Families and Teachers are Questioning Ed Tech. Are Schools and Districts Starting to Listen? | KQED
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When Los Angeles parent Lila Byock’s son started middle school, his grades suddenly collapsed.
It didn’t make sense. “He’d always been a bright, curious, engaged kid who did really well in school,” Byock said. She and her husband were confused and concerned.
Teachers assured the family that their son understood the material and the problem wasn’t academics. “They said, ‘He just can’t stay on task on his iPad,’” she continued.
That answer surprised Byock. Like many parents, she assumed that after pandemic remote learning ended, classrooms had largely returned to face-to-face instruction. Instead, she learned her son was spending much of his school day on a district-issued device.
“He was scrolling YouTube Shorts during math class. He was playing Fortnite battles with classmates during class,” Byock said. Other students watched streaming shows during lunch on school-issued iPads, and one student even showed pornography on a school device, according to Byock.
After talking with her son, Byock realized he wasn’t trying to break rules, but rather, he felt trapped by distractions he couldn’t seem to resist. “It was eroding his self-esteem,” she said. “He told us, ‘I want to stop, and I don’t think I can.’”
When Byock asked school administrators how devices were being used and what safeguards existed, the school’s answers didn’t satisfy her.
Byock’s experience reflects a larger shift in American classrooms. Over the last 15 years, schools invested billions of dollars in laptops, tablets and educational software, often under the promise that technology would personalize learning and prepare students for a digital future. Today, some educators and parents are beginning to ask whether those tools changed classrooms in ways they never intended.
The promise of education technology
For decades, education technology — also called ed tech — has been marketed as a way to make learning more customized, efficient and equitable. Writer and ed tech historian Audrey Watters said those promises stretch back long before laptops or artificial intelligence.
In the early 1900s, educators embraced standardized testing and intelligence testing as a way to make learning more measurable and objective. That same logic eventually shaped educational software, including the creation of the “teaching machines” designed to automatically grade multiple choice questions and aspirationally automate teaching. Personal computers entered classrooms in the 1980s, internet-connected learning expanded in the 1990s and 2000s, and after 2010 districts rapidly adopted one-to-one laptop programs. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the rapid push to remote learning made the full transition to digital learning nearly complete by providing students and schools with internet connectivity, devices and curriculum. Schools have long since reopened, but the reliance on ed tech continues.
“We see this long history of this desire to automate education, automate teaching, automate testing, that’s very much bound up in really this very old story of this idea that if we can just measure everything, then perhaps we can engineer things so that they’re optimized,” Watters said.
However, classrooms don’t work that way.
“Humans are messier,” she added. Students don’t all develop, think or learn in identical ways. “This desire to standardize and optimize things as a science has great appeal but I’m not sure it’s actually practical or realistic.”
Watters is particularly skeptical of one of ed tech’s central promises: personalization. Educational software often claims to tailor instruction to each student’s needs. But Watters says that promise begins with an assumption that teachers themselves lack sufficient insight into their students.
“There is this notion from outside of the classroom that somehow teachers don’t know what’s happening and that they need this technology in order to actually understand students and then be able to personalize or individualize what they’re doing to meet those students’ needs,” she said.
Teachers have long incorporated videos, computers and other digital tools into lessons. The difference today is that many instructional decisions are increasingly shaped by software platforms designed outside the classroom.
“There’s some margin for experimentation and play, of course, but mostly you’ve lost your agency and autonomy because the whole vision of what things look like is really in the hands of these technology companies,” Watters said. “They’ve already decided what teaching and learning look like with their tools.”
That concern resonates with Molly Esquivel, a fifth-grade teacher in Fullerton, California. She recalled being instructed to administer the reading program i-Ready to her students, despite believing it wasn’t the right instructional choice. When she objected, “the principal came back at me and said, ‘You have to do this,’” she said.
For Esquivel, the issue extends beyond one software program.
