After 13 years as an educator, I can share countless stories about highly skilled, hardworking teachers and administrators. I thought about this recently while in a teacher’s classroom at my school, watching a group of students sound out words for the first time as she guided them with steady encouragement. The space was impeccably curated to engage students in their practice, and the teacher carefully selected her words as she helped students persevere. Moments like these make it undeniably clear to me how much craftsmanship and experience it takes to be a great educator contributing to strong outcomes.
But growing up in Silicon Valley, I can’t ignore the disparity in value afforded to educators versus the overhyped opportunities of the edtech world. My LinkedIn feed is rife with posts about grandiose visions of how technology will solve the problems of the education system, and funding for edtech has matched that grandiosity.
As a school administrator who regularly sees the sort of instructional magic only an excellent teacher can foster, the incongruity feels impossible to ignore. If we want to improve educational outcomes, we have to enthusiastically invest in the vehicle that actually drives learning — educators — rather than the shiny but insufficient opportunities of edtech.
Edtech Can’t Do the Heavy Lifting of Teaching
Edtech won’t be the solution to our education crisis. Don’t get me wrong: it has a role to play in personalizing instruction and making educators’ lives more manageable, but that role is limited.
For instance, at the independent K-8 school I helped launch in San Francisco, we use digital learning tools to get students extra practice on discrete skills and give rapid feedback. But even with the advent of incredible AI tools that enabled our team to do things like vibe code apps for high-frequency words or quickly analyze data from handwritten student work, the most engaging learning still happens in human-led classes and a school ecosystem designed by human educators.
Moreover, our teachers are responsible for much more than just filling kids’ heads with content. They have the onerous responsibility of designing responsive lessons that help students view themselves as capable learners. This is work that will never be replaced by technology, though it may be augmented by it. Think of the best learning experiences you had as a student. What likely comes to mind is the personality of the teacher who brought it to life, or interactions with peers as you engaged in the experience, not the screen you were looking at.
We’ve Overestimated Tech and Underinvested in Educators
The most essential work of education remains in the daily grind of human-to-human interaction. Why, then, have we funded the edtech industry as though tech tools are a cure-all for educational problems while leaving schools under-resourced? Between 2023 and 2025, for example, MagicSchoolAI raised $60 million in seed funding, and it’s common to find stories of funding rounds upwards of $10 million invested in companies that are yet to prove profitable. Meanwhile, schools themselves are undergoing debilitating cuts to funding.
This resource discrepancy was incredibly clear to me when, in 2015, burned out from teaching, I took a break and joined a young edtech company as a curriculum designer. I met smart, hardworking colleagues, many of whom were former teachers themselves. We enjoyed the perks of the company’s recently raised rounds of Silicon Valley capital. From catered daily meals to stock options and generous annual raises, the company compensated our work financially and made work life enjoyable.
One of the starkest differences was that we had specialized teams dedicated to a single, focused product. A team of designers, another of engineers, one for sales and another for customer success. As a teacher, on the other hand, I handled curriculum, data, IT issues, emotional support and more all solo in my classroom. Even now as an administrator, on any given day, I toggle between design, strategy, operations and crisis management, sometimes all in one morning. Most schools have to stretch every dollar, the opposite of the well-funded structure I saw in the tech world.
Let’s Put Our Resources Where Our Students Are
I think a lot about what would be possible for the demanding, on-the-ground work educators carry every day if schools had access to the resources the tech world enjoys. Competitive salaries, manageable workloads and valuable growth opportunities — even a fraction of those resources could make the education profession as lucrative as any other specialized career path. I want to see educators remain in the profession rather than leave it in droves because the rigor of the career isn’t matched by its compensation and work-life balance.
My issue with edtech funding isn’t that edtech lacks value. It’s that the same enthusiasm and urgency, if applied to schools, could actually deliver the kind of outcomes edtech has promised for decades but failed to deliver. At the end of the day, it isn’t a tech tool that creates the magic of a great learning experience for students. It’s the team of human educators.
