Toucann

Creating targeted plans to help kids, parents, and schools ensure that all students are ready for college.

The Problem: College graduation represents a key lever in changing a student’s life trajectory. Studies show that college graduation cuts the chance of incarceration by 90% while quadrupling employment chances and doubling the attending salary. Despite these immense benefits, our nation suffers from a low application rate to, readiness for, and completion of college. Only 70% of high school graduates are enrolled in college. On top of this, Colleges face a 44% dropout rate and 41% of college students require remediation. Unfortunately, students and parents lack the information to guide themselves toward being ready for and apply to college, and schools are often too overburdened and underresourced to help. While the market has produced a number of college prep apps, they are almost universally focused on the college application cycle, but by this point it’s too late: you can maybe tell a student where they can get in, but you can’t change the trajectory of schools they could have gotten into.

Our Solution: Toucann is a college fitness app initially geared at students, parents, and teachers with the ambition to eventually develop a teacher and school-facing platform. We believe in order to change students’ college trajectory we should get them and the stakeholders in their life thinking about, and cultivating the skills to attend, college as early as ninth grade. To that end, all we ask for from students is their graduation date and a gpa, and Toucann uses its proprietary algorithm to generate a college fitness score that students can use to see what colleges they would already be competitive at by the time they’re applying. From here, Toucann asks students to pick a target school (without input, this school is automatically picked), then generates a set of goals directly related to improving college competitiveness (like studying for the SAT) alongside challenges (like daily outside reading) to encourage development of the knowledge, mindset, and skills necessary to be college ready by graduation. Parents and teachers, when granted access by students, can see their student’s fitness, goals, but also have access to their own set of challenges to encourage them to support and motivate their students. We intend Toucann to be a freemium model (with removable apps for a small fee) to individuals, with eventual plans of a subscription model for the school-facing platform. In a world where over 30% of high school graduates do not attend college, with an additional 44% dropping out and 41% requiring remediation in college, the need for an app that can help students become college ready is clear. By creating a free-to-access platform for students, parents, and teachers to use that begins in ninth grade, we help to remove a number of barriers to success in college that stack the playing field against students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. We help students and parents understand how to think about college, create concrete goals to motivate and guide students and parents, ultimately demystifying the college process and helping students of all backgrounds reach their full potential.

Toucann's innovation comes from approaching college readiness from the perspective of a motivation or fitness application, not guidance.  We use a proprietary algorithm to generate a 'college readiness score' for students to see where they stand, then use this score to generate short and long term goals to push the student forward. These goals can then be shared with guardians and schools, enabling them to better help their students succeed. Over the longterm, we intend to use this data to determine what actions--by students, parents, and schools-- most help students succeed.

Currently, tech was necessary to developing our original algorithm to generate college readiness scores and subsequently targeting goals based on this score. 

Going forward, we will use big data to analyze how best to push students forward. This includes:

a. A/B testing goals to see how best to motivate students

b. ascertaining what goals have the most impact on students' success

c. refining our college readiness score to better reflect where students stand

d. comparing peer schools to help schools in order to develop best practices for schools to follow.

1. Currently facing students, guardians, and teachers, we intend to expand our app to include a counselor-facing side that prioritizes sharing critical information that allows targeted intervention across a student body.

2. Outside curricular goals for students: For students that need curricular help outside of school, Toucann is exploring goals and partnerships that will help students find the support they need.

3. Expanded content for parents: Toucann is working on a separate set of goals for parents to help push their understanding of college readiness and how they can best support their student.

1. Partner directly with a mix of public, charter, and private schools to deploy Toucann, develop Toucann into a platform with value add for schools across a diversity of strengths and needs.

2. Partner with larger education companies (eg McGraw Hill) for wide-scale distribution.

3. Partner with universities to conduct research: most important levers for students during high school, best practices for high schools, best practices for colleges to find and keep students. Apply for SBIR grants to fund this research.

4. Expand platform to universities, offering data on how to recruit, serve, and help students graduate.

Initially, we'll be working through three separate paths to reach students:

1. Directly to students and parents based off of a known network through direct tutoring experience.

2. Through classroom deployment through personal network of teachers from Teach For America.

3. Outreach to students and teachers through personal networks, education non-profit connections, and online education resource distribution centers.

Currently we are pre-beta and accordingly have zero users. However, we plan to launch our beta in fall, and have multiple students, parents, and classrooms across the country intending to test our platform.

Within 12 months we expect to serve roughly 1,000 people. Wihtin three years we hope to scale to 100,000 (.05% of high school students and parents).    

From students, we hope to see higher college readiness indicators (gpa, standardized tests, curriculum, etc) as well as college admissions success (more applications, acceptance, matriculation).

For parents, we hope to measure increased planning for college, more active intervention with students.

For schools, we hope to see increased focus on helping students in grades 9-11 plan for college, and increased attention to data on college outcomes for their students. 

My time with Teach For America in the Mississippi Delta, and subsequent years developing curricula for standardized testing and tutoring privately allow me to bring a diverse set of knowledge and skills necessary to this project. First, I have direct experience with students across a wide range of socioeconomic background. Second, access to an education network to deploy, provide feedback to refine our platform, and find funding. Third, systemic understanding of secondary and post-secondary education to guide the development of Toucann from promoting individual students’ readiness to provide analysis to address systemic issues at the high school and college leve.

For individual students, parents, and teachers, we intend to use a freemium model where the base application is free. We will test user receptivity both to advertisements and a small fee to remove them as well as possibly cosmetic options for a small price. This will allow our platform to easily expand, while also allowing us to gather data to make the platform more beneficial to all users, ultimately enabling us to offer powerful insights to high schools and colleges on how to better serve their students.

For schools, we will charge a yearly base subscription fee for the platform, with additional charges, as we become capable, for providing additional longterm analytics (eg tracking how students perform in college and what leads to those outcomes, offering comparisons to peer schools to develop best practices). We will have a similar model for universities once we have tracked students through college and developed the university-facing platform. This would include helping universities find, recruit, and better serve students from a diverse set of backgrounds, ultimately to make sure all students are able to successfully graduate from college.

We are applying to solve because we understand that the platform we are building, while it has incredible potential to move the needle on college readiness, also has a lot of complex parts that require a diverse set of skills and the funding to realize our vision. We believe Solve can advance our work by helping us connect with expertise and skills we don’t have, providing mentorship as we go into beta and hope to scale, and help us find the funding to grow our platform.

1. Chicken-egg problem: to best serve students, we need better data on how to drive achievement. But, to get that data, we need users to adopt the platform first.

2. Education is often skeptical of new technology, often because of previous claims of being a silver bullet by past tech.

3. Creating an adaptive, learning system: Toucann will need to learn from its own data to become better over time and have a meaningful impact.

Solve can help by mentoring us on the skills and people we should look for, and hopefully by connecting us to those individuals.