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For years, putting a screen in front of every student was treated as visionary education reform. The data are now in — and they tell a very different story.
American students' test scores have been declining since 2012. By 2022, math scores for the lowest-performing students had fallen to levels last seen in the 1970s. Reading scores were lower than when the data were first collected in 1971. This happened during the same period that schools were pouring billions of dollars into laptops, tablets, and classroom technology. Google alone has racked up fourteen billion dollars in global Chromebook sales to schools, capturing sixty percent of the education technology market worldwide.
The results? Research from the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that in countries that invested heavily in classroom technology, screens hindered rather than helped educational progress. Neuroscientists at Columbia University found that children's brains process written text more deeply when reading from a printed page than from a digital screen. One analysis found that even thirty minutes of daily digital device use in the classroom correlates negatively with reading comprehension scores. Another study concluded that investing in air conditioning produces more measurable academic benefit than investing in a laptop for every student.
Meanwhile, teachers who banned cell phones discovered students doing the same things on their school-issued Chromebooks — watching videos, playing games, and messaging each other. The device changed. The distraction didn't.
Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath [HOR-vath] delivered Senate testimony earlier this year with a finding that should stop every educator cold — Generation Z is the first generation since cognitive records began in the late 1800s to score lower than the previous generation on measures of attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, problem-solving, and IQ. They also have more access to technology than any generation before them. That is not a coincidence.
States including Kansas, Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, and North Carolina are already rethinking their one-laptop-per-student policies. Researchers are recommending a return to printed textbooks, paper testing, and computer labs used selectively rather than screens assigned to every desk.
This isn't about being anti-technology. It's about pro-learning. The tool should serve the student — not the other way around. Classical schools figured this out first. The rest of the system is slowly catching up.
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