Turning Oppression into Opportunity in Schools - Tom Davidson, Founder and CEO of EVERFI

SHIV GAGLANI:Hi, I'm Shiv Gaglani and today on Raise the Line, I'm really happy to be joined by Tom Davidson, the founder and CEO of EVERFI, which is a leading education technology company that drives social change through education. Since starting in 2008, EVERFI has reached more than 43 million learners across K-12, higher education and workplace environments. It recently announced a hundred million dollar commitment to building and expanding K-12 courses to address the most important issues that are leading to economic inequality and social injustice. Before we get started, I'd like to thank Victor Hu at Lumos Capital for first introducing Tom and me. He speaks the world of Tom, so I'm really excited about this podcast. Tom, thanks for joining us today.

TOM DAVIDSON:It's great to be here. I think that's the one area of life Victor does not have good judgment, but everywhere else, he's incredible.

SHIV GAGLANI:Starting off on a very humble note, but you have a really interesting career story for someone running a major technology company like EVERFI. Most CEOs I know did not start as state legislators. So can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to your interest in educational issues?

TOM DAVIDSON:Yes, it is a unique background and it's interesting. I always tell people whenever anyone says, "What's been the most shocking thing about the move from politics and being an elected official to running a business?" I think it's actually how little differentiation there is between the two. Politics is all about identifying some interesting problem or some big problem that people are dealing with and trying to figure out some policy answer and then getting a whole lot of people to get around it and convince them to do that. You have to do that by giving voice to it, applying budgets to it and then dollars and spend and convening your constituents and having people yell at you like our boards do and everything else.

It was actually more similar than I would've thought. The genesis of EVERFI, though, did really come out of two pretty seminal experiences when I was in the state legislature. One was, I was lucky enough to be a part of wiring the schools. I had chaired the committee that had jurisdiction over public utilities and energy and those things which included localized cable systems and communications stuff. I got very, very interested in the connection of rural broadband, the first wiring of schools and libraries together, building out teacher professional development systems that allowed them to get trained up on technology. This was 1994, '95, '96, '97, pretty early in the gig and then in my last term, worked with governor Angus King, now Senator Angus King, to do the first one-to-one laptop initiative in the country that a lot of us worked on there. It was a fascinating effort.

What it showed me was two things. When you sit through what winds up being hundreds of hours of school funding formula debates on the floor of the house, which in every state pits town after town, region against region and you realize the advantages, ultimately, that kids who were born into the right zip code have and that when you're born into the wrong zip code, you are in pretty rough shape from a funding perspective and let alone these sidecar, private foundations and others.

It occurred to me that there were two things: one, there were all these areas that were left outside the core curriculum that kids need; and two, there was never going to be any way to pay for it if you just relied on public funding or a 501(c)(3) non-profit. You had to create a new way to go about it. That all came from listening to debates that no 23-year-old should have to — I should have been out at bars, but I was listening to school funding formula and mill rate debates on the house floor. It was a life-changing experience. I went to school on it and learned a lot about it.

SHIV GAGLANI:That's fascinating. We definitely are familiar with people who started their careers in business then went into politics and it's a little unusual, less heard of, the other way around. At least starting a company from scratch — a lot of people go into consulting, but starting a company from scratch is very interesting. Some of these things that you worked on in the '90s because of COVID are coming straight back, like equitable access to Internet for people who are working remote. Maybe let's dive into that, if you don't mind, before we go deeper into EVERFI. What are some of the things that COVID has brought out, maybe in the policy wonk part of you?

TOM DAVIDSON: You nailed it. Number one is, there's a fundamental decision we need to make as Americans, I think. The interesting thing, it's actually more up to the states than it is the feds. We need to decide whether we believe access, basically to the Internet, is something that should be deemed a public utility or not. We've not put it there, so we don't put it alongside water and sewage and sewer systems and electricity. So it runs into a lot of the same access issues that we faced with things like renewable energy or there's certain things we deem a public good. There's an interest in all of us when that is distributed equitably and sometimes, the public sector and governments have to step in to subsidize that, to enable that, to do that.

I think the pandemic forces us to have this discussion, and more importantly, to make this decision as a country, which is, "Do we believe that this is an enabler of opportunity that should be equally distributed or not?" I was on with the chancellor of one of the top five largest school districts in the country yesterday morning. We were talking about the facts that the school system is overwhelmed with help desk requests and how we could help, as a company, by potentially allocating certain hours towards just helping deal with families who have not had access in the past to the technology, have gotten the technology, been lucky enough to get technology from the district, which is not an equitable thing anyway.

