SAT Scam Alert

This time, it's not the College Board perpetrating the scam.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry sent out an alarm on Monday warning that scammers are contacting parents of students who are getting ready to take the PSAT, SAT, and ACT. The pitch is for some non-existent test prep materials. And it's not just Pennsylvania. 

"Just give us a deposit, and the materials will be on their way," say the scammers, who also promise that the deposit will be refunded after the materials are used and returned. Just use your credit card to put down the deposit.

The parents get no test prep materials. The scammers have their credit card numbers and a chunk of their money.  

What really sells the scam is the information the scammers have. Folks reporting the scam to the Better Business Bureau say that the caller claims to from the College Board, just calling to confirm the student's information, and the scammers know the name, address, school information, and the date and location for the student's test. 

Caller, Carson, stated my son had requested SAT prep materials through College Board student services. He had my address, my son’s name, date and location of the SAT test my son is scheduled to take. Caller stated they needed parental permission prior to sending documents and that I needed to give him a credit card number for collateral.

We would be sent the college SAT prep materials; the materials would be free of charge for 30 days and we would need to return the materials in the envelope provided and my card wouldn’t be charged. The caller stated they send email reminders prior to the return deadline and will send shipping confirmation once the material package is mailed out. My card was charged $249.95 instantly.

Authorities remind you not to give out financial information to strangers, and the College Board won't call you up to ask for your credit card number.

This is not a new scam; it was being run back in at least 2022. It's just one more sad side effect of the fear and anxiety that have been attached to these Big Scary Tests that students are repeatedly told will Affect Their Entire Future! But it does raise one question--whose data has been hacked in order to provide scammers with all that info about the student? 

Teaching Flow State

As I noted a month ago, we have research out there that shows a parallel between playing jazz and teaching a class, mostly related to the gazillion microdecisions that are made in the process. For the subset of teachers who both teach and play jazz, or basketball, or any number of similarly dense and intense activities, this was not exactly news-- we'd already sensed the connection.

We can particularly sense the connection when we are in the zone, what the grown-ups who study this kind of thing call "flow state." If you've been there, you know it--the Something just flows through you, and you are just a conduit functioning so well and so clearly that you feel pretty awesome all the way to your bones. You make those gazillion microdecisions instantly in what the science folks call "effortless attention to a task."

But how do we get there? What makes flow state happen? Which way to the zone?

There are a variety of theories. New research suggests there is a particular explanation of what is going on in the flowing brain, and for me that suggests a few things about learning and teaching.

One theory flow is a version of hyperfocus, that executive function portion of the brain get cranked up and organize everything around the task (I am not a brain scientist, and you probably aren't either, so I'm going to do some oversimplification here). If that were the accurate explanation, then we'd expect people to get good at stuff through concentration, focus, executive function type stuff. Think back to that teacher who taught by way of intense demands to focus attention on the task at hand.

But the other theory says that executive function actually steps back, and in a flow state operation is taken over by an entire other neural processing network that doesn't need the executive function network and basically tells it to go sit quietly while the flow gets going. This would fit with details such as the fact that it's harder to get in the zone when you're just learning the task, or that middle-ground area that you might describe as thinking too much and getting in your own way.

The new study, "Creative flow as optimized processing: Evidence from brain oscillations during jazz improvisations by expert and non-expert musicians," comes down on the side of that second theory.

The study hooked up a bunch of jazz musicians (guitarists) of varied experience and had them do some soloing while scientists watched their brains. Interestingly, they also had some jazz experts judge the quality of the solos (all 192 of them). 

Things they concluded. More experience made higher flow scores. Self-rated quality ("Yeah, I nailed that") predicted flow for all players, but judged quality only predicted flow for low-experience players. In other words, if low-experience players had a good solo, it was probably flow, but for high-experience players, not necessarily. That makes sense to me; with enough experience, you can do a perfectly fine job on "autopilot," which is not at all like flow.

