Modal Math

In the United States alone, an estimated 7.3 Million students receive special education services. That equates to about 15% of all public school students in the US, and that number has only grown over the past few decades.

Unfortunately, by the time many of these students graduate, they’re years behind academically across all subjects—Deaf and Hard of Hearing high school graduates in particular test at an average 5th-6th grade math level, for instance.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides government funding to school districts and mandates that schools provide support for students on IEPs, but this support is often limited by a number of factors, like population or geographical constraints (schools can’t hire certified interventionists if there are no certified interventionists in their area, for instance). And while IDEA was certainly a step in the right direction, historically it has not provided schools with the level of funding that was initially promised.

What does this mean? It means that teachers often lack the resources to effectively teach students with special learning needs. That means poorer test scores, which often leads to less overall school funding. Parents struggle to support their struggling students academically. And students with special learning needs frequently face poorer than average educational outcomes, which often equates to lower salaries and fewer career opportunities.

This is an incredible problem. It’s one that Modal Math is uniquely qualified to begin fixing.

Modal Math is an online platform and mobile app that provides struggling students with Common Core-aligned math lessons and assessments. Modal Math features a growing library of dozens of lessons and thousands of practice questions.

Lessons and practice questions are currently presented in five different learning modalities: American Sign Language, visuals, videos, voiceover, and simplified text. The purpose here is to reinforce learning using complementary methodologies so that students who struggle with identifying numbers visually, for example, will have audio, text, and sign language to assist them.

Lessons are also do-at-your-own-pace and can be rewound, paused, adjusted for speed, and played over and over again.

Modal Math specifically aims to help the 7.3+ million students in the United States who are currently receiving special education support—and, tangentially, aims to support their teachers, parents, and school administrators as well.

Even with government funding, many schools lack the resources to provide students with IEPs the help they need. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Large class sizes often make it difficult to give students with specialized learning needs the extent of 1:1 or small group attention that they need
• Every disability or learning difference requires something different; the needs of a student who is Deaf or Hard of Hearing may differ from those of a student who has ADHD, and providing for students with these varying needs in a classroom setting can be challenging.
• The amount of funding provided by IDEA has historically been much less than what was mandated in the act. In many districts, teachers are expected to make do, and to use their own income to supplement the needs of the classroom. The extent to which this works is obviously very varied.

Modal Math uses supplemental, curriculum-aligned, multi-modal resources to help struggling PreK-5th grade students finally understand and master math concepts. In doing so, we also work to help build their confidence and foster a love of STEM that will hopefully last for years to come.

And because the platform works to better prepare these students, teachers thus have to spend less time and fewer of their own resources on creating or buying content for their special learners, parents are better able to engage their students with math, and administrators can thus start to see improved test scores (and potentially increased funding as a result).

Nadia Iftekhar is the founder and CEO of Modal Math. She’s a certified teacher of the Deaf, with a bachelor’s degree in Speech and Hearing Science and master’s degrees in Elementary Inclusive Education and Education of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing from the Teachers College at Columbia University, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Educational Psychology and Technology.

Nadia spent her first 5 years as a teacher of the Deaf trying to find educational resources. She had a clear vision of exactly what she needed: clean, user-friendly, accessible tools that would help students learn math while also building their confidence, and that would lead to improved student outcomes while also making life easier for teachers and parents.

Unfortunately, she couldn't find anything. There were zero supplementary tools for teaching math to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

So she decided to create the resources she needed. They were a success. Her students loved them. And Nadia began creating resources for other teachers, too: dozens of lessons and thousands of practice questions, designed to be multi-modal and accessible to the Deaf and HoH.

Nadia has spent years working and engaging with the Deaf and HoH community, and with other teachers of students with special learning needs. Since building Modal Math, she's also worked to connect with its users (primarily parents and teachers) to better learn how to improve the platform to suit the needs of students. 

Also on the team is Maria Ada Santos, Modal Math's COO. She grew up alongside a sister with severe developmental disabilities; basic sign language was the only way they were able to communicate. She began her career teaching ESL in South Korea, before moving back to the United States and teaching PreK to 1st grade at a small private school. Since then, she’s worked with several education technology companies, both as an employee and as a consultant, assisting with operations, people ops, no-code workflow creation, and strategy.

Modal Math currently has 250+ active enrolled students, and we're working towards engaging them even further at every step of their learning so that we can continue to improve and support their learning needs.

Modal Math launched in 2020, and for the first two years ran as an MVP while she gathered data and improved the content and platform. She then put Modal Math on pause for a few years due to changes in her family situation—it continued to run in the background on a more minimalistic basis, but she was unable to dedicate much time and resources to it outside of what was needed to keep it operational.

