Profile / Marketing & Education
He taught eighth grade for nine years and was named Teacher of the Year. Then he spent the next two decades convincing the world's biggest education brands to market like they still remembered the classroom.
There is a specific kind of tired that only a middle-school teacher knows. It arrives around 9pm, with a stack of essays still to grade and a lesson plan for tomorrow that isn't written yet. Jason Ediger lived nine years of those nights before he ever set foot in a marketing department. It turns out that was the best training he could have gotten.
Today Ediger is the Chief Marketing Officer of Cengage, the Boston-based education company that pulls in around $1.5 billion a year selling digital courseware, textbooks and learning platforms to colleges and schools. He got the title in 2026, after leading the company's higher education and international marketing. On paper it is the top of a long climb. In practice, he will tell you the job hasn't really changed since he was standing at a whiteboard in front of thirty eighth-graders.
Most marketing chiefs study their customer through dashboards and persona documents. Ediger had a shorter path to the insight: he was the customer. For nine years he taught eighth grade, the grade level teachers quietly agree is the hardest one in the building. He was good enough at it to be named Teacher of the Year. And somewhere in those years he did something that, in hindsight, reads like a prophecy - he wrote his school district's first education technology plan, back when wiring a classroom to the internet was still an experiment rather than an industry.
That detail matters more than it looks. Before EdTech was a word people put on a conference badge, Ediger was already asking the only question that has driven his whole career since: how does technology actually help the person doing the teaching? Not the district. Not the procurement office. The teacher.
“I'm excited to continue to tell the story of how we're creating products that save teachers time.”
Jason EdigerRead that quote again and notice what is missing. No mention of engagement metrics, no adaptive-learning buzzword, no talk of the platform. The whole sentence is about the teacher and the scarcest thing they own, which is time. That is the entire Ediger thesis, compressed. He learned it grading papers, and he has never let go of it.
After the classroom, Ediger moved to the Orange County Department of Education, where he oversaw the design, production and marketing of online services built for teachers. It was the natural next rung - still education, still teachers, but now thinking about how to reach thousands of them at once instead of thirty at a time.
Then came the big swing. Ediger spent roughly fifteen years at Apple, helping build and lead the marketing strategy for Apple Education. This is the part of the résumé that makes people lean in, and understandably so. But the interesting thing is how little it changed his worldview. Apple is a company obsessed with the person holding the product. Ediger walked in already believing that the person holding the product was a teacher who did not have a spare minute. The company and the man agreed on the premise before they ever met.
When Ediger left Apple, he did not leave education. He became Chief Marketing Officer of Discovery Education, the company that grew out of the old Discovery Channel's schools business. Then, in 2022, he moved to Newsela, the fast-growing platform that turns news articles into leveled reading for classrooms. He arrived first as interim CMO and senior vice president of solution marketing and brand experience, and was soon named permanent CMO.
What is telling is how he described the Newsela move. He did not talk like an outsider hired to fix the marketing. He talked like a fan who had been watching from the stands.
“I watched Newsela completely transform instructional materials in the classroom.”
Jason Ediger, on joining NewselaHe had seen the product work as an educator would see it, from the outside, in real classrooms, over the better part of a decade. When he finally took the marketing job, he was not learning the customer. He already knew the customer by heart. That is a rare position for any marketer to start from, and it is the closest thing Ediger has to a competitive edge.
In 2024 Ediger joined Cengage Group as senior vice president of higher education and international marketing. Two years later, the company handed him the CMO title. The move up matters because Cengage is a different animal from Newsela. It is bigger, older, and it plays across higher education, K-12 and workforce skills at once. Its brand has to speak to a nervous college student worried about the price of a textbook and to a provost worried about learning outcomes, sometimes in the same breath.
Higher education is also, right now, one of the harder rooms to market to. Students are skeptical about cost. Institutions are skeptical about hype. Everyone has heard the phrase "AI-powered personalized learning" enough times to tune it out. In that climate, a marketing chief whose instinct is to strip away the buzzwords and talk about a real person's real time is not a nice-to-have. He is a corrective.
Step back and the shape of the career is unusual. Most ambitious people treat the classroom as a launchpad - a thing you do for two years before business school. Ediger did the opposite. He climbed out of teaching and into the C-suite while keeping the classroom in the room the whole way up. His English degree from Biola University sits under a career built entirely on telling education's story, which is a tidy kind of symmetry.
He lives in Los Gatos, California, and works for a company headquartered in Boston, which is its own quiet comment on how much of modern education has moved online. But the philosophy underneath it is stubbornly analog. It comes from a room with desks in it, and a teacher who did not have enough hours in the day.
There is a lesson buried in all of this for anyone who markets anything. The shortcut to understanding your customer is to go be your customer for a while - not a survey of them, not a persona doc, the actual job and the actual bad days. Ediger spent nine years earning an insight most companies pay consultants to guess at. When he says a product should save teachers time, he is not repeating a slogan. He is remembering a feeling. That is the difference, and in a category drowning in jargon, it is the whole game.