Excessive use of technology in the classroom has completely failed

Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions of taxpayer dollars equipping classrooms with laptops and other devices in hopes of preparing kids for a digital future. The result? Students have fallen further behind on the skills they most need to succeed in careers: the three R’s of reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. Just 90% of schools provide laptops or tablets to their students. Yet as students spend more time than ever on screens, social skills are deteriorating and test scores are near historic lows. Just 35% of eighth graders are proficient in math and 30% in reading. For 12th graders, the numbers are similarly dismal (24% in math and 37% in reading, according to the most recently available scores). And US students have also fallen further behind their peers in other countries. The push for laptops in classrooms came from technologists, think tanks and government officials who imagine that the devices would allow for formulaic approaches to student success, empowering them to learn at their own pace and raising achievement levels. It hasn’t worked. The push also came from another source: computer manufacturers. However wellintended the push, they have a financial interest in promoting laptops in classrooms and have profited handsomely from it.

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When Google released its inexpensive, utilitarian Chromebook in 2011, the company quickly captured schools via new websites and computer use. Why should children learn the quadratic equation, a Google executive asked, when they can just Google the answer? Today, the same executive might ask: Why should children learn to write essay — or even a sentence — when they can ask a chatbot to do it for them? The answer to both questions is that mastering the three R’s is the first step toward the type of education critical to thinking and problem-solving.