It’s a critical moment in education, and districts are asking companies to meet higher standards than ever before.
So says Richard Culatta, the CEO of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)
“We’re in a moment where some big funding shifts are getting ready to happen,” he said. “The bar of entry to schools for tech tools and apps is naturally going up.”
Richard Culatta is the CEO of ASCD/ISTE, an organization that focuses on education technology and evidence-based pedagogy. Prior to joining ASCD/ISTE, Culatta served as the chief innovation officer for the state of Rhode Island. He also served as executive director of the Office of Educational Technology in the U.S. Department of Education in the Obama administration and was an education policy adviser to U.S. Sen. Patty Murray.
Ahead of this year’s ISTE convention in Denver, Colorado, Culatta has a message for education companies: The expectations for ed-tech are changing, and vendors must ensure that their business practices and products are tested and solid they prepare for what’s coming next.
Not only is federal stimulus aid expiring — school systems have received $190 billion over the past four years — but school districts and ed-tech advocacy groups, including ISTE, are setting guidelines for vendors to meet K-12 standards for effective ed tech.
Culatta spoke with EdWeek Market Brief Staff Writer Alexandria Ng about the new demands for digital products and services that he sees for the industry. He also talked about how attendees of the ISTE show — a gathering that draws thousands of K-12 educators, as well as education companies — can expect to see those themes play out at the event.
Let’s start with your event. What are the dominant themes we can expect to see at ISTE this year?
There’s obviously a big focus on AI this year — no surprise — but what I’m really excited about is that our AI focus, as you look at the sessions and the topics this year, it’s a little different from what I’ve seen in other events so far.
We’re talking less about what AI tools and apps we might use and focusing more on what do we need to do to prepare young people to grow up in an AI world. What conversations do we need to have, what lessons do we need to teach young people so that they are growing up being AI creators, not just the AI consumers?
We’ll also have something called an innovation arcade, and it’s a VR/XR experience that will be a chance for educators to experience some immersive learning. We do believe that VR and AR have a lot of potential in education. We’ll also have a day before ISTE where we bring a group of product leaders together, and we work to help them build better tools and apps for education. So we’ll be having a lot of conversations about how they can build better tools so that educators have what they need in the classroom.
As you prepare for your organization’s conference, what are the biggest ed-tech trends you see playing out right now?
We’re in a moment where some big funding shifts are getting ready to happen. The bar of entry to schools for tech tools and apps is naturally going up. That means that the types of technology that we’re using really have to be awesome. It really has to show an impact.
What you’ll be seeing is school leaders being more demanding, in a good way, of the products and the results of the types of technology they’re using. So a lot of the conversations, the sessions will be around showing what’s really working and what’s not. Let’s really double-down on using technology in ways that are working.
My biggest concern is that the schools where I see them being more reactive in a negative way, as opposed to embracing AI in in a healthy way, [they] tend to also be the ones that are serving underserved populations.
What new standards are emerging from districts, and how is ISTE trying to compel companies to step up?
We’ve created the ISTE Seal, which is basically a good housekeeping stamp of approval. It’s a way to validate high-quality products. A number of districts, like L.A. Unified, are now requiring that their products receive these before they show up at their schools. And it’s not like you go through and pay some money to get a little sticker. The process the companies go through actually involves them improving the quality of their product.
They submit their product, and we have a thorough review process, which leads to a bunch of feedback. In all the companies we’ve ever been through, there’s only been one company that has not had to make any changes to their product. So [we tell them], “Here’s what you have to do to make it more usable, to make it more accessible,” and then they have a period of six months where they can implement those changes. So that’s the easiest thing to do if you want to be able to make sure you have your act together in bringing your A game.
What does that mean for districts selecting ed-tech products?
With schools, they can reject a product, but the procurement process we have now isn’t designed to help the companies improve their product. You might get rejected and not get a chance to get into a school, but you never get the feedback on what you need to do to improve. So that’s the gap we’re trying to close.
What other big themes are you seeing play out in ed tech this year?
There’s been a lot of conversations on digital citizenship. What does it mean to be a digital citizen? What does it mean to be a good member of our school community in a virtual space? We’re going to be releasing, for the first time, our digital citizenship curriculum.
Just with this overwhelming feedback from schools of needing help to try to set healthier conditions, we formed a coalition and created a series of lessons on teaching digital well-being, which we’ll be releasing at ISTE Live.
Are you trying to set a similar standard for AI literacy?
Yes, but it’s a little bit different. Our AI literacy is really focused on the educator. We believe very strongly that if you want to have young people learn and use AI effectively, you have to get teachers involved. We’re the largest provider of AI professional development for educators currently, and that’s only going to increase.
We have an experience called Explorations for Educators, which is an online experience, but we do believe it is critical that educators have at least a foundational element for AI. We’re also launching another course that will be the next level up for those early adopters, that will dive deeper in for those educators that really want to go into the deep end of AI.
