The LAUSD moment isn’t about the ban itself. It’s what the ban reveals about how we lost the question. Most people would agree: handing a kindergartener a tablet for forty-five minutes to answer math questions probably isn’t the best use of that kid’s time in that community. The ban doesn’t land because it’s radical. It lands because it names something everyone feels.

Even in the early device pilots, the question was always there: What are we trying to do here? What are students actually doing with this? Not replacing the teacher. Not multiple choice worksheets masquerading as learning. Just: what’s the intention?
Somewhere in the hype cycles around one-to-one, adaptive learning, and personalized content, that question got quiet. The tool stopped being a deliberate choice and became the default answer.

And sure, LA’s track record on these decisions isn’t perfect. But that doesn’t take away from what many of us have felt. You see it everywhere now. Kids in restaurants on tablets. In the backs of cars always on tablets. In strollers. Then you walk into a classroom and see a room full of five and six year olds staring at screens. You ask yourself: are we missing something bigger here? Something human?

Whether the process was flawed or not, we can’t ignore what this moment is telling us. The LAUSD resolution is a forcing function. What matters isn’t whether you agree with the ban. It’s what question we ask next.

The Real Problem Isn’t Screens. It’s Who Gets to Decide.

Districts didn’t wake up one morning and decide bans were fun. They woke up to a decade of decisions they never actually made. Schools bought infrastructure they couldn’t see into, couldn’t govern, couldn’t adjust. The vendor made all the meaningful choices. What data gets collected. How learning gets measured. What the student experience looks like. The district just paid the bill and hoped it worked.

The ban is the district firing the vendor retroactively, one policy at a time. It’s blunt force because subtlety stopped working. You can’t negotiate your way out of a system you don’t own.

This is where the conversation usually splits. One side says the bans are anti-tech hysteria. The other says we need better vendor accountability, better contracts, smarter purchasing. Both miss the point. You can’t contract your way into control you never had. A better deal with PowerSchool doesn’t give you the ability to say: we want to run this differently tomorrow.

The forcing function works because it finally names what’s been true for years. Districts need to own the decision layer. Not the hardware. Not even the software. The decisions. What tools do what, when, why, and for whom. That’s infrastructure. That’s governance. That’s what was missing.

What’s Actually Needed: District-Owned Learning Infrastructure

Think of it in three parts: the data layer, the decision layer, and the tools.
The data layer is non-negotiable. It’s the foundation of the entire operation. All the information about what’s going on. Enrollment. Special education records.

Assessment data. Financial information. Student learning. That data layer is the goal of the operation. It stays with the district. It’s theirs to govern, to understand, to act on. Right now, that data is scattered across seventeen different vendors, each one a silo. The district can’t see the whole picture.

The decision layer is where the real power lives. It’s a school leader on a Sunday morning saying: this week, we’re focusing on collaboration and critical thinking. What experiences do our students need? How do we build that? Not what does the software allow.

The tools plug into that infrastructure. A classroom management system here. An assessment tool there. An AI-powered writing coach. They come and go because they’re serving the district’s decisions, not the other way around.

When the whole class gets in trouble, not everybody was guilty. But something wasn’t right. Now you have two camps. One says: you’re taking away our tools. The other says: we are excited to build better.

Jim Collins has a concept he calls encodings. The idea is that each of us is wired for certain kinds of work. Not just good at it. Encoded for it. There’s a difference, and it’s the difference between a career that simply works and a life that lights up.

The dangerous place to be, Collins says, is doing work you’re good enough at. You have the talent. You have the skills. You can execute. But it doesn’t light your fire. You’re competent. You’re just not encoded for it.

Competence without encoding is a trap. You can spend years, decades, being successful at something that was never actually yours to do.

So how do you find what you’re encoded for? You try things. You sample. You explore widely enough that the shape of your actual fit starts to reveal itself.

David Epstein calls this range: the ability to move across domains, gather diverse experiences, and let them compound into insight. Federer didn’t become the greatest tennis player by specializing at age six. He played basketball, badminton, soccer. He skied. He tried many things. Through that range, he discovered not just that he was good at tennis, but that tennis was encoded for him.

We’re pushing kids the other way

Club sports in second grade. Advanced tracks in third. By middle school, the pressure to choose is intense. Pick your sport. Pick your instrument. Pick your lane. Commit.

