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Teachers have always led a very basic form of personalized learning: students needing a challenge are given extra-credit assignments, while those struggling are given more attention and supplemental work. But packed classrooms and the demands of rigid curricula make it impossible to sustain at any scale, leading to the common teacher lament of being forced to teach to the middle--pushing slower kids on to the next level before they're ready while the faster learners become disengaged. "Our pacing schedule says when a kid doesn't get something, you keep moving forward and provide remediation as necessary when time allows," says Ben Newman, a math teacher at Festival Foothills. "At the same time, you have to challenge the smart kids so they're not sitting there bored. It's always, 'You already mastered that? Well, why don't you help your neighbor?' You can only ask someone to help their neighbor for so long."
"The concept of differentiating instruction on the student level has been around for years. That's sort of the holy grail of what teachers are supposed to be doing, but it's incredibly hard when you have 30 kids in your class," says Adam Newman of Education Growth Advisors, a consulting firm. Researchers have long touted the benefits of one-to-one tutoring. "It's not hard to imagine why there would be more learning that takes place with a skilled tutor than if you have a kid in a classroom of 30 spending the same amount of time getting one-size-fits-all instruction," says Chris Dede, a professor in learning technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.
It's impossible to provide one-to-one teaching on a mass scale, but technology enables us to get closer than ever before. As schools increasingly invest in computers and other digital products, students have access to a wider range of study materials, and teachers and administrators have the ability to view precise analyses of how they respond to that material, adjusting as needed. Proponents claim that these tools will allow teachers to help struggling students before they fail a test rather than discovering problems too late. The promise of these predictive metrics has set off a gold rush in education technology.
The global education market is estimated at nearly $4.6 trillion in 2013, according to research by asset-management firm GSV Advisors. A minuscule portion of it is spent on technology, but experts expect the balance to shift as the industry becomes increasingly digitized. Education-tech start-ups aimed at the K-12 market attracted more than $425 million in venture capital last year, according to the NewSchools Venture Fund. "Investors are looking at education and saying, 'Holy cow, there's a huge number of dollars being deployed here. If we can wrest free some of it, there's a huge opportunity to make money here,'" says Michael Horn, executive director for education at the Innosight Institute.