Hugh Grant, floppy-haired British rom-com star. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, conservative firebrand with presidential aspirations. Oprah Winfrey, one-woman media empire.
All have used their megawatt stardom to campaign against education technology, arguing that the tools districts invested tens of billions of dollars in over the past decade impede learning and harm kids’ mental health.
Grant supports a nonprofit named Close Screens, Open Minds that wants to “pause” ed tech’s rollout in K-12. Cruz recently convened a Senate hearing on screen time in K-12 schools featuring three of ed tech’s most prominent critics. And Winfrey has hosted experts on her popular podcast who claim that tech is “destroying the education system from within,” according to a summary of her March 3 episode.
Celebrity involvement is a clear sign that the conversation about the effectiveness—or lack thereof—of digital learning tools isn’t confined to PTA meetings and teacher professional development sessions. It’s broken out of classrooms and district central offices and into Hollywood and the halls of Congress.
But famous and influential voices are hardly the only ones educators hear. Similar criticisms are coming from parents, policymakers, and increasingly, students themselves.
More than half of educators who work for public school districts—61%—say that most parents and caregivers feel there’s too much technology in schools, compared with 37% who say families feel the amount of technology in schools is “just right,” according to a survey of 596 district and school leaders and teachers, conducted by the EdWeek Research Center in February and March.
Opposition to ed tech far predates the iPhone or the Chromebook. Back in 1992, a school board member and parent accused her child’s California district of “cramming computers down kids’ throats.”
But the backlash has escalated recently, spurred by ground-shifting changes in both digital tools and the way schools use them.
Three big developments are fueling the tech pushback
Over the past five to six years, nearly all schools started or dramatically expanded 1-to-1 computing programs that put a school-issued device in the hands of nearly every student, fueled by a pandemic-era push for virtual learning and billions in temporary federal pandemic-relief funding.
Schools are now grappling with a game changing technological twist—generative artificial intelligence—which purports to personalize lessons for struggling students but can also serve as an uncredited ghostwriter for would-be cheaters and opens the doors for massive student-data privacy problems.
Districts started suing social media companies, contending they willfully ignored evidence that their products’ design contributed to declining child mental health.
A blockbuster book—The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt—argued a childhood spent in largely unrestricted screentime has had disastrous consequences for the wellbeing of children and young adults.
Experts credit Haidt’s book, which spent over a year on The New York Times’ bestseller list, with fueling a bipartisan push across at least 36 states and the District of Columbia to place restrictions on the use of student cellphones in school.
Now, there’s mounting scrutiny of other types of screen time in schools. At least 17 states are considering bills that seek to pump the breaks on the use of technology during school hours.
For instance, Utah recently approved legislation that calls for districts to limit “nonessential” screen time, a term the law doesn’t specifically define. It also prohibits using AI for grading and for making “essential decisions” about students.
Support for tech use in schools is still strong in many circles
But ed tech also has high-profile champions, including President Donald Trump. At a White House event in March, first lady Melania Trump sketched out a future in which children would be taught by an ever-patient robot named Plato, who would give “instantaneous access” to “classical studies.”
The presentation underscored the administration’s policy moves on AI and education. Most prominent among them: An executive order released last year called for schools to infuse the technology throughout education, including training teachers on how to use AI to improve instruction and workflows.
Plus, getting technology out of schools, or allowing parents to opt their children out of digital learning tools, isn’t as simple as hitting an off switch. Technology is infused into nearly every part of the K-12 system.
Annual reading and math assessments, which are required under federal law, are largely digital. And learning management systems—software programs that help educators create, manage, organize, and deliver online learning materials for students—are now staples for school districts.
When Casey Rimmer taught social studies back in the early 2000’s, her students could point to countries in their textbooks that no longer existed.
Two decades later, North Carolina’s Union County School District, where Rimmer is now executive director of curriculum and instruction, relies on online resources for its social studies curriculum, which can be easily updated to reflect changes in the world.
