JONATHAN D. HARBER Co-founder & CEO SchoolNet, Inc.

Biography

Panelist Perspective

Biography

In 1998, Jonathan D. Harber conceived and co-founded SchoolNet Inc., a company with the mission to help improve the world’s school systems by using data to drive decision-making. Jonathan has spent over 20 years in education technology.  

Today, Jonathan’s innovative vision is helping school districts to increase student achievement and to improve institutional efficiency. SchoolNet serves over 50 American cities that educate over 2 million students in 14 states. As a result of his leadership and passion, SchoolNet has won three Codie Awards, has twice won INC Magazine’s Inc. 500 Award, and three times has won Deloitte’s Fast 50 Award.  In 2007, Ernst & Young recognized Jonathan with the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year ® Award in the New York region. 

At Wesleyan University, he studied Cognitive Science and completed an Honors thesis on education technology.  At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harber earned his M.S. and completed a joint Master's thesis between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Sloan School of management involving the creation of an environment for multimedia case studies.

Harber was the co-founder and president of Diva, a publisher of multimedia software, which sold over one million units around the world. Diva’s flagship product, VideoShop, was used by students and teachers to create interactive-multimedia projects. Diva was acquired by Avid Technology (NASDAQ: AVID), the world’s leader in digital media technology.
Jonathan was president and founder of the award-winning children’s educational software company KinderActive.  The company created interactive reading products for young learners winning the “Teachers Choice - Excellence in Classroom Products” Award from Learning Magazine.

Jonathan was the co-founder and Chairman of NewKidCo the first company to develop and market children’s educational video games including Elmo’s Letter Adventure and Elmo’s Number Journey - for PlayStation and Nintendo N64. NewKidCo was acquired by SoftQuad  (NASDAQ: SFQD) in 1998.

As a Board member of New York City Outward Bound and Trail Blazers (not-for-profit organizations), Jonathan has actively worked to help disadvantaged youth in New York City.

A native New Yorker, Jonathan lives in New York City with his wife, daughter and son.

Education defines us as a nation and people.  Our country’s education priorities reveal America’s aspirations and ambitions.  As Thomas Jefferson said, a “people who expect to be ignorant and free expect something that never was and never will be.”

But America, once the world leader in education, schooling 55 million K12 students and12 million post-secondary students, is falling behind.

We are experiencing two mounting gaps in academic achievement – the first is between the “haves” and “have-nots” in our country.  With less than 50% of our poor and minority children graduating from high school, a large percentage of the American public will be condemned to low paying service jobs or, worse yet, unemployment or incarceration. Education is the civil rights issue of our time.

The second gap is a “global” achievement gap, one that exists between our children and those from around the world.  In math, science and analytical thinking, we have fallen behind our peers. We are literally outnumbered by the math and science graduates in emerging economic powerhouses such as China and India. Our education system is not arming our children with the skills and knowledge needed to be leaders in the global economy of the 21st century.

How we, as a people, recognize, prioritize and mobilize to address these twin achievement gaps will reflect our commitment to our founding fathers’ vision of democratic capitalism – unique in the world -- and our quest for international leadership.  We face difficult choices.

America’s population of slightly more than 300 million people is comprised of 60 million children (0 to 18), 100 million seniors (over 65) with a work force of just over150 million. 

Domestic manufacturing, mining and agriculture -- at 25% of the nation’s employment -- remain critically important to our way of life but are no longer a source of high paying, low skill jobs that they were in the 20th century.

Domestic infrastructural service jobs (police, sanitation, fireman, etc) represent another 20mm jobs that must be filled locally.

Students must at a minimum be prepared for our domestic “blue collar” and infrastructure jobs – now less abundant than in years past – lest leave behind a fruitful life contributing to society.

Unfortunately, our dropout rate is eclipsing our diminishing domestic “blue collar” job market.  Our economic future and international competitiveness lies in developing a 125  million workforce into “white collar” workers to be engaged in the high value-add service economy – designers, analysts, engineers, bio-medical, teachers, professionals, managers, innovators, artists, entrepreneurs – “brain workers” who add value to the economy by what they know and are able to do.
 
But most “brain” work, in an interconnected Internet era, is fungible; unlike basic blue collar work – construction, mining, agriculture -- it can be completed remotely without distribution or transportation costs – it can go off-shore! A daunting challenge.

To maintain global leadership, our available “brain workers” must be able to out-compete our overseas peers whose educated workforces will soon dwarf ours by both quality and quantity, because as all indicators suggest, they are already out-performing us academically, and by birth rates.

We will need to get more output from our human capital than our neighbors do, or import “brain” workers by virtue of liberalized immigration policies.  Or both. Education and technology are our levers. 

With less than 10% of our children currently graduating from four-year colleges and a fraction of those earning professional and post-graduate degrees, we must recognize that the current system needs revolutionary change.  As is true in other sectors, education must utilize our best management science practices, our best human capital practices, and our best technology practices to out-educate, and out-compete the globe.