The EdTech Illusion: What Screens in Schools Were Supposed to Do, and What They Actually Did
A seven-year-old with a school-issued tablet is not evidence that her school is modern. It’s evidence that somebody sold her school a tablet.
That’s the whole illusion. Educational technology arrived in classrooms wrapped in the language of progress, personalization and twenty-first-century skills, and most parents accepted it the way you accept a new textbook, because who argues with the school about learning tools? But a device is not a textbook, the evidence that it helps children learn was never there, and the people most eager to tell you otherwise are the ones selling it.
Does edtech improve learning? What the evidence actually says
Start with the biggest review anyone has done. In 2023 UNESCO published its Global Education Monitoring Report on technology in education, and its finding was that there is little solid evidence that digital technology adds value to learning at all, that whatever benefits exist disappear when the technology is used in excess or without a qualified teacher, and that handing out devices without changing teaching does nothing. It also said out loud the thing everyone in education knows: most of the evidence that edtech works comes from the companies selling it, and evidence that comes only from the vendor “may be biased.” The report found fewer than a quarter of countries had bothered to ban smartphones in schools, despite the distraction evidence, and it noted that of the education interventions the U.S. What Works Clearinghouse has assessed, under two percent had strong or moderate evidence of effectiveness.
Then there’s PISA, the international test of fifteen-year-olds. In the 2022 round, about a third of students said they were distracted by digital devices in most or every math lesson, and those students scored meaningfully lower. The OECD’s own analysis found the relationship between device use at school and math performance is not a straight line: a little use, roughly an hour a day for learning, tracked with slightly better scores, and everything past that tracked with worse ones. Leisure use of devices at school, the scrolling that happens on the school Chromebook when the teacher’s back is turned, was flatly negative.
So, does technology in schools improve learning? Used sparingly by a trained teacher, maybe a little. Used the way most schools actually use it, as a device on every desk for most of the day, no.
The difference between a tool and a device
I don’t have a problem with technology in a classroom. I have a problem with the confusion between a tool and a device, and it’s the same confusion that runs through every screen argument.
A tool is something a child uses to do a real thing: type an essay, record a piece of music, look up a fact, edit a photo. In my house, that’s what a screen is for. There’s one iPad and it’s my husband’s, and my kids use a music app and a graphic-art app on it, and my older ones use a MacBook for schoolwork when the work needs one. A tool is picked up, used, and put down, and nothing about it is designed to make the putting-down hard.
A device, in the sense I mean, is engineered to hold attention. It has feeds, notifications, points, streaks, autoplay, a next thing queued before this thing ends. And here is what schools did: they bought devices and called them tools. A “learning platform” with badges and a leaderboard and a sound when you get one right is not a pencil. It’s a game, built by people who understand exactly how a nine-year-old’s reward system works, and it is now the format in which she does her reading, her math practice and her spelling, for hours, and then she goes home and you wonder why she can’t sit with a book.
What I watched
I taught teenagers for eleven years, and the phones were the end of this story. I had kids beg me to tell their parents to take them away, because they couldn’t stop and they knew it. I watched a lunchroom full of teenagers sit shoulder to shoulder in silence. I watched them storm the bin at the bell and walk into walls in the hallway. Every one of those kids had spent elementary and middle school being handed a screen by the adults in the building and told it was learning, and by the time they got to me, the idea that a screen might be for something other than holding you was gone. The school hadn’t just failed to protect them from the device. It had trained them on it.
Why it happened, and why it isn’t your kid’s teacher
Here’s where the blame goes, and it isn’t on the teacher who assigned the app. Districts bought devices because devices are a purchase you can point to, and “one-to-one technology” is a line in a strategic plan, and a company salesperson had a very good deck. The devices came with platforms, the platforms came with data, and the data came with a way to measure teachers, so the whole thing hardened into policy before anyone asked whether children learned more. The teacher in your kid’s classroom was handed the cart and the login and told to integrate it. Most of them have doubts. Almost none of them have the standing to say no.
That’s a normalized thing from the inside: everyone privately doubts it, and everyone keeps doing it, because the alternative is being the one teacher who didn’t. I know how that sounds if your kid’s teacher does this, and she is not the villain here. Blame the purchase.
What you can do
You can ask, and you can opt out, and both work better than people expect.
Ask the school three things, kindly, in writing: how many minutes a day is my child on a device at school, which platforms is she using, and what evidence did the district review before adopting them. The third question is the one that changes the conversation, because usually the answer is none, and a district that has to say so out loud starts to look at its own policy.
Then opt out of what you can. Most schools will let a parent decline a take-home device or request paper alternatives for homework, particularly in the early grades, and more of them are quietly relieved when someone asks. If your kid’s reading practice is on a gamified platform, ask for the book instead. If her math practice is a leaderboard, ask for the worksheet, which I never thought I’d say. And keep the school device out of her bedroom and off the dinner table, because a school Chromebook at 8pm is not homework. It’s a device, doing what devices do.
And at home, hold the line you’ve probably already been trying to hold. A screen is a tool for something real, or it doesn’t come out. That’s the policy in my house, and it’s the one the school should have had.
One thing
Tonight, ask your kid one question: “What did you do on the computer at school today?” Then listen to how long the answer is, and to how much of it sounds like learning.
If your kid came home with a device and something in you said “this isn’t right” and you’ve been talking yourself out of that feeling, You’re Not Imagining It is a free assessment I built for exactly that. I also write every week; you can find me on Instagram or join the list.
For where I think schools should go from here, and what AI changes, read Technology Skills Are Human Skills.
