How teachers and ed tech can help each other

In the 1990s, computer access was a reward for students. I remember the glee of playing Number Munchers after finishing a period’s work. This was the extent of incorporating technology into the classroom. Times have changed. Technology has evolved, but we have two issues. We struggle to equip teachers with the tools to use new technologies effectively. We also struggle to compensate highly effective teachers altogether. Fortunately, we can solve both problems at once.

Education technology (ed tech) has become a massive, multimillion-dollar sector within the American economy. Companies like Khan Academy, Kahoot, and Chegg offer valuable learning tools for kids (and adults) around the United States (and the world). They also rake in millions of dollars in profits each year. Khan Academy, for instance, brings in close to $50 million in revenue each year, and its nonprofit status means the profits are tax exempt. Larger tech companies, like Google and Microsoft, generate profits that dwarf those of Khan Academy partially through making tools that are used in schools. In sum, a massive tech sector is profiting from American schools. More of these profits need to be reinvested in the schools these companies rely on.

What should that investment look like? There are lots of possibilities, but I want to focus on one idea. Ed tech companies should more systematically incorporate teachers, especially teachers of color and teachers serving vulnerable subgroups of students, into their corporate board apparatus. More simply, large ed tech companies should start rotating teachers onto their corporate boards or develop advisory boards made up of current teachers.

The benefits for teachers

Corporate board positions are quietly lucrative financial opportunities. A recent study conducted by Lodestone Global, a leading international board development firm, finds that corporate board members receive, on average, an estimated $49,200 of additional annual earnings and that board member compensation can reach as high as $500,000 per year.

Juxtapose this to the average public school teacher base salary, which was $66,397 in 2021-22 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). Imagine what even a fourth of the average board member salary could mean for boosting the average salary of a teacher. A teacher in Mississippi could go from making the state average of $47,162 to making more than $59,000. These would be meaningful salary increases going to some of our society’s most undervalued professionals.

The primary challenge is designing corporate governance structures to incorporate as many teachers as possible. Corporate boards are meant to be small deliberative bodies that convene periodically to evaluate the performance of the company and offer insights on how to maintain success. They typically are made up of no more than 15 members to avoid the problem of having too many cooks in the kitchen. However, if the hundreds of ed tech companies already out there (and the new ones emerging) add designated seats for teachers or create an entire separate paid advisory board for teachers, they could widely circulate opportunity to hundreds, even thousands, of teachers.

How exactly do you circulate the opportunities? Companies could seek out recommendations from principals, district leaders, peers, or even parents and students. It could be an honor reserved for teachers who demonstrate a consistent level of effectiveness in the classroom, especially among students with the greatest needs and disadvantages. If companies build relationships with specific districts and agree to select teachers from those districts, company board membership could be a tool districts use to reward and retain their best teachers without adding additional strain to district budgets. And it would be an opportunity for districts to spread out honors to teachers beyond identifying 50 state or one national Teacher of the Year.

Ed tech companies could create entire corporate advisory boards made up of teachers.

Alternatively, districts could use random selection for determining which teachers receive stints on ed tech boards. The selection process, however, could be weighted based on factors like underrepresentation in the workforce, personal student loan debt, and/or the gravity of the needs a teacher’s students face. This method turns board opportunities into a way to recognize and deepen the confidence of the less-heralded teacher who is trying their best.

To spread opportunities even further, ed tech companies could create entire corporate advisory boards made up of teachers. Each ed tech company generating revenues of more than $10 million could partner with an urban district and agree to sponsor an advisory board of eight to 12 teachers each year who would be compensated for providing their expertise. If 100 companies participated, up to 1,200 teachers a year could receive meaningful supplemental income. If we expand the size of the advisory boards, the number of teachers awarded the opportunity could expand exponentially.

According to the Pew Research Center (Schaeffer, 2019), 16% of teachers take on summer jobs to supplement their income and keep up with rising living costs. Half of those jobs are completely outside of the school context. Wouldn’t it be better for them to receive compensation for their expertise? Corporate board participation is a way to accomplish that.

The benefits for ed tech

Why would ed tech companies do this? The lack of teachers on ed tech boards is a glaring weakness. My research assistant, Kiyara Leis, and I analyzed the boards of a sample of ed tech companies based on a list compiled by an online tech startup community called Built In. They highlighted a total of 63 ed tech companies. We researched each company’s board to analyze the professional backgrounds of their board members.

Only 35% of the companies provide information on their board members. Among that 35%, professionals with business/corporate backgrounds make up a vast majority (77%) of the boards. Only one company, Great Minds, has current teachers on its executive board. Teachers, on average, only represent 2% of ed tech board membership in our sample.

The lack of representation helps explain the issues with application. More than a decade of research reveals teachers’ unfamiliarity with emerging technology and discomfort with integrating it into the classrooms (Franklin, 2007; Nikolopoulou, 2020; Wood et al., 2005). This problem isn’t necessarily going away as younger, more tech-savvy teachers enter classrooms. In a 2023 report from the International Society for Technology in Education, 56% of the incoming teachers surveyed expressed low confidence in their ability to use learning technology in the classroom. And as new technologies emerge, teachers will need to figure out how best to use them. Consider, for example, the rapidly emerging questions about artificial intelligence (Collins, 2023).

One way to narrow the teacher technology gap is to create better feedback loops between teachers and the companies designing the technology. What better way to create those feedback loops than by having teachers be part of the company’s governance structure? Teachers should be at the forefront of helping companies see the strengths and weaknesses of the technologies they’re developing. They should be much more than a miniscule 2%. Having a governing role makes the teachers more invested in the feedback they provide and in the ultimate success of the technology.

Ultimately, incorporating teachers into ed tech board governance is about making the American education system more equitable. The COVID-19 pandemic vastly accelerated schools’ reliance on technology (Ferdig et al., 2020). If the teacher shortages persist, technology will enable districts to continue serving students despite human capital losses. Technology will either be the ladder that helps our kids climb to new heights or the shovel used to dig an even deeper hole. A way to make sure we are reaching for the ladder is to have teachers and technology companies building and engineering together.

References

Collins, J.E. (2023). Policy Solutions: Policy questions for ChatGPT and artificial intelligence. Phi Delta Kappan, 104 (7), 60-61.

Ferdig, R.E., Baumgartner, E., Hartshorne, R., Kaplan-Rakowski, R., & Mouza, C. (Eds.). (2020). Teaching, technology, and teacher education during the COVID-19 pandemic: Stories from the field. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.

Franklin, C. (2007). Factors that influence elementary teachers use of computers. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 15 (2), 267-293.

International Society for Technology in Education. (2023). Transforming teacher education. Lodestone Global.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Table 211.60. Estimated average annual salary of teachers in public elementary and secondary schools, 1969-70 through 2021-22. Digest of Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education.

Nikolopoulou, K. (2020). Secondary education teachers’ perceptions of mobile phone and tablet use in classrooms: benefits, constraints, and concerns. Journal of Computers in Education, 7 (2), 257-275.

Schaeffer, K. (2019). About one-in-six U.S. teachers work second jobs — and not just in the summer. Pew Research Center.

Wood, E., Mueller, J., Willoughby, T., Specht, J., & Deyoung, T. (2005). Teachers’ perceptions: Barriers and supports to using technology in the classroom. Education, Communication & Information, 5 (2), 183-206.

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This article appears in the February 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 5, p. 60-61.