Digital tools can also provide students instant feedback on their assignments. They can analyze data quickly, telling a teacher that 75% of a class missed a particular question, prompting educators to reteach a certain skill.
Without technology, “we just couldn’t be as agile as we are right now,” Rimmer said. “I think we would go backwards on curriculum.”
Educators’ own perceptions of ed tech’s effectiveness are mixed.
The majority of educators—55%—say ed tech has a positive impact on academics and engagement, according to the EdWeek Research Center survey. But more than half also believe it has a negative impact on social-emotional development, students’ overall well-being and mental health, and their behavior.
For some educators, ed tech’s reckoning is long overdue.
Joe Clement, a Virginia social studies teacher, has watched students’ ability to focus deteriorate as more technology has been introduced over his roughly three decades in the classroom.
It’s an “unfair burden” to ask students to try to concentrate on, say, conjugating Spanish verbs or mastering geometric formulas when they can open a new browser and use their classroom device to watch YouTube videos of their favorite pop star, Clement said.
Sure, filters and other digital hurdles exist, but students easily get around them, he said.
But others caution not to let the current tech backlash go too far. They worry that digital tools they’ve found helpful in differentiating instruction or adjusting their teaching based on student data may be brushed aside in a coming rush to reduce screen time.
“Especially in special education, technology can be the difference between a student being able to access grade-level content or being left out of it,” said Heather Gauck, a special education teacher in western Michigan.
And some teachers just feel caught in the middle, trying to find the balance between too much and too little tech use.
“I know that during an observation [for my performance review], if I don’t use technology, I’m going to get dinged because I’m not using technology,” said one middle school teacher in an affluent Midwestern suburb who asked that their name be withheld in order to speak candidly. “And if I do use technology, I’m going to get dinged because [students] should have some screen-free time.”
How schools are reacting to ed-tech pushback
Many educators, experts, and parents say schools need to do a better job explaining the “why” behind technology use for teaching and learning. Others want to see more intentional tech use, including a pivot back to computer labs and laptop carts and away from universal access to digital learning devices.
And some are pushing even further, wanting parents to be able to opt their kids out of ed tech entirely. That’s something Emily Cherkin, a former middle school English teacher who testified at Cruz’s hearing, has advocated. Cherkin, who has become a face of the movement to push back against the overuse of technology, has a catchy, oft-quoted line: “Ed tech is just big tech in a sweater vest.”
Two years ago, Cherkin persuaded her daughter’s Seattle school to provide tech-free alternative assignments after the middle schooler complained of frequent headaches. It worked and hasn’t had an impact on the girl’s grades, Cherkin said.
But those types of changes in schools are not widespread. Most educators—74%—say their districts have not reduced their investments in educational technology due to pushback or complaints from parents, according to the EdWeek Research Center survey.
The percentage of districts dialing back tech use in school could rise as generative AI increasingly becomes integral to ed-tech tools, and educators, parents, and students see the downsides of too much AI use. Surveys from multiple organizations so far show that while parents want their children to learn how to use AI, they have qualms about employing it for instructional purposes.
Nearly 7 in 10 parents said they did not support schools using AI software to store and analyze students’ grades, assessment data, or other personal information, according to the annual PDK poll on the public’s views on education conducted in June.
It’s unclear whether the level of parent opposition to technology use in school is equally vehement everywhere.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, a coalition of parents have organized campaigns to pressure schools to limit screen time, NBC News reported. Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held about technology in the classroom, and nearly all who spoke criticized how much screen time their children are experiencing in class and how it negatively affected their behavior and grades.
But that feeling isn’t universal in the Los Angeles area.
Jose Rivas, who teaches physics and engineering at Lennox Math, Science, and Technology Academy—a charter school in Los Angeles County with a predominately Latino, heavily immigrant population—hasn’t heard a single parent question the amount of technology he uses in his classroom.
“They trust the educators to lead their kids to the right place,” Rivas said of the families.
