About myEDmatch

A Radical New Approach

Creating good matches between teachers and schools is really important. Every school is different and every teacher is unique. Studies show mission and culture fit are key to teacher satisfaction and school performance. In the candidate search and selection process, School-Teacher Fit is often overlooked, yet it is one of the best predictors of mutual success. In Short, Fit Matters.

myEDmatch is an easier, more effective way to connect educators and schools with similar goals and beliefs about education. myEDmatch is a job-matching site for educators that matches good-fit educators and schools. It offers an information-rich environment for teachers and schools to learn about each other during the job-search and hiring process.

The secret sauce for myEDmatch is a matching algorithm that produces a Match Score to indicate the degree of mission and culture fit between a teacher and a school. The methodology behind the Match Score is grounded in education and psychology research.

Three Easy Steps

Build an Online Profile. School and teacher profiles provide information that the other side really wants to know. Profiles include basic facts, school and geography preferences, and a virtual portfolio that includes multi-media elements like video, work documents, pictures, and DonorsChoose.org classroom projects.

Get matched. Teachers and schools complete a Core Beliefs Profile that describes what really matters to them about education in seven critical areas: mission, instruction, professional development, planning, student culture, staff culture, and school environment. A special algorithm calculates a Match Score between schools and educators based on the similarity of their core beliefs.

Search for jobs and candidates. Schools post current job openings so that teachers, whether matched or not, can search and discover opportunities. Teachers have over a dozen ways to discover schools and jobs, such as geography, academic model, and school type. Schools can search for matched and unmatched educators using over twenty different criteria, such as location, expertise, or preferences about where they want to work.

The $7 Billion Problem

Research shows that teachers hit their stride after 3-5 years in the classroom. (CITE) But far too many teachers never realize their full potential. Roughly 1 in 3 new teachers quit teaching within their first three years. Nearly half of all new teachers leave by year five. This crisis is even worse in low-income schools, where up to 80% of new teachers quit within five years.

The cost of teacher turnover is staggering. One estimate puts the annual cost of teacher attrition in the United States at just over $7 billion. (CITE-NCTAF 2007 report) In some schools, principals can spend up to 70% of their time in the spring semester on recruitment to replace departing teachers. This is money and time that could be better spent directly on efforts to improve student outcomes.

The number one reason teachers quit the profession? Despite popular belief, it’s not the pay or the students. It’s dissatisfaction with working conditions. One study cites the lack of fit with a school’s instructional culture as the main driver of teacher turnover. (CITE TNTP report)

myEdMatch is a radical new approach: Fit Matters. Better matches lead to greater educator satisfaction, lower teacher turnover, and better outcomes for students.

Inspiration Struck

In spring 2012, Alicia was finishing up an Executive MBA program at Washington University in St. Louis. At the same time at her mother’s encouragement she signed up on an online dating site to try to find a boyfriend. One night while searching for a topic for a paper on innovation, she took a break and decided to check out her new matches on the dating site. Inspiration struck. If online dating could connect people that otherwise never would have met, why not teachers and schools? What if we combined the efficiency and effectiveness of online dating with teachers and schools looking for their own matches?

After some months of refinement, Alicia in early September 2012 shared her idea for a job-matching site for educators with Munro. Munro quickly realized that this was the big idea he had spent the past two years looking for. After a few weeks of discussion, they both quit their jobs so they could focus full-time on launching myEDmatch in spring 2013.