Last fall, the social scientist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation and a central figure in the recent push to ban cell phones in schools, turned his attention to a new target in K–12 classrooms: laptops. “Get laptops and tablets out of classrooms now,” he wrote on X, linking to an op-ed by psychologist Jean Twenge in which she argued that 1:1 device programs once hailed as a breakthrough have proven to be “a failure.” Twenge called for parents to be allowed to opt out of device use, and for some districts to “eliminate school electronic devices entirely.”
A host of other public intellectuals, like UPenn organizational psychologist Adam Grant, have issued similar calls. Many of the most vocal critics of laptops cite the work of Jared Horvath, a neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne, whose 2025 book The Digital Delusion argues that the rapid expansion of classroom technology has done more harm than good.
“Everyone went heavy tech, like a Band-Aid during the pandemic,” Horvath told Edutopia. “But COVID stopped and no one ripped the Band-Aid off.” Schools, in his view, have defaulted to screens without enough thought, and are long overdue to return to a more “limited and purposeful” use of devices.
The backlash is already shaping policy
The Los Angeles Unified School District recently moved to limit screen exposure in early grades.
But as the tech backlash spreads from phones to laptops, many teachers say a fundamental insight is being lost: not all devices—and not all uses of those devices—are the same. After a broad consensus formed against cell phones, high school English teacher Marcus Luther says it seems many educators and thought leaders have “sort of said, okay, let’s just keep going and go for the computer screens, too.”
That blurring, teachers worry, is already shaping how policy is being discussed—and how fast it’s moving. Calls to rein in laptop use in early grades, or restrict specific platforms have expanded into broader arguments to eliminate laptops in K–12 classrooms altogether. But those arguments, teachers told Edutopia, often fail to distinguish between passive, unmonitored screen time and activities like engaging in an hour of guided web research, using digital tools to support reading fluency, or collecting peer feedback on a creative writing assignment.
Luther, who describes his own approach to laptop use in class as minimalist and intentional, said he feels like classroom teachers are increasingly caught between two poles—one pushing for the full adoption of new technologies like AI, and the other for sweeping bans that would return classrooms to a version of school that no longer reflects how students will work outside of it.
Even teachers who support less tech worry about the scope of bans
Dylan Kane, a middle school math teacher in Colorado who recently wrote about his month-long experiment without Chromebooks, said broad mandates to eliminate or sharply restrict laptops trouble him. “I believe teachers do their best work when they’re trusted as professionals,” Kane said. “I get very nervous about mandates and things that can feel very blunt and erode teacher judgement.”
Related: Object-Based Learning Boosts Deep Thinking
The thrust of Horvath’s argument against screens begins with a recognition he says many teachers already share: things have tipped too far. “There is this broad sense of, yes, there is too much tech,” he said. In a 2025 survey of nearly 400 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers, 80 percent said students have a device assigned to them in school—up from about a third before the pandemic—and 70 percent said those devices distract students from schoolwork “a little” or “a lot.”
He then asks: “Do you go cold turkey and get it out of schools, or do you moderate its use?” To argue that severely curbing device use is the better path, he points to national and international data over the past two decades—data that, critics say, often aggregates different devices and uses under a single category.
Like Haidt, Horvath leans on patterns in data provided by PISA, the international assessment of 15-year-olds administered by the OECD. The 2022 PISA results show a decline in academic performance at the heaviest end of device use: Students who spent five to seven hours a day on devices for learning scored 10 points lower than those who spent three to five hours. Roughly 30 percent of PISA students also reported that they were distracted by their own digital devices during math lessons.
Synthesizing nearly 400 meta-analyses covering more than 20,000 individual studies, Horvath calculates that classroom technology produces an average effect size that is positive but below the threshold researchers typically consider meaningful. He pairs that with state-level data: aligning NAEP scores with what he identifies as each state’s “digital inflection point,” he argues that achievement tends to plateau and then decline soon after widespread device adoption. “If you adopted tech in 2009, your scores started going down in 2009,” he said. “If you adopted tech in 2017, your scores go down in 2017.”