“It skips over the very foundation of curriculum and instruction and goes right to handing over that pedagogic power to a device rather than a person,” she said. “ And that, to me, is not sound practice.”
She said it is obvious when students are on physical materials as opposed to individually on devices. “I oftentimes refer to my classroom as a living, breathing organism,” she said. Students interact with one another; they move and solve problems together. When every student is on a device, “they are now interacting with an inanimate object.”
Some schools are pulling back on tech use
At McPherson Middle School in Kansas, Principal Inge Esping said teachers began raising concerns that district-issued Chromebooks were becoming distractions rather than instructional tools. Teachers found themselves spending more time monitoring screens than interacting with students.
“They, too, felt really tied to their own devices,” Esping said of educators. “They want to be busy around their classroom and helping students remain focused [and] problem solve.”
Rather than eliminating technology, school leaders and teachers at Esping decided to change how students access it. Instead of taking Chromebooks everywhere, devices remain on classroom carts and are used when teachers believe they add instructional value. The shift wasn’t framed as a ban, Esping said, but as an opportunity to reevaluate their relationship to technology. “Over this next year, we’ll really assess how often are we on screens to consider if we need to have additional goals [related to technology] or not,” she added.
Since Lila Byock first began raising concerns with Schools Beyond Screens – the advocacy group she founded because of her son’s experience in school – the Los Angeles Unified School District has adopted grade-level limits on student screen time. The new policy prohibits screen use altogether in kindergarten and first grade, and allows families to opt out of taking district devices home.
She sees the policy as progress, even if she believes more work remains. “One of the things we’ve been pushing for is a moratorium on AI use in the classroom on student devices until the district develops a comprehensive AI policy,” Byock noted.
Her family’s story began with one struggling student, but the conversation it helped spark has grown into something much larger.
During the summer, Byock went to drop off her son’s enrollment papers and one of the school’s administrators mentioned that this year parents can expect a renewed focus on hands-on learning and more pencil-and-paper activities. In order to accommodate analog learning, the school had ordered “tons of extra paper.”
Episode transcript
Nimah Gobir: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir.
Nimah Gobir: During the 2024-25 school year, Lila Byock’s son had just started middle school. And then something shifted. He began bringing home the worst grades he had ever received.
Lila Byock: He’d always been a bright, curious, engaged kid who did really well in school And my husband and I were confused and concerned.
Nimah Gobir: The thing is – it wasn’t that Lila’s son didn’t understand the material. His teachers actually told her he’s above grade level.
Lila Byock: They said, “He just can’t stay on task on his iPad.”
music
Nimah Gobir: They were talking about his school-issued iPad —
one that every student in the Los Angeles Unified School District receives under a one-to-one device model. In class, students were required to use an online program called i-Ready to complete assignments. But there was nothing stopping them from opening another tab — and doing, well… basically anything else.
Lila Byock: We said, well, how much time is he spending on his iPad? And they said, Well, we use it sort of for everything all day. And that was… a complete revelation for us.
Nimah Gobir: As Lila started asking more questions, she learned what her son — and many of his classmates — were actually doing during the school day.
Lila Byock: Our child was. Scrolling YouTube shorts all during math class. He was playing Fortnite battles along with many of his other classmates during class. A student at lunchtime was watching Squid Game on his school issued iPad. Um, and, you know, my son watched that with him. Um, somebody showed him porn on a school issued device.
Nimah Gobir: After talking it through with her son, Lila realized he was just as frustrated as she was. He’d always been engaged in school, and now he felt trapped in habits he couldn’t seem to stop.
Lila Byock: It was like it was eroding his self-esteem. And he told us, you know, I want to stop and I don’t think I can.
Nimah Gobir: Worse yet, There were no clear policies. No safeguards. When Lila realized how much the IPads were being used, she sent a list of questions to the school’s administrators
Lila Byock: And the answers I got back were just completely unsatisfying. It was as if no one had ever thought about these things before and [00:06:20][32.1]Lila Byock: [00:07:00] that raised every red flag for me.