As a parent, you feel it. The anxiety that if your kid doesn’t specialize now, they’ll fall behind. The club programs are already recruiting. The competitive cohort is already forming. It feels like urgency.

But we’re getting the sequence wrong, at home and at school. You can’t find your encoding without range. And range requires time to explore. To try things that don’t work out. To fail safely. To discover what actually engages you versus what you’re just good enough at.

School should be where this happens

Instead, school is making it worse.

Most school days are worksheets and digital learning tools. Big tech has standardized what learning looks like. Kids spend six hours moving through digital questions and paper exercises designed to hit coverage benchmarks. There’s little space for exploration. No room for a teacher to craft something unexpected. No flexibility to let a unit breathe and become something different.

It’s all scope and sequence. All measurement. All standardization.

Some teachers want to do better. They want to bring project-based learning into their classrooms. They want to create space for students to explore. And they’re doing it. But at enormous personal cost. A weekend spent planning. Extra hours designing something that fits neither the curriculum map nor the digital tool vendors’ requirements. A Herculean effort just to carve out a few days where kids can actually try something different.

These teachers are heroes. But the system shouldn’t require heroics.

The lanes are well-established now: big tech, standardized pathways, coverage-first design. Parents are starting to ask why. Why can’t my kid explore? Why is school just worksheets? Why does it feel like we’re training them to follow a script instead of discover what they’re actually wired for?

When you optimize for coverage, you eliminate range. You eliminate the very conditions that help kids discover what they’re actually encoded for.

What it looked like when we still had space

In 2011, my medieval history classroom was selected to pilot Chromebooks. One of the first. Because the tools were brand new, and because medieval history carried less pressure around coverage, we had something rare: permission to explore.

There was no rigid playbook yet for teaching and learning with technology. The industrial ed-tech complex hadn’t ramped up. So we experimented. Kids created videos. They posted work to blogs. They had rich digital discussions. They built projects around historical topics. They figured out what these tools actually were, and what it meant to create on the internet.

Fifteen years later, I still run into former students who remember those lessons. We laugh about the mistakes. We remember the news broadcast we made and posted to YouTube. We remember the fun. We remember what it felt like to explore.

Right now, the pendulum is swinging to remove technology from classrooms and reduce screen time. Eventually, it will swing back. When it does, I hope we’re more thoughtful about how we design experiences that let students explore their range, develop a breadth of experiences, and uncover their encodings.

That’s the real question. And it starts with remembering what we had before the system calcified. When exploration was still possible. When teachers still had space to be creative. When range was still part of school.

That’s what we need to build toward again.

A couple sits down for dinner in New York City.

It is their last night. Suitcases in hand. They are flying out right after the meal.

They are talking about their trip — the places they went, the things they loved. Then one of them says it.

“We did everything. But we never had a New York hot dog.”

Not a complaint. Just a small regret. The kind of thing you only notice when it is too late to fix.

The story comes from Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara’s reflection on his years running Eleven Madison Park.

A server overhears the comment. No system flags it. No checklist requires it. No manager assigns it. But someone leaves the restaurant, finds a street cart, buys a hot dog, and brings it back.

When it arrives, it is not just handed over. It is plated. Elevated. Given a touch of the restaurant’s style. Still unmistakably a New York hot dog. But now part of the experience.

The couple laughs. That is the moment they remember.

The best hospitality organizations are built around moments like that. They call it front of house. Everything the guest sees, feels, and remembers.

Behind the scenes sits an entire operation making it possible — logistics, systems, coordination. But the goal is not the system. The goal is the moment.

K–12 education has a front of house problem.

Walk into most schools and you will find extraordinarily talented people who understand students deeply. They know when a kid is disengaged. They know when a lesson could turn into something special. They know how to create moments that stick.

But they rarely have the space to act on it.

The system they operate in is built almost entirely around back of house. Compliance. Reporting. Coverage. Coordination across tools that were never designed to work together.

The result is predictable. We measure what was completed. We track what was submitted. We confirm what was covered. But we rarely design for what will be remembered.

This is not a failure of effort. It is what happens when a system absorbs the capacity of the people inside it.

