How Online Dating Lead to A Remarkable Way to Improve Teacher Retention
“Technology is never going to replace the need for great teachers.”
One Mother’s Day, Alicia Herald decided to try online dating.
Although she wasn’t successful in the love department, her career was thriving. After years of teaching fourth graders in South Central Los Angeles, she had joined the staff of Teach For America as a recruiter and had most recently started and operated the Teach For America – Kansas City region as their executive director.
After all this time in the educational system, she had noticed numerous pain points and had seen the state of American schools first-hand.
Statistics like 20% of teachers leaving every year or only 50% of teachers making it to their 5th year, made her realize that something had to change and it had to change fast.
While the online dating scene wasn’t working out quite as she had planned, it lead her to one of those entrepreneurial “Aha” moments! She saw that if you took the concept of online dating and applied it to K-12 education, you could fundamentally change the way teachers are placed into schools.
And that’s how myEDmatch was born. Today, myEdmatch works with over 500 partners across the US, helping both teachers and students thrive.
In this conversation, we talk about Alicia’s kids, how she still stays in touch with them, how she came to work in education and how she defines the future of education. Alicia shares how, growing up, she never wanted to go into teaching.
She went to excellent private schools and was determined to follow that by going to law school. All that changed when she was recruited by Teach For America and began teaching fourth grade in South Central Los Angeles. Alicia shares her view of the future of education and what she believes needs to change immediately.
Learn more about myEDmatch here.
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