Managing AI by Default: Dean Celaj of GoTeacher on the Future of K–12 Data Privacy

Dean Celaj is the Founder and CEO of GoTeacher, a platform helping school districts understand, manage, and enforce student data privacy. Previously, he founded Akademi.al, an education platform used by over 90% of students in Albania during COVID, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode

1. Why most school districts are technically out of compliance with student data privacy laws
2. How “free” edtech tools create the biggest privacy blind spots
3. Why AI fundamentally changes the risk profile of student data
4. What risk-based management of AI tools means for responsible adoption in schools
5. The biggest mistakes edtech founders make when selling into K–12

✨ Episode Highlights
[00:02:34] Student data privacy is a capacity problem, not a policy problem
[00:03:00] Why districts often have DPAs for <10% of the tools students actually use
[00:05:56] How AI training on student data creates irreversible privacy risk
[00:07:30] Dean’s case for blocking risky AI tools by default in schools
[00:11:26] Why “move fast and break things” fails in K–12 edtech
[00:14:56] What gives Dean optimism about the future of AI, content, and assessment in education

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Dean Celaj: AI is the biggest concern right now because if you ask the traditional vendor to delete student data, they could just always go back and delete the data from the database. Whereas with AI, you have the student data in the database, and then you have the machine learning applied on student data, which is almost impossible to reverse.

You know, once an AI algorithm trains with your biometric data, it'll always have the data. So this is my opinion. I think that risky AI tools by default need to be blocked in school districts. You know, you have a lot of transcribing tools, you have a lot of image recognition tools, which you would be surprised at how many of these tools are in school devices today.

And in my opinion, the default policy should be blocked unless you have a data privacy group.

[00:00:52] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to. Impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. 

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Hello EdTech listeners. We have a special guest today, Dean Celaj. He's the founder and CEO of GoTeacher building core infrastructure that helps schools understand and manage student data privacy. He previously founded academy.ai, the Khan Academy for Albanian speaking students, which was adopted by 91% of students in Albania during COVID, and he was named to Forbes 30 under 30 actually.

Was it Academy AI or Academy AL, was it AL? 

[00:02:04] Dean Celaj: Yeah, it's AL, but now we're in the age of AI, so everyone says AI. 

[00:02:08] Ben Kornell: There you go. Well, we are so excited to learn from you have you here, Dean, welcome to EdTech Insiders. 

[00:02:15] Dean Celaj: Thanks so much, Ben, for having me. 

[00:02:17] Ben Kornell: Alright, so let's start at the beginning from your vantage point at GoTeacher.

Why are so many US schools still falling short on student data privacy compliance in 2026? Is it primarily a policy problem, a tooling problem, or a capacity problem? 

[00:02:34] Dean Celaj: Yeah, I'd say it's primarily a capacity problem disguised as a policy one. So districts have policies on paper, but they lack the tools and the staff required to continuously monitor what's happening, what data is being shared with vendors and block things that are risky in real time.

[00:02:52] Ben Kornell: So what are the most common blind spots you see when districts believe they're privacy compliant, but actually aren't? 

[00:02:58] Dean Celaj: Yeah, by far the biggest blind spot I see is the thinking that we only need the data privacy agreement with vendors that are paid. Actually, federal laws state that if you're sharing student data with any vendor, free or paid, you need a data privacy agreement.

And in most cases, districts have 40 paid vendors or like 80 for the bigger ones, whereas they have hundreds and hundreds of free tools that lack privacy agreements. So that's why the DPA coverage in the average US school district is less than 10%. 

[00:03:32] Ben Kornell: Wow. So even for things like Khan Academy or chat GPT.

There needs to be some sort of privacy agreement. 

[00:03:39] Dean Celaj: Yeah, of course, Khan Academy for sure. But then with Chad GBT, with all of the AI models and training models with human data, the risk is even higher. 

[00:03:49] Ben Kornell: So speaking of somebody who's been on a school board for a school district, we have these complex procurement processes.

We have tons of vendors, we have short staffed IT teams, and we're all very concerned about privacy, but there's a lot on our plate. What do you think needs to change systematically to fix these issues? 

[00:04:10] Dean Celaj: You're right, you're extremely right. There are hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of third party applications that have access to student data on a daily basis.

And I think systematically we need fewer tools. We need shared visibility and even transparency with the community. Most importantly, automation that allows districts to enforce their policies. So when they make a decision, they can quickly enforce the rules at scale rather than to dealing with hundreds of apps on a one by one basis.

[00:04:40] Ben Kornell: So we kind of jumped into what your company does at Co-Teacher, but can you talk a little bit about why you founded Co-Teacher? What was the inspiration? You were doing incredible work with Academy Al in Albania. Where did this startup come from? 

