Has the Commercialization of Education Ruined Quality? A Teacher and Parent’s Honest Take
My daughter came home last week with a worksheet from her math program. It had bright cartoons, a QR code linking to a video, and the kind of cheerful font you’d find on a cereal box. She stared at it like it was written in Greek. “I don’t get it, Mom,” she said. “My teacher said we have to finish this for a grade.”
I looked at the problem. It was a multiplication word problem buried under three steps of extraneous visuals and a “real-world example” about a kid buying gaming tokens. The actual math was simple; the packaging made it impossible to find.
Her school spent a lot of money on that program. I know because I teach in the same district. Every year, there’s a new subscription, a new app, a new series of “personalized learning modules” that promise to close gaps and raise test scores. The glossy catalogs come to the staff room. We sit through training sessions where consultants tell us to “lean into data” and “maximize engagement.” Then we go back to our rooms and try to figure out how to fit it all into a forty-minute period.
I used to think this was the end of education as we knew it. That the corporations had won, and teaching was now just an exercise in plugging kids into software and testing them until they glazed over. The industry is huge—test prep, curriculum packages, learning management systems, online tutoring—and it can feel like a thick layer of plastic wrap over everything genuine in a school.
But I’ve been teaching long enough to notice something strange. The commercialization is loud, but it isn’t everything. Underneath all the branded materials, the same old human work is still happening—if you know where to look.
Let me back up.
Every fall, the district walks us through the newest “research-based” curriculum. They put us in a windowless room and show us graphs. A woman from the company tells us about “student ownership” and “rigor” and “engagement.” We get binders. We get login credentials. We get a poster to hang.
One year, it was a literacy program that came with a giant box of “decodable readers.” They were fine, I guess. The stories had been written by committee, so every sentence felt flat. My kids read them dutifully. Then one afternoon in October, I noticed a substitute teacher down the hall. She was reading Because of Winn-Dixie to a group of third graders, out loud, with no projector, no worksheet, no slides. She did the voices. She paused at the sad parts. The kids were sitting on the edge of their carpet squares.
That ten minutes did more for those kids’ reading fluency than any commercial program I’ve ever seen. There was nothing to buy. Just a book, a human, and time.
Here’s the thing that worries me as a parent: the products are designed to look like the real thing. A dashboard with colorful mastery badges feels like progress. A computer that tells your kid “Great job!” after every problem feels personal. But it isn’t. It’s just a very expensive mirror.
I’m not saying edtech is evil. Some of it helps. My son used a phonics app during the pandemic, and I think it kept him from falling completely behind when everything else fell apart. But there’s a difference between a tool and a teacher. And there’s a difference between something that makes a school look good on paper and something that actually helps a child think.
A few weeks ago, my daughter’s teacher did a lesson on fractions using a bag of apples and a plastic knife. She cut the apples unevenly on purpose. The kids had to figure out why the pieces weren’t equivalent. One boy kept saying, “But they’re both halves!” and the teacher kept asking, “Are they? Look at them.” He finally got it, and the look on his face was genuine. Not a badge, not a point system—just a kid who realized something.
I asked her about it later, during pickup. “Do you ever feel pressure to only use the purchased programs?” I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear her say it.
“Every day,” she said. “But if I just run the slides, the kids don’t learn. They learn when I talk to them and they make mistakes. The program can’t hear them. I can.”
The most honest way to describe the current state of education is this: we are drowning in expensive stuff, but we still have to teach our own way through it. Commercialization hasn’t ruined quality so much as it has buried it. Quality is still there—in the conversations, the messy experiments, the read-alouds, the arguments about whether a character made a good choice. You just have to be willing to dig it out.
As a parent, you can help with that digging. You don’t have to be a teacher to do it.
When your child comes home with a packet full of glossy pages, ask them what the actual assignment was. Not the QR code. Not the graphic organizer. What did they have to figure out? If they can’t tell you, that’s a red flag that the product did the thinking for them.
Ask your child’s teacher about the programs they’re required to use. Most teachers are refreshingly honest about which ones they love and which ones they roll their eyes at. Frame it as curiosity, not accusation. “What’s genuinely helpful this year, and what’s just filling time?” You might be surprised by what you hear.
And maybe most importantly, pay attention to the moments when your kid is engaged in a way that has nothing to do with screens or incentives. That’s the signal you’re looking for. It might be a chapter book they’re reading on the couch. It might be a question they keep asking about dinosaurs or space or why the sky changes color. Protect that. It isn’t flashy, and it won’t show up on a dashboard, but it’s where the real learning lives.
I don’t know if commercialization has permanently ruined education. Most days, I don’t think it has—it’s just made it harder to see the good stuff. It’s louder. It’s shinier. It takes up an awful lot of our time as teachers and parents.
But last night, my daughter came to my bedroom at 10 p.m. with her math textbook. “We don’t have homework,” I said. “I know,” she said. “I wanted to ask you about the word problem. The one I was supposed to do today.”
She sat on the edge of my bed and showed me the problem. It was about fractions, but it was written in this bizarre scenario about buying pizza slices for a party. She had been stuck on it all day, not because it was hard, but because she kept getting distracted by the silly pictures and the “fun fact” sidebar.
I put my finger over the pictures. “Just read the words,” I said. She did. She solved it in about forty seconds.
“Wait, that’s it?” she asked.
“That’s it,” I said.
She went back to her room. I sat there for a while, thinking about the substitute teacher and the apples and the expensive binders sitting unopened on a shelf somewhere.
The products are never going to leave. That’s probably the most realistic thing I can say. But neither are the people. And as long as a teacher can cut an apple in half and a parent can cover up a cartoon with her thumb, I think the actual stuff of education—the slow, human, often unglamorous process of figuring things out—has a way of surviving.
It just doesn’t come with a login.
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