Here is the quiet reality inside most school systems.

Core workflows run on spreadsheets, shared drives, PDFs, and email threads. Student data lives across dozens of disconnected platforms. Every new tool adds another layer. Every new requirement adds another step. And the people closest to students spend their time holding it all together.

Take something as fundamental as student accommodations.

On paper, it is straightforward: identify the supports, share them with teachers, make sure they are implemented. In practice, the same information gets entered into multiple systems. Hours disappear into distributing plans manually. Transfer students arrive with incomplete context. Teachers often learn what a student needs after the fact.

This is not a failure of diligence. It is a system that was never designed for the experience it is supposed to support.

In hospitality, the system exists to remove friction for the staff. In schools, the system often creates it.

That difference matters. Because moments require space.

The server who brought the hot dog had time to notice. Time to act. And the confidence that the operation around them would support the decision.

Most educators do not have that. Not because they lack instinct. Because they lack capacity.

So the moments slip. The conversation that could have gone deeper gets cut short. The project that could have come to life gets simplified. The student who needed something just a little different gets the standard version.

Over time, those missed moments add up. Like that couple on their last night, realizing what almost happened.

Something important has changed.

The cost and speed of building software have collapsed. What used to take months now takes days. Which means schools are no longer confined to generic systems designed for the broadest possible market.

We can build tools that actually fit how schools operate. We can fix the back of house.

But only if we start in the right place.

Hospitality does not start with the kitchen. It starts with the guest. Education should do the same.

Start with the experience. What should a student feel in a classroom? When do they feel seen? When do they feel challenged? When do they feel proud of something they created?

Then work backward. What systems need to exist to support that? What friction needs to be removed? What information needs to be clear and accessible in real time?

This is where the next phase of school technology will take shape. Not as one platform. Not as one vendor. But as a modular layer of small, flexible tools designed around real moments.

Today, most districts operate inside a patchwork. Dozens of vendors, each solving a narrow problem, each holding a piece of the workflow. Very little coordination between them. Very little adaptability once they are in place.

What is emerging instead is different. A model where districts own the foundation. Where workflows are shaped around their context. Where tools are smaller, faster to build, and easier to change.

You can already see it taking shape in places like New Orleans, where new approaches are being tested. Start with one problem. Solve it well. Build the infrastructure underneath it. Then layer in the next.

Over time, something shifts. The system becomes more flexible. More responsive. More aligned to the people using it.

And that opens up a new layer of interaction. Lightweight tools. Ephemeral experiences. Things that can exist for a week, a unit, a single lesson — then evolve or disappear.

That is the opposite of what we have today. Large systems. Long contracts. Slow change.

If we get this right, the shift will not feel like more technology. It will feel like less friction.

More space for people to notice. More space for people to respond. More space for people to create moments that matter.

Because the goal is not better systems. The goal is better moments.

More students who leave a classroom remembering something specific. A conversation. A project. A feeling.

The people capable of creating those moments are already in schools.

They just need the space to do it.

A student is issued a personal identification card. They use it to log in to a machine that knows who they are and where they stand in the curriculum. The machine delivers personalized questions calibrated to their current level. Answer correctly, and you advance. Answer incorrectly, and the system branches, routing you to a remedial question designed to address the specific gap before moving you forward.

Every student progresses at their own pace. The machine adapts. The teacher is freed from rote delivery to serve as a mentor and guide.

This is not a pitch from the early 2010s. It is a vision published in 1957 by Dr. Simon Ramo, a Cold War weapons engineer best known as the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile, in a paper called “A New Technique of Education.” The student’s ID card was called a “charga-plate.” The machine was a console with push buttons. And for a brief, strange window in American history, this was the future of school.

The push-button school was a product of Sputnik and the panic it created. When the Soviet Union put a satellite in orbit on October 4, 1957, the United States concluded that its classrooms were failing. Congress responded with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which funneled federal dollars specifically into technological innovation in schools. A market opened overnight. Psychologists and engineers promised to turn education from an art into a science.

The theoretical backbone came from B.F. Skinner, who broke subjects into tiny incremental frames, steps so small that students were almost certain to answer correctly, with each correct response acting as a reinforcer. His rival Norman Crowder had a different philosophy. Errors were not to be avoided but diagnosed. His machine, the AutoTutor, branched incorrect answers into remedial explanations before routing the student back. Two competing approaches, but the same underlying premise: a machine could deliver personalized instruction more efficiently than a teacher standing in front of thirty students.

