Press

“One of the major failings in the educational marketplace is a lack of data from end users,” said company founder and CEO Kirby Salerno, noting that the $25 billion K-12 market is dominated by major suppliers such as the publishing houses McGraw-Hill and Pearson. “This puts teachers in an incredibly powerful position.”

Teachers may be the users of classroom products in K-12 schools in the U.S., but others in the schools actually choose which products to buy, such as textbooks and technology. It’s a dysfunctional market, according to ClassroomWindow — a brand-new web startup in Needham that wants to upend the market with a Yelp-style, crowdsourced approach.

Classroom Window…is building a data system that would combine Consumer Reports-like expertise with crowdsourced knowledge like that popularized by Yelp in order to report what innovations are being used in a given context, how they are being used and how that leads to both teacher and principal satisfaction as well as to student achievement.