Education startups: The bottom-up approach doesn’t work here

Plenty of wide-eyed, ambitious, and possibly naive startups have set out to “fix” or at the very least, improve, education. You can’t fault anyone for that — with US students lagging most of the world in subjects like math and science, the sector has much room for improvement.

The problem comes when those startups try to sell software and tools to schools. The schools want to innovate. It’s just not that simple. There’s a culture clash at play.