Nimah Gobir: Lila is far from alone. Versions of her story are coming from parents all over the country.
Nimah Gobir: In 2024, many public schools responded to concerns about distraction by banning student cell phones. But in many cases, the screen time didn’t disappear, it just shifted to school-issued devices. So today on MindShift, we’re asking 3 big questions : What role should education technology actually play in the classroom? When does it help — and when does it get in the way? And is it time to rethink the one-to-one device model altogether? All of that and more, after the break.
Nimah Gobir: To understand how schools got to a place where students spend so much of the day on screens, it helps to zoom out.
Audrey Watters is a writer and historian who studies education technology. She says the debates we’re having about ed tech today stretch back to way before students were using laptops..
Audrey Watters: We see this sort of long history of this desire to sort of automate education, automate teaching, automate testing, that’s very much bound up in really this very old story of this idea that if we can just, if we can just measure everything, then perhaps we can sort of engineer things so that they’re optimized.
Nimah Gobir: Audrey says some of the earliest ed tech promises didn’t start with computers at all — they started with standardized testing.
Audrey Watters: The idea of creating a multiple choice test was so that you could get rid of any sort of subjectivity and make this field more objective.
Audrey Watters: You want to be able to develop a machine that can administer, grade, and teach more efficiently, more objectively, than teachers.
Nimah Gobir: Efficiency. Objectivity. Optimization. Those ideas have shaped education technology ever since. According to the National Education Policy Center 13 million students across the US use iReady in their classrooms. In it, students work on lessons that adjust based on their answers, so if they miss a lot of answers on a certain subject, they get more questions that help them practice that area. There are other similar programs in use like Khan Academy, Ascend Math and ReadTheory.
Nimah Gobir: As recent as 2024, schools spent 30 billion on education tech. It is projected to increase.The promise to schools is that these products will measure growth, identify areas of need, and fill in learning gaps if you use their adaptive learning models
Nimah Gobir: Audrey says that every wave of ed tech promises to improve learning, but underneath those promises is a deep discomfort with how human and unpredictable classrooms actually are.
Nimah Gobir: But Audrey says that way of thinking however, runs into a problem. Learning doesn’t behave like a machine.
Audrey Watters: We want to think of education as a science. I think we want to think about learning as a science. And I don’t say this as though it’s not, but that doesn’t seem to ever quite entirely capture what happens both individually, what makes us love certain subjects for example, be curious and interested in certain ideas and then be utterly indifferent to others. I’m not sure that we can sort of science our way out of that. [00:03:00][31.2]
Nimah Gobir: The appeal is easy to understand. If every student learns differently, wouldn’t it be helpful to have software that could adapt to each child’s needs? That’s been one of ed tech’s most powerful selling points. But Audrey says the focus on personalization begins with a troubling assumption.
Audrey Watters: There is this notion from outside of the classroom that somehow teachers don’t know what’s happening and that they need this sort of science and they need this technology in order to actually understand students and then be able to personalize or individualize what they’re doing to meet those students’ needs. [00:09:45][18.9]
Nimah Gobir: To make one thing clear, teachers have used technology creatively for decades — They might show short videos to illustrate a concept or even take students on a virtual field trip.
Nimah Gobir: Oftentimes learning with tech is shaped by the companies that make the tools
Audrey Watters: They’ve already decided what teaching and learning look like with theirs with their tools. – Of course, there’s some margins for experimentation and play, of course, but mostly you’re still sort of you’ve lost your agency and autonomy because the whole sort of vision of what things look like is really in the hands of these technology companies. [00:12:29][19.8]
Nimah Gobir: Audrey’s argument is that education technology has failed because it was built to standardize learning.
Nimah Gobir: Lila Byock, the parent we heard from earlier, was watching what happened when learning was done almost entirely through a screen.
