There’s a time to applaud the innovations and advancements in the ed-tech sector. But there’s also a time to get real about the failures — and a panel of tech and industry insiders seized the opportunity to do just that during a major industry conference this week.
Jeff Livingston, CEO and founder of EdSolutions; Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD; and Kristen DiCerbo, chief learning officer for Khan Academy, took the stage at ASU+GSV promising to go “beyond the hype” — and they didn’t hold back.
The conversation offered an inside look at the persistent market failures that have haunted them for years, and what they believe ed-tech companies keep getting wrong.
Calling out shortcomings bluntly and working toward addressing them is critical so that education companies “are rewarded for doing the right thing, not just rewarded for having the most Patagonia vests standing next to you at the [education conference],”said Livingston, a former McGraw Hill executive.
“We can empower the school systems and the teachers to say, ‘No, I need this, and I will pay for this [quality] — and only this.”
Here are five of the big problems the panelists say are plaguing today’s market.
1. Companies Are Rewarded Even When Products Gather Dust
For a long time, an ed-tech company founder could come up with an idea, get funding, and test it out in a school without ever going more than a mile from their office in Palo Alto, said Livingston.
Earlier in his career, publishing executives got a bonus regardless of whether their product was sitting in shrink wrap for years or not — their job was just to make the sale.
“It was horrible what was passing for education technology in those days,” he said.
Those dynamics have started to shift, and companies face more pressure to test their ideas in schools, the panelists agree. District purchasing practices like outcomes-based contracts, which tie pay to measures of a product’s success, create incentives to do this.
But the speakers argued that every player in the marketplace needs to be a part of the movement toward prioritizing high-quality products and services over popular ones.
“We have an opportunity now, with more engaged, better-informed buyers and clear standards about what quality is, to do it right,” Livingston said.
2. Talk of ‘Quality’ And ‘Evidence’ Is Often Just Talk
There’s a lot of public dialogue about quality in the education space that doesn’t align with the reality of the options available to schools, and that’s been true for years, said Culatta, who directed the office of ed tech in the Obama administration.
For example, his organization advocates for high-quality products, while at the same time allowing anyone a booth space on the show floor at the annual ISTE summit so long as they make the required payment.
That’s changing this year, Culatta said. The organization will give preference to vendors who can demonstrate efficacy, with the goal of in future years ensuring that only vendors who can meet a bar for quality will be there.
His organization will also post signs with question suggestions for educators that aim to spur better discussions with vendors, encouraging questions about the specifics of a product, the evidence behind it, or how it would apply in their district, for example.
“Nobody has ever done that in an education event before,” said Culatta. “It’s a small shift, but I hope that we will start to get a little bit better at taking more seriously this process of figuring out what’s really a good product and what isn’t.”
States and districts also talk a lot about the need for evidence-backed practices and tools, but they often aren’t digesting the most rigorous studies about what kinds of products work.
In a previous role, Livingston said he was asked to put together a book of efficacy studies on all of the products a publisher was selling. The idea was to give it to administrators and teachers, so they could review the work, which included randomized-control studies — considered the gold standard of scientific research.
He had a hunch this wasn’t actually the type of resource administrators would find helpful, so he left a chunk of pages in the middle of the book blank except for a sentence directing them to an email address.
More than a decade later, no one has ever emailed that address, he said.
“If the RCT [randomized control study] is just a check box and nobody looks at it, then that’s not good enough,” Livingston said. “That’s not even close to good enough. Teachers trust other teachers. Teachers trust only other teachers. They don’t care what the senior professor at the university thinks about this.
“We have got to be able to share those signals better and faster. We have got to say this [product] is worth trying, and you will help us get it better.”
3. Adults Think They Know What Kids Want
“I used to say that most education technology looks like what 50-year-olds think teenagers want to do,” Livingston said. “Now it looks like what 35-year-olds think teenagers want to do. That’s better, but it’s still not good.”
Starting product development with a learning science and theory around improving outcomes is important when designing and building, but too often companies fail to see how younger students actually interact with the final version, said DiCerbo.
DiCerbo’s colleagues watched students in New York and Newark schools type “idk” — short for “I don’t know” — into their AI chatbot tool Khanmigo over and over again, which isn’t exactly the ideal interaction developers where going for.
“You don’t see that until you’re in classrooms with students and teachers,” she said.
4. Sales Teams Believe Teachers Are Customers
Livingston remembers the moment in a former marketing role that he realized most of his team “didn’t know who the customer was.” The company was attempting to target messaging toward teachers as the main consumers of their product.
But that’s not how sales work in K-12, Livingston said. The company staffers needed to change their focus, and recognize that the decision-maker in buying products — typically central office administrators — is not the same as one of the key end-users: classroom educators.
“I had to be the one to say: Purina has no puppy customers, Baby Gap has no infant customers, and you have no teacher customers,” he told them.
Few teachers have a say in what curriculum shows up in their classroom, Livingston explained. Administrators are the people education companies are selling to, and they are the ones who sign purchase orders.
5. There’s Not a Mechanism for Weeding Out Products Early On
The industry is very focused on the long-term impacts of products and services, said Culatta.
It’s a good thing to be measuring impact over several years and working to improve products, but, unlike many other industries, the focus on long-term results in education means there’s not a lot of focus on filtering out product and tools at the front end of the process, he said.
Join Us for EdWeek Market Brief’s Virtual Forum
Join our virtual forum June 10 & 11, 2025, to hear directly from school district leaders and industry peers about important trends playing out in the sector—and the support school systems need from education companies.
New features in other industries have “a whole series of baseline thresholds” and requirements that must be met.
The K-12 education space needs a handful of indicators that companies can show educators — indicators that confirm whether their product or tool has been validated by a third party — before the product is ever in the hands of students, Culatta said.
His organization has launched a webpage that aims to offer this by allowing educators to plug in a product name and see the data on what third-party reviews have been done in one place.
The site is supposed to act as a kind of Amazon for ed tech, and aims to take the burden of sifting through pages of studies and reports off the backs of administrators.
“It’s not super-onerous, but you’ve got to check some boxes,” he said. “If we do it at all [now], the burden is placed on districts to do it.”
Clarification: This post has been updated to make it clear that ISTE is going to give preference when selling booth spaces at ISTELive, its annual conference, to vendors who can demonstrate efficacy.