The paper also rules out the default mode network (the daydreamy, reflective part of the brain) as a player in flow.

The paper also includes a whole lot of information about pieces of the brain that light up and statistics stuff (the paper is here, and a plain English explanation is here). 

But the bottom line here seems to be that only through experience over time do you grow the capacity to flow, that mastering the task or task set is the business of building a new neural network in your brain to manage the task.

This would fit nicely with, for instance, the conventional wisdom that it takes a teacher five to seven years to really get good at the work. 

It would also suggest that the teaching model that says we just explain the content and make students focus on it real hard is not necessarily the best path, that a certain amount of repetition is useful, because we're not trying to get them to focus real hard and acquire a particular bit of knowledge, but we are trying to build a neural network through repeated experience. 

It's certainly not a radical new idea to suggest that practicing something a whole lot makes you better at it (though, before someone brings up the 10,000 hour rule, that thing is debunked). Still, "Build a neural network" is certainly a way to think about teaching and learning, perhaps most at odds with some of our traditional approached because it requires one major ingredient-- time. Think of how often we insist that students learn something, Right Now, because if they would just Apply Themselves and Focus, they could get it. As always, some balance might be good.

It also suggests that pressuring students to substitute intensely focused attention in place of time is perhaps not useful. In fact, it strikes me that repeated experiences of frustration, pressure and failure are also building a neural network that's not helpful, another version of the injunction for performers to avoid practicing something the wrong way.

Of course, not all learning needs to aspire to creating a flow state, and I'm sure there's more studying to be done. Always fun to think about building a brain, though. 

NC: A Truly Terrible Candidate For Education Chief

Catherine Truitt was no prize, a stalwart friend of the school privatization movement who served as a senior education advisor to Governor Pat McCrory, a chancellor of an online college, and most recently as North Carolina's superintendent of public instruction. In that role she was a friend to the wealthy, the privatizers, and the Trump crowd.

And yet, she apparently wasn't friendly enough, because in the primary she got her incumbent butt handed to her by a spectacularly unqualified opponent, who is now the GOP candidate for the state superintendent post.

That's bad news for North Carolina, because Michelle Morrow could easily be one of the worst state education leaders in the nation.

Morrow couldn't even win a school board election just two years ago.

Morrow has no background in education. She was a nurse. She's homeschools her own children and is virulently opposed to public schools, calling them "indoctrination centers" and "socialism centers" and urged parents not to send their children there. When running for school board, she said, “I think the whole plan of the education system from day one has actually been to kind of control the thinking of our young people.” She argued for more money for tutoring which could be paid for by cutting spending on "nonessentials items" such as "social activism," though she couldn't provide examples of such activity, but she'd, you know, heard stuff.

Morrow's board campaign also included complaints about books with sex acts in them. Just child porn she claimed, and was among some folks in Wake County who filed police reports against the board over naughty books in the library. 

Morrow was at DC on January 6, though she says she stayed out of the capital- just there for a homeschooling civics lesson for the kids. Except that her video, which starts out "Hey patriots" and announces that she's at the capital "because that's where I President asked us to come" pans her surroundings, and there are no kids in sight. Maybe the educational experience was going to be delivered second hand. "If you are going to commit treason, if you are going to participatre in fraud," she announces, "We are coming after you."

In March of 2021 she was still out on the streets for Trump and MAGA (here's some video) for Liberty First Grassroots PAC.

CNN dug into her social media activity and found, among other things, that she would "prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad," in response to the notion of sending Barack Obama to prison at Guantanamo Bay. "Death to all traitors" she tweeted under a fake Time Magazine cover showing Obama in an electric chair. She also shared plenty of QAnon stuff. In one particularly thorough post, she wrote

Obama did it. Hillary did it. Schiff did it. Comey did it. Yates did it. Holder did it. Clapper did it. Gates did it. Fauci did it. Time for #WeThePeople to DO IT and #DrainTheSwamp!!!!! #NoJusticeNoCountry #DeathToTraitors #ProsecuteThemNow #TakeBackAmerica .@dbongino #KAG,

She has called Islam evil. She has ranted about Deep State Globalists. She has the backing of Moms for Liberty chapters in North Carolina. 