That's number one and that can be funded. It can be prioritized. That's a decision that the country has to make. I know where I stand on it, but it's a policy decision that, I think, will be driven by the public sector pulling the private sector to that party. Then the second thing, I think, is that teachers, it sounds like one of those cheesy things, but until you see what teachers, call them heroes, it's like I spend so much time talking to teachers about almost everything but education technology. It's like them navigating how to deliver food at kids' back doors. Like a conversation I had in Mississippi recently, it's everything from food security to clothing security and everywhere in between.

We've got to figure out a way to get teachers the tools on the human development side of the house, mental wellness, kids. People need to realize that these schools, they're not buildings for learning, whether we like it or not. These are buildings for kids to get their ears checked, nurses to check on them, food to be delivered, safety, a warm place during the winter; it really is, for millions of students. So this will, absolutely, lay all of that bare and then we'll make a decision as a country whether we want to give the buildings and the people in them the respect that they deserve.

SHIV GAGLANI:Yes. I couldn't agree more on both points. On that last point, we on this podcast talk a lot about social determinants of health and how we have a reactive sick care system, not a healthcare system. What you're pointing at is the social determinants of education, that there's so much more that goes into it, access at home to Internet, the health of the child. One of the proudest partnerships we have at Osmosis is with the primary school, which is Priscilla Chan's school. She's a pediatrician, as you know, and it's all about, how do we get people who are in under-resourced communities, kids in the K-3 period, to be as healthy as possible and get their parents trained up to make them as healthy as possible so that they can become successful in school? I think you've nailed both of those points. 

Switching to EVERFI, I think one does not make a company get to 43 million learners and counting, thousands of customers, hundreds of employees, without doing something right. Can you talk a bit about what EVERFI provides for its users? How does it differ from other online learning companies and then, what is the secret to your growth?

TOM DAVIDSON:Well, next time I'll know to bring the people in my company that are doing things right. I don't think you have the right guy. It's an extraordinary team. We're trying to pull off something, I think, that's pretty tough, but I think because it's tough, it is so clear what's missing and thus, we've been able to convene people around this idea. The basic idea of this is there is a missing learning layer of education in schools and there's a range of topics and every year there's two more that come to the fore. But whether it's teaching kids about financial wellness and financial literacy, understanding how they get trapped in credit cycles or debt cycles or by payday lenders or under mountains of student debt. We all learn these things, except for the rare individual, by mistake.

We learn them by mistake, like I did. I trashed my credit. and people would say all the time, "You must be really good at this personal finance." I'm like, "I'm terrible at this personal finance." It's literally the entire reason why I started the company and I'm not good now. But I think it's all the more reason that this should be a life skill that is taught at the very earliest stages. Kids should have a respect for the power of compounding and savings and the power of getting this mindset right early on. It's something to be in awe of. The problem is that if you don't get it right early, it is one of those things that you can be a little late to the game to if you wait until you're in your 40s or whatever, to start getting right.

We've taken that philosophy and looked out at other big problems. I would tell you there's three kind of keys to our model: first is give me a big, hairy, seemingly intractable, trillion-dollar problem. These are going to be things like student loan defaults, opioid addiction and substance abuse, sexual violence, particularly on college campuses, and financial literacy to go on and on. We've picked about 15 of these things. Can you build a course that has a fundamental base of research around it? Can you build a course that can go into grade schools, high schools, middle schools, colleges and the workplace to really get, using all the latest and greatest technology to capture students' minds and imaginations around it?

Then, can you get somebody else to pay for it all so that it is not a layer of cost, to show that, ultimately, if you're in Beverly Hills or Darien, Connecticut, you've got it. If you're in Marks, Mississippi, you don't. That was the three-legged stool for us. It's been fascinating. I think the biggest thing, for me, intellectually, is the education system is the last place that has welcomed innovation and private sector players. The good thing about being a former elected official is I've voted on something like 6,200 bills, so there's no secret to what I believe. I'm a bleeding heart, liberal Democrat, but I'm a bleeding heart, liberal Democrat that believes deeply in the fact that in this particular space in education, the private sector has to be brought fully into the mix.

A lot of people don't agree with that because I fundamentally believe that they've taken a knee on their involvement in a way that they haven't in healthcare, haven't in energy systems, haven't in transportation systems. This is the last open front where the private sector needs to be brought to the table because the challenge of it is this: if you focus on kids in the highest poverty areas in the country, EVERFI has 35,000 or 38,000 schools networked together in some of the lowest tax rate areas in the country, meaning their ability to fund education and the funding formula around schools. We have to be able to have a mechanism that— It's taken us 400 years to basically disadvantage kids to such a disastrous level that we have in those communities. You've got to bring the bazooka to this thing, so that is what we're trying to do with the private sector model.

