The Benefits of Tech in the Classroom Have Been Oversold

T he 2010s were an interesting time to watch the direction of macro education theory in the United States. Technology portability was reaching heights never before seen, with thousands of potential applications. Organizational tools via office suites had more than proved their usefulness throughout the 1990s, communication tools were hitting their stride through the aughts and early 2010s with the rise of smartphones and inter-platform connectivity, and video games had proven to be an interactive medium in which children would readily engage with difficult concepts.

The next natural step, as hundreds of marketing, education, technology, and development companies discovered, would be to come up with an endless sea of solutions — each shinier than the last — to provide to schools that were positively brimming with government cash. Vendors of every shape and sort have spent the last decade flooding local school libraries and principals’ offices to share how their latest and greatest tech products would solve every issue the school had ever faced while finally providing the ticket to educational utopia.

This critical investment of millions must have resulted in skyrocketing academic performance, whose brilliance matched the bright lights and screens of technological investment — right? Not even close.

Computer labs became traveling laptop carts, which were eventually replaced with individual Chromebooks, PCs, and tablets for every student. What were fairly spartan attendance and gradebook database systems became vast environments of learning-management systems with automatic grading, plug-ins for learning exercises, and a virtual cornucopia of (rather expensive) outside content at the click of a mouse.

Elementary and middle schools bought millions of dollars’ worth of plastic toys that promised a pipeline to aerospace engineering and coding proficiency that rivaled the most ambitious science-fiction stories. At Indianapolis Public Schools, we had no fewer than eight subscription services to various STEM playgrounds alone — none of which showed any academic worth. One 2020 study found that 60 percent of programs developed from 2011 to 2017 didn’t meet STEM classification criteria.

The Covid-19 pandemic sent the education-tech world into an even deeper sugar coma. Now this education technology was not just a nicety, but a necessity for students to learn. The very best in immersive learning tools were a moral obligation for each school to help students through this trying time (and with it quite a substantial price tag). I watched as a children’s robotics program developed an incredibly expensive virtual world for the plastic robots in under six months — chasing that virtual pipeline of education perfection.

Even before the Covid-19 lockdowns, students didn’t turn in any more work assigned to them virtually than on paper in person. There has been little to no evidence that suggests students engage more in a virtual lab than in one taking place in front of them.

Manipulating math figures on a computer screen via an expensive subscription plan makes math no more intriguing than scrawling the numbers individually on a whiteboard. Exponential price tags have yet to best a classic Expo marker.

Students don’t appear to be reading articles more now that they can watch each word highlighted on screen as a paid voice actor reads it to them, and reading-comprehension scores are just as abysmal when delivered by a virtual learning environment as on paper. Indeed, most of the nation’s largest urban school districts with the greatest investments in high-tech learning environments have shown no improvement since adopting such programs.

We were promised that typing practice would increase spelling and phonics proficiency — though none of these promised improvements have yet been observed.

Screen addiction, blue-light exhaustion, and other medical issues accompanying near-round-the-clock screen use have only increased during this age of the computer replacing the teacher in the classroom. ADHD, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities’ coping mechanisms, often achieved through handwriting and screen restraint, are becoming less common as physical media takes a back seat to the convenience and entertainment of classroom computer use.

Short-term and long-term memory development has also taken a massive hit in the education space. The ability to search most answers with a few key presses has discouraged developing minds to retain information that doesn’t facilitate dopamine. Of course, that brings the additional concern that chasing hormonal “highs” with poorly implemented gamification and screen use could damage a developing child’s endocrine and nervous systems (perhaps permanently).

While many in the progressive education space suggest that this lack of performance improvement is but a result of teachers inability to use the games and software properly, I have yet to see an educator use these tools without the aforementioned side effects also making themselves present in their classrooms.

Even if a student uses his or her phone “responsibly” in class, active screen time still alters stimulation, reaction time, and memory retrieval in students at all grade levels.

As the science coordinator for Indianapolis Public Schools, I observed dozens of classrooms a week, K–12. The most effective classrooms I saw minimized the use of screens as much as possible to focus on what students could do themselves. The less students used their Chromebooks, the higher they seemed to function on Bloom’s taxonomy.

Many schools in both the public and private sector have begun abandoning the technology-saturated environments that have become so prevalent since the 2010s. One public-school system I observed in southern Illinois in early 2022 had removed personal devices from students’ hands, allowing only faculty members to use computers during the day (save for computer classes).

Several classrooms I observed left a considerable impression. I saw levels of student engagement and skill (in both retention and processing) that I hadn’t seen since my time student-teaching in a rural Indiana school.

While I can’t fully endorse or decry screen use in any classroom, I can report what I’ve seen — and how far the implementation of technology in schools has fallen from what was promised by the education-technology salesmen of the early 2010s. Your child doesn’t need a fancy game with cartoon characters to be taught math or literacy. Excessive screen use comes with consequences. Invest accordingly.