 Does she get the whole campaign as a public figure thing? In a video, she complains that CNN "stalked" her and tried to get her to answer questions after a gathering (questions like, Do you stand by your demand that Barack Obama be executed?) You can watch the video of what happened--it looks a lot like typical reporter asking a candidate questions that she would rather not answer.

Then she moves on to arguing that the CNN reporters don't really care about North Carolina students, or they'd be asking questions about the failing schools and the "74% of eighth graders that are not competent in reading, math, or science." So, more failure to understand what "proficient" means on the NAEP (it means above average, not competent). North Carolina voters are too smart to be fooled by "these people from other states and these left-wing media." She's a victim. Soon they will see how she returns the schools to awesomeness (though why it has failed terribly while the GOP has had control of everything in the state is not explained).

She's been on Steve Bannon's show. He asked why "they" are hating on her so much, and she explains that the Democrats know it's a swing state, and "the other thing is I've been speaking truth about how we want to get back to the basics of education and exposing what's been happening in our schools, the failures of the left in the radical agendas and the political and sexual and racially explicit stuff that's that's poisoning our children's minds and keeping them from getting a good education."  And I will remind you that Morrow home schools and that North Carolina Republicans have enjoyed a well-gerrymandered majority for years (and a super-majority since 2023). Also, they lied and smeared President Trump and she's just "next on the hit parade." 

Her own campaign video claims she is facing "the most radical extremists the Democrats have ever run" and accuses opponent Mo Green of spending six years "leading a progressive organization that funded efforts to destroy families, public schools, and everyone's safety in this state." She means, I think, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, a philanthropic group that does grants aimed at improving communities in North Carolina. 

It goes on and on. There's the time she had a meltdown over being in a Dollar Tree with a bunch of people who didn't speak English. There's her desire to do away with the department she wants to run.

Or a week or so ago when her campaign spokesperson Sloan Rachmuch flipped out over a pride flag hanging on the wall in a school's administrative wing, posting, “Yet another example of the socialist indoctrination camps @MicheleMorrowNC talks about.” It's a diabolical plot. Rachmuch is the head of the Education First Alliance and Pen and Shield Media, a pair of right wing outfits that have their very own rabbit hole. 

It appears that North Carolina, between Mark Robinson and Michelle Morrow, is about to field test just how much juice is left in the far-right Trumpian victimhood culture panic approach to politics. If it has enough to elect this woman, that will be bad news for folks in North Carolina who care about education (and also for those who don't, but it will take them longer to realize it). Let's watch this race. 

A Voucher By Any Other Name

Voucher supporters have one major problem: school vouchers are unpopular.

The tern doesn't test well. Measure of public support is iffy-- if you ask people if they would like every student to have the chance to ride to a great school on their own pony, people say yes, but if you ask a more reality-based framing ("should we spend education dollars on public schools or subsidies for some private schools") the results look a bit different. 

But one clear measure of public support for vouchers is this; despite all the insistence that the public just loves the idea, no voucher measure has ever been passed by the voters in a state. All voucher laws have been passed by legislators, not voted in by the public. 

Voucher supporters have developed one clear strategy-- call them something else.

The basic school voucher idea is simple-- the state takes money that it was going to spend on public education (either after that money has been paid in taxes, or by having someone trade a "contribution" to a voucher fund in exchange for tax credit) and giving it to parents, who in turn can go out and buy education services on their own. 

They're not taxpayer-funded vouchers--they're "tax credit scholarships." They're not vouchers-- they're an Education Freedom Account. And if you want to get in a twitter battle, go ahead and call education savings accounts "vouchers," because part of the whole point of education savings account was to create an instrument that was both a super-voucher and not-something-we'll-call-a-voucher-at-all-so-stop-doing-that-dammit.

