Michael Horn argues that billions in EdTech spending have barely changed teaching or student outcomes because technology can't fix the structural problems of traditional schools: fixed seat-time and grade-based progression. Real change requires redesigning school models entirely, not just adding computers to existing classrooms.
The billions that schools have spent on computers have had little effect on how teachers teach and students learn, save possibly to increase costs and draw resources away from other school priorities. They haven't brought schools much closer to realizing the promising path of building students intrinsic motivation or frankly outcomes and so forth. Now that's a line that Clay Christianson, Curtis Johnson and I wrote back in 2008 in Disrupting Class in and it's still frankly true. And I was reminded of it recently reading Ajay Agarwar's Josh Ganz's and Avi Goldbarb's book Power and the Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence because they talked about how as a point solution, AI could enhance learning in the existing school system to some extent, but the real impact would have to be in a very different sort of system because you can't personalize fully in the current system marked by seat time and grades and things like that that would hold students back artificially or frankly race ahead of them. And what I think is interesting is that even right now, as a lot of folks love to point fingers at EdTech not having its impact, they forget it's because we're cramming it into the existing school system rather than using it to transform by building schools from whole clothes. Now that's where micro schools and some other things I think get pretty interesting and might change the outcomes. Similar to why we've seen some pretty stunning outcomes from technology in places that Imagine Worldwide, for example, has worked where there have been nine RCTs to that effect. So it's not about the technology, it's about how the technology is used. That means different systems, all in a piece I recently wrote titled why EdTech and AI will continue to Disappoint in Conventional Classrooms.
