Has commercialized education already ruined what made schools good? A teacher parent’s honest take
The school gym smelled like cold pizza and rain-soaked jackets. I was sitting on a folding chair that had been donated by a local funeral home—yes, that funeral home—listening to the principal explain why we needed to raise twelve thousand dollars for a new “personalized learning platform.” The PTA president nodded along, and the screen behind the podium showed a cartoon owl wearing a graduation cap. A second-grade teacher near me was scrolling through her phone, and I caught a glimpse of her screen: she was looking at a Facebook Marketplace listing for used math manipulatives.
Someone raised their hand. “Does the platform actually work?”
The principal smiled. “It’s adaptive. Each student gets their own path.”
That wasn’t an answer, but the meeting moved on.
I’ve been a teacher for fifteen years, and a parent for nine. I’ve watched our school’s hallway bulletin boards go from student artwork to advertisements for reading apps. I’ve sat in faculty meetings where we were told to “leverage the new phonics software” while the copy machine stayed broken. And I’ve been the parent who paid thirty dollars a month for a math app because the school’s math curriculum felt like it was designed to sell supplemental materials rather than teach division.
So when someone asks whether commercialization has permanently ruined education, I don’t think in abstract terms. I think about that cold pizza in the gym, and the tired teacher next to me looking for secondhand counting blocks.
Here’s the thing. The gym smells like pizza because our school rents out its cafeteria on weekends to a catering company. That money buys the lost recess equipment. The tired teacher is my friend Helena, and she can’t afford new counters for her classroom, so she’s combing Facebook. The personalized learning platform costs the school eleven thousand dollars a year, and it replaced a math program that was honestly pretty good, just not as flashy. The company that makes the platform offers a free trial, and the kids love it because it feels like a video game. The parents love it because there’s a parent dashboard that shows progress in pretty colors. The teachers hate it because it doesn’t align with state standards, but they weren’t asked.
And yet, I’m not sure “permanently ruined” is the right phrase. Because the deeper issue isn’t that companies make money off kids. We’ve always bought workbooks. Scholastic book orders have been around for decades. Even my own grandmother used to sell educational encyclopedias door-to-door in the 1950s. The problem is subtler. It’s that the incentives have shifted so far toward profit that actual learning—messy, slow, human learning—has become a byproduct rather than the goal.
Let me give you an example from my own classroom. Last spring, I had a group of third graders struggling with fractions. They had an app for that. Two apps, actually. One was newer, more expensive, and had gadgets where you could earn virtual coins. The other was a free printable worksheet that I’d run off on the school’s dying printer. The kids begged for the app. They’d spend twenty minutes tapping at a screen, earning coins, and they’d answer fraction questions correctly in the app. But when I sat with them at a table and handed them a paper plate, scissors, and markers, and asked them to cut the plate into thirds, they froze. They didn’t know what a third was. They only knew how to tap the right place on a screen.
That’s not ruin. That’s a particular kind of failure that feels worse than ruin, because the kids think they’re learning. The parents think the kids are learning. The app company posts glowing testimonials. The district buys the upgrade. But the actual understanding isn’t there.
Now, here’s where I get complicated. I’ve also seen commercialization do things the old system couldn’t. I’ve seen a struggling reader who wouldn’t touch a paper book but would read for forty minutes on a tablet because the font was bigger and the background color was adjustable. I’ve seen a free online program help a dyslexic kid spell words that three years of traditional instruction missed. I’ve seen a district negotiate a contract with a learning software company so that low-income families get free access at home—something that used to be unimaginable when you had to drive your kid to a tutoring center.
So is it permanently ruined? I think the word “permanently” is too strong. But “ruined” in some places, for some kids, yes. And the reason is the same reason a school gym smells like cold pizza. We’ve convinced ourselves that education is a product like any other. You put in a little money, you get out a measurable output. Test scores go up, engagement minutes go up, parent app logins go up. But the real things—curiosity, patience, the willingness to be confused, the joy of finally getting it after nine failed attempts—those don’t track well in a dashboard. So they get quietly de-prioritized.
What can we do about it? I don’t have a sweeping answer. But I’ve made a few small, practical rules for myself and for the parents who ask me for advice.
First, I ask one question about any educational product: What happens when the free trial ends? If the answer is “you need to renew the subscription,” I’m wary. Not because paying for things is wrong, but because the exit strategy tells me what the company is really selling. Is the product a tool, or is it a dependency?
Second, I time how long my own daughter can use an app before she stops asking questions. Real learning produces questions. A good app might produce answers, but a great one produces “why” and “what if.” If she’s just collecting stars, that’s not learning, no matter what the marketing says.
Third, I talk to teachers—not administrators, not tech coaches, but actual teachers—about what they’d buy with five hundred dollars. Their answers are always boring. Paper. Printer ink. A new carton of scissors. A class set of novels that aren’t falling apart. I’ve never once heard a teacher say “a new adaptive learning platform.”
Finally, as a parent, I’ve learned to consciously resist the panic that commercialization thrives on. The ads say “your child is falling behind” and “don’t wait until it’s too late.” And sure, sometimes that’s true. But I’ve also learned that a kid who is bored in math might just need to play with blocks for an afternoon, not another app subscription. A kid who hates reading might need to pick their own crummy comic book, not a “leveled library” that someone is trying to sell me.
So, has commercialization permanently ruined education? No. It’s made it worse in some ways, better in a few others, and infinitely more confusing. My daughter came home yesterday with a homework packet that had three pages of math problems and a QR code for a “bonus challenge” that led to a free trial of a reading program. I threw the packet away and we baked a cake instead. She measured the flour with a 1/3 measuring cup and got it exactly right, because she missed the stop on pouring. And when she scraped the excess off, she looked at me and said, “So that’s what a third is.”
The math app will still be there tomorrow. The cake is already gone. And I still don’t know if we’re winning or losing this fight. But I do know that the moments when education actually works are almost always the ones that cost nothing.
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