“Hurling Money” at Edtech: Understanding Public Funding, Private Profit, and Union Resistance during COVID-19

• In Event: Interrogating Education, Technology & Capitalism in Chicago and Beyond

Proposal

In the context of the COVID crisis, concerns for student, teacher, and administrator survival, together with the urgency of returning to teaching and learning, the infrastructure and technology necessary for virtual schooling, and the availability of billions of federal dollars in emergency funding for schools, led to the most significant, albeit temporary, privatization of US schooling in history, where almost all of the teaching, learning, and administrative encounters occurred through the medium of for-profit technology and telecommunications companies.

For a brief moment in history, beginning in mid-March 2020, the US public paid massive amounts of money to these for-profit companies to facilitate virtual education through contracts with school districts. Very few restrictions were placed on this funding to ensure it was meeting district needs in this moment of crisis (Silberstein and Roza 2024).

This presentation broadly asks, who profited from public money during the pandemic, and how did the political contexts of cities/counties and states in the US shape the terrain of profit from edtech? Using the cases of public school districts in Chicago, Illinois, the host site of CIES 2025, and Orlando, Florida, we explore the financial politics of teaching and learning during the pandemic by focusing on which edtech companies had and/or received contracts from these districts and which investors invested in these edtech companies before, during, and after the pandemic.

We situate our analysis within a conceptualization of the expansion of edtech and for-profit schools as ultimately predicated on “educational capitalisation” (Authors et.al., 2024). Drawing on Muniesa et. al.’s (2017, 11), educational capitalisation is the set of uneven racialized, gendered, classed, and geographic processes and social relations through which education is valued in terms of expected monetary return on investment. In this paper, we consider the institutionalized contracting, budgeting and investment processes and relationships through which this valuation occurs.

To understand this moment, connections, and profit, we draw on data provided to us by both Crunchbase and Pitchbook, along with Chicago Public Schools and Orlando Public Schools budgets and edtech contracts between 2019-2024, and interviews with key stakeholders in both venture capital and districts. We also looked at budget applications made for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund to identify priority areas, budgetary needs and rationale. In our analysis, we empirically examine which companies received contracts and/or purchases and which investors invested in those companies by looking at school district contracts and VC investments prior to, during, and after the pandemic. We also investigate how the different politics of school reopenings at the city/county and state levels, including the demands of teacher unions and parent organizations, shaped opportunities for profit. Moreover, we consider how the technological infrastructure and corporate-school relationships put into place prior to the pandemic in these districts set a foundation for the financial opportunities created by the pandemic. In examining these different dimensions, we explore the different stories and global connections that shaped the provision of education during this moment of crisis.

Authors

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge

• Klint Kanopka, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

• Tyler J Hook, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

• Shahnaaz Khan, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• María Fernanda Rodríguez, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Mariam Sedighi, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Sofya Smyslova, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge