An Open Letter to Google

I’m thinking of you, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as I write this. Not actually you, more like the mental image I have based on reading Mr. Levy’s book “In The PLEX.”

So what’s the point of this letter? I want Google to transform education in the most fundamental way. Former Googler Katie Stanton is quoted as having said “working in government, is like running a marathon. Blindfolded. Wearing sandbags,” after having served in the Obama administration. I believe we can deliver a free tool for union members which unites them as a network of professionals, fostering innovation and collaboration and reinvigorating collective bargaining from the bottom up. This would go a long way to reduce the burden on educators, allowing them to run without much of the political baggage described by Ms. Stanton.

Of course, when you read this, the obvious next step would be to leave this inquiry in the hands of staff like the esteemed Jonathan Rochelle. What I am envisioning here is not so much at the level of Google Classroom or even G Suite for Education, it’s more about creating a tool to redefine unions as decentralized networks of professionals, using educator unions as a first use case and subsequently applying to independent contractor unions, adjunct university processors, and so on. The recent Janus case, while supported by interests intending to kill public sector unions, could instead re-launch a new generation of decentralized unions, built on Google technology. The Janus ruling provides an opportunity to empower the previously inaccessible union space. I don’t intend to disrupt unions, rather, I hope to provide a tool that attracts union members and empowers them in their professional pursuits. But I need engineering talent and an organization willing to think big to make this a reality.

To be honest, I’m not even sure that I should be involved at all. I see a huge opportunity to support educators and offer an authentic education to public school students and I can’t ignore what I see. My hope is that someone who can think big will read this and will run with it. My role should be limited to my areas of experience in producing actual results. There is no way I could develop this tool myself. My skills are grossly deficient in some required areas. I have seen significant success in education reform, so let me digress and share a bit about where I come from.

I was born in Israel, grew up in inner city Chicago, attended a public International Baccalaureate (IB) program in high school after nine years at the nascent Chicago Waldorf School. I worked for DEC for their dual-core 64-bit Alpha architecture in 1997, after earning my BA in physics from Brandeis. I worked at Great Place to Work(r) Institute, Inc. and then Quigo (“AdSonar”) in the age of AdSense, and then I went into education where I brought an obsession with data to improve student (and staff) experience. Burning Man and similar intentional communities have had an ongoing influence in my life. Just last year I took my eight-year-old daughter to Burning Man for the first time.

As a teacher I was honored to run an award winning FIRST Robotics team, looking to implement Dean Kamen’s vision in my school. We became the top nationally ranked team of all minority, inner-city kids. Of the twenty-three male students in my program (we also started an all-girls robotics team) not a single one of them had a father active in their lives. Subsequently, as the principal of an alternative high school for students who had been expelled from other schools, I would stand outside of the school building as students turned the corner from Madison Avenue onto 128th street in Central Harlem where the school was located. You could see from their faces as they arrived whether our school building was pulling them in or pushing them away. Student experience was my ultimate focus.

In terms of data, I analyzed weekly grade data to look for changes so that I could identify a student who had a life event (family illness, for example) by a drop in their performance. In that way we could pull the student into a private space and ask what happened. To them it was like we were clairvoyant. The boys in particular, who were reluctant to share, would be caught off guard and tears would flow, a connection would be formed. Similarly the analysis of week-to-week grade deltas showed me students who suddenly were making an effort. A student may have an overall average of 35% but if you looked at just the past five days their average was 95% — a potential inflection point in their academic career! We would call those students out in front of their peers and ask them how they did it, make them the resident expert in academic transformation, thus helping to extend their new efforts by acknowledging them publicly. For many this was the first time in many years that they were seen as academic superstars.

We also produced hundreds of videos and audio recordings because I saw that when these students were in front of a camera they showed up with metacognitive skills that they wouldn’t share otherwise. I think that was a result of their having grown up with YouTube. These efforts led to a prestigious award and our school data turning around in less than two years, taking us from being one of the 24 worst schools in a city of nearly 2000 schools to earning the top ratings on city performance reports (“Well Developed” on School Quality Review 2014–15 and “A” Grades on School Progress Reports 2012–2015 after which letter grades were no longer given).

Despite these successes, in 2017 I was “taken down” by old time political bosses. They got behind a teacher who didn’t like my demanding leadership style and began attacking me with lies in the tabloids. Kate Taylor wrote a front page New York Times article, doing a good job telling the story as best she could, given the limited space afforded in the newspaper. Many remarkable details could not be included in her piece, which I partially articulate in this article.

What I am proposing is a tool that would establish a decentralized network of innovative educators, protecting them from the type of take down (or threat thereof) that I experienced as a principal. The fact is that the way I was attacked is used much more frequently against teachers who have less power to fight than does an administrator like myself. With a modest budget and just a few engineers I believe we can design a tool which helps to identify effective and innovative professionals and establish them as thought leaders among their peers, regardless of their tenure. Whether they are implementing mindfulness practices, teaching science through social justice, engaging history in ways suggested by experts like James W. Loewen, or deploying mobile applications into their classroom, this tool would become the go to source for teachers to design an engaging learning environment for public school students. At the same time this tool would focus singularly on data from student work products to measure impact, shielding educators from artificially charged politics which tend to avoid controversy rather than introduce students to relevant topics which have no simple answers.

I am inviting Google to become the agent of transformation of our public schools, empowering a new generation of teacher unions to innovate in ways that have not been seen in more than 150 years and subsequently launching a new decentralized union movement. Let’s replace the SAT and ACT and even college essays with the crowd intelligence of our best teachers. Sound improbable? Read my upcoming book and see if I can’t convince you otherwise.

Unlikely to receive your response,

Nadav Zeimer

P.S. Please click and hold the clap button to help distribution of this letter and forward to people you know who works at Google or even at one of their competitors who are ready to think big.