By the early 1960s, the teaching machine craze had taken hold. Companies rushed to market. Field trials launched across the country. The most prominent was the Roanoke Experiment in Virginia, where eighth graders were taught ninth-grade algebra through programmed instruction. The early results were striking. Students completed a full year of algebra in one semester, with mastery levels exceeding traditional classrooms. Carnegie and Encyclopedia Britannica Films poured in grant money. The study expanded to 900 students.

As the program scaled, the hardware became prohibitively expensive. And researchers kept surfacing an uncomfortable finding: programmed textbooks, where students simply covered the answer with a piece of paper, worked nearly as well as the expensive machines.

The superintendent of Roanoke, Edward Rushton, drew the clearest conclusion of anyone involved. The primary value of the experiment, he noted, was not the technology. It was that the program forced teachers to reconsider how they taught mathematics, to become more invested, more intentional, more reflective about their instruction. The technology was the catalyst. The teacher was the variable that mattered.

That finding was quietly noted and mostly forgotten. The ed-tech gold rush moved on to mainframes, then to PLATO at the University of Illinois, then to Khan Academy, then to the adaptive learning platforms of the 2010s. Historians call this pattern “innovation amnesia.” Each generation of ed-tech entrepreneurs erases the past, declares war on the industrial model of schooling, and pitches their tool as something entirely new. Because nobody remembers the charga-plate or Roanoke or Rushton’s conclusion, the cycle repeats.

I was fortunate enough to be part of some of the early Khan Academy pilots in the Bay Area, efforts to understand whether personalized learning tools could be scaled effectively in K–12 classrooms. The platform was genuinely powerful. The data it generated was real. The adaptive logic was sound.

And what we found tracked almost exactly with what Rushton had observed sixty years earlier.

The most powerful difference in student outcomes could be traced back to the teacher. Not to the platform version. Not to the device. Not to the bandwidth. To the teacher. How she chose to use the tool. Whether he had internalized what the data was showing about each student. Whether the platform was something she wielded deliberately or something that had been handed to her as a solution.

In classrooms where teachers were deeply invested, where they treated the platform as a component of their practice rather than a substitute for it, the results were strong. Where they were not, the results were mediocre. The pattern was consistent and unambiguous.

This brings me to what I think is the most important structural insight for anyone thinking about AI in education today.

The most dangerous assumption in K–12 ed-tech is not skepticism about technology. It is the quiet belief that a sufficiently powerful tool can make the quality of the teacher a secondary variable.

Nobody states this directly. The language is always about “empowering teachers” and “freeing up time for meaningful interaction.” But embedded in how many of us think about technology at scale is the notion that a great platform in the hands of an average teacher will produce great outcomes.

The evidence, from Roanoke in 1960 to the Bay Area in 2012, says otherwise.

The closest analogy is medicine. The most advanced surgical instruments and diagnostic imaging systems are only as effective as the surgeons and hospitals deploying them. No one looks at a da Vinci surgical system and concludes that the quality of the surgeon is now secondary. The tool amplifies the skill. It does not replace it.

We have arrived at a moment where the technology is a commodity. AI-powered adaptive tools are proliferating faster than any school system can evaluate them. The question is no longer whether students will have access to machine-delivered personalized instruction. They will. The question is what we build around that reality.

The teacher is not a delivery mechanism made redundant by better software. The teacher is the relationship, the standard, the judgment, the care. The teacher is the variable that determines whether a tool amplifies learning or merely replaces one passive experience with another.

Edward Rushton understood this in 1960. He just didn’t get the press that the machines did. We are living in the same story, at higher speed and greater scale. The question is whether we will remember the lesson this time.

The future of education has a very long past. And the message across seven decades is consistent: it was the human, all along.

To learn more about this history, Audrey Watters' "The Engineered Student: On B. F. Skinner's Teaching Machine," published in The MIT Press Reader, is an excellent place to start: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-engineered-student-on-b-f-skinners-teaching-machine/

We may have it backwards.

