What An Education Uber Actually Looks Like

Betsy DeVos is among the many education disruptors fond of imagining a world in which education is handled Uber-style; but we don't have to imagine what a gig-economy education system would look like. It already exists.

Outschool was founded in 2015 by Amir Nathoo (he cutely lists his title as "learner" in his LInkedIn profile), and while he looks like he's about twelve, he's been at work for a while. He got a Master's Degree from the University of Cambridge in 2002, worked in software development for IBM, founded a couple of companies, invested in a few other, and then launched Outschool. The company is based in San Francisco.

Nathoo was interviewed by Rick Hess back in 2019 in an interview that Education Next just dusted off because, as you might imagine, Nathoo's distance learning micro-credential marketplace is having a strong pandemic moment. In it, Nathoo describes Outschool this way:

Outschool offers live online education experiences that connect teachers with learners in small-group settings to explore everything from Minecraft, Pokemon, and cooking to chemistry, algebra, and literature.

Nathoo also talks a lot about fun and passion, and his story always mentions how he got a computer when he was five and that sparked an interest in games and programming and his technology career, leading him to create this marketplace for "fun and social learning experiences." Others have characterized it with less sparkle, like the Techcrunch article that characterized it as "a platform for homeschooled students to bolster their extracurricular activities." But a super-profitable one-- from August 2019 to August 2020, Outschool sales jumped from $6.5 million to $54million. And venture capitalists have been taking notice.

Some writers call Outschool the Netflix of education, and that makes sense from a customer standpoint--log on and select from 100,000 live-taught virtual classes from 10,000 different instructors. But from the other side, this looks much more like Uber, because all 10,000 of those "instructors" are gig workers. As Nathoo explains, "All teachers on Outschool are independent and set their own class prices and schedules." They have to come from the US, Canada, U.K., Australia or New Zealand, and Nathoo says they and their classes are vetted, though I didn't find anything about what the vetting checks for. One waggish headline writer blurbed them as "Spanish with Taylor Swift, Potions with Harry Potter." 

Outschool.org is sponsored by the Edward Charles Foundation, a Beverly Hills organization that acts as a fiscal sponsor for organizations. Outschool.com is where the education stuff happens. The library lets you sort by date, day/time, age, format, length, topics,  and subject area. If you want to teach, Outschool offers you online listing for your class, access to the "community of learners," secure online payment, an integrated video chat platform, and "responsive" support. No teaching credentials are required, but you do have to pass a criminal background check.

Outschool takes a 30% cut; you decide what to charge for the course and how many students to allow. Also, you can sign up to teach as an organization. Classes and teachers come with Amazon-style reviews. And while class costs "start" at $10, I found plenty in the $100-$200 range. There are English, math and history classes, but anime and blogging are also covered. There are also such things as classes that meet only once, which are considerably less expensive. I suspect there are all sorts of tricks to marketing yourself as a teacher in this environment. The site says that those who teach online earn an average of $50 USD per hour of teaching. That comes of course with no benefits or extras--good basic gig economy stuff.

Outschool currently claims a half-million students in over 200 countries--that's up from 80,000 pre-Covid. It may have helped that they offered chances to sign up for free last spring to those whose buildings had closed. Nathoo has been writing articles as well about how to avoid homeschooling problems and "why trying to re-create school at home isn't working." (Spoiler alert: because you need an on-line resource that gives you access to many topics in a variety of modes.) You can read about one family's trial of Outschool-- lessons include all manner of caveat emptor, including due diligence on instructors because "anyone can teach in Outschool." 

Another mainly positive review of Outschool by a writer who has used the platform as a teacher and a parent underlines how much caveating the emptor has to do because of the ease of getting yourself on the platform:

However, the process to apply is very easy. You just write a brief application and make an introductory video. Many people are approved within a couple hours of submitting the application. Some get rejected two or three times, but just make slight adjustments to their application and are approved – it is unclear to those who have gone through the process whether there was rigorous evaluation of the applications, or more the whim of the reviewer. There’s no interview… no mock teaching sessions before being hired. Just the application.

