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.

> 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.

Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?

My guess is that the kids were learning ahead of the rest of the class and it made the teacher's life harder to keep track of where each kid is, or had to field questions outside of her expertise since often elementary school teachers only know enough to teach elementary school

Yeah - this is on OP if that is the case. No teacher wants that and it's annoying for the ahead kids and the behind kids. Better to give them something tangential to keep them engaged but still gate on moving ahead with the mainline curriculum.

To be fair - maybe that's what the product mentioned should have been doing? You can focus on general problem-solving ability by giving talented kids hard problems with the amount of knowledge adequate for their level rather giving them more an more material and making the whole learning process less manageable.

"general problem solving ability" isn't a real thing. Proficiency in solving, for example, math problems, does not confer the ability to draw conclusions based on evidence in history class. If you require a kid who's already mastered fractions to simply do harder and harder fractions rather than allowing them to continue onward, they will become bored and distracted, and ultimately burned out or resentful of the education system

OK, not general problem-solving ability, but subject-specific problem-solving ability. And I don't mean more tedious problems, but rather those that require self-discovery of non-standard approaches while not relying on any knowledge from further grades. E.g. for maths Olympiad problems exist for at least as early as 3rd grade, it might be possible to figure out something for younger children too.

I don't see why would shouldn't make it a goal to allow more advanced students to learn at a more advanced pace. They shouldn't be held back by the other students