Jess Gartner, Allovue CEO and Founder, discusses district and school finances and the impact quality information can have on critical decisions. Gartner and Allovue are hosting The Future of Education Finance Summit on July 22nd in Baltimore, Maryland. Allovue and sponsor, the Reason Foundation, are bringing together key voices representing the United States Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, district leaders, and innovators like Classwallet, LEA(R)N, and Noodle Markets.
Transcript
Host: Well, this should be fun. Jess Gartner and I chatted a few years ago. I was saying off-air that it felt like it was three or four years ago and maybe it was even less than that. But like you said, being in the entrepreneurial space can be like living in dog years.
But tell us, Allovue is spending to student achievement, which I think is such an innovative idea when we’re looking sadly at the waste in funding and the way it’s managed in education. And I think that’s fair to say around the world.
If you could catch us up on where Allovue is right now in 2016, Jess.
Jess Gartner: Yeah. Well, it’s funny to me that you say it’s an innovative idea.
Host: This is a comedy show [laughing]
Jess Gartner: Yeah. The fact that we’re saying that this is an innovative thing is sort of part of the problem, right, because we connect spending to outcomes in pretty much every other industry. So education is a little bit behind the curve in that respect. I mean, if you look at how most other industries operate, you are certainly being very critical about where you’re allocating resources and how it’s impacting your bottom line. Now, in education, we say student success is the bottom line, right? The goal should be to allocate resources to promote student achievement. If we are funding resources or initiatives that aren’t moving the needle on student achievement, then we should be doing something differently.
Allowing Flexibility
Host: –Yes, it’s innovative, but it shouldn’t be when other industries have been doing this forever. But I would imagine that their questions to you become different as they become more understanding of the power of it. How have you seen growth over time with the people that are receiving it?
Jess Gartner: Yeah. So what’s been fascinating is that we intentionally made the product flexible for a variety of use case scenarios. And our district partners continue to invent new ones, which is really cool. So we have seen some districts using our correlation analysis tool to look at equity analysis in their district and start seeing how they’re allocating dollars equitably across different populations. So, you know, are they prorating dollars equitably for Title I populations based on those enrollments across schools and sort of doing an equity analysis either to double-check a current funding formula or perhaps propose a new one? We are also seeing districts use it to gauge the usage and effectiveness of very singular programs. So let’s say they launched a new reading program and they want to look at that.
We have districts particularly in California where they are doing the LCAP, the local control plans, where they have to plan how their dollars are linking to their goals for the district. We’ve actually started mapping their chart of accounts to their goals. So it’s essentially a whole second general ledger that is based on the goals and priorities and strategies for the district.
Strategic Planning
So one of the biggest challenges with creating a strategic plan like that is saying, “Okay, well, you know, we have this accounting structure, that’s not really meant to track goals. How do we align that spending and then communicate that with our school leaders and our stakeholders in the community to say this is the goal for our district. These are the strategies we’re employing to accomplish that goal. And here’s how we’re actually allocating dollars and resources to accomplish that goal.” And then throughout the year and at the end of the year, we can evaluate the success metrics that we have identified to see if this is working. And if it is, we can keep investing in these resources. And if it’s not, we can reevaluate it.
So we see a lot of that with our districts in California. And then my personal favorite and really one of the biggest inspirations for founding Allovue is the empowerment piece. I have long believed that principals and people that are closest to students are some of the best people to be making decisions about where resources go, right? They understand what their students need, what their teachers need, what their communities need and they can really tailor those resource decisions to meet those unique needs at their school.
Tracking Success
Host: You know what I love about it, you’re talking there is a fluidity to Allovue and by the very nature of it; you’re not going to stay static. And so much of education has been sort of “we develop it” and then it just stays as some legacy system that should be put in the closet forever. You’re getting data on a day-to-day basis in ways the people interpreting it force a change in the way that you’re even looking at data and building systems, which I think is really, really compelling in a space that has been antiquated for so long.
Jess Gartner: Yeah. We really believe that the ability to track and monitor your accounts on a daily basis or even weekly is a huge part of moving the needle in this area because, I mean even if you think about, your personal finances, imagine if you only looked at your bank account once a year. That would be a real challenge.
EdFinTech
Host: It would. It would. So, Jess, tell us what #EdFinTech is? It was a sort of a hashtag campaign. But I know it’s on your website, so what is #EdFinTech?
Jess Gartner: EdFinTech. Well, you know, we decided education could use one more hashtag. It was kind of born out of the fact that people did not know what to do with us. People like to put things in categories. And they were like, “You’re not really EdTech but you’re not really FinTech.” And people’s heads were exploding because they were like, “We don’t know what category to put you in. We don’t know what hashtag to use.” So I was like, “All right, we’re inventing our own category, our own industry, our own hashtag. It’s going to be EdFinTech.”
And, you know, it really gets to the heart of the fact that traditional FinTech solutions don’t fit education. They just don’t. The needs and the nuances of education finance are just too unique to the traditional FinTech model. But those solutions fall short. And so, the Ed piece is kind of twofold. One is we’re saying, “This is the FinTech solution truly for the education market. This is built for educators, by educators, for education decision making.”
The Future of Education Finance
Host: Yeah. You can make informed decisions. Jess, let’s close with this. Tell us about The Future of Education Finance Summit.
Jess Gartner: Yes. We are so excited about this. This is the first year we’re doing The Future of Education Finance Summit. We’re co-hosting it with some of our friends at The Reason Foundation. We have an all-star roster of all folks in education finance and EdFinTech, including some folks from the U.S. Department of Education, talking about the future-ready framework. We’ve got district leaders, superintendents, CIOs, CFOs, talking about both how they’re using Allovue and other finance frameworks. We’ve got our friends from ERS, Education Resource Strategies, and EdBuild. And Marguerite Roza is doing our keynote from Edunomics, talking about the power of data in the future of education finance.
So it’s going to be an all-star cast for the day. And Cory Turner from NPR’s School Money is going to be moderating a panel of EdFinTech founders. So I’ll be on that with our friends from ClassWallet and Noodle Markets and LearnTrials. So it’s just going to be a great day bringing together K-12 district finance professionals, education finance researchers, education finance consultants, founders, tech companies, all of the above will be there mingling and talking about ideas for innovations and finance.
Closing
Host: I get the sneaky suspicion this will grow from one day this year, July 22nd, to maybe a couple of days with many people and topics, right?
Jess Gartner: That would be a dream. That would be a dream. Maybe our organizer Lisa would have something to say about it.
Host: One can hope, right? Well, I think it’s great.
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