[00:04:56] Dean Celaj: Thanks. Yeah. So in Albania at one point we had 91% of the kids in the country using our resources daily and we were primarily grant funded.

So we worked with unicef, all of the major international NGOs, and they kept asking the one question, they would tell me, you're off the reporting monthly usage. So we know you have half a million students logging in this month, but can you show me how your. Resources are actually improving the needle on student outcomes.

And I could never answer that question. So when looking at strategies on how to do that, I realized that we had to become an aggregator of tools, getting all of the data in one place to be able to solve that problem. So as part of the roadmap and the vision, we want to solve the big how is technology improving the.

Outcomes question, but in order to get there, you have some more urgent problems. And through that privacy compliance, especially with AI, it's a huge concern that we're looking to address. 

[00:05:56] Ben Kornell: Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about that. With AI, they're proliferating in classrooms and outside of classrooms.

What does responsible AI adoption actually look like beyond setting some high level principles, what should schools be doing day to day that most aren't? 

[00:06:12] Dean Celaj: Well, in my opinion, no one really understands the impact of AI on children and teenagers yet. But what's worked very well for me and my team is we organized these bootcamps where students would come in and they have a limited amount of time to solve a problem.

So in our case, they had to use AI tools to create a social impact venture. So we taught them how to use all of the different AI tools to create business models and then create very nice looking slide decks and build the actual prototypes. So the biggest takeaway was that the people that the children had attended, they quickly found out what AI was good at and the limitations of AI.

So it was great at creating slide decks. It was great at building a prototype, but it wasn't very good at creating original ideas. So that realization that AI actually has certain limitations. It was the big takeaway because the importance is for the children not to outsource their thinking to AI. They have to learn how to work with it, but not outsource their thinking fully.

So that was a big takeaway 

[00:07:17] Ben Kornell: and one of your big focuses is on data and data privacy. How should schools be thinking differently about data governance and consent? When AI models are trained, integrated, or updated using student data? 

[00:07:30] Dean Celaj: AI is the biggest concern right now because if you ask the traditional vendor to delete student data, they could just always go back and delete the data from the database.

Whereas with AI, you have the student data in the database, and then you have the machine learning applied on student data, which is almost impossible to reverse. You know, once an AI algorithm trains with your biometric data. It'll always have the data. So this is my opinion. I think that risky AI tools by default need to be blocked in school districts.

You know, you have a lot of transcribing tools, you have a lot of image recognition tools, which you would be surprised at how many of these tools are in school devices today. And in my opinion, the default policy should be blocked unless you have a data privacy agreement. 

[00:08:18] Ben Kornell: Yeah, we recently saw that Denver Public Schools ban chat GPT and is really only allowing purpose-built education AI partners.

Now, they may be using an LLM underneath to power it, but they're sequestering personalized data before it gets to the LLM or anonymizing. That data. Really interesting. Talking a little bit about the work that you've done. You've built platforms that have real deep adoption academy during COVID to GoTeacher today.

I'm curious first, like I keep hearing about Albania as like a hotbed for EdTech innovation. What's going on in Albania? Why is it such a magnet for innovators, for capital to deploy? What is it about that community that has really spurred this incredible innovation? 

[00:09:11] Dean Celaj: We're a small country and we get disproportionate sort of PR for how small we are as the country.

So it's true that a lot of Albanians around the world are doing and building great things. In terms of why I launched an education startup in Albania, it's because our country really needs it. The educational Albania. You know, it's not really valued in this society. So if you're, you know, in the US if you're a top student, you go to a top college, you probably will have a good life in Albania is quite the opposite.

If you are the best student, doesn't always mean that you will get a good job or even a good life. So that was the reason why I wanted to get into education, make a change around how, how the country thinks about it. So that's my original. Stuart. 

[00:09:58] Ben Kornell: Yeah, it's just um, really interesting there. The UNICEF education technology hubs.

There was a big investment there. There's these Council of Europe Development Bank installing smart labs in over 600 schools. There's the Albanian mooc. You know, and then I even had some exposure when I was in London last time to the Prime Minister who is really adamant around education, education, innovation.

I think that's something very unique going on in Albania. If people wanted to learn more about. Innovation in Albanian education system, what would you recommend they do or read or listen to? 

[00:10:37] Dean Celaj: Yeah. UNICEF resources in Albania are extremely helpful. We work closely with them. They have a great team in Albania and also, I'm not sure what English resources that could be around, but yeah, I, I would say unicef.

[00:10:50] Ben Kornell: We all have AI, so we should be able to translate. 

[00:10:52] Dean Celaj: Yeah, to go to charge GT and Ask Charge gt. They, they'll pull everything together for you. 

