Why school software is often stuck in the 90's

At the intersection of education & technology lies a phenomenon:

School software is usually behind by decades.

Don’t believe me? Just take a glance over the counter of your local public schools front-desk to the computer monitor, and find yourself transported to a different time. But why is this? Let’s explore some reasons from 2 perspectives:

The Schools Perspective

• Educators are SO busy, they have little time to consider new software.
• Older software often did things better than newer software
• Schools IT systems are usually under-powered, and there’s few staff to support it.
• Decisions about software choice comes from “on high” (the district)
• Data is locked-in to proprietary formats, that can’t be transferred easily.

On top of all of this, school software is “mission critical”, so once it’s working for their needs, schools justifiably think “Don’t fix what isn’t broken”.

but that’s not the only reason school software is stuck in the past.

The Software Company’s Perspective

As the main developer Spark School Software, I’ve been coming to the realization that education software is intrinsically difficult for these reasons:

• The sheer amount of feature needs for educators is overwhelming: Marketing, Communications, LMS features, SIS features…
• Children's privacy is of UTMOST importance, complicating all areas of the software solution.
• Educators need speed and convenience, increasing the importance of great UX.
• The balance between too much data entry, and not enough, is very difficult to find. Software needs to support all opinions on this matter.
• Load on servers & databases can be high when students are involved.
• Schools are often strapped for cash, meaning they can’t pay much.

So why in the world did we decide to dive into the challenging field of education software?

Is it because we are masochists? too slow to realize how difficult it’ll be? or just plain crazy? Well, perhaps a bit of the latter, but we believe God has led us to build Spark for these reasons:

Parents need more school choices for their kids,

Therefore we need more schools,

Therefore schools should be smaller & more distributed,

Smaller-school educators deserve good software for their needs

Because THEY are the ones truly achieving the impossible every day.