The edtech debate is loud right now — phone bans, screen time limits, districts pausing technology renewals to send the “right message” to parents. But what happens when the research being used to justify those decisions doesn’t actually apply to classroom technology? In this season finale of If Teachers Ruled the World, I sit down with Adam Sparks, founder of Short Answer and a former classroom teacher, to talk about what’s really driving the anti-edtech movement, what he’s seeing on the ground, and why he’s not stopping.
The edtech debate is loud right now. Phone bans. Screen time limits. Districts pausing technology renewals to avoid sending “the wrong message” to parents. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the people who are actually building thoughtful, research-backed educational technology are watching the pendulum swing — and trying to keep building anyway.
This week’s guest is one of those people. Adam Sparks grew up on a farm in Nebraska, taught for seven years in Nebraska, China, and Chicago, went to Stanford, and built Short Answer — an edtech platform now used by over 80,000 educators in all 50 states and 15 countries. I’ve used it in my own classroom, and it’s one of the best tools I’ve ever found for improving student writing and critical thinking. This conversation was a long time coming.
What “Weaponizing Screen Time” Actually Means
Adam has a phrase for what’s happening in the edtech policy conversation right now, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since he said it. He argues that we’re collapsing two completely different things into one category and using research from one to justify policy decisions about the other. The conversation in this episode gets into exactly where that line is — and why it matters for what’s actually happening in classrooms.
What the Anti-EdTech Movement Is Getting Wrong
Adam is not shy about naming the books, the researchers, and the cultural forces driving the current backlash — and where he thinks the evidence is being bent to fit a narrative. He’s writing about it on his Substack, he’s doing interviews about it, and he came on this podcast specifically to push back. He also shares what he’s actually seeing on the ground — grants declined, district renewals paused, teachers whose plans for next year just hit a wall.
What Short Answer Does That Paper Can’t
Before we got into the policy conversation, we talked about Short Answer itself — what it is, why Adam built it, and what makes it genuinely different from a digital worksheet. I share a specific classroom story from my own AP classes that I think illustrates exactly why this tool belongs in the category of technology that earns its place. You’ll hear what happened the first time I used it and why it changed how I teach writing.
How He Keeps Building When the Tide Is Rolling Out
This is the question I most wanted to ask. Adam has built something that works, teachers love it, the research supports it — and policy decisions made for reasons that have nothing to do with his product can make it inaccessible overnight. How does he keep going? His answer involves a Warren Buffett quote, a principal in Chicago, and a level of genuine belief in what he’s building that I found pretty moving.
This is the season finale of the If Teachers Ruled the World summer series on technology in the classroom. And I think it’s a fitting close — ending with someone who is living this debate from the inside, and who still believes the pendulum will find its way back to the middle.
Key Takeaway: The edtech debate isn’t really about technology in education, it’s about implementation. As Adam Sparks of the Short Answer app explains, intentional technology use paired with sound educational technology policy matters far more than blanket screen time schools bans.
Key Moments:
00:01:32 – Leah introduces Adam Sparks, founder of the Short Answer app, and sets up today’s edtech debate on the podcast’s Summer PD series finale.
00:09:29 – Adam shares two classroom stories showing what intentional technology use looked like long before he built Short Answer, from Kahoot Fridays to asynchronous video lessons in Chicago.
00:18:30 – Leah walks through her own experience using the Short Answer app for AP short answer questions, and why comparing student work side by side changed her teaching.
00:24:41 – Adam breaks down how Short Answer has evolved in the age of AI, including full-screen lockdowns, peer feedback, and new AI-powered activities.
00:29:09 – The conversation shifts into the heart of the edtech debate, questioning whether tools like Kahoot prioritize engagement over real learning.
00:33:46 – Adam and Leah dig into educational technology policy, unpacking why blanket screen time schools bans miss the real issue of implementation.
00:37:20 – A closer look at how research on kids and social media has been misapplied to technology in education, and what that means for teachers on the ground.
00:45:35 – Adam explains his favorite framework for thinking about intentional technology use: tech as an amplifier of human intent, for better or worse.
Resources and Links
Short Answer – myshortanswer.com
EdTech Confidential — Adam Sparks on Substack
Can evidence compete with a story people want to believe? – Adam Sparks
Modern Classrooms Project – modernclassrooms.org
Justin Reich – MIT Education Researcher
The Anxious Generation – Jonathan Haidt
The Digital Delusion – Jared Cooney Horvath
Reach Capital – EdTech Venture Fund
Infusing Tech One Lesson at a Time – leahcleary.com blog
Summer PD Series:
The Tech Pendulum: Are We Solving the Wrong Problem in Education? – If Teachers Ruled the World Podcast, June 2, 2026
AI in Education: What Teachers Need to Know Right Now – If Teachers Ruled the World Podcast, June 9, 2026
Five Questions for Intentional Technology Use That Changed How I Use Technology in My Classroom – If Teachers Ruled the World Podcast, June 16, 2026
The Walk, the Lake, and the Laptop: What I Learned About Rest and Screens for Teachers – If Teachers Ruled the World Podcast, June 23, 2026
Stop Playing AI Police: How to Reimagine AI in the Classroom – If Teachers Ruled the World Podcast, June 30, 2026
Teacher Voices on Technology: Not One Said Get Rid of It – If Teachers Ruled the World Podcast, July 7, 2026
Prefer Reading? I’ve Got You…
Show Transcript
What we’re doing is we’re just weaponizing the term screen time, and we’re pretending that scrolling through TikTok at two in the morning on your cell phone is somehow equivalent to doing a check for understanding quiz on Google Classroom under the guidance of a professional educator on a school managed device.