For the past decade, standards have quietly become the primary driver of innovation in schools. The tools districts buy. The schedules they design. The way students spend their time. Everything points toward coverage, pacing, and measurable progress toward benchmarks.

And in some ways, it has worked. Students have never spent more time on task. They have never had more access to standards-aligned practice. They can answer math questions on adaptive platforms and complete digital assignments that track every click.

But something important is getting lost in the process.

School was never supposed to be about efficient exposure to content. As a parent of elementary school aged children, my real hope is not that they get more practice questions right. My hope is that they learn how to work with other people. How to wrestle with a hard problem. How to communicate an idea clearly. How to deal with frustration and keep going. How to build something that did not exist before.

Those are the skills that actually determine whether someone thrives in the world they inherit.

Yet what many students experience instead is a steady diet of individual work, digital worksheets, and reward loops that trade thinking for engagement. Answer ten questions. Earn game time. Move on.

No one designed this because they thought it was the best version of learning. It is simply the version that is easiest to systematize. It is easier to assign a worksheet than to design an inquiry project. Easier to measure a quiz than to measure collaboration. Easier to track standards than to track growth in judgment or resilience.

Human skills are messy. They do not show up cleanly in weekly data dashboards. But that does not make them less important. It makes them more important.

Which raises a bigger question. What if schools treated human skill development as the primary goal and standards mastery as the natural result of meaningful work, instead of the starting point?

Consider what that might look like. A fourth grade class is studying measurement. The traditional version is familiar. Twenty problems on area and perimeter. Show your work. Turn it in.

Now imagine the teacher introduces a problem instead of an assignment.

Our playground has unused space. If we could redesign part of it, what should we add? How much space would it take? How would we convince the principal?

Now math becomes necessary. Students measure parts of the playground. They sketch designs. They calculate area because they need to know if their idea fits. They revise when it does not. They write proposals. They present their thinking to real people who will actually respond.

Without forcing it, they practice measurement, area and perimeter, writing arguments, and speaking and listening. The standards are still there. They just appear as tools instead of objectives. More importantly, students practice collaboration, negotiation, communication, and ownership.

Math did not disappear. It became meaningful.

The same shift works at any grade level. A middle school class investigating cafeteria food waste ends up practicing data analysis, research, argument writing, and presentations. But the bigger gains are human: observation, empathy, systems thinking, civic responsibility. Students remember this work because it is real.

The pattern is simple. The traditional model moves from standard to assignment to practice to test. A human-first model moves from problem to collaboration to thinking to standards mastery. The standard still gets covered. It just gets covered in the context of work that actually matters.

This kind of learning is already happening in pockets everywhere. There are teachers in every district designing incredible experiences like this. Building projects. Creating authentic tasks. Finding ways to make learning feel real.

But they are doing it at a real cost. Late nights designing materials. Weekends building slides. Personal time spent creating resources because the easiest things to find are still worksheets and scripted curriculum.

The system is not yet designed to make this kind of teaching easy. The dominant tools in education are still built to deliver content efficiently, not to support complex human learning. They are optimized for assignment distribution, grading efficiency, and standard tracking. Not for collaboration design, inquiry workflows, or real-world problem solving.

If we are serious about preparing students for the future, it cannot depend on heroic individual effort. It has to become easier to do this well than to avoid it.

That is a design problem. A tools problem. A leadership problem. How do we build platforms that make meaningful learning easier to design? How do we create tools that support collaboration instead of just tracking completion? How do we measure what actually matters?

This is where innovators in education have real work to do. Not just building faster ways to assign work. Building better ways to design meaningful work. Not just better assessment engines. Better human development infrastructure.

For years, education has looked to industry to define the future of work. But something different is happening right now.

AI is rapidly changing the nature of knowledge work. Routine tasks are becoming automated. Information is abundant. Content is cheap. Answers are everywhere.

The advantage is shifting toward something else entirely. Judgment. Creativity. Collaboration. Adaptability. Communication. Empathy. The most human skills are becoming the most durable ones.

Which creates a rare opportunity. Instead of waiting to be told what the future needs, schools can help define it. Schools can become the places where we intentionally develop the kinds of humans we hope the future is built by.

This may be one of the most important moments in decades to rethink what school is optimizing for. Not because standards do not matter. They do. But because standards alone are not enough.

