Engrade

» see engrade.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

American K-12 school districts are a market with their own weather, and none of it reached Turkey. I was at university through most of this product's first run, and grades arrived the way they always had, posted on a board or read out. What pulls Engrade onto the list is the shape of the ending rather than the software: a free tool that millions of teachers chose for themselves, bought by a textbook publisher, then switched off.

Bri Holt wrote the first version in 2003, while he was still in high school, for the ordinary reason that the gradebook his own school ran was unpleasant to use. He put it online and made it free. Teachers found it the way teachers find things, from each other, and started entering real grades into a web application maintained by a teenager.

That adoption pattern is the whole story of why it got expensive later. Engrade spread underneath the procurement layer rather than through it. By the time a district's technology office noticed, several of its schools were already running on it, and the people whose job was to approve such a purchase were instead being asked to bless something already load-bearing.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Venture money arrived about a decade in. Engrade took roughly $8 million across two rounds, $3 million in 2012 and $5 million in July 2013, with Javelin Venture Partners leading the later one and Samsung's venture arm among the others. VentureBeat's headline on the first round captured the oddity exactly: a high school coder gets $3 million for his gradebook software, ten years later.

The product grew past the gradebook into a learning management system with assessment tools attached, which is what you build when you want to sell to districts instead of to teachers. The user count reached a reported 4.5 million, and in March 2015 Alexa still had engrade.com inside the top 5,000 sites in the United States. For a piece of school administration software that is enormous.

~ the fifty million ~

McGraw-Hill Education agreed to buy the company in January 2014, with the news breaking in early February. TechCrunch put the figure at around $50 million and framed it as a textbook house moving away from printed books toward software subscriptions, which was accurate about the strategy and optimistic about the execution.

What McGraw-Hill actually acquired was distribution. Engrade had relationships with school districts that a publisher could not easily buy any other way, plus a brand teachers already trusted. The software itself was the part that could be replaced later, and in an acquisition like this one it usually is.

~ the day it died ~

Engrade was discontinued on 30 June 2019, five and a half years after the sale. There is no press release to point at. What exists instead is the paperwork districts generate when a vendor goes away: blog posts with titles like Transition Out of Engrade, written by school technology staff explaining where the grade history was going and how long teachers had to pull it down.

End of June is a deliberate date. It is the last day of the American school year for most districts and the last day of the fiscal year for a lot of them, which makes it the cleanest possible moment to switch off a gradebook and the cruelest, since that is exactly when final grades are being entered. engrade.com does not resolve at all today.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »