Speaker: Nathan Estel
Please share your name and describe your background.
Nathan Estel: Hello, my name is Nathan Eston. I'm the Managing Director of Passage Preparation. I'm thrilled to be in this job and it's taken a lot of years to get here. I started as an eighth grade science teacher who was confused about why I needed to take certain courses or pass certain tests to get a license to teach and to teach the grades in subject areas that I wanted to. And in that journey, I was asking questions, what does the state sound like? And why is the state telling me I have to do this. So I applied for a job at the West Virginia Department of Education very early in my career. And I was lucky enough to get that job and it was sitting in that corner cubicle processing applications for liener from teachers across the state that I began to really ask, why does it matter if you have this GPA? Why does it matter if you have this particular series of courses or this number of hours or this particular degree? And why does it matter that you passed this test? And by the way, what's on this test? That's so important uh that that we would hold up someone's license because they didn't pass it. And when I began asking those questions, policymakers, members of the State Board of Education, and certainly my superiors started to encourage me to continue to ask those questions. And I did, throughout my time at the West Virginia Department of Education, I progressed through a series of different positions that helped me to better understand why those questions, why I was asking those questions and ultimately the answers to those questions. And soon after leaving the Department of Education, I worked for both educational Testing service and the evaluation systems group of Pearson, the two biggest players in the teacher licensure assessment landscape. And during my time there, I had the opportunity to engage with colleagues from across the country, other states that were grappling with those same questions that I had been asking um and to gain a better understanding of what was covered on the test and why. And I know now what's covered on the test. And I know more importantly why that information is covered on the test. And that's what led me to passage preparation. A few years ago, I was given the opportunity to create a new test preparation product from the ground up. And that is exactly how it was described to me, a test preparation product. So I thought long and hard about what that should look like and how it could deliver high quality and affordable resources to any candidate who needed to demonstrate that they had the requisite knowledge to gain the keys to the classroom. That's why I'm here today and that's why I'm thankful that you're here learning more about our product and how we can help you.