If we lead with human development, standards will follow. If we lead with standards alone, human development becomes accidental. We should not leave that to chance.

As a parent, I do not lie awake wondering whether my kids will get enough practice problems. I wonder whether they will know how to work with people. Whether they will know how to recover when something is hard. Whether they will know how to think for themselves. Whether they will know how to be kind.

School is one of the few places where we can intentionally build those capacities. That feels like work worth prioritizing

.

There is no shortage of debate about screen time and children. Whether it is too much. Whether it should be less. Whether the research is conclusive or contradictory. Reasonable people disagree on the quantity question, and they probably will for years.

But there is a quieter question that matters more: What are the screens actually for?

Because right now, in most classrooms, the answer is delivery. Content delivered to students. Assignments delivered through platforms. Assessments delivered on devices. The screen is a window that only opens in one direction: information flows toward the student, and compliance flows back.

That is not inevitable. And it is not the only version of this story.

When I was teaching seventh-grade history at a KIPP school, the tools were rudimentary by any current standard. But the instinct was already there.

Students would publish their work to blog posts and turn in a link for review rather than a piece of paper. They used YouTube to create and share video reflections on different periods of history: not watching videos, but making them. We used Google Moderator, a tool that no longer exists, to facilitate real-time voting and discussion on historical questions, simulating the kinds of debates that might have taken place centuries ago. Students would surface different opinions on interesting topics as if the past were happening now and we just happened to have the tools to talk about it.

One of the projects I am most proud of was KIPP Student News. This weekly news show, which my students and I produced together, covered current world events and shared a video with the rest of the school every week. They were not consuming the news. They were making it. They were becoming creators of knowledge rather than recipients of it.

None of this was sophisticated. The tools were free, general-purpose, and often clunky. But the principle was clear even then: when students create rather than consume, something fundamentally different happens to how they learn.

Now imagine what that same classroom looks like in 2030.

Not as science fiction. As a reasonable projection of where modular, accessible tools are heading.

A seventh grader studying medieval history does not read a chapter about the West African gold and salt trade. She builds a simulation of it instead. By mapping trade routes and adjusting variables, she watches how scarcity and geography shape economies. Another student reconstructs elements of feudal Japan, not as a diorama but as a digital environment where the social structures of the warrior class become something you can explore from the inside.

The lesson does not feel like content delivery. It feels like running a living history simulation, where students engage as active agents rather than passive observers. The teacher is not assigning material. She is designing worlds.

Technology, in this version of the future, evolves away from being a digital pacifier. It moves past the multiple-choice question, the auto-graded worksheet, and the platform that asks nothing of the student except compliance. It becomes a tool for creative input. For building. For sharing custom experiences that make abstract history tangible.

Some version of this is already happening. But it is happening unevenly, and for predictable reasons.

High-end independent schools have the time, the budget, and the institutional support for design thinking studios and project-based learning hubs. They can afford to experiment because experimentation is built into their operating model.

A typical charter or district-run school does not have those resources. It does not have the capacity for that kind of exploration. So the default becomes what is easiest to assign and manage at scale, namely large content solutions where a student sits quietly and clicks through material. Not because educators lack vision. Because the existing tools and workflows make passive delivery the path of least resistance.

For educators, the neural pathways are deeply set. Assign a digital tool. Assign a worksheet. The existing flows are optimized for it. Changing those habits will not come from inspiration alone. It will come from a fundamental reimagining of the tools available and the ease of using them in the classroom environment.

This is where the economics become important.

One of the driving forces behind this shift is the collapse of costs around development. Teachers who once spent their creative energy building elaborate PDFs and presentations to sell on Teachers Pay Teachers will find themselves reinvigorated. This is not because they have more time, but because the tools to build rich, interactive experiences are becoming radically more accessible.

What once required a game developer’s budget and skill set is becoming available to an educator with a clear idea and a weekend. The same modular, affordable development tools that are reshaping district operations are beginning to reshape what a single teacher can create for her students.

This is not about replacing teachers with technology. It is about removing the barriers that currently prevent most teachers from doing what the best-resourced schools already do — designing learning experiences where students actively build, explore, and create rather than passively receive.