Lila Byock: For my son, um, school became the place where he could essentially have unrestricted screen time.
Nimah Gobir: While she was going through this, she felt isolated.
Lila Byock: I started confiding in some other parents of middle schoolers and every single person I talked to said, oh, thank God it’s not just us. Everyone was dealing with the same thing and no one was talking about it because we had all just kind of accepted the idea that for some reason our kids needed these internet connected devices. On their desks all day in school.
Nimah Gobir: Together, Lila and likeminded parents and teachers formed a group called Schools Beyond Screens to push for changes in how schools use technology.
Lila Byock: There’s so much parental and teacher outrage and discontent about the hours and hours and hours our kids are spending on these apps, and I believe we’re going to see a shift in some of those policies.
Nimah Gobir: But if schools do decide to change course, what would teachers actually want instead? Molly Esquivel, a 6th grader teacher, a fifth-grade teacher at a public school in Fullerton, California, doesn’t want to get rid of technology entirely. She thinks that teachers should get more say in how tech is used in their classrooms” When she taught at a public school in Fullerton, California…
Molly Esquivel: I was asked by the principal to give the kids iReady. You have to.
Nimah Gobir: Molly pushed back because she didn’t think the program was a good fit for her students. But her district had purchased the iReady program and was requiring teachers to use it.
Molly Esquivel: The principal came back at me and said, you have to do this. So there are mandates, there are requirements.
Nimah Gobir: To her, that’s the bigger issue. Decisions about teaching are increasingly being made far away from the classroom.
Molly Esquivel: That skips over the very foundation of curriculum and instruction and goes right to handing over that pedagogic power to a device rather than a person. And that to me is not sound practice, sound pedagogy and completely, as I said, sidelining not only the expert, but the human.
Nimah Gobir: Molly wants more opportunities for students to interact with each other and with their teacher. She says the difference feels obvious.
Molly Esquivel: I oftentimes refer to my classroom as a living breathing organism. Kids are interacting with each other or even interacting with themselves and they’re moving and evolving and growing [00:26:28][18.3]
Nimah Gobir: Compare that to a classroom where every student is working on a device.
Nimah Gobir: It means kids have headphones on, their heads are tilted down to look at a screen.
Molly Esquivel: They are now interacting with an inanimate object. That doesn’t sit right. It doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t look right. That’s not what classrooms would even be drawn as or what we would ever imagine them to be.
Nimah Gobir: For teachers like Molly, the goal is to make sure technology serves learning rather than replacing the relationships that make learning possible. Amy Tyson is a child and adolescent psychologist and the founder of EverySchool.
Amy Tyson: We were sold devices and told that this was innovation. That like merely having the device in the classroom equaled innovation. But what we ended up doing was just replacing traditional methods that we know work, that are tried and true, with devices that are just less effective.
Nimah Gobir: At her organization, EverySchool, she has worked to synthesize research so that teachers don’t have to. A big thing she did that many folks don’t do was that she focused on research that wasn’t funded by people with a stake in these tech tools. A big finding that may surprise you is that there isn’t conclusive evidence saying that tech is making kids smarter or improves learning.
Amy Tyson: Shortly after the widespread adoption of school issue devices, which happened around the year 2012, we began to see an alarming downturn in academic outcomes also beginning in 2012.
Nimah Gobir: Now, we can’t pin this all on edtech. There are a variety of factors that may be contributing, but at a minimum it’s safe to say it isn’t helping.
Amy Tyson: EdTech has flourished in the classroom, our test scores, and I’d also like to say notably, the scores on loneliness, which are important for student health and well-being, continue to slip down year after year. So there’s really zero indication that it’s helping and I would say that there is mounting evidence that it is harming . [00:11:40][13.1]
Nimah Gobir: A lot of schools use ed tech tools
Amy Tyson: EdTech and TechEd are not the same thing. But teaching how to using technology, teaching transformative technology skills is not the same thing as using technology to teach every subject.
