EdTech Investors, Meet Our Server

Depending on who is doing the counting, venture capital funding for educational technology runs between $500 million and $2 billion a year. That's not peanuts.

The promise of EdTech is that it will address every conceivable inequity in the K-12 education system—and profitably, too–while engaging our students far more effectively than any 19th century industrial model could ever do in this era when almost all kids are digital natives.

But a year spent in an actual school, and an informal poll of fellow rookie teachers who work across a variety of districts, from well-off suburban to decidedly not well-off rural, leads me to a question my wife often asks when promise and reality don't sync up: Are you kidding me?

The Clayton Christensen Institute, after the pioneering Harvard Business School professor of Innovator’s Dilemma fame, is a big booster of the promise.

Here’s the reality. At my school we can’t stand up an online version of the student newspaper—the first time this has been attempted, mind you—on Wordpress, the world’s most popular blogging platform. Why? Because the school’s firewall won’t permit Cascaded Style Sheets, or CSS, and the IT department can’t figure out how come since the firewall was created by a previous regime that left little in the way of documentation. This also means our students can’t use sites built on Wordpress, including time.com and other top-notch destinations.

For most of the year, my classroom ran on virtual machines that were connected to a server seemingly powered by three squirrels. Log-ins often took 10 minutes to complete. Asking students to hit the same site at the same time created bottlenecks worthy of Boston before the Big Dig. My classroom finally got Chromebooks but many others remain reliant on the squirrels.

Lest you think I’m dumping on our IT guys, consider this: there are exactly two of them, serving a school community of over 600 people who are typically using equipment from at least two business cycles ago.

Fellow teachers at other schools tell similar tales of woe. U.S. schools' tech infrastructure is many years and many billions of dollars away from being able to handle what EdTech offers—and that’s before any analysis of whether most of what EdTech offers is actually any good. Before schools can run on EdTech, they have to walk. And often they’re still crawling.