Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

Instead of buying more/better equipment, teachers, or technology why hasn't anyone tried to buy a better student? I'm fairly certain that if you paid elementary students cash for better grades you would see a huge jump in achievement for the average student. A small amount of money to us feels like a huge amount to a kid, and there are plenty of studies showing that rewards increase performance for basic and mechanical skills.

If you're just skimming the titles, you should know that occasionally the title is not actually the bad thing, it's something about/from/done with that thing: e.g 32 "Common Core State Standards" isn't saying the standards are bad, but the rollout of them.

The question then becomes is that the type of student you want to create? Any elementary school teacher who frequently rewards students with candy can tell you horror stories of what this sort of system leads to. Every task becomes a bargain of 'what will I get for doing this?' as opposed to building an innate desire to learn.

Education is broken, but going this route won't fix much. Fixing standardized tests, or scrapping them, along with eliminating things like the SAT would go a long ways is creating better learners, instead of better test takers.

On mobile and wouldn't be sure where to find it anyway, but this has been done! It turned out that the proximity of the reward was critical. A cash prize for a end of unit grade had nearly no effect, while an immediate cash prize tied to, say, a daily quiz showed some decent effect on the particular quiz/assignment. The take away from the study was that shorter feedback loops are important. Questions were also raised on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivators.

I spent years working in ed-tech, at more than one company on this list, and know people at many others.

There were two overarching lessons I took from my experience.

The first is that a successful educational product needs to deeply and intimately understand pedagogy and materials -- teaching and learning techniques and how they vary between students, and what kinds of materials are suitable -- deeply, I mean like at a postdoc level.

I've seen so many products fail because the engineers and designers didn't have the slightest idea how students actually learn, think that algorithms could make up for crappy materials, or have zero understanding of what teachers actually do.

And creating good teaching materials with good pedagogy is very expensive. You have to hire educational+domain experts. They don't come cheap. There just aren't that many people who can clearly explain complex concepts gradually, relatably, and accurately in a simple manner.

For some reason, because we all went to school, so many of us think we understand teaching and learning. It's pretty humbling to discover you don't at all.

The second lesson is that education software isn't sold to the kind of market you're probably familiar with. It's not bought by consumers, or even the kinds of enterprises you might be familiar with. It's bought by school districts (or universities), each of whom have incredibly extensive needs for customization -- for interoperability, for the curriculum, for whatever -- and each of whom expect to be given lots of individual attention for a long time before they sign.

Your company will be primarily salespeople, not engineers.

But because there is a ton of money in EDU, you actually only need a handful of school districts or universities to sustain your company. Which then turns into a problem, because it means everyone is using different products, and so much is custom-built. So standards and interoperability don't emerge -- or when they do, they're just, well, really bad.

It's a complicated space. The only other space that feels similarly insanely complicated to me is healthcare.