Welcome back to If Teachers Ruled the World. I’m Leah Cleary, and today I’m here with Adam Sparks. He’s the inventor and CEO of a really excellent edtech platform called Short Answer, and we’re going to get into what that is in just a little bit.
Adam grew up on a farm in Nebraska and went on to teach there, first middle school social studies, then high school social studies. He also taught in Chicago and taught English in China. When he came back to the States, he was accepted into a graduate program at Stanford University, and his capstone project there became Short Answer. Short Answer won both the Stanford Learning Design Challenge and the Futures Learning Tools competition.
He now runs Short Answer full time with his wife, Alexa, from Nebraska. Short Answer is currently used by over eighty thousand educators in all fifty states and about fifteen countries. So let’s talk to Adam.
Hi, Adam. It is great to have you on If Teachers Ruled the World today. How are you doing?
I’m doing well, I’m doing well. It’s nice to meet you digitally, and I’m excited to chat.
Yeah, well, you know, we’ve met once before. It was a few years ago, at the AP conference in Seattle.
Okay, you can’t judge me for repeatedly forgetting this, because that was, like I said, literally one of our third conferences ever. That was the earliest days of Short Answer. I’m proud that you even remember me given how long ago that was in my mind. So, excited to chat.
I remembered you. First of all, you and your wife gave me a t-shirt that I love. It’s a cute t-shirt, and I use it in my classroom all the time.
I’ve been teaching AP World History and IB Theory of Knowledge for the past ten years. Prior to that I was an English teacher, and I’m actually going back to English in the fall, middle school English. So I plan to keep on using Short Answer, and we’ll talk about that in just a little bit.
But I want to talk about you first. I know you grew up on a farm in Nebraska. Is that right?
That’s correct. I’m currently zooming to you from that farm, so I’m back home now.
So you’re back on the family farm.
We are, yeah. My wife and I are. I’m looking at a barn out my window right now.
Do you have horses? Cows?
No, my dad used to have cows, but he sold those about fifteen, twenty years ago. He just raises corn and soybeans now, here in eastern Nebraska. So yeah, I grew up in rural Nebraska, love it. We lived all over for the last ten years, but we moved back last June and plan to continue building Short Answer from here, which we’re very excited about.
Nice. I know that you taught for seven years, right?
That’s right, yep. You have much more experience than I do, but similar domains. My last year in the classroom I was teaching AP US History, but I taught English and social studies during those seven years. Kindred spirits.
Exactly. Yeah, I read that about you, and I was interested, because I started out in middle school English. Then I spent most of my career, about twenty years, in social studies, about ten of those in AP. And now I’m going back to middle school English. Full circle.
Well, I love middle school. It was my favorite age group I ever taught. I taught middle school social studies at Milford Public Schools here in Nebraska.
At the high school age, you’re dealing more with attitude. At the middle school age, you’re dealing more with random stupidity, but I kind of love random stupidity. That’s the joy.
The kids are old enough and advanced enough that you can have really meaningful, in-depth conversations about big things, specifically in a history classroom. But they’re still enthusiastic and eager and want to be there. A lot of the challenge of high school is motivating kids to want to be there. At least with the middle schoolers I taught, that wasn’t as much of a challenge. It was almost the opposite, getting them to settle down a little.
So I love middle school, and I hope you enjoy the transition back to it.
Thank you. Well, they still have that sense of wonder. What made me want to go back to middle school was having ninth graders for the first time in twenty years this year, and I just thought, oh, this is home. Ninth graders are still basically middle schoolers.
Well, I’m glad you enjoyed your experience with ninth graders, because I’ll be honest, when I taught high school I’d say freshmen were the toughest age group I worked with. Not for me, but that’s okay, I’m glad other folks connect with freshmen.
It takes all kinds. And you taught in Chicago and in China too, right?
Yeah, all over the place. Rural Nebraska, and then in China I taught oral English, very specific, spoken English. Then in Chicago I taught world literature and US history, and then AP US History.
Oh my goodness, we’ve taught the same things just about. It’s crazy. But I wanted to ask you, because I’ve always been really interested in edtech, and obviously that’s the direction you’ve gone. What drew you to edtech?
Good question. When I was teaching at Milford Public Schools, my principal, Brendan Mowinckel, asked me to join something called the Tech Leadership Cadre. They send you to the regional service center and train you on effective use of educational technology. Then you become a staff leader in your building, helping fellow staff members with different tech tools. The capstone is presenting at the big statewide edtech conference in Nebraska, the Nebraska Educational Technology Association’s spring conference.
