HSe Web App Intro
Transforming K-12 education results in the US
HSeverywhere.com, LLC, better known as HSe, seeks major change in secondary education results.
Outcomes must be provable—and they must be measured in hard numbers.
The tool to transform the productivity of secondary education in the U.S. is the HSe website application, referred to by parents as the HSe web app. Although the secondary education years are generally thought of as grades nine through twelve, the HSe web app process begins much earlier . . .
Before age two: To transform education results for grades nine through twelve, the HSe web app process must simultaneously focus on infancy, early childhood, and K-8.
For instance, at age two children can be divided into “haves” and “have-nots” based on “background knowledge.” This difference appears to be a predictor of their socioeconomic fate. Revolutionizing of a young person’s background knowledge and recasting the ability to apply it—to put new material in context, use it to reason and make increasingly abstract associations—are part of the HSe web app environment.
Must be available as early as possible in a child’s life
The HSe demographic is from time of birth until high school graduation. If the HSe web app stands to dramatically transform the background experience and horizons of young people—for the whole of the HSe demographic—then launch it.
Otherwise, the logic goes like this: As any HSe parent or volunteer can attest, young people who are struggling with math, and reading in middle school will not be prepared for math and reading in high school. This cruel inequity may begin years earlier. If a student is at-risk and struggling in the eighth grade in math, and reading, that student was likely struggling in the seventh. Year by year for each preceding year, this inequity may track back to a particular time when a child seemed to lose interest in school, or it may track back to early childhood.
Reading and STEM
For young people far behind their age-mates in background experience, they are at an unfair advantage not just in learning to read, but subsequently in their ability to learn from what they read (where the background experience gap meets the context gap). A child with a relatively rich level of background knowledge is in an excellent position to put reading material in context, learn from it, and soar to new heights.
The “Reader’s Icon”: For anyone at any age ready for it, tucked back inside the HSe web app will be the bells and whistles of the HSe Reader’s Icon; there to entertain and transform the non-reader to a reader. Offering something extraordinary, the process will be one on one, personal, and for older non-readers, too.
Another issue is STEM: HSe will seek to enhance a young person’s perception of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Focus will also be placed on the arts, profoundly enriching that young person’s background experience. Dedicated to STEM will be a battery of internal HSe metrics.
The “HSe demographic”: infancy to high school diploma
To summarize, learning is cumulative—it must build on something. That “something” is prior learning. Not just boosting and further empowering the haves . . .
The HSe web app will be there during infancy, early childhood and for every year of K-12 for the have-nots as well. Remember, the deeper and richer a young person’s background experience, the easier it is to learn the next thing. The opposite is the tragedy of have-nots struggling for years, in classrooms with our nation’s haves.
The HSe web app will be fully independent of private or public schools. All such schools have enough to do already. The HSe web app will not add to that load. Fully independent, the HSe web app is designed for a nonstop operation by a massive, highly specialized staff, assisted by parents (in HSe oversight roles), mentors, educators, and young people themselves. The incredible hands-on talent of students will help make the HSe website application transformative.
The effectiveness of K-12 education as the U.S. competes globally
The HSe web app is poised to empower the U.S.’s vast K-12 human capital resource as that resource prepares to compete with other nations.
Two sad snapshots of U.S. K-12 results today, before the launch of the HSe website application:
Snapshot ONE: The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) says 12% of US high schoolers do not graduate from high school in four years. Now for the HSe follow-up question: Can the graduating 88 percent, each with a diploma in hand, be assumed to be competent at reading, writing and arithmetic? Actually, no! Only half of the graduates can read or do math well enough to achieve even the lowest level of proficiency on the Nation’s Report Card—that’s the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (It’s also referred to as “NAEP,” rhymes with cape).
Snapshot TWO: Not having had an HSe web app-like environment, these new grads often bound off in ill-suited and random directions; thus putting at risk a more satisfying life and perhaps greater personal productivity. It will be these young people, our nation’s most valuable human resource, who go on to shape national health and welfare.