Teachers also create a LOT of new classes very quickly – many get inspired by an idea and knock out a class description and send it in. The first class you submit can take a week to get approved. But after that, you can receive an approval for a new class minutes after submitting the application, which makes me wonder how much attention is given to it. But, then again, classes can also be rejected for seemingly small reasons, then easily accepted when re-submitted. So, as I said, not a lot of oversight – there’s simply too many teachers and classes for there to be the sort of thorough evaluations that you as a parent might hope for.

Also, Outschool appears to have some serious copyright issues with many classes tied to pop culture topics and materials. Nor is it clear how the usual fair use rules apply in a situation that is not really a school. But Nathoo has some crazypants aspirations, as per this quote:

We’re now working to directly measure love of learning and have a research grant to study it further and establish a metric as an alternative to test scores.

I can't begin to imagine how that's going to work, and I'm dying to know who funded that grant, but if he can crack this code, there are bigger things ahead than running a platform for gigging educators.

I can't imagine trying to make a living on Outschool, and it will be interesting to see what happens to those 10,000 teachers when regular school buildings open up again. But the model is simple enough. Parents have to look out for their own interests, teachers have to look out for their own interests, nobody is really providing any oversight, and Outschool makes a bundle of money operating a platform. There's your educational Uber. 

Donors Choose Monday: Making Music

Continuing my plan to try to help a bit in the real classrooms of the nation. Not excusing the local districts that ought to be funding these projects, but I prefer to light and candle and curse the darkness at the same time. Multitasking, you know. 

This week I'm looking at some music asks, because music generally gets the short end of the too-small stick to begin with, and it's near and dear to my heart. As always, I invite you to donate to one of these , or to comb through the site for something near and dear to your heart, or to just reach out to a local teacher who can use something for her classroom.

Mr. Lewis is at the Ramon C Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts in Los Angeles (known unofficially as Grand Arts High School) and he would like to "take" his students to a virtual choir festival. The pandemic has been hard on performing groups everywhere, so this seems like a nice chance for his group.

Mr. Rodrigues at Homestead Senior High School in Homestead, Florida, would like a flugelhorn. If you're unfamiliar, a flugel is a mellower sibling of the trumpet (Chuck Mangione is the only guy I know of to ever popularize it), and very few high school musicians have one of their own--heck, not that many school programs have one. But it provides a little more richness and variety to the sound, and while I'd be just as happy if everyone had a trombone choir program, this is a worthy addition to any band program. 

Ms. Blizzard is at Dearing Elementary School in Dearing, Georgia, (a rural town with no traffic light) and she would like a bass xylophone for their Orff ensemble (she is Orff trained), which is a great percussiony way to get students involved in music. So basically, this would take something cool and make it cooler.

Another Biz-Friendly Edu-octopus

We live in an era in which companies grow primarily through acquisition, and what looks like a world of options is just many limbs of the same animal. Here's one more display of what the sausage family looks like.

This journey starts with a simple question-- here at the Institute, the CMO (chief marital officer) pulled out one of her programs from school and asked, "Who are these guys, anyway? I was trying to follow up on them and ended up on some other site entirely," knowing that I'm always interested in these sorts of questions. So stay with me here:

Learning A-Z

These guys are the creators and publishers of Vocabulary A-Z, a program from the Learning A-Z family of education-flavored products focused on lots of ed techy solutions. They are "an education technology company dedicated to expanding literacy through thoughtfully designed resources," which is good, because wow do I hate those other thoughtlessly designed resources. They focus on the PreK-6 market; the product family includes Reading A-Z, Science A-Z, Writing A-Z, Vocabulary A-Z, Raz-Kids, Raz-Plus, Headsprout and some big collections of materials.

Learning A-Z was founded in 2000 by Robert Holl, who was president of the company for a couple of decades. Holl taught for ten years, then left to get into the publishing biz, working for Addison-Wesley, Scott Foresman Publishing, and the Wright Group. And if Headsprout seems out of place on the list of products, that because they were acquired in 2013 by Learning A-Z; Headsprout itself had been acquired by Mimio, which was purchased by Skyview Capital LLC earlier in that same year. Mimio is still out there, now best known as the Boxlight people and are busy in the interactive whiteboard field. 