Prior to that cadre, I didn’t use technology all that much, but that introduced me to it and got me interested. Most importantly, once I started using those tools, it changed my teaching. It made me so much better in so many ways, and it was exciting and inspiring. It made me want to build edtech, but I didn’t have the skills, so I kept teaching.
After that I went to Chicago and continued using technology, and I really had to advocate for it there because our school didn’t have a lot. Once again, it revolutionized my teaching. So I looked for master’s programs that might teach me how to build the tools I wanted to build, and I got lucky and got into a great one, the Learning Design and Technology program at Stanford. It’s a full-time program where you spend a year trying to solve a problem in education using technology, and Short Answer started as my master’s project there.
That’s the trajectory: introduced to edtech through my principal, fell in love with it, wanted to build it, and did a grad program to help me do that. That’s how we ended up building Short Answer. It’s been a cool journey.
We’re definitely going to talk about Short Answer in just a minute, because it’s truly one of the best edtech tools I’ve ever used. But you mentioned that using edtech upped your game as a teacher. Can you give me a specific example? Is there a specific tool, a specific way it made you better?
Yeah, I’ll give you two. The first one isn’t even a tool I necessarily love, but when I was teaching middle school social studies in Milford, every Friday we did Kahoot Friday. There’s a lot I don’t love about that tool, but one thing I did like was that my kids loved it, especially eighth graders.
What I’d do is post the CNN 10 throughout the week, hosted by Carl Azuz. It’s a short clip, maybe ten minutes, catching kids up on current events. Then on Friday, at the beginning of class, we’d do a Kahoot based on that week’s CNN 10s. So if you wanted to be successful on Friday’s Kahoot, you needed to have watched CNN 10. It was a way to incentivize kids to pay attention to the news.
The questions I put in the Kahoot were, as much as possible, connected to the content we covered that week. So if we were covering the American Revolution in eighth grade US history, we’d try to find connections between the ideals they were fighting for and things going on in the news, maybe related to the Supreme Court or whatever else.
It’s really silly, it’s just a trivia game, but the kids loved it, and it incentivized them to watch CNN 10 and pay attention. We didn’t have to take a lot of class time, but we were still pulling in current events, and those discussions were some of the more meaningful ones we had all year. That was one of the early use cases that made me fall in love with teaching with technology.
The second one is a completely different context, in Chicago. Almost a third of our students were STLS students, students in transitional living situations. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re homeless, but they’re in between, staying with an aunt this week, an uncle the next, without a permanent residence.
That resulted in a lot of absences. If I was doing direct instruction on any AP US History topic, kids often missed it. So I used a framework called the Modern Classrooms Project, which I’d recommend to any teacher. I’m not affiliated with them, but it’s a curriculum framework that’s self-paced and mastery-based.
Say that one more time?
It’s called the Modern Classrooms Project.
Modern Classrooms Project. Okay, I’ll link to that in the show notes.
Yeah, I love it. It was built by educators, and they’ve measured its effects. It has a positive impact on kids’ outcomes, and it did in my class.
It’s self-paced and mastery-based, so kids move through the curriculum at their own pace and only move on once they’ve mastered the content. You could walk into my classroom on a Monday and every kid would be working on a different lesson depending on where they were at.
The only way I could pull that off was by recording my lectures so students could watch them asynchronously. They could speed them up when they understood it, slow it down when they didn’t, pause it and come ask me questions. Just that simple affordance of pause, rewind, fast forward meant I could jump into content on Tuesday even if I wasn’t there Monday, and I hadn’t missed anything, and I could still have one-on-one conversations with students.
I didn’t do that my first year in Chicago, and the difference between my first and second year was night and day because of it.
That is a really good example of teaching to your audience, to your clientele. I don’t know that it would necessarily work everywhere, but that sounds like a perfect solution if you’ve got a very transient population, or students who are absent a lot.
It was. And I think the larger point you’re making is that teaching is deeply contextual, and you have to customize what you’re doing to the students you’re serving. It’s tempting to want to make broad, sweeping claims about best practices in education, but it’s actually really hard to do that because of how contextual education is.
That’s kind of what our series this summer has been about. We’ve been taking a look at the backlash against edtech, and that’s an example of throwing a blanket on an issue that doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone.
Yeah, there are many facets to this wave of anti-edtech sentiment that I think are flawed, and I’m happy to talk about any of them. But the one we’re touching on here is that blanket statements about edtech are generally misguided, because of how contextual teaching is. Whether or not tech serves your students’ needs depends on context, so making broad claims about the effectiveness of all technology at once is pretty dubious in my mind.
Yes, and I definitely want to come back to that toward the end. One of my central arguments on this issue is that it’s not a tech problem, it’s an implementation problem.
I think a huge issue was that a lot of districts rolled out one-to-one out of necessity during the pandemic, and teachers got stuck. You remember the old SAMR model, the different stages you move through when implementing technology, starting with substitution and moving up to redefinition, transformation. I’ve talked about that on my blog, and we discussed it in the very first episode of this series.
