In the middle of every big mistake made by an institution, the tide slowly turns. Nothing is said about it. There are a few votes by the school board here, a petition from parents there, and then the district quietly puts carts full of iPads back in storage. For American school technology, that time is now.
It was thought that more technology would help students learn better in U.S. public schools for about ten years. Kids in kindergarten took laptops home with them. Textbooks were replaced by apps. A lot of the time, districts signed contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with edtech companies that hadn’t really tested their products in a real classroom. There was no way to argue with the logic at the time. Get kids ready for life in the digital world. Fill in the gaps in technology. Quickly move. It was then time for the results.
Test scores are very close to all-time lows. In classrooms, teachers have to fight every day to keep students’ attention. They’re not up against other students or outside distractions, but against the devices their districts made them use. That’s how a Los Angeles sixth-grade English teacher put it: every day is a negotiation between her lesson and Minecraft. It’s not a figure of speech. It’s the truth about teaching in the year 2025.
There is no panic going on right now. It’s an update, and some might say it’s long overdue. LA Unified, the country’s second-largest school district, just passed a broad resolution to take devices away from its youngest students, block YouTube on Chromebooks that the school gives out, and look over edtech contracts worth $1.6 billion. Laws that limit screen time in schools are being thought about in at least 14 states right now. As a matter of public health, the federal government warned young people not to use screens too much. You can feel the shift, and it’s getting stronger quickly. For teachers, this shouldn’t feel like a crisis but rather like a green light.
Because of the pandemic, school had to go online almost overnight, and devices were really important in that emergency situation. No one is making a different case. But what began as a lifeline turned into policy over time. Schools took money away from textbooks and learning on paper and put it toward digital platforms. Technology stopped being a tool and slowly turned into the lesson plans themselves. The teachers saw. The parents saw. In their own way, the kids also noticed, but they changed things in the way that was easiest for them, which meant playing games and listening to playlists on YouTube and Spotify instead of algebra.
One parent in Los Angeles said that when she looked at her daughter’s device history, she saw hours and hours of cat videos and makeup tutorials. The Chromebook her daughter got from school. Her daughter’s tool for learning. There’s a chance that story sounds strange. Most likely, it’s not.
People who work as teachers and have seen this happen firsthand say that many of them knew something wasn’t right before the data proved it. A lot of kids were writing on touchscreens instead of learning how to hold a pencil, they saw. They saw students use Google Translate to finish their Duolingo Spanish homework. They saw that almost no one was reading a real book anymore. This wasn’t because kids didn’t like books anymore; it was because all of their work was now done on screens, and screens come with everything else.
Right now, teachers don’t need a new app or a different rule from the district. To get back into their classrooms, they need help from the school system. Even though it’s a mess, the backlash against edtech is doing just that. Parents are getting together in living rooms on Saturday nights to demand textbooks and paper, and school boards are looking over billion-dollar contracts. This is a rare chance for teachers to say, “We need to teach differently.”
That doesn’t mean giving up all technology. That argument doesn’t make sense and isn’t needed. It means restoring some basic balance, like letting teachers give a handwritten essay when that’s the best way to do it, letting kids read a physical chapter instead of clicking through a digital module, and letting teachers decide what to teach instead of the platform telling them what to do.
A lot of the products in the edtech industry are based on the idea that engagement equals learning. It doesn’t always mean that. A student may not have learned anything useful after forty minutes of being “engaged” by a game-like app. Someone who has to work hard to read two pages of dense text might remember it for years. In all the chaos, that difference got lost.
Teachers in the US have had to deal with technology rules that didn’t always help them or their students for years. The weather is changing. People are really angry. There is a hole there. It’s a shame not to take it.
