My Cancer and My Purpose
By Matt Greenfield, Managing Partner, Rethink Education
On January 8th, 2023, I accidentally discovered that I had a tumor in my pancreas. Three days later, I learned that it was probably the same kind of cancer that killed Steve Jobs — a neuroendocrine pancreatic tumor. It might sound strange to describe this diagnosis as good luck, but since that third day I have felt lucky on several levels.
About 5% of pancreatic cancers are neuroendocrine tumors. Most of the rest are adenocarcinomas, which tend to be aggressive, fast-growing, and often swiftly fatal. Neuroendocrine tumors, on the other hand, are generally treatable and in some cases entirely curable. The doctors I talked to on January 10th both used the same phrase: “we have a lot of tools in our toolkit.” Steve Jobs, they told me, succumbed to the disease in part because he chose to reject many of the standard treatments.
I will skip to the bottom line: I had the tail of my pancreas removed, but I have been getting clean scans for 18 months and am generally healthier than I was at the end of 2022. But along the way there were moments of worry and some moments, especially during the three days after the initial diagnosis, when I thought I might be about to die soon.
Hearing a cancer diagnosis is like getting a kind of moral X-ray: it illuminates one’s inner landscape, making the bones of one’s character shine. Cancer teaches one what one values. During those first three days, I asked myself what I would do if I had 10 years left to live. Or five years. Or two years. Or six months.
One clear answer was that I would have a heightened sense of gratitude for the gift of each day: for my family, for my friends, for my three dogs, for the beauties and pleasures of this world, and for the chance to do meaningful work.
I asked myself whether I would stop working if I had only six months or a year to live. And the answer I came up with was no, I would not quit: however long I had left, I wanted to continue my work and to deepen my legacy.
As I was working through this question about my priorities if I were facing imminent death, I found myself thinking a lot about Ignite Reading, a company I had invested in and on whose board I sit. Ignite Reading is a tutoring company focused on struggling readers. Ignite Reading’s mission is to ensure that every child has a chance to become a fluent reader.
In this country, bad reading instruction has caused a huge and preventable tragedy. As recently as 2020, approximately 60% of all elementary schools used “balanced literacy,” a method of teaching reading that has been proven ineffective. As a result, two-thirds of fourth graders do not read fluently, and 54% of adults read at or below the sixth-grade level. 21% of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate.
Those who do not become fluent readers are four times likelier to drop out of high school. They are likelier to die young, go to prison, and become addicted to drugs or alcohol.
When I was in my early twenties, I tutored, or tried to tutor, illiterate adults in Baltimore, 15 years before the era in which The Wire is set. I am afraid that I learned more from my students than they learned from me. I learned lots of little facts about being illiterate — what it is like to go to a drugstore or a supermarket to find the right medication or food, what happens when you take the wrong bus, what it is like to try to find work.
I also learned how massively fortified the systems of inequality are. Illiteracy and the other problems of Baltimore seemed completely insoluble. I and the other tutors were untrained and without the tools we needed, and we had at best a minimal impact.
This sense of helplessness deepened when I helped try to start a program to bring Yale graduate students into New Haven’s Hillhouse High School as tutors. I am sure that talking to us was interesting and useful for the Hillhouse students, but the problems were deeply entrenched. There was one 10-day period in which three sophomores died in separate shooting incidents. It would not be an exaggeration to say that those students died because America doesn’t make sure everyone learns to read. All of the other big problems of New Haven — the poverty, the unemployment, the crime, the addictions, the broken families, and the despair — are downstream of bad reading instruction.
My experiences tutoring in Baltimore and at Hillhouse High School were what drove me to make my earliest investments in education technology, starting in 2003, five years before the phrase “impact investing” was coined.
One of my first education investments, the company now known as Amplify Education, started with software for assessing early reading skills. They then developed a reading curriculum grounded in the scientific evidence about how people learn to read. Amplify’s government relations team also helped catalyze a massive public policy shift: 32 states now have legislation requiring evidence-based, scientifically sound reading instruction.
