We need to start giving agency to educators instead of edtech vendors

“Key points: The people closest to the classroom should be at the front of purchasing How librarians can make the case for increased funding Sustainable change starts with educator voice For more on educators and agency, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub American schools spent roughly $30 billion on educational technology in 2024–a figure that’s projected to nearly double by 2033. Superintendents are constantly bombarded with emails , brochures, and demos from education technology companies. What’s more, teachers and students are trying to figure out how to make the most of top-down mandates on technology from school and district leaders. Schools have processes for these decisions–pilots, data reviews, stakeholder check-ins, procurement policies–all of which create something that feels rigorous. But by the time most schools are running through that process, they have already answered a prior question: Who gets to name what the school needs? That answer usually comes from someone outside the classroom, often before a teacher has been asked. Giving agency to educators does not mean abandoning technology as a possible tool in our schools. Instead, it is a call about whom we treat as an authority to define the terms by which we evaluate our decisions. Teachers are the closest source for identifying what is missing from the classroom, and when school leaders start there rather than at the vendor’s value proposition, the solution space opens up in ways that serve schools better. Sometimes that solution will be a platform. Sometimes it will be a schedule change. But we cannot know until we have asked the right people the right questions first. Current decision-making sequence There is plenty of evidence nationally of teachers and students expressing concern and disagreement with administrators’ decisions to bring in technology tools. When the California State University system signed a contract with OpenAI, the announcement caught faculty and students off guard. More broadly, a 2025 survey found that 71 percent of faculty say administrators “overwhelmingly” lead conversations about introducing AI into research, teaching, and policy, with “little meaningful input” from faculty, staff, or students. In K-12 schools, even though more than 60 percent of teachers say they believe they should be the primary decision-makers regarding classroom technology, only 38 percent report being consulted during the procurement process. Within three months of Los Angeles Unified’s high-profile launch of a $6 million AI chatbot in March 2024, the vendor collapsed and the tool was pulled, prompting the teachers’ union to demand that future AI tools be subject to transparent consultation with educators and to collective bargaining. The typical path to technology adoption follows a similar pattern nationally. Someone, often a key decision-maker, is made aware of an educational technology solution, either through an email pitch, conference demo, or marketing campaign. The school then attends a demo, checks against its budget and procurement policies, maybe starts with a pilot, and then adopts the tool. The vendor in these cases is largely the center of the conversation: Do we adopt this tool? The vendor explains why schools should, and then schools decide if that meets a need the school has. While this process still evaluates against what the school needs, it only looks where the vendor tells us to look. If the vendor sends a solution for managing custodial schedules, we check if our custodial scheduling system is sufficient. This is made even more difficult with federal and state edtech funding and grants that narrow the scope of focus based on funding priorities rather than pedagogical ones. And, because decision making is concentrated with leadership, vendors focus on selling to administrators, not teachers. The buyer and the user are structurally separated by this split, especially when teacher voices are not driving the process. This results in a needs assessment process that runs in reverse: The vendor names the gap, the school confirms it, and stakeholder consultation becomes reactive rather than constitutive. Stakeholder-driven decision-making Imagine that instead of a room full of brochures, demos, and swag, you have a group of students and teachers in the room. They are chosen as representatives of the population and not based on enthusiasm for a technology. This group has no predetermined theme or goal to work towards except to share what the biggest problems, struggles, and gaps in the school are. There is no anchoring effect regarding trying to figure out what they want from a demo, and instead they are just naming what they are actually observing. This starting point would be very different from the ones we are seeing across schools and universities right now. This teacher- and student-led needs inventory could become the first document in any edtech RFP, written before any external party is contacted. That document names the gap the school is trying to close in the school’s own language, not the vendor’s. Companies responding to the RFP would then have to contextualize their products against that documented need rather than against a generic value proposition. If the gap a school identifies is that students cannot sustain disagreement in classroom discussion, vendors have to say how their tool addresses that gap or honestly acknowledge that it does not. That changes the conversation from “here’s what we sell” to “here’s how we fit what you actually need.” The same group that writes the inventory should also sit on the evaluation panel. If teachers and students write the criteria up front and weigh in on which response best meets them, the buyer and the user stop being structurally separated. This is a slow process. However, slowness being a negative assumes that the fast pace we are moving at right now is worth defending–and we have no evidence to support that speed. In fact, that speed is the consequence of steps we are skipping rather than a sign of more efficient processes. We are also likely to get answers that are not easily solvable with a technology tool, and that too is the reality of genuine problem-solving for our schools. If the honest conclusion is that “we need smaller classes” or “we need an additional counselor,” discovering that early is cheaper than a failed platform rollout that solves the wrong problem. The current choice to use vendor-provided frameworks is a kind of cognitive outsourcing. It seems comfortable and fast, but over time it’s subtly corrupting our school culture. The fix is putting the people closest to the classroom at the front of the process, before any vendor is in the room. This is not only about a procedural need or change, but also ultimately about whom we cede our agency to and whom we treat as reliable authorities in our classrooms.

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