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.

To be fair, it is less about "keeping top kids down" and more about "let's use our very scarce resources helping the bottom kids". Put that way it seems less malicious, and more like probably the right thing to do over all, while still being extremely frustrating if you are, or are the parent of, a 'top kid'. I know that in Seattle, I've been very frustrated with all the talk and promise of our school to provide enrichment to kids like mine who are able to learn quickly and are ready for more advanced learning opportunities, only to discover that it is haphazard, often in name only, and there isn't time or interest in providing more.

But it's not because of some drive for 'equity'. I've talked with teachers (as friends, not in a school setting). They're doing what they can with the resources they have.

> "let's use our very scarce resources helping the bottom kids"

So why does the richest country on the planet have "very scarce resources" only when it comes to educating its kids ? Of course, that very same public school has a stadium that is easily several times larger than facilities provided for Olympic level athletes in a poor country like India. That same school has a music program with a huge ballroom, recording studio, fancy musical instruments...bass sax, harps, bassoons and contrabassoons, double bass, violas...like literally, even a top of the line Bollywood studio doesn't have half of this. USA has chosen to prioritize just about everything other than basic classroom stem education. Then when you ask the math teacher why the kids don't know their logarithms and trig tables, he is like...well we have calculators and chromebooks. I have spent multiple years trying to engage with school board officials in public schools here in the mid-west. The most reasonable, unemotional, takeaway after all this engagement is that Americans are simply not interested in classroom education. They don't have teacher, don't have the time to teach, don't care for books or chalkboards...its simply not their thing. That's fine. I do hope all of this hyper-investment in music and sports produces some world class track and field athlete who can run a mile under three minutes while playing the bassoon.