The Playbook Nobody Reads: Arun Ramanathan on Mergers, Scale, and AI in Education

just wrote about it on LinkedIn.

But is my beliefs that the system can do their job for our kids.

And as I work in different parts of the education sector, My focus was how do we make sure that a system that is not working for kids, including most of the kids I work with, kids with disabilities, significant disabilities, how do we make sure that that system is providing educational justice, ensuring that they learn at the highest levels, that they have extraordinary opportunity beyond education, And, you know, that's, I think the wonderful thing is, is in each of those sectors, there is, you know, that principle of educational justice is threatened.

One of the things that we're thinking a lot about in terms of educational justice is just the transitions in our sector.

I feel like it's been challenging for some organizations to go from a founder to the next leader or the next leader on.

What have you learned taking over a number of different leadership positions, including from multiple founders, about what needs to happen for that transition to be the most successful?

You know, the interesting thing about each of the different sectors that I worked

in

are parts that I called them parts of the education ecosystem.

I actually talked to class at Harvard about this, how you actually achieve educational justice in these different parts of the sector or different sectors that are part of this ecosystem is the importance of learning.

potentially culture of each sector.

So school districts have a very specific culture, right? Particularly the ones that I worked in, which were large, urban, kind of bureaucratic and highly politicized systems.

I was chief student services officer in San Diego.

So it's amazing the number of different departments and people that report up into that type of structure, right? It's a very bureaucratic model.

And then non-profits, particularly policy, because non-profits, they're much smaller, but the culture there in terms of policy change is very much research-oriented, right? And it's also, you know, focused on, you know, how do you achieve policy change? And when I was at Ed First West, at a state level, right? And so there's a different culture in a policy advocacy organization.

There's a different way that legislators speak.

There's a cadence to the whole cycle, right, that you have to learn.

Similarly, and then after that, I ran education, professional learning, nonprofit.

Then interestingly enough, acquired a for-profit and then merged with another nonprofit, right? And so...

Nonprofit professional learning, but nonprofits in general that are potentially trying to sell services to school districts, they themselves also have a culture, have a language.

They essentially run like a business and you have to learn things like sales cycles and everything.

You have to pay attention to how revenue comes in, right? And you have to pay attention to, you know, how you develop and roll out products.

So marketing and sales.

And so I say each of these parts of the ecosystem, I called it an ecosystem, each of these sectors, you know, like I said, have a distinct culture, have a distinct language, have a distinct set of values, but they tend to overlap in some interesting ways.

It's both the distinction within each of them and then the overlap, which I've always found fascinating.