I expect that behind the curtain there have been folks fervently doing messaging testing on other names for vouchers, and from the results around the nation, we can deduce that words that tested well were "education" and "freedom" and "scholarship." Also, "empowerment" is coming on strong. States with education savings accounts have the chance to play with the initials ESA. 

So what pops out of the branding machine is Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (Arizona), Education Freedom Account (Arkansas, New Hampshire), Family Empowerment Scholarship Program (Florida), Choice Scholarship Program (Indiana), Opportunity Scholarship Program (North Carolina), Education Choice Scholarship (Ohio), and, of course, who could forget Betsy DeVos's national tax credit scholarship voucher program, the Education Freedom Plan. 

You can mad lib your way to a voucher program of your own. Education Freedom Scholarship Opportunity Program! Family Freedom Education Scholarships! Family Freedom Empowerment Education Scholarship Opportunity Choice Program Plan! Just don't call it a voucher.

Bonus credits to Louisianna, where someone took the trouble to write a bill pushing the Louisianna Giving All True Opportunity to Rise-- LA GATOR. And in California, legislature voucherfiles are trying "Education Flex Account" for their latest attempt to pass an ESA voucher.

But a voucher by any other name still smells the same. It's a payoff to parents so that they'll exit public education, a false promise of education choice, a redirection of public taxpayer dollars into private pockets, an outsourcing of discrimination, a public subsidy for private religious choices, a means of defunding and dismantling public education as we understand it in this country, a transformation of a public good into a market-based commodity. Call it what you like. There isn't enough air freshener in the world to make it smell like a rose.

ICYMI: Easter Knee Birthday Band Edition (3/31)

Happy Easter to those of you who observe the occasion. We're fans here at the Institute, though this year it caps off a busy time.

Today is the birthday of the Institute's West Coast Executive Vice President, and tomorrow kicks off the season for the town band to which the CMO and I belong (it celebrates its 168th anniversary this year). 

And earlier this week I had some arthroscopic surgery performed on a knee. I had pretty much the same meniscus-trimming exercise performed forty-some years ago. Back then the post-op protocol was to immobilize the leg in a hip-to-ankle cast. I had to trade cars with my brother (switching a 1979 Opel hatchback with standard shift for a 1954 Buick with an automatic). The after six weeks the cast came off to reveal a pale imitation of a functional leg. Nowadays, the Best Practices are to get up and humping around on the leg ASAP, which I'm doing with limited grace. But at least I won't need three months to fully recover from the whole business. Makes me wonder what would have happened if the state legislature had, forty-some years ago, passed a law mandating the protocol as the only legal treatment. Do you think they could have shifted as nimbly as the actual medical professionals. 

At any rate, here's some reading from the week to go along with your tasty chocolate treats.

The false promise — and hidden costs — of school vouchers

Voucher expert Josh Cowen explains what's really happening and why Pennsylvania in particular should not get on the voucher train. It's at the Philadelphia Inquirer, so my apologies if you can't get to it, but if you can, you should.

School voucher proponents spend big to overcome rural resistance

The Arkansas Advocate reports on the big push in Texas and elsewhere by deep pocketed fans of dismantling public education, including DeVos's AFC Victory Fund.

Success Academy eyes Florida expansion as Schools of Hope operator

Eva Moskowitz can small Florida dollars all the way from New York City. You'll have to hold your nose a bit for this news, which reports without examination the charters claims of high test scores and full college placement (but not its hard work in getting rid of students who might mess up its numbers). 

Research from pro-charter school group makes case for halting the approval of new charters

Kris Nordstrom explains how the Fordham Institute inadvertently made the case against more charter schools in North Carolina.

Colleges Are Facing an Enrollment Nightmare

MSN pulls up a Rose Horowitz article from the Atlantic that explains why the FAFSA is throwing a giant monkey-wrench into college application this year.

