McGraw Hill made two acquisitions in September that, at first glance, seem to address very different parts of the K-12 market.
On Sept. 2, the company acquired Teachally, whose technology supports curriculum development, localization, translation, and adaptation. McGraw Hill plans to use those capabilities both in its own development process and in tools that allow educators to modify instructional materials for different classroom needs.
Two weeks later, it acquired TeachFX, which analyzes classroom audio and provides teachers with feedback on instructional practices such as questioning and student talk. McGraw Hill said the acquisition also expands its presence in a professional-learning market the company estimates at $6 billion.
Both acquisitions involve AI. But the more interesting connection is not the technology.
Teachally reaches into the work teachers and curriculum teams do before and around instruction: changing materials, differentiating lessons, and adapting content. TeachFX reaches into what happens once instruction is underway and teachers begin evaluating and refining their own practice.
Taken together, the acquisitions point to a larger shift in the K-12 instructional-materials market. The curriculum itself is still important, but more of the competitive activity is moving into the work required to make that curriculum function once a district has bought it.
That work has always existed. Teachers have always adapted lessons. Districts have always needed assessment, professional learning, and intervention. Publishers have offered implementation services for decades. What is changing is how closely suppliers are connecting those activities to the instructional products they already sell.
And the evidence suggests there is plenty of unfinished work after the adoption.
Districts have invested heavily in selecting stronger instructional materials, particularly as states have built review processes around materials identified as high quality. But choosing a curriculum and making it work well across hundreds of classrooms are different challenges.
A 2025 study from EdReports and The Decision Lab found that 72% of district leaders surveyed were confident in their ability to select high-quality instructional materials. Only 59% said they had processes for evaluating curriculum effectiveness during implementation, while 48% reported implementation difficulties.
That gap helps explain why so much supplier activity is moving toward what happens after a purchasing decision.
A curriculum enters a school alongside existing technology, assessment systems, supplemental programs, intervention structures, and professional-development plans. Then it enters a classroom, where teachers have students working at different levels, different amounts of instructional time and needs that cannot always be anticipated in an adoption process.
Teachers respond by changing what they were given.
RAND’s analysis of six years of American Instructional Resources Survey data found that most teachers mix and match materials. On average, teachers reported regularly using two curriculum materials and five supplemental resources, and nearly all reported modifying curriculum materials.
Educators for Excellence found much the same behavior in its 2025 national teacher survey. Eighty-one percent of teachers said they sometimes or often create, buy, or download lessons to replace or supplement their curriculum. Difficulty differentiating the provided materials and concerns about student engagement were the most common reasons.
That makes the Teachally acquisition easier to understand in market terms. AI did not create curriculum adaptation. Teachers were already doing it. The opportunity is to bring more of that work closer to the adopted program rather than forcing teachers to leave it, find something else, modify that resource, and then determine whether it still aligns with what they are expected to teach.
Whether doing so truly reduces workload will depend on what happens next. A faster way to generate or alter a lesson still requires someone to judge whether the result is accurate, appropriate and useful for the students in front of them.
The same issue appears when districts move from curriculum to assessment.
Simba’s recent reporting on Renaissance found that districts already have considerable information about student performance. Teachers may be working with screeners, benchmarks, classroom assessments, intervention data, and assessments embedded in the core curriculum. The more difficult problem is often deciding which information matters and what to do with it.
Renaissance Chief Product Officer Todd Brekhus put the problem simply during a September interview with Simba: what does a dashboard actually tell a teacher to do?
Knowing that a student is below benchmark does not automatically tell the teacher whether to change core instruction, provide additional practice, differentiate an assignment or move toward a more intensive intervention.
That is the space suppliers are increasingly trying to close.
McGraw Hill is not alone in trying to connect more of that work.
HMH’s acquisition of NWEA brought curriculum and assessment under common ownership. When the transaction was announced, HMH said it planned to connect NWEA’s interim assessments more directly with HMH curriculum while continuing to offer NWEA’s platform-agnostic assessment products.
Renaissance is pursuing a different model. Rather than owning the curriculum itself, its Core Publisher program connects Renaissance assessment data with materials from publishers including Savvas, Great Minds, and McGraw Hill. The McGraw Hill collaboration was announced for a nationwide back-to-school 2026 rollout, although Renaissance’s current partner page still lists the integration as forthcoming.
