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Forbes
09-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
4 Entrepreneurial Skills Every Founder Can Learn From Teachers
A teacher instructing students in a classroom setting. Teacher Appreciation Week, first championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, who convinced Congress in the 1950s of its importance, honors educators for their dedication. Yet beyond their classroom contributions, we should recognize teachers' remarkable entrepreneurial abilities. As a former public school teacher who left the classroom in 2009 to create a youth entrepreneurship program, I've navigated this transition firsthand. Behind every successful teacher stands an entrepreneurial leader, innovator, and problem-solver who thrives despite tight constraints. The qualities most valued in top entrepreneurs—resilience, adaptability, creativity, and grit—are the skills teachers develop and demonstrate daily. Here are four ways teachers are natural entrepreneurs—and lessons business leaders can learn from them. Ask any teacher what they've accomplished with minimal funding, and you'll hear stories that rival those of the most determined startup founders. The numbers tell a sobering story: According to the Association of American Educators, 94-95% of public school teachers spend their money on classroom supplies, averaging $673 annually out of pocket. For teachers in high-poverty schools, this figure climbs to $761, according to EdWeek. Even more striking, reports these personal expenditures have increased 44% since 2015, with the average reaching $860 for the 2022-2023 school year. Meanwhile, the typical school-provided supply stipend hovers around just $300-500. Whether creating classroom materials from scratch, transforming limited supplies into engaging projects, or crowdsourcing necessary resources, entrepreneurial teachers master doing more with less. Entrepreneurs facing early-stage constraints can adopt this mindset. Teachers show that limited resources create opportunities for innovation rather than barriers to success. Great entrepreneurial teachers break down complex ideas into accessible lessons for students with diverse learning styles. They adjust their communication in real time, responding immediately to confusion, questions, and moments of understanding. Founders pitching to investors, building teams, or marketing products need the same skill: the ability to make ideas clear, actionable, and compelling. Effective communication isn't about talking but ensuring the message reaches its audience. Teachers practice this essential skill every day. No lesson plan survives first contact with students. Teachers adjust continuously, modifying lessons, fixing technology issues, handling unexpected situations, and advancing learning. This mirrors the entrepreneurial process of testing ideas, gathering feedback, changing direction, and improving. Teachers live this cycle daily. When I taught in public schools, I regularly had to scrap entire lesson plans when I discovered: This constant adaptation taught me to think quickly and create solutions with whatever resources were available, skills that proved invaluable when I launched my own venture. As Laura M. Burke, Chief of Innovative Systems & Empowerment at VALE – Venture Academy of Leadership & Entrepreneurship, explains, 'Educators have long been some of the most entrepreneurial people. When you consider the collaboration, risk-taking, and learning from failure that educators do every day, it's no wonder they have such strong entrepreneurial mindsets. They try new strategies that sometimes don't work, adjusting, trying something different, and continuing until they achieve that lightbulb moment from students.' Burke's words capture why teachers exemplify entrepreneurial thinking, often without the formal title. A successful classroom isn't just about curriculum—it's about culture. Teachers foster belonging, trust, and motivation, creating spaces where students feel secure enough to take risks and grow. In my classroom of 35 students, we functioned as a cohesive team with our own culture, mottos, and designated responsibilities. Students had specific jobs—from technology manager to discussion facilitator—that fostered personal accountability and collective ownership of our learning environment. We celebrated successes together and worked through challenges as a unit, reinforcing that everyone was responsible for the classroom space and our educational outcomes. This approach to building community and shared purpose parallels how successful founders establish company culture. Startups aiming to build innovative cultures can learn from an entrepreneurial teacher's ability to create shared purpose and psychological safety. A great classroom provides a model for what makes a great team. The growth of teacher entrepreneurship isn't just a feel-good trend—it's an emerging economic force. As of 2022, Teachers Pay Teachers reported over 85 million downloads of educational materials, with top sellers earning six-figure annual incomes by sharing resources with other educators worldwide. For many teachers, platforms like TpT have opened up sustainable income streams beyond their traditional salaries while creating new professional pathways. In addition to online marketplaces, teacherpreneurs are launching micro-schools, learning pods, tutoring services, and curriculum consultancies. Former public school teachers often find they can earn more and have greater autonomy by building their own education-focused businesses rather than staying within traditional systems. This surge in entrepreneurial activity among educators points to a broader shift in education: Teachers are no longer just implementers of curriculum—they're becoming creators, innovators, and business leaders shaping the future of learning. As more teachers explore entrepreneurship, their work is not only transforming their own careers—it's introducing fresh ideas, innovative models, and personalized approaches to education that could ripple outward to benefit students, families, and communities. When I left my public school classroom in 2009, I didn't see it as abandoning education—I viewed it as expanding my impact. The frustrations I experienced trying to implement innovative teaching approaches