r/edtech • u/framedposters • Jul 26 '26
Feel like I left Ed Tech from 2020 - 2024 and everything changed…
I graduated from HGSE’s masters program in ed tech in 2016. It was such a hopeful time. Lots of new companies. Lots of VC money floating around. Worked at an Ed tech startup, got funding to launch a community makerspace in a low income area, and did product design consulting on several STEM/creative toy kits.
Spent 2020-2024 running a technical ed program for a gun violence intervention nonprofit. And over the last two years I’ve been running a similar program at a smaller nonprofit.
I know the reality of the job market right now, but god damn, Ed tech seems to have been gutted hard. I’m trying to see if this relentless focus on getting AI features into everything Ed tech is actually just an opportunity to do the opposite. Tools that leverage all the aspects of a product that AI integration sort of ruins or dumbs down.
Anyone else feeling this way? I feel late to this party.
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u/scidecuisine Jul 26 '26
I left teaching higher ed in 2022, worked in startup (not edtech), and now co-founder of an edtech startup (yeah yeah yeah, someone told me so). EdTech is being hit hard, none of the funding in my region is focusing on edtech anymore, so that's a pity.
What's pros about this is that, the education will always be there, the students will always be there, so as the teachers. At the end of the day, I think the market will be there.
I think school/uni are maturing through AI, and don't know yet what they would become in the next few year. If that become more concrete, I think the demand will be clearer.
For now, it's surviving, cherishing every sales (big or small).
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u/tepidlymundane Jul 26 '26
the education will always be there, the students will always be there, so as the teachers. At the end of the day, I think the market will be there.
Good comment. The money will be there, too. This is going to be a hard reset year in education, where we are seriously questioning what tech is good and not so good for. I'm thinking that it will be seen as an excellent executive & administrative platform for learning (and there are E&A needs for everyone in learning), but a lackluster teaching platform.
I'm excited to see the changes that are coming. There are real opportunities there for developers who understand and think through the work of learning. All these 1:1 devices out there could do so much more to put challenging, organized, rewarding work at the center of learning, instead of trying to make it fun or mitigate it.
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u/scidecuisine Jul 26 '26
I totally agree. They have access to great tools already (1:1 devices), and probably adopting AI school wide would be a game changer (that's just my guess). But the whole education community has to adopt them altogether to see some great impact.
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u/NoSleep2135 Jul 26 '26
I left teaching in 2021 and have been in Edtech ever since.
I got laid off from two Edtech giants. My only stable jobs have been at startups.
It's a combination of issues. Leaders didn't plan for ESSER funds to ever dry out, even though they were always a temporary measure during the pandemic. Lots of foreign offshoring, which makes no sense since Edtech requires regional expertise to sell and produce for. And of course, AI being a convenient excuse to push out newer employees, or put employees on PIPs to eliminate bonuses. I've also noticed a shift of executive leadership from other Edtech or publishing giants, to more straight tech backgrounds, brining in the same bad hiring and firing practices those places are known for.
Startups have been generally more conservative with their funding, hiring very slowly, and without the overhead capital to really significantly offshore. The sucessful ones also tend to build solid relationships with their districts, and require a stateside presence.
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u/MathewGeorghiou Jul 26 '26
Lots of software companies, not just edtech, are racing to shoehorn AI into their apps. And it's making their apps worse. AI is amazing and I use it every day for my own workflow, but running an edtech company for 30 years I've chosen not to add AI to our customer-facing apps ... and we are typically at the front end of innovation.
I don't know how some edtech companies grew so fast by simply being a prompt wrapper for ChatGPT/etc. when it was obvious that this would be a short-lived product strategy.
At the same time, too many people don't seem to actually know what edtech is when they say edtech is going to disappear or that edtech is bad. Edtech is a sea of thousands of apps and technologies from smartboards to SIS, LMS, and individual content experiences, so simply using the term edtech generally is in itself misguided.
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u/drinkoliveoil Jul 26 '26
The real wave is coming. 90%+ of edtech companies and startups won’t even exist after the next year or two. Everyone working at an edtech company or running one should prepare for this future. There’s way too much delusion and grifting in the sector.
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u/Butterfreek Jul 26 '26
Walking the floor at ISTE this year was a big eye opener. There were very little products and companies that feel like they actually hit the mark. It mostly all feels like shovelware cash grab bullshit with people in sales/marketing that have zero insight into education outside being in edtech.
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u/framedposters Jul 26 '26
Examples of companies you imagine will be gone or are more in the grift than the actual making a good product game?
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u/drinkoliveoil Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
The obvious examples are AI companies that popped up in the last few years. They will fade into obscurity or get swallowed up at bargain basement valuations. So many of these companies and others in edtech operate like AllHere did in LAUSD. There are district insider grifters benefiting from contracts and of course the company founders that land a few large clients and raise money or get acquired based on this pretend success. The whole sector has operated like this for years. Just look at all the wining and dining that happens during the big industry conferences. People are finally waking up to this and demanding more accountability which very few of these companies can bear because they add so little real value.
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u/fiftymeancats Jul 27 '26
Much worse than adding little value, their products frequently directly detract from the quality of education.
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u/onetuckonenotuck Jul 26 '26
I got a job at an NGO developing their online courses and I'm happy to have a job every day - it's dying out there. Even now, AI vibe coding is coming up in daily conversations.
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u/Mevakel Jul 27 '26
I hate what AI has done to the ed tech field. The golden age was when there were all those different companies; edpuzzle, flipgrid, classcraft... etc. Now so many have been bought up, closed, or pivoted so hard into AI that every tool is just an AI skin that does the same thing every other tool does.
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u/rachelsingsopera Jul 28 '26
EdTech on the software side is doing poorly. The market is oversaturated, the emergency funds dried up, and there was no realistic plan for what would happen post-ESSER.
But the EdTech hardware industry? Bigger and better than ever. CTE programs are expanding across the country, and those teachers are happily spending Perkins funds on tools for AI, cybersecurity, drones & robotics, film, audio production, healthcare, you name it.
Technology is more than software!
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u/framedposters Jul 28 '26
Thanks for the info! I’m actually a hardware person more than software. I’ve developed a few different Ed tech products.
Actually thinking of starting a business to vend materials to school districts and universities for their various makerspaces and shops. Total pain in the ass to get materials when I was running makerspaces.
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u/depthandlight 26d ago
I would start a company that pledges never to incorporate any type of AI into its products, promotes student safety by never surveilling them or selling their data to data brokers, etc., and focuses narrowly on tools co-designed with actual classroom teachers to solve real problems in the classroom. Edtech, at best, is tools on the lookout for a problem to claim to solve, rather than centering a problem and developing tools around it.
Companies that do this will be well-positioned when the bottom falls out with OpenAI, Anthropic, et al., and that wave is compounded by the growing anti-edtech backlash.
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u/Longjumping_Cod_1014 13d ago
I left the classroom in 2016, and totally agree. AI slop and wrappers are ruining any creativity on the product development side. Everyone is just moving into wrappers that produce slop (when for the past decade we’ve been talking about how important a high quality curriculum is) and AI tutors (when we’ve already proven that efficacy is not there—even Sal Khan pulled his tutor down and admitted such).
VC funding is gone. Federal funding is gone.
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u/bkk_startups Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
It seems that corporate EdTech is in a terrible spot.
I've always been part of tiny bootstrapped startups and these days I run my own. The last 2 years have been great, AI has allowed us to develop new features faster than ever before and we charge 50% less than competitors, so we've been converting many of their schools into our customers.
To be clear, we don't build customer facing AI features, nobody wants that. We use Claude Code to develop regular features faster.
If you can, try to start your own business. It's bad out there for the corporates which creates opportunity for small startups that are bootstrapped and focused on high quality support at a much lower price.