A lot of teachers got stuck on the substitution step, I think, as a result of the pandemic. And I understand you worked in an office in a school district rolling out Chromebooks during the pandemic.
Yeah. Covid hit in March of 2020, and I was still teaching in Chicago, but we went fully online. A couple months later I found out I got into Stanford, so I resigned from my school with plans to move to California. Then Stanford said, because of Covid we’re going fully online next year, so we’re giving you the option to defer. I really wanted to go engage with that community in person, so I deferred a year, but I’d already resigned from my teaching job.
So my wife and I moved back home to Nebraska, and because of the massive rollout of technology, there was a school district, Papillion-La Vista Community Schools, that decided to go one-to-one with Chromebooks overnight in response to the pandemic. They needed help rolling out those devices, and I jumped in part time to help. That was really eye-opening, since I’d never worked on that side of the building before, never worked in a tech office or in an administrative role.
I did that part time and substitute taught that year too, which was also eye-opening. Then the next year I went out to Stanford. So yeah, I did work in a tech office, and I learned a lot.
What was your biggest takeaway from that?
Oh, man. When I was a teacher, I’d request tools all the time, and I’d get so angry when the tech department came back with, no, we’re not approving this because of X, Y. Now I kind of get it. When you’re working at scale, especially at a district like Papillion-La Vista with around twenty thousand students, you can’t just approve everything willy-nilly from a security perspective. I gained an appreciation for the work the tech office does that I didn’t have before.
When you went out to Stanford, that’s where you developed Short Answer. It started as your master’s capstone, but now it’s your full-time job, and you’re constantly developing it. In just a second I want you to explain what Short Answer is, but first I want to tell you that when I returned from the AP conference in 2023 with my cute little Short Answer t-shirt, I was ready to try it in class. The very first time I tried it, it was a hit.
But here’s what I wasn’t expecting. I had been doing something similar in an analog fashion, but it wasn’t nearly as good, and I think this is an example of technology being genuinely transformative. I’d have students write SAQs, short answer questions. We’d practice them, I’d model it, then they’d write them, I’d put them in groups of four to peer edit, and we’d pick one from each group to share and discuss as a class. Then they’d take their first quiz, and I always gave short answer question quizzes.
A lot of times, even after doing all of that a few times, they’d still be lost. They didn’t understand the difference between identify and explain, or why they didn’t get credit because they named a thematic category instead of giving a specific historical example. Then we did Short Answer, and talk about a big bang for your buck, because we only did it two or three times before their first quiz, and when they took it, nobody was confused about what was required.
I think part of that is because they were actually getting to compare everybody’s responses side by side. One student’s response would come up, then another, and whatever I wanted to focus on that day, I’d build into the rubric categories. At the time you actually dragged the categories on top of the responses, though you don’t do that anymore.
You were there in the earliest days. That’s so cool to hear.
Yeah, earliest days. I’d put things in if I wanted to focus on specific historical evidence, most specific example, that kind of thing. A lot of times they’d try bullet points or sentence fragments instead of complete sentences, and College Board won’t score those, so we’d focus on that too.
At the end, with the students’ permission, I’d share their names, and we’d review the top three. I try to create a classroom environment where mistakes are okay, and I hope I succeed at that. Especially at first, we’d go over the top three and I’d say, okay, this one is solid writing, but it wouldn’t get the point from College Board, and here’s why. The student who wrote it would get candy for being in the top three and being a good sport about being in the hot seat.
I found that to be a very valuable tool, and I still do. I feel like that’s something you can’t really do in an analog way, because by that point the students had seen everybody’s responses and had a genuine investment in the top three. A lot of times, when I’d explain why a response wouldn’t get the point, a student would say, but I picked that one, I thought it was the best. What was wrong with it?
Yeah, one hundred percent. I think the learning science principle behind why this works is that you’re exposing kids to a bunch of different worked examples in a relatively small amount of time. By going through that process of analysis, here’s two, which one’s stronger, oh, you said this one, why, they have to articulate what makes for a strong example, and they develop their own internal sense of what makes for good writing.
I think another big part of it is that it creates an authentic audience for their work. It’s, oh my gosh, I’m going to write something and my classmates are going to see it, so I should try hard. We’re going to put it up, we’re going to discuss it, and it can be anonymous, so it’s done in a safe way. But yeah, to your point, it’s also important that there’s a culture where it’s okay to make mistakes, that we’re here to learn from them.
If I can nerd out on the learning science a bit more, we grew out of a research base that’s a little skeptical about rubrics. I’m not saying rubrics are bad, but there’s research suggesting a rubric can become a script for a kid: I read the rubric, I follow it, I submit my work, and I perform well because I followed the script. But if you remove that script, do you perform as well, or were you dependent on it?
The way we’ve gone about it is: do the writing, then analyze a bunch of different worked examples. I think that helps you see the forest from the trees, rather than just following a script to meet a performance expectation. That way, kids are better able to identify and produce the specific characteristics they’re looking for in a document-based question, a short answer question, or an extended response question on something like an AP test.
