April 2000 and beyond: the common-sense HSe4Metrics story
For America’s young people, a potentially transformative, free-access solution for K–12 student performance is decades overdue—with metrics results verified in hard numbers
When HSe4Metrics was first registered in 2000, founder Vernon Baker was leading his own residential (land) development firm—building subdivisions in the Richmond, Virginia region and expanding into neighboring counties.
At the same time, he was meeting with parents of K–12 students—and even those with children not yet in school—to discuss a bold new idea: a platform designed to support and elevate student performance nationwide. That idea would later become HSe4Metrics.
Parents who participated in those early conversations shared three underlying convictions:
- Free access for all. To ensure that no family would be left behind, the platform must remain free-access at all times—regardless of its substantial operational cost.
- Active parental involvement. Parents must have the right to personally and actively participate in the platform’s operations in real time.
- A lifeline for K–12 performance. The success of the platform would provide an academic lifeline for K–12 student performance—regardless of where a student’s school ranked on the NAEP scale.
Since that time, Baker has personally funded the platform’s development, accepting no compensation or outside contributions. (Pro bono: A top-50 U.S. law firm is providing no-cost assistance with the potential conversion of HSe4Metrics into a private foundation. However, HSe4Metrics is currently awaiting a federal agency’s determination regarding whether such a conversion is necessary.)
Baker, now 80 years old—shown in one of the homepage slides holding the emblematic HSe “cube”—urges a federal agency and/or Congress to test the platform’s hard-number metrics potential for transforming K–12 student performance nationwide.
Since the founding of HSe4Metrics in 2000, tens of millions of K–12 students have graduated without the advantage of the HSe4Metrics platform—NAEP results confirm the horrific consequences.
But to launch and operate the platform at scale, significant funding will be required.
- Startup and annual operations could cost tens of millions.
Should demand surge and success scale broadly, cloud infrastructure costs could ultimately reach billions per year.
Meeting those needs will require a federal entity or a major publicly traded company willing to sponsor the platform, conduct due diligence, and help bring a bold K–12 innovation to life.
Free K-12 student access—if funded by a federal sponsor
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K-12 student performance. Failure by the states—and by the federal government.
Failure by the States. K–12 student performance across the states—on average—has long been in crisis. This reality was exposed by President John F. Kennedy shortly after taking office in 1960, when the staggering extent of the states’ failure to deliver strong educational outcomes nationwide became unmistakably clear.
He was assassinated before he could act on his vision for national reform.
Failure by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). Seventeen years after Kennedy’s death, the K–12 performance crisis remained unresolved. In response, the federal government created the DOE.
However, the DOE quickly proved just as ineffective as the states it was meant to help.
The cost of failure
The cost of these repeated failures has been staggering—both human and economic.
Generations of K–12 students have entered adulthood without the reading, writing, and math skills needed to thrive in modern society. The result has been millions of unrealized dreams, lower workforce productivity, and diminished national competitiveness.
For the United States, the loss is measured not only in lives but in trillions of dollars in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that could have been generated by a fully educated population.
The nation continues to carry the burden of this failure—every year, every graduating class, and every child left behind by an underperforming system.
K-12 inclusivity. A stronger economy and GDP mean a stronger safety net
Funding the HSe4Metrics platform is an investment in the nation’s human capital—one that will strengthen the U.S. economy and empower all families and individuals, from the most privileged to the most marginalized.
The opportunity missed by the U.S. Department of Education
The creation of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) should have been a turning point—an opportunity to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s vision of ensuring that all students, including the disenfranchised, are placed on a path more likely to succeed.
Instead, the DOE became an administrative body rather than a performance-focused engine of change. It managed programs, generated layers of paperwork bureaucracy, and spent billions—without producing measurable, multi-point, year-over-year gains in K–12 student performance.
In fact, in terms of national K–12 student performance, the DOE produced no meaningful improvement at all.
Its founding legislation should have been rewritten—or the Department itself restructured or even terminated. The law that created the DOE seemed to forget that President Kennedy ever existed.
The good news: the HSe4Metrics platform, in the hands of a bipartisan Congress and a forward-thinking president, can remake the nation’s K–12 student performance.
But as an innovation, it must first be implemented and tested.
A two-minute video provided by a volunteer—highly recommended by parents
Early brain development. Infancy and the years before kindergarten represent a once-in-a-lifetime period of brain development. How do external stimuli shape foundational traits like intellectual energy and cognitive capacity?
The bottom 50%. For decades, as if destined from birth, half of K–12 students fall to the NAEP bottom. HSe4Metrics’ free-access online platform offers a societal innovation to rewrite that future—unlocking a human capital gold rush for the United States.
The top 10%. NAEP is far from the only key metric. Even the top 10% of students risk falling short of their full K–12—and lifetime—potential.
Students in the middle. With the HSe4Metrics platform, students between the top 10% and the bottom 50% could rise to compete with the top performers.