Amy Tyson: Would argue that students are far more likely to be missing out on soft skill development, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, problem solving, interpersonal skills, empathy, creativity, even eye contact at this point.
Nimah Gobir: Amy also debunks that EdTech is neutral. You might hear edtech is a tool… like a pencil
Amy Tyson: Screens do have uniquely negative effects that like a pen just doesn’t have. Screens hijack our attention, they distract us into a constant state of multitasking, they infiltrate our reward system, give us constant bursts of dopamine. It’s not the same thing as a pencil. It is not a neutral learning tool.
Nimah Gobir: And that brings us back to Lila and her son. Who was definitely not using his ipad like a pencil.
Lila Byock: Algebra’s hard. It’s not very hard to scroll YouTube.
Nimah Gobir: This is Lila again. Talking about her son.
Lila Byock: This year we, before the first day of school, we notified the principal that our child would not be taking home his device and we opted him out of the iReady program.
Nimah Gobir: And teachers were very accommodating. One of his teachers was actually quite excited and said that she’d do a one-on-one novel study with him while other students used the iReady program on the IPad.
Lila Byock: And that just speaks to the trade-offs that are being made in favor of these ed tech apps. You know, our kids could be doing rigorous novel study, reading real books. Which is so rare now.
Nimah Gobir: Since Lila first started asking questions, LAUSD has adopted new limits on student screen time, including restrictions on classroom device use and new options for families to opt out of bringing devices home. It’s a sign that some districts are beginning to rethink their relationship with technology.
Nimah Gobir: Psychologist Amy Tyson and her EverySchool colleagues came up with something called the ed tech triangle , a framework designed to help schools make those decisions more intentionally. Picture a triangle with the pointy tip facing downwards
Nimah Gobir: At the smallest pointy tip is Disruptive technology
Amy Tyson: And that’s tech that disrupts learning and breeds habitual use.
Nimah Gobir: Think of activities that pull students away from learning, like unrestricted access to cell phones, or other excess screen time uses.
Amy Tyson: So really it’s something that we encourage educators to use to really to avoid using if possible.
Nimah Gobir: Think of activities that pull students away from learning like unrestricted access to cell phones, or other excess screen time uses.
Nimah Gobir: One level up in the triangle is restrictive technology.
Amy Tyson: That’s restricting learning outcomes.
Nimah Gobir: These are tools that may be convenient, but don’t necessarily deepen learning. For example, reading a digital worksheet instead of a paper one, or completing an activity on a screen that could be done just as effectively without one.
Amy Tyson: So, use sparingly and in very specific situations if you do end up needing to use it.
Nimah Gobir: These are tools that may be convenient, but don’t necessarily deepen learning. For example, reading a digital worksheet instead of a paper one, or completing an activity on a screen that could be done just as effectively without one.
Nimah Gobir: Third from the bottom Second from the top is supportive technology.
Amy Tyson: Supportive is the area that supports learning in helpful ways.
Nimah Gobir: This might include things like speech-to-text tools, accessibility features, or software that helps students organize their work– technology that supports learning but doesn’t fundamentally change it.
Amy Tyson: It can be helpful to be used in moderation.
Nimah Gobir: This might include things like speech-to-text tools, accessibility features, or software that helps students organize their work– technology that supports learning but doesn’t fundamentally change it.
Nimah Gobir: And at the very top is
Amy Tyson: Transformative, which is a technology that produces a unique outcome or develops a high level skill. [00:08:55][6.5]
Amy Tyson: We’re talking about skill development. So. It’s very hard to teach robotics if you aren’t programming a robot, if you’re not using a device. That’s teaching a high level skill, it’s producing a unique outcome.
