The education reform conversation has shifted in a noticeable direction lately: more people are asking harder questions about technology in schools, and the answers are starting to look like a backlash. Ed “techlash” is in full swing, with 22 states passing phone bans and prominent education figures openly questioning whether devices belong in classrooms at all.
The shift comes after years of unchecked adoption. Schools handed out Chromebooks, districts pushed one-to-one device programs, and social media became a constant presence in students’ lives. Now, the consequences are harder to ignore.
Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, recently wrote about what makes us distinctively human. Michael Goldstein is starting a research center on getting kids off their phones. Even unusual allies have found common ground: AFT President Randi Weingarten and Moms for Liberty have teamed up against Big Tech. The motivations vary, but the fear of AI’s impact on entry-level jobs is a major driver. There’s also the sobering reality that we ran a massive experiment with unregulated social media, and the results weren’t good.
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The blowback is clumsy, as Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute put it. It’s mostly unconcerned with fine distinctions. But that’s understandable. When tech vendors and district leaders spent years dismissing skeptics while hyping “innovation,” parents and policymakers responded with the crude tools available to them: bans and restrictions. None of this is particularly well-designed, Hess acknowledged. It’s a pendulum swinging back on a tech sector that talked big and underdelivered. For the boosters, the bill has come due.
What’s remarkable is how little pushback the tech rollout encountered in the first place. Parents bought iPhones for 10-year-olds. Influential voices urged schools to adopt one-to-one devices. A parade of new tech solutions was hailed and quietly ditched.
Why did we imagine that students spending hours on Chromebooks wouldn’t corrode the human dimension of schooling? Or that digital texts wouldn’t alter reading habits? Or that phones wouldn’t change how kids socialize?
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Tech has steadily thinned out the thick interpersonal connections that once characterized bus rides, cafeterias, and classrooms. The fabric of childhood was treated as a given, even though discussions about “bowling alone” and social isolation have been around since the last century. Education seemed to miss that conversation entirely. There’s a broader pattern here that goes beyond screens. The U.S. tends to swing wildly between extremes, as Jal Mehta of the Harvard Graduate School of Education noted. One week AI will reinvent schools; the next it should be banned as a developmental hazard. The same dynamic played out with DEI initiatives, which went from being in every school document to being scrubbed from websites entirely.
That pattern doesn’t lend itself to careful reflection. It lends itself to whiplash.
In terms of whether the downsides can be reversed, the first step is realizing there’s a problem. On that count, the world is gradually waking up to the idea that giving every young person a highly addictive device to carry 24/7 may not be such a good idea. A big part of growing up is having in-person experiences, and that’s hard to replicate through a screen. Hess wonders how reasonable it is to think we’ll do better with AI than we did with social media. Mehta hopes the next decade brings experimentation with different ways of addressing the problem. The questions are getting sharper, even if the answers aren’t clear yet.