Roughly 20 years sitting dormant
Time lost: Roughly 20 years have passed since the beginning of a relentless effort by parents and volunteers to expedite action on the launch of HSe web app. Parents, long before this most recent 20 years, had been crying out for a change agent for their kids. And the cry continues today. The parents and volunteers did all they could for as long as they could, but it became clear that their determined HSe efforts could not continue. The pressing demands of their personal lives would not allow it.
Further, the HSe founder, overwhelmed by the demands of residential subdivision development, had to put the HSe project aside. As the years went by, pivotal K-12 metrics essentially remained unchanged. HSe’s former volunteers were not fooled during ensuing years by the occasional publicized celebration and high-fives if a critical K-12 metric seemed to edge up a fraction of a point, when multi-point jumps were desperately needed.
Bold new national programs were tried, disruption was massive, and lost years mounted—lost opportunity for tens of millions of young people. Although the nation did not know that the HSe option existed, the upper echelon gatekeepers at the U.S. Department of Education did. The guards shielded the Secretary from all those pesky parents who were using odd words and terms such as metrics, hard numbers, and real time.
To allow for maximum agility in adapting and evolving from one moment to the next, important to HSe and the HSe demographic, the legal formation of HSe is as a for-profit. However, the right is reserved to switch to non-profit. Although perhaps sacrificing a bit of precious flexibility and reaction time, a non-profit status would allow for nonprofit fundraising and nonprofit tax treatment.
The HSe Business Plan
The HSe business plan includes the road map of the HSe website application, in which the application is composed of an overlay of fun and enjoyment backed by fascinating discovery, action, human connection, and deep learning.
In sum, the web app offers a compelling and competitive advantage to those who experience it; for top-decile students, students who are struggling, and the vast range of students between the two. Incrementally, one day at a time, the benefit of the HSe web app experience will logically be a positive and self-motivating influence for students the next morning in school.
As if by kaleidoscope, the HSe experience will be new and fresh every 24 hours, all subject to layers of HSe web app quality control and complex processing, without which the website application would fall flat.
Engaged in the HSe web app environment—per hard numbers in real time—young people will be positioned to begin quickly and methodically building background experience, logically far deeper than that of their parents or teachers in topic after topic.
As a hypothetical, here’s “Miss Sally”
Picture an ordinary third grader uninterested in school—and who perhaps dislikes it. Let’s call her Sally. Sally will be aware, as will the nation, of the HSe web app’s impending launch (following a beta launch and lead-up to national launch).
Let’s use Sally to illustrate one of many tiny examples of how the HSe web app may do its job: Paramount is that she finds the HSe web app to be compelling—once again, and in a word, “fun.” Fun as a metric translates to “sticking around.” Sticking around and coming back heightens the possibility of new insights, discovery and perhaps an occasional epiphany, together with enriching the young person’s background knowledge.
Let’s say that Miss Sally stumbles upon a nearly hidden glimmer of a topic that turns out to be an example of “combinatorics,” a branch of mathematics and graph theory. Although a more likely discovery in college or in the workforce, Sally finds that STEM topic in the third grade. Sally is captivated by some aspect of the combinatorics presentations and by how it lets her change combinatorics outcomes by using simple game-like rules—and devising her own. The HSe web app dynamic is poised to take another leap whenever Sally, within the web app and at that very moment of engagement, connects with a topic-specific expert or with fellow students also at the topic. From a fun-packed cursory level to any depth thereafter, the HSe web app will accommodate.
By the way, few parents or teachers have ever heard of combinatorics—just ask them—and many universities do not offer it. But for Sally, who is having fun, the discovery may profoundly change her motivation to learn.
Fun, scale, and inclusion are key determinants
What may be fun and compelling to one child may be drudgery to the next. Caveat: Don’t be distracted when you are told that a particular “learning” website is terrific. Instead, look at the numbers: If 99.999 percent of the nation’s young people avoid a website because they don’t like it, then arguably it is all but useless to that 99.999 percent.
Scale and subgroups: The HSe web app will “scale” to any number, whether 8,000 young people or 80 thousand or 80 million. As third-grader Sally seizes on a discovery, tens of millions of other K-12 students (as well as the youngest of children with their parents) at any moment can be elsewhere in the expanse of the HSe web app. The web app will be engineered to bring concentrated focus to every student “cohort” or subgroup—Sally’s, too.
endless reminders to act: TIMSS, PISA, STEM and ASVAB.
