Education in the US is broken. The good news is that it can be fixed if we are able to reconsider some basic assumptions.
Investing in education is “buying low and selling high”
The dream of the tech investor is to buy Apple and Amazon stock at the IPO and then watch it grow 1000%.
Investing in education is essentially buying a broadly diversified index fund for pennies and then realizing a healthy profit decades later.
Over time, Tech should deliver more value at less cost
If the cost of technology does not decrease over time, then something is not working. My intuition is that schools spend more money on tech because the vendors need to “increase shareholder value”
Education does not require purchasing finished products.
It may be easier for administrators to purchase a package, but that convenience comes with long term penalty. The vendor will optimize for profit, typically by narrowing scope and flexibility.
A more appropriate approach is for schools to consume services from other schools. Art schools can provide the user interfaces for the computing services provided by the technical schools. Institutions like MIT have operated this way forever. The approach of exchanging expertise and value.
Schools can benefit from vertical integration using open source
If a school can leverage the ecosystem of open source software, it can avoid the perennial dependence on commodity services purchased from the private sector. Schools without the critical mass to maintain their internal applications could purchase those services from service providers with the stipulation that the content be portable if the school decides to switch providers.
(this category of service provider may not yet exist and is an opportunity for small businesses)
The process behind learning is not transitive
The path to becoming a good technologist may end with technology, but it does not begin there. Just as watching a lot of films does not prepare someone to be a filmmaker, using a lot of computer programs does not prepare someone to be a software developer.