I’m really glad to hear you’ve had a positive experience with it, especially because what you’re describing is the earliest iteration of Short Answer. It’s no longer the dragging anymore, now it’s just a click, and we’ve augmented it with AI and a lot of other things since.
Yeah, and I want you to speak to exactly what Short Answer is now, and some of the changes you’ve made. I’m so glad you explained some of the learning science behind it. The biggest and most important thing I’ve found to do with it in the age of AI is to take devices away, give students the prompt, have them write their response on paper, and then have them take out their devices and type it into Short Answer, because a lot of them will otherwise try to get a chatbot to write it for them.
Yeah, and we’ve had to design around that too. When a kid signs in, we take over their screen in full screen mode, and if they leave full screen, they can’t get back in. So as a teacher, if you’re walking around and see a kid out of full screen mode after you’ve set that expectation, it’s a pretty easy indicator that they’re not following directions.
The second thing is we’ve created a toggle where teachers can turn off the ability to copy and paste into a response, if they’re worried about outside influence. Those are a couple of additions in the age of AI. I like that use case you described, doing the writing by hand first and then using Short Answer for the feedback piece.
To answer your question about how it’s changed: we still follow that same core structure of three steps. Students sign in and do the writing, that’s step one. Step two is feedback. Step three is discussion and reflection. I think the biggest thing that’s changed is step two, because now it’s peer feedback, AI feedback, or both.
We still have the comparative-judgment peer feedback you described, sometimes called battle royale, where a student sees two anonymous pieces of peer writing, decides which one’s stronger based on our success criteria, clicks it, and explains why. That repeats, and we generate feedback reports accordingly.
With AI, we now have an activity called Quick Write, where students get automated AI feedback based on the success criteria and reflect on it. We tally up scores to see if the class can hit a class score goal together, and if they don’t, they can revise and resubmit, using the AI feedback to immediately improve their understanding and performance.
We also have a newer activity combining AI with peer feedback called Pen Pals. Students read each other’s writing, decide through comparative judgment which is strongest, and those responses get thrown to AI characters we’ve created who argue about the writing. The kids vote for which character they agree with. We’ve built some ridiculous personalities, like Surly Sam, an angry old man.
I can’t wait to try that with middle schoolers.
Oh, we had to put a warning label on Surly Sam because he’s sometimes inappropriate with his feedback. There’s also Bubbly Bo, who’s like a supportive bro. You pick two of these characters, they argue with each other, and the kids vote for which one they agree with.
The primary goal is getting kids to think about the success criteria in a unique and engaging way. The secondary goal is some AI literacy, don’t just take the AI’s feedback at face value, question it and challenge it, and we’ve tried to structure the experience so that’s inherent to it.
That’s where the product is right now. By the end of the summer there’s a whole other half of Short Answer coming that we haven’t released publicly yet, so I don’t want to get into the weeds on it, but stay tuned, because there are some big changes coming that I’m really excited about.
I’m excited too, I can’t wait.
I am very pumped. It’s tough because these features are actually done at this point, so it’s just a matter of when we release them. It doesn’t make sense to release them on June eleventh, when the majority of teachers in the US just left school and the last thing on their mind is anything related to the classroom, rightfully so. So we’re waiting a bit, but more soon.
I can’t wait. All right, I want to pivot now away from Short Answer. I think it’s absolutely phenomenal, which is why I wanted you as my guest for this series, because I love what you’ve created and what it shows about how tech can be transformative.
You mentioned Kahoot earlier, which is fun, but as we segue into our next topic, can you tell me what your issue with platforms like that might be?
I think Kahoot is a tool you could hold up as an example that, if used incorrectly, causes problems, though I do think you can use it effectively. I’d like to think the example I shared of how I used it in my social studies classroom is one of those.
I think I’m going to steal it.
Please do, please do.
I’ll be teaching ELA, but I’ll figure out a way. We’ll do that.
You could make the case that Kahoot is a tool that prioritizes engagement over learning, through a few mechanisms. First, you get more points for how quickly you respond.
I agree, I don’t like that.
I’m not in love with that either. The actual goal of that is to juice engagement through dopamine hits, go fast, go fast, go fast, and kids love it. But I don’t necessarily know if that’s good for learning.
In the context of a low-stakes, fun quiz about current events, I don’t think it’s a big deal, but using Kahoot on a daily basis for formative assessment feels ridiculous. I always feel like I’m throwing stones in a glass house when I criticize fellow edtech companies, since it’s the world I live in, but I do think there are a lot of tools that have chosen to prioritize engagement over learning science and outcomes. If there’s a valid criticism, that’s one of them, that there are too many tools focused on engagement over learning.
And that’s been a problem for a long time, stepping outside the edtech world. For years, teachers were told to prioritize fun over genuine learning, and those are two very different things.
Yeah, and I’m hopeful. I think this current moment is generally misguided, but I’m hoping some good reform can come out of it, a doubling down on efficacy, research, and best practice in whatever interventions we’re using in classrooms, edtech or not. I don’t know if that’s what’s coming, based on the legislation I’ve seen so far, though.
