…Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I’ve been loosely tracking “who’s funding ed-tech” for a couple of years now. But I’ve really only maintained detailed records for the last year, and I’ve always got questions involving a longer view of ed-tech trends (something that you can glean, in part, from watching the herds of investors flock from idea to idea). I would like to be able to list all the investors who’ve been part of this most recent “boom” in ed-tech funding, and so this past week I started wading through old stories on Hack Education in order to make that list. (Yes, I probably could have done this programmatically via Crunchbase. Or I could have paid an investment analysis firm for the data. But I’d like to collect it myself from stories I’ve written myself. If nothing else, that means I can make it freely available to others.)

Reading through old articles is a little painful, as both the style and content of my writing on Hack Education has changed a lot over the course of its own meager history. I started the site in May of 2010 with a great deal of excitement about chronicling the latest in education technology – I figured I’d do what I was assigned to do more broadly as a “tech blogger” for ReadWriteWeb but for ed-tech. I'd write about product and funding news, mostly. But it’s pretty striking as I work my way through the site's archives that, less than a year and a half after I started, I had already become completely disillusioned by this particular crop of ed-tech “innovations” – the innovators and their investors.

So what changed? What happened?

I started spending time in Silicon Valley, for starters. I went to a lot of hackathons. I heard a lot of pitches.

I could see the gulf between what teachers – particularly progressive, technology-using teachers – wanted and what entrepreneurs and investors wanted. I knew a lot of teachers (I’d worked at ISTE for eighteen months immediately prior to becoming a “tech blogger”); I talked to teachers; I considered them my colleagues and my friends. The entrepreneurs and investors I met didn’t seem to know a lot of teachers. They didn’t like teachers. They considered them obstacles. I met plenty of ed-tech entrepreneurs who had been in TFA; but they considered their teaching experience a transitory step on the path to “better things.”

No surprise, many of the things they built were at best silly and at worst dangerous.

I could see the tech industry’s seething hatred for the education system, particularly for unions – they made no attempts to hide it. The more I learned about venture capital, the more I saw how incompatible it was to the public endeavor of education. The closer I looked at “the business of ed-tech,” the more I saw incumbent corporations – the testing and textbook industry – behind the venture funding and the dominant narratives. This was no “disruption” of these corporations’ economic or political power. It was a solidification of it.

I became more and more uneasy with “the business of ed-tech” the more I spent time writing about it. The more I poked at the stories that ed-tech entrepreneurs and their investors and their PR teams told, the more questions I had. The more questions I had, the less willing these folks became to talk to me.

Reading through the archives of Hack Education for this latest funding research project, it’s so clear that two events really crystallized how I’ve come to think about the ed-tech industry. And that’s the response I received from writing critiques of Khan Academy and Codecademy at the height of their popularity. I wrote the former in July 2011 and the latter in October 2011. And that’s when the hacking attempts on my websites started. That’s when I started getting hate mail. That’s when the death and rape threats started too.

“Why do you hate ed-tech?” ed-tech evangelists often ask me. “And if you hate ed-tech so much, why do you write about it?” But see, I don’t hate ed-tech. (I hate injustice. I hate exploitation.) At some point, however, certain folks in (near, adjacent to) ed-tech decided they hate me. So, yeah, I guess that changed the stakes for me personally – personally and politically and philosophically – about how I work and what I work on and why. If nothing else, it's made me more furious and more curious.

And the writing and thinking and research I do now? I love it.