What will it take to bridge the gap between companies and districts right now in the way that AI is viewed and implemented?
There’s a gap between district leaders who are a little more forward-leaning and district leaders who are very reactive. Our goal is to try to help bring everybody along.
My biggest concern is that the schools where I see them being more reactive in a negative way, as opposed to embracing AI in in a healthy way, [they] tend to also be the ones that are serving underserved populations. In order to learn to work, to live in the future, you have to have AI skills, and I’m very concerned if we have a whole generation of students that are being left behind in that process. It’s very hard to catch up with that.
How do you close that gap between the AI-savvy and AI-resistant districts?
That’s what our focus is. We look at those school districts where there’s a leader who has mistakenly said, “We’re going to sit this one out and step back and hope this goes away,” and we tell them, “I know this is a change, and it’s a little scary. Let’s help you.” There are enough districts that we work with now in how to do this the right way that we can show you how to do it.
We also recently published an AI guide for school leaders to help them know how to bring AI into their school, which has been very popular. We did that in partnership with AASA [The School Superintendents Association] and the two principals associations. It’s just making sure everybody has that information and then really helping handhold leaders through this transition.
Can you talk a little more about what worries you when it comes to equity in AI?
It’s really worrisome because there’s a couple layers of equity. There’s equity in terms of the kids who need it most and to have a chance to engage and have opportunities that they may have been left out of in the past.
But it’s also thinking about the ways that we’re using AI. I’m worried that there are some schools that are creating really good AI consumers — kids who know how to punch in an answer or almost using AI like a glorified search engine.
But what’s much more interesting is what I would call AI creators. These are students who are using AI as a problem-solving partner, an entity to help generate solutions, to help brainstorm, to visualize concepts in a way that can help them engage with other people. These are some of the deeper skills that we really need kids to learn, and every kid has got to have these critical AI skills.
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So those are some of the gaps that we’re trying to close now early on, so we don’t end up three years down the road like we usually do in education, scrambling to get people caught up. It is far easier to just bring everyone along in the first place, then leave people behind and then scramble to catch up afterwards.
How do you think we’ll see AI evolve in K-12 environments over the next few years?
We’ll start to see some new and different types of assessment. Assessment in education has been behind the innovation curve. We haven’t looked at ways to rethink and reinvent learning assessment with the whole variety of new tools and technologies that are available to do that. So AI is going to start to give us some really interesting new ways to assess student learning at a much deeper level.
It’s also going to lead to some really interesting questions and conversations about what are uniquely human skills. What are skills that are uniquely human that should not be handed off to AI, and what are skills that AI does better than humans, and let’s happily hand it off to them? As a school, you can deepen learning around things like discernment. AI is really good at generating solutions, but not very good at picking the right one. Humans struggle at divergent thinking, they struggle to generate lots and lots of solutions, but they’re actually quite good at picking the right option in a complex scenario. So, optimizing learning around those sorts of uniquely human skills is going to be a really exciting shift that we’ll see down the road.
AI, in a lot of ways, can supercharge educators and give them some supports that they need. There are so many manual processes that educators do that just waste their time. So I’m excited about being able to give some time back to educators through the use of AI, and I think we’ll see that play out over the next little bit. But it’s still evolving, and we need educators at the table and participating in giving feedback. If we do this right, there will be educator fingerprints all over the AI tools that are being created. It’s a time to be increasing our engagement, not pulling back.
What other forces will influence the relationship between districts and providers?
This is going to be a moment of truth on whether companies get their act together around accessibility risks and data privacy. This is what happens in the market this sort of ebb and flow, but we’re at the point now where anybody who’s serious, anybody who’s really going to be in this space, has to take interoperability, privacy, and accessibility very seriously.
One other thing is that educators are really looking for a more joyful learning experience. It’s been a hard last couple of years. We’re all recognizing that if we want to stop losing students, with student enrollment declines, and if we want students to be engaged and to make up for the learning loss of these years, learning has to be joyful. It has to be creative; it has to be engaging. Schools are looking to companies to not just have a rigorous solution, but a solution that’s joyful and engaging.
Do you see any gaps in the market where there’s potential room for innovation?
We’re still seeing gaps around tools that help educators personalize the learning experience. I hope with AI, we’re going to see a boost in in that. But a lot of the apps I’ve seen so far are just some level of prompt-engineering, but what we really need are tools that can use AI to tailor learning experiences to individual students’ needs. We also need tools that don’t just make the experience better for a student in their app, but recognize that they’re part of a broader ecosystem and use their data to make the experience better outside of the app.
This idea of having everything self-contained in the app, that’s an old model. What we really want to see is if I built an app, that no matter what it does, how can we extend that experience that happens in the classroom, so that after they’re using the app, parents at home can use that data to help in another activity? That’s a concept that is still a big gap, and we’ve just got to get better at that.
