For years, a Common Sense Education review was often the first stop for a teacher or district leader trying to figure out whether a new app was worth bringing into the classroom. Reports indicate that service is going away: Common Sense Education plans to pause its edtech reviews starting in February 2026, closing off a resource that hundreds of thousands of educators have relied on to gauge classroom fit and usability at a glance.
Why This Matters
The pause doesn't create an emergency, but it does leave a real gap. District leaders now have to ask a question they haven't had to think about in years: where do we get a trustworthy rating?
One option educators are already pointing to is the EdTech Index, a resource associated with ISTE+ASCD that leans on validation badges from partner organizations rather than a single star rating. It's a reasonable stopgap, but it's not the same as an independent, evidence-based evaluation built specifically around how a product affects children at different stages of development.
The Underlying Problem Hasn't Changed
Whichever rating service a district uses, the core challenge is the same one that's driven scrutiny of edtech for years: most of what's known about a product's safety and effectiveness still comes from the company selling it. Independent, third-party evaluation platforms have tried to close that gap, but coverage is uneven, and a single pass/fail or star rating can flatten real differences between how a product handles a first grader's data versus a high schooler's.
What an Independent Framework Should Do
This is exactly the gap Responsible Technology in Education (RTE) was built to address. Rather than one overall verdict, RTE's framework evaluates classroom technology across twelve separate domains, from privacy and data practices to attention, mental health, and learning efficacy, calibrated across four age bands from PreK through grade 12. Every claim is checked against independent evidence, not vendor marketing, and no single funder or technology company can hold more than a limited share of influence over the outcome.
The certification framework is still being drafted in the open, with input from educators, researchers, child development experts, and families, and first applications are expected to open in 2026.
What Districts Can Do in the Meantime
- Don't wait for a single source of truth. Cross-reference whatever rating service you're using with your own privacy and procurement checklist.
- Ask vendors directly for the evidence behind their safety and efficacy claims, not just their marketing copy.
- Get involved early. Districts, researchers, and families can all join the working groups shaping RTE's framework before certification opens.
If your district or organization wants a seat at the table while this framework is being built, reach out to RTE about joining a working group