The Federal Office of Ed Tech is Gone. Here’s What That Means for the K-12 Market

Remote learning. Artificial intelligence. Student data privacy. Social media.

Over the past decade, state and local education officials — and education companies — have been forced to navigate a slew of new and emerging technologies in the education sector. K-12 leaders have typically been forced to make sense of those shifts while coping with major constraints, particularly tight budgets and limited staff expertise.

Amid those challenges, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology has stood out as a resource that K-12 officials could count on, providing them with information to evaluate evidence-based approaches, guidance to navigate new state and federal policies, strategic advice to improve product-market fit for ed-tech tools, and support to experiment with open educational resources.

That resource is now gone — one of several casualties of mass layoffs that hit the federal agency last week. The Trump administration pushed through a reduction in force to bring its head count to 2,200 employees, or just over half of its size when President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20.

Trump this week signed an executive order calling for the closure of the department, a goal conservatives have been pursuing for decades and that Trump promised to accomplished during the 2024 presidential campaign. (Taking that step would almost certainly require an act of Congress.).

The White House order directs Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” while ensuring its programs and services can function “uninterrupted.”

Shuttering the OET — among a host of other programs and offices at the department — was one of the Trump administration’s first steps in shrinking the agency’s footprint and operations. McMahon has said her aim is to increase efficiency and direct more funding and spending control to state education agencies.

The OET played not only a key role for district and state leaders. It also provided a number of resources to ed-tech companies and K-12 organizations seeking to improve their offerings and better serve students’ needs.

With the office’s elimination, those organizations will now be forced to look for the same resources and guidance elsewhere in the market, said Joseph South, former director of the federal office of ed-tech during the Obama administration and the current chief innovation officer for ISTE/ASCD. The organization is probably best known for staging an annual conference that attracts thousands of educators, as well as for providing resources and direction on ed tech.

South spoke to EdWeek Market Brief about the OET and what its loss means for the K-12 vendors that serve districts and the broader educational market, as well as strategies and resources they can turn to in the wake of its demise.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you thinking about these cuts at the department and what they mean for the K-12 market?

As a country, we delegated certain responsibilities to the U.S. Department of Education and then we’ve all gotten really used to them being there. Some of the things that are being cut are the people who are responsible for research and development activities around educational technology.

It’s the people who are responsible for seeing the next technology on the horizon and anticipating it coming to schools, and then providing some insight and perspective and guidance to those schools about it. It’s the people who are, to some degree, collecting useful data across the country and then sharing it back out.

I think the argument put forward by supporters of cuts to the Department of Education is that state and local governments — or even private sector ones — can make up for its role.

It’s not that some other entity couldn’t do those things. It’s that in the case of OET, for 30 years, we had an entity that did it.

It’s not as if you can instantly go, “Oh, well, then let’s have these other people do it.” Then the question is, “Who’s going to fund them to do that?”

At least temporarily, we’ve lost a lot of capacity around evidence-based approaches for teaching and learning and ed-tech. That would be an immediate impact.

In a recent LinkedIn post, you laid out a list of the OET’s accomplishments over its history. What themes do you see as most significant?

There are a few themes here. One is that innovation is happening all over the country, but it tends to happen in pockets. Sometimes the district literally down the street doesn’t know about one of the most innovative things happening next to them. We would find something we were going to highlight nationally, and their next-door district had no idea it was happening.

Through instruments like the National Education Technology Plan, we were able to gather these innovations and thematize them so that you could wrap your mind around the different categories and ways of doing it, and then share those back out to the country and with lots of examples, that made it feel like this is really possible.

We underestimate how important shared language — and an example of somebody who’s actually done it — is to innovation. Those two things can really supercharge innovation because with the shared language, we get on the same page about what we’re doing, and with the real example, we eliminate the barrier of, “It can’t be done here.”

What would the impact of the loss of the federal ed-tech office on states?

One huge benefit that the office provided and did a really good job of is just having convening power.

Every state is running as fast as they can to make education work in their state. They don’t have a lot of time to stop and look around and see what other states are doing. They may not be thinking, if literacy is on fire in their state, about what they can do around science education. But there’s another state where science education is on fire, and they are thinking about what to do about it.

