Investigation finds EdTech companies lobby to get into the classroom

EdTech companies offering tutoring, literacy services and more spent nearly $900,000 lobbying in Michigan in 2024 and 2025, according to a Detroit Free Press analysis.
Lawmakers acknowledged the vetting of these companies could be better, amid mounting concern that students are getting too much screentime in school.
Multiple safety and security companies started lobbying after the Oxford High School tragedy, and advertised for districts to use state grant money on their products.

In spring 2025, an education software program called iWellness posed seven questions to Anthony Alaniz’s daughter and other students at Tecumseh Middle School, including: “Do you feel happy?” and “Do you have strong self esteem?”

She’d long requested attention from counselors at school, he said. So she answered the survey questions in a way she thought might finally draw attention from school staff, one of the selling points of the software.

Weeks passed and she didn’t hear from a counselor. The software hadn’t been the bridge between her and an adult at school. By the end of the school year, her issue was resolved and she didn’t need to talk to anyone anymore, Alaniz said.

Michigan taxpayers spent $1.2 million to put iWellness’ survey in front of Alaniz’s daughter and her classmates through last year’s state budget. Several parents in Tecumseh, including Alaniz, have questioned whether the program is the best use of taxpayer resources — or the best steward to collect mental health information from children. iWellness’ leaders declined to be interviewed and did not respond to questions and numerous follow-up messages sent by the Detroit Free Press.

The funding was a part of a pilot program for student mental well-being in a smattering of districts in Michigan — specifically for the districts to utilize iWellness, software that uses a survey to regularly check in with students about how they’re feeling and connect them to school staff such as counselors or social workers.

Michigan’s classrooms run on technology: The weapon detection built into security cameras capturing their walk through school doors. The resources meant to shepherd young learners’ all-too-critical transformation into readers. The digital tutors they access through their school districts. Even how they get to school, thanks to ridesharing apps specifically geared for education. And education technology is fueled, in part, by taxpayer money.

But for all the technology that keeps schools running and new apps for parents to download, the industry is also a vast, unregulated and largely unchecked frontier. One where many tech companies have come to the state Legislature to create an even bigger market for their products, spending money on lobbying — at least $872,519 in 2024 and 2025 combined, according to an analysis by the Detroit Free Press — to encourage policymakers to route taxpayer funds to them. And some have won big, with grants created seemingly geared to their products or through specific earmarks.

But the journey tech products take to your child’s classroom may not always be paved with diligent quality checks, the Detroit Free Press found. And lawmakers are sometimes sold on products just by word-of-mouth, through lobbying backed by thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars, even amid mounting concern that students are getting too much screentime in school.

“Clearly, I think there ought to be better vetting of these programs,” said state Rep. Tim Kelly, R-Saginaw Township, who chairs the subcommittee on appropriation for school aid. “I think it’s wrong the way we craft the budget where these people come to us, lobby legislators about line items … and then once they’re in, they expect to be in year after year.”

iWellness has spent more than $14,000 on lobbying in 2025 so far and spent a little more than $24,000 in 2024, according to disclosure reports.

The Michigan-based software company’s product is designed to ask students questions every week about their mental wellness, questions like, “Do you feel happy?” and “Do you feel connected to others?” It then sorts the students into one of three categories in a dashboard for school staff depending on their needs: green, yellow or red.

The check-in survey, which has made its way in front of thousands of students, doesn’t appear to have been the subject of peer-reviewed research to prove its validity — scientific foundation one expert told the Detroit Free Press he would expect with such an assessment. Nor does it appear to have been developed by anyone with formal training in psychology or mental health. Founder Whitney Foley has been described in media interviews as a certified wellness coach, but isn’t licensed in mental or behavioral health fields by the state. The undergraduate degree she lists on LinkedIn is in communication and advertising.

iWellness’ check-in process, according to the company incorporated in 2021, is rooted in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a long-standing psychological theory that posits self-actualization can only come after basic needs are met. In education, it’s often used as an argument for students to have access to more resources such as free lunch or breakfast: Students can’t learn if they are hungry, tired or otherwise don’t have their needs met.

iWellness doesn’t claim its software is a psychological instrument, but several school officials in districts using it have referred to it as a screener for student social-emotional wellness or cited concerns about student mental health as a reason to utilize iWellness’ check-in.

Some parents have found the survey useful: One parent in Swartz Creek, which has used the software since at least 2023, said it has been helpful when their family went through a hard time and her daughter needed intervention from school counselors. The software did its job: It flagged her as needing help and an adult helped. And schools are surely looking for options to address a long-brewing mental health crisis among students.

