Banning Edtech Is the Wrong Response to the Right Questions

Nary a day goes by without a headline about the growing edtech backlash. With increasing fervor, these articles spotlight the latest state, district or school to ban devices. The parents are prevailing, they declare: “In Backlash Against Tech in Schools, Parents are Winning Rollbacks.” 

Parents aren’t wrong. They’re responding to concrete issues they see every day. Passive screen time is on the rise, math and reading scores are on the decline, and too many rote activities and tests in class erode real learning. With teenagers spending on average 7.5 hours per day on devices, it’s not surprising so many parents want less tech and more human interaction.

It doesn’t help that the research is wildly confusing. Conflicting studies point to negative, neutral and positive correlations between edtech and learning. Pediatric and mental health experts also warn about the cumulative impacts of excess screen time on sleep, attention, and mood. 

A blanket tech ban is the easy move, but it’s also a lazy one — one that deepens inequities between families with the resources to use technology well, and those who don’t. It also ignores the basic reality that not all tools serve the same purpose. There is a difference between banning Minecraft on Chromebooks, versus the reading tool that catches a child’s dyslexia, or software that makes content accessible for students with special needs.

Edtech should earn its place only when it demonstrably advances learning, is aligned with child development guidelines, and does not crowd out the human connection. The evidence is still emerging, but a pattern aligns with what teachers already know: tools that simply give answers short-circuit durable learning, while those that coach — surfacing misconceptions, offering scaffolded hints, prompting explanation, and helping turn mistakes into “aha!” moments with teachers and peers — support learning.

That’s a standard most tools don’t yet meet. Parents have reason to worry when technology replaces, rather than strengthens, the essentials: human connection, collaboration and deep, sustained thinking. 

But it’s a comforting myth that going “tech-free” will magically produce utopian classrooms, stocked with modern, culturally responsive, personalized materials, without adding hours to educators’ workload or shortchanging the growing share of learners with IEPs, learning differences, and diverse linguistic backgrounds. Today, access to high‑quality print curricula is uneven and many resources are outdated, requiring teachers to spend significant time assembling and adapting them to meet diverse needs. When I was a history teacher, pulling down the old wall map meant explaining why Africa was labeled “The Dark Continent,” and why our textbooks skipped so much — ancient civilizations, anticolonial movements, and voices outside the European canon. We shouldn’t pretend that’s a past worth reviving.

While the evidence on whether technology improves student learning is genuinely conflicting (credible studies point in every direction, and clean causal claims are scarce), the impact on teacher workflows and lesson planning is clearer. A Gallup–Walton survey found that teachers who use AI weekly reclaim nearly six hours a week — totaling roughly six weeks over a school year — time that often goes back into small-group coaching, student feedback, and family engagement. 

This time saving is more critical than ever as we are in the midst of a teacher shortage that is straining our public school system. Stress and heavy workloads routinely rank among the primary reasons educators leave, often ahead of or alongside pay. Teachers experience job‑related stress at roughly twice the rate of working adults. The job has become unsustainable.

At Reach Capital, we’ve spent more than a decade studying how technology can widen educational opportunity across schools, homes, universities, and the workforce, and what separates the tools that help from the ones that don’t. Tech isn’t always the solution. But it’s an exceptionally powerful tool for expanding access, addressing learning differences, enabling personalized experiences, and helping students build fluency with the tools they’ll need in life.

What technology does better than anything else is scale. And the drive to scale learning is as old as teaching itself — from the oral tradition to the printing press and the internet, from libraries to schools and universities.

The question was never whether technology belongs in schools. It’s which technology, for whom, and under what conditions. That’s what we’ll spend the next few weeks exploring.