School leaders urged to ask more questions of EdTech providers |
Schools are awash in technology in a way never before seen, in large part due to the pandemic. Now, two years after schools rushed to employ digital tools to facilitate distance learning, school district leaders are being urged to ask more questions of education technology providers about the evidence supporting claims of their products' efficiency. There are few, if any, barriers to entry to the EdTech industry, and no governing body is holding companies accountable for their claims the way the Food and Drug Administration does with drug companies before they bring a product to market. Bart Epstein, chief executive of the Edtech Evidence Exchange, comments: “More and more companies are ready for the question about efficacy and research, and that’s a step in the right direction, but there’s a world of difference between someone having an independent, third-party, government-funded gold standard efficacy study showing how a product performs in a similar environment, and on the other end of the spectrum something written by a marketing department that uses vaguely academic, flavored language that is meaningless.” As a result, folks in the industry—well-intentioned though they may be—have been incentivized not to invest millions on a high-quality research study, but to spend that money beefing up their sales and marketing teams, to send people to conferences and trade shows, to source new potential customers.