October 2022
Case
HBS Case Collection

EducationSuperHighway 2.0

By: William A. Sahlman, Allison M. Ciechanover and Emily Grandjean

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:35

Abstract

In 2012, Evan Marwell launched EducationSuperHighway (ESH) to address a major problem: though most public K-12 schools in the US had access to the Internet, only roughly 30% had true broadband access that would enable every student to have high speed connectivity. Marwell and his team raised philanthropic capital and worked with schools, telecommunications companies, and local, state, and federal government officials to meet that challenge. By 2019, over 99% of the public schools in the US had true broadband access.
Marwell and his team had begun the process of winding down activities at ESH when the pandemic erupted. Students were working from home, not physically at school. They decided to try to help 18 million households with 47 million people to have affordable broadband access at home.
In 2020, Marwell and Jessica Reid Sliwerski also launched a program to tackle a pernicious problem in education; by third grade, only about one in three US children were reading at grade level. Ignite! Reading offered students access to an individual science of reading tutor for 15 minutes a day over Zoom while at school. Early evidence suggested that for every week working with an Ignite tutor, kids gained over 2 weeks of reading comprehension. Ignite was organized as a public benefit corporation.