within a traditional system became the catalyst for creating my program. Starting WIT (Whatever It Takes) required the same skills I had honed as a teacher: The transition felt natural because the entrepreneurial mindset was already embedded in my teaching practice. My story isn't unique. Consider Lindsey Wander, who taught math, biology, and STEM in California's low-income neighborhoods. Despite creating an engaging classroom environment, she found that time constraints, budget limitations, and administrative barriers prevented her from giving struggling students the individual attention they needed. Recognizing this gap, she relocated to Chicago at age 30 and launched her own tutoring business, which evolved into WorldWise Tutoring. Her venture aimed to improve academic performance and develop confident, independent learners and future leaders, extending her educational impact beyond what was possible in the traditional classroom setting. Former teachers are founding education technology companies, alternative schools, teacher training programs, and curriculum development firms. The skills that make them effective in the classroom—empathy, communication, organization, and creativity—translate perfectly to entrepreneurship. What's particularly remarkable is how many teacher-entrepreneurs focus their ventures on solving problems they experienced in the classroom. This authentic connection to the challenges they're addressing gives them unique insight and credibility that outside entrepreneurs often lack. This Teacher Appreciation Week, let's expand how we celebrate educators. They aren't just teaching—they're leading, building, innovating, and adapting daily. Some even take their skills beyond the classroom to launch businesses, showing that entrepreneurial spirit thrives in education. The journey from classroom teacher to education entrepreneur confirms this natural progression. Founders have much to learn from educators; perhaps, teachers represent the original entrepreneurs. The classroom experience provides the foundation for successful ventures far beyond school walls.
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Shark AI uses fossil shark teeth to get middle school kids interested in paleontology and computer vision
Most kids have a natural curiosity about sharks − especially their sharp and abundant teeth. Our team had the idea to use the appeal of this charismatic apex predator to teach how scientists use artificial intelligence. We are researchers in AI literacy and STEM education who helped create a series of lessons that use fossil shark teeth to demonstrate the power and pitfalls of AI. The curriculum guides middle school students and teachers through building and evaluating computer vision models that can reliably classify fossil shark teeth. Computer vision is a type of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms and a lot of image data to classify and identify objects. It's the same technology that enables Google Lens to identify plant species in photographs or self-driving cars to recognize people, cars and bicycles. Our free Shark AI curriculum has five modules, which are aligned with national and state science education standards. These standards outline the key knowledge and skills students should learn at each grade level. The lessons are designed to cultivate students' interest in AI, data science, paleontology and the nature of science. The overall objective of Shark AI is to show that one does not have to be a computer scientist to use, teach or learn AI. We believe all teachers can and should be prepared to teach about AI in order to facilitate the technology's meaningful integration into K-12 education. AI is already transforming our lives at a dizzying pace. To help prepare kids to live and work in an AI world, it is important for them to learn about the technology in school. Most of the resources available to teach AI in K-12 classrooms focus on the technology itself. As a result, these lessons may be offered only in specialty classes such as computer science and engineering, which may not be offered to all students at all schools. Systematic integration of AI in education is relatively new, so many teacher preparation programs are just beginning to incorporate it. There's a need for professional learning opportunities for teachers already working in schools to learn about AI. Our research shows science teachers have a variety of preconceptions about AI. Additionally, many teachers are worried about teaching something they have little experience with. Nearly half of educators told EdWeek in a survey that 'they're uncomfortable with AI technology,' suggesting they are unlikely to add AI lessons to their already packed curriculum. To break down that unfamiliarity, the curriculum starts by introducing the various types of AI, such as natural language processing, automated speech recognition and computer vision. Students then get to work with fossil kits containing 15 real fossil shark teeth and one 3D-printed megalodon tooth. Megalodons were behemoth sharks that roamed the waters starting 20 million years ago and are now extinct. Students sort teeth in any way they want – such as by size, color or shape. Then, they learn how scientists typically classify fossils and practice sorting the teeth by species of shark and by what it eats. After this, students use Google Teachable Machine, a free, online tool that uses the powerful machine learning model trained on millions of images. That creates their own computer vision model to classify fossil shark teeth. The data they use can be pictures they take of the real teeth in their kits or pictures they upload from databases such as the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History paleobiology digital collection or iDigBio. The models occasionally misclassify teeth, which creates an opportunity for teachers to discuss bias and limitations of computer vision, such as why it is important to train AI on lots of high-quality and diverse images. The Shark AI curriculum concludes with students creating, showcasing and discussing their own computer vision models. Through these activities, students learn about AI concepts such as the strengths and weaknesses of AI compared with human intelligence along with paleontology concepts such as the fossil record