Through the convening power of the office, you’re able to bring those folks together, find out what everyone is doing, and then come up with a vision that everyone can benefit from.

Another [benefit] of the office is in crisis response. When [the COVID-19 pandemic] came, there was a central place for new technology. When social media hit schools hard, they needed help and guidance. For AI, schools need help and guidance. OET provided a central place where we could learn, reflect, gather, and respond.

How did the OET work with companies in the space to help them understand the K-12 market and its needs?

It inspired tech providers to focus on some of the most pressing problems in our ecosystem. If you just take a random Silicon Valley hacker, they are probably going to make a math app. The first thing they’re thinking about is not going to be, “How do I make [special education Individualized Education Plans] more efficient?” probably, but there’s a huge market in making IEPs more efficient.

So what practical impact did the office have in making those opportunities better known for companies?

OET illuminated those markets for tech providers. We would point them to things that were not the first thing an innovator was going to think of that really needed support. We put that out in our ed-tech developers guide. It was one of the most popular resources we ever created that listed out areas other than math and science that you could apply technology to.

That drew a lot of attention from providers, and providers told me that some of them pivoted toward these problems.

What are some other ways the OET advises K-12 companies about districts’ biggest needs?

We would periodically meet with venture capitalists and would talk to them about the need for evidence-based solutions and brainstorm with them. VCs are not opposed to evidence-based solution. They like the idea of it. They just don’t feel like they can spend that money first [to establish the product’s evidence base] if the buyer isn’t demanding it.

It’s something they get to later, and we worked with them to say, ‘How can we make this a higher priority sooner in the development process in the companies that you’re funding?

What other audiences has the office tried to support?

We also worked with nonprofits to create validators that companies could earn that reflected values that the whole field wanted. We helped set up third parties and supported them in creating interoperability validators and privacy validators, and we lifted those up. There was something for the company to aspire to.

None of this is impossible [for another entity to do]. It’s just that we had honed a lot of machinery to do it efficiently and in a way that was trusted to be bipartisan and relevant.

What would be a good example of some of this policy work?

Future Ready Schools is a great example. We saw that leaders had just delegated ed tech to their CTO, and we’re like, “That’s not going to work.” What’s the framework for a leader? There wasn’t one.

So we convened the most forward-leaning districts across the country of every type and found out what framework they needed and helped develop that framework, develop the Future Ready Schools Network to amplify and train about it, and then we handed it to a nonprofit to go and do the work.

Another one is GoOpen, an effort that we did to bring more openly licensed educational materials, high-quality ones, into schools, because they can be a really important tool in the toolbox of a school.

There’s not a commercial interest in that. There is a public good interest in that. So the question then is, who would carry that forward?

Schools are grappling with the proper role of AI in classrooms. How did the ed-tech office try to help, and where do things go from here?

The OET had some of both the first and best AI guidance in the field. To some degree, over a long enough time frame, if you give the states enough time, many of them will sort of get to a good place eventually. But if you can give them a leg up at the beginning, you can cut in half the amount of time it takes to get to a good place.

I feel like the OET did that with AI. It just massively accelerated states. It helped them not just wander down dead-ends.

Now that we’re a couple of years into AI, there are a lot of other organizations that are putting out solid guidance, and there are good examples at state levels and at nonprofits that have embraced the mission. There are more good places to look, so is OET’s role in AI as essential today as it was a couple of years ago when they first put out guidance? Probably not. But did OET get us to today’s point much, much faster than we would have gotten there? Absolutely.

Up until right before they were shut down, [the OET] was still putting out very useful AI guidance. They weren’t done putting out useful AI guidance. I think we’re going to be OK, but I think it would have been better for them to still be on the job.

What advice would you have for education companies now that the OET is eliminated?

My challenge to them would be to think about how they can fill the gap.

We need those efficacy studies. We need to know whether tech products are working, so that the ones that have the capacity could step up their engagement in creating, disseminating independently validated studies of their impact.

There’s more onus on [providers] to be really clear about what makes their product good. There’s one less validator, amplifier out there. I hope they’ll be seeking out relationships with universities and research organizations to fill in that gap.