It’s erring on the side of the lazy version, kids can spend X amount of time per day on a screen, that sort of ridiculous initiative. They’re ridiculous because they don’t focus on quality of instruction at all, just the medium, and that’s because they’re predicated on the assumption that the medium itself is flawed. I don’t think that’s supported by research, and I’ve been trying to push back against that however I can with my small following.
Well, that’s what we’re pushing back on this summer. I’ll say, the county I’m just leaving, the superintendent is very anti-technology, and I think that’s a trend, not just him. What we’re seeing in that county is limiting screen time in high school and screen bans for elementary and middle school. I agree with you, that’s not treating the actual problem, because it’s not a technology problem, it’s an implementation problem. Instead of addressing implementation, they’re addressing the medium.
Yeah, because the medium is easier to legislate around than quality. Quality of instruction is really hard to legislate. On some level I understand it, but it’s lazy, and I don’t think it’s going to have the impact we want. In fact, I think it’s going to have the opposite impact, making teachers’ jobs harder unnecessarily. We’re already seeing that in some of the schools we work with.
So let’s talk about what you’re actually seeing there. I know Short Answer has taken off, I believe it’s used in all fifty states. Is it eighty thousand schools, or teachers?
No, not schools. Eighty thousand monthly active teachers and students, though that fluctuates during the year. We crossed over one hundred thousand this year at one point, which was really exciting. Right now we’re at close to zero monthly active users because it’s June.
Well, that was going to be my question. Are you seeing a drop in usage because of the pendulum swinging against technology?
We haven’t seen drops in usage, but we’ve seen more of a brick wall when it comes to adoption from schools. I worked with a couple of teachers this year on grants to fund Short Answer, and I heard back in the last couple weeks or months that those grants were declined. If you read between the lines of the feedback on why, it’s pretty easy to see: this is technology and we don’t want to fund that right now.
That was really frustrating for me and for those teachers, because they spend a lot of time putting together those grant applications. They’re very tedious, and the teachers did it because they were already using Short Answer, having a great experience, and improving outcomes. That was hard for me and harder for them.
Then just last week, one of our existing district-wide customers in Texas sent me an email saying the renewal of Short Answer is on pause because their district admin is pausing all tech renewals, so they don’t want to send the wrong signal to the community. I have this person’s permission to talk about it. They were frustrated too, because their teachers were planning to use it next year, and now it’s not going to be available, just to avoid sending the wrong message to the community.
We shouldn’t be setting education policy based on what will satisfy parents. It should be based on evidence and best practice, the same way it is when you go into a doctor’s office or hire a lawyer to represent you.
It’s so politicized. Superintendents, school boards, they’re all very concerned with appeasing their constituents. Unfortunately that’s the reality we live in, and a lot of the decisions they make aren’t based on research, they’re based on public perception, which are two very different things.
With all the research done on things like cell phone use and social media, my fear, and it’s not really a fear because it’s already happening, is that they’re taking research meant for a very different context and placing it on edtech, when those are two different things.
Yeah, no, literally, you are exactly right. I watched Justin Reich, a researcher at MIT who studies edtech and has written some good books on it. He’s a bit of an edtech skeptic, but a more even-handed one, willing to admit the positive affordances that are there.
I’ll be sure to link to him in the show notes too, so our listeners can look him up. Say his name one more time for me?
Justin Reich, I think it’s spelled R-E-I-C-H.
Okay, thank you, R-E-I-C-H.
Yeah. I watched a speech he gave recently, I think in Arlington, Virginia, to a parent group, one of these that have grown up around being anti-screen-time. They got up and spoke before he did, and led off with a summary of Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book, about social media and cell phones.
That has been so very misapplied. He has some very valid research, it just doesn’t apply to edtech.
That’s one of my, yeah, exactly. What we’re doing is we’re just weaponizing the term screen time, and pretending that scrolling through TikTok at two in the morning on your cell phone is somehow equivalent to doing a check for understanding quiz on Google Classroom, under the guidance of a professional educator, on a school-managed device.
I know. And for ten, fifteen years, I don’t even know how long, I’ve made my students put their phones in a pouch in my room, even before that was ever a district policy or state law. I’ve always been pretty decent at using edtech meaningfully in the classroom. So there are two different things, and I really want people to realize that.
One hundred percent, yeah. It’s telling to me, I’m actually writing a Substack about this right now, about the direct line being drawn from Jonathan Haidt’s work to the anti-Chromebook, anti-everything-in-technology movement in schools. Jared Cooney Horvath, who wrote The Digital Delusion, which I think of almost as a sequel to The Anxious Generation, grows directly out of Haidt and is just as flawed.
I’m going to link to your Substack in the show notes.
Yeah, please do.
Yeah, that’s Adam Sparks on Substack.
Yes, it’s called Ed Tech Confidential.
