Why EdTech & AI Will Continue To Disappoint in Conventional Classrooms

Recently reading Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb’s book Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence had me nodding in agreement when they talked about the potential impact of AI on education.

No, they didn’t blindly cheerlead its impact. Instead, they offered this:

“As a point solution, this AI could enhance learning in the existing school system to some extent, although the impact would be limited because once a student completes their grade’s age-based curriculum, they would be done for the year or need to continue any further learning with limited teacher support because teachers are often trained for a specific level (e.g., middle-school math). In the existing system, this problem would become increasingly severe in later grades as the spread between faster and slower learners in a subject area grows over time.”

The line reminded me of our observation in Disrupting Class that the vast majority of education technology had disappointed because it had been “crammed” into the existing system—in effect, implemented as a point solution.

As Clay Christensen, Curtis Johnson, and I wrote at the time:

“The billions schools have spent on computers have had little effect on how teachers teach and students learn—save possibly to increase costs and draw resources away from other school priorities. They haven’t brought schools much closer to realizing the promising path of building students’ intrinsic motivation… The reason for this disappointing result is that the way schools have employed computers has been perfectly predictable, perfectly logical—and, if transforming learning is the goal, perfectly wrong. … Schools have crammed them into classrooms to sustain and marginally improve the way they already teach and run their schools, just as most organizations do when they attempt to implement innovations, including computers.”

We caught a lot of flak from those in the edtech community at the time who said we weren’t acknowledging the big contributions they were making. It led to a deeper line of research where we looked at blended-learning models—and we observed that education technology could make a contribution, but likely only an incremental one so long as those models sustained the traditional classroom system, but didn’t disrupt it.

Indeed, in 2019, two research studies about New Classroom’s Teach to One proved the point.