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Does Edtech Have Any Values?

by Arun Ramanathan on
From the Field

I plugged that question into a commonly used commercial LLM, and this is what I got: “Edtech doesn’t have values—people do.”

Truer words have never been derived by a Large Language Model drawing upon all the knowledge on the internet. Regardless of sector, it’s the people in it who determine the values that drive their work.

I am a newcomer to edtech and an accidental AI-native CEO. I joined PowerMyLearning to run a math company focused on improving the atrocious state of early-grades math education. The choice we made to build a complex AI solution, MathVoice, that can analyze and improve children’s mathematical reasoning was strategic and circumstantial, not predetermined (more on that in another post).

I came to this work with values accumulated over a career that spans three distinct education sectors: traditional K–12 schools and districts (not charters), policy advocacy and organizing, and nonprofits and for-profits that sell professional development. Each sector has a culture, values, and a language of its own. I taught a class about how to understand and navigate these differences at theHarvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) called Working the System: Navigating the Education Ecosystem in the Pursuit of Educational Justice.

The last two words of that course title are the most important: educational justice. I know there are many complex interpretations of that term. But as someone who started in special education, it has always meant the same thing to me: fixing a broken system that harms our most vulnerable kids instead of educating them.

It’s easy to find people in the traditional K–12 sector who share my interpretation of those words and core values. My wife, a veteran teacher, and I may disagree on a whole range of topics, but not that. The same goes for the district superintendents and senior staff I know and respect.

Policy advocates are notoriously ornery, but even when I despised my opponents’ policy solutions, I never (well, mostly never) questioned their values. The same holds true in professional development. One reason the reading wars are so vicious is that the acolytes of specific approaches believe with a quasi-religious fervor that their pedagogical approach is the only way kids can learn to read. It’s nowhere near as vicious in math, but the same dynamic is present.

So, what about edtech?

Over the past two years, I’ve learned that, like every other sector, edtech has a culture, values, and a language all its own.

Well, what are those values? How well do they align with those of the other sectors? Do they care about educational justice for vulnerable students and families?

Now, I’ve only been in edtech and its recent AI variant for a couple of years. To answer my question about whether it has any values, it most certainly does. It values making money. It also values competition, speed, scale, and, to some extent, innovation, all of which I appreciate. But there is no indication that it values educational justice, at least not the way the other sectors do.

That’s one reason its acronym conferences—#ASU+GSV, #SXSWEDU, and #NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF)—are so disconcerting for people from other education sectors. They’re not just outnumbered; they’re irrelevant. Teachers and students are rolled out as props. District leaders are, at best, endorsers; at worst, glorified trophies. The orgiastic frenzy of networking, invite-only parties, Davos-style speakers, and fundraising pitches is utterly alien. To use a lovely English phrase I learned in my childhood, the whole thing is rather unseemly.

I left the last ASU+GSV—the one with the protesters—not thinking about the future of education but about the Cuban scenes from The Godfather Part II. NewSchools, which does try harder, is still a conference where all the important insider meetings happen behind closed doors, and everyone else chases after rich people and funders like the crowds of beggars at a tourist bazaar. I wish I had something similarly snarky to write about SXSW EDU, but I’m still not sure what it’s about. Good Lord, even during the brief woke interlude of the early 2020s, it all seemed a bit performative. Now, even that is mostly gone.

Go to the big meetings in other education sectors and you’ll see what I mean. They’re generally about the best ways to educate children. This difference in values, especially the centrality of educational justice in the other sectors, lies at the heart of edtech’s recent credibility crisis over screen time, chatbots, and AI.

Whether edtech and AI can bridge that values gap may determine their future in education.

Do you agree? I’d love your opinion. In my next post, I’ll explain why I think the answer is yes and why I believe edtech and AI are on a collision course with every major education sector unless we address that gap.

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