As a middle school English teacher from 2003-2015, I witnessed a lot of changes in regards to technology and teaching. Perhaps one of the most striking examples came around 2010, when my school asked teachers to start posting student grades in a school portal.

Like most teachers up until this century, I had been using a traditional green paper grading book, which really hadn’t changed much over time, but served a neat and tidy purpose: I could list each of my classes in the “student” column, note their assignments across the top, then add rows of checks, pluses, minuses, or grades as needed across the grid. 

I loved it. It was visually appealing and easy to find student names and see when something was missing. I held it in the crook of my left arm as I walked around the classroom checking annotations or homework assignments quickly as class started. I could pop it into my school bag to take home with me when I was grading papers or vocabulary tests. And when a student came to ask me about a missing assignment or low grade they were unhappy with, I could flip open my gradebook to see the full story.

When we shifted to the digital portal, I still used my paper planner, but had to spend extra time entering in the grades from each day’s classes. It was busy work and increased my risk for errors, since I now had grades in two places and had to be sure to always update both. 

But even worse was the impact it had on my students and their parents. 

Pre-portal, my students would come visit me before class or at lunch to ask about a grade. I always dedicated a few days at the start of the school year to teaching about why self-advocacy was an important part of their middle school experience– that learning to ask for help was going to matter a lot as they grew up. That I would always work with them to find a solution if they felt that a grade wasn’t accurate or that they could do better (because isn’t the point to learn by letting them rework things?), as long as they came to talk to me.

But once the grades went into the portal, two huge shifts occurred:

1. My students stopped coming to talk to me…

2. Instead their parents, with access to the portal, now emailed me to ask why their child had a missing assignment or low grade.

As a result, I spent even more time in front of my computer, responding to parent emails. Some parents were clearly hovering on the portal page, clicking refresh, then emailing me when a day went by and a grade wasn’t entered. Now, instead of dealing with my student’s anxieties about life and school, I was responding to parental anxiety about grades and assignments.

I’d been a teacher for nearly a decade, and nothing had ever so drastically impacted my teaching experience as the online grade portal and the effect it had on my students and their parents.

And this was over a decade ago. Things have changed…a lot. Keep reading. :)

So let’s look back for a minute. How did we get to where we are today? How is it that EdTech’s promises and claims have come to dominate the conversation about education? And…does EdTech make teaching and learning better?

*** 

Around the same time I was asked to use an online grading portal, Bill Gates was noting that “aligning teaching with the Common Core– and building common data standards– will help us define excellence, measure progress, test new methods, and compare results. Finally, we will apply the tools of science to school reform.”

While I am a big fan of using (independently funded) data to inform (intentional) decision-making, Gates and his products had a vested interest in “redefining” school reform efforts through a technological lens. If they could show that technology could enhance learning, Gates would benefit in more ways than just being able to say he “improved” education– his profits would also increase.

In the fall of 2013, Gates declared, “It would be great if our education [technology] stuff worked. But that we won’t know for probably a decade.”

Spoiler alert: the “education stuff” did not work. In fact, 2012 was the last year that national education scores for 13-year-olds peaked in Math and Reading. It’s been a steady decline since. 

Ouch.

That alone should get our attention. But it gets worse.

Last year, in 2023, a Global Education Report by UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) found that not only is there little evidence to support the benefits of digital technology use in classrooms, but the “studies” that claim it is beneficial are funded by the very companies trying to sell it.

Let me rephrase that, because it is shocking: The very companies who claim that all these EdTech tools and platforms are beneficial to students and learning are the same companies that profit from the sales of said products. Of course their “research” finds it beneficial!

Or as Warren Buffet has quipped, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” Of course he’ll tell you you do.

Absurd.

***

It’s great to have independent, non-industry-funded research like UNESCO to prove that EdTech is mostly just expensive smoke and mirrors.

But we could also heed the anecdotal evidence about the failures and limitations of EdTech. Over the past several years, as EdTech implementation has steadily increased (one estimate found that districts can average over 2,500 unique applications over a school year), teacher after teacher has reported declines in student motivation, focus, aspiration, and joy…not to mention skills, from fine motor to social skills to reading and writing (who needs to handwrite when you can finger-tap on a tablet? It’s worth noting that few children are actually learning to type before they are handed computers for school).