But in Alaniz’s estimation: The state paid $1.2 million for iWellness to ask students seven questions. That’s money that could have been spent on hiring licensed behavioral health professionals.

“You should have bold evidence this thing’s actually going to help kids,” he said. “At least as a parent, every other day there’s some new app or thing we have to sign up for or some new technology. … Is it actually useful?”

Meghan Way, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment at Tecumseh Public Schools, wrote that iWellness is “one component” of a broader student support system “designed to enhance, not replace, the individualized care provided through one-on-one meetings” with counselors and a countywide school psychologist.

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When kids become the ‘guinea pigs’

Edtech is a massive industry that’s only grown since the pandemic. Districts across the nation used an average of 2,982 edtech tools over the 2024-25 school year, up from 851 in the 2018-19 school year, according to an annual industry report from Instructure, an edtech company based in Utah. With the rise of artificial intelligence in education, even more tools have come to market.

The industry is so saturated that some school leaders have separate phone numbers and email addresses they keep from the public because they’re so bombarded by sales pitches from edtech companies, said Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education. His Virginia-based organization is advocating for better quality checks for edtech in the classroom.

“The current system is so broken that it is just completely overwhelming,” Culatta said. He later added, “We want these great new apps to be used in schools, but we want them to be used in schools when they’re ready to be put in front of a kid and not having kids just be guinea pigs for app developers.”

The Detroit Free Press examined education tech lobbying at the state Legislature, tracking how those same companies end up in public school classrooms. The investigation found:

Education tech companies that lobby at the state level often have lucrative contracts — for as much as $17 million — either with the state or with public school districts.
Language in education budget bills can be pointed, steering districts to certain edtech products, experts said, particularly in school safety.
Several big safety and security firms with edtech products for schools began to lobby in the year following — or, in one case, one week after — the November 2021 Oxford High School shooting. Since then, many of the same companies use state school safety grant money as a point of advertising on their websites.
School safety isn’t the only sector to see lobbying from edtech companies. The push for intensive tutoring after school closures and the push to better align early literacy instruction to the science of reading has coincided with lobbying from companies offering digital tutoring and online literacy resources.

Lobbying by education companies, and other corporate interests, isn’t new. To lawmakers, it’s a part of the job. But the competition to attract tax dollars from public schools is fierce. While the federal relief dollars that poured into states during the pandemic brought more opportunity for edtech companies to capture new business, that grant money has faded away, said Liz Kolb, a professor of education technology at the University of Michigan.

“There are kind of more hard sales tactics that are happening because they are now competing against many more vendors than they were 10 years ago and the finances for districts to buy … is not as readily available as it used to be,” she said.

And while tech companies have prevailed in the state school aid budget, other education requests have gone unfunded. Mike Travis, the superintendent of Munising Public Schools in the Upper Peninsula, hoped lawmakers would hear his pleas for urgent funding this budget cycle. Buildings in his district are crumbling, the 105-year-old elementary school verging on hazardous. When it rains or the snow melts, water runs down building walls next to electrical panels — “a nightmare,” he says.

“It’s Maslow’s hierarchy, right?” he said. “You have to take care of the basic needs first, which are safety, security, warmth, food, shelter. … We don’t want to be in a position where we have to compromise on the most important base elements of that pyramid in order to even worry about learning at the top.”

A Michigan wellness company raises questions

iWellness was founded by Foley, a former account executive at a health care technology company. Adam “A.J.” Hartley, a former school superintendent in Genesee County, and Nicole Hartley, a former Genesee County teacher, are also executives at the company, according to their LinkedIn pages and state incorporation records.

How iWellness made it into the fiscal year 2025 budget is somewhat of a mystery: Jasper Martus, a Democrat who represents Flushing, said he took a meeting with lobbyists about iWellness only to find his former T-ball coach, Adam Hartley, sitting in the room. He said he was supportive of iWellness because it sounded like, from the lobbying meeting, the company was popular among Genesee County school districts. It had been used in Swartz Creek and Fenton schools, districts where Adam Hartley previously worked as an administrator.

“I was not the reason that it made it into the budget,” he said. He’s not sure how iWellness made it in.

State Rep. Nancy Arno-Jenkins, R-Clayton, put in an earmark request for more money for the pilot program in this year’s state budget, but the funding did not make it. She told a reporter in a phone call that she didn’t know who originally championed the program in the previous year’s budget; it preceded her time in the Legislature.

The earmark process has recently changed in an attempt to add transparency to a process oft-criticized for being opaque to taxpayers. Starting next year, state law will require earmark requests to have names attached to them. But iWellness was funded in 2024, before much of the attempted reform of the earmark process.

