Giving Compass' Take:

• The author implores edtech financers and investors to understand the challenges of student engagement and attention to classroom lessons, and explain that tech integration is not necessarily the solution.

• The author suggests that edtech creators should systematically mine the great curriculum that already exists and identify/commision the curriculum designers that are most capable of the mining process.  Are these feasible suggestions for edtech designers?

• Although edtech might miss the mark in some ways, educators are discussing a balance of education and technology in the classroom. 

To Impact Investors, Foundations, and Policy Makers,

I wish you knew deep in your bones why it’s so hard for teachers to light that fire for students.

I wish you had to plan a lesson and teach a class. At least once. In a public school. Figure out how to boil down a big subject into scaffolded, age-appropriate and differentiated chunks. Make it interesting and engaging for 50 minutes for 30 of the unwilling—kids walking in from a world of distraction and the instant gratification of a tiny screen.

If you had that firsthand experience of this enormously daunting task, I’m convinced your perspective on how to “disrupt” education would change profoundly.

In three years as an investor at Reach Capital, an edtech venture fund, I’ve watched public, private and philanthropic dollars pour into school operations, adaptive software, data analytics, teacher development, and teacher tools in worthy attempts to improve education. But most entrepreneurs and funders overlook the thing that matters most—equipping teachers with the recipes and ingredients, in the form of quality curriculum, to light that fire for students.

I wish you shared my deep conviction that supporting caring, skilled teachers with great curriculum, along with relevant professional development, is the most immediate and meaningful way to improve education, more so than revamping school structure or increasing the level of tech integration.

Bottom line, I wish you spent more time in the classroom. Because that’s the key—being there to watch how students respond reveals the profound difference between the standard, meat-and-potato curriculum that regularly fills their pails and the harder-to-find great stuff that lights the fire of the lucky few who are taught with it. Then you’d see the massive business opportunity to fill this market void.

Read the full article about edtech by Jim Lobdell at EdSurge