After years in staffrooms and leadership briefings, rewriting and updating policy and working through risk reviews around the use of EdTech tools and social media, I have witnessed the same thing quietly surface almost every time, only in different words. Many decisions about which technologies to use are being made by people who simply have not been given the chance to know what is actually happening inside the tools we are putting in front of children. Not in the gentle, hand-wavy sense of...

What you are about to read is a condensed and updated version of my long-form essay, The Quiet Front Line. This version includes recent developments, among them the Polymarket scandal, which emerged after the original was published, and that felt too important, too revealing, to leave sitting on the sidelines. If this piece moves you, or makes you want to understand more, the full essay is waiting for you over on Substack. The conversation there goes further. So does the discomfort. But so...

The story being told is smaller than what is actually happening. When the chatter is all innovation and efficiency and extraordinary possibility we need to ask bigger questions because underneath it, something else is always taking shape. What I have learned over my years in the industry is that every major technological shift follows exactly the same pattern. 1.     The technology arrives fast. 2.     All of the excitement, innovation and positives hit the media cycles. 3.     The harm...