Instead, he’s heard complaints from his students, who are studying engineering, but feel cheated out of a person-to-person interaction when they suspect a teacher relied on AI to grade a paper or plan a lesson.
‘When it is used with purpose, ... ed tech has a lot of power’
Though ed-tech fans and skeptics each claim to have research on their side, there’s no silver bullet study or sweeping academic analysis that definitively demonstrates education technology works or doesn’t, said Michael Robb, the director of research at Common Sense Media. “The big general question of ‘is ed tech good?’ is almost impossible for a researcher to answer in a way that makes them feel good,” said Robb.
So much depends on the merits and purpose of a particular platform and whether teachers have been trained to implement it effectively, he added.
Educators with deep experience in digital learning agree that the broader context is key.
They fear that ed tech could be tarred with the same broad brush as social media apps that spread misinformation or AI tools that enable teenagers to create deepfake pornographic images of their classmates.
“When it is used with purpose and when it enhances the instruction, I think ed tech has a lot of power,” said Rimmer, the director of curriculum and instruction in the North Carolina school district. “But it can also be misused.”
As a parent of tweens, Rimmer sees a difference between the time her kids spend on a learning platform that’s been selected by the district for practicing a math skill versus less educational tech activities, such as scrolling social media sites.
The problem is that many parents who are questioning the value of tech use in school “are just seeing screens,” said Rimmer, a 2022 Education Week Leader To Learn From.
Rimmer’s district is constantly evaluating its digital tools with key questions: Are teachers using them, or are they languishing in the digital dustbin? Did a school or teacher who used a particular tool often see significant progress? If so, what did they do and how can others learn from it?
When teachers are having trouble integrating a particular platform or it isn’t getting results, Rimmer may jettison it entirely so that the district can concentrate precious dollars and equally precious professional development time on what works.
Even with those kinds of critical evaluations, many schools are still concerned that tech is overused. That is why some are mulling a return to computer labs or laptop carts—the status quo in many districts, pre-pandemic, especially in earlier grades.
“I think carts or labs are probably the answer” for 2nd grade through middle school, said Brandy Taylor, a district leader in Kansas. “There is nothing anywhere that says an app does [instruction] better than a human. When we went to 1-to-1 [computing], the test scores did not jump up. What changed for those students? I would argue that it was to their detriment.”
But not everyone agrees.
Rob Dickson, the chief information officer for the Wichita public schools in Kansas, argues that going back to the days of devices on carts makes it tougher for educators to see what students are doing on laptops and tablets, whether that’s about completing an assignment or a Google search that raises safety alarm bells.
Wichita is instead trying to provide parents and teachers with more complete information about when and how tech should be used. District leaders worked with parents and teachers to craft detailed tech guidelines.
The guidelines, which still must be revised and approved by district leaders, include grade-level explainers outlining how technology should be used with different age groups.
Some schools turn to tech-free days and better explanations to parents
Other schools are combining a strategy of paring back time spent on devices with clarifying for families why and how they use digital learning tools.
Sapulpa Middle School, in Sapulpa, Okla., which transitioned to 1-to-1 computing during the pandemic, recently surveyed parents and teachers to see how they felt about tech in schools.
The results were overwhelmingly negative. Seventy percent of parents and a whopping 99% of staff felt there was too much technology in the classroom.
Now, about a third of Sapulpa’s 45 teachers have been experimenting with a technology-free day once a week, said Amy Sanders, the school’s assistant principal. That means students are off their Chromebooks and are instead doing hands-on, interactive lessons, reading physical books, or writing in physical workbooks. At the same time, the school conducted events to give parents an idea of what kids use Chromebooks for during class and what tech-free activities teachers have students do, too, she said.
The challenge for educators is to find a comfortable balance between too much and too little tech use and be very intentional about the purpose of using Chromebooks for certain lessons, Sanders said.
“We can’t just have it go back to worksheets and pencil/paper,” she said. “It has to be interactive. It has to be engaging. It has to actually [help students] master the standards.”