or the information that can be learned about the history of life on Earth by studying fossils. Teachers have the flexibility to modify the activities, sequence and time they want to spend on the curriculum. This allows them to highlight the aspects that make most sense for their instructional needs and goals. To prepare teachers to use Shark AI, we host a weeklong professional learning session in which teachers learn how AI is used in science. They also practice doing the activities in the curriculum, and we leave plenty of time for discussion to demystify the technology. An important component of the training is to create a community for the teachers. They have opportunities to check in, brainstorm and troubleshoot together throughout the year. The Shark AI staff also checks in frequently with teachers individually to provide personalized support, usually troubleshooting questions about Google Teachable Machine. The teachers meet as a group once every few months to build community. With these supports, we have found that teachers can change their understanding and beliefs about AI, and feel comfortable and prepared to teach science with AI methods. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Christine Wusylko, University of Florida and Pavlo Antonenko, University of Florida Read more: AI can help − and hurt − student creativity What are AI hallucinations? Why AIs sometimes make things up ChatGPT could be an effective and affordable tutor Christine Wusylko works for the University of Florida and receives funding from the NSF. Pavlo Antonenko works for the University of Florida and receives funding from the NSF.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Remote Learning Was Supposed to Make Snow Days Obsolete. But Did It Really?
Since Jan. 1, roughly a dozen major winter storms have shuttered school doors around the United States and kept students home. Before COVID-19, snow days like these were routine, not even worth mentioning. But with the switch to virtual schooling came predictions that days off from school because of weather would soon be a thing of the past. There would be no reason to cancel classes if they could just go remote. An EdWeek survey from November 2020 even reported that around 70% of principals and school district officials had converted or were considering converting snow days to remote learning days. But a 74 survey of policies around the country finds that while some districts have made the shift — or tried to — others have gone back to that time-honored tradition. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Seattle Public Schools used to build snow days into its academic calendar but ended the practice after the pandemic. While a traditional snow day isn't completely off the table, the district usually implements remote learning when schools close due to emergencies, said Tyler Hamilton, Seattle's director of school operations. 'Are we getting the same level of quality instruction at the end of the school year? Is having some type of instruction remotely going to be more meaningful than having paused completely and then doing some type of makeup day?' Hamilton said. 'It really is more of … looking to provide as much consistency as possible for kids.' Related When the entire district had to switch to virtual classes on Feb. 5 and 6 because of a snowstorm, some students remembered the routine, while younger children who weren't yet in school at the beginning of the pandemic struggled, Hamilton said. High school and middle school teachers were expected to host classes like normal, while elementary teachers had a less structured schedule. 'Second graders [were] showing off their bedroom to their friends and being excited as like a show and tell opportunity, which was similar to a lot of our earlier days of COVID,' Hamilton said. 'If my [high school] class was normally a 55-minute class with my algebra teacher, I'm going to have that same time of day with that algebra teacher.' Attendance policies were the same as for in-person classes — but students weren't counted as being late if they didn't join the class on time. Hamilton said the district is still analyzing attendance data from the two snow days. For some schools, attendance routinely lags during remote learning on snow days. Last year, attendance rates in Pittsburgh-area schools on virtual days ranged from 99% to as low as 66%, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Related New York City Public Schools tried to implement remote learning on a snow day in February 2024 for the first time since its no-snow day policy was introduced two years earlier. School officials deemed it a failure after students were unable to sign in. The district tested the system later that summer and still plans to use it for future snow days. Challenges like access to the internet or computers at home have made some schools rethink their remote learning plans. One superintendent in Maine said his district of 2,300 students will continue traditional snow days because some kids can't access online learning. 'Not every family can be linked in,' Superintendent Christian Elkington told the Sun Journal. 'Not every family has the same supports and services.' Related Other districts have to implement traditional snow days because state regulations leave them no choice. In New Jersey, state law doesn't allow remote learning to count toward the 180 school days required each year unless schools are closed for three consecutive days because of a state-declared emergency. Virtual classes were permitted during the pandemic because of an executive order. Last year, lawmakers proposed a bill to allow remote instruction during snow days, but it failed to advance. Alaska schools also have to use traditional snow days after the state's education commissioner told superintendents in December that remote learning shouldn't count as school days because it doesn't 'adequately meet students' needs.' In Seattle, Hamilton said administrators are still assessing how the two days of remote learning went. Some parents reported technical or logistical difficulties. 'As a whole, the day went much smoother than some of our initial implementations,' he said. 'We're going through our data right now looking at how many students and staff members were online [and] how long they were online.'