I reviewed the book, and more importantly, researchers have come out and reviewed The Digital Delusion negatively, because what’s happening in that book isn’t grounded in evidence. It’s bending evidence to play on the anxieties of parents who are already primed to be anti-technology, because they’re frustrated with cell phones and social media, and frustrated when they go out to dinner and see kids conking out on an iPad. I don’t blame them for that frustration.
But that’s priming parents to be angry about technology broadly, and there’s a group of folks all too happy to play into those fears and anxieties to sell books and consulting services. I’d lump Jared Cooney Horvath and the movement he’s promoting into that. I know that’s a controversial thing to say, but it’s incredibly frustrating, because when you look at the actual research on technology in schools, it’s generally positive, with mixed effects like most education interventions, since it all comes down to implementation.
Generally speaking, the effect sizes of technology in schools are positive, and this movement has bent the research to subtract away those positives in ways I think are pseudoscientific. One researcher I talked to recently described it as appalling, his word, not mine. It’s frustrating to see research bent to fit a narrative, and I’m worried that because our culture is so primed to be anti-technology right now, it’s taking off like wildfire, and schools and teachers are once again caught in the crossfire, being blamed for things they shouldn’t be, and having their jobs made harder.
It’s been frustrating for me both as an educator and as an edtech developer. Part of why I wanted to come on and talk with you is that I want to push back however I can, and I’d encourage other folks to do that too.
Thank you, I’m glad you’re doing that, I really appreciate it. As a practicing classroom teacher who tries to use technology well and implement it for transformative purposes, when I find a tool like Short Answer, I get excited. When I see schools banning this stuff, I get upset.
What are your colleagues in the edtech industry saying about all of this?
It depends who you talk to. It’s been an interesting response. From what I’ve observed publicly, I’ve seen some edtech founders trying to play both sides, kind of talking out of both sides of their mouth. Yeah, parents, you’re right, technology is kind of bad, except mine, mine is really good. It’s a very politician-like response.
I’ve also seen people more in my wheelhouse pushing back adamantly, because it’s not supported by research. These are folks who’ve studied learning design and technology like I have, know the positive affordances, and find this movement absurd.
I’ve also started to see a more organized response from organizations like ISTE, the largest professional development organization for K-12 edtech, now ISTE/ASCD, also the largest organization of curriculum and instruction leaders across the country. They have their big annual conference in two weeks in Orlando that I’m heading to, and I’m curious what they roll out in response, if anything, but I’m confident there will be an organized response.
Some of the large funders of edtech have started pushing back too. I’m generally skeptical of venture capital in K-12 education technology, but there’s a firm I have a lot of respect for called Reach Capital that’s been putting out some really good material we can link in the show notes.
Definitely, Reach Capital.
Yes, and I’ll share the post with you. Their framing, which I think is right, is that this anti-edtech movement is the wrong answer to the right questions. You’re right to question the quality of instruction in the classroom, right to question whether technology is being used effectively. Those are good questions, but we’re arriving at the wrong conclusion, let’s just ban it writ large.
It needs to be more nuanced and focused on quality, which is very much in line with what I’ve been trying to say. I’m encouraged to see more of an organized response, but the pessimistic side of me questions, if the general public wants to believe this story, to what extent does evidence even matter?
That is a problem, isn’t it?
It is, and it’s true with everything, not just edtech. If you want to believe something, I don’t know how much evidence changes your mind, but I’m going to do my darndest to try, and I appreciate you giving me a space to keep trying.
Well, you said something in an interview I was listening to that I thought was interesting, and I want to ask you about it. You described technology as an amplification of human intention. Can you explain that for me?
Yeah, that’s a Sal Khan quote. Sal Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, which I love, though it’s become a bit of a lightning rod for criticism over some of what they’ve done with AI and chatbot tutoring. But I love Khan Academy and the work they do, and I know some genuinely amazing educators who work there.
Technology is an amplification of human intent, so whatever your intention is, you can use technology to augment, improve, and amplify it. If I’m a student studying for the MCAT because I want to go to med school, I can log into NotebookLM and study better than I ever have, having it spin up quizzes and quiz myself.
I love NotebookLM, so cool.
I can have it make a podcast about a study I have to take a quiz on and listen to it while I work out.
I do that all the time. I’ll load all the articles from a research thing into it and just listen to a podcast about it if I’m trying to pull on a thread.
Me too, one hundred percent, I love it. If I’d had it in grad school, and especially undergrad, since I was a nerd who spent most of my time in the library studying, that particular technology would have amplified my ability to study.
But it goes both ways. If I’m demotivated and don’t want to do the work, I can just click the easy button that is ChatGPT and have it write my essay for me, because my intention was just to get it done, check the box, without putting forth any cognitive effort or learning anything, and just get a good grade. I can do that too.
What I like about “technology is an amplification of human intent” is that it captures how tech can be good, bad, or neutral, depending on who’s using it and why.
So the question for us as teachers, then, is how do we foster good intent in our students, the intent to learn rather than the intent to just get the activity done, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that’s always been the challenge for teachers. Technology hasn’t changed that, it’s just amplified it in some ways. So again, it’s amplification, that’s what the quote means to me, and I think it’s especially helpful for thinking about aiming intent in this world of AI.
