Over the past 25 years, multiple waves of education technology and innovation have slowly washed into America’s schools and colleges. Along the way, innovators have often over-promised and under-delivered, causing many smart people to wonder if we’re now in a frothy bubble of irrational exuberance, most eloquently summarized by Audrey Watters in Hack Education, who worries that “education technology [merely] serves as a ’Trojan Horse’ of sorts, carrying… the ideology of Silicon Valley [into public schools].”
Working as an entrepreneur, executive, philanthropist and investor over the past few decades, at some of the very organizations Watters bemoans, I’ve had a unique vantage point for observing numerous successes, failures and—most importantly—long-term trends that make me optimistic about the next wave of education innovation.
