Mark Schneider and Auditi Chakravarty assess the challenges associated with rising education technology costs.
US spending on K–12 education technology reached $30 billion in 2024; some estimates predict this number will double by 2033. Online learning platforms and devices are sold as tools that could pull students out of their decade-long, COVID-exacerbated learning slump. Yet student test scores continue to stagnate, fueling a growing backlash against education technology, which often comes in the form of cell phone bans and restrictions on screen time in school.
Ed tech skeptics have a point. After all, if we’re spending tens of billions of dollars on learning technology and students’ scores aren’t improving, what are we buying with all that money? Lurking behind this critique is a set of more unsettling and urgent questions: Why are so many students still struggling to read? Why does math proficiency remain out of reach for so many children? Why do schools keep adopting new programs and technologies when it is unclear whether they improve learning?
These are not pro- or anti-technology questions. They are evidence questions: What interventions help students learn, and under what conditions?
The problem is not that effective programs don’t exist. The problem is America lacks a reliable bridge between research and scale—one that moves proven tools to millions of students and keeps unproven ones out of schools. Too many products reach schools because they are well marketed, easy to buy, or offered by familiar vendors, not because they have been shown to improve learning. Meanwhile, too many evidence-backed ideas remain stuck in universities, labs, pilot programs, or philanthropy-funded demonstrations without a viable path to the students who need them.
We need a research and development (R&D) ecosystem that can identify innovations that work, help them improve, and guide their adoption by their evidence of impact. Technology and private enterprise are already part of American education. The challenge is to build an evidence system that helps schools, funders, and policymakers distinguish what works from what sells.