The question for 2030 is not whether screens will be part of the classroom. They will. The question is whether those screens remain delivery mechanisms or become creative instruments.

Whether a student studying the medieval period reads a textbook on a device or reconstructs a medieval economy in a modular environment she can manipulate. Whether the technology serves the curriculum or the student’s imagination.

The answer will depend less on the technology itself and more on who has access to the tools that make creation possible. If those tools remain expensive and complex, the gap between well-resourced and under-resourced classrooms will widen. If they become simple and accessible, every educator gains the capacity to design the kind of learning that right now only a few schools can afford.

The debate about screen time will continue. But the more productive conversation is about screen quality, which focuses on building a future where the default is not consumption but creation. Where a seventh grader does not just learn about history but helps reconstruct it. Where the educator’s role is not assigning content but crafting worlds where every student actively learns.

That is a future worth building toward. And the tools to build it are closer than most people realize.

Open almost any district operational process and you can see how school technology actually works.

A compliance coordinator pulls up a spreadsheet to check which student accommodations have been reviewed this quarter. She cross-references it with notes from a meeting stored in a shared drive. She opens the student information system to verify dates, then switches to email to follow up with a case manager who hasn’t submitted an update. Four systems. None of them connected. Every link in the chain held together by her memory and her discipline.

Nothing is technically broken. But nothing is truly connected either.

So the process depends on people. Remembering what comes next. Following up. Reconciling information between systems. Moving data by hand. Filling the gaps that no product was built to close.

This is not dysfunction. It is the natural outcome of how education technology evolved. Software solved major categories, student information, learning management, assessment, finance, communication. The actual work of schools happens in the seams between those categories.

That is where the next phase of education technology begins.

For most of the past twenty years, districts adopted technology through a simple and rational model. Buy large platforms to manage major functions. Standardize operations. Make complex systems manageable.

These platforms created enormous value. They brought order to chaos and made it possible to run large organizations with some degree of consistency.

They also required compromise.

To work across thousands of districts, software had to generalize. Workflows had to conform to the product rather than the other way around. Customization had limits. This was a fair exchange at the time. Building custom software was unrealistic. Buying software was practical.

So districts bought. And over time, those platforms became the backbone of school operations.

Most districts are not questioning whether those core systems work. What they are beginning to question is everything around them.

The processes that never quite fit inside a single platform. The operational work that lives between systems. The workflows that still require manual coordination because no product was built specifically for how their schools actually operate.

Compliance processes. Student support coordination. Reporting workflows. Program management. The thousands of operational tasks that keep districts running but never became product categories.

This is the fine gold of district operations, the long tail of specialized workflows that big SaaS platforms were never designed to serve. It is where districts still rely on institutional knowledge instead of infrastructure. Where time is quietly lost every day. Where a veteran coordinator retiring means a process has to be rebuilt from memory.

One of the least visible truths in education technology is that districts have always been building their own solutions. Not through formal development. Through necessity.

When no system existed for a workflow, they built the process anyway. Spreadsheets. Forms. Email coordination. Shared documents. Knowledge passed from person to person.

Not because this was ideal. Because it was required.

For years, that was simply accepted as the cost of operating complex organizations. The assumption was that building real software to solve these problems would always be too expensive, too slow, and too risky.

That assumption is now changing.

The biggest shift is not new products. It is the changing economics of building software itself.

Modern development tools and AI have dramatically reduced the time and resources required to create targeted applications. What once took a year now takes a month. What took a month takes a week. Problems that were previously too narrow to justify a vendor’s attention are now realistic to solve.

This introduces a possibility that did not exist before.

Not replacing major systems. Strengthening the foundation around them. Districts solving specific operational problems with tools designed for their actual workflows, instead of adapting their workflows to whatever a vendor decided to build.

Not transformation. Iteration. One capability at a time.

This creates an interesting strategic moment.

Some large SaaS providers may evolve into more open platforms, allowing districts to extend workflows and build around their systems. Some may continue expanding their product suites to cover more operational ground. Others may reposition around data infrastructure and AI enablement.

All are rational responses. The open question is not just how vendors evolve. It is how districts respond to having more choices than they have had in a decade.

Large platforms will remain central for a long time. Not just because of functionality, but because of trust, contracts, training, and operational stability. Systems that become infrastructure develop gravity.

