Most edtech pilots in US public schools never become purchases. That finding comes from the Pilot-to-Purchase study of piloting ed-tech products in K-12 public schools, which examined how districts run pilots and found conversion consistently undermined by unclear success criteria, weak evaluation design, and procurement processes disconnected from the pilot itself. Digital Promise built its edtech pilot framework around exactly these failure points. A decade later, the failure modes remain common — and they are structural.
Why do pilots fail to convert?
The research and subsequent practitioner guidance converge on a short list. Most pilots begin without written success criteria, so when the trial ends there is no agreed answer to what the evidence showed. Enthusiastic volunteer teachers, the easiest way to staff a pilot, produce results that do not generalize to skeptical colleagues. Procurement is never briefed during the pilot, so a product that succeeds still faces a bid threshold, a privacy review, and a budget cycle that starts from zero. And the pilot runs on a semester timeline while district money moves on a fiscal-year timeline — a mismatch that alone kills conversions, because a successful December pilot cannot be funded until the following July's budget, by which point the teachers who ran it have moved on.
What changes when pilots are run deliberately?
Districts that formalize the process define quantitative success criteria before launch — usage thresholds, outcome measures, or workload indicators agreed with the vendor in writing. They pilot with a representative group rather than volunteers. They bring procurement and the data privacy officer in at the start, so the pilot doubles as vetting. And they calendar the pilot to end before the spring purchasing window, so a positive result can actually become a purchase order.
The detail vendors misread
Vendors treat a pilot as the top of a sales funnel. Districts experience it as free — no decision has been made, no budget attached, no administrator accountable. A pilot with no budget owner is not a delayed sale; it is a demo. The fix works in both directions: vendors should ask who owns the budget before donating a semester of access, and districts should refuse pilots they have no intention of funding, because they cost teacher time and produce false negatives for products that might have worked. For state and federal programs funding pilot grants, the same lesson applies: a pilot grant with a procurement bridge attached converts; one without it ends in a report.
For more context, read How school districts actually buy edtech: procurement explained.
For more context, read essa evidence tiers.
For more context, read Why FERPA's vendor exception decides what ed-tech can access.