U.S. K-12 schools now spend approximately $30 billion a year on education technology. About $8.4 billion of that goes to software licenses. Two-thirds of those licenses are never opened.

That is roughly $5.6 billion per year spent on software that nobody uses.

The problem is not new, but the scale keeps growing. A Glimpse K12 analysis found that 67% of purchased software licenses go unused across districts they studied. In some districts, the number hits 90%. Teachers get handed login credentials for platforms they never asked for, never trained on, and never touch.

The buying happens at every level. Superintendents sign district-wide contracts. Principals purchase site licenses. Individual teachers subscribe to tools with school credit cards. Nobody tracks overlap. Nobody audits usage. The result is a sprawl of redundant products doing the same thing across the same building.

San Diego Unified School District is one of the few that actually tried to fix this. The district audited its ed-tech stack, cut hundreds of unused tools, and saved $90 million over 12 years. Most districts have no system to even measure whether purchased software is being used, let alone whether it's working.

The research on impact is equally sobering. Studies show that ed-tech products are used by only about 5% of students at the dosage required to produce measurable learning outcomes. The software exists on the network. It just doesn't exist in the classroom.

The market is projected to nearly double to $56 billion by 2033. Vendors are adding AI features, raising prices, and bundling products into larger contracts. Without usage tracking, districts will keep buying more of what they're already not using.

The $5.6 billion figure is conservative. It counts only unused licenses, not underused ones. The actual waste is almost certainly higher. And every dollar spent on software that sits idle is a dollar that could have gone to a teacher, a counselor, or a building that doesn't have air conditioning.

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