What My Professors Never Told Me About Teaching

Jherine Wilkerson at EdWeek with a listicle of items that teachers will recognize.

A Grim Anniversary, A Useless State Report Card, and New District Chiefs – Its Easter Time In Tennessee

More on the ground reporting from TC Weber

Will Untenable Voucher Expansion Threaten Public School Funding in Ohio?

Ohio has joined the ranks of states writing a choice check that its taxpayers can't cash. Who's going to end up paying? Jan Resseger looks into it.

Ohio school board may raise teacher license fees as budget shortfall looms

Of course, if they're really strapped for cash, they could always try to squeeze some more out of teachers.

Another Crusade Against "Diversity" in Education

Steve Nuzum tells the story of a bill that seeks to ban diversity, equity and inclusion without explaining what they mean.

West Virginia governor signs vague law allowing teachers to answer questions about origin of life

West Virginia tries one more way to get creationism into the classroom.

Secret recording shows pressure on Republican lawmakers to vote for school vouchers

In Tennessee, yet more recordings showing that lobbyist tactics on the school voucher issue are pretty direct and threatening.

Public school leaders slam bills to fund private schools 

Those same folks are in Louisianna trying to ram through yet another privatization bill. 

Many Houston charter schools are violating state transparency laws.

Texas is home to one of the biggest charter school scams in the nation. Yet, as this report by Miranda Dunlap for Houston Landing shows, there's still an awful lot of non-compliance when it comes to transparency.

Why I Am Not Going To Use a Chatbot to Do My Writing For Me

David Lee Finkle is the creator of Mr. Fitz, an outstanding comic strip about teaching. He also blogs occasionally, and this latest piece has lots worth reading to say about AI as a classroom tool. 

Fostering Authority in Student Writers

Paul Thomas with some excellent thoughts about how to teach writing. 

LGBTQ activist group 'Free Mom Hugs' delivers cease and desist to Moms for Liberty

Moms for Liberty called them groomers, then doubled down. So now they can deal with some lawyers. 

What the hell, Oklahoma?!

Oklahoma gets a whole section of ICYMI this week. Start with the Politico profile of education dudebro Ryan Walters, collecting all his sad and infuriating story in one place. Also, maybe his department is misusing federal money to plug a substitute teacher problem they helped create. Meanwhile, as lot so folks line up to grab the limited public comment spots in a OK Department of Education board meeting, the department locked itself in by tying doors shut with extension cords. And while his department now has a shiny new School Choice Department, it apparently no longer has any lawyers. Quite the operation out there.

Kids as young as 14 were found working at a Tennessee factory that makes lawn mower parts

More frontiers in child labor. Well, child immigrant labor. 

Also, at Forbes.com, I wrote about why the push to legislate Science of Reading would be a bad idea even if Science of Reading was a legit good idea. 

Join me at substack. I'd love to have more readers, and it's free and easy for you. 

The Trouble With Classical Education

Classical education, despite the fact that most people who use the term appear to know exactly what they mean, is a wide, messy category. A recent Emma Green piece in the New Yorker captures much of that, from the original concept of Dorothy Sayers to the controversial stances of Doug Wilson, granddaddy of the Association of Classical Christian Schools to Jeremy Tate's relentless pitching of the Classic Learning Test, the supposed alternative to the SAT and ACT. 

Classical schools have been commandeered by a variety of folks, from far right conservatives to the christianist nationalists of places like Hillsdale to others who, well, are not in tune with those ideologies. But they all give me a hinky feeling. I would never put my child in a classical academy of any sort. The reason boils down to this quote from the Green piece:

Classical education is premised on the idea that there is objective truth, and that the purpose of school is to set kids on a path toward understanding it. This principle is often framed in philosophical shorthand—classical educators love talking about “truth, beauty, and goodness,” which can sound like a woo-woo catchphrase to the uninitiated—and it’s paired with an emphasis on morality and ethics.