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
New Study: Teacher Working Conditions Worsened After COVID — and Still Are
Teacher working conditions not only worsened when the pandemic began, but have continued to decline, a new study finds. The University of Missouri research discovered ongoing issues including increased classroom disruptions and declining trust between teachers and parents, principal and colleagues. The researchers analyzed data from the 5Essentials Survey which collected responses about school wellness from roughly 123,000 to 130,000 teachers in more than 3,300 Illinois schools annually from 2019 to 2023. 'I would have thought the 2020-21 school year was the big disrupted year,' said Cory Koedel, a University of Missouri professor who worked on the study. 'It's quite reasonable to think that was the worst. But this data is telling us that's clearly not true. And our findings give no indication that working conditions will rebound naturally now that the pandemic is behind us.' Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter The 5Essentials survey identifies five main indicators of school success: effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environments and ambitious instruction. Each year, teachers and students are asked to rate their experiences. The most dramatic change after the pandemic began was in classroom disruptions. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 70% of educators said students in their schools misbehaved more than before the pandemic. In 2024, the percentage increased to 72%. Koedel's research found the quality of student discussions and professional development also declined from 2019 to 2023. The trust teachers felt toward parents, principals and other educators didn't worsen from 2019 to 2021 but deteriorated from 2021 to 2023. Teacher safety significantly improved in 2021, when most schools shifted to online learning, only to drop again in 2022 and 2023, once students returned to classrooms. A few working conditions initially declined but improved from 2021 to 2023, including collaborative practices and student engagement in learning The study also analyzed Illinois survey data by school demographics. Teachers from schools in wealthier communities had better working conditions, but experienced the same decline as educators in lower-income schools. Schools where instruction was delivered online during the 2020-21 school year also had larger declines in working conditions compared with schools where learning was in-person. Koedel said that while the study focuses on Illinois, educators nationwide have experienced similar working conditions. Related 'There's really no reason to think Illinois is some weird place that's so different from every other [state]' Koedel said. 'In my opinion, we should expect Illinois to be like other places, because a lot of what's happening in schools there is happening everywhere.' For example, other national studies have highlighted the link between teacher job satisfaction and educators' well-being and retention. A 2022 study from the RAND Corp. found that teachers who had administrator support and felt they belonged in their schools were less likely to report burnout and job-related stress. Those who had strong positive relationships with their colleagues and felt their students were engaged in learning were also much less likely to report poor well-being. 'There's a deeper question of, like, 'What exactly is it that's driving this?' ' Koedel said of the University of Missouri results. 'I believe this is telling us we have made some sort of bad decisions about how we're running schools, but this doesn't tell us what decisions we made that were bad, right? So I'm trying to understand that better.'