Legislation and sound reading curricula are a good start, but literacy is still a complex and multi-dimensional problem. Teachers need to be trained or re-trained, instructional processes need to be re-engineered, and funding needs to be re-allocated. And many children require individual tutoring to become fluent readers.
That is where Ignite Reading comes in: they have developed the tools and processes I needed but didn’t have when I was tutoring. Ignite Reading delivers remote one-on-one tutoring 15 minutes a day, five days a week. The company trains tutors for over a hundred hours and then equips them with a science-based curriculum and a tool that tracks their mastery letter by letter and letter cluster by letter cluster. Ignite Reading also carefully rehearses the logistics, including making sure that the schools are prepared to move students around the building and troubleshoot problems with their Chromebooks.
Unlike many other tutoring businesses, Ignite Reading does not sell its services directly to affluent parents. Ignite Reading is focused on the most vulnerable students, and its services are paid for by schools, school districts, and state governments.
Everything Ignite Reading does is grounded in the science of reading, and that plus their operational excellence has led to excellent outcomes.
Ignite Reading is one of the fastest-growing companies I have ever invested in. They have now tutored tens of thousands of students — tutored them, transformed them, and empowered them to live lives of prosperity and dignity.
Watching a roomful of students videoconferencing with their tutors is a magical experience. It is striking how focused and serious the little kids are. There is no horsing around. The daily one-to-one conversation with a caring adult is incredibly important to the kids and has benefits well beyond becoming literate: it changes their whole relationship to school.
The CEO of Ignite Reading is Jessica Sliwerski, who has spent her entire adult life helping people learn to read, as a teacher, academic administrator, a founder of several startups, and as CEO of a nonprofit that develops free curricular materials for K-12 schools.
Jessica is also a cancer survivor. She wrote a book called “Cancer Hates Kisses” to help people who are getting treated for cancer explain the treatment to their children. Coincidentally, Jessica sent me a copy of the book days before I received my own cancer diagnosis. And she gave me some profoundly impactful advice and support about my own cancer treatment.
Jessica is not just an exceptional social entrepreneur. She is not just creative, relentless, mission-driven, and inspiring. She is incandescent and ferocious in her commitment to the mission. Jessica and her equally relentless co-founder Evan Marwell never allow any of their stakeholders to forget that every struggling reader Ignite Reading does not tutor has a heightened risk of not living a good life — a heightened risk of poverty, illness, addiction, incarceration, and premature death.
I have known Jessica for a decade, and she was always intensely committed. But her experience with cancer gave her a keener sense of urgency, a keener sense of the preciousness of each of the lives Ignite is saving.
I was always a little obsessed with Ignite Reading from the moment I discovered that it existed. But it took a cancer diagnosis to teach me just how important Ignite Reading is to me.
In those first three days after my diagnosis, when I thought I might be about to die in a few years, I surprised myself by not panicking, raging, or melting down. My fear was like a sliver of ice in my chest, dense and chilly but small enough to be manageable.
When I asked myself whether I would continue to work if I had only six months left to live, I immediately thought of Ignite Reading. I thought about the children Ignite Reading is tutoring. I thought about the things I could do to remove friction from Ignite Reading’s pathway to tutoring a million children a year. I thought about the company lifting a million children a year out of darkness and into the light. And I felt a sense of warmth and hope expanding in me.
My time horizon has now expanded back to multiple decades. But when I look at a startup as a potential investment for my firm, I now always ask whether I would want to spend time working with that startup if I had only six months to live.
You may not ever have had a moment when you thought your death might be imminent, but your time and resources are also finite. So you might find it useful to ask the same clarifying questions: would I still do this if I had six months left to live? Will it deepen the meaningfulness of my life? Social entrepreneurship and impact investing work best when you have a fierce need to do them.
Some insightful pieces on the science of reading for those who want to dive deeper:
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