Which is why the near term future is not replacement. It is layering. Core systems provide stability. More flexible, district owned capabilities emerge around them. Districts gradually decide where flexibility matters most and where control is worth the investment.

If you look ahead, two realistic paths are forming.

In one, large vendors successfully evolve into extensible platforms. Districts customize and build within those ecosystems. What becomes possible is still shaped by what the vendor makes available.

In another, districts begin investing more directly in infrastructure they control. They deploy modular solutions around their core systems. They build capacity to solve operational problems on their own terms, with partners who help them own what they build rather than rent it indefinitely.

Both paths can coexist. The more interesting question is how districts decide where ownership matters.

What if adding a new capability to your technology environment required a modest increase in infrastructure cost rather than a six-figure vendor negotiation? What if the second application you deployed required no new security review because the foundation already existed?

The deciding factor may not be technology. It may be confidence. Confidence in internal capacity. Confidence in governance as AI makes data environments more consequential. Confidence that a district can shape its operational future rather than only purchase it.

For the first time in a long time, the central question is not just what software to adopt. It is what capabilities to own.

The next phase of education technology will not arrive as a dramatic shift. It will arrive as quiet decisions.

One workflow improved. One process redesigned. One capability brought closer to district control. Each one making the next one easier. The investment compounding in the district’s favor, not the vendor’s.

Some districts are already beginning this work, partnering with organizations that focus less on selling software and more on helping districts build the technical foundations needed to solve real operational problems. Whether that becomes the dominant model remains to be seen.

But districts that begin investing in flexibility today will have more options tomorrow. And in a period where technology is evolving faster than traditional procurement cycles, optionality may quietly become the most important capability a school system can build.

The districts that recognize this early will not necessarily move first. But they will be the ones most prepared when the choices arrive.

That is a future worth building toward. Carefully, and together.

When I started teaching in Los Angeles in 2007, classroom technology was barely present. We had a cart of laptops that could be checked out, mostly for typing essays or building slide decks. Technology was a supplement. A word processor. A nicer poster board.

Then something changed.

My little history classroom was selected as one of the early places to pilot Chromebooks. The open internet came with it. Instead of turning in assignments to me, my students published their work on blogs. They embedded videos. They recorded audio. They built projects that blended historical analysis with creativity. They weren’t just completing tasks. They were making things.

It felt like magic.

The devices weren’t the point. They were tools. Hammers and paintbrushes and printing presses. Technology expanded what students could do. It amplified voice. It gave them audience. It made school feel connected to the wider world.

Over time, though, I watched that original promise drift.

Gradually, technology in classrooms shifted from tools of creation to systems of consumption. Platforms became more closed. Experiences became more managed. Personalization too often meant serving students a steady diet of algorithmically generated multiple choice questions. And then COVID accelerated everything. When students were sent home, screens became the only option. Entire systems were built around keeping students “on platform.”

What we were left with, in many places, feels less like empowerment and more like pacification.

If we’re honest, classroom technology today often resembles the candy at the grocery store checkout aisle. It’s bright. It’s convenient. It keeps everyone quiet for a few minutes. It promises a quick hit of engagement. But it’s not nourishment.

We can do better.

In the next chapter of my career, I want to focus on helping schools build a different foundation. A starting point for a world where ownership over data is real. Where the learning artifacts students create are not scattered across dozens of disconnected platforms. Where access to that information is intentional, secure, and aligned with the long-term interests of students and teachers.

It’s time to move technology from the candy aisle to the produce section.

Produce requires intention. It requires planning. It doesn’t always look as flashy. But it makes you stronger over time. It builds capacity. It supports growth.

What would it look like if we treated classroom technology that way? If we designed tools that cultivate agency instead of dependency? If teachers were empowered as the chief executives of their classrooms, able to choose and shape tools for the specific humans in front of them? If students’ work was treated as meaningful intellectual property, not disposable data points in someone else’s database?

Those are the questions I’m sitting with.

Classroom in the Future will be a place where I think out loud about them. A professional journal for this next stretch of the journey. I don’t have a finished blueprint. I don’t pretend to. But I believe the direction matters.

We’ve seen what the sugar rush looks like.

Now it’s time to start growing something healthier.

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