EDIT: Sorry for the length :) This 1 minute video with Matt Damon glosses over my points well enough http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFHJkvEwyhk

The short of it is that there hasn't been a good "X aid" that's been proposed yet that solve the classroom issues. For me, the "I've seen..." etc. opinion comes from seeing a majority of education startups claiming to be "disruptive" without doing enough due diligence in the industry. I can often tell that the bulk of the research done by the entrepreneur is thinking back to their own school days or that of their kids.

The reality is that, most likely, if you are a technology entrepreneur, you were at the top of your class your entire academic career, whether it be via GPA or through raw intelligence or through hard work. When you were in school you needed something "more" to augment your education, and the current system held you back. The entrepreneur now uses this experience to create a tool that would have sped his own learning along as a kid. It's not a "bad" assumption -- heck this was me for a while. I used to wholeheartedly believe that well-made learning games would change education forever and usher the US into a new knowledge renaissance.

However, the reality of a classroom is far different than what one would assume. The process of education is different for each student, and is so dramatically different that modern software, videos, or digital tools cannot replace a teacher. Lets go back to the "future entrepreneur in the grade school class" example. For every first grader that's light years ahead of his peers, there's another who is light years behind. A first grader who doesn't know 75% of their letters of 50% of their digits. In the same class. To assume a tailored, yet mass produced lesson will teach this class better than a trained individual is ill-fated. To tell a teacher that one could is condescending. Each class and student deserves unique, custom education, and that's what the current system provides.

Then there's the reality of a teacher's life. It's no picnic. Countless hours are spent grading, making lesson plans for the bulk of the class, coming up with extra projects for the gifted kids, and coming up with remedial training for the behind ones. On top of it all, teachers are forced to pay for the overwhelming majority of their office supplies. Need construction paper? Fork it up. Need extra copies? Fork it up. Need lamination? Fork it up. Need reading books that aren't falling apart? Fork it up. Want to get extra training to better teach your students and get a tiny pay raise? Oh, you'll definitely fork that up. The list goes on. Those expenditures make up the XYZ thousand a year that teachers spend on their classes that you see in market research reports. There's little room, if any, for software, especially if that software will ultimately do a poor job at reaching students. Bringing software in is high risk without the payment. Its the same as handing the class off to another teacher that they haven't met yet.

And there's no summer break -- just a few months without students. They're working during that time period.

Finally, the US is getting destroyed in science/math education by other nations. Those other nations are not using software to leapfrog us. They're using more interactive discussion, reasoning, and practical application of these concepts. Socratic learning, where the students lead the conceptual discussion with the teacher as a guide, not a lecture.

Things like software and videos are great for teaching small groups. I plan on buying them myself when I have kids, and I plan to have the Kahn Academy site as my homepage.

But the classroom ecosystem and supplemental learning scenarios are very different, and products developed for them should be targeted for the needs of that environment. I support innovation in the classroom wholeheartedly, but without the right level of research in developing products, you might as well be bringing a football to a basketball game :)