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How the AI-enabled race for taxpayer money starts in a superintendent’s inbox

Strange meetings keep appearing on Heidi Sipe’s Google calendar.

The superintendent for the Umatilla School District in eastern Oregon never requested these meetings. But sales representatives selling education technology have found their way onto her calendar anyway. Sipe says it’s the latest tactic from education technology companies racing for her district’s business.

Every week, Sipe roots through these unwanted invites and hundreds of other messages in her inbox from these companies. They offer her and her 1,500-student district “transformative experiences,” “memorable strategies,” and “research-backed answers.” There is seemingly no limit on buzzwords or emails. But her budget for software, online training, AI tools, and curriculum is far from infinite.

Sipe isn’t the only school superintendent who says their inbox is bursting at the seams. asked her and four other superintendents from New York to Oregon to share the sales pitches emailed to them in one day in March. In total, they shared 90 messages from 79 companies offering everything from 3D frog dissection simulations to AI training to student fingerprint scanning. The sheer avalanche of options makes the task of finding a quality tool that much harder. The superintendents also said they’ve found the flood of emails takes away their time and attention.

While the endless march of marketing emails is a familiar irritation for Americans, ed tech companies are targeting taxpayer dollars. , but . Ed tech companies, meanwhile, don’t seem to be slowing down — industry leaders say entrepreneurs now face fewer obstacles to creating new products, because they can use AI to quickly spin up a new tool and the marketing emails to promote it.

The backdrop to all this is a confusing moment for education and technology. School district leaders are thinking about how to rapidly adapt to the AI boom at the same time .

“It’s just a lot of energy drain that goes towards responding to this, in my opinion, instead of being focused on providing what students really need,” said Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of the Harrison School District in Colorado Springs, and one of the five superintendents who shared pitches with Chalkbeat.

AI fuels flood of ed tech marketing emails

Chris Ryan, who worked in ed tech sales for decades and , said new AI-powered and advanced online marketing tools are part of the problem. They’re “finding ways in, faster than we realized.”

Sales representatives have more tools at their disposal to reach more districts than they used to, he said. And these more aggressive tactics are magnified for smaller districts, where superintendents are already strapped for time. He recalled once making a sales call to a superintendent of a rural district in Texas who had to leave the call to drive a school bus, because the driver didn’t show up.

“I don’t know that vendors understand how demanding that role is,” he said.

Ryan thinks he might know why Sipe is suddenly getting unsolicited calendar invites.

Recently, he sent a district staff member an unsolicited calendar invite. It was an accident, done through AI email marketing software and what Ryan admits was his sloppy prompting.

Birhanzel said the sales pitches often feel scattershot, advertising to solve problems her district doesn’t have.

For instance, she gets a lot of marketing for data collection. But she doesn’t need more data collection. In one day, she got emails from companies separately touting student academic data collection, employee data collection, and visitor data collection.

“Many of these sales people haven’t done their research,” she said.

And sometimes the promises companies make don’t add up. Several superintendents said they’ve bought tools that flopped.

Birhanzel said her 12,000-student district once backed out of a contract after a data company failed to even transfer district data to its service. Curtis Finch, superintendent of the Deer Valley Unified School district in Phoenix, said in his early days as a district administrator, he didn’t push companies enough about whether their products would integrate into a district’s existing system.

Because Deer Valley is a relatively big district, Finch has an instructional technology team to talk to app developers to truly see if a new technology will fit in the district. With 4,000 employees serving 31,000 students, not vetting products well can be a costly mistake.

“If I’m changing a thing that impacts 4,000 people, I have to train everyone on this new system, and it takes years to get everybody up to speed,” he said.

Ed tech marketing overload makes leaders’ jobs harder

Chalkbeat attempted to email every company that emailed the five superintendents. Most did not respond to a request for comment. A few emails bounced back. One company’s automated email system only succeeded in directing a reporter back and forth between a form and an email address.

Some of the companies that did respond acknowledged that there’s a lot of competition in the ed tech industry, but that they try to be relevant and useful in the marketing they send.

One of the emails that ended up in a superintendent’s inbox was from a company called Digitability. The message advertised a “financial ‘slam dunk’” — this was March, a peak time for college basketball — and the company’s financial literacy program, with a link to download a March Madness-themed financial literacy activity.

Digitability’s founder, Michele McKeone, is a former special education teacher who built the company out of frustration that there weren’t enough tools to equip students with disabilities with practical skills. She said Digitability’s slam dunk email went to prospective customers on the company’s mailing list, indicating the superintendent may have already engaged with their website.

“Most of our customers find us in some meaningful way.”

But crowded inboxes and a glut of choices — in an industry where there’s little regulation — isn’t helping school district leaders make smart choices, superintendents said.

In some states, districts can turn to other government authorities for help.

Alicia Gallegos Butters, director of educational technology at the San Diego County Office of Education doesn’t keep a list of products to recommend, but tries to assess a district’s need when pointing them to a particular product.

The federal government’s . It outlines what would be considered strong evidence, as well as when a tool might have less evidence behind it but still demonstrates a strong-enough rationale to use. But that framework fails to address some key concerns in ed tech, like data collection and student privacy issues.

Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, or ISTE, said his organization has developed denoting whether a tool is evidence-based to help superintendents and instruction officers make more informed decisions, in part because it’s clear that they’re overwhelmed.

The index — an ongoing project — uses a combination of validations from third-party organizations and ISTE’s own seal. Companies can submit their own research, but ISTE also reviews the product to verify claims, a spokesperson wrote in an emailed response to questions. Proving whether something is evidence-based can be imprecise, .

“There’s no way to browse the options,” Culatta said. “I think if that existed … schools could go and say, ‘here’s what I need.’ And you wouldn’t have to be in this case where they’re relying on these weird dysfunctional behaviors to get stuff in front of them.”

As for Sipe? She just wants fewer emails.

“If I’m seeking something, I’m not going to find it from an unsolicited email,” she said. 

Edited by Erica Meltzer and Andrew Ujifusa

Development and data analysis by Thomas Wilburn

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