Why the Education Technology Market Fails to Reward What Works | American Enterprise Institute

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America spends roughly $30 billion annually on K–12 education technology, yet student outcomes remain stubbornly poor. This is not due to a shortage of innovation; it is because the system rewards products that are well-marketed and familiar over those with evidence of improving learning. Bans on devices and growing skepticism toward ed-tech reflect legitimate frustration, but the real question is about evidence: what helps students learn, and under what conditions?

Researchers, educators, and entrepreneurs are developing tools grounded in learning science and tested in real classrooms. What is missing is a reliable mechanism to move proven tools to students at scale while keeping unproven ones out. Research and markets operate on separate tracks, each with its own incentives and timelines, leaving too many effective ideas stranded in labs and pilots while inferior products reach millions of students because they are easier to buy or backed by recognizable vendors.

A handful of examples show what the bridge between research and scale can look like when conditions align. Magpie Literacy, developed through the Reading Reimagined program at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), translated research on the decoding threshold into adaptive digital tools and formed a distribution partnership with Great Minds to reach students at scale. CueThink, supported by AERDF’s EF+Math program to embed executive function strategies into math instruction, was acquired by Imagine Learning after rigorous classroom-centered development. A2i, a K–3 reading intervention, took nearly two decades of sustained federal investment and multiple grants before Scholastic acquired it and integrated it into a national product suite. These success stories are exceptions, each dependent on rare alignments of patient funding, educator collaboration, and commercial partnership.

The fundamental problem is the funding gap in the “messy middle” —…

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