SHIV GAGLANI:That makes a lot of sense. I love how you summarized the three stools upon which EVERFI models sits. This year, you guys announced the hundred million dollars of funding for courses about racial injustice and economic inequality. Can you talk a bit about some of that? How do you go from that intractable large problem to an evidence-based course? How do you measure success based on that?

TOM DAVIDSON:It's a little different in each of the categories. Back to our commitment to this thing, we really have been in this all along. It's interesting, seven years ago, we built what was really the first scaled African-American history course, course 306, because we knew that that gap that existed for a sense of self and deep respect for the journey of Black Americans in this country was just totally missing from the school day. No one knew why we were doing it; it was so random. It was kind of like the second thing we did after financial literacy.

We built this really incredible course on compassion with Jeff Weiner, who just left as CEO of LinkedIn. Jeff really wanted to have a course that taught kids the definition of compassion, how that relates to our African-American history course, how that relates to a course on a family's financial security or student mental wellness. They're all intrinsically tied and what happens is when they become this cascading chorus of oppression on kids when they're not learned and when they are learned together, they become this beautiful chorus of opportunity for kids. But you can't just do one, you've got to build this. We needed to accelerate the builds of other things that tied to this. The only way we knew to do that was to accelerate our product build so that we weren't waiting five years to build the course on mental wellness basics for kids in schools or compassion or whatever it might be.

We've always had the lens that everybody gets to start with their, "Why?" I wanted to start in communities, always that I felt were not just left behind, but way left behind. They were the small rural communities in many parts of the South. They were Native American reservations and others. They were the first communities we stepped into in 2008 and early 2009 and we remain today. The goal was to accelerate the product timeline so we could move things faster and bring the private sector along to match it.

SHIV GAGLANI:That makes a lot of sense. You guys announced a lot of this stuff this year. I would love to hear more about COVID. In the media, we have heard a lot about how COVID has changed the education system as a whole. What are some lasting changes that'll come from that? Ed tech is here to stay just like telemedicine is here to stay for a lot of healthcare. How has COVID affected EVERFI?

TOM DAVIDSON:I don't know enough about other spaces to know the correlations between certain things, but I will tell you this, the education space is such a tough one because it's all hyper-localized. I tend to make these definitive right or wrong, never-in-doubt statements. One of those things I tell people is I'm 100% right 47% of the time, which is from the Will Farrell movie, Anchorman, I think it was. Sorry, but I feel very strongly that education will never not be a local control issue in this country. So you've got to deal with what it is today, which is that in Mississippi or Iowa, you have hundreds and hundreds of school districts all making their unique budgeting, curriculum, standardization, standard requirements.

Sometimes states will do things, but the whipsaw effect of policy, and this kind of goes back to my political days is, and I'm going to tie it back to the private sector and why it's so important, particularly in COVID right now is that, if you think back just in the last 10 years, you've had 12 years or whatever it might be, of governors come and go, mayors come and go, presidents come and go. You have No Child Left Behind, Race To the Top, you'll have whatever President-elect Biden decides to do. They're all important and they all matter and you may not agree to them, but they're also very fleeting. I've always thought of EVERFI as something that could, potentially, be the most consistent thing that teachers can have in their lives. Number one, it's at no cost because we get someone else to pay for it, so there's never any budget yo-yo-ing. Number two is, it's not predicated on any presidential administration or anything else.

When COVID hit, I think what it did when the paddles literally went on the education patient across the country and it shocked all of our systems, coast to coast, was that number one, the insurance policy of remote learning, needing to be there, whether it's a pandemic or a cyber attack that shuts down a district, there's contingency for all of these things. They happen and sometimes it's the heartbreak of a school shooting or whatever it might be that shuts a district down for weeks or days or it could, potentially, be months on end. In some cases we've seen this now. We would have never guessed this. So having access to real and structured and prepared remote learning plans, I don't think it's ever going away. 

One of the things that I feel really strongly is, people say, "Wow, this must be a great time to be an ed tech company." I say, "Well, I wouldn't want to be an ed tech company that was selling to school districts because the education budgets, it's going to be a really tough year next year on the biannual budget cycles and everything. So I think what it has done for me is it's given me urgency that we as EVERFI — it's totally self-serving, in some ways — but it is more like we've got to figure out how to put more things in play, because I feel like it's going to wind up that districts who realize they need these really meaty learning plans, remote learning plans and access to ed tech aren't going to be able to afford it. That bums me out. It's one more thing in addition to connectivity that we're going to have to figure out.

