Trajectory thinking often separates demand creation winners from also-rans. Not so long ago, Facebook was the second-ranked social networking site, while MySpace led the pack. But News Corporation failed to invest in innovation after it acquired MySpace in 2005, while Facebook charged ahead. By 2009, Facebook had overtaken MySpace; today, it’s hard to remember when the race was even competitive.
REED HASTINGS’S COMMITMENT to building a steep trajectory catalyzed one of the most curious—and celebrated—scientific challenges of recent years: the $1 million Netflix Prize, offered to anyone who could improve the accuracy of the company’s Cinematch movie recommendation system by a mere 10 percent.
Launched in October 2006, this unique competition attracted no fewer than thirty-five thousand participants from 180 countries, ranging from expert teams based in universities, think tanks, and corporate research labs to lone tinkerers like psychologist Gavin Potter, who based his approach on insights from behavioral economics and enlisted his daughter Emily, a high school senior, to help with the math. (Potter’s quest may sound quixotic, but at one point, his entry climbed as high as sixth on the leaderboard.)
After a spirited scientific race followed like a sporting contest by observers around the world, the Netflix Prize was claimed in September 2009 by a team of seven mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists known as BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos.
A 10 percent improvement in movie choices sounds modest. But offering brilliant, spot-on movie recommendations is one of the crucial hassle-reducing tools that make Netflix powerfully magnetic. The contest yielded an impressive array of new insights into the tastes and preferences of movie fans. For example, customer ratings for some specific movies tend to shift in particular ways over time. People usually give the schmaltzy Robin Williams flick Patch Adams a high rating immediately after viewing it; after taking time to reflect, they assign it a noticeably lower grade. The opposite pattern applies to the complex psychological thriller Memento, which appears to grow on people during the days and weeks after they watch it (as they gradually disentangle the convoluted plot).
Another finding: Most movies draw reactions that appear logical based on categories like genre, style, period, and performer: If you like one John Wayne oater, you’ll probably like the next. But a few pictures seem to defy such classifications. Two examples are the quirky indie films I Huckabees and Napoleon Dynamite. Both tend to draw wildly disparate, love-it-or-hate-it reactions and fall into no logical grouping. (Liking Huckabees doesn’t seem to correlate with liking Napoleon, for example—or with anything else in particular.)
And still another finding: The winning BellKor team discovered that Netflix users’ ratings of pictures are dependent, in part, on their mood at the time they enter the rating. Sounds obvious, maybe, but the insight has a specific resonance that’s both subtle and useful. When a Netflix patron visits the company website to pen a negative critique of a picture he has watched, and then lingers on the site to rate other movies, those ratings are likely to be lower than they would otherwise be—a form of temporary bias that the team learned how to anticipate and correct for in their system.
Netflix has good reason to keep advancing the science of movie selection. Each time a Netflix customer receives a recommendation that’s misguided, he or she may be disappointed, maybe even angry or insulted. So the company figures that a 10 percent improvement is worth more than a million dollars in customer retention—probably a lot more. (And indeed Netflix reports that customer satisfaction and retention rates have already begun to climb.)
The Netflix Prize illustrates one of the qualities that make Reed Hastings a premier demand creator. Having labored for years to create a magnetic product, he didn’t quit once he was ahead. He and his team kept going, experimenting with ways to get better on the dimensions that matter most to customers. The steep slope helps Netflix remain magnetic and sparks continuing conversation about the product among millions of consumers.
RATHER AMAZINGLY, there’s a remarkable example of a steep trajectory in an arena where most Americans, and many experts, have concluded that any improvement is next to impossible: the world of public education, long dominated by discouraging statistics, financial headaches, and political disagreements.
Into that world parachuted a twenty-two-year-old woman armed with $2.5 million in start-up donations and an idea she’d developed for her senior thesis at Princeton. Wendy Kopp’s key insight: What American education needed was a way to lift its flatline trajectory. Her vehicle: the nonprofit organization she founded and leads—Teach For America (TFA)—which today is at the forefront of a powerful and growing education reform movement. TFA is climbing a steep trajectory on several dimensions that are crucial to the future of American education.
Kopp’s journey began in 1988, during her senior year at Princeton, when she encountered the hassle map for aspiring teachers who hope to improve America’s educational system:
I was still trying to figure out a practical answer to my own uninspired job search. Teaching might just be it, I thought. I went to the career services office. They referred me to the teacher preparation office, which helped ten to twenty Princeton students attain teacher licensure each year. It was too late for me to enter this program, but the office pointed me to a file cabinet stuffed with job applications and certification requirements from school districts across the country. The files were a mess of mismatched, multicolored, jargon-filled papers.
Most young people would just roll their eyes and cross teaching off their list of potential careers. But Kopp—like Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg, and other demand creators—understood that the hassle map could be an opportunity map. She understood, too, that a huge gap existed between the kinds of careers that many talented students at America’s top colleges really wanted and the work toward which they’d traditionally been channeled. There was an equally huge gap between the kind of education that at-risk public school students received and the kind they needed.
