The EdTech Problem Isn't Technology. It's Market Structure.

Let me start with a number that should bother you more than it does.

Between 1990 and 2020, administrative staffing per student in U.S. public school districts grew by approximately 118%. That's according to the National Center for Education Statistics, pulling from their Common Core of Data, the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset on public school staffing we have.

118%.

In 1990, districts ran on paper. Scheduling was manual. Payroll was manual. Personnel records lived in filing cabinets. Hiring was a stack of applications and a phone call.

By 2020, virtually every district in the country had migrated to digital systems: Student Information Systems, HRIS platforms, payroll software, finance and accounting tools, and compliance tracking. Tens of billions of public dollars invested in digitizing school district operations over three decades.

And after all of that, districts needed more than twice as many administrators per student to keep the lights on.

That is not a technology success story.

Why EdTech Gets This Wrong

The standard narrative in education technology is that the problem is adoption. Districts are slow to change. Staff resist training. Implementation is messy. If we could just get everyone to use the tools correctly, the efficiency gains would follow.

I don't buy it.

I've spent enough time inside school districts, talking to HR directors, operations leads, finance staff, and principals to know that most people are genuinely trying to use the tools they have. The problem isn't that they're not adopting the technology. The problem is that the technology was never really designed to reduce their burden in the first place.

And if you look at how the EdTech market for K–12 administrative systems is actually structured, that starts to make a lot of sense.

Five Companies. Decades of Lock-In.

Here's the market reality: roughly five companies dominate the core administrative software stack in U.S. K–12 districts. Student information systems, HR platforms, payroll, finance — a small number of largely private or private equity-backed vendors capture the overwhelming majority of that spend.

Most district administrators couldn't tell you who owns the company behind their SIS. Most parents have never heard the brand names. These are not household names. They don't compete for headlines. They don't have to.

Because they have something better than brand recognition: switching costs.

When a district selects an administrative software system, they're not making a five-year decision. They're making a fifteen-to-twenty year decision. Data migration is expensive and high-risk. Staff retraining is disruptive. Integration with state reporting systems creates dependencies that are painful to unwind. Contracts often include provisions that make exit difficult and expensive.

The vendors know this. The entire business model is built around it. Win the RFP, implement the system, and then you have a captive customer who will pay annual maintenance and licensing fees for as long as they possibly can avoid the pain of leaving.

That's not a criticism of anyone's ethics. It's a description of rational market behavior inside a structure that rewards lock-in over performance.

15 to 20 Years Behind. And Nobody's Panicking.

Here's what makes this particularly frustrating. If you took the core administrative workflows inside most K–12 districts today, hiring pipelines, leave management, substitute tracking, absence reporting, payroll exceptions, and compliance documentation, and compared them to the equivalent workflows in a mid-size logistics company or healthcare system, you'd be looking at roughly a 15 to 20-year technology gap.

I don't say that to be provocative. I say it because I came from logistics operations at a major e-commerce company before starting Radar. I've seen what modern workforce management systems look like when they're designed for organizations that actually have to compete on operational efficiency. The contrast with what I see inside school districts is stark.

The difference isn't that logistics companies are smarter or more disciplined. The difference is that in a competitive market, a company with a 15-year-old workflow stack eventually loses to a competitor with a better one. The market punishes stagnation.

In K–12 administrative software, there is no equivalent punishment. The vendor doesn't lose the account because the workflow is clunky. The district doesn't leave because switching costs are too high. Everyone tolerates a system that doesn't work well because tolerating it is less painful than replacing it.

What's the result? Customer sentiment that ranges from muted to quietly miserable. When I talk to HR directors about their core platforms, I hear a lot of resigned shrugs. "It is what it is." "We've been trying to get them to fix that for years." "We just work around it."

That's not learned helplessness. That's a rational response to a market that offers no real alternative. If the only vendors with K–12 integrations and state-level compliance experience are running similar products at similar prices with similar lock-in structures, what exactly is the district supposed to do?

This Is a Market Structure Problem

I want to be precise about this, because the distinction matters.

This is not a technology problem. The technology to build better K–12 administrative tools exists and has existed for years. Modern APIs, cloud-based HR platforms, workflow automation, and data interoperability standards, none of this is exotic. Consumer and enterprise software has been doing this stuff for a decade.

This is a market structure problem.

Concentrated vendor markets with high switching costs and captive public institution buyers don't innovate. They don't have to. The competitive pressure that normally forces product improvement simply doesn't exist in sufficient form.

And the buyers, school districts, are not well-positioned to create that pressure on their own. They're public institutions operating under procurement rules that favor incumbent vendors. Their technology decision-makers are often generalists wearing many hats. They don't have the staff or budget to run rigorous competitive evaluations every few years. And even when they want to switch, the integration dependencies with state systems create a kind of structural stickiness that no individual district can easily overcome.

This is why EdTech spending has gone up while outcomes have gone sideways. The money isn't buying better systems. It's paying tolls to get through the gates that were built to keep vendors in and competition out.

What a Path Forward Actually Looks Like

I'm not arguing that districts should rip and replace everything they have. That's not realistic, and in most cases it's not even advisable. What I am arguing is that the path forward requires being honest about the structural dynamics first, because until you understand why the market produced the current situation, any proposed fix is just treating symptoms.

With that grounding, here's what I think actually moves the needle:

Start with end-user experience, not system architecture. The people who suffer most from bad administrative software are the HR coordinators, payroll administrators, and principals who use it every day. Their friction is real, measurable, and often invisible to leadership. Start there. Map the workflows that cause the most time loss and error. That becomes your roadmap, whether you're building something new or making the case to a vendor for improvements.

Layer modern tools alongside legacy systems. This is where real change is happening right now, quietly, in districts that are figuring it out. You don't have to replace the SIS to build a better hiring workflow on top of it. You don't have to replace the HRIS to add a modern applicant-facing portal. Point solutions, lightweight, API-connected tools that solve specific problems without requiring a wholesale system replacement, can dramatically improve staff experience without triggering the full switching cost equation.

Advocate for open standards. This is the longer-term lever, and it requires collective action at the state and association level. Interoperability standards that require vendors to support data portability would fundamentally change the switching cost calculus. If a district can export its data cleanly and integrate with state systems through open APIs, the lock-in erodes. That's a policy and procurement fight, but it's the right one to pick.

Where Radar Fits

This is the problem we're trying to operate inside of at Radar, and more specifically, through our work with Community Data Labs.

We're not building a replacement for the enterprise systems districts are locked into. That's not a realistic or necessary goal. What we're building are lightweight tools — purpose-built for specific, high-friction workflows — that don't require six-figure contracts, multi-year implementations, or dedicated IT teams to stand up and maintain.

The premise is simple: if you can identify the three or four workflows that consume the most time and create the most frustration, and you can build something that meaningfully improves those without disrupting the broader system, you've created real value. No RFP required. No three-year integration project. No vendor lock-in.

Districts that are tired of waiting for their enterprise vendor to fix something they've been asking about since 2017 don't need a revolution. They need a starting point.

We think we can be that starting point.

The NCES data cited in this post comes from the Digest of Education Statistics, Table 213.10: "Number of public school staff, enrollment, and pupil/staff ratios, Fall 1990 through Fall 2022."