The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.

The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.

We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.

That's "equity" for you. We can't be unfair and give someone something that makes them better. It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up.

That's not necessarily the reason. OP probably was letting faster kids jump ahead but that doesn't really do anything helpful for a class that's going through a topic together step by step.

Better would have been to let the faster person learn something else tangentially related to the course so that they stay engaged but they don't disengage because they're simply ahead of the rest of the class on the next topic - which is just frustrating for everybody.

Alternatives exist for self-directed study and the tutorial system but that's presumably not what they're building for.