[00:10:59] Ben Kornell: That's great. Well, given that you've already been a successful entrepreneur, once we and our audience is, you know, deeply involved in entrepreneurship in EdTech, and now you've got this new initiative with co-teacher, when you look at your journey, you've learned a lot and you've seen what works and what doesn't work to help tools scale.

What do you think is the biggest mistake EdTech founders often make that keeps their tools stuck in pilot mode? 

[00:11:26] Dean Celaj: Yeah, education and K 12 actually challenges a lot of what you hear on the internet. You know, the typical startup ideology is ship fast, make mistakes, iterate quickly. But in K 12, if you ship with mistakes, you immediately lose trust because school districts are the most risk averse organizations.

So you have to, it's challenging because as a small startup, you're resource constrained. Whereas, uh, schools expect a, a working product that has no mistakes. So that's challenging. So the biggest mistake founders make, especially I made this mistake many times, is because we're so deeply passionate about building, we often start building without really understanding what we're building or without really solving a problem.

You've probably heard this a million times, but listening closely to real problems. And even if you have the, if you're lucky enough. To be part of a team where you are in the school districts and then you can observe the current state of things and then you maybe have the ideal state of things in mind.

That's very powerful. It's much better to, you know, come from inside the system and you're entrepreneurial and you can design. Some solutions because you'll end up building, you know, the wrong thing. It'll be costly because schools expect a fully baked product. So the combination of those two can be very challenging.

[00:12:52] Ben Kornell: Yeah. You mentioned trust being so important. What were some of the key things you did to build trust, either for Academy or for GoTeacher? 

[00:13:02] Dean Celaj: Yeah. Well, since I started entrepreneurship at a young age, we always try to do more than we were asked to do. We always try to exceed expectations. This was kind of like the goal starting a K 12 startup at 22, you really have to build that trust because you have to be taken seriously.

So what we're doing with Goal Teacher is that we've spent the last six months. Just working on partnerships. We have a partnership with the Massachusetts State IT Directors Group Meta, and we're working on a lot of this statewide partnerships so that when we, you know, if you build trust at the state level or at the state IT director groups, you can get that buy-in and then you can share your successes through that network.

And something that's working very well is actually giving something away for free. Because people want to try it then buy it. So that's been working very well for us in Albania. We, we actually gave everything away for free and UNICEF then started, you know, giving us lot of grants and then UNICEF told their.

The other organizations to support us. So giving something away for free and making sure it's good because you can give away something for free, and it is, if it's not very good, it'll actually do the exact opposite thing that you intended to do. It'll show you are a young startup with a half baked product.

So, you know, trust is about forming close partnerships with people doing always more than what's expected, and obviously being transparent when asked. 

[00:14:27] Ben Kornell: Yeah, it's really incredible to talk to someone who's had so much success. But also decided to take the irrational step to start a second. Mm-hmm. Startup, because we all know how hard it is in in education.

When you look out on the space, I know it's gotta feel tough with all of these issues with data privacy and data security, but what's giving you the most optimism? What's giving you the most hope? What are you seeing that's inspiring you in education and technology? 

[00:14:56] Dean Celaj: Well, obviously I'm super excited about the student debt, privacy, compliance issues that I've seen.

It's a challenge. It's a big challenge. I wanna say that 99% of school districts are in some shape or form out of compliance with the data privacy laws, and I see this as a huge opportunity to go in and support districts and actually create a movement around their privacy because you know this better than I do it teams.

In school districts are very small and resource constrained. So how are you supposed to manage a thousand vendors who no one is willing to sign a data privacy with you? You are often left with very little choice. So I'm super excited about solving this problem in, in this space. I've always been excited around.

Content. I feel like content assessment and data are the three things that every ed tech tool should do very well. And with AI nowadays, you can create very differentiated content and assessment at scale. So I've always been interested in this, so I look forward to seeing very entrepreneurial teachers leverage AI tools to build, you know, cool and very effective curriculum.

That's something which. I'd love to see. I, I'm not sure how the market is gonna react to that, but I'm excited about it. 

[00:16:12] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Well, like you said, especially in a, in an AI moment, these issues are critical and once the data is in the model, you can't get it back. So thanks so much, Dean, for joining us. If people wanna find out more about GoTeacher, how can they find out more?

[00:16:30] Dean Celaj: They can go to GoTeacher.com, if you're a school district, we are collaborating with state groups to provide a free assessment of their, you know. Workspace. So just in two minutes or less, they can see where they're at. So how many tools they have connected. Is there a DPA in place? So we are offering this free assessment with various state groups around the country.

And yeah, just GoTeacher.com. You can find out a lot of information there as well. 

[00:16:57] Ben Kornell: Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Dean. 

[00:17:01] Dean Celaj: Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks for having me. 

[00:17:03] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.

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