Meanwhile, in 2004, Learning A-Z was acquired by ProQuest, who also acquired ExploreLearning and Voyager Expanded Learning. But then they sold off most of their content to Cambridge Information Group and changed their name to Voyager Learning Company.

Lazel Inc

Up a level, we find that the Learning A-Z family of products is actually owned by Lazel Inc. When we start looking at these guys, it gets a bit more complicated because...well, they are based in Tucson, AZ, Robert Holl's home town. But for business purposes they are also based in Dallas (we'll explain why in a moment) and are incorporated in, of course, Delaware (if you wonder why that's common, here's an explainer. Short answer--taxes and very, very friendly court system).

Lazel's treasurer is Barbara Benson, which makes perfect sense because she is the CFO for the next level up.

Cambium Learning Group

Founded in 2003 as Cambium Learning Technologies, it has been a gobbling monster. We'll get back to the list in a bit, but remember Voyager Expanded Learning? They merged with Cambium in 2009, spawning Cambium Learning Group. 

Cambium's CEO is John Campbell. A Wharton School graduate, He worked for Commodore (the computer company--oh, C-64, how sweet you were back in the day), tech director for Tribune Media in Chicago back in the late 90s working on the tech strategy for the education publishing subsidiaries, McGraw-Hill (Breakthrough to Literacy was apparently his baby), and then in 2004, became senior VP of ProQuest. From there it was on to COO of Voyager Expanded Learning and then leadership at Cambium. His "about" on LinkedIn tells you where he sees his priorities:

Experienced CEO having increased the value of the company by 14.5x in 5 1/2 years. Managed the company from a being a public company to a private company owned by private equity.
Experienced in M&A, having led many successful acquisitions, including Learning A-Z, ExploreLearning, and Time4Learning.

The leadership team is about what you'd expect, with a Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Legal Officer, and, charmingly enough, a Chief People Officer. And the corporate argle bargle flows freely. The current president of Learning A-Z, whose background is in edu-biz marketing, starts her bio like this:

As an ardent change agent and leader serving the education market for over 20 years, Lisa O’Masta brings her passion for education and commitment to effective student outcomes to every organization she serves. As President for Learning A-Z, Lisa works to energize and evolve the market-leading, digital-first organization in service of K-6 students.

So who belongs to the family of "educational essentials"?

The Cambium Family

Voyager Sopris Learning is now run by Robert Holl, and it is its own web of various programs and companies dealing with literacy, math and professional development. Lexia Rapid Assessment is one of theirs, because Lexia Learning is also part of the Cambium family. The "sopris" and "voyager" names both have a tangled corporate history.

Kurzweil Education is the oldest member of the family, tracing its history back to Raymond Kurzweil and his machine that could do text to speech back in the 1970s (Cambium brags that Stevie Wonder was Kurzweil's first customer in 1997). Cambium bought them in 2005.

Time4Learning provides online homeschooling curriculum. Cambium picked that company up by also buying VKidz; the two were started by John Edelson in his own home in 2004. Vkidz "partnered" with private equity group VSS in 2016, then was glommed up by Cambium in 2018. Vkidz no longer exists as its own brand under Cambium, but Edelson is still the president of Time4Learning out of Ft. Lauderdale. 

ExploreLearning is a math-and-science-focused business. Computerized simulations called gizmos are their claim to fame. David Shuster got a BA and  PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Virginia, and went on to found this company 22 years ago. ProQuest grabbed them in 2005, and so they were part of the Voyager deal later on.

Lexia Learning came to Cambium as part of the package when Cambium bought Rosetta Stone (the language learning folks) in 2020; Rosetta Stone had acquired Lexia in 2013. In fact, it appears that Cambium bought Rosetta Stone only to get its hands on Lexia, it just announced its intention to sell off the language learning portion of Rosetta Stone. 

Finally, Cambium also operates Cambium Assessment, which used to be the assessment division of American Institute for Research before Cambium bought them in 2019. You'll remember AIR as the folks who brought us lots and lots of awesome Common Core testing, first with the Smarter Balanced Assessment and later with varied other state-specific products (e.g. Ohio and Florida). And if you hated them when they were doing all that, you'll really hate their newest hot idea-- using AI to tag students as "at risk" based on testing responses. No way that could end badly, and their track record is super.

