That's the point of the group, though, really -- they have close relationships with a good set of schools, and can be involved enough to see actual pain points that are amenable to technological solutions, talk through ideas with teachers, find the teachers who give reliable/insightful feedback, find administrators who can give insights into what expenses would be easy to get sign-off for & what wouldn't, etc..

Soliciting ideas from the target market directly isn't as useful -- you get a lot of ideas of what people think would be neat, but often the ideas are seriously flawed (ideas for flashier solutions that in practice are less efficient/practical/flexible than the old method... ideas for things that would be better but would not fit easily into any budget... etc.).

I've gotten lots of ideas from teachers directly for my (education-targeting) site, but most of them aren't actually very valuable - things that are either obvious (and already on my to-do list) or far too specific to their particular needs, or ideas that seem good at 3000 feet up, but explode when you look into actual implementation details.