Helping Failing High School Students Pass: Revolution Prep Founders Ramit Varma and Jake Neuberg (Part 3)

SM: Are you primarily a brick-and-mortar tutoring service, or are you an online education service?

RV: The SAT prep courses are 90% offline and 10% online. However, we have another larger business that we started in California and Texas three years ago which is 100% online. In California, students have to take the California Exit Exam in order to graduate from high school. The requirements are to demonstrate proficiency in eighth grade math and tenth grade English arts. Three years ago the state conducted an evaluation and asked for customized intervention solutions for students who failed the exam, because students were initially failing at a 50% to 60% rate.

Over 40 companies responded to the request for proposals (RFP) and three companies were chosen by the California Board of Education: Revolution Prep, McGraw-Hill, and Peoples Education. We have since been the largest selling program of the group. Our program is an online software program, and there are 100,000 students in California using it every year.

Our software program scaffolds back to areas of need and weakness in a customized manner for each student. We have found that when a student fails an eighth grade math problem, it is because they are missing third or fourth grade math standards such as adding fractions. Our software identifies those gaps and delivers content to teach the missing concepts.

Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest district in the country, works exclusively with us to provide this software to all eleventh and twelfth graders in their district who have not passed the state exit exams. They have experienced very strong results through their use of the Revolution Prep software. Los Angeles Unified accounts for 25,000 of our students alone.

SM: How did your relationship with Los Angeles schools come about? What does the structure of a deal like that look like?

RV: The process started when we first responded to the state’s RFP. The state tagged intervention money specifically for use on one of three selected vendor products. We then went to each school district and presented our product. When we presented to Los Angeles Unified, they said that the other programs were very textbook/workbook-oriented programs. They felt we offered a truly customized, groundbreaking intervention program.

They asked us to make additional customizations to the software. One example of that would be language audio tracks so that students could listen to the lessons. That was important for some students with visual or special issues and learning disabilities. Additionally, the majority of the students in their districts who were failing had English as a second language. We then added Spanish-language text and audio for the students. When they fielded the program, with their customization changes, they found it to be an incredibly engaging experience.

Pricing was initially set by the state. It is priced on a per-student basis and is based on the number of students who have not passed the particular exam. The school districts pay for the courses, so no money comes from the students or their families.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Helping Failing High School Students Pass: Revolution Prep Founders Ramit Varma and Jake Neuberg
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