Scaling access to high-quality curriculum

Opportunity & Investment

Our investment in TeachTown provided an opportunity to scale a business in a highly impactful and underserved special education market, that we knew well. Through diligence, we determined that TeachTown’s solutions were highly differentiated; it was the only solution built on the proven Applied Behavioral Analysis-based pedagogy and had very strong customer advocacy. However, TeachTown had limited brand recognition. We saw a clear path to accelerate growth by expanding the company’s go-to-market strategies and resources. In addition, we saw the potential to expand TeachTown’s product portfolio to include a comprehensive K-12 adapted core curriculum.

In December 2020, BCDI acquired a majority stake in TeachTown. Management chose to partner with BCDI due to our strong alignment with TeachTown’s mission and impact, as well as our depth of knowledge and experience within education and special education specifically. In addition, we believe we were differentiated in our track record as a hands-on investor, with the resources and capabilities to help build the team, infrastructure and capabilities required to rapidly scale.

Value Creation

From the outset of our investment, our partnership with TeachTown has been centered around building out a best-in-class team that can deliver effective tools for students, teachers, and parents. Key areas for driving value included:

Building a foundation for growth

Immediately after we invested in TeachTown, we began working to prepare the company for a period of rapid growth. This involved several key executive hires and adding new tools, resources, and capabilities to bolster TeachTown’s sales and marketing strategy.

Expanding product line

During our ownership, we partnered with TeachTown to expand the company’s adapted core curriculum product, enCORE, to serve middle school and high school students.

TeachTown’s enCORE product now covers K through 12^th grade and provides students with high quality, effective, standards aligned tools and resources. “TeachTown has changed teaching for me,” says one high school teacher. She cites that prior to enCORE, teachers often had to develop their own curriculum for special education students because no available solution worked.

Strengthening impact best practices

We worked closely with the management team to implement best practices from our impact playbook. This included launching the company’s first High Performance Organization (HPO) survey, supporting annual improvement on the B Impact Assessment, and integrating impact targets into the management team’s compensation structure.

Improving student outcomes⁴

Delivering exceptional learning outcomes for students is key to achieving TeachTown’s mission and continued growth. Prior to our investment, the team had researched the effectiveness of TeachTown’s original supplemental curriculum solution and found students experienced higher gains across all tested dimensions (e.g., social skills, language, shape identification) versus a control group. We partnered with TeachTown to continue to track and measure student outcomes, across all key products. Most recently, the company completed a study of TeachTown’s core curriculum solution for elementary school found participating students showed strong mastery of all targeted math and English Language Arts skills.

Next Chapter

After achieving significant commercial and impact growth under our investment, TeachTown is excited to embark on its next chapter in partnership with L Squared Capital Partners. L Squared bring significant education expertise and are excited to continue investing in the company’s impact goals to drive positive outcomes for students and educators.