Introducing CAIRO — A New Marketplace for High-Quality Instructional Materials

I want every teacher to have high quality district provided instructional materials.

And I've been doing a lot with school leaders lately to encourage them to take that challenge seriously.

To say, if you hire a teacher to teach a class, you also need to make sure that that teacher has the materials they need.

And researchers have noted for a number of years now that when teachers have to look online for their own materials, often they spend a lot of time, they spend their own money, and what they find is not always the best quality.

So I think this is a problem we need to tackle at the systems level.

I think this is a school level problem.

But in the meantime, I think it's also something that we can tackle at the individual level and get better resources into each other's hands.

Because I know you have probably created resources that you are proud of, that help students meet standards, that have grade-level rigor and don't water down the content, but really hold students to a high level and help them achieve what they're capable of.

I know you are making things like that, so I want to tell you about a new marketplace that I'm launching called Cairo.education.

Cairo, like the city in Egypt, .education, and we're Just getting started, just building this out.

I just added payment processing yesterday.

And what I'm looking for right now is people who can help me test things to make sure everything works and people who are interested in becoming sellers.

But I wanna let you know what my standards are going to be because I'm very, very aware of the problems with some of the other marketplaces that are out there.

I'm not interested in putting more coloring sheets out into the world or cute things that do not help students learn what they need to learn.

So the focus is going to be on high quality instructional materials that are rigorous, that are standards aligned, And I'm also very interested in preventing piracy.

I think this is a huge problem with a lot of the kind of bundles that are out there is a lot of what's in them is stolen.

It is not from the people who are selling it.

It's taken from other people.

I saw one complaint this week that a course that somebody signed up for was actually just screenshots of videos.

Could click on it, but it was just a screenshot of a video, so it didn't even play.

So like there's all kinds of garbage out there and that's part of why it takes so much time to find good materials.

So if you have good materials, I'm interested in hearing from you and I would love to get you set up as one of our early sellers on Cairo dot education.

And if you're willing to help me test this out, either as a seller or just as a buyer, uh, check out what I have for sale there.

And you will find that the prices are especially low on some of my most popular products from the principal center.

so that you can help me test out the new payment processing and make sure everything is working.

So check that out at Cairo.education and reach out if you're interested.