Yeah, I like that a lot. So with all of this backlash against edtech, and you living and working in that realm, developing a high-quality product that I feel like teachers with good intent can use to foster writing and critical thinking, how do you keep building amid all of this?
I had a principal in Chicago, Jennifer Reed, a really great principal who’s gone on to become a senior leader at Noble Charter Schools, the largest charter network in Chicago. She’d always say, you control what you can control. There’s a lot of garbage going on outside these kids’ lives, and that’s hard, but when they walk in the door, you can control what you can control, show up, and be the best educator you can for them, meeting them where they’re coming from.
I sometimes find myself thinking about that now. I can put out Substack posts, do interviews with media organizations, and try to promote the evidence base for educational technology and for learning design and technology as a valid field. There’s a reason there are master’s programs in this at prestigious universities across the world. So I’m going to keep fighting the good fight, but ultimately you can only control what you can control.
I believe in what we’re building, and I know it’s grounded in evidence, so I’m going to keep my head down. It’s almost like a storm rolling through, you batten down the hatches and hope you don’t knock down too many trees or have anything land on the house, and once it rolls on, you go out, recover, and keep building. It’s a test of whether you really believe in what you’re building, because if you jumped into edtech just to make a quick buck on some software-as-a-service and jump out—
Oops. Like getting into real estate in 2007.
Yeah, exactly, poor timing on your part. But what a moment like this does is weed out a lot of folks. I’m from outside Omaha, Nebraska, so Warren Buffett is an influential voice here, as you might imagine, and he has a quote I love: when the tide rolls out, you see who was skinny dipping. In his context he was talking about people leveraged with debt on their investments.
In our context, it’s the same idea, as the tide rolls out we’re going to see how much people believe in what they’re building, because it’s really hard. It’s always been hard to build K-12 edtech, and now it’s harder than ever. So we’ll see who’s here to stay. Long story short, I’m just going to keep putting my head down, and so is my wife Alexa, and so is our team, and we’re going to keep building what we believe in.
Well, the hope is that the pendulum, I won’t even say swings back, because for a few years it was tech at all costs, let’s get devices into students’ hands, and a lot of times teachers were just assigning digital worksheets and YouTube videos. Maybe the pendulum swings to a middle ground, where instruction takes center stage and technology gets used in service of that, or not, depending on the goal.
Yeah, I hope so.
I’m hopeful. We’ll see.
So, last question for you, Adam. This show is If Teachers Ruled the World, and I know you’ve been in edtech a while, but you are a teacher at heart, you taught for seven years. So my question is, if you were in charge of everything, what would your teacher law be? What law would you enact? I ask every teacher who comes on the show this question, so I’m not picking on you, I promise.
I hope this doesn’t come off as pandering, because I do believe it. I would pay teachers what they deserve to be paid. Educators are professionals in the same way a doctor or a lawyer is a professional.
Yeah, you’ve got my vote.
Teaching in China, one of the things that was most jarring was how differently Chinese culture views teachers compared to American culture. Teachers are respected a lot more in China, for a lot of reasons, but one negative side effect here is that I think teachers are underpaid and overworked. I don’t know what we could do about the overworked piece, but I know what we could do about the underpaid piece from a legislative perspective.
My law would be: let’s pay teachers not just a livable wage, but pay them based on the quality of their teaching. One of my frustrations as an educator was that it didn’t matter how much effort I put in, I’d be paid the same. I’d keep putting in the effort anyway, but if there were a way, and this is really hard to do, for a teacher to move up the pay ladder based on quality, in addition to experience and post-secondary education, I think that would be my law. I don’t know exactly what that would look like, but all of it would result in teachers being paid more.
I’ll take it. But it’s really hard to gauge quality, isn’t it? You can teach in a wealthy district with all AP and IB students who have personal tutors, and get really good results even if you’re not doing a whole lot. Whereas you can teach in a district where kids are very transient with high absenteeism, and your results might not look as good on paper, but maybe the teaching is really high quality. I’m not sure exactly how you’d gauge that, but I think I like it, Adam.
Yeah, I’m glad we don’t have to get into the details, just pay teachers more, we’ll figure that out.
Well, all right, thank you so much, I really enjoyed our conversation today. Adam Sparks, and the website is myshortanswer.com, correct?
That’s correct. I really enjoyed talking to you, and I appreciate you having me.
Yeah, well, we’ll have to have you back sometime.
Sounds good.
That was a great conversation with Adam. I’m glad I got to have it, and I’m glad you all got to hear it. We started the Summer Professional Development Series with the Tech Pendulum, went deep on AI, and got practical with five questions to decide whether technology is right for a particular activity, because our big goal this summer was to teach with intention and use technology intentionally.
We talked about rest, we talked about reimagining instruction, and we ended the series this summer with someone who has been building what we’ve been talking about: edtech that is transformative. Thank you so much for joining me this summer for this PD series.
We’re going to take two weeks off now as we all head back into the new school year. And when we come back, we are going to be launching season two, same podcast, new look. I’ll see you then.