Giving Compass' Take:

• Former Microsoft CEO and philanthropist, Steve Ballmer, invested in Social Solutions, an Austin based tech firm to help improve education systems for students. 

• How is education technology assisting students in the classroom? Should more philanthropists prioritize edtech funding? 

• Read about where education tech is going in 2018. 

The U.S. education system continues to lag behind other developed nations. Only two U.S. states have high-school graduation rates above 90 percent, and 15 states graduate less than 80 percent of their students. American kids are also more likely to be absent from school compared to their peers in other developed countries, with chronic absenteeism rates exceeding 30 percent in some cities.

These numbers caught the attention of billionaire businessman and philanthropist Steve Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team and served as CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. Back in August, the Ballmer Group—the philanthropic organization co-founded by Ballmer and his wife, Connie—announced a five-year, $59 million commitment to Austin technology firm Social Solutions in order to improve educational outcomes for students across the country.

“After studying this space for the past couple years, we are making our largest commitment yet to improving data use for nonprofit, education and social services work, and we hope this acceleration of innovation will really help these organizations more effectively serve kids and their families,” Ballmer said in a statement announcing the investment back in August.

The company works with over 18,000 nonprofit organizations, community groups and government agencies from all 50 U.S. states, as well as communities in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Latin America. It offers two primary software products: Apricot for smaller organizations, such as Kansas City’s Local Investment Commission (LINC), and Efforts to Outcomes (ETO) for larger nonprofits and government social service agencies, including a collaborative human service network in Boulder County, Colorado.

Clients use Social Solutions’ software to combine data from local participating community programs, school districts and government entities and create actionable insights to better serve program participants. LINC, for example, uses Apricot software to share data between local schools and its after-school programs.

Read the full article about improving education systems by Mary Mazzoni at TriplePundit