Update: h/t Bill Fitzgerald. I had missed that the Cambium Assessment "test delivery system" is used by the College Board for their digital testing. Cambium Assessment claims they "served" 38% of students in the U.S. Which means on top of everything else, between Cambium and the College Board, there's a heck of a data base in play here. 

So while Cambium is no Pearson (not quite, not yet), chances are you've crossed paths with them at some point. But if you've been reading carefully so far, you'll have noticed we have one more level to climb. The leash on the octopus, as it were.

Veritas Capital

In 2018, looking to plant some investment in the ed tech space, Veritas Capital bought Cambium. 

Veritas is a private equity company that's two whole decades old. Says their website, "We invest in companies that provide critical products and services, primarily technology or technology-enabled solutions, to government and commercial customers worldwide." But perhaps the scarier part, if you're a small tentacle they've decided to partner with, is this:

We seek to create value by strategically transforming the companies we acquire. Our sector focus and deep expertise are our competitive discriminators and allow us to identify and execute on multiple strategic levers that drive the performance of our investments.

They "employ an active approach to ownership and value creation," which has a pretty ominous Bond villainy sound to it. The world of acquisitions and mergers is a crazy world. You can play this who acquired whom game all day and never find a place that seems solid and stable. 

Bottom line is this. If you're using any of this vast array of products, you're tapped into a network that involves layers and layers of management that is for the most part far more business oriented than education oriented--certainly not layers and layers of people who are thinking in terms of what a classroom teacher wants or needs or experiences. And the higher in the corporate layers you go, the more you find people who think the company's purpose is to create value and provide ROI to equity managers. Education flavored products are just a means to that end. 

ICYMI: Happy Valentines Day Edition (2/14)

Well, Congress rushed through their work so that they could get started on their vacation. Why shouldn't the rest of us. Let's take a look at this week's reading list.

In Disorienting Return To Civility, Joe Biden's DOJ Backs Up Betsy DeVos

A couple of outlets picked up this story this week, but only Time found a clever angle to go with a clever headline.

My HBCU experience has been life-changing

Lets have some positive stories this week, please. A nice first-person story here from Marissa Stubbs at The Undefeated. And she's in Florida, so there is hope.

Update: Dispatch from the Covid trenches

Grumpy Old Teacher, back in the building, checks his classroom ventilation. The results are not encouraging.

School Ratings, Ranking and Wrongdoing  

Have You Heard welcomes Akil Bello from Fairtest to talk about how much baloney can be squeezed into a ratings list (spoiler alert: a lot).

Big Data on learning loss is not the point: Teachers know how to use formative assessments to guide their work with each child

Jan Resseger adds to the stack of excellent essays explaining just how the chickjen littling about learning loss is a bunch of hooey.

$100M for children "learning faster than ever before" in Tennessee?!

Nancy Bailey takes a look at Tennessee's adoption of Reading360, and why it's not good news.

Who really created the Marvel universe?

A new Stan Lee biography is out, and this is one of the better looks at the attempt to unravel the man's complicated, troublesome legacy. No, it's not about education. I like comics and have read them my whole life. Happy Valentines Day.

OpenAI and Stanford researchers call for urgent action to address harms of large language models like GPT-3

Let's grab that barn door and see if we can't get a handle on the loose horse mess that is language mimicking software. Since GPT-s is OpenAI's baby, I'm not sure how much of this is responsible science and how much of it is trying to handicap marketplace imitators, but since these damn things are going to be proposed as teacherbots sooner or later, we should be paying attention to this stuff.

Piano-playing Penn State professor supports students' mental health

From last October in the Collegian. I have mixed feelings about this mechanical engineering prof who closes class with some piano playing, probably related to the mixed feelings about the amount of tuition I sent off to PSU with my daughter years ago, but it's certainly a bit outside tbe box.

How East Stroudsburg schools plan to diversify curriculum, staff and more

A school district in PA makes an attempt and a plan for getting the schools to more properly reflect the diversity of the student body. From the Pocono Record.

