Once upon a time, we were told that achieving educational equity involved bringing more and more technology into the classroom. Devices for every student. Special computer programs to remediate students. New software for teachers and admin.

Well, the ed tech promises never panned out.

A very different attitude toward technology in the classroom now seems to be taking hold, at least in some corners. Wealthy districts and private schools commonly eschew technology dependence in the classroom, if they ever embraced it to begin with. For instance, the Oaks Academy in Indianapolis proudly boasts “screen-free classrooms” within a list of what makes its educational experience special for students.

Meanwhile, Indiana as a whole is about to tighten up its ban on cellphones during the school day. The state’s pursuit of a social media ban faltered again this year, but that too follows a wider national trend of trying to get cellphones and social media out of classrooms and kids lives. The thing is, only some forms of technology are leaving the classroom. Others, perhaps no less impactful, remain. And a hyperfocus on the obvious villains might be blinding us to other minions worth rooting out.

The Vast Majority of Public Schools Remain 1-1

I thought I was going to write a piece about how schools are abandoning technology, retreating from its use in droves. While that’s true in isolated cases, it’s not yet the norm. The chromebook, as it were, is far from dead. Consider the most recent data dump from the Institute for Education Sciences, which estimates 88% of public schools have a 1-1 computing program as of the 2024-25 school year. Nearly half of those schools let their kids take those devices home after school or on weekends.

Indeed, if this 2024 piece in The New York Times titled “Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before It’s Too Late” hoped to be prophetic, the dangers and fears it unearths have yet to generate a widespread awakening.

Still, I find its central argument prescient when Jessica Grose notes, “We’ve let tech companies and their products set the terms of the argument about what education should be…. Companies never had to prove that [they] helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into America’s public schools.” Perhaps the sporadic, uneven, or nonexistent retreat is down to pure entropy. It may well be too late, too many schools bound up with their Chromebooks. No easy off ramp.

But tech companies are not schools’ friends. The purpose of ed tech is not academic improvement, however convincing the packaging. The purpose is profit. And generating profit is not, unfortunately, contingent on demonstrating academic improvement. Consider this AP reporting on schools using tens of millions of pandemic-area federal funds on ed tech, which ultimately stated, “Schools, however, have little or no evidence the programs helped students.”

The quiet part has always been loud, if we are willing to hear it. You know how tech workers always generate a bit of buzz when they admit they send their kids to screen-free schools or don’t let their kids use social media? Canaries and coal mines, as they say.

It seems clear to me that bringing more technology into the classroom these past couple decades hasn’t transformed our ability to educate students well. In fact, its very presence could be ensuring we can’t. Students need to know how to read and write, how to do math, and how to problem-solve with critical thinking skills. We don’t need screens for that.

1-1 Devices Can’t Solve Educational Disparities

It’s not so much that our only options are screens in classrooms or no screens in classrooms. But the prevalence and persistence of screens in public school classrooms may be blinding us to the fact that their absence wasn’t the reason for our educational disparities. And their presence can never solve them.

It’s all left me wondering if things like cellphone bans and social media restrictions (as important as they might be) are blinding us to other forms of technology in the classroom that could be getting just as much in the way of student learning. Or, if not being an outright impediment, perhaps acting as a crutch that doesn’t aid learning so much as pacify students.

Take, for example, the story in that New York Times article about the student who spent literally hours each school day watching Youtube videos rather than engaging in anything resembling learning of any kind. Surely, a world where kids watch more Youtube is not what any educators had in mind when they embraced one-to-one devices.

The problem is, Google is perfectly happy for kids to mindlessly watch Youtube instead of learning. The good news? We can ditch technology in the classroom, or at least rebalance students’ relationship with it. I’m under no pretenses this will be easy. But it feels increasingly urgent.

More books. Less Chromebooks.