Not just as a female, but as, say, a Latina, Sally is in a cohort where less than three percent will pursue STEM in college. If the remaining 97 percent is a monumental lost opportunity for the US, is it now time to act?
TIMSS AND PISA. In addition to the disastrous results on the Nation’s Report Card, U.S. students generally place 20th to 30th on such international assessments as “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study” and “Program for International Student Assessment.”
ASVAB, the “Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery,” has likewise been a key longitudinal metric for decades. Military recruit applicants must take the ASVAB test and score well enough to enlist. For applicants who test poorly on the Nation’s Report Card, scoring well on ASVAB testing may be far less likely, as may be qualifying for top military schools such as those involving this V-22 Osprey. Now that the military can no longer draft, it must depend on volunteers, and yet must seek appropriate scores.
Although not an objective of HSe, the HSe web app can transform metrics even for the military, as noted in the HSe Business plan.
History And funding effort of HSe
The HSe founder’s success with using banks for major real estate developments was almost automatic. But that was because banks understand that topic and are experts with the paperwork, formulas, and forms.
However, regarding the HSe website application and such topics as national K-12 issues, the Nation’s Report Card, national dropout rates, and so on, the founder felt that his bankers were the wrong audience. No bank was ever approached for HSe funding. Instead, to find funding, parents and HSe volunteers began contacting the nation’s largest corporations to explain the potential marketing power of funding the HSe web app—being seen nationally as the HSe web app’s Sponsor.
Unchanged is that only one Sponsor is needed, although there could be more than one. For example, the business plan uses the hypothetical example of a public-private partnership between two highly metrics-challenged potential Sponsors, the U.S. Navy and General Motors, the domain name coined by parents as GMNavy.go.
The invitation to corporations was simple: Study the HSe project in terms of what it can do for you as the Sponsor. And the message was straightforward: In doing your due diligence, estimate to what degree parents and other consumers across the U.S. might reward you by doing business with you. Ask yourself to what degree otherwise intractable key metrics such as market share and margins (and ASVAB scores, in the case of a military branch) might respond? Perhaps ask yourself what even the barest measurable uptick in market share might be worth? How about the value to your corporation of a full one-point increase? Rounded off to the nearest $100 billion, what would five points be worth?
Using the example of the market share metric, what minimal increase in market share would equate to multiples of the cost to be the HSe web app Sponsor? What are those multiples?
Also look at margins. Look at stock value. Look at stockholder satisfaction with investment results as the corporation makes this bold, national marketing effort. And look at stockholder pride—pride by association with the Sponsor.
But the issue during those initial attempts in reaching out to a potential Sponsor about the HSe web app was this: Corporate gatekeepers and intermediaries were not the ideal audience to hear the detail. Moreover, parents and volunteers could not be expected to have the specific expertise to communicate every point.
The early years
The early funding effort (primarily following the April 18, 2000 founding of HSeverywhere.com, LLC) was well before the advent of such phenomena as “social media,” and “apps.” It was even before the terms “metrics,” and “STEM” became part of everyday lingo. And it was before today’s level of federal emphasis on CSR—corporate social responsibility.
Moreover, it was before crowdfunding, at least, to the extent the public has become familiar with it today.
Today, 20 years later, the combination of crowdfunding and social media has the bandwidth to fully fund the HSe website application
Characterized by citizen involvement, crowdfunding combined with social media can fully fund the HSe web app, obviating the need for a major corporate Sponsor.
However, the HSe preference continues to be a Sponsor-funding solution
HSe favors involvement by a landmark corporation. For the HSe demographic, such a relationship would be positioned to deepen the richness of the web app experience for the HSe demographic. Moreover, the sponsorship funding route would be positioned to expedite HSe web app development, beta, and startup, and streamline ongoing operations funding.