Those changes resolved themselves in early 2024, and Modal Math is now ready to broaden its focus not only to students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing but to all students with special educational needs.

Currently, Modal Math has 250+ active enrolled students, and several dozen teachers and parents. It contains dozens of lessons and thousands of practice questions, and over time we would like to expand on content and improve what currently exist. In 2020 it raised a friends and family funding round of $54,000 and has earned $26,490 in revenue since launch. However, we're still working to gain traction, and thus feel we're best categorized as being in the Pilot stage.

Raising funds is definitely one reason we're applying, but it's not the only one!

More than anything, we want to be able to meet and learn from other people passionate about improving educational outcomes for students everywhere—and we want to gain more knowledge about the best way to do that at scale. We also want to gain additional visibility, and leverage the research and learnings that have been done by others in the education technology space to help refine our product even further.

Modal Math has created a supplemental learning platform where struggling students are provided with personalized, adaptive, multi-modal math lessons.

Most of our competitors fall into one of two buckets:

1. Edtech solutions designed for students without special learning needs.
2. Edtech solutions designed for students with a specific learning need (solutions aimed at teaching math to students with dyscalculia, for example).

The first bucket is by far the largest. These are solutions like Khan Academy, IXL Learning, or Boddle, most of which use gamified learning to engage students. These platforms have many strengths, and serve thousands of students each day. However, these solutions weren't created for students with special learning needs; many of them treat accessibility as an afterthought, and by design they're often built to maximize entertainment and engagement, even if that's sometimes to the detriment of actual learning.

The second bucket is understandably much more narrow: solutions like Nessy or Dyslexia Gold to teach reading to students with dyslexia, for example. These solutions are designed for and tailored to students with a specific learning need, and often do a fantastic job of providing support within their niche. But because their focus is so narrow, they're often much less able to help students outside of that focus (and often may be entirely inaccessible to students with different learning needs as well). 

What makes Modal Math innovative is that it was specifically built to be as accessible to as many learning differences as possible. Modal Math uses multi-modal avenues of learning—American Sign Language, simplified text, audio, visuals, and video—to teach, reinforce, and assess PreK-5th grade math concepts. Accessibility is built into its very DNA. 

In addition, because Modal Math is curriculum-aligned, the platform not only teaches in such a way to ensure that students learn, it also teaches in such a way that students also learn how to perform well on tests.

We believe strongly that every student, but especially students with special learning needs, benefit from multimodal approaches to learning. Inclusive, accessible education is perhaps the only way to reduce the gaps in educational outcomes that are currently pervasive within the United States and abroad, and Modal Math's mission is to create the resources needed to ensure that every student is able to learn (and reinforce their learnings) in the modalities that work best for them. We've created a logic model to illustrate this, which is accessible by clicking this link.

Modal Math's goal is to ensure that every student in the world has access not only to quality education, but also to quality education that is uniquely suited to them and their specific learning needs.

Over the next five years, we want to become the #1 platform in the United States for students with special learning needs. Modal Math is the first step in achieving that goal, but we plan to also expand to PreK-8th grade Reading, Writing, Social Studies, and Science, before eventually expanding to high school level subjects as well.

In order to do that, our short- to medium-term goals include:

• Moving off of a third party LMS and building our own platform and app.
• Leveraging generative AI and machine learning to allow for adaptive, personalized lessons so that students are taught at a pace and in an order that works best for them.
• Expanding our existing support for students with vision issues (i.e. adding descriptive audio to supplement existing closed captions).
• Adding multilingual support to provide assistance to the millions of students in the United States who don't speak English as a first language.

There are a number of factors we’ll track to help us determine impact and how successful our efforts have been. They include:

• Platform usage. Are students engaging with the platform? How many lessons are they completing (in a week, a month, over the lifetime of their subscription)? How long are they spending on Modal Math per session? Are there any lessons that seem to be “stumbling blocks” because we’re not presenting content as well as we could?
• Churn rates. Are churn rates as low as possible (ideally under 15%), and are they decreasing over time?
• Student outcomes. This is the most important factor we’ll be looking at, and will involve both using our own platform metrics (how do students perform over time on Modal Math’s quizzes and practice tests?) and metrics we’ll solicit from teachers, parents, and schools (have test results and outcomes increased over time? If so, to what extent? If not, why do we think that might be?)
• Quarterly or twice annual NPS and user surveys. Do a greater percentage of students express interest in STEM than did before beginning Modal Math? 

