Karen Mahon never had the goal to start her own business, but after seeing too much instructional “junk” out there, she couldn’t hold back. “If you read the marketing claims of most ed tech products on the market today you will see that pretty much all of them say that they improve kids’ learning. And it just isn’t so,” she says. As president and founder of Balefire Labs, a subscription service for parents and educators, she has made it her mission to keep school curriculum and technology directors from having to reinvent the wheel by coming up with their own screening systems, to help teachers and parents, and to drive spending dollars toward those developers who are really doing a good job creating high quality instructional products. The most common question she hears from parents and teachers? “How can I tell that an app actually teaches?” As very few…