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When school districts sign contracts for educational technology, they typically buy a set number of licenses. The software company delivers the product and the district cuts a check. Whether students actually benefit or even use the tools doesn’t factor into it.
Over the past few decades, that has generated a growing tension among parents and educators, who have begun questioning the very idea of ed tech.
But a new kind of funding scheme may turn that dynamic on its head: A recent report finds that a different approach to buying classroom technology may not only be workable but, in many cases, produces results that traditional contracts don’t. Called outcomes based contracting, the model ties what companies get paid, at least in part, to whether students actually learn.
The findings, from the nonprofit groups Digital Promise and the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, also come as school budgets are tightening after COVID relief funds dried up and district leaders find themselves under growing pressure to justify spending.
The report examined a group of school districts piloting an outcomes based model. It finds that the arrangement offers a new way to determine whether tech is actually working for kids, since it dictates that a portion of vendors’ payments depends on meeting a set of agreed-upon student benchmarks. If students don’t reach them, vendors don’t collect the full contract amount.
2,739 Ed Tech Tools Later, Where Are the Outcomes?
But the model also builds in a layer of shared accountability: Districts must commit to making sure students use the tools at the levels, or “dosage,” necessary to produce results.
Brittany Miller, the center’s executive director, said that forces everyone to take implementation seriously.
“What this model does is it tells everybody across the ecosystem: ‘Prioritize this,’” she said. “You have to get to this level of implementation integrity, which translates into dosage, in order to actually have a meaningful experience for a student.”
Kids ‘not getting the dosage they need’
Before looking at whether a tech product improves student outcomes, Miller said, there’s a more basic question that districts rarely ask: Are students using these tools at all?
The answer is often, “No.”
The report found that more than 65% of purchased ed tech licenses typically go unused, with school districts paying full price for products that sit idle. But districts participating in the outcomes based pilot met dosage requirements for as many as 95% of students. Overall usage rates were typically 10 times higher than under traditional contracts.
“We talk a lot about dosage, and kids not getting the dosage that they need,” Miller said. “And that, to me, is a proxy for being a responsible consumer of tech: Are our kids actually using it in a way that will drive outcomes?”
Miller said part of what drives the usage shift is that both districts and vendors share a direct financial stake in students actually using the products. Under the model, if a student falls behind on usage, the district must find out why and get that student back on track. If they don’t, there’s a record of that and the district is on the hook for payments, even if the student’s achievement didn’t improve.
Brittany Miller
It’s only fair in cases like these, she said. “The provider wasn’t able to prove that their product worked because kids didn’t actually use it.”
Beyond usage statistics, the report found that districts in the pilot reported greater instructional coherence. Technology was being used with more intention tied to specific learning goals rather than as a general add-on to existing lessons. And teachers were more deliberate about how they integrated tech into their instruction.
Miller, who formerly led large-scale tutoring implementation in Denver Public Schools, said she has sat in classrooms and watched students working with these products, typically supplemental literacy and math tools. She said many of them can make a difference, but only if used properly.
Under Pilot Program in Texas & Florida, Tutoring Fees Depend on Student Progress
“We’re talking about technology that has the ability to help students pronounce words correctly, support their fluency and break down words for them,” she said. “In mathematics, we’re talking about students using technology to really try different ways of solving problems and getting them exactly what they need in the moment.”
The report also found that tech companies benefited from the model in unexpected ways: Because outcomes based contracts require detailed, real-time data on how students are using a product, companies got access to information about their tools’ effectiveness that most standard contracts never generate.
Fewer tools, better results
Perhaps most counterintuitively, the report found, districts that rely on outcomes based contracting actually end up buying fewer tech products.
That’s because the process of building such a contract requires district leaders to clearly define what problem they’re trying to solve, what success looks like and whether a given product is actually the right tool for the job. That level of scrutiny, said Miller, produces a kind of natural audit.
“We’ve seen in a lot of districts as they’ve taken this on, the number of ed tech tools they’re purchasing just [goes] way down at the district level,” she said.
In one district, Miller said, officials found they’d purchased licenses for more than 1,000 tools. As they examined the list they said, “If there is not a clear reason and purpose that we’re using this in the classroom that’s actually driving student learning, then we’re not going to pay for that tool anymore.”
She added, “It just shifts the mindset of the system to really say, ‘Let’s look at what we’re purchasing more carefully, figure out what is and isn’t working, and start to cut down on the noise.”
The center, based at the Southern Education Foundation, grew out of research conducted at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research under economist Tom Kane, who in 2021 brought together a small group of tutoring providers and school districts to examine whether outcomes based contracting — already used in healthcare and workforce development — could be adapted for K-12 education.
The project eventually moved to the foundation, with Denver among the early participants. Miller was a district leader at the time and got involved in the work that Denver was piloting on tutoring.
Making Districts and Providers Mutually Accountable for Student Success
As of February, Miller’s center had worked with 87 education institutions ranging from school districts to state education agencies and tracked results for more than 63,000 students.
In addition, six states — California, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Indiana and Louisiana — have launched initiatives around the model. Together they represent more than 28% of total U.S. K-12 education spending, constituting a potentially fundamental shift in how schools spend money. That shift, Miller said, could have a huge impact on children’s achievement if educators are asking the right questions.
“There’s a student at the end of the day that’s being served by this,” she said. “How are you really humanizing their lived experience in the classroom and making sure that they’re achieving the outcomes that we know they’re able to?”
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