Charter schools invaded our neighborhoods without public input

Carl Peterson in Patch for Los Angeles talks to Eastside Padres Contra La Privatization about how charters moved in, public schools were damaged, and local voices were silenced.

Stop Disrespecting Teachers, Please

Arthur Goldtsein is in the New York Daily News detailing the disrespect that NY teachers have been feeling.

To Test or Not To Test

Well, the correct answer is "not," but this Hechinger Report article by Kelly Field does a better job than some of detailing the sides at play here.

Village teacher wins $1 million prize 

Ranjitsinh Disale wanted to be an engineer but ended up taking on a rough rural gig in India. Now he has a million dollar prize. From NPR

Searching for Shelley Duvall

Shelley Duvall is okay. Another not-education story, but a story that's just very human. 

Now they love her

A beautiful reflection on the forever-awesome Karen Lewis

Amid tough school reopening battles, Americans continue to cheer teachers unions

Rebecca Klein and Ariel Edwards-Levy at Huffington Post reporting that, contrary to what you're hearing from some politicians and pundits, teachers are not actually widely hated for single-handedly keeping school buildings closed.

My Battle With Learning Loss

It first hit me in the July after high school graduation--I had lost my learning about Algebra III. A whole semester, mostly gone.

Of course, I told myself, I never really actually "learned" any of that stuff in the first place. So maybe I didn't actually lose that learning. 

But in college, there were other warning signs. I was an English major, so I didn't take science courses, and all of my high school science stuff started to dribble away, leaking slowly out of the brain-tank where learning is stored. And I had actually understood some of that stuff; but soon, there was nothing left but some mental images of Julius Sumner Miller flinging a bucket around, and I'm pretty sure those are stored in the giggles tank, not the learning one.

It may be because so little of college is spent in an actual classroom as compared to K-12, but learning loss was accelerating. And not just in classes like German, where I was not adding any new learning because I was not actually paying attention. And then I graduated.

Well, you know how it is. If you aren't sitting in a classroom located in a school building, you just lose learning, right and left. Plop. Out of your head.

In the canned fruit aisle at the grocery store. Plop! There goes a whole semester of Spanish. Taking communion at the rail of the First United Methodist Church. Plop! No more tenth grade English vocabulary. Just out for a nice walk on a sunny day. Plop! The entire plot of Hamlet, gone. The instant you step outside of school, you just start losing learning left and right.

I've heard the "experts," talking about how learning involves relationships and lattices and frameworks and bunching interacting with experts and this whole big complex batch of brain science stuff. I've heard professional educators explain why mediocre multiple choice tests are a lousy way of measuring how much learning is in a person's brain. I've read stuff by people arguing that you can't measure learning by the day or the inch or the pound (it might have been me, but, you know--plop). But at this point in my life, I understand that they were all wrong and the test manufacturers and politicians and newspaper editors were right-learning is just slapping a bunch of sticky notes onto the big board in your brain, and if you're not in school to have someone repeatedly bearing down on those stickies with a meaty thumb, they'll just let go and float away. 

So now, in my sixties, I'm like that guy Charlie in Flowers for Something-or-other (Plop!) who just keeps getting dumber and dumber because learning loss is an unavoidable natural process that clearly happens to everyone when they are not in school. At this point I'm just hoping to hold onto basic speech functions and my ability to dress myself, but who knows. I used to know how to diagram sentences, but yesterday I bent over to tie my shoes and --plop! Gone. 

I can't imagine how bad things are getting during this pandemic with students not in school to get sticky notes pushed back onto their brain boards, all those little pads of knowledge and skill just slipping down and away. Or maybe it's like their brains are buckets with holes in them and if schools aren't constantly pouring stuff into the bucket, it's just emptying out. Or maybe it's like learning can only be measured by a series of dumb tasks and if students aren't constantly drilling the dumb task, the dumb task part of their brains shrivels. I don't know. I suppose somebody could argue that that whole model of education shows a deep lack of understanding of what learning is and how it works, but it won't be me, because while I might once have understood all that rigmarole, now, well--plop.

