Everyone hates edtech now, but is it really to blame for low achievement?

“When tech enters education, learning goes down,” neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate subcommittee. His testimony went viral. In The Digital Delusion, Horvath makes the case that declining test scores are linked to rising screen time. Classroom technology, such as a laptop or tablet for every student, is undermining learning, he argues.

The anti-tech "message is resonating with some parents, educators, and lawmakers," writes

Matt Barnum on Chalkbeat. As part of the backlash against ed-tech, "some states are considering new restrictions on school-issued devices."

Barnum finds "no smoking-gun data showing that education technology killed achievement, or even wounded it. But he thinks there's reason to question whether some tech tools are "doing more harm than good."

Test scores started to fall at the same time schools started giving students laptops, Horvath argues. International test show students who spend more time on computers learn less.

Academic research shows that “most general-use educational technologies perform below the effectiveness of ordinary classroom instruction,” he said in his written Senate testimony.

Finally, writes Barnum, Horvath argues that "tech can make learning frictionless," which is not a good thing. "For instance, it’s easy to take notes on a computer. Yet the process of hand writing notes requires more consideration of what is being written, and that can help commit it to memory."

At the same time a schools ramped up the use of edtech, a lot of other things were happening in the U.S. and elsewhere, Barnum points out. That includes the pandemic and a huge rise in use of screens outside of school.

Furthermore, the research is not definitive on whether ed-tech helps or hurts, Barnum writes.

A lot of education research is unreliable, says Elizabeth Tipton, a Northwestern statistician. She told Barnum that "she’s not aware of a high-quality summary of research on ed-tech broadly." Effectiveness depends on the ed-tech, which changes rapidly, and how it's used.

Horvath concedes many of these points, but argues there's a lot more evidence that edtech is harmful than evidence showing it's helping. The burden of proof should be on the edtech salesman, he argues.

Cognitive science research is troubling, writes Barnum. "Although it’s debated among researchers, there is some evidence that students learn less from reading and from taking notes on screens."

Teachers almost universally complain about tech-distracted students. “If kids have a Chromebook and they can find a way out of whatever they’re doing so they can do something more fun with the Chromebook, they will,” says cognitive scientist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia.

The $164-billion edtech industry is fighting a wave of bills proposing to limit screen time at school, reports Tyler Kingkade for NBC News. Legislation is under discussion in 16 states.

"At the Utah Capitol last month, a mother told lawmakers her children struggled to stay focused on homework because their school-issued laptops supplied an endless stream of notifications from online games, chats and videos," he writes. A Kansas mother complained to a Senate committee that "her son’s ninth-grade class had to read a novel together out loud because the laptops they used at school had zapped their ability to focus."