Pondering these cases of mismatched demand, Kopp came up with an idea. Why not create a teachers’ corps modeled on the Peace Corps? She could sidestep bureaucratic hiring hurdles and recruit college graduates who were willing to commit to two-year teaching assignments. They’d receive intensive, hands-on training by experienced teachers, job assignments from school districts in poor rural or urban communities that were desperate for young talent, and year-round feedback, mentoring, and assistance to help them achieve meaningful results with their students.
Kopp was convinced that her young peers—many of them seeking fulfilling career options, just as she was—would find this a powerfully magnetic alternative, one that provided the opportunity to make a real difference in the world. And if her teachers’ corps could stimulate, and satisfy, demand for teaching jobs among bright, talented young people, why couldn’t those idealistic young teachers stimulate new demand for high-quality education among students in some of America’s most neglected school districts?
Kopp got to work. She raised seed money from corporations that had earmarked funds for educational causes and hired a staff of five people—socially conscious recent college graduates like herself—who traveled the country making campus connections. Within a year, they managed to recruit TFA’s first class of teachers—five hundred in all. After an intensive summer of training, they applied for jobs in local school districts identified by TFA as needing an infusion of new talent. They started teaching in classrooms across the country in the fall of 1990. Teach For America was up and running.
It was an impressive start—the first evidence supporting Kopp’s conviction that there was real hidden demand for the challenge of teaching among America’s young college graduates. But it was just a start, and even before the founding of TFA, Kopp was practicing trajectory thinking. “Only a monumental launch,” she has written, “would convey the urgency and national importance of our efforts.”
By 1999, Kopp’s teacher recruitment team had ten staffers. By 2010
, it numbered 142 recruiters, who worked, in turn, with paid student representatives on more than 350 campuses around the country. Today, TFA recruiters are as familiar a presence on elite campuses as their counterparts from the big consulting firms and investment banks. They’re also fixtures at state universities, historically black colleges, and scores of other institutions. They’re in constant contact with faculty members, career counselors, and deans who can identify the most accomplished students on campus; there’s scarcely a student government officer, black or Latino caucus leader, or fraternity president they don’t meet.
You might imagine that TFA attracts applicants by downplaying the hardships of inner-city teaching—the long hours, the scanty resources, the often dreary surroundings, the discouraging two-steps-forward-one-step-back pace of progress. But just the opposite is true. Elissa Clapp, TFA’s director of recruitment, says:
The work we’re offering is incredibly challenging, and we work aggressively to get people to understand that. We need people who are able to push forward despite the barriers, who are willing to put in the hours of unglamorous effort it takes to make magic happen in the classroom. Actually, we have a saying around here: “There’s nothing magical in what we do—hard work is the magic.” So we bring current corps members and recent alumni to campuses to tell their true stories to students who are thinking of applying. The type of person who finds a really tough challenge appealing is the type of person we want.
Hungry for just such a meaningful challenge, thousands of the country’s brightest college students now clamor for places on the teacher corps waiting list. In 2011, 48,000 graduates applied for around 5,000 Teach For America slots—an increase of 2,000 over 2010’s then-record applicant pool. The staggering numbers are a direct result of TFA’s aggressive recruiting methods—only one applicant in six had considered becoming a teacher before hearing about TFA. At nearly forty colleges and universities, TFA is the top employer of graduating seniors. Twelve percent of all Ivy League graduates applied for TFA positions in 2010, including 13 percent at Harvard. Seniors at historically black Spelman College applied at a 20 percent rate.
Back in 1996, just six years after founding TFA, Wendy Kopp rather brashly declared that she hoped a stint as a teaching corps member would one day be considered as prestigious as a Rhodes fellowship. Today, it is. The demand that no one believed existed—no one but Wendy Kopp, that is—has turned out to be a gusher.
Perhaps Kopp was so confident in her ability to get young people excited about the challenge of teaching because she shared that excitement herself. “I’m glad that I somehow landed on this thing that I became so passionate about,” Kopp has said, “because I’ve spent not one bit of energy for twenty years trying to figure out what I really want to be doing.” Like most demand creators, Kopp is very smart—but even more important, she has a powerful heart that is fully invested in her vision.
And even as the sheer numbers of TFA applicants grow, their quality also continues to rise. Corps members in 2010 boasted an average GPA of 3.6 on the 4.0 scale—the highest in TFA history. The steady expansion of TFA recruiting efforts belies the widespread assumption that bright young Americans “just don’t want to teach.” It also represents the first of three crucial dimensions along which TFA has established a steep slope of improvement.
The second dimension is even more important: a steady increase in the classroom effectiveness of Kopp’s young teacher corps. It isn’t enough to send bright, well-intentioned young college grads into troubled schools around the country. They need to achieve results—improved grades, higher test scores, and enhanced skills in reading, math, science, and history.
In pursuit of these goals, Kopp has built a system that develops ever-increasing information, insight, and knowledge about the educational methods that actually work in the classroom. For all its importance, teaching has traditionally been regarded as a kind of “art,” ineffable and practically impossible to describe. Today that is beginning to change.
