The EdTech products themselves may be "harmless," but school devices and networks are often so poorly managed that students have access to way more than simply EdTech applications.
One message is clear from this article is that waiting for perfect evidence is so difficult that it protects tech companies not students. Policymakers should look at overall patterns and decide whether the technology is actually helping. Sir, I absolutely agree with your article. I belong from a generation dependent on phones and social media for their living. I have seen my peers lacking behind in academics primarily due to their increased consumption of social media.I have seen them posting less because according to them they don't want to get judged by their peers.
Recently, I have noticed that my peers have become lazy to consume their information. We went from reading the daily newspaper to scrolling on Instagram reels to consume information. I am okay with people consuming their news from short form content but we need to realize that it is making people lazy to consume their news. Short form content creators have realized this and they have started to use this flaw to peddle baseless news. Just by posting something emotionally charged or pretending to be contrarian can fetch you views nowadays. You need not to cite any information or source and no one will question you. There are many individuals who have become lazy that they are not even fact checking their news using google! This is extremely dangerous for countries with high population as news can peddle really quickly and can disrupt governance.
I request Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath to look into this. This is the high time. Today, over 5.66 billion people are online using social media. They have the power to either create chaos or the power to bring good governance.
I appreciate your spotlight on the states contemplating legislation to curb ed tech use. This will be a trend to watch.
I'm predicting that ‘ed tech reform’ bills will move through statehouses at least as swiftly as the recent, unprecedented wave of Science of Reading reform. Literacy legislation has crossed all 50 states between 2019 and 2025, with a peak run of 223 bills between 2019-2022; state leaders are showing much more willingness to put guardrails on schools.
Fun fact about Tennessee: it will be easier to get devices out of Tennessee schools, because the state enjoys widespread use of book-rich curriculum which is designed to be used in print, rather than digitally. I wrote about it here:
Are you implying that SAGE adaptive summative assessments is the cause (or at least a cause) of declining test scores here in Utah for grade 4-8 students? Because that would seems specious.
It would be much more convincing if you unpacked and identified which ed tech products were most heavily and widely used during this period, and which of those you believe are most strongly related to stagnation or decline. Even better if you could correlate adoption with stagnation / decline district by district or school by school (roll-outs are not uniform), let alone student by student.
Simply pointing out that Utah implemented SAGE assessment (not even an instructional product) and adding that "digital tools... became structurally embedded" thereafter is not enough.
"...what we cannot ethically do (just as with beauty filters) is deliberately expose children to systems we have strong reason to believe may undermine learning simply to satisfy an unrealistic evidentiary demand."
I agree, but which systems are you talking about? Which digital tools?
1-1 laptops? As of 2021 less than half of all Utah students had those (and almost all of those were limited to grades 7-12), according to UEN.
The LMS? I have a hard time seeing how a relatively pedagogically neutral digital platform like that would contribute to declines in scores, but I'm open to being educated. Just be sure to indicate how its being used and by who.
We're not looking for perfect evidence; we're looking for something more than broad correlation. And that's because, at least here in Utah, there are just too many other confounding factors during the same period. E.g. Utah's massive population growth, increased population density, socio-cultural diversification / decline in the mormon mono-culture, shift from public to charter school enrollments, teacher shortages, increased proportion of underqualified teachers in Utah schools, rise of social media, etc. Of course, it's possible none of these are strongly related to the decline in test scores -- I'm just throwing out examples that could be considered (or even controlled for) before presuming this data supports the conclusion.
No evidence of harm? How about this, from a recent Common Sense Media survey of teens:
"Many of these respondents (41%) reported having seen pornography during the school day, including roughly one in three
(31%) who said they had viewed pornography while attending
school in person. Furthermore, among teens who reported
that they have viewed pornography during the school day,
nearly half (44%) reported having viewed pornography on
school-owned devices."
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/2022-teens-and-pornography-final-web.pdf
The EdTech products themselves may be "harmless," but school devices and networks are often so poorly managed that students have access to way more than simply EdTech applications.
One message is clear from this article is that waiting for perfect evidence is so difficult that it protects tech companies not students. Policymakers should look at overall patterns and decide whether the technology is actually helping. Sir, I absolutely agree with your article. I belong from a generation dependent on phones and social media for their living. I have seen my peers lacking behind in academics primarily due to their increased consumption of social media.I have seen them posting less because according to them they don't want to get judged by their peers.
Recently, I have noticed that my peers have become lazy to consume their information. We went from reading the daily newspaper to scrolling on Instagram reels to consume information. I am okay with people consuming their news from short form content but we need to realize that it is making people lazy to consume their news. Short form content creators have realized this and they have started to use this flaw to peddle baseless news. Just by posting something emotionally charged or pretending to be contrarian can fetch you views nowadays. You need not to cite any information or source and no one will question you. There are many individuals who have become lazy that they are not even fact checking their news using google! This is extremely dangerous for countries with high population as news can peddle really quickly and can disrupt governance.
I request Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath to look into this. This is the high time. Today, over 5.66 billion people are online using social media. They have the power to either create chaos or the power to bring good governance.
Excellent Jared!!
Thanks for the shoutout and for providing such amazing, helpful information, based in fact and stats. You're the best!
“No evidence of harm” is too low a standard anyway for anything I’m supposed to inflict on my students. Write me back when you have evidence of help.
Always love the data and the wisdom of your words!
I appreciate your spotlight on the states contemplating legislation to curb ed tech use. This will be a trend to watch.
I'm predicting that ‘ed tech reform’ bills will move through statehouses at least as swiftly as the recent, unprecedented wave of Science of Reading reform. Literacy legislation has crossed all 50 states between 2019 and 2025, with a peak run of 223 bills between 2019-2022; state leaders are showing much more willingness to put guardrails on schools.
Fun fact about Tennessee: it will be easier to get devices out of Tennessee schools, because the state enjoys widespread use of book-rich curriculum which is designed to be used in print, rather than digitally. I wrote about it here:
https://www.karenvaites.org/p/how-book-rich-knowledge-rich-curriculum
Are you implying that SAGE adaptive summative assessments is the cause (or at least a cause) of declining test scores here in Utah for grade 4-8 students? Because that would seems specious.
It would be much more convincing if you unpacked and identified which ed tech products were most heavily and widely used during this period, and which of those you believe are most strongly related to stagnation or decline. Even better if you could correlate adoption with stagnation / decline district by district or school by school (roll-outs are not uniform), let alone student by student.
Simply pointing out that Utah implemented SAGE assessment (not even an instructional product) and adding that "digital tools... became structurally embedded" thereafter is not enough.
"...what we cannot ethically do (just as with beauty filters) is deliberately expose children to systems we have strong reason to believe may undermine learning simply to satisfy an unrealistic evidentiary demand."
I agree, but which systems are you talking about? Which digital tools?
1-1 laptops? As of 2021 less than half of all Utah students had those (and almost all of those were limited to grades 7-12), according to UEN.
The LMS? I have a hard time seeing how a relatively pedagogically neutral digital platform like that would contribute to declines in scores, but I'm open to being educated. Just be sure to indicate how its being used and by who.
We're not looking for perfect evidence; we're looking for something more than broad correlation. And that's because, at least here in Utah, there are just too many other confounding factors during the same period. E.g. Utah's massive population growth, increased population density, socio-cultural diversification / decline in the mormon mono-culture, shift from public to charter school enrollments, teacher shortages, increased proportion of underqualified teachers in Utah schools, rise of social media, etc. Of course, it's possible none of these are strongly related to the decline in test scores -- I'm just throwing out examples that could be considered (or even controlled for) before presuming this data supports the conclusion.