Delivering returns for investors and impact for special education students

Impact thesis

Over 7 million students—nearly 15% of the public-school population—receive special education services.¹U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (May 2024). National Center for Education Statistics. Students with Disabilities. Retrieved April 1, 2025. Often students with disabilities have limited access to appropriate education resources, and special educators are forced to customize general education materials to meet the individual needs of their students. To address this, TeachTown builds curriculum and software specifically tailored to the unique needs of special education students, whom traditional curriculum providers largely overlook.

Opportunity and investment

Double Impact’s investment in TeachTown provided an opportunity to scale a business in the underserved special education market, one in which we have investment experience. Through diligence, we determined that TeachTown’s solutions were highly differentiated, built on a proven Applied Behavior Analysis-based pedagogy, and endorsed by passionate customer advocates. Despite the products’ effectiveness, TeachTown had limited geographic reach, low brand recognition, and served elementary school grades only. The opportunity to accelerate growth through product expansion was clear. In December 2020, Double Impact acquired a majority stake in TeachTown. The founding management team chose to partner with us due to our strong alignment with TeachTown’s mission and impact, as well as our depth of knowledge and experience in the sector and in special education, specifically. In addition, our track record as a hands-on investor, along with our resources to support leadership and infrastructure investments, positioned us as the right partner for rapid scale.

“Through our partnership with Bain Capital, we were able to expand access to our educational solutions, invest in a strong team, launch innovative products, and establish the infrastructure and processes to support our long-term growth. As we enter our next chapter with L Squared, we look forward to continuing to enable educational achievement and positively impact the lives and learning journeys of more than seven million US students with disabilities.”

Richard Becker / Chief Executive Officer / TeachTown

Value creation

From the start, the goal for our partnership with TeachTown was centered on building a best-in-class team delivering practical tools for students, teachers, and parents. Key areas for driving value included:

Building a foundation for growth

Immediately after we invested in TeachTown, we began preparing the company for dynamic growth. This involved hiring key executives and investing in new tools, resources, and capabilities to bolster TeachTown’s sales and marketing strategy.

“We are proud of the results that our strong partnership with the TeachTown management team has yielded, both in driving its business performance and enabling access to high-quality, evidence-based instruction for students. TeachTown serves some of the most vulnerable populations in our society and plays a critical role in empowering those learners to reach their full potential.”

Iain Ware / Partner / Double Impact

Expanding product line

During our ownership, we partnered with TeachTown to expand the company’s adapted core curriculum product, enCORE, to serve middle school and high school students, which was completed in 2022. Prior to our exit, the company launched an enCORE pilot for pre-K students.

The team continues to develop new tools and resources to support teachers and students. For example, TeachTown recently launched Benchmark Assessments, a full suite of assessments that allow teachers to monitor students’ progress throughout the year and provide data-driven, personalized instruction.

Strengthening impact best practices

Double Impact worked closely with the management team to implement best practices from our impact playbook. This included launching the company’s first High Performing Organization (HPO) survey, driving annual improvement on the B Impact Assessment, and integrating impact targets into the management team’s compensation structure.

Improving student outcomes

Delivering exceptional learning outcomes for students is crucial to achieving TeachTown’s mission and driving its continued growth. Before our investment, the team researched the effectiveness of TeachTown’s original supplemental curriculum solution and found that students experienced higher gains across all tested dimensions, including social skills, language, and shape identification, versus a control group. We partnered with TeachTown to continue and improve the tracking of student outcomes across key products.

Next chapter

TeachTown has grown tremendously since its 2003 funding and, at the time of Double Impact’s exit, supported over 100,000 students annually¹Source: TeachTown proprietary data represents the number of students served based on the total number of student licenses as of December 31, 2023. with differentiated products and a purpose-built curriculum.

In June 2024, Double Impact and TeachTown announced its next chapter for growth through an acquisition by L Squared Capital Partners. L Squared has dedicated education-sector expertise and is committed to continuous investment in the company’s impact goals, driving positive outcomes for students and educators.