Sure, there is truth, beauty and goodness--but only one version.

That's an attractive approach for anyone whose belief system is centered on One Truth, whether that's a secular truth or a religious one, so we shouldn't be surprised by the sorts of folks who are attracted to the classical school approach.

Any why not, some folks are going to argue. 2 + 2 = 4. If you jump off the top of a building, you will fall to the ground. There are absolute and objectively true things in the world, so why not make our foundation solid by resting upon them?

Here's my problem. That statement of premise (as Green acknowledges elsewhere in her piece) is only half complete.

The real premise in classical schooling (and fundamentalist religion and hard line culture politics and other One Objective Truth world views) is this:

There is an objective truth-- and I know exactly what it is.

It's the "I know exactly what it is part" that is the major hitch. It's that part, that "Trust me because I am right about everything 100% of the time" part, that I simply don't believe.

If you're going with, "Well, if you don't believe in an objective Truth, then you must just believe in some sort of relativistic, higgledy-piggledy, situational ethics, spinning moral compass view of the world," well, that's not it either. I believe that the universe is a solid, real thing, that history happened, that words mean things, but I also believe that the universe is a big, complicated, possibly-infinite, quantum-fueled creation beyond human comprehension. We humans have as much chance of Understanding It All as the chipmunks in my back yard have of grasping differential calculus. 

We are limited creatures, and our ability to perceive is seriously limited and influenced by what we can see from where and when we stand. On top of that, we humans like to make all sorts of stuff up, sometimes in an attempt to reduce Vast Confusing Reality to a manageable symbolic representation, and sometimes in attempt to create an illusion of power and safety for ourselves.

The One Truth view can be a refuge for frightened folks, folks who want desperately to believe that the One Truth is graspable and, when grasped, will yield a set of rules that will keep us safe if we just follow them. It also appeals to people whose insular, self-important view of the world is threatened, in hopes that they can nurse their special little flower safely, waiting to get back to their imaginary position of deserved domination. That despite a rich human history that shows no such thing is true. 

We wrestle with all of this regularly. Ralph Waldo Emerson became a dean of US letters and philosophy with his essay "Self-reliance," which helped set the argument that we weren't going to find the One Truth by studying classical dead white guys, and that what truth we could find would have to be rediscovered anew in each new day (including, it should be noted, truths about ourselves). 

These are scary times (maybe not objectively scary, maybe not as scary as the world-falling-apart 1930s or the nuclear Armageddon any day now 1970s, but with fear as a major political currency, we regular convince ourselves the times are scary) and in scary times, folks like something solid and reassuring, like a belief system that says the One Objective Truth can not only be known, but has already been pretty much mapped out by a bunch of ancient guys, so if we just study that, we'll be safe.

Plus in an education system, the One Objective Truth makes organizing education is so much easier. "Critical thinking" just means "thinking that leads you to the One Correct Answer." All tests are objective tests (easy to score). And you can foster the belief that those who know the One Right Answer are better than those Others. Congratulations, young meritocrat.

Are there classical schools that avoid the One Objective Truth trap. Probably. Certainly there have been people who used their classical education training as a tool to bust out of their classical education training (Emerson and many of his buddies would be examples). 

Any education system based on the notion that there is only One True Answer for any of life's complex and complicated and eternally shifting vantage points is not a system that I'm interested in. Too much of life is looking for One Better Answer or One Answer That Works Reasonably Well or One Answer I Can Cobble Together With The Tools At Hand, not to mention One New Revised Answer Now That I've Had A Chance To Think Abou What I Said Yesterday. It's not all higgledy-piggledy land of do as you please; most of the time some answers are definitely better than others.

But to attempt to build a fortress out of One True Answer is folly. It's a small, brittle fortress that confines more than it protects, and doesn't even protect particularly well. 

