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The Unlikely CEO

Teacher-turned-tech-whiz Axel Shalson is helping school districts mobilize student data with his cutting-edge online software

By Elizabeth Weiss Green

On the day his life changed, Axel Shalson (L.A. '95) was sitting in the back of a conference room, not paying attention. It was August 2001, and the Los Angeles Unified School District, where Shalson worked as a tech specialist, had just implemented a new literacy program. Carol Fujita, a friend and literacy coach, was presenting on the program's progress. The mandatory assessments, conducted every six to eight weeks, gave teachers valuable insight into their students' growth. There was just one problem: compiling all the data. Teachers had been correcting the assessments by hand, then making carbon copies for the literacy coach and the principal. "Couldn't we use technology to track this data?" a principal asked Fujita. "The way we're doing it, it's just locked into paper." A light went on in Fujita's head-Axel could do it.

As a tech specialist, Shalson was responsible for wiring classrooms and testing software; writing his own code was not part of the job description. Still, he signed on and soon the project was consuming all of his free time. After work he scoured programming manuals and instructional guides, teaching himself to write software from scratch. "I basically gave up six months of nights and weekends [to create a prototype]," he says.

Today, the fruit of that sacrifice is Red Schoolhouse Software, a private company that makes data management software for 110 California school districts and beyond. Shalson just signed a contract to produce software for Baltimore County Public Schools.

The software-called OARS, or Online Assessment Reporting System-has changed the practice of the hundreds of teachers and principals who use it. "I have my home page set to OARS," says Jefferey Lagozzino (L.A. '91), principal of La Primaria Elementary School in El Monte, Calif. "I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I'll wonder [about some data point], and I'll sign in, and I can get the information right then and there." Cherie Spamer, an educator for 31 years who is currently principal of Cohassett Elementary School in the LAUSD, calls it "one of the best tools we've ever had."

Finding innovative uses for technology in education has become Shalson's major life pursuit-but just 15 years ago, neither field interested him much. After graduating from the University of California-Berkeley in 1992, he worked at a homeless shelter in the Bay Area. He applied to Teach For America on a "leap of faith" after the shelter closed. During his four years at Berkeley, Shalson had also shunned the tech boom. "I really didn't touch a computer the whole time I was in college," he says.

However, Shalson's corps years teaching fourth and fifth grade in Compton plugged him in. A chance opportunity to install a few computers and a scanner in his classroom evolved into a dedicated passion. To aid his teaching, Shalson created PowerPoint presentations and generated organizational tools, activity sheets, and graphic organizers.

Two years later, he sent a résumé to Spamer, then the assistant principal at Rosemont Elementary School in Los Angeles. "His portfolio was the best I had ever seen," Spamer says. The standout feature: his use of technology in the classroom. "You could tell that he was a techie," she says, "and we hit it off very well." Shalson took the strategies with him to Rosemont, and soon his kindergarteners were pros at using computer software. "His kindergarteners could do better than most adults," Spamer says.

When the chance came along to apply for a grant that supported programs to help English-language learners, Spamer went to Shalson. They wrote a grant proposal for a program that would use technology to build language and literacy skills. "Thousands of proposals went in," Spamer says. "I think five of them were funded that year." They received a $1.3 million grant, and later that year Shalson left the classroom to oversee the new program. He designed four new after-school courses-in chorus, art, science, and computers-each with a language-acquisition and a technology angle.

In 2000, a new district-level position came up in precisely Shalson's area of expertise-instructional technology facilitation-and he took it.

For two years, he supported a districtwide project called E-Rate that wired classrooms for instructional purposes. "It was definitely all about getting the technology into the hands of the kids," he says. He also tracked developments in educational software packages such as Reader Rabbit and Hyper Studio.

But on that day in 2001, Shalson's attention expanded to creating something few other companies had built-software for teachers. Data-driven instruction had become a mantra in L.A., but without a comprehensive way to access data, teachers couldn't use it. "People started saying, 'OK, how did all the second [graders] do across the district?' or 'How did our English learners do, or our African-American students?' " he says. "There was no way to answer those questions."

The OARS software began as a simple Excel spreadsheet that Shalson designed to allow teachers to input test scores and get quick results. The spreadsheet helped with organization but didn't show how subgroups of students were performing across the district. For those numbers, Shalson had to aggregate dozens of spreadsheets manually every six weeks, a painstaking process that took nearly a month-an eternity to a teacher. By the time principals received a report, there was no time for teachers to adjust instruction to help the kids who weren't getting it, because units were long over. Shalson's solution: put the data-entry software online, so all the information could be stored and accessed instantly in one place.

The result was a rudimentary version of OARS. Now, Shalson updates the software frequently, translating feedback from teachers into fast, practical improvements in the software. Once, at an early training session, Lagozzino made a suggestion. "It was just like a simple little, 'Well, if your program could do this, that would be really neat,' " the principal recalls. "Within a couple of months, it was available."

Launching Red Schoolhouse, however, required knowledge Shalson wasn't sure he possessed. With no formal business training, he sought guidance from his father, Vaughan, the former CEO of several small biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies in California. "He was just really instrumental in terms of getting the ball rolling," Shalson says of his father, who eventually came out of retirement to become Red Schoolhouse's director of business development, helping the company buy insurance, negotiate contracts, and develop licensing agreements, among other things.

In Shalson's mind, a "crucial" advantage was being able to work from within the system. "I had a test bed basically," he explains. "I started out with a smaller sort of group of guinea pigs, so to speak. And I worked in my region only and spent a year doing testing and getting feedback and suggestions... whereas a lot of companies are run by people who never worked in education. They're run by entrepreneurs who have what they think is a good idea, and maybe it is and maybe it isn't."

Business has been so good for Red Schoolhouse Software that Shalson doesn't even budget for advertising. "Most of our business comes from word of mouth," he says. "All of our new business so far has come from an existing [customer] recommending us to a new district."

According to Shalson, the possibilities in education technology are plentiful for the budding entrepreneur. "No Child Left Behind came along and there are discretionary funds and competitive grant funds that suddenly put money into special pots [for new programs]," he says.

"There's huge opportunity right now-that is, as long as you have a product that can get results. Districts have gotten a lot smarter about what they buy. They're not just buying whatever's thrown at them. They really are more focused on what these products can do for student achievement."

It's not an exaggeration to say that OARS has revolutionized the way Lagozzino and his teachers work. The principal references data reports in meetings with teachers, going over the color-coded rows indicating students in need of improvement and then brainstorming solutions. He can also look at state test results long before they're sent to him, giving him a head start on forthcoming accountability reports. Comparing data across the district has also been useful. Recently, Lagozzino found that his English-language learners had scored much lower on a test than the same set of kids had scored the year before. Troubled, he immediately looked up scores from other districts, comparing their results from year to year, and found a similar trend. "It told me that there [might be] an issue with this test," he says.

Since launching Red Schoolhouse, Shalson has left the school district to focus full-time on his company. But he makes time for regular school visits to check on how his product is working for teachers and students in classrooms. "When you love your work, it's easier to work long hours," says Shalson, who plans to hire two more employees this year. "Still, there are times when I'm like, 'Wow, I really miss teaching kindergarten.' "