Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade
Overall, I agree that the promise of tech in education never manifested, or at least hasn&#x27;t yet, and the last decade was full of half-baked or poorly conceived ideas. But I&#x27;m worried there&#x27;s some baby in that bathwater...<p>I started my career in K-12 education, first in the classroom, then as an administrator, and thanks to a coding bootcamp, am happily pursuing another career as a software developer. I have plenty of friends who&#x27;ve done the same. Will it be a long-lasting model? I don&#x27;t know, some are clearly already out of business (the one I did, Hack Reactor, is still going though). But it may be the first wave of upending having to spend six figures on accreditation &#x2F; skill acquisition.<p>And while a lot of the flipped &#x2F; personalized tools never panned out specifically, a lot of the concepts were helpful in  bringing in new structures to instruction. The ideas helped us move away from simply &quot;I do, we do, you do&quot; lessons to units where students could get some material up front and then do more exploratory or self guided lessons, and teachers could work with individual students who needed attention.<p>Education needs innovation. Instructionally, the major changes won&#x27;t come from software but from restructuring how school operates at different grade levels. Given the different needs of 7th graders from 3rd graders, it&#x27;s interesting that their days are still structured so similarly, not to mention that we&#x27;re still not really developing skills that are useful for the kinds of jobs that exist today.<p>That said, there is a place where there&#x27;s a desperate need for high quality software in education: operations. Follow a school office manager for a day and you&#x27;ll see exactly what I mean. The number of systems that are still either paper-based or involve manual processes that can quickly be automated are incredible. As with any public enterprise, there are lots of reasons that these systems haven&#x27;t been updated, but streamlining operations for schools will actually make much bigger impacts for student outcomes than almost all the edtech software out there.