Let me try one more explanation. You could, for example, enter into a marriage saying, "Here's a list of rules. This is what you're supposed to, and here's what I'm supposed to do, and here are the rules for how we'll interact, and we'll just follow those rules for the rest of our lives, so we don't really ever have to talk about this again." But that's not much of a marriage, not really a relationship between two living, breathing humans.

Some folks want to try that same sort of thing with their God or their understanding of the universe. "Just give me a list of rules, and I'll follow them carefully every day, mostly, and we don't ever have to talk again." But that's not a living, breathing relationship. 

I don't know how you have a static relationship with your spouse, your friends, your God, your universe, your understanding of yourself. But that's what One Truth promises-- a static relationship where, once you Know the Truth, nothing ever changes. This is not my idea of a functional relationship with the world, and it strikes me as particularly ineffective to try enforcing this relationship on children and youths, for whom change is constant and unavoidable. When you're young, your perspective on yourself and how to be fully human in the world is constantly changing.

Maybe that's meant to be the appeal of classical schooling-- in a world that seems to be constantly changing, here are some eternal Truths to latch on to. But only I know them, and you will have to trust that my One Truth is the correct one ignore all the other truths floating around, and I promise, if you just stay in this tiny little bubble, everything will be okay. Good luck with that. 

What Ever Happened To Coursmos (Or, How Those MOOCs Doing These Days)

Once upon a time, internet-delivered courses were the Next Big Thing. Outfits like Udacity were promising to deliver a college education, digitized and personalized. In a Wired article on "The Stanford Education Experiment [that] Could Change Higher Education Forever," Sebastian Thrun predicted there would only be ten universities left in the world and that his online education company Udacity would be one of them. That was in 2012. Ten years are up.

Read Audrey Watters piece, "I Told You So" in which she takes a deserved victory lap in the wake of Udacity's sale to a consulting company. 

Back ten or so years ago, plenty of outfits wanted to get in on the biz. Let's look at another one and see if its story has a happier ending than the story of Udacity (spoiler alert: it does not).

In 2013, Coursmos launched, promising to fill a "soundbite-sized gap in the e-learning delivery space," a sort of mini-MOOC for your phone, "e-learning for the Twitter generation." Coursmos was a Russian start-up, co-founded by Roman Kostochka, Kateryna Seledets,  Pavel Dmitriev, Alex Sinichkin, and Pavel Konan. The team included Kostochka (CEO), Dmitriev (CMO), Vyacheslav Grachev (CTO), Seledets, Konan (Lead developer), Igor Pahomov, Todd Gibons (Growth Hacker), Paul Shuteyev, Pedro Sanchez de Lozada, Igor Shoifot, Brian Sathianathan, Igor Ryabenkiy, Jon Nordmark, Dmitry Ufaev-- a team assembled from USA, EU, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.  

The company opened up shop in San Carlos, CA. Kostochka had previously founded EdKarma in Silicon Valley. Seledets had had worked at the Happy Farms Business Incubator, the American-Ukranian business accelerator that helped launch Coursmos. Sinichkin doesn't list Coursmos on his list of startups.

The model was basically a learning brokerage. Instructors could sign on, and students would find them, and Coursmos would take a cut for being the educational matchmaker. Their own pitch found them a bit behind others in the field (Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, etc) both in funding and courses, which they cleverly spun as Coursmos offering the best dollar-per-course ration. 

The idea was to set up a phone app, so they hit the Apple Store first, then later added Google play. "Mobile first" was supposed to be their "disruptive" element. Their exit strategy was to be acquired in 2-3 years, possibly by Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Benesse, the Washington Post Company, or Apollo Group. (Spoiler alert: that did not happen).

Coursmos did its seed rounds of investing in 2014 and 2015, then in 2015 went after venture capital. It was a half-million here, a half-million there some of it from the Russian Imperius Group. By 2015 it was claiming a half million registered users and pushing itself at corporate users, saying its strongest markets were in U.S., Russia, the U.K., India, Brazil and Indonesia. 

