Photo by Webb Chappell

In late February 2020, the Japanese government announced it would close every school in that country to prevent the spread of COVID-19. On the other side of the world, in his Billerica, Massachusetts, office, Rob Waldron (MBA 1992) saw the news. Waldron, the CEO of Curriculum Associates, a company that creates research-based print and online instructional and assessment tools for US students and teachers, quickly gathered his executive team. “I want you to be prepared to run this company 100 percent remotely, and I want you to assume every school in America will be shut down,” he told them.

Within a month, Waldron’s far-reaching predictions proved accurate. And Curriculum Associates was ready, not just for the new world of remote work but also with respect to the increased demand for remote learning. The company committed to doing whatever was necessary to ensure teaching and learning continued despite school closures, including developing free, printable reading and math activity packs in English and Spanish. It also developed teacher guides to keep K–8 students learning even if they didn’t have reliable internet access.

The company also expanded access to its i-Ready digital program to nearly two million students for free. It was an easy choice, Waldron says. “It was like having someone knock on your door and saying, ‘I need water now.’ You just get them water.” From their homes, the company’s hundreds of employees moved swiftly to enroll and support new students. Over the last eight years, Curriculum Associates had enrolled 8 million children. In just three and a half weeks during the spring of 2020, it added a million more.

“The things that mattered most were not the things we did in that moment. It took a decade to be ready for a week I never thought we would have,” Waldron says. “You need to have an outstanding team; you have to have the right product; you have to have the business systems; you have to be the right kind of organization.”

For Waldron, that means being a company with purpose. It was the mission to make classrooms better places for teachers and children that drew him to the company in 2008. Waldron had spent most of his career in the education sector, working for both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, in mission-driven and profit-driven settings. His experiences had convinced him that socially responsible, for-profit companies could have the biggest positive impact in education. When Waldron joined Curriculum Associates, the company had already been doing just that for almost 40 years. The owner asked Waldron to make a long-term commitment to those same ideals and sign a contract with 20-year terms. Waldron agreed. “There is a relationship between long-term thinking, social purpose, and success,” he says.

Since taking over as CEO, Waldron has invested in the foundations of this relationship. He has focused on service to employees and on stakeholder communities, increasing the company’s minimum wage to $15 in 2015 and overseeing a historic gift of about $200 million in stock to the Iowa State University Foundation and the Boston Foundation. At the same time, Curriculum Associates has transitioned from a solely print-based company to a largely online one, earned local and national best-places-to-work awards, and seen revenues increase 20 times over. “It turns out, doing what is right and what is good offer the best returns for investors, for customers, and for employees,” Waldron says.

Waldron is optimistic that more companies are embracing a mission-driven approach to business, especially in a tight labor market. “People don’t want to work just anywhere. I believe purpose-driven companies are going to outperform because they are powered by people who care deeply,” he says.

For Curriculum Associates employees, the importance of their products—used in classrooms as well as virtually—is as clear as ever, Waldron says. “We were having a crisis in education before the pandemic, in terms of disparities in kids’ learning gains.” Now, after two years of disrupted learning in many places, those inequities are even more apparent, and progress is hindered by continued absences and the ongoing mental health impacts of the pandemic. Such conditions have accentuated a dire need to address the instructional needs of teachers. “One hundred percent of our focus is to be of service to educators,” he says.

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