To find an appropriate Marquee Sponsor, a limited-purpose crowdfunding campaign Could fund a Professional presentation team
Rather than a fully inclusive crowdfunding campaign to fund the entire HSe web app, a limited-purpose crowdfunding campaign would finance only the creation and services of a professional presentation team. The professional presentation team, no longer heroic HSe volunteers and parents, would reach out to the nation’s corporate giants to find a Sponsor acceptable to HSe.
The team would already speak the language of those super corporations and would have vast experience working with them. Further, the team could bring in analysts to drill down on any point. Thus, the presentation team could guide corporate candidates to do their due diligence in evaluating the HSe web app as a marketing opportunity, a means to opening the door to potential windfall benefits.
In addition, the Sponsor would be positioned to set a new benchmark for corporate social responsibility, where CSR is both important to the federal government and increasingly important to the American consumer.
Donor delight
In the event of a crowdfunding campaign supported by a single entity such as a college, the excitement of prelaunch anticipation and countdown to the web app’s launch won’t just be limited to the nation’s young people. It will include the campaign donors, and bring excitement and delight for them as well.
Post launch, as HSe web app successes begin to mount, ongoing news events will be a personal win for every donor.
For instance, featured in a news event might be an intriguing feat or STEM discovery by a K-12 student in conjunction with the HSe (or Sponsor-named) web app environment—a personal win for every donor. On another day, likewise with attribution to the HSe web app, might be a headline news announcement of yet another K-12 record gain in a vital metric. Again, a personal win for the campaign donors.
Equally rewarding to those who donated to the campaign to make the web app possible will be knowing that the entire nation of young people, whose names and stories will never be known to the donors, will stand to have their lives changed by the web app platform.
Unrealized depths of self-motivation and enhanced learning during k-12
In the U.S. every year, top-decile high school graduates, together with all their fellow graduates, join the nation’s newest wave of graduates across the nation. But none of these graduates (whether the top-decile, those struggling or those between the two) has experienced the HSe web app during their years in K-12 or before.
Even the most select K-12 school fortunate to have the best of the best guidance counselors could in no way offer an HSe web app-like value. They are not able to immerse their young people into a potentially transformative HSe web app universe. The HSe web app experience may logically lead to deeper levels of self-motivation, a more powerful K-12 performance, and a more fulfilling and judicious presence beyond high school.
Let’s talk costs
The cost for a young person to access the HSe website application: none. Access must be free.
It is interesting that the corporate world will pay $60 million for six minutes of Superbowl ads, and that a tiny state in the Northeast will pay $300 million to try to patch an education issue.
The cost to launch the HSe web app is $40 million to $60 million, depending on ancillary add-ons such as scholarships and internet access programs. Even at $80 million, that would be less than a dollar for each of the nation’s 80-plus million young people.
On the other hand, the State of Connecticut recently provided for $300 million to be spent on the issue of high school dropouts. The opposite of single-issue patches in K-12 education is the essence of the holistic HSe web app dynamic, where every issue is systematically nurtured and made stronger by every other.
Also interesting is that the HSe $40 to $60 million for the HSe web app is far less than the nation’s $700 billion (with a b) annual cost, payable by the taxpayer for the young people enrolled in public K-12. Yet the HSe web app stands to transform the $700 billion’s K-12 results—and will be measurable in hard numbers. The $700 billion does not include the $100s of billions for early education, private schools, religious schools, and home schools, also payable by the taxpayer. The actual total is in the region of $1 trillion.
Volunteer to help with the HSe funding puzzle
Volunteer to explain the HSe web app. Sit down with decision-makers in the private and public sectors to help them review the HSe business plan and the implications to their organization.
For a top publicly traded corporation willing to learn how being the HSe web app Sponsor is poised to help achieve corporate goals, the HSe web app may be explained as a marketing tool. For instance, for carmaker General Motors, every new-car-buying parent in the US might suddenly consider GM, even if only momentarily, and even if many of those parents have never before set foot inside a GM brand’s showroom. For a government department or agency, the HSe web app may be explained as a public good and as a means through which to impact that department or agency’s mission. For a foundation formed to benefit the nation, look to see how the foundation’s and HSe’s missions align. Then explain that.
“Together, let’s impact the US for generations to come.”