The website pitch was "Education for generation distracted." At first. By 2016, the pitch was "Build your online education business" and aimed clearly at folks providing the course materials. It bragged 1.7 million students, 36,032 courses, and $2.5 million in sales. They even had a wikipedia page.

But by 2016, the buzz had died down for the micro-learning platform. Kostochka's LinkedIn profile says he co-founded and CEOed a new business in January of 2017-- in Hong Kong. The Coursmos Twitter account went dormant in October of 2016 (except for one random post in May, 2018). The barely-active Coursmos Courses account likewise stopped in September, 2016. And a Coursmos R&D account opened up in August of 2013 with "Today we are launching it in the AppStore-- in Russian--then posted a total of 19 times. 

In 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, the website was pitching a "leading-edge training solution that enables your company to efficiently train employees and build a modern corporate learning system" with a "new generation SaaS LMS platform" boasting 5000 "off-the-shelf business courses." Then the wayback machine archive shows Coursmos going silent-- with nothing but 404 messages or a message, in Russian, that the domain registration has expired.

But the Coursmos story isn't over yet!

In December of 2023, a promise that "our website is coming soon." 

And sure enough, on January 1, 2024, Coursmos was back. Same logo, same web address, but a slightly different mission. "We turn your stress into straight A's" the bold print promises.

We're your writing wizards. Custom essays, research papers, and dissertations on any topic. We cover everything from online class help to exams to homework and assignments. Our academic superheroes take your strain. So you can stress less and score more.

 Yeah, one of those sites. The current Coursmos offers services ranging from "essay writing help" and "dissertation help" to "do my assignment," "do my homework," "take my online exam," and "take my online class." There are links to industry recognition articles, all written about the old Coursmos. 

There are glowing student testimonials that all follow the same basic outline, making sure to mention the course involved in the first part of the first sentence (Couldn't make it to my psychology class, My literature essay was a breeze, Tackling environmental science was tough, I was kinda lost on my biology thesis, History can be tricky sometimes, For my business dissertation, etc). 

A broad business like this would seem to require a whole lot of inhouse experts to help the customers cheat study. Unless you had a whole library of previously created educational content that you could just tap.

There's also a friendly chat that immediately offers help, as soon as you give it your email and phone number. That was "powered by Brevo," a firm that automates customer relationships, but my chatter said she works for Coursmos.

I asked the chat (Samantha) who the CEO is, but didn't get much in the way of an answer, though she did indicate that the business has been taken over. The whole ownership and operation of the biz is mysterious. They have a blog, which weirdly today put up some posts about some gamer codes, in German, and I'm just not going down that rabbit hole today. The rest are more closely related to the actual cheating business of the site, with none from before January 1, 2024.

Three names turn up in the blog. Tom Baldwin, Garfield Conner, and Dave Franklin. Of the three, I could only find Franklin, who just happened to set up a profile on M5Srack Community two weeks ago. From this we learn that Coursmos HQ is now in a Los Angeles "coworking and office space" location. On this page, Franklin describes Coursmos as a platform that offers "bite-sized courses on a wide range of topics," but on other profiles the "academic writer" is clearer that "we offer cheap online class help in USA." 

We could chase leads all day. There's Andrew Stevens, a guy from New York whose LinkedIn profile names him the CEO of Coursmos from 2014 till the present. Of course, almost everyone who's linked to Coursmos doesn't note an end date.

But mostly what we have here is the lifecycle of a piece of education-flavored entrepreneurialism. Coursmos was never started to make an important advance in teaching people-- it was created to be just good enough to attract a deep-pocketed buyer so everyone could cash out. When that didn't happen (because MOOCs are not a great idea and miniMOOCs are even less great), there was a brief attempt to tap a different market, and then Coursmos went into a coma until someone bought up all the "content" aka all those courses that folks created for them, and sold it to someone who decided the content library could be used to help students cheat. 

Is there a lesson here? I guess. Every ed tech has a story, and very often it's not a story about education. Pay attention.