Bridging Literacy Gaps with AI: A Young Founder’s Journey
A Teen’s Bold Charter School Support
Vivek Ramakrishnan was only 16 years old, and a high-school student at West High School, in Madison, Wisconsin, when the school board held a televised meeting. To discuss a proposal for a new charter school. A school that would ensure a longer school day and school year to support students of low income and color. Students whose academic outcomes in the Madison school system had been traditionally impacted by circumstantial factors.
The meeting room was filled with teachers, administrators, parents and other grim-faced adults – some in favour of the proposal, others viciously opposed, a few perched on the fence. The discussions hadn’t started, and there was a palpable hush when Vivek was called to address the room.
Ramakrishnan hadn’t known this earlier, but he was the only student who had signed up to speak, among 25,000 students. More unnervingly, for the jittery high-schooler, the board had a policy of “students speak first”. Summoned to the wooden lectern, his heart pounding louder than the 3-minute timer, Vivek started speaking. At some point, the mic stopped working. When the school board’s Chairman tried to cut him off, he turned to the audience and shouted out his message. Which was: YES, they desperately needed to try something new in Madison, a charter school proposed by the Urban League of Greater Madison.
Gaining Insights on Segregation
The scene might have been less striking if Vivek wasn’t an Indian American, whose parents belonged to the high-achieving, educated set. His father, Raghu Ramakrishnan, currently a CTO for Data at Microsoft, had been a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin and the author of an iconic textbook on Database Management Systems. His mother, Aparna Ramakrishnan, held a Master’s in Electrical Engineering and was a whiz at investments. This charter school wouldn’t have boosted Vivek’s chances, or that of many others in the Indian American community. Why was he so invested in a cause that didn’t affect him personally?
But maybe it did. At West High School, Vivek had signed up for many sports, as he always had, through elementary and middle school: baseball, basketball, racquetball, American football, hockey, Table Tennis. Thumping or tossing balls around had granted him an unusual insight into his country: in the hockey team, he was often the only brown kid among whites. In the football team, he was one of few who was not African American.
With heightening consciousness about race, he started sensing how his school reflected a segregation of sorts. One that mirrored fractures in the surrounding community. His high school offered two tracks – one for the academically-focused lot headed to competitive colleges. And a fuzzier path for those who teetered on thin edges. West featured on a list of federal schools that “needed improvement” because of appalling achievement gaps.
Tutoring Sparks Social Vision
Ramakrishnan recalls that at 14, he too was laissez faire about academics. While gambolling on football fields or basketball courts, he wasn’t striving for higher grades. At that point, his father pulled him up with a sharp, “I will pull your ass out of every sport you care about unless you get it together.” The parental reprimand worked. Because from the Spring Semester of his Freshman year, Vivek had hoisted his own performance to a level that could make the cut at Columbia University.
But college was only a means to an end. Because, by virtue of being schooled at West, Ramakrishnan had stumbled on his mission well before graduating. As a member of the football team, he had bonded closely with peers. At one point his coach asked him to tutor a few players on Monday evenings. Especially those who had fallen so far behind that they were ineligible to compete in games.
When Vivek started working with his buddies, he reconfirmed something he had always intuited: there was no dearth of intelligence, talent, diligence, passion, grit – all those supposedly ingrained traits that sieve the winners from the also-rans. His friends were contending with much tougher social and familial situations. Moreover, Ramakrishnan had imbibed something vital from his mother: a strong social conscience and the encouragement to pursue any field that interested him. His volunteer tutoring stint had already seeded his interest in education – and more broadly, stoked his curiosity about variant outcomes.
Questioning The Model Minority Myth
An encounter at a graduation party reinforced the difference between Vivek and many other Indian Americans, who bought into or perpetuated the model minority myth. Surrounded by kids from his community who attended a different school, Vivek mentioned that he played hockey and football. One kid said, “You play football? I wanted to play basketball here, but my parents didn’t want me hanging out with black kids.” Ramakrishnan’s jaw dropped, shocked and ashamed at the explicit racism. He was disheartened when others echoed the sentiment. And acknowledged that their parents drew similar boundaries.
Catalyzing a Real School
As it happened, his speaking out at the school board meeting had been life-changing. Soon after, he received a call from Kaleem Caire, who was then spearheading a non-profit called the Urban League of Greater Madison. Caire was keenly advocating for innovative charter schools and passionate about bridging academic gaps. He was taken in by young Vivek. Who had displayed unusual gumption in speaking up in a daunting setting. Caire asked Ramakrishnan, who had started college at Columbia by then, to research the need for a pre-school in South Madison.
Vivek helped Kaleem with a concept paper around what such a preschool could look like, and how it might operate. At 19, the young Ramakrishnan was already hustling on something real: forging a business plan and supporting Caire as he sought support to restore a dilapidated building, where the school would be housed, and pitching in on all related duties.