School Choice: Branding for an Open Market

Coming up with the right name for a policy initiative is a critical step in framing a conversation and controlling the narrative. The classic example is the abortion debate, in which one side is "pro-choice" and the other is "pro-life," carefully selected terms that frame each side as champions of an undeniable good. Just watch supporters of "defund the police" get caught in an endless loop of "no, no, what we really mean is..." to understand how important this branding can be.

"School choice" is branding, and relatively new branding at that. You can watch it take off on the Google Ngram viewer to see how often the phrase has been used:

It starts its steep rise in the mnid-80s (Reagan, Nation at Risk), peaks in 2001, hits a trough again in 2013, and has been bouncing back since. 

But what is "school choice" the brand name for? I mean, if we were serious--really serious--about school choice, we would come up with a system that allowed families to choose any school in the state, and we would take the regulatory steps to make sure that every one of those schools met the requirements of a quality school that was part of the public good of public education. We would provide several freelt available different choices within each community, all part of the public education system, and we would tax people out the wazoo to finance the excess capacity needed to allow choice (otherwise family choices would be limited by available spots in a school). And we would, of course, allow for the choice of a private (religious) school or homeschooling, just as we always have.

We've been pummeled by the modern definition of school choice so much that we've forgotten that nothing about the idea of school choice says it must involve privately owned and operated businesses funded with public tax dollars. 

In other words, folks didn't start with the idea of "school choice" and then try to figure out how that would work. They started with an idea about what they wanted to do and then decided to brand it "school choice." 

So what did they want to do? They wanted to open up the education market do that private businesses could score more public tax dollars. 

Consider, for instance, how some reformsters like to call public education a monopoly. This has never made sense to me--public education is many thousands of locally owned and operated systems, many on the order of a mom and pop business. They are not centrally controlled, and families can move between them, admittedly by the cumbersome and restrictive method of moving. For the education "consumer," the system doesn't resemble a monopoly at all; it's not like having to use Microsoft software no matter what or the old, inescapable phone company monopoly.

But public education does look like a monopoly if you are a business trying to get into the market. You want to score some of those sweet public taxpayer dollars, and you're told that only a local government can operate a school and the only way to get some of that vast pile of money is through official government channels. To you, this feels like a monopoly. 

"School choice" is a brand, a fig leaf for covering the real initiative, which is to open the education market. When certain reformsters start talking about school choice, a good way to understand what they're really talking about is to substitute the words "open market."

So we go to the EdChoice website, formerly the Friedman Foundation for the economist who decried the school monopoly and we find "School choice allows public education funds to follow students to the schools or services that best fit their needs" and read that as "An open market allows public education funds to follow students to the schools or services that best fit their needs."

On the School Choice Week website, we find "School choice means giving parents access to the best K-12 education options for their children" which actually means "An open market means giving parents access to the best K-12 education options for their children"

Betsy DeVos: "School choice is coming" is really "Open markets are coming."

Associated Press: "DeVos and President Donald Trump have repeatedly invoked school choice as the solution to parents’ woes" is really "DeVos and President Donald Trump have repeatedly invoked an open market as the solution to parents’ woes."

Jeanne Allen (of the Center for Education Reform): "a united school choice movement was able to repel the attacks from the guardians of the status quo effectively" is really "a united open market movement was able to repel the attacks from the guardians of the status quo effectively." Allen is the woman who coined the "backpacks full of cash" phrase for describing how open markets would work; note that it emphasizes where the money would go, not the student's mind or education.

Substituting "open markets" for "school choice" doesn't reveal nefarious intent, nor, I suspect, does it even change the statements into that proponents would disagree with. But it says a little more clearly what we are talking about. Choicers may add arguments about supposed benefits to students or the community, but that's an afterthought--the main idea remains to open those markets so that other folks have a chance to make money in the education biz. I'm a big believer that we have better conversations when we talk about what we're really talking about, and in the voucher/charter/ESA/micro-credential/personalized learning/education disruption debate, what we're really talking about is converting from a local government universal system to an open market system. We're talking about ending the promise of a free and appropriate education for every child in the country and replacing it with a promise that anyone who wants to try to make a buck in an education-flavored business will get that chance. 

