Start-ups focus on creating tools for teachers

The Boston Globe reports:

Molly Levitt thought the only thing she would ever be was a teacher. But soon after taking charge of her first classroom in 2010, she became frustrated with the bureaucracy, the paperwork, the “structural things” that kept Levitt from her students.

So she started tinkering, building a website that lets teachers more easily monitor student progress, giving them more time for teaching.

Along the way, Levitt’s effort morphed into a start-up business.

She joins a growing movement of young people — many of them former teachers — using technology to improve education, but from outside the classroom. They bring the wide-eyed enthusiasm they once had for teaching to writing code and designing Web pages.

And like the Cambridge resident, many are starting those businesses in Massachusetts, which has become a hub for education technology start-ups.

“We have investors, we have the educational institutions, and we have this culture of entrepreneurship, so it makes sense that this is happening here,” said Eileen Rudden, cofounder of LearnLaunchX, the first business accelerator program in Boston just for ed-tech companies, which launched in June with seven start-ups.

Massachusetts — long a Petri dish for new thinking in education — has more than 150 fledgling ed-tech companies, including Levitt’s BrightLoop Learning, and many other, more established firms, such as Lexia Learning in Concord, which recently agreed to be purchased by Rosetta Stone.

Private sector innovation.