Technology is the spinal cord of everything... including your kid's school.

Schools globally have outsourced their operational backbone. The Canvas hack just made what has long been an invisible dependency visible.

This week hackers took control of Canvas (for the second time this month) and threw school systems globally into chaos. For those who are unfamiliar: Canvas is a cloud-based platform for classrooms, with over 30,000 users globally, across 8,000 educational institutions.

As I read the coverage, I thought of a piece I wrote over a year ago (as DOGE rampaged through the government) highlighting that technology is the spinal cord of government. While my focus in that piece was on how technology is a dependency of public policy, what I articulated is true everywhere… just replace the word “government” with “education” or “health care.”

Technology (and implementation more broadly) has long been dismissed as an afterthought by policy experts both inside and outside of the government. Over decades, the US government systematically outsourced technology to the private sector through multi-billion dollar contracts. Today, government employees largely do not design or build products or systems, they “manage” implementation of systems developed by contractors or consultants.

In this formulation, technology is subordinate to the policy work, when the truth is that policy is inextricably entangled with technology. Separating policy from the technology it depends on has been a root cause of much of the dysfunction we have grappled with across government for decades.

Technology is not an extra thing that you add onto government programs and services—it IS the service. It’s not an extra thing that you add into the institution—it is the spinal cord of the institution. Sort of like how cars are no longer mechanical, they are now computers wrapped in metal. People working in tech understand this implicitly.

I stand by every word, and want to clearly say: Whether we like it or not, this is true for everything. Every institution, every sector… everything is mediated by technology, whether we see it or not.

I, and many of my colleagues, have spent the better part of the past 20 years trying to convince lawmakers, academia, and the media of exactly this when it comes to government. Our institutions continue to treat technology as something that is subordinate to their primary mission, when the mission is entirely dependent on (often invisible) technology. That this point has been largely dismissed as hyperbolic or extreme would be an understatement.

But as with all of my work here, I want to focus on how this is most directly relevant to us as parents — and our kids’ schools.

Schools have outsourced their agency.

Over the past several decades, schools have done exactly what every other institution has done: they have systematically outsourced their operational backbone to technology products and the companies that build them. The list of platforms that now mediate the basic functions of education — attendance, grades, assignments, communication — is almost comically long. As I’ve written before, most schools are running 10–15 different EdTech products that all promise efficiency, but in reality create confusion, frustration, and complicate what was once much simpler.

The trade-off is giving up control and information/data in exchange for efficiency. Schools traded control of their operations for cost savings, scale, and the recurring promise that technology would finally (this time!) transform learning. Well, it hasn’t. And now, when a single platform gets compromised, the entire operation of thousands of schools grinds to a halt.

The Canvas hack made the invisible dependency visible. Don’t look away.

Here are the questions I want everyone in a position of authority in schools and school systems to sit with:

1. Do you understand the degree to which your work is dependent on products and systems that someone else (who is profiting off of you) is in control of?

2. What are you getting in return?

3. How much of this is necessary?

Don’t say “efficiency,” because efficiency is not the goal of education. The goal of education is LEARNING, and (as I’ve argued before) learning is inherently inefficient — that’s what makes it stick. Schools are not supply chains to be optimized, the things that make teachers great are not scaleable, and the things that make learning meaningful are not automatable. Stop pretending like they are.

If we actually cared about education, we’d be asking questions that illuminate uncomfortable realities, but as MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum
(inventor of the first widely-known chatbot) said in an interview back in 1985:

It is much nicer, it is much more comfortable, to have some device, say the computer, with which to flood the schools, and then to sit back and say, “You see, we are doing something about it, we are helping,” than to confront ugly social realities.

So again: do schools recognize the degree to which they’ve outsourced the backbone of their mission? And if so, what exactly are they getting in return? Because right now, what I see is institutions trading agency and control for the promise of operational convenience, only to discover that it may just be a Faustian bargain.

The Devil tempts Faust (Poster for the play ‘Faust’/Wikimedia Commons)