Yes, yes, yes--there are choice advocates who have a different focus (#NotAllChoicers) and plenty of free market acolytes who sincerely believe that a free market will serve students well (spoiler alert: their sincerity does not make them any less wrong). 

Using the term "school choice" is about muddying the water and framing the discussion. Unleashing the open market is a scary conversation-- will their be safeguards and regulations put in place to protect the "consumers,' or will open market education be like the meat packing industry of 120 years ago? Saying "school choice" over and over allows proponents to skip the hard conversation that the country deserves. 

HI: A Houseless Village

 It started with this tweet:

Children who are houseless (homeless), have the chance to win laptops to help with their distance learning during the pandemic. They need your online votes to help them win. #HawaiiNews https://t.co/yg3maBntZ8

— KHON2 News (@KHONnews) February 6, 2021

Reactions were peak tl;dr, with most people not making it past the tweet. But click past to the story, and then on to the contest itself, and you quickly see there' a lot to this.

I'm no expert on Hawaii. My ex-wife lived there for a few years and my sister-in-law and her husband lived on O'ahu for a while. My wife and I visited for about a week. We stayed in a condo near the beach up near the zoo, and is our habit, we took our rental car on some road trips to see the rest of the place. Which on O'ahu, once you get out of city traffic, doesn't take all that long. It's a place of great contrast. Travel up the west side of the island, and you soon arrive at the tip that looks like the end of the world; exposed to the brunt of the ocean, just past the government space-listening station, the road just ends in a patch of lava. Rough paths and an eerie peaceful quiet, not twenty miles away from a roaring metropolis. On the way there, you go past some rough patches of poverty. We would have driven past the community in this story without knowing it. But as I said--no expert, which is something I share with many folks drive-by commenting on this. It's not just homeless kids. It's a whole community.

That community is Pu‘uhonua O Wai‘anae (Refuge of Wai'anae), a community of about 250 houseless people, characterized by resident Twinkle Borge as  "Not homeless-- a village without a place."

Hawaii is a tough place to be homeless. On the one hand, the weather is generally on your side, but on the other, local authorities are not. While we were there, an early morning walk would get you free admission to the morning rousting of the homeless along Waikiki. Pu‘uhonua O Wai‘anae's residents are primarily Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, long underserved and marginalized. Sweeps to clean out the homeless are not uncommon. And then there's stuff like this--some lady offered to buy any homeless people a bus ticket to Wai'anae (and offered a flotation device to anyone who wanted to donate some cash to her effort).

But Pu‘uhonua O Wai‘anae has been taking steps. With the help of donors, the village has purchased 20 acres of land to be used for affordable housing for the villagers. As part of that new, real location for the village, they have plans for a meeting house that will also be used for the education of the children (about 40 of them, who attend the Wai'anae elementary school), complete with a hotspots and, hopefully, computers (they already have one hotspot). The village has their own incorporated 501-C(3) organization (Dynamic Community Solutions) with a detailed, multi-phase plan for creating a place for themselves, as well as a website (Aloha Lives Here) that answers questions about the group and the plan.

Much of this seems to be because they have Twinkle Borge, who appears to be a force of nature all by herself. Like most of the folks there, Borge did not end up houseless because she lived a blameless, pristine life, but by God, if any of her press is even half-accurate, she has worked her butt off since joining this community. Pu‘uhonua O Wai‘anae has worked hard to operate a just community, a community that gets along with the more conventional community nearby. She and James Pakele, head of Dynamic Community Solutions) are the faces of this evolving tent city and its new future.

It's quite a story, and I wish I were in a position to learn more about it. It's certainly not the story lots of folks imagined when they reacted to that tweet. And while I agree that it would be nice if the sponsoring company (Mobile Beacon) just handed over the computers and the $10K, I'll also admit that framing this whole thing as a competition allows each of the ten groups to leverage some free publicity (like the news story in the tweet, or this post), which is hugely valuable in its own right. 

In the meantime, if you'd like to vote for the group, here's that link. And if you'd like to chip in directly, they have a GoFundMe as well.