The money for the pilot program was administered through the Lenawee Intermediate School District, which helps support the districts in the county in the southeast part of the state, including Tecumseh. Superintendent Mark Haag wrote in an email response to questions that his district agreed to be the fiduciary for the state money for iWellness because Lenawee had been looking for such a program. iWellness had already been identified as the funding recipient, he wrote, and is being used in nine of 11 local Lenawee districts, as well as in Haag’s ISD.

“We weren’t looking for another complex program or diagnostic tool; we needed a Tier 1, universal check-in system that could help staff understand how students felt about safety, belonging, and connection in real time,” he wrote.

Universal mental health screening tools aren’t new. But one expert contacted by the Detroit Free Press raised questions about iWellness based on the research available on its website. Ryan McBain, a policy researcher with RAND, a California-based research organization, and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote that he could not find any peer-reviewed publications supporting iWellness’ survey, important to proving its validity — in other words, that the questions iWellness asks students are measuring what they intend to measure.

“A glossy report that ‘seems’ impressive may mislead school districts and parents when trying to decide whether to implement this,” he wrote.

The Detroit Free Press could not find anyone with formal education in psychology or behavioral health involved in the development of iWellness’ survey. A reporter located the LinkedIn profile of a psychologist who reported working at iWellness from 2023 to 2025, after iWellness had made it into schools. The psychologist, who could not be reached for comment, was on a temporary limited psychologist license, meant for professionals working toward full licensure, until late 2023 when they were issued a master’s psychologist license from the state.

Kolb, speaking generally, said technology companies targeting schools include research on their own websites about the efficacy of their tools, but that research can often be biased.

“It’s really important that we’re looking at evidence-based research around these tools and not just the research that companies are putting out,” she said. Adding later, “A lot of schools don’t have the time to truly do these deep-dive evaluations … so they end up trusting what the vendors are telling them and pushing on them because they just don’t have the time or the capacity.”

$1 million for iWellness pilot

The Legislature billed the wellness pilot program funded in 2024 as a case study, which should look at how the software and consistent check-ins impact student anxiety and depression levels, absenteeism rates, sense of safety at school and other metrics.

The Detroit Free Press made numerous attempts to reach Foley and the Hartleys, including calling and sending email messages. Nicole Hartley responded to an email declining an interview request, writing, “unfortunately we did not receive funding this fiscal cycle.” A reporter sent a list of questions, but iWellness representatives did not respond.

Alaniz and other Tecumseh parents have been skeptical of the program.

Jacob Willey, who writes a watchdog publication around Tecumseh Public Schools and is the parent of a former Tecumseh student, has a master’s degree in psychology. After hearing from other parents about iWellness, he researched the product and doubts its validity as a tool. And, he asked, if the survey is not a psychological instrument, then why is it marketed as being based on psychology?

His concern? Spending money on the software takes away from funding for what he says is really missing in Tecumseh schools: mental health professionals.

“If you do it in a community like ours that’s shrinking … then you’re spending $1 million to guide resources,” he said. “It’s supposed to guide them to counselors, but if you can’t afford counselors then the survey does nothing.”

Michigan has the second-highest student-to-counselor ratio in the country, at 573 students to 1 counselor, second only to Arizona, according to the American School Counselor Association, whose most recent data is from the 2023-24 school year. The state also faces what an April 2025 state School Safety and Mental Health Commission report called a “critical shortage” of school psychologists, with roughly 1 psychologist for every 1,500 students.

Another Tecumseh parent, Michelle Malewitz, said she is concerned about how iWellness uses the data it collects. iWellness’ online terms specify the company can use “de-identified” data for any lawful purpose. Amelia Vance, a student privacy expert and president of the Public Interest Privacy Center, said actually de-identifying data can be “incredibly difficult” for companies, and could be particularly so for iWellness given the sensitive nature of the data and the frequency that students take the check-ins.

Spending money at the Capitol, making money from districts

iWellness is hardly the first edtech company lobbying lawmakers. The companies lobbying include reading software organizations, an education ridesharing company, school software platforms, and digital tutoring platforms.

Others have also benefited from policies adopted by lawmakers. Michigan’s education budgets over several years have included millions in funding for teachers to receive LETRS training, an evidence-based training program from the company Lexia Learning for teachers to improve their approach to literacy instruction, according to the Michigan Department of Education. Lexia comes with evidence-based research, including peer-reviewed research.

The education department has called the $10 million training grant, a program introduced in the 2023-24 school aid budget, a partnership with Lexia, a for-profit Massachusetts-based company. Lexia has been lobbying in the state since 2019, as a push for improving reading instruction across the country began to take off.

