Key points:
Imagine, for a moment, that a children’s medication is released to the market without undergoing rigorous clinical trials to determine its efficacy. With no reliable data on proper dosages and modes of administration, doctors write prescriptions based solely on the pharmaceutical company’s word that the pill works perfectly well.
Thankfully, such a scenario is unthinkable. In the medical realm, strict government and industry safeguards protect children’s health. Yet in education, educators embrace classroom “interventions” that have zero evidence of effectiveness.
The answer to stagnating test scores is not adopting technology that has never demonstrated any ability to move test scores. Educators have to finally recognize that hope is not a strategy and cease rewarding vendors who show up without RCTs and rigorous validation.
Breaking this pattern requires a significant structural shift in procurement mindset and process. Districts should adopt outcome-based contracts (OBCs) that center on building a true partnership between educator and edtech provider, a partnership of shared ownership and accountability.
On the district side, accountability starts by heeding the red flags hidden within clever sales pitches. Four clear signals to steer clear of an edtech offering are:
- An absence of independent research: When districts have to hunt through a vendor’s website to find third-party evidence of effectiveness, it signals that a product may not deliver meaningful impact for students. Proven products center credible research right on the home page.
- A request for massive screentime: The research is clear–too much screentime in the classroom is harmful to students’ development. Products that demand 45 minutes or more of screen time per week are confessing their inability to deliver a reasonable return of growth on minutes invested.
- Lack of positive approvals by state education agencies (SEA): Edtech providers need to demonstrate that their products have been evaluated and recognized by SEAs, including evidence of efficacy and verified impact on student test scores.
- A failure to provide clear outcomes: Providers must be transparent about the measurable impact of usage and the precise dosage required to provide that impact.
K-12 education is fundamentally failing–while the country’s spending per-pupil has increased 140 percent in real dollars since 1975, reading scores have remained unchanged. Two in three children were not proficient readers 50 years ago and two in three are not proficient readers today.
If there is one certainty in the years ahead, it is that dollars for K-12 classrooms will be precious. Providers must stop taking funding and then giving nothing back. We can no longer operate like vendors selling buses and books. Instead, we must become true partners in growth creation. Our job is not to manufacture software but to help students succeed.
This shift requires program providers to support educators with everything needed to achieve outcomes. Monetizing teacher training and other key requirements for implementation fidelity is the ultimate act of self-defeat. Would any pharma company try to get physicians to pay them to learn how to utilize a drug? Every drug company invests massively in transferring knowledge to doctors, understanding that for a medical treatment to be used efficaciously, training is essential.
Partnering for growth means payments are tied to growth and payment is not demanded for the services that provide the foundation for growth. With this mindset established, educators and providers can forge outcomes-based partnerships grounded in mutual accountability. Providers can truthfully state, “If you use our product with fidelity, we will deliver for your kids,” while the educator responds, “And we will take ownership for implementing the product with high fidelity when equipped with the right training and resources.”
What matters most in this relationship is aligning edtech’s mission with educators’ priorities. From the outset, both educators and edtech must commit to clearly defined outcomes–whether that’s guiding students through a third-grade reading gate or closing critical learning gaps in middle school. Once these outcomes are agreed, pinning down the metrics that matter is typically easy.
Recent research has confirmed what we’ve all known: So far edtech, while impactful when implemented with fidelity, has not moved the needle significantly. Frighteningly, for those of us who have dedicated our lives to building the software in widespread use, edtech’s ubiquity has coincided not just with stagnation but with test score declines.
Yesterday’s edtech was mostly a non-event in the world. Today’s (AI) is altogether different. AI is massively more capable. AI will do one of two things–help students as never before or rot their brains as never before. To avoid the latter, we must not deploy AI that has never proven its worth in rigorous research. We must not allow vendors to give teachers tools that undermine the district’s instructional strategy and defeat coherence. We must not persist in rewarding business models keyed to charging for training or monetizing student data via advertising.
Instead, edtech and educators must take shared ownership of doing what matters–driving student growth–through outcomes-based partnerships, holding each other to the highest standards.