The approaches are different, but the problem they are addressing is similar: teachers and districts have to move among curriculum, assessment and intervention systems and then make sense of what those systems are telling them.
Districts do not necessarily need one company to own every part of that process. They do need the handoffs to become less cumbersome.
That distinction is important because the K-12 market often treats consolidation and integration as though they are the same thing. They are not. HMH and NWEA illustrate what integration can look like under common ownership. Renaissance’s publisher partnerships show that independently owned products can also be connected.
The value to districts will depend less on the corporate structure than on whether those connections actually make the work easier.
So far, interoperability itself does not appear to be what educators value most when deciding what to keep. In a 2026 EdWeek Research Center survey of 729 educators, cost was cited by 71% as playing a major role in decisions to retain, reduce or eliminate an edtech product. Ease of use followed at 56%, teacher buy-in at 54% and student engagement at 50%. Interoperability was cited by 23%.
That does not make interoperability unimportant. It suggests that a technical connection only becomes valuable when the people using it can see a practical benefit.
The same standard applies as suppliers move from assessment into professional learning.
The Research Partnership for Professional Learning’s 2026 work describes districts trying to support teachers through widespread adoption of high-quality instructional materials while also managing teacher shortages and unstable budgets. Professional learning in that environment cannot be separated easily from curriculum implementation. Teachers are not simply learning abstract instructional practices; they are trying to use specific materials with actual students.
TeachFX brings McGraw Hill closer to that part of the process.
There is some independent evidence that automated classroom feedback can affect teacher practice, although the evidence is more specific than broad claims about AI coaching sometimes suggest.
A preregistered randomized controlled trial involving 224 Utah mathematics and science teachers tested automated feedback on one particular practice: using “focusing questions” that encourage students to explain and reflect on their thinking. Teachers who received the feedback increased their use of those questions by about 20% relative to the control group. The study did not find changes in the other teaching practices researchers measured.
A separate 2025 working paper interviewed 20 mathematics coaches and analyzed 41 coaching conversations involving nine of them. Coaches found automated classroom evidence useful for some purposes, particularly because it could make patterns in instruction easier to see, but they also raised concerns about accuracy. The researchers continued to emphasize the role of the human coach in interpreting and using the information.
Both studies remain working papers, so the findings should be treated as emerging evidence. But they illustrate an important point about where this market may be heading.
Technology can provide teachers and coaches with information they did not previously have, or provide it more quickly. It does not remove the need to interpret that information.
That is a recurring theme across curriculum, assessment and professional learning. The closer technology moves to actual instruction, the more valuable human judgment becomes rather than the less necessary it becomes.
That tension matters because efficiency is becoming part of the sales argument around many of these products.
Districts have reason to listen. CoSN’s 2026 survey of more than 600 education-technology leaders across 44 states found that 66% reported adequate staffing for core IT functions such as maintaining networks and applications. At the same time, 58% said their districts were understaffed when it came to supporting technology used for teaching and learning.
A district can therefore have enough people to keep its technology running and still lack the capacity to help teachers use that technology well.
That makes products promising fewer steps, easier access to information or closer connections among existing systems understandably attractive. But measuring whether they actually reduce work is difficult.
Gallup’s 2025 national survey of public-school teachers found that teachers who used AI at least weekly estimated that it saved them an average of 5.9 hours per week. Those are teachers’ own estimates rather than observed measures of time use, but they suggest that regular users perceive meaningful benefits on some tasks.
A 2026 systematic review of 45 studies of commercial curriculum resources complicates that picture. The researchers found limited evidence of sustained workload reduction. Materials could reduce the need to build lessons from scratch while creating other work around searching, checking quality, aligning resources, adapting materials to local needs and meeting accountability requirements.
Those findings are not necessarily in conflict. A teacher can save time generating a first draft of a lesson and still spend time reviewing it. An assessment can identify a skill gap quickly and still leave the teacher responsible for deciding what to do about it. Automated feedback can identify a pattern in classroom talk without determining whether that pattern was appropriate for the lesson.
The more useful question for districts is not whether a product automates something. It is whether the total amount of unnecessary work decreases once the entire process is considered.
That is where the current market conversation becomes more consequential.
McGraw Hill’s own filings show that the company views closer product connections as part of its business strategy. Its fiscal 2026 annual filing describes integrated core, supplemental and intervention products as a way to improve teacher workflow, while separately identifying up-selling and cross-selling as part of its “land-and-expand” approach.
