“Funding uncertainty, budget constraints, and a move toward paring
down inventories of educational technology are top of mind for many
district officials… Despite these downward pressures on ed-tech adoption,
the number of tech tools in use in school systems continues to increase…”
~ Alexandria Ng, Education Week
They knew exactly what they were doing and admitted as much, as when Tim Kendall, Facebook’s former director of monetization, said last year, “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset… We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible and turn it into historically unprecedented profits.”
Addictive, and eventually, but too late, we figured that out all by ourselves, heads buried in phones, face-to-face conversations buried, too. But still… We watched, shook our heads, fretted with worry, and went tech shopping, anyway—teachers and parents alike, with politicians adding to the mix and kids paying the price.
Schools jumped quickly on board the tech bandwagon in the mid-1980s, getting a big kickstart from Steve Jobs’s “Kids Can’t Wait” program. Its aim: “A computer in every school in America.” Sounded so good, we just never dreamed that, waiting in the wings some 25 years later, were Chromebooks for every kid and ultimately Smartphones that fit in our pockets, or that ed-tech would entirely transform teaching and learning while costing taxpayers billions.
The upshot?
As a middle school teacher put it: “The misuse and over-emphasis of technology will continue to be the demise of education, and there is no other side of this coin.”
Said another educator: “The trend of kids learning less started about ten years ago when phones, tablets, and laptops started falling into their hands. I’m mostly seeing an inability to self-motivate for a task and a deficit in critical thinking abilities, as well as a deficit in willingness to maintain focus and effort over a period of time.”
And the Proof:
On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, “The Nation’s Report Card:”
** In reading, just 31% of the 4th graders performed at the Proficient or Advanced Levels.
** In math, just 39% of the 4th graders performed at the Proficient or Advanced Levels.
** In reading, just 30% of the 8th graders performed at the Proficient or Advanced Levels.
** In math, just 28% of the 8th graders performed at the Proficient or Advanced Levels.
Below Basic: Reflects below grade-level performance
Basic: Reflects only partial knowledge and grade-level performance
Proficient: Reflects solid academic grade-level performance
Advanced: Reflects superior academic skills
Couple all that with this from author/speaker, former teacher and administrator, Mike Schmoker: “We’ve known how to ensure record levels of literacy for some time now. But decades on, we have yet to get our literacy house in order. Our priorities lie elsewhere, with confusing, overloaded literacy standards, with ill-conceived programs, or wholly unproven, often tech-based innovations that seduce us with their newness. Once trusted literacy organizations are now telling us to ‘decenter’ book reading and essay writing. After all, we’re now in the age of digital literacy.”
And so, despite years of talk, just 25 states currently have laws or policies that ban or limit cell phone use in K-12 public schools, while students are all online in our tech-heavy classrooms.
Meanwhile, parents fretting with worry, keep buying tech devices for their little kids …
*** An August 2024 Common Sense Media survey of 1,578 parents of children 8 and younger discovered that 40% of their toddlers have their own tablet.
*** A February 2025 Common Sense Media follow-up survey found that these youngsters spend, on average, 2-1/2 hours on screens every day, with 33% now using AI for learning, too, plus:
- 79% have a smartphone that can go online and use apps;
- 19% have a smartphone with limited access to the Internet and apps; while,
- 3% have very basic phones.
And now that AI is the new tech habit in town, despite warnings, teachers are in its embrace, allowing it to even craft their lesson plans. So much for “Buyer Beware.”
“Storage is not understanding. Search is not synthesis. And AI summaries, while efficient, can make it worse… The tools we think are helping us remember are actually training us to forget. Everything becomes equally searchable, which means nothing feels worth knowing.” ~ Debbie Jenkins, founder of Postnoted: The Antidote to Digital Amnesia
~ With thanks, Carol