Parents tell me daily about how much their child hates the excessive tech-for-learning or boring digital science curriculum at school, or worse, is apathetic about it, seeing it as an obligation they must suffer through until they can go home and get “real” (aka “fun”) screentime. As a former teacher, it pains me that children have lost curiosity and joy in the learning experience. Children are naturally curious; to have that stamped out is deeply concerning. 

It’s true that student phone devices and social media have contributed to the declining well-being of children, especially in adolescence. And the global pandemic definitely didn’t help with limiting screen use. This is definitely a complex issue. 

But before COVID and the upswing of EdTech, parents didn’t even think to ask about tech use in school, because really until about ten years ago, it was still relatively minimal.

Screen use for school has changed significantly in the past few years. 

In addition to the 7.5 hours per day on screens children ages 8-18 are spending on screens outside of school hours, they are potentially spending four or five hours per day on screens at school. Unfortunately, there is no clear data about this, in part because there are such huge variations between districts, schools, grades, and even individual classrooms. 

In spite of the obvious failures and anecdotes from concerned teachers, schools around the country continue to beat the EdTech drum.

Ten years ago, I was forced as a teacher to spend increasing amounts of time at my own computer to respond to anxious parent emails and enter grades into a portal. 

Today, however, teachers must upload all assignments– not just the worksheets, but reading materials, links to additional sources, PDFs, and more– to a “learning management system.” They must monitor classroom “pages” where past assignments and reading materials can be stored (thus assuring that, even on days when they are absent, students have work to do) and another place where they must upload grades (that yes, parents can still see). Now, in addition to their role as educators and nurturers and social workers and recess monitors and lunchroom supervisors, teachers are also now IT experts. I don’t know of any teacher who still uses a paper grading book (if you do, please let me know!). 

Of course, students are also now on personal computers for class work and research and, if they have down time, to “read” or do “math” or play games or surf the internet or listen to Spotify (all true). Some teachers use tablet time as a “reward” for student behavior or completed work. (And I’m referring to classrooms as young as kindergarten in all these examples– this is by no means limited to middle or high school.) 

The math isn’t mathing.

Unfortunately, as I hope is abundantly clear by now, most parents have very little idea of how much time their children may actually be spending online or on screens at school (in class or, as is often the case, watching videos or gaming on breaks and at lunch, too). And many parents are still struggling with the “how much is too much screentime” question on the home front, too. 

There is a place for technology in education. I firmly believe that. But the way in which EdTech has co-opted education has not helped students. EdTech has harmed children. And because EdTech companies are very wealthy and very powerful, it’s very hard to resist or push back. 

But we cannot give up.

I was told that my 7th grader will have 40 students in her English class this year. Forty! This is outrageous. Even the best teacher in the world cannot possibly connect with 40 students, with 40 different levels, with hundreds of different needs, in a 45-minute class period, and expect to see significant progress. I hate this for her teacher. I would have hated this as a teacher myself. But that’s today’s reality.

The other big difference in my daughter’s classroom this year is that all the student laptops for “work” during class will be monitored in real time by the teacher. In part because of parent complaints and concerns about misused class time (one study found that for every 60 minutes a child spends on a laptop for class, 38 minutes are spent “off task”), the district has signed a contract with GoGuardian, a surveillance platform that will “help” a teacher monitor student devices during classroom.

This means that teachers can now sit behind their own computers and monitor the screens of all 40 of their students during class…to make sure they aren’t off task.

The irony of all this isn’t lost on me. The simplest, least expensive, most obvious solution would be to simply not have the laptops in the classroom in the first place. But that would mean countering all the marketing and “research” that EdTech has been feeding us for the past decade. It would mean that districts and administrators would be forced to admit that they were wrong about the benefits of EdTech. It means that Gates’ ten-year experiment has failed.

What’s happening in schools today, with all these technologies, is not what good teaching and learning look like. Learning is hard. Learning requires struggle and friction and discomfort. Technology’s promise is to make our lives fast, easy, and frictionless.

While that might be great for an internet search, it’s disastrous for education.