Better Ed-Tech Tools Don’t Make Better Schools

Most people believe that if you give a school better tools, you get a better school. We often hope that a new app or a better curriculum will be the key to helping children learn more.

But after building tools for hundreds of schools over the last three years, I have found a mismatch that we often miss. It isn’t that schools are broken or resisting help. It is that the energy we spend on "fixing" doesn’t often match the rules they have to live by. Schools are actually very good at what they do; they are just optimized for a goal that just isn't relevant in the modern era any more for past two decades at least.

When you give a faster car to someone who only wants to drive to the grocery store, they do not suddenly start racing in the Indy 500. They just get to the grocery store faster. Schools are the same. They take every new idea and use it to do exactly what they were already doing - just a little faster and better maybe.

My team and I have spent over three years building Schoolze. We started small, with a simple app for my son’s preschool teacher to send newsletters. It worked well, and soon we were in dozens of schools.

Then we started seeing a few signals and pieces of feedback that suggested we might be onto something bigger. As if we had unlocked a secret of some kind. In our quest to understand schools, we may have discovered a few secrets about what truly makes a school successful in a real sense. Since then, we have found ourselves chasing the idea of building around what really makes a school successful. Unlocking the idea of “school success” felt so enticing because it directly ties into what student success means in today’s day and age.

As we deep-dived into school success, we quickly learned that success is not just about test scores or grades. It is much more than that. In fact, it may be better to say that success does not have much to do with test scores and grades at all.

We first built a system to measure how much parents and teachers were involved in a student’s learning. Later, realizing that the student is a core part of the equation, we added them as well and created a framework for schools that became the basis of the S.T.P. Framework. We believe this is the answer to finally understanding whether schools are actually getting better or not. The surprising fact is that academic performance is not what drives a better S.T.P. score for a school.

But when we gave these tools to schools, something unexpected happened. At first, it felt strange to us, though in hindsight it may have simply been a natural expression of how resilient schools are as systems.

The schools did not change. They absorbed what we had built and continued to operate exactly as they always had.

Think of a school like a giant sponge. If you pour blue water on a sponge, the sponge stays a sponge; it just turns blue. Our tools are the blue water. If you give a school or a district a new way to grade students based on actual skills instead of just tests, this is what will most likely happen. They will like it. They may also use it. But a few months later, they will find a way to fold them back into the familiar A, B, and C letter grades that state education machinery requires of them. The surface will look new, but the goal will remain the same.

This happens because of a hidden cause: schools have an "immune system." In a human body, the immune system attacks anything that doesn't belong. In a school, the system attacks any idea that threatens the way things are usually done.

The school system is built to produce one thing: people who are ready for college. Because colleges want test scores and grades, schools must produce test scores and grades to survive. If a principal tries to stop focusing on tests, the school loses its "success" ranking. If a teacher stops grading for a week to focus on creativity, they might get in trouble with the district.

The system rewards compliance. It rewards doing what you are told and following the rules. Even if you give a teacher a tool for "creativity," they will use it to make sure the kids are following the rules more creatively.

This is the core insight I missed for years: Technology does not change systems; incentives do.

An incentive is like the rules of a game. If the rule of a game is "whoever has the most points wins," everyone will focus on points. You can give the players better shoes or a prettier ball, but they will still only care about the points. If you want them to play differently, you have to change how they win.

Right now, schools "win" by getting high test scores. Parents "win" by getting their kids into famous colleges. Students "win" by getting a piece of paper that says they graduated. None of these "wins" require actual learning. You can get a grade without knowing the subject, and you can get a degree without being able to do a job.

We spend months writing plans for skill-based learning and new ways to track progress. We present them to leaders who say they love innovation. But the structure of the school—the bells, the schedules, the report cards—stays exactly the same. The structure is the boss. If the tool doesn't fit the structure, the tool gets thrown away or changed until it fits.

We even try to help parents and teachers feel less stressed. We know that if the adults are unhappy, the kids will be unhappy too. But you cannot be stress-free in a system that measures you every single day against everyone else. The system is designed to rank people, and ranking always creates stress.

The biggest bottleneck for any student right now is waiting for a human to tell them if they are on the right track. Learning happens best when you can try, fail, and fix something quickly. But today, that loop is slow. A student might wait days to get a paper back from a teacher. By the time they see the notes, the spark for that lesson is gone. We were trying to solve this with our new framework. We want to help teachers see where kids are stuck in real-time using better data and faster communication, so that learning can happen several times in one hour instead of once a week.

After all this work, I realize that we are trying to fix the horse cart. We were making the cart shinier and the wheels smoother. But the world doesn't need a better horse cart. It needs a car.

A car is not just a faster horse cart; it is a different way to travel. You cannot build a car by adding parts to a horse cart. You have to start over and build something that works on its own.

This realization is the beginning of a new way of thinking for me. If the system is a sponge that absorbs every new idea and turns it into the old one, then the answer isn’t just to add more tools. The answer is to start looking at the foundation.

We shouldn’t just ask how to make schools better at teaching 21st-century skills; we must ask how to protect those skills once they are introduced. What happens if we build a way to learn where the 'reward' is not a degree, but the ability to build something real that helps people? And importantly... At Scale.

Real change might not happen by just making the old way slightly better. It happens by making sure the new way can eventually stand on its own. We don't just need to redesign the school system for the 21st century; we need to begin seeding the alternatives that the future is already asking for.