Currently, our core technology is the Thinkific LMS. Thinkific is a platform that allows users to leverage no-code in order to build courses. Thinkific hosts Modal Math's content, including quizzes, lessons, videos, and more. We've also leveraged other no-code tools such as Make.com to automate the creation of student progress reports.

Our goal within the next 1-2 years is to move off Thinkific and create our own custom portal and app. While Thinkific is robust and has worked very well with our early users, it does not yet have the ability to create adaptive assessments or learning paths. By building our own custom portal, we'll better be able to use AI and ML to create adaptive learning paths for each of our students—learning paths that will use student inputs (such as pace, responses, etc.) in order to build customized curriculum for students designed to teach them in whatever manner will work best. 

Currently, Modal Math has 2 part-time employees (Nadia and Maria). If our application is successful, both of us will use funding to begin working on Modal Math full-time.

Nadia has been working on Modal Math since January 2020. Due to changes in family situations, the time she spent on Modal Math was much more minimal in 2022 and 2023. However, in early 2024, those changes resolved themselves, and she's now ready to begin working on Modal Math on a much more full-time basis.

Nadia and Maria are people of color who grew up in a world that often seemed much more antagonistic to them than it was to those with more “palatable” surnames. We grew up dealing with racism, both overt and subtle. We grew up experiencing macro and micro-aggressions, dealing with the consequences of wealth inequality, and trying to learn while simultaneously butting against the limits that were sometimes imposed upon us. We were successful. Some might argue that those challenges made us stronger.

Individually and as a company, we vehemently reject the idea that tomorrow’s children should have to suffer the same hurts or indignities that we did growing up (the “when I was your age, I had to walk to school uphill both ways, barefoot in the snow” defense). We want things to be better for the children of today and tomorrow. We want to build a world that’s kinder to those that come after us—and we want those efforts to start today.

That means proactively seeking out diverse perspectives at every level of our organization. It means purposefully building out teams that reflect the realities of the world around us: teams that are racially diverse, that embrace each other’s learning differences, and that celebrate the differences that make us unique.

It means being intolerant of intolerance. It means thoughtfully and critically building systems that constantly assess our own processes (hiring processes, performance review processes, etc) to identify and eliminate unintentional biases. It means acknowledging that different people have different needs, and working with each to help provide for those needs.

We want to build a company that positively impacts the 7.3 million students being served by IDEA today, and the tens of millions more who struggle with STEM for myriad other reasons. We know that diverse teams perform better. We know that work cultures built with equity and inclusion in mind perform better.

DEI is at the heart of what we do. It has to be. There’s no way for us to make the impact we want to make on our children otherwise.

Modal Math is currently sold through three different models:

1. Teachers: one subscription per teacher (annual/monthly), depending on the size of their classroom.
2. School Districts: one subscription per student (annual/monthly)
3. Parents: a per family subscription model (annual/monthly)

However, one of our core philosophies is that teachers should not be forced to spend their own money on their classrooms, especially given the way that funding works for IDEA students. Because of this, over the next year we'll be focused aggressively on selling to school districts. Doing so will potentially allow us to provide additional free resources to teachers whose districts may not be able to afford supplemental resources.

Over the next few years, will begin piloting tiered subscriptions, small group tutoring as well, and free, ad-supported resources on platforms like YouTube.

Modal Math is currently raising funding for two core purposes:

• To expand our existing library of math resources, including additional lessons, new educational games, and a switch to adaptive learning paths
• To hire marketing, sales, and product team members, who'll work with us to expand our reach, sell to school districts, and create additional content and educational resources.

Modal Math raised a $54K friends and family round of funding in November 2020; that funding round, combined with more than $26K of revenue, allowed Modal Math to create a content library of dozens of multimodal lessons per grade level, thousands of multimodal quizzes and assessments, and to reach 100+ teachers and thousands of students over the last four years.

Most of our existing subscribers are individual teachers who've purchased Modal Math for their students. Our goal in 2024-2025 is to begin marketing much more aggressively to school districts, with the aim of reaching thousands of additional students while also decreasing the financial burden on individual teachers.

Over the next few years, we'll begin piloting additional revenue sources as well:

• Tiered subscription levels, where upper level tiers may include access to small group tutoring, interventionists, or professional counselors.
• Small group tutoring with certified teachers
• Ad revenue via free resources published on platforms like Youtube
• Affiliate and other partnership income from partnering with related platforms and resources (we've already begun building relationships with other Edtech platforms, like ASL Aspire)
• Referral programs
• Sponsorships