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Common Sense Paused Edtech Reviews
Common Sense Education paused all edtech product reviews from February 2026. Its privacy ratings still run. What schools should use instead.
Common Sense Education paused all edtech product reviews beginning February 2026. The existing review pages are still online but frozen. They carry notices saying they are no longer being updated. Separately and importantly, Common Sense's Privacy Program is still fully operating, which is a distinction most secondhand summaries have blurred into "Common Sense stopped rating edtech." That is not what happened.
If you are a teacher, coach, or district buyer who used those reviews as a filter, the practical consequence is this: you have lost your single best free source of learning-quality ratings, you have not lost your privacy ratings, and no direct replacement with the same methodology exists. This page covers what is verified, what the real alternatives are, and how to run an evaluation yourself now that the shortcut is gone.
Last verified: 21 August 2026.
What is verified
The pause. Tech & Learning reported on 30 January 2026 that Common Sense Education would pause edtech reviews starting in February 2026. EdTech Institute covered it on 11 February 2026.
The pages are frozen, not deleted. Review pages remain reachable and readable. They carry a notice indicating they are no longer being updated. Nothing has been taken down as of this page's verification date.
Privacy ratings continue. The Common Sense Privacy Program is a separate operation from the learning-quality reviews and it is still running. The clearest proof is a fresh evaluation issued 26 March 2026, well after the review pause took effect, for the product Yourway, which received a 93% privacy rating, announced via PR Newswire. A dormant program does not issue new evaluations with new scores.
This is the split to hold in your head:
| Common Sense program | Status as of August 2026 | What it told you |
|---|---|---|
| Edtech product reviews (learning quality) | Paused since February 2026; pages frozen but online | Whether a tool was pedagogically good, with an age rating and a teacher-facing score |
| Privacy Program / privacy ratings | Active, issuing new evaluations | How a product handles student data, tracking, ads, and third-party sharing |
| Family-facing media reviews (movies, games, apps) | Outside the scope of this pause | Age-appropriateness of consumer media |
The alternatives that actually exist
Two cautions before the table.
First: ISTE does not describe itself as Common Sense's successor. That framing comes from trade press coverage, which points to ISTE as the leading alternative. ISTE has not claimed the mantle, and it would be dishonest to put those words in their mouth.
Second, and more practically: these are not like-for-like swaps. Common Sense's reviews produced an editorial learning-quality judgement, a human reviewer scoring pedagogy against a rubric. The main alternative works differently. If you copy a Common Sense-shaped process onto a differently-shaped directory, you will think you have replaced the signal when you have not.
| Source | What it is | Methodology | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| ISTE EdTech Index / Learning Technology Directory | The largest active edtech directory; descends from the EdSurge Product Index, running since 2012 | Validation-badge system, products earn badges against criteria, rather than a single learning-quality score | Free to browse; free to list |
| EdTech Impact | Directory built around verified reviews from educators who have used the product | Aggregated practitioner reviews | Free to browse |
| Common Sense Privacy ratings | Still-active data-privacy evaluations from Common Sense itself | Structured privacy rubric, percentage rating | Free |
The honest summary: ISTE's index is the best place to discover and shortlist products and to see what a product has been validated for. It is not a drop-in replacement for a learning-quality score, because it does not produce one. A badge tells you a product met specified criteria; a Common Sense review told you a reviewer thought the product taught well. Those are different claims.
What to do about the gap
The learning-quality judgement now has to come from you or your colleagues. That is more work, but it is not mysterious. A workable process:
- Screen for privacy first, using Common Sense Privacy ratings. This is still free, still active, and still the fastest way to eliminate products outright. Anything with a poor privacy rating is done, no further evaluation needed.
- Shortlist on the ISTE index, filtering for the badges and evidence claims relevant to your use case.
- Check practitioner reviews on EdTech Impact for whether the thing survives contact with a real classroom.
- Run your own 20-minute check on the two or three survivors. Ask: What does a student actually do for the first ten minutes? Is there a task with a right answer, or only exploration? Can a teacher see what a student produced without buying a higher tier? What happens to student work if you stop paying?
- Ask the vendor two questions in writing. Can we export student work in a standard format? What is the deletion process for student data when we leave? A vendor that will not answer those in writing has answered them.
Steps 4 and 5 are what the Common Sense reviews were doing on your behalf. Rebuilding them as a shared department checklist is more sustainable than waiting for another free reviewer to appear.
Follow-up questions
"Can I still trust the frozen reviews?" Partly. A review's description of what a tool is and how it teaches ages slowly and is still useful context. Its description of pricing, tiers, features and privacy behaviour ages fast and should be treated as of-its-date only. Always check the review's date, then verify pricing and privacy against the vendor's live site.
"Is this permanent?" It was announced as a pause, not a shutdown. Nothing in the coverage commits to a restart date, so plan as if it is indefinite and be pleasantly surprised if it is not.
"Did Common Sense say why?" We are not going to characterise the reasoning beyond what was reported. The coverage above is the primary record; read it directly rather than trusting a summary, including this one.
"Does this affect Common Sense's digital citizenship curriculum?" That curriculum is a separate offering from the product reviews and was not the subject of this announcement. Verify current status on their site before building a school year around it.
Disclosure: who published this page, and why we are not recommending ourselves here
This page is published by CodeIt (codeitlearn.com), which makes a browser-based coding studio for families, built for ages 8 to 14.
We are going to be direct: CodeIt is not a relevant recommendation for the audience of this page. If you arrived here, you are almost certainly evaluating software for a school or district. CodeIt has no school or district features, no rostering, no LMS integration, no teacher dashboards, no standards alignment. We are a consumer product bought by parents. Putting ourselves on your shortlist would waste your time.
For school-facing coding curriculum specifically, the established options are CodeAI (formerly Code.org, free, K–12), CodeHS (grades 6–12), Kodable for K-5, and Scratch (free, MIT). Evaluate those through the process above rather than taking our word for it.
We wrote this page because the facts were being reported wrongly, specifically the widespread claim that Common Sense stopped rating edtech entirely, when its privacy program demonstrably still issues new ratings.
Questions parents ask first
Can I still trust the frozen reviews?
Partly. A review's description of what a tool is and how it teaches ages slowly and is still useful context. Its description of pricing, tiers, features and privacy behaviour ages fast and should be treated as of-its-date only. Always check the review's date, then verify pricing and privacy against the vendor's live site.
Is this permanent?
It was announced as a pause, not a shutdown. Nothing in the coverage commits to a restart date, so plan as if it is indefinite and be pleasantly surprised if it is not.
Did Common Sense say why?
We are not going to characterise the reasoning beyond what was reported. The coverage above is the primary record; read it directly rather than trusting a summary, including this one.
Does this affect Common Sense's digital citizenship curriculum?
That curriculum is a separate offering from the product reviews and was not the subject of this announcement. Verify current status on their site before building a school year around it.
What you can do on CodeIt
Last verified 2026-08-21.