The Digitization of American Schooling

Screens have grown like kudzu over school classrooms, hallways, and cafeterias. According to an Education Week survey, 55 percent of American students spend between one to four hours of class time on screens, and 27 percent of students spend five hours this way. With roughly 50 million public school students in the country, that means approximately 14 million students walk into their classroom and spend virtually every minute staring at a screen.

They practice math problems on the latest learning app. They read literature online. They log into digital textbooks and answer questions on virtual forms. They turn in assignments on learning-management software systems. They watch videos in history class. They play online games if they finish an assignment early.

From bell to bell, our students are staring at and interacting not with books, classmates, teachers, papers, and pencils, but with laptops and tablets. Instead of providing moments of relief from screen addiction, schools are leading drivers of it.

Once upon a time, I confess, I took this approach as an educator. It was convenient. No dogs ate homework. No jammed copy machines inconvenienced my workflow. No papers got lost, nor were books ruined by spills or gum. But one morning, in my tech-friendly classroom, I noticed how quiet it was. Students walked into my classroom as they always did, opened their laptops, and played games.

I slowly trimmed away the kudzu and instead planted pencils, paper, and books back into my instruction.

They should have been cramming together for tests, doodling in pairs, or simply talking, joking, and connecting with one another. Instead, they were silent, cloistered off, and interacting individually with a device. I saw not exciting ed tech progress but a dystopia in my room that day, so I slowly trimmed away the kudzu and instead planted pencils, paper, and books back into my instruction.

The History

The overgrowth of screens into the school day has a history, paralleling how Ernest Hemingway’s character famously went bankrupt: at first gradually, then all at once.

The early 2000s were an era of technological hope in education. In 2001, No Child Left Behind sought to cross “the digital divide by ensuring that every student is technologically literate by the time the student finishes the eighth grade.” To accomplish that, the bill set aside $1 billion to support the integration of technology into all curricula. Moreover, many of the testing regimes No Child Left Behind incentivized were made available online, which meant schools had to get a tranche of new computers to administer the required exams.

Many state policymakers championed one-to-one device policies and new software in the classroom, using Race to the Top federal grants to purchase iPads for children, for example. Many schools even sought to integrate cell phones into the classroom. From 2010 to 2016, the number of schools that had cell phone prohibitions dropped from 90 percent to 65 percent.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. The federal government doled out hundreds of billions of dollars of relief funds, which districts subsequently spent on more computers, software, tech services, and learning apps. Before the pandemic, two-thirds of high schools and 40 percent of elementary schools provided devices to their students. After the pandemic, those numbers leaped to 90 and 84 percent, respectively. Schooling became a virtual experience.

Today, the digitization kudzu has grown over into the home, regardless of whether families embrace or resist it. When all learning occurs online, that inevitably forces screens into households. Students access homework and turn in essays on Google Classroom. Communication and class updates come through software and email. Parents that desire a tech-free home environment have to purchase computers and compromise their own family boundaries because the school has embraced tech.

Technology has certainly changed education. But many technological innovations are akin to educational furniture.

Ironically, such faith in the promise of new technology to transform education is itself an old concept. In 1841, Josiah Bumstead wrote, “The inventor or introducer of the system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind.” His book was The Black Board in the Primary School, and the system of which he wrote was—you guessed it—the blackboard. One-to-one computing, microfilm, televisions, blackboards, radios, slide projectors, iPads and iPhones, calculators, the internet, and now AI chatbots all have had their boosters claiming that this innovation will finally revolutionize education in a way never before seen.

Technology has certainly changed education. But many technological innovations are akin to educational furniture. Administrators, policymakers, and researchers fret about their purchase and effects, and then they sit in the background, becoming the way things are often done without much consideration. Few consider the role that central heating or erasable pencils play in education, though they certainly changed it.

But is schooling transformed? Have we reached the maximum point on the ed tech parabola, or are we now well past it on an interval of decrease?

The Impacts

If anything, as algorithmic advances continue, the trade-offs of technology seem to outweigh any benefits. Techno-advocates promised a new era of connections and democratized information sharing. Instead, we got increases in anxiety and depression, rewired brains that struggle to focus and crave quick hits, lower academic achievement, loneliness, and even more trips to the emergency room.

