While conversations about edtech often organically lead into discussion about lack of efficacy research, or sometimes even go deeper to consider Laurence Holt’s “5% problem” (the reality that even randomized controlled trials showing causal impact exclude about 95% of learners because they do not meet usage requirements), we rarely point to the systemic root cause of the issues: procurement.
Too often, edtech procurement processes are fragmented and disconnected from classroom context. Consequently, the average district accesses nearly 3,000 distinct edtech tools in a single school year with no real evidence of return on investment. Without a standardized, systemic framework, education leaders juggling competing priorities must rely on compliance-based checklists, creating an opaque purchasing landscape that leaves an estimated 65% of licenses completely unused. This inefficiency makes edtech software the largest source of wasted spending in K-12 districts, equating to over $5.6 billion wasted annually in the U.S.
Digital Promise’s new EdTech Procurement Framework is designed to support district teams with bridging this gap, moving past isolated buying habits toward a system that leverages collaborative, transparent, and intentional procurement processes.
After researching and codifying recommended practices to conduct edtech pilots, Digital Promise launched the EdTech Pilot Framework. That launch—10 years ago—was in an era focused on figuring out how to test a single tool in a classroom. But a decade of partnering with districts, schools, and nonprofits has taught us that small-scale pilots are no longer enough to fix a noisy, fragmented market.
To map out a successful purchasing ecosystem, Digital Promise spent the last decade studying procurement processes and analyzing innovative edtech purchasing models, such as Denver Public Schools’ cross-functional evaluation approach, the inaugural national cohort leveraging Outcomes-Based Contracting (OBC), and the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office’s learner- and practitioner-centered co-design strategy.
The insights from this research are clear and actionable:
Building on these research insights, Digital Promise’s newly launched EdTech Procurement Framework offers an intentional, transparent roadmap designed to establish explicit, collaborative decision-making processes. Rather than treating procurement as a discrete task, this framework helps teams incorporate it into a coherent ecosystem by establishing identified needs, building implementation plans, managing budgets strategically, and collecting meaningful data to ensure classroom technology delivers an actual return on investment.
The EdTech Procurement Framework offers a comprehensive, six-step structure:
1. Analyze & Inventory: Conducting a needs assessment first enables teams to analyze actual student data to clearly determine where instructional interventions are most needed before looking at software options.
2. Discover & Decide: Establishing clear quality standards while researching intervention options empowers teams to hold edtech tools to rigorous criteria, ensuring selected products align with data-based needs and community priorities.
3. Design & Plan: Co-designing implementation plans with providers and educators results in defined usage expectations and professional learning, establishing a monitoring plan to ensure tools can be used effectively.
4. Mobilize & Implement: Engaging educators in the design and launch of the implementation strategy builds instructional ownership, establishes clear intention for tool use, and provides educators with the necessary support to manage and track usage.
5. Evaluate & Reflect: Through collaborative data analysis, teams can assess implementation alignment to classroom contexts and student engagement alongside academic metrics to measure the tool’s holistic impact on learners.
6. Sustain & Scale: Leveraging comprehensive outcomes data empowers education leaders to make objective, evidence-driven choices about whether a tool should be scaled, adjusted, or discontinued.
Finding evidence-based edtech products to pilot can still feel like searching in the dark. To make the process simpler for schools and districts, Digital Promise, 1EdTech, CAST, CoSN, ISTE, and SETDA co-developed the Five EdTech Quality Indicators to provide a unified definition of what high-quality technology looks like: Safe, Evidence-Based, Inclusive, Usable, and Interoperable.
As a partner in the EdTech Quality Collaborative (EQC), we’re excited to share a new practical resource for education leaders to supplement this revamped framework: the EdTech Quality Indicator Guide.
This timely asset bridges the gap between theory and practice by explicitly identifying exactly where these five quality indicators should live within a district’s active procurement workflow. Furthermore, it outlines how leaders can confidently leverage trusted, third-party certifications, hosted on the EdTech Index, to streamline product quality evaluation processes, saving administrative time and minimizing the validation burden from individual school systems.
We are entering an era where edtech can no longer enter classrooms through isolated, unmeasured experiments. By shifting toward a structured, mutually accountable ecosystem, educational leaders can turn edtech procurement into an intentional, transparent, community-based approach to drive meaningful student growth and ensure strategic resource management.