Following the pandemic and calls to help students to recover from school closures, online tutoring companies started lobbying in Michigan: Tutor.com started lobbying in 2022, a company called HeyTutor in 2023, Headstream Technologies in 2021 and several others. In 2023, supported by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, lawmakers approved MI Kids Back on Track, a $150 million grant program for tutoring and other academic interventions to help students catch up.

One tutoring company, HeyTutor, on its website advertised itself as a possible tutoring provider specifically for that grant funding, urging districts to “Take Advantage of Michigan’s $150 Million Grant for High-Impact Tutoring” by partnering with HeyTutor, based in California. In 2024, HeyTutor spent almost $53,000 lobbying in Michigan.

Such advertisement isn’t unique: The Detroit Free Press found several instances of edtech companies with lobbying records creating pages on their websites urging schools to spend grant money on their services.

Lawmakers acknowledged there are issues with this process, particularly when it comes to spending on resources that end up in front of kids. Kelly said there ought to be more vetting of the companies that engage the Legislature, but the vetting should be done by a third party, like the Michigan Department of Education.

Former state Rep. Pamela Hornberger, a Macomb County Republican and a former teacher, said she remembered for-profits coming to her when she was a lawmaker.

“Quite honestly, I don’t know that anyone has proven their results are phenomenal,” she said. “Look at the amount of dollars in education. It’s inevitable, I guess. … When you see money out there, if you’re savvy, you’re going to go after it.”

Safety and security companies lobby after Oxford

Just seven days after tragedy struck at Oxford High School, where a teen opened fire in a hallway and killed four students, a new organization registered to lobby in Lansing: Critical Response Group, a firm that provides incident mapping technology, often marketed to schools for emergencies.

Three other safety and security companies specializing in school safety followed, with all four spending more than $150,000 combined in 2022 alone on lobbying. Lawmakers that year passed legislation that included $10 million for incident mapping — funding that Critical Response Group used as a selling point on its website.

Jason Russell, a school safety and security consultant in Michigan, said that while schools ultimately decide how to spend school safety funding, it’s not a coincidence that language in legislation often steers leaders to particular products.

“They tend to put restrictions or words … that would kind of guide you towards these specific types of technology,” he said, adding that while he doesn’t have a specific problem with many technology firms, “What’s unfortunate is for the state to limit what schools can spend their safety funding on.”

Included in this year’s state budget as an allowable expense in a $300 million safety grant program is “safety infrastructure,” including “firearm detection software that integrates to existing security cameras.” That language is similar to the language that an AI-firearm detection company, ZeroEyes, uses to describe its product, gun detection software that “integrates into existing security cameras.” ZeroEyes spent $95,000 lobbying in 2022 and $45,000 in 2024.

A spokesman for ZeroEyes wrote that “part of our approach is to educate policymakers on emerging security technology, best practices, standards and where the industry is headed.”

State Rep. Regina Weiss, D-Oak Park, told the Detroit Free Press that ZeroEyes originally lobbied lawmakers to carve out a specific grant for its product. While Weiss said lawmakers denied that request, they did make it clear in the budget that spending for that type of product would be allowable.

“There was no ambiguity or confusion within the language in terms of what the available usage is,” she said. But schools don’t have to spend their money that way, she said.

Chad Marlow, a privacy and surveillance expert who is the author of an October 2023 American Civil Liberties Union report investigating the edtech surveillance industry, said many of these security companies — ZeroEyes is one of the companies named in his report — create a market for their products by lobbying for school safety grant programs.

But overall, security firms tend to make big claims they can’t back up, he said.

“Oftentimes, schools buy the best marketed product as opposed to the best product,” he said.

And that’s a concern across the education tech industry, said Kolb. Ideally, she said, a government agency would step up to regulate the vast number of products on the market, but that is an unlikely scenario.

“It is very worrisome because the focus of these companies is to make a profit,” she said. “Not necessarily to make sure students are learning and academically growing, and that the software really truly benefits them and doesn’t harm them.”

Travis, with Munising Public Schools, said he believes in making sure his students are equipped with technology they need to learn. But every morning as he goes through his email, he deletes message after message from tech companies advertising all the ways he can spend district money on their products.

The superintendent would use spare state funding — if he had it — to address more dire needs in Munising schools, like the boilers he worries will fail and leave the district without heat in an area where freezing temperatures are common.

He’s still hopeful lawmakers will hear his pleas.

Amid all the other requests.

Free Press staff writer Kristi Tanner contributed reporting to this article.

Contact Lily Altavena: [email protected].

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