Is the EdTech Backlash Real?

What the National Data Suggests — and What Only Your Community Can Tell You

Something has shifted in American education, and school administrators are feeling it from every direction, in school board meetings, in parent emails, in meetings with teachers who sense that something is not working.

The data is now hard to ignore.

National Assessment of Educational Progress scores remain below pre-pandemic 2019 levels in every tested grade and subject. PISA scores declined broadly across participating nations during the same decade when digital devices flooded classrooms. In early 2026, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that the $30 billion American schools spent on educational technology in 2024 alone — roughly ten times what was spent on textbooks — has not produced the outcomes the industry promised. 

In that testimony, Horvath argued that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the generation before them. That claim is contested by researchers who point to COVID learning loss and other contributing factors, but it has landed with force in a national conversation that is long overdue.

The data does not prove that EdTech caused these declines, but the correlation is consistent enough across countries and studies that it should not be ignored.

37 states have either passed laws or required districts to adopt policies restricting phone and device use in K-12 schools. More than 20 states have returned cursive handwriting to elementary classrooms. Sweden has allocated $83 million toward physical textbooks, with the stated goal of providing every student a textbook for each subject. In New York, Governor Hochul's 2026 State of the State included a formal "Back to Basics" initiative in math and literacy.

A reckoning is underway. And school leaders are the ones who have to make sense of it.

What Went Wrong

It would be easy, and wrong, to cast the EdTech industry as the villain in this story.

The companies that sold tablets, Chromebooks, and learning management systems were responding to genuine demand. Schools wanted to modernize. Parents wanted their children prepared for a digital future. Policymakers wanted a scalable answer to persistent achievement gaps. The EdTech industry offered tools. Schools bought them.

The problem was not malice. It was assumption.

The assumption was that more technology would produce better learning. That screen time was neutral. That engagement on a device was the same as engagement with an idea. That a platform could substitute for a skilled teacher's judgment. These assumptions moved faster than the evidence.

Independent researchers have raised serious concerns about the quality of that evidence. Dr. Velislava Hillman, writing in The Guardian in 2025 and author of Taming EdTech, concluded that "the evidence base for EdTech is narrow, industry-driven and shaky at best." Her analysis found that much of the research cited to support EdTech products was funded by the companies selling those products, and that independent research often contradicts the positive findings from industry-funded studies.

The friction that makes learning durable — the struggle of handwriting a sentence, the cognitive effort of reading a physical page, the sustained focus required to hold a problem in your head — may have been quietly engineered away in the name of convenience. Convenience is not the same as learning.

Not All Technology Is the Problem

This is where the conversation must stay honest.

Technology has transformed some dimensions of K-12 education for the better, and it would be a mistake to lose those gains in a wave of overcorrection.

Some classroom technologies have given teachers powerful tools to engage students and create shared focus in the learning environment, tools that many educators report have meaningfully improved instruction. Think of the student in a maker space who moves from a hand-drawn sketch to a 3D-printed prototype in a single class period, using design software that teaches spatial reasoning, iteration, and applied problem-solving simultaneously. That is not distraction. That is learning with technology playing a supporting role. Assistive technologies continue to give students with learning differences genuine access to curriculum in ways that were not possible a generation ago.

The question was never whether technology belongs in schools. The question is which technology, in what context, in service of which learning goals, and with what guardrails.

A well-deployed interactive whiteboard in the hands of a skilled teacher is a lever. An iPad with uncurated internet access in the hands of a distracted sixth grader is a trap. The difference is not the device. It is the intention behind its deployment.

This is the distinction school leaders must make as pressure mounts from every direction.

The Risk of Overcorrection

The pendulum has begun to swing. And pendulums rarely stop at the center.

The instinct to ban, restrict, and return to paper is understandable. The evidence supports parts of it. But education has a long memory of overcorrections that traded one problem for another. Whole language replaced phonics until literacy scores dropped and phonics came back. Open classrooms replaced structured instruction until focus collapsed and structure came back. The lesson is not that innovation is bad. The lesson is that wholesale adoption without evidence, in either direction, is what causes harm.

The school administrator's job in this moment is to resist the zealous sentiment on both sides. The EdTech maximalists who argue that every student needs a device every hour of every day are wrong. Those who want to strip every classroom of technology are also wrong. The answer is in the careful, intentional middle, and that middle will look different in every district.

Community Engagement Is Not Optional

This is the point that does not get enough attention in the national conversation.

Policymakers issue mandates. Researchers publish findings. Vendors pitch solutions. But the communities that have to live with the decisions — parents, teachers, students, local employers, civic leaders — are often the last ones consulted. That is a structural failure, and it is one that school administrators have the power to correct.

Every district carries a different fingerprint. Urban and rural schools face different infrastructure realities. Communities hold different values about technology in childhood. Teachers bring different skill levels and comfort. Students arrive with different needs. The right answer for a suburban district in Arizona is not automatically the right answer for a rural district in Appalachia or an urban district in Chicago. Generic solutions applied district-wide without local input are part of how we got here in the first place.

What is needed now is structured, honest, solution-oriented dialogue between school leaders and the communities they serve.

That means creating space for parents to voice concerns and proffer solutions without dismissal. It means inviting teachers into technology decisions. It means bringing community members into a conversation about the future, letting them inform components of the district’s strategic plan — and working backward from that vision.

The districts that navigate this moment well will not be the ones that follow the national trend most quickly. They will be the ones that slow down long enough to ask their own communities what they believe, what they have observed, and what they want for their children. The educational solutions a district arrives at will, and should, reflect the collective insights and values of its community. That is not indecision. That is exactly how it should work.

There is no standard algorithm for that conversation. There is no EdTech platform that can run it. It takes leadership, humility, and the willingness to co-produce solutions with a district’s stakeholders. 

Now more than ever, effective community engagement is the work that matters most.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Brake has spent 25+ years helping organizations make consequential decisions by bringing customers or constituents into the process. As CEO of The Grandview Group, he built a business around stakeholder engagement, helping healthcare organizations, school districts, professional associations, government entities, and publishers convert market insight into products that make a difference. That expertise became the driving methodology behind OPTICS for Healthcare, an AI-first platform he co-founded to address workplace violence. The same methodology powers S4CGV, a collaboration with S4Carlisle to help clients develop content that connects with their target audiences.