In response, policymakers in 18 states and the District of Columbia have banned cell phones from bell to bell, and I’m happy to report that these prohibitions have been a success. Studies on the effects of phone-free schools and classrooms find that they reduce the number of consultations for psychological symptoms, lower rates of bullying, improve GPAs for girls, improve scores on end-of-course and end-of-class exams, improve achievement on standardized tests, and even foster more exercise during outdoor recess.

While laudable, prohibitions on phones are insufficient. We need to instead reconsider the entire paradigm of providing education through the medium of a screen.

The push for the computerization of learning contradicts what we know about how students learn. According to Scientific American, there is a “steady stream of research” confirming that students learn best when they complete work by hand. Typing is so efficient that we can write out notes without really thinking about it. Conversely, handwriting is a slower process, which forces students to attend to, synthesize, and write out information, thereby helping them learn it. Moreover, one study found that students registered more connectivity across the brain when writing as opposed to typing, as the physicality of shaping every individual letter fostered more activity than typing, whereby the action of pressing every key is functionally the same.

When students read on paper instead of screens, they better comprehend and remember the material.

The benefits of analog learning apply to reading as well. When students read on paper instead of screens, they better comprehend and remember the material. Myriad distractions on devices clutter their thinking. In addition, even the physicality of a book improves comprehension because we remember, vaguely, where in a book or article an author wrote a pithy line or penned a beautiful image.

Unfortunately, every tech entrepreneur can promise that their technology is different. They will succeed where others failed. The latest software, the latest update, the latest innovation really is “it” this time.

The latest fad is AI. In a widely viewed 2023 TedTalk, Sal Khan, founder of the online tutoring software Khanmigo, predicted that “we’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” Through its purported ability to deliver one–one tutoring, AI-powered chatbots will save, not destroy, education, he argues. If former technological promises are to be any guide, there’s good reason to consider such promises suspect.

And that doesn’t touch on the myriad risks AI carries. Will it teach students accurate information? What happens when we replace human-to-human instruction with an artificial intelligence? How will interactions with digital friends impact social dynamics in the next generation? Even if we can, there’s always the question whether we should.

The Fix

I can hear the counterarguments. It’s the 21st century, and students need to learn 21st-century skills. They need computer literacy. They need to keep up with other countries. I don’t contest this point. Rather, skills like computer science and responsible AI usage can be and should be their own discrete lessons, units, or classes. Students won’t develop cutting-edge technological skills simply because all their class readings are online or because they type their notes. That they need to learn the skills of technology does not mean that all their learning needs to be delivered through said technology.

The pairing of text, video, and imagery demonstrated moments from history that a mere lecture alone could not.

And there are some learning activities that only technology can allow. As an educator, I used an online, 360-degree tour of the Globe Theatre so students could better picture what it would be like to watch a Shakespeare play in Elizabethan England. I showed clips from documentaries. The pairing of text, video, and imagery demonstrated moments from history that a mere lecture alone could not. But a good rule of thumb is that if the activity is no different on screen or paper, use paper.

As for remedies, most fundamentally, we need to interrogate the unquestioned embrace of constant innovation, the obsession that American education seems to have with the latest trends, and the preference for the shiny and new over the tried, true, and proven effective. There are policies that could aid in this balance.

Most importantly, school boards and state policymakers need to hold tech vendors to a far higher standard. If signing another software contract or purchasing another gadget for every student, the school should consider the return on investment. Vendors should provide, and schools should demand, clear evidence of the efficacy of their products from outside analysts. Even if the products are effective elsewhere, policymakers should consider whether the investment will prove fruitful for their specific school or district. If the vendors’ products are not improving academic outcomes, the solution is simple: Terminate the contracts.

Another remedy would be a move away from one-to-one computing. If teachers had to reserve computer labs or Chromebook carts again, it would incentivize a more judicious approach to technology use. Teachers would have to ask: Why do I need computers? How will they actually enhance this learning activity? Or are they more trouble than they’re worth?

Technology has done wonders for the advancement of humanity, but that’s not a reason to bring a phone to family dinner or a computer to story time before bed. Neither is it a justification to force every new, untested technology into the hands of students.

Daniel Buck is a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute.