Dive Brief:

• Policy changes like Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluations offer business opportunities for tech companies to introduce relevant items, Edthena CEO Adam Geller wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed.
• For example, Study Island, a study aide product, got a boost from classrooms preparing for NLCB-era assessments.
• By contrast, New York’s student privacy policies helped put an end to inBloom, a longitudinal student data system.

Dive Insight:

So what current policy issues are shaping education technology? Teacher evaluations, for one. Apps intended to streamline the evaluation process and help teachers build their skills have proliferated. BloomBoard, for example, builds compliance tools, and Newsela helps teachers get ready for the Common Core.

Edthena itself is building on a new requirement from the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation that teacher training programs provide outcomes-based evidence on how their teachers do. That means assessing teachers. Edthena offers video-coaching for K-12 teachers and has worked to become an approved provider for teacher assessments that include video components.

As for the looming ESEA rewrite, it has the potential to throw open new doors and close others. If passed, it will likely tamp down the focus on high-stakes assessments, put stricter controls on student privacy, and boost focus on teacher training and student support. What that will mean for the burgeoning education technology world is not yet clear.