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Texas may allow families to pay for private schools with public funds
Donald Trump's executive order on school choice last month may soon be wholly embraced by the state of Texas. Earlier this month, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, announced school choice as an emergency item during his State of the State address, and just last week, the Texas senate easily passed a school voucher bill (known as senate bill 2 or SB2), which House Republicans expect to pass imminently. Should SB2 pass, it would allocate $1bn of state funds to allow families to use up to $10,000 of taxpayer dollars per student per year to fund education at an accredited private school. Texas would then join 28 other states and Washington DC in having some form of 'school choice' or a school voucher program, per EdWeek. Abbott, who has previously said the 'next legislative session will be known as the school choice session', is one of many lawmakers across the country who aims to help state legislatures adopt new or expanded school-voucher laws. A publicly funded alternative to public school is not a new idea in Texas, which since 2015, has seen school choice passed in the state senate five times. Having repeatedly died in the Republican-controlled house, the failure underscores that education in the state is a divisive issue – regardless of side of the aisle. But recent state elections may be the final push the movement needs. During the statehouse primary elections last year, Abbott – bolstered by campaign contributions from vocal school-choice advocates and billionaires Jeff Yass and Betsy DeVos, Trump's former US secretary of education – endorsed 15 candidates willing to challenge their incumbent opponents on school choice. More than 10 of those candidates won; only four statehouse representatives who opposed education savings accounts (ESAs) and vouchers managed to hold onto their seats. David DeMatthews, an education policy professor at the University of Texas in Austin, told the Guardian that 'the massive campaign contributions' were noteworthy because they 'push[ed] out, for the most part, very conservative rural Republicans who voted on party lines, on everything for the most part – except for school vouchers'. 'Vouchers were basically bought, that the policy was for sale, and that was the one issue,' he added. The split in the party over school choice has more to do with geography than it does ideology. Those against various versions of school vouchers often represent rural districts, where there aren't many places to send kids to school – effectively making vouchers a subsidy only for urban communities that have private schools. Rebecca Pringle, president of the National Education Association, told the Guardian that some of the Republicans in those areas are opposed likely because they 'realize 'my constituency does not gain from this'. And in fact, they lose.' All four Republican state representatives who retained their seats represent rural districts. More than 675,000 US students use some kind of voucher program to attend a private school, according to a 2023 report from EdChoice, a pro-school choice organization. And while the data on who these users are is incomplete since private schools aren't required to share enrollment statistics, one 2023 study from the Ohio Education Policy Institute found that vouchers increasingly benefit wealthier families in the state who are already enrolling their children in private school. Pro-voucher advocates often tout benefits for students with disabilities, who may struggle to access resources in a public school and are eligible for up to $11,500 for private education under SB2. But a US department of education report on a Washington DC voucher program found that 'a main reason why students didn't use a voucher offered to them was that they were unable to find a participating school with services for their learning or physical disability or other special needs'. '21.6% of parents who rejected a voucher that was offered to their child did so because the school lacked the special needs services that their child needed, and 12.3% of the parents who accepted a voucher for their child but then left the program cited a lack of special needs services at the school they had chosen,' the report states. Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion DeMatthews called what's proposed in Texas 'publicly funded discrimination'. 'You start to have two parallel systems: the public system is educating all the students with disabilities, and the private system is not,' he said. 'It costs more to educate children with disabilities.' Should SB2 pass in Texas, DeMatthews says to look to other states for what will happen next. 'What we've seen in other states that have passed large voucher programs is the private schools in that state immediately raise tuition. That's the first thing,' he said. 'And sometimes that even happens before the bill gets passed there. They're anticipating it, and they just raise tuition because they know now that any family that wants to attend there, even the families that are already enrolled in those schools, have say a $10,000 voucher in their hands.' An example of this has already happened in Arizona. Shortly after creating its universal ESA program in 2022, the state saw dozens of its private schools raise the price of tuition – half beyond the rate of inflation, according to the Hechinger Report. Public schools, which are funded largely based on enrollment, won't see a significant decline in enrollment at first, DeMatthews said. But such a decline at a rural school district with far fewer students could manifest more harshly. While Abbott has said he is committed to fully funding Texas's public schools, Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research in Houston found that 73% of Texas school districts are already underfunded. DeMatthews noted that Texas could see a rise in non-public school options that could benefit from a voucher scheme, prompting competition for enrollment and further diverting funds away from public schools. 'There's not a lot of limitations on who can actually use [vouchers],' he said, adding that there are financial and tax incentives for people to open up schools. 'There's not a lot of oversight for getting in the game. In Texas, it would be harder to open up a barber shop than it would be to open up a school.'
