Robert De Niro spent an entire movie franchise deciding whether Ben Stiller belonged inside the circle of trust (Meet the Parents fans, rise up), and he still ran a sharper vetting process than most vendor evaluations do.
Pitches for virtual school programs open with product screenshots and land on pricing tiers, which answers a logistics question nobody in the room was losing sleep over.
The real worry is far more understated. Districts want to know whether a partner eventually competes with them for students, and whether instruction holds up once it moves onto a screen.
Dylan Hoffman, VP of Operations and Customer Success at Subject, has guided dozens of districts through virtual launches nationwide. He would rather superintendents put both fears on the table in the first meeting. "New can mean disruption," he says, and he takes the hesitation seriously enough to answer it head-on.
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: Grade your vendor in 60 seconds
What We’re Tracking: App audits, gym class and $48B of AI
From Our Desk: Don’t call it a comeback
Watch of the Week: Con artists make good PD, apparently
Grade your vendor in 60 seconds
Every vendor meeting is secretly an oral exam, and the vendor is the one being graded. They just don't know it, which is the best part of the whole arrangement.
Dylan has sat on the answering side of this exam dozens of times.
A few questions do most of the work, and the grading happens in the sixty seconds after each one:
Question 1: "Are you trying to take our students?"
Most leaders save this for meeting four, once the relationship feels safe enough. Meeting one is better.
Failing answer: four minutes about shared values and partnership philosophy.
Passing answer: a flat no, then the business model that makes it true. Length is the tell. A vendor still talking at minute three is negotiating with itself.
Question 2: "Will the teaching get worse?"
Every vendor on earth says no. Listen to what comes after.
Failing answer: the word rigorous, standing alone in a field.
Passing answer: the instructional model described out loud, tradeoffs included. Dylan starts with why the format looks the way it does. "We're a video-first platform, and we really, really believe in the power of short-form, bite-sized video content as an effective method of learning."
Four seconds of awkwardness in the first meeting buys years of clarity. Our latest playbook adds a third question about proof that holds up under your own state's rules, plus one question worth asking yourself before you ever walk in.
The meeting about the meeting has a fix: Elisa MacDonald tells EdWeek that team leaders are running adult learning rather than facilitating an agenda, and that the real test is whether a meeting made a measurable difference for kids. Her comparison is cooking: same ingredients, same recipe, results depending entirely on who's in the kitchen. Anyone who has watched a ninety-minute agenda produce one action item is already nodding.
Dartmouth actually opened the doors to its neighbors: More than 60 educators from 15 Upper Valley public schools spent a day at Dartmouth for twelve workshops launching a new K-12 partnership, several of them run by engineering students. Most higher-ed partnerships announce themselves and then go quiet for a fiscal year, so leading with a room full of teachers is worth noting.
E-Rate goes under review, volume goes up: The FCC's review could shrink the program or end it, and The 74 found a Coachella Valley superintendent who struggles to name a district system that isn't running on the broadband network, down to the bus tracking app parents check and the cafeteria accounts kids eat on. Advocates are promising a "very loud" protest, possibly the first public comment period in history that people are looking forward to.
One counselor, 700 kids and a system that sorts: Foussat Language Academy in California’s Oceanside Unified piloted a tiered support model where teachers deliver short whole-class SEL lessons while counselors and clinicians work on identifying students who need more. The school has a single counselor for 700 K-5 students, so the alternative was a referral list with no bottom to it.
$48 billion of options, no aisle signs: The US EdTech market generated almost $48 billion in 2024 and is expected to pass $90 billion by 2030, and a Tennessee superintendent said the AI market has become overwhelming for districts and vendors alike. One researcher named the actual mechanic, which is that providers always know more than the districts buying from them. Which happens to be the entire subject of this issue.
Utah read the fine print and found it was fiction: BYU researchers tested the 100 most-used apps in Utah schools and found that 52% of EdTech companies studied collected student data and 36% shared it. HB55 took effect July 1 with audit rights and contract termination if a violation goes unfixed for 30 days. Every district that signed a privacy agreement and filed it should probably go read theirs.
Our partner school, Treetops School International, shared the best comeback story since the new season of Ted Lasso.
Let’s hang out IRL. Send an email to [email protected] if you want to meet up at any of these conferences:
Sept 11: Napa Appreciation Event (CA)
Sept 18: Temecula Appreciation Event (CA)
Sept 24-25: Texas Leaders Round Up Event
Our pick of the week: Lucky
Why we’re obsessed: Seven episodes of a con artist trying to get out clean while the FBI and a crime boss both close in on her from opposite directions. Anya Taylor-Joy spends the whole season reading rooms to figure out who is telling the truth, which is the exact skill your cabinet burns through every procurement cycle.
Recommended integrations for staff PD and district meetings:
Vendor evaluation workshop: Open with a scene of Lucky talking her way out of a corner, then hand out stopwatches and replay your last two vendor calls. Time how long each rep took to answer a yes-or-no question. Anything past ninety seconds goes in a column labeled "still deciding what to tell us."
Crisis communications tabletop: Give tables six minutes to draft the family-facing message. Compare drafts against what your district actually sent the last time a bus never showed. Lucky improvises faster than most cabinets approve a single paragraph, and she does it without legal review.
Data privacy refresher: Put your district's app inventory on the screen and ask every principal in the room to name the last privacy agreement they read start to finish. Count the hands, then share the Utah audit that found half of 100 tested apps collecting data their contracts never covered. Lucky survives on untraceable identifiers. So, apparently, does your reading intervention platform.
Risk and contingency planning: Ask each department to list every pilot currently running and write its exit criteria on a sticky note. Anything without a written ending has quietly become a permanent program that skipped the budget conversation. "One last job" is what everyone said about pilot number seventeen too.
Budget forecasting: Have finance walk the room through next year's projection and stop at every line that assumes nothing goes wrong. Mark those lines in red. Lucky's crew makes that assumption exactly once and spends seven episodes paying it off.
Succession planning: Every character in this show has an exit plan and none of them wrote it down. Give each cabinet member ten minutes to draft the "if I'm gone Monday" page for their function, including vendor contacts and the one deadline nobody else knows about. Collect them at the door. That's a continuity binder, finished before anyone resigns in August.
Want to test your vendor pop quiz skills on us? We can take it, promise.
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