SHIV GAGLANI:Absolutely. I know we're coming up on time. I want to be respectful, so I had two other questions for you. The first is, at Osmosis, we have an audience of millions of current and future healthcare professionals. We've all heard about the Fauci effect where there's increased number of applications to medical schools and we see that in nursing and PA and pharmacy and other health professions as well. What's your advice to people considering a career in healthcare about meeting the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond?

TOM DAVIDSON:Just hearing you say that, and I've read that, whether it's the Fauci effect or anything else, it is so wonderful to hear and one of the few bright spots of the year. I think the biggest thing is it would be more like an ask that I would have for health professionals as it relates to the buildings that sit on the corners in their neighborhoods and stuff that kids go to school at every day. What I would say is, it's a very unfair fight and kids' access to basic healthcare and mental health services, when you think about specialists and kids who find themselves on the spectrum or special needs, these numbers, when you go into a school and you say, "How many speech pathologists do you have per [student]?" They're like, "Oh, one to 750," or, "How many counselors do you have?" “One to 450.” It's a very unfair fight.

I've always wondered, is there a creative way that we can get more resources? Some kind of interesting health corps that is designed to go make that less of an unfair fight along the way, because I think this whole child thing is the real deal. Folks who tend to crop dust education and come in and say, "Oh, teachers need to do more in these really basic looks at things," or, “Teachers are the problem," or whatever, are missing the entire boat. The more that we can have healthcare professionals who are able and lucky enough to get integrated into the school day and around kids, I think the better. If that could be something that came out of this pandemic, that would be a real gift to the world.

SHIV GAGLANI:I love that. We've also had recent guests from Hazel Health on the Raise the Line podcast and they're all about how do we bring telehealth to school districts as well as what the primary school is doing. I love the idea of the care corps and we've talked a lot about that on Osmosis as well, where 60,000 people apply to med schools in the U.S. every year, but only 25,000 people get into MD and DO programs. A lot of the people who don't get in, they wind up taking lab jobs and reapplying or they shadow at a hospital health system.

For those people, just like TFA, Teach for America, as you know well, could be a very robust set of highly-motivated, intellectually-stimulated people who could be part of the care corps and they could spend, just like TFA, but a Care for America or something along those lines. It's definitely an idea we've been playing around a lot with, so would love to chat with you about that at some point. My last question for you is, is there anything else you'd like our audience to know about yourself or EVERFI or anything else, education, healthcare, policy, that we haven't covered?

TOM DAVIDSON:Yes. If I had to say kind of my big takeaway from this year is that it's so funny, we're working on a really important project right now around building networks and mentors around kids in high-poverty areas. I remember the biggest thing that, a year ago, we were just debating. We were like, "How in the world would you ever get people on a Zoom?” At EVERFI, we started Zooming NFL players. We run a really big initiative with the NFL on bullying and character and certain things. So we were dropping in NFL players and it was just this— There would be 15, 20 kids on a Zoom and the great Carson Wentz or somebody who would be on and we were like, "Wow, I wonder if you could ever get people's minds around the fact that they can Zoom into classrooms or do things like that.”

Now we've had this multi-trillion dollar conditioning of the market to enable that to happen. I think that's, needless to say, a fundamental sea change where it's a two-way street, where you as a young doctor, physician, or mental health expert now, there's nothing stopping you all from a mindset and technology from influencing the lives and checking in, and then building a network of kids across countries, there's nothing stopping you anymore. I told someone the other day I was talking to a group of Fortune 500 CEOs. I just said, "Listen, this is just anarchist, this missing learning layer, financial literacy, college readiness, compassion, whatever it might be. It's not like I mapped the human genome here. This is fully actionable. It can be in every school tomorrow. It's absolutely affordable, not that hard to do. It's just a decision. This is just a decision.”

I'm of the belief that if 200 doctors want to get together in a certain area and influence the lives of kids in the school district and create a network that allows an access to that, it's doable, that's actionable, it can happen tomorrow. It's cheap, it doesn't cost anything. Someone will pay for it and it's desperately needed. I put that lens on things now where I'm like, "What's actionable and what's important?" When those two things come together, you owe it to yourself to take a swing at it. So that's a real benefit coming out of this, this concept of networking kids in the Mississippi Delta together with people in Washington, D.C., It's not hard anymore. We need to lean into that because what will come of that organically is going to be incredible.

SHIV GAGLANI:That's a really excellent point and a good one to end on. Tom, I'd like to thank you for not only taking the time to be with us today on the Raise the Line podcast, but obviously, for the important work that you and your team at EVERFI are doing to educate the next generation.

TOM DAVIDSON:That's great. It was wonderful to be here. I appreciate it.

SHIV GAGLANI:With that, I'm Shiv Gaglani. Thank you to our audience for checking out today's show and remember to do your part to flatten the curve and raise the line, since we're all in this together. Take care.