Sorry to revive an old topic, but there’s one more factor in the education space that I want to point out for where the money goes: Supplies, textbooks, and digital resources.
These companies are often duopolies or have resisted disruption over the course of the past few years, and work hard to build a closed ecosystem as much as possible. Textbooks didn’t get upgraded with anything fresh for years, ctrl+c, ctrl+v for too many of the editions.
I don’t have any numbers for this next bit, just anecdotal evidence: Google Classroom is eating everyone for lunch, but there were a lot of folks who were shockingly bad at implementing it pre pandemic. There’s a lot of resource bloat, underutilization, and scattered focus in the urban education field. If the district buys NewsELA for everyone, but the teachers only use it 5 times a year, is that optimal? Discovery education? Phet (amazing free resources) means that I’ll only go to those pages a few times. What makes the most sense?
Focus, consistency, retention, and discernment do wonders in the education field, but it doesn’t scale all that effectively.
Sorry to revive an old topic, but there’s one more factor in the education space that I want to point out for where the money goes: Supplies, textbooks, and digital resources.
These companies are often duopolies or have resisted disruption over the course of the past few years, and work hard to build a closed ecosystem as much as possible. Textbooks didn’t get upgraded with anything fresh for years, ctrl+c, ctrl+v for too many of the editions.
I don’t have any numbers for this next bit, just anecdotal evidence: Google Classroom is eating everyone for lunch, but there were a lot of folks who were shockingly bad at implementing it pre pandemic. There’s a lot of resource bloat, underutilization, and scattered focus in the urban education field. If the district buys NewsELA for everyone, but the teachers only use it 5 times a year, is that optimal? Discovery education? Phet (amazing free resources) means that I’ll only go to those pages a few times. What makes the most sense?
Focus, consistency, retention, and discernment do wonders in the education field, but it doesn’t scale all that effectively.