Nimah Gobir: In other words, technology should be hardest to justify when it’s simply replacing something that already works. Its strongest case is when students are doing something they couldn’t do otherwise. And some school leaders are already using frameworks like this to make hard decisions, including rolling back one-to-one devices altogether.
Inge Esping: My name is Inga Esping. I’m the principal of McPherson Middle School at McPhersen, Kansas.
Nimah Gobir: In the spring of 2024, Inge and other leaders at McPherson Middle School were reviewing their data. For years, the school had been making steady academic gains. But now, that progress was slowing.
Inge Esping: We were starting to feel a little like we were plateauing. So our question was, how do we continue the momentum that we’re on to really improve the culture and the academic experience in our school?
Nimah Gobir: At McPherson, every student had a Chromebook they carried to and from school. Teachers began raising a possibility that echoed what parents like Lila had been saying: maybe the devices were getting in the way.
Inge Esping: They were frustrated by the distractions. They just didn’t feel that it was enhancing learning to the level that they were hoping to.
Nimah Gobir: Teachers told administrators that when students were on their laptops, they ended up on laptops too. They spent less time circulating, less time connecting, more time monitoring screens.
Inge Esping: They want to be busy around their classroom and helping students remain focused, problem solve, really to get involved. But they too felt really tied to their own devices.
Nimah Gobir: Teachers found themselves policing tabs and websites. And over time, those constant corrections began to strain relationships with students. Some students felt a sense of ownership over their chromebook like “you can’t tell me what to do. This is mine.”
Inge Esping: And how that would sometimes cause a challenge of not knowing exactly what was and wasn’t homework concerned about the amount of hours their students were online and saying that they’re working on school work when in fact that wasn’t always the case.
Nimah Gobir: The two words that changed everything were what if. As in, What if they didn’t do school this way anymore?
Inge Esping: What if we helped our students understand this is a tool that can be very powerful to use. But at this point, the way we’ve approached it right now, it feels like more of a distraction. And we have such important work that we’re trying to do here in school, we want you to refocus.
Nimah Gobir: School leaders began digging into the research –much of the same research Amy Tyson pointed to— showing that one-to-one devices often fail to deliver on their promises.
Nimah Gobir: Instead of having students carrying Chromebooks all day, McPherson invested in classroom carts to keep devices in the room and had teachers use them only when teachers believed they genuinely add value.
Inge Esping: As we came back this school year, we started really training our teachers. This is coming. We’re not sure when. We are unsure exactly the timeline. Actually over the last two days, students have returned to their Chromebooks.
Nimah Gobir: This wasn’t a ban. And it wasn’t a rigid policy. It was more of a reset.
Inge Esping: So students will actually come back and have zero Chromebook time for their first few weeks in our spring semester.
Nimah Gobir: McPherson is in a fortunate position. Teachers still have access to physical books, worksheets, and materials. These are resources some schools no longer have because they may have completely replaced them with digital books or ed tech programs.
Inge Esping: All we’ve done is give guidance. Please use them as sparingly as possible. Think about when they really enhance the lesson, enhance the learning.
Inge Esping: So, over this next year, we’ll really assess how often are we on screens to consider if we need to have additional goals or not.
Nimah Gobir: Inge is clear-eyed about the limits of this approach. Keeping Chromebooks at school won’t magically solve every problem. But she hopes it’s a start.
Inge Esping: What I’m most proud of the work here is that I have a staff who is really brave to try something different. They’re allowing us to make this change knowing that we’re going to face unknowns, we’re going to face challenges.
Nimah Gobir: Her hope isn’t that other schools copy McPherson exactly, but that they feel empowered to ask their own “what if” questions.
Inge Esping: I would just encourage. Schools who are also interested in joining us in this initiative to be brave, acknowledge that there’s going to be challenges, communicate with your stakeholders when those challenges arise and seek your community members, your students, your parents, seek their input so that you can really build the program and the school that you hope to see.
Nimah Gobir: MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED. This episode was made possible by the Stuart Foundation.