A growing number of these documents can be found on a new website hosted by the nonprofit European Edtech Alliance (EEA). As of press time, it included links to 48 ed-tech resources from ED that EEA states are no longer available on the department’s website. Whether there will be any new federal guidance on education technology remains to be seen.
As the Trump administration continues to take steps to shrink or eliminate ED, some experts said local leaders may need to lean more on education nonprofits and professional associations to fill the potential void in national ed-tech guidance, and that states must work together to make sure kids in every district have access to the same educational opportunities.
BIRD’S-EYE VIEW
A functioning ED has the time, resources and vantage point to put together guidance for states on a number of complex topics, according to Amy Loyd, a former assistant secretary in the department who now serves as CEO of the nonprofit All4Ed, an equity-focused education research and advocacy organization.
“The thing about the department is it doesn’t mandate curriculum, it doesn’t mandate standards, but it has the bird’s-eye view of being able to learn from what all the states are doing,” Loyd said. “People who are working in states don’t have time to lift their gaze and determine what’s happening in best practices in other states.”
In the months leading up to the presidential election in November 2024, ED’s guidance for ed-tech leaders included documents — now missing from the department’s website — on how schools can avoid the discriminatory use of AI, a road map for schools to create their own cellphone policies, and a series of briefs on how to build technology infrastructure for K-12 learning.
Such resources are often relied upon by ed-tech leaders and can be especially crucial in smaller under-resourced districts, where staff may not have the time or expertise to research these issues on their own, according to Carla Wade, senior director of external relations at the nonprofit Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a professional association for K-12 ed-tech leaders. In her 22-year career as digital innovations lead for the Oregon Department of Education, Wade said ED resources such as the National Education Technology Plan were essential.
“I lived through multiple iterations of the National Education Technology Plan, and that was always my North Star, so to speak, about things we needed to be thinking about,” she said.
MINDING THE GAPS
The most recent version of the plan, issued in January 2024, focuses on closing technology gaps across America’s K-12 schools. It includes the word "equity" 70 times in its 113 pages.
“My suspicion is that these are pages that are being stripped just because there was a search-find that identified a handful of words that were seen as in opposition to the political stance of the current administration, and therefore the whole page or the whole resource was eliminated,” Loyd said.
The hope is that many of these resources will be reviewed and reposted after the dust settles at ED, and that at least some level of federal ed-tech leadership will resume, according to Julia Fallon, executive director of the nonprofit State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). If not, Fallon said her fear is that there will be even greater divides in the educational experiences of students from state to state.
“There’s some risk that, without states having that federal guidance, there might be some disparities that happen in your policies or procurement or broadband access because of your state leadership. You might not value it as much as another state that’s next door,” she said. “There’s risk of fragmentation. But we’re hoping that SETDA, our membership community, can kind of maintain some of that cohesion and information sharing so that we can reduce the disparities.”
MAINTAINING COHESION
For school leaders, staying the course on district goals for students can be tough if those goals are in conflict with the current administration, according to Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director of advocacy and governance for the nonprofit School Superintendents Association.
“Different communities are going to have different thresholds in terms of willingness and ability to either stay the course or acquiesce, and you have to balance the mission of your district with your local community willingness and capacity to navigate tumultuous political times,” Ellerson Ng said. “And you have to balance all of that within the confines of a publicly funded budget.”
To keep best practices for students front of mind throughout this transition, she said state ed-tech decision-makers can continue to use the recently removed ED resources, as they’re preserved on other websites, and that they can also find guidance from groups like CoSN and SETDA, both of which publish annual reports on the nationwide use of technology in education.
Loyd said All4Ed, SETDA, CoSN and other groups have an important role to play in lieu of federal leadership: keeping states informed about what’s best for students and creating “spaces for states to more explicitly learn from each other.”
“I think it’s going to take building a coalition of sister organizations that can walk alongside states,” she said, “to support them in the absence of a national voice on vetted and emerging promising practices.”
