Did you know your school and students are a potential cash cow? There are lots of edtech entrepreneurs, and the venture capitalists who finance them, who think they can make big profits in the “education sector”. A good deal of this activity is focused on the college level but a not insubstantial amount of money is also flowing into startups trying to create “disruptive innovations” for us in K12.

I stumbled across a recent post about Why VCs Usually Get Ed Tech Wrong, addressing, of course, the business side of things, which linked to another entry on the blog of one of those venture capital firms, Rethink Education, who offer this focus statement on their website:

Our education system is one of the last places to be remade by technology.  That’s about to change.  We are investing in the people, ideas and companies that are rethinking the way we learn and teach.  Today.

Rethink Education seeks to invest in progressive growth-stage companies that are at the forefront of the education technology industry and have the capacity to make positive impacts on our communities.

Very nice. Except what if the system doesn’t want to be remade? What about the large number of educational institutions, probably the majority, that are very comfortable with their traditional processes and are most interested in technology for cost, management, and administrative savings?

Even one of the VCs they quote, someone who has “named education as one of his key targets”, understands those questions.

I wouldn’t want to back a business that’s selling to public schools or characterized by public financing, unions, or government-run institutions. Those institutions are incredibly hostile to change. [my emphasis]

So, if the people with big bucks to invest in the education business sees hostility to change in public schools, why are they putting large amounts of money in this “sector”? The answer is that they aren’t really investing in public schools.

Those edtech entrepreneurs are developing products – electronic textbooks, automated teaching systems, data collection/management systems, and more – for charters, private schools, for-profit colleges, and a variety of other education structures that will be subsidized in large part from public funds. And they’re counting on that area to grow quickly over the next decade or so.

Their customers are not the people working directly with kids. They are selling to administrators, politicians, and chain school owners who think the process of educating children is very complex (which it is) and who are looking for ways to reduce that complexity, homogenize the results and spend less doing it. Those tech companies and their investors who are looking to “disrupt education” are gearing up to sell them the “solutions” to make it happen.

And it is going to happen. Unless those of us who believe in public schools get to the disrupting first. We need to change ourselves, our institutions, before it’s done to us. We need to take a long look at every part of our traditional approach to educating kids and remake it to fit the fast changing, chaotic world in which they (really all of us) will live.

We need to start the hard work of disrupting ourselves.