TFA corps members don’t step into the classroom until they’ve benefited from an intensive five-week Summer Institute. The graduates receive training and support that extends throughout their two-year teaching assignment.
The results have been impressive. TFA teachers have been among the most thoroughly scrutinized in the history of education. And while research studies since 2002 have showed varied results, the most recent have credited TFA corps members with being more effective than other new teachers and equally effective as experienced teachers in such core subjects as math, science, and reading, despite their lack of traditional credentials—teaching certificates, education courses, master’s degrees.
What’s even more impressive is the way in which Kopp and her leadership team are pushing the organization and its members up a steep slope toward improved performance, year by year. Journalist Amanda Ripley has tracked TFA’s largely unprecedented research into teacher effectiveness:
For years, [TFA] has been whittling away at its own assumptions, testing its hypotheses, and refining its hiring and training. Over time, it has built an unusual laboratory: almost half a million American children are being taught by Teach For America teachers this year [2009–2010], and the organization tracks test-score data, linked to each teacher, for 85 percent to 90 percent of those kids. Almost all of those students are poor and African American or Latino. And Teach For America keeps an unusual amount of data about its 7,300 teachers—a pool almost twice the size of the D.C. system’s teacher corps.
We described Netflix as “an entertainment company run by a computer scientist.” Wendy Kopp is no computer scientist—she majored in public and international affairs—but she has instilled the same kind of show-me-the-numbers culture throughout Teach For America. “We’re so data-driven,” Amanda Craft, TFA’s director of strategy for human assets, told us, “that we literally change our models and processes every year based on what’s working and what’s not. The tweaks are constant.”
Applying this mentality to TFA’s enormous pool of information about teachers and classrooms from Memphis to New Mexico, Phoenix to Charlotte, East Los Angeles to the Twin Cities, has produced one of the first large-scale efforts to objectively define the qualities of exceptional teachers. TFA researchers have been studying what happens in the classroom through teacher observation sessions, surveys and interviews, “reflection sessions” between teachers and support teams, and studies of student learning data designed to isolate the most effective teaching techniques.
TFA’s analytics have identified the specific behavioral traits shared by highly effective teachers. Steven Farr, TFA’s director of learning, has described and analyzed these six traits in his book Teaching as Leadership. Now the specialists in TFA’s Teacher Preparation, Support, and Development division are translating these traits into specific teaching strategies and tactics for inclusion in the Summer Institute. The methods are also illustrated via annotated “rubric-norming” video clips of real-life classroom interactions, enabling TFA corps members to see what works, compare their own methods, and make rapid, concrete improvements, not through trial and error but by learning from the best.
The findings have been revelatory. As Farr puts it, “When we look at what our most effective teachers are doing, it is so clearly replicable. It is not magic. We can describe it, and that means that many teachers who are good can become much, much better. It’s just a matter of turning the light on what our most effective teachers are doing differently from our moderately effective teachers.”
TFA is also using its research findings to develop better systems for identifying high-potential teachers. For example, when Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, studied the work of 390 TFA corps members, she discovered that those applicants who scored high on a “perseverance” scale, as measured by a multiple-choice test, ended up producing learning results 31 percent better than those of otherwise matched applicants. More surprising, applicants who scored hi
gh on “life satisfaction” outperformed their colleagues by 43 percent. Duckworth’s study suggested that such teachers may exhibit extra zest, enthusiasm, and energy in the classroom, which gets communicated to students. Now TFA deliberately tests for perseverance and other key personality traits when evaluating new applicants—just a few of the more than thirty data inputs considered in TFA’s unique selection model.
“Life satisfaction” as a defining trait of a great teacher—who’d have guessed? And that’s the point, of course. Demand creators don’t rely on assumptions, intuition, or “common sense.” They dig for evidence and follow wherever it leads—often to the unexpected places where demand is hiding.
Developing objective standards and techniques for measuring and increasing teacher effectiveness is a huge and complex challenge. But TFA’s efforts are already beginning to bear fruit in the form of rising standards of student achievement. Internal studies appear to show that the performance of students taught by corps members has improved year by year, suggesting that the enhanced teacher selection and training methods are achieving real traction. That upward slope of improvement represents thousands of children with improved skills in math and reading, better equipped to meet the challenges of higher education and twenty-first-century careers.
Yet the ground-level stories of TFA teachers and the lives they’ve touched are even more impressive than the statistics. Yale graduate Yoona Kim is now in her third year of teaching special education students in New York’s Spanish Harlem—the kinds of children for whom expectations have traditionally been very modest. Not so in Kim’s classroom. “If there is one thing I really admire about Teach For America,” she says, “it is the organization’s emphasis on continuously increasing your effectiveness as an educator. It requires constant assessment and reflection on learning data to inform what you will teach and how you will teach it.” The trajectory thinking that helps make TFA a uniquely effective organization has been adopted by individual corps members like Kim.
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