State of the Education Technology Market: What to Expect in 2026 and Beyond
"Most companies are happy just to be flat this year."
That is Chad Johnson, managing partner at Cherry Tree & Associates and a 25-year veteran of the education market, describing the current state of edtech in Tech & Learning. He means it as good news. After a couple of years where renewals were tough and new business was tougher, flat is a recovery.
Sit with that for a second, because it explains a lot about the vendor emails in your inbox.
Johnson's read is that the ESSER hangover is still working through the system. Districts got an enormous slug of federal money starting in 2020, spent it on licenses and devices and platforms, and then the money stopped. Schools reset their budget expectations. Vendors, who had staffed up and priced up accordingly, are now resetting theirs. He expects the cycle to turn eventually, because education budgets always lag the broader economy in both directions.
The pockets he says are doing well are STEM curriculum and career and technical education. Everything else is treading water.
Here is why this belongs on your desk and not just your CFO's. A vendor sitting at flat revenue does one of three things: gets acquired, gets aggressive on pricing, or gets quietly worse at support. Johnson's actual job is arranging the first one. He advises entrepreneurs and private equity firms who are selling education companies, and a leveling market is exactly when that pipeline fills up.
So when your student information system or your filtering vendor or your single sign-on provider announces a "strategic partnership" in the next eighteen months, you already know what that means for your roadmap and your renewal price.
Which is the argument for pulling your contract dates into one spreadsheet this fall and knowing, cold, which of your vendors you could actually walk away from. Some of them are counting on the answer being none of them.
Featured articles
Kids Online Safety Act clears key Senate panel with bipartisan support
The Kids Online Safety Act is back on the Senate floor after clearing Commerce by voice vote, with 76 cosponsors behind it. The Senate already passed it once, 91-3, in 2024. The House let it die. Three companion bills on AI privacy, chatbots, and AI toys advanced alongside it.
None of this regulates you directly. It regulates the platforms your students use, which means your filtering vendors and MDM suites will spend next year selling you "KOSA compliance" modules for a law that governs somebody else.
How the costly digital age is leaving behind rural, underfunded schools
Matthew Splain, superintendent of Otto-Eldred in rural McKean County, Pennsylvania, is watching refurbished laptops die in students' hands. That's the whole story, and WHYY tells it well: districts in the mountains running on hand-me-down hardware while the rest of the sector debates AI pilots.
If you have ever inherited a fleet someone else already used up, you know the math. Refurb saves money once. It costs you every year after that in tickets, in swap stock, in the twelve minutes a kid loses waiting on a loaner.
Cheap devices are not cheap. They just move the bill to your desk.
Gemini in Google Classroom is expanding to users of all ages, with contextualized Gemini starter prompts for students
Vendor Perspective: On August 10, Gemini in Google Classroom drops the age floor. It was educators, then higher ed students 18 and up, and now K12 students of all ages, provided you have already granted them Gemini access. That last clause is the whole story. If you turned Gemini on broadly for students at some point in the last year and forgot about it, second graders get contextualized starter prompts on the tenth whether or not anyone at your district discussed it.
Check your Workspace access settings this week!
Schools are building AI rules before they know the destination
Most district AI policies I have read are acceptable use policies wearing a costume. They say what students cannot do with a chatbot. They say almost nothing about what students should be able to do with one by graduation. Scott Laband's argument in eSchool News is that we started writing rules before anyone answered the actual question: what do kids need to learn here?
That gap lands on you eventually. Every policy that stops at prohibition turns into a filtering ticket, a blocklist request, a teacher asking why Gemini works in one building and not the next.
You cannot enforce your way to a curriculum.
Tech tip of the week
Test Chromebook imaging process with latest OS version before deployment
The image you validated in June is not the image that will land on those Chromebooks in August. Google will have pushed two or three stable channel releases by then, and enrollment behavior, extension compatibility, and your kiosk configs all ride on whatever version the device pulls down out of the box.
So pull one device out of the cart before you touch the other four hundred. Powerwash it, let it update to current stable, then enroll it fresh against your production OU and watch what actually happens. Does the network config apply before login? Do your force-installed extensions land, or does one of them now throw a permissions prompt? Does the printer show up?
If you pin OS versions in Admin console device settings, confirm the pin is still valid. Google retires old milestones, and a pin pointing at a dead version silently means no updates at all.
Fifteen minutes with one Chromebook beats a help desk queue in week one.
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