It has been a good year for the University of Minnesota, and the work that researchers have done there over the past thirty-plus years. This month saw the acquisition of FastBridge Learning by Illuminate Education, and raising of new capital for the University’s spin-out Reflection Sciences. This comes on the heels of Renaissance Learning’s acquisition of Early Learning Labs in April, and the acquisition of Flipgrid by Microsoft one year ago. 

‘What’s been going on up there?’ you might ask. As someone who has had a unique view to these exciting and innovative companies, I’ll try to explain. Disclaimer: I am not a psychometrician, and I’ll never give away anyone’s secret sauce. (And anyway given the former, the latter is probably impossible.) 

Minnesota has long been known for its leading education companies, and the list is too long for me to include here. Many of the recent acquisitions are focused on assessment, specifically Curriculum Based Measures (CBM), whose origins go back to 1985. CBM was designed to be a set of simple, efficient, standard procedures that are objective, allow for comparison of students to peers and to grade-level benchmarks, allow for repeated measurement, and show student growth over time*. They essentially tell educators if a child is on track or not on specific elements of a curriculum. That may sound like all formative assessment. Our take is that the reason educators are increasingly adopting CBM and solutions like FastBridge, is because they are easier to administer and less time-consuming, while providing actionable data, and maintaining academic rigor, validity, and reliability.

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Prepared by:

Chad Johnson, Managing Director and Partner

cjohnson@cherrytree.com | 952.253.6010

www.cherrytree.com