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.

I've always thought it would be interesting to have a education system that focused primarily on the best outcome for the brightest students and focused the vast majority of resources on the top 5% or so. I wonder if the total impact made (gdp, research contributions, etc) by a cohort of students this way would be higher vs spending resources to slightly bring up the average on a large number of students that never make much of themselves.

There are concrete objectives for educating a voting public in a democracy that would be entirely unserved by this proposal.