Teaching Math, Changing Lives
On graduating from Columbia, Vivek was sure about persevering in education. Moreover, he was galvanized by challenges. At college, for instance, he had tutored young adults who had been previously incarcerated. He signed up with Teach for America to teach at a low-income public school in Memphis, Tennessee. Assigned to impart Math and Personal Finance to 12th Graders, he was tasked with creating the curriculum and lesson plans from scratch. “I was working 80-hour weeks that first year, in addition to just the emotional bandwidth that teaching students takes up in Memphis. It was a crazy first year, but then I did a second year, and I was ready to keep going until this opportunity came back to move home.”
An Unconventional COO’s Journey
While he was at Memphis, Caire reached out with an opportunity to join One City Schools as the COO. The charter school was planning to grow vertically, adding classes up to the second-grade. Operating the institution while expanding it would entail a lot of work. But Ramakrishnan realized that this was a rare and valuable role for someone as young as he was. Grateful to Kaleem for trusting him, he returned full-time to One City, and took charge of the operations – which involved running all aspects of the school apart from teaching.
For two months, he even needed to play the custodian’s role, since their custodian developed a back problem. On top of his regular operations role, he cleaned the school building: “Probably like a four to five hour job to get it ready for the next day.” At one point, they didn’t have a cook. Ramakrishnan pitched in to cook breakfast and lunch, do the dishes, rustle up the afternoon snack, clean up the kitchen and prep for the next day. Till he could head home, to attend to other COO tasks till midnight. To return at 5 a.m., to do it over again. “It was just crazy,” Vivek chuckles.
On another occasion, he needed to fill in for a first-grade teacher. But Ramakrishnan is quick to add that Caire, as the CEO had modelled similar heavy-lifting across functions: “He cleaned the building the whole first year, when we were just bootstrapped.”
Impacting Parents and Children
There were times where the school’s innovative model of an extended school day/year stretched the team thin. Vivek wondered if they should have just turned One City into a traditional school that would have been less stressful to manage. Then he shows me a message from a parent, received on Facebook, that makes it all worthwhile: “I just need to really thank One City Schools for offering your before-school care options. I was so close to losing my job because I was having to take my kid with me in the mornings. This has absolutely saved my entire life. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you.”
From Education to Innovation
While running One City Schools, Ramakrishnan realized that he liked building ventures. Enterprises that could impact education and bridge opportunity gaps. To build more scalable models, he applied to Stanford for an MBA.
Vivek’s first year at Stanford was marred by the pandemic. But he topped up his educational leanings with coding skills that would prove useful soon.
Ramakrishnan and John Danner’s intergenerational partnership was sparked off during a class on educational innovation, cross-listed between the business and education schools. Intrigued by Danner’s insightful comments, Ramakrishnan discovered that he was the famed Founder of Rocket Ship Charter Schools, an enterprise he had always admired. Their collaboration took shape when Chat GPT launched, springing from a shared belief that this could be transformative.
Project Read AI: Bridging Literacy Gaps
The idea for Project Read started with a simple Python script Vivek created with open AI APIs, generating personalized bedtime stories for children. John sensed that this could be extended: that kids could read these stories aloud and receive coaching and feedback. Like many ventures spun off from the legendary Palo Alto campus, they had decided, over a caffeinated conversation, to co-found Project Read.
Incorporated in May 2023, Project Read has already started testing its capability with its intended audience: inside low-income classrooms, partnering with elementary school teachers. Like at One City Schools in Madison and at a charter school in Harlem, New York. Besides, they’ve had thousands of teachers sign up online, and hundreds roster their classrooms for practice with the AI Tutor. The app imparts the kind of personalized, one-on-one leg up that a reading tutor would offer. Ramakrishnan was also awarded the Stanford Impact Founder Fellowship, which includes funding and critical handholding for a year.
They’re also building guardrails to ensure that the story content does not transgress age-appropriate boundaries. And integrating concepts from the “Science of Reading” – from the latest research on how kids learn to read. As Vivek puts it: “Let’s say you miss the word ‘mat’, we give you another chance to read it. You miss it again. We give you a hint. You finally get it, but we know you struggled with that word. We’re going to say, ‘Hey, great job persevering’. And we make sure you see that word in future stories.”
Though Project Read is a for-profit organization, Ramakrishnan is not yet courting venture capital. He plans to get the product right first, and also grow organically in the spaces that need it most. Over time, they might sell the app in other English-reading markets.
In the long term, Ramakrishnan is clear that his venture will be fuelled by its social mission: “Instead of thinking about what’s going to be most likely to succeed, what is fundamentally worth failing for is a question I think about a lot.
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