Thanks for raising this issue. I'm one of the founders of Clever, a former educator, & super privacy conscious. I'm really proud of the work we're doing for a few big reasons:

1. When schools adopt Clever, they often tell us about the way they were setting up software previously. It's always inefficient (i.e. teachers hand-entering class lists every week), but all too often insecure (i.e. faxing attendance sheets, or emailing XLS files to a support team). Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically.

2. Without centralized login systems, teachers report just getting their class logged in to an app takes 25% of class time on average. The friction of using technology is preventing students from learning. Clever eliminates that friction.

3. Clever is a tool schools use to manage their applications. They manage data sharing & own any data in Clever (our TOS & Privacy Policy make this very clear).

Please let me know (dan@clever.com) if you have suggestions for how we can improve privacy or security for students. It's our top priority & one of the biggest reasons we raised this round.

You don't really address the issue. I'll admit you're in a tough spot though, since there's no real way to disprove that you won't sell the data you collect about students. Maintaining trust will be important.

It appears your service is:

(a) an API that collects student data from schools and then parcels it out to school-approved educational apps that have paid for access to your gateway.

(b) an OAuth login system like Facebook/Twitter/Google login.

I'm not sure if this is correct though, since your website doesn't clearly explain this (it does have a picture of Magnus Carlsson playing chess in your office though, which is pretty cool).

So then I guess your business model is to become the middleman between educational software and schools? Educational software companies will pay you to sell their software in your educational app store, similar to how Apple and Google take a 30% cut in their app stores? (edit: I just read below that you also charge the vendors of the student database software). In exchange, apps get visibility to schools and streamlined access to student data, and teachers get a convenient system for installing educational software?

That sounds good. I have no idea what schools budget for apps and educational software, but I imagine it will increase if Chromebooks and iPads become more commonplace in classrooms.

    teachers report just getting their class logged in to
    an app takes 25% of class time on average

That sounds made-up to me. That would imply some classes spend upwards of 40% of their time logging kids in to an app?

    Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically.

How? Also how is faxing/emailing attendance sheets any less secure than routing their precious data through your servers?

First off, I am not with Clever but I have spent a fair amount of time looking at their platform.

Being in the industry, I think the 25% number is high. It is a significant frustration especially in lower grades if kids have different username/passwords for every education app they are using during their school week. I think this is a pretty good idea and it helps. However as schools move to Chromebooks more and more I do wonder if schools will push more for vendors to just integrate directly with Google's login since all users have to have a Google account to use the Chromebook. Maybe Clever supports this? I haven't looked into it lately.

The way they improve efficiency is due to fact that schools will no longer need to upload CSV files nightly to vendors servers to update their student rosters. Many inner city schools have a very high degree of student transience (meaning kids move schools a lot) and this is a huge pain to update across multiple vendors every day. A lot of vendors support the upload of CSV files to provide an updated list of student rosters. Imagine how much easier it is for the schools if they don't have to do any of that or only have to integrate with one vendor. I can't speak to the security side and how they improve that really.

They do charge the vendors at the school level and for many vendors their fees can really eat into their margins and so I still think you see a lot of vendors relying on CSV files. Schools are used to doing this and so setting up one more job to upload the same file every night is not a huge burden to them.

Not to mention that every vendor has different formats.

"That would imply some classes spend upwards of 40% of their time logging kids in to an app?"

I have developed and support a language portfolio system - I was on site at a high school giving support for one period. I was shocked at how lax most of the students were (well... maybe not) but 25-30% of the students couldn't remember a username/password, even ones they created themselves. In a 45 minute period, 25 minutes were spent giving about a dozen or so students their username/password combos (I was doing manual resets on site to speed the process). It was insane, but I don't see many ways of making it better, short of tying in with edmodo or something similar (maybe clever? but I have no budget for this).

As someone who taught a high school programming class for a year, 25% is high, but not as far off as you'd think.

In general, "boot up time" for most students was usually fast, but the problem is that the edge cases (students who forgot their password, typed the wrong URL, didn't follow instructions properly, had a technical error) required individual attention, and would quickly eat up time. Many of these problems came from sending students to a web site they hadn't used before, or logging into a service they didn't use often.

I don't work for Clever (I'd disclaim it if I did. I currently work for a different educational tech company) but I can definitely see how a single sign-on for everything would be helpful to teachers.

As a former high school teacher, assuming classes are between 45 and 60 minutes, this sounds absolutely reasonable to me. If one kid can't log on, you might be able to move ahead and deal with it later. If two or more are stuck, forget it. They'll be unable to focus, very frustrated, and it will take the class completely off track.

25% number comes from a survey of teachers done by MDR. It matches my anecdotal experiences as well.

Fax and email are generally considered much less secure means of transmission than an authenticated HTTPS api. SMTP is generally an unencrypted protocol, for example.

For one, post your code.

Also, if I can't get to it from the front page of your website (and it doesn't look like I can), it doesn't exist.