There is nothing unusual about a supplier wanting to deepen its relationship with an existing customer. But as companies expand into more of the work around curriculum, districts have reason to expect more evidence in return.
If a supplier is no longer selling only the curriculum but also the adaptation tool, the assessment connection, the intervention recommendation or the professional-learning support, then the question is no longer simply whether each component functions.
The question becomes whether the combination changes anything that matters.
Some emerging procurement and evaluation efforts are already moving in that direction.
Digital Promise’s 2026 study of the first cohort of districts using outcomes-based contracting for edtech examined arrangements in which districts and providers set implementation expectations together. Participating districts reported substantially higher product usage than Digital Promise described under more traditional contracts, but they also encountered additional staff work, problems accessing data and difficulty translating recommended product dosage into classroom practice.
The study does not show that outcomes-based contracting is becoming standard district practice. It does show one way buyers are experimenting with extending provider responsibility beyond delivery of the product.
Other frameworks are making similar questions more explicit.
The Five EdTech Quality Indicators developed by a group of national education and technology organizations put evidence alongside safety, inclusivity, usability and interoperability. Federal guidance released in August likewise encouraged states and districts to ask what learning problem a technology is meant to solve, who should use it, how long it should be used and what evidence shows that it improves learning.
CoSN’s own survey suggests those practices are far from uniform. About 55% of respondents said their districts required vendors to provide information about product safety, while 41% required information about evidence-based design and 29% required information about inclusivity and accessibility.
That unevenness may become more important as products move closer to classroom activity itself.
TeachFX, for example, says classroom recordings can contain teacher and student voices and describes encryption, deletion and data-use safeguards in its privacy policy. Technologies that analyze classroom interaction therefore introduce questions about consent, access, retention and personnel policy alongside instructional questions.
Those issues do not make classroom-recording technology inherently problematic. They do mean that implementation now includes more than training teachers to use a product.
The Research Partnership for Professional Learning and EdInstruments have developed shared measures for curriculum-based professional learning that look at implementation, instructional leadership, teacher practice and outcomes. That kind of work points toward a more useful standard for evaluating increasingly connected systems.
Districts can ask whether teachers spend less time moving information between products. They can measure whether assessment results lead to faster or more appropriate instructional responses. They can examine whether professional learning changes classroom practice, whether teachers continue using a product after rollout and whether the added functions justify their cost.
Those questions get closer to the value suppliers increasingly say they are providing.
For years, much of the instructional-materials market has understandably been measured at the point of adoption: which program wins, how large the contract is, and which supplier gains share.
But that moment captures only the beginning of what happens to a curriculum.
Teachers change it. Students need support the original lesson did not anticipate. Assessments reveal problems that require a response. Districts build professional learning around new materials. Instructional leaders try to determine whether implementation looks the way it was intended to look.
Suppliers are moving closer to that work.
AI is one reason they can do so at greater scale. It can help generate adaptations, analyze classroom interactions, and make information from different systems easier to surface. But AI itself is not the most important signal in McGraw Hill’s September acquisitions or in the broader moves by HMH, Renaissance and others.
The larger change is that the boundary around the curriculum is becoming harder to draw.
A curriculum may increasingly arrive with tools for adapting it, assessments connected to it, recommendations based on those assessments, and professional support intended to shape how it is used.
For suppliers, that creates more opportunities within an existing customer relationship. For districts, it could reduce some of the gaps teachers currently have to navigate on their own.
But the closer a supplier moves to the work of implementation, the harder it becomes to judge value simply by whether a product was purchased, connected or used.
The more important question is what changed after it reached the classroom.
The market opportunity increasingly sits after the adoption. The evidence will have to follow it there.
Where is demand changing, why is it changing, and what does that mean for the companies competing for a place in district budgets?
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About the Author
Martha Scharping is Senior Education Analyst and Content Strategist at Simba Information, where she leads coverage of K–12, higher education, and workforce-aligned learning markets. She brings prior experience as an educator into her analysis, grounding market intelligence and policy signals in firsthand classroom and instructional practice. Her work integrates market data, policy analysis, and teaching-informed insight to translate system-level shifts, including AI adoption, credential evolution, and work-based learning expansion, into clear strategic guidance for education publishers, EdTech companies, and institutional leaders. She focuses on how trends reshape incentives, operating models, and measurable outcomes over time.