Brookings35%
From access to impact 58%
By Molly Curtiss Wyss0% Brad Olsen0%
7/6/2026, 3:57:30 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Indoctrination, and Optimism Bias, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 16.9% saturation with 86 hits. Analysis detected 828 faulty-reasoning hits from 510 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 54.7% and a BS Rank of 58% (8,795 of 20,495 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 57.10% of the article peer group.
In the past decade, especially since COVID-19, interest in education technology (EdTech) has surged to expand learning, boost access, and improve education.
Despite rising investment, little evidence exists on how governments choose and scale digital innovations, the forces influencing decisions, and how scalability, political economy, and sustainability are considered.
Filling this gap is vital for equitable, lasting learning improvements.
This brief addresses this gap by bringing together existing research on scaling the impact of promising or proven innovations (Brock 2026; Cooley and Linn 2024; Fullan and Pomfret 1977) with analysis on government decisionmaking around education reform in low- and middle-income countries (Carney and Klerides 2020; Kucirkova et al.
2026; Mundy 2007; Olsen 2023).
Drawing on this work and interviews conducted with key stakeholders, the brief examines the forces informing decisions about EdTech in South and Southeast Asia and the constraints and enabling factors that shape the scaling process.
This brief is written for decisionmakers in central and subnational government, local officials, funding representatives, private-sector EdTech providers, and researchers.
It offers analysis organized around three dimensions—motivation, feasibility, and sustainability—and proposes recommendations for making clearer, better-informed decisions around scaling EdTech.
After reviewing key literature specific to the focal regions, conducting a dozen interviews with key stakeholders, and triangulating findings against a decade of our own research on scaling, the central takeaway is that decisionmaking about EdTech in these contexts often prioritizes motivation for and feasibility of scaling over sustainability and evidence.
This runs a high risk of worsening existing inequities, contributing to policy and implementation fragmentation, and hindering the impact of scaling.
But with greater intentionality around evidence and sustainability, scaling efforts can be designed so that the benefits of EdTech outweigh the risks.
Recommendations for decisionmakers
1.
Start with a focus on the hardest-to-reach locations and users.
Design, select, and test innovations with low-resource, low-connectivity settings in mind from the beginning.
Scale and equity are not tradeoffs; they complement each other.
2.
Focus on the purpose, not the product.
Before adopting an EdTech innovation, clearly identify the intended change, how it will occur, and how the impact will be measured.
Do not be afraid to decline innovations that do not fit this vision—especially popular ones.
3.
Strengthen institutional capacity as a core scaling strategy.
Prioritize effective, ongoing professional development for teachers and local/middle-tier education officials.
Foster in-house expertise across all levels of the system.
4.
Invest in contextualization of innovations.
Collaborate with teachers, students, and parent organizations in the piloting, adaptation, and scaling of EdTech solutions.
Encourage the development of innovations tailored specifically to the local context.
5.
Prioritize interoperability and system coherence at all levels.
Ensure up-to-date national guidance exists on safe, effective, and inclusive EdTech adoption in schools, and that policies are regularly updated in response to new evidence and emerging technologies.
Create clear structures for coordination across teams and departments.
6.
Fund, support, and demand data on the impact of EdTech, including its effectiveness, relevance, inclusion, and sustainability.
Recognize when it is time to move on from an innovation that is not showing impact.
Speakers
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Analysis
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