The edtech industry has a problem, and it's not what most people think. It's not that technology is bad for learning. It's not that we're moving too fast. The real problem is simpler and more insidious: we're building incentive structures that reward companies for abandoning the humans who make educational technology actually function in classrooms.
Walk through any edtech conference and you'll hear the same refrain. Growth. Adoption numbers. Platform reach. How many schools? How many districts? How many students can we touch? These are the metrics that attract venture capital, that move stock prices, that get founders on panels. And there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting your product to help more people.
But here's where the incentives break down. When a company's success is measured primarily by adoption speed and user volume, the people who shoulder the actual implementation burden get pushed to the margins. I'm talking about teachers.
Teachers are the infrastructure that edtech runs on. They're the ones debugging problems in real time. They're the ones learning new interfaces on their own time. They're the ones troubleshooting when students can't access materials, when the platform crashes during a critical lesson, when the "intuitive" design turns out to be anything but intuitive for a classroom of diverse learners. Yet the business model of most edtech companies treats teacher support as a cost center to minimize, not an investment to celebrate.
Consider what happens in a typical rollout. A district purchases a shiny new platform. There's maybe a half-day training session. Then what? Teachers are expected to integrate it into their practice while managing 150 other professional demands. When adoption stalls or outcomes disappoint, guess whose competence gets questioned first. Not the software design. Not the unrealistic implementation timeline. The teacher.
The perverse incentive here is obvious. Companies win by moving fast and minimizing support costs. They lose when they invest heavily in professional development, ongoing coaching, or building tools that actually fit into existing classroom workflows. So what do they do? They chase the next district, the next adoption wave, the next growth metric. The previous implementation gets abandoned to struggle on its own.
This creates a secondary market of "edtech consultants" and professional development specialists who charge districts extra to make these platforms actually work. These are smart people doing valuable work. But notice who's capturing the value. It's not the teachers doing the heavy lifting. It's the adjacent service providers and, ultimately, the platforms themselves.
What would it look like if edtech companies were incentivized differently? What if success metrics included teacher satisfaction, sustained classroom integration rates, or measurable improvements in teaching practice? What if business models rewarded companies for building tools that teachers actually wanted to use, not just tools they could be convinced to adopt?
The broader context matters here. There's genuine conversation happening in education technology about online learning, STEM innovation, AI safety, and data-driven decisions. These are important topics. But they obscure a more fundamental question about who wins and who loses in the current system.
Right now, the winners are obvious. Companies scaling fast. Investors backing growth. Executives hitting their targets. The people who should be central to this story--the teachers translating technology into actual learning--are treated as implementation details.
This isn't a call to reject edtech. It's a call to notice whose incentives we're actually aligning with, and to ask whether that alignment serves students and teachers, or just shareholders. Until we reward companies for supporting teachers rather than minimizing costs around them, we're building a system that looks impressive at scale but struggles where it actually matters: in classrooms.