual funds" and then lets them go at it. Some investors have boasted double-digit returns--at least on the Web. (See: "The Oracle of Manitoba") Marketocracy current has about 70,000 managers. Potential investors can mimic those managers' trades, provided they begin by investing $50,000. They also pay an annual management fee of about 1.9% of assets under management. (Editor's note: Forbes, too, runs a similar program with its affiliate, Investopedia, at stocks.forbes.com). Still others include Cake Financial (See "Piece of Cake,") and Covestor.

To become a manager whom others can mirror on kaChing, investors must establish an investing track record of at least one year's worth of trades. Investors must also publish information that explains the rationale they use for trading and must score at least 140 points on what kaChing calls its "investing IQ" scale. KaChing developed the algorithm inspired by the kinds of assessments that Ivy League endowment funds use to rate their money manager. The algorithm includes the risk-adjusted returns of investments, the investment rationale of managers (namely how well they can describe the reasons for their top positions) and a measure of how consistently they keep to their strategy.

Hitting 140 points qualifies an investor as a "genius" (and, not accidentally, would be a fine score on an old-fashioned IQ test, too.) So far, 10 people have earned that rank on kaChing. Not everyone is comfortable with the label. "My personal favorite definition is that a genius is merely a talented person who's done all his or her homework," says Fairview's Mathieson, who commands a 142 rating on the kaChing scale. (KaChing calculated that based on five years of data for one "typical" client account submitted by Mathieson.) KaChing founder Carroll is a 148. Both Mathieson and Carroll are outranked, however, by a few amateurs including top-scoring Min Thang (172), who works in health care at Stanford Hospital and Ryuto Andrew Kawai (154), a systems engineer.

Traders earn money on kaChing when other investors mirror their trades. Traders and kaChing split a management fee that is largely set by the traders but that Carroll expects will average about 1.25% of assets under management. (KaChing pockets about 25% and the investor scoops up the rest.)

When the real-dollar investing portion of the site goes live, Carroll and Rachleff figure that there will be about $2 million in real dollars invested. (The site does not accept 401K funds). Since kaChing lacks the cachet of a big brand-name mutual fund, Carroll contends that he's going after investors who will roll up their virtual sleeves and pay attention to the details. "We're going after people who are frustrated with their mutual funds and swayed by data," he says. "If they're ignorant enough to be swayed by a brand, they'll lose money." Of course, there will be plenty of folks looking for a quick buck, too. Wrote one recent poster: "Hi. I am new to this application help me out how to invest money."

Carroll says that kaChing has safeguards to protect against abuse and fraud. Investors have to share details about accounts that they're managing that they are not documenting on kaChing. Fairview's director of research, John Rutledge, says that the kaChing account will be treated with the same care as any other client--and that his firm already has rules in place to ensure that trades for one client do not unfairly disadvantage another.

Mathieson sees kaChing as providing the infrastructure that will let investors too small to qualify as his clients have the opportunity to use his investment services--if they like Fairview's investing philosophy. "Service businesses should be bought, not sold," he declares, meaning that rather than woo people with slick advertising, he'd rather let clients show up because they like the service he provides.

Even if Mathieson is averse to advertising, kaChing already has the kind of Web 2.0 swagger that attracts attention. The dozen-person operation recently moved into what was formerly a dry cleaner's store not far from Palo Alto's downtown strip, an area that has been home to the likes of Facebook and Ning. Carroll and Rachleff clearly like cheeky names and lack long-time Wall Street traders' superstitions (why else plan a launch for Oct. 19, a day that still makes old-timers remember the 1987 "Black Monday" plummet of the Dow Jones average?)

"Radical transparency is the only way to avoid some of the problems" of fraud that have wracked the investing world, declares Rachleff. But kaChing isn't just cleaning up investing. Grins Rachleff: "How often do you get to disrupt and improve an enormous industry?"

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/18/mutual-funds-investors-technology-personal-kaching.html

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Tech-media power couple moves on

Posted by Adam Lashinsky, Editor at Large

October 6, 2009 7:06 AM

Tech journalism loses Corcoran and Anders

It's a sign of the times that two of the tech world's finest, most seasoned, intelligent and nicest journalists no longer are plying their trade for the mainstream media. That they're also married means an entire household's prodigious output isn't finding its way anymore into the pages of two important business publications.

Elizabeth Corcoran and George Anders, she formerly of Fortune competitor Forbes and he formerly of The Wall Street Journal, are on their own these days.

Anders, a bigshot columnist and book author who spent years at the Journal in multiple postings, left a while ago. He reports that he's working on a book on talent. He writes: "It's a panoramic look at all sorts of fields ranging from venture capital to pop music, sports, teaching and medical-school admissions.

"The core idea is that the people who do it really well have a surprising amount in common. The book will explain why picking talent is so hard for most organizations, how some folks get it right — and what the rest of us can learn from them."

His editor is Adrian Zackheim of Penguin Group's Portfolio imprint, the same fellow who edited Anders's previous book, Perfect Enough, about former HP (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina. Anders says the book will be done within the next year.

Corcoran is a keen science writer who worked at the Washington Post and other places before joining Forbes. She's leaving the writing trade altogether to do an education-oriented startup. "The goal," says Corcoran, who, like her hubby, I'm proud to call a friend, "is to help teachers find and share the 'best practices' for using technology in the classroom so that they are freed up to inspire kids and help get them ready for the challenges of the future." The startup is called Lucere, and it's tagline is "Learn. Share. Teach. Inspire!" Look for its Web site, lucere.org, soon.

Daily and bimonthly journalism's losses are the book writing and startup world's gains. Good luck, George and Betsy.

http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/06/tech-media-power-couple-moves-on/

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