By Brett Roer, Founder & CEO of Amplify & Elevate Innovation
I was on AmpED to 11 with Julia Fallon, Executive Director of SETDA (the State Educational Technology Directors Association), and we ended up in a conversation I want every superintendent to hear at some point. SETDA’s work is one of the quietest forces shaping how AI lands in K-12 classrooms across the country, and most districts have more to gain from it than they realize.
If you are a superintendent or cabinet leader thinking about AI procurement, the work I want to share here is what becomes possible when district decisions sit on the foundation that state-level leaders are building.
The Question I Find Myself Holding
When I sit with district leaders on AI procurement, the question I keep coming back to is this. What infrastructure do you already have to lean on, and how can your district decisions stand on it.
The answer matters because procurement is one of those places where district leaders can feel they are inventing the wheel each time. There are real benefits to slowing down and discovering what state-level work has already put in place. Quality indicators. RFP templates. Vendor evaluation guides. Cross-state learning networks. The infrastructure is there. The district decision gets stronger when it rests on it.
Julia framed her work in a way that has stuck with me. She talked about wisdom of crowds. Individual brilliance is one thing. When you put a lot of people working on similar challenges together, you can go further than any one of them could alone. SETDA is a small and mighty association of state-level education technology leaders building exactly that kind of collective intelligence. The districts that engage with the resources it produces walk into procurement with the wisdom of dozens of states behind them.
What State-Level Work Makes Possible
The infrastructure SETDA and similar organizations are building gives districts a few specific things to lean on.
Quality indicators for EdTech and AI vendors. SETDA has published quality indicators that vendors can validate their products against, and districts can use as a reference point during procurement. They give a busy procurement team a shared language and shared standards to work from, instead of starting from a blank page for every tool.
Procurement guides built around those indicators. Julia mentioned the work SETDA has done on procurement guides that translate the quality indicators into the questions a district should be asking during an RFP. That kind of resource is built for the procurement officer who is not a technology specialist and needs answers in one place. It makes the vendor evaluation process more rigorous and easier to run.
Cross-state learning and shared models. State leaders working together produce models that districts can adapt. A community-grounded AI policy from one state can shape the listening sessions in another. A vendor evaluation framework from one state can save a district months of internal work.
The pattern I love about this is that it puts the heaviest lifting in the place where it can scale, and gives every district the benefit of that lift.
Why I Bring Community Values Into Every Procurement Conversation
There is something Julia said in our conversation that I have started borrowing. She was talking about AI policy and adoption, and she said: the answers are really right here in this room. The community can have targeted conversations that allow the wisdom in the room to shape what your AI guidance and policy is.
That principle applies to procurement too. State-level quality indicators give a district the technical floor for vendor selection. The community gives the district the values floor. The combination is what produces a procurement decision that lasts.
A practice I bring into district procurement work is to pair the technical evaluation with a values conversation. What does our community expect from AI tools that interact with our students? What questions do parents want answered before this tool is in their child’s classroom? What does responsible adoption look like to the students who will be using it? Those answers do not replace the technical due diligence. They sit alongside it and shape which trade-offs the district is willing to make.
A Decision-Making Move Worth Borrowing
One move from the conversation with Julia that I want to highlight for district leaders is one I have started using in EdTech consulting work. It is about how to know whether a tool is delivering after adoption.
The move is simple. AI tools generate usage data. They show you how much a student is engaging with a product, what features are activating, what outcomes the tool was meant to support. When the metrics are not matching the intended outcomes, the next step is to interview the students. Why is the tool not landing? What would help? What do they think the tool was supposed to do for their learning?
The responses tell you a lot. They also produce something boards and parents respond to. People do not like waste, and a district that can say “this tool did not deliver on the metrics, and our students explained why” earns trust by demonstrating discipline. It is the kind of accountability that gets buy-in for the next round of decisions, not the kind that creates defensiveness.
Building Systems That Catch Harm Before It Scales
A thread Julia returned to that I want to put in front of every district leader is about systems-level responsibility. Her framing was that we want to build systems that can notice harm and respond before it scales, rather than relying on everyone being individually responsible. When everybody is responsible, no one is accountable.
In practice, this means building review structures that catch a problem early. An AI advisory committee with diverse representation. A clear escalation path when a teacher or family raises a concern. A calendar-driven review of tool performance and student experience. A relationship with the state’s quality indicator work so that district reviews can be informed by what other states are surfacing.
The districts that build these systems early are the ones who handle the unexpected well, because they have somewhere for the unexpected to land.
A First Move for District Leaders This Month
If you are a superintendent or cabinet leader thinking about AI procurement this year, the first move I would recommend is the connection one. Look at what your state’s education technology leadership has produced on AI procurement, quality indicators, and vendor evaluation. SETDA’s resources are publicly available and a strong place to start. State-specific guidance from your own state leaders is the next layer.
Bring those resources into your next procurement conversation. Your district decisions get stronger immediately, because they are now grounded in the work the state-level community has been building. That is the kind of infrastructure that exists for districts to use.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does state-level AI procurement infrastructure include?
State-level AI procurement infrastructure includes quality indicators that vendors can validate their products against, procurement guides that translate those indicators into RFP-ready questions, cross-state learning networks, shared models for vendor evaluation, and policy reference materials. SETDA and similar associations build and share these resources for state and district leaders to use.
How can K-12 districts use state quality indicators in AI procurement?
Districts can use state quality indicators as a reference point during vendor evaluation, as the basis for RFP questions, and as the technical floor that the district’s community-values conversation then sits on. The combination of state-level technical standards and community-defined values produces procurement decisions that earn trust and last.
How should districts evaluate whether an AI tool is delivering after adoption?
A practical move is to pair the usage metrics the tool generates with student interviews. When the metrics are not matching the intended outcomes, asking students why surfaces both the issue and the path forward. The combination of data and student voice produces accountability that boards and parents respond to.
What role do community values play in AI procurement decisions?
Community values shape which trade-offs a district is willing to make and which questions matter most during vendor evaluation. They sit alongside the technical due diligence, not in place of it. The procurement decision that survives is the one that satisfies both the technical floor and the values floor.
Bring This Work Into Your District
I partner with school districts on AI procurement and EdTech strategy that draws on state-level infrastructure and grounds decisions in community values.
If you are shaping AI procurement work in your district this year, I would welcome the conversation: brett@aeieducation.org.