Despite the attention his work has drawn—he made his case to the U.S. Senate earlier this year—Horvath isn’t arguing for laptops to disappear entirely. He wants “friction”: a return to an older model of shared laptop carts or dedicated computer labs where devices are checked out for a purpose rather than open on every desk.
Not everyone reads the data the same way
Adam Sparks, a former middle- and high-school teacher who now runs an edtech company called Short Answer, took aim at Horvath’s arguments in a widely read newsletter. He noted that the real picture of the effect of laptop and edtech use in classrooms grows more complicated on closer inspection of the data—and that tidy narratives about tech’s effect on learning tend to overlook other possible culprits like teacher shortages, rising economic inequality, chronic absenteeism, and pandemic learning loss.
Take the 2022 OECD report. What Horvath presents as evidence against classroom devices, Sparks points out, is built on a category—”devices”—that lumps laptops and cell phones together. While it is true that a large share of students are distracted by their own device use, the report doesn’t distinguish between purposeful academic laptop use and a student scrolling Instagram under the table.
Where the report does draw clear distinctions is between devices used for learning and those used for leisure. There, the picture is harder to flatten into a neat conclusion. While academic performance does decline at the highest levels of screen exposure when used for “leisure,” at more moderate and purposeful levels of use, the report notes, the pattern reverses sharply. PISA students who use devices for up to an hour a day for “learning activities” scored 25 points higher in math than students who don’t use them at all.
To Sparks, the same flattening of key distinctions between devices and use cases is also a problem in the meta-analysis at the heart of Horvath’s book. In addition to being highly correlative, he said it collapses fundamentally different interventions—1:1 laptops, adaptive software, specialized learning tools, and games—under a single heading: edtech. “We’re referring to edtech as if it is this one big umbrella term,” he said. “But it’s not. It’s thousands of digital applications and curricula and different devices.”
Related: Ex School Chief Gets 2 Year Sentence
What teachers actually see in their classrooms
Kane notes that even though Horvath’s book inspired him to ditch laptops in class for a month, he isn’t entirely convinced by all of the data presented by critics like Haidt or Horvath. Even before encountering the book, he said he’d already begun scaling back on tech tools he’d relied on—daily DeltaMath practice, weekly Desmos activities, and nearly all quizzes and tests administered online—because he was frustrated by the “logistical headaches” of keeping students on task once laptops came out.
The results of his experiment impressed him. Students were more engaged in discussion, more willing to wrestle with problems on paper, and more open to revisiting mistakes. But there were tradeoffs. Planning and grading took longer, and tools like DeltaMath—which efficiently mix old and new skills for practice—proved hard to replace. Kane also missed how quickly laptops allowed him to analyze results across a class. “It’s just so fast and easy to see, ‘Hey, a lot of students got this wrong. I need to reteach that,'” he said.
Months after the experiment, Kane now describes himself as “paper-first,” but not anti-technology. He’s aware of what he’s lost by reducing his laptop use: the ease of assigning and tracking homework online, and the immediacy of feedback. He also hasn’t sworn laptops off for good; he expects to use them in more targeted ways, for occasional activities that work better with digital tools, and ahead of state testing, which occurs on computers. “Students like variety,” he said. “I’m not someone who is saying no technology ever again.”
For all the messy public debate about classroom technology playing out on X, in the pages of the New York Times, and in state houses across the country, voices like Kane’s—real classroom teachers grounded in the day-to-day realities of schools—have largely been absent from the discourse.
Talk to teachers, and a more complex picture comes into focus. Most aren’t defending the status quo, and many share Horvath’s concerns about overuse of screens. But they also describe a set of everyday practices—real-time feedback, recorded lessons for absent students, digital research tools, quick formative checks, and faster grading cycles—that they say meaningfully augment what they can do in a classroom. The shift they say they find themselves making lately is not away from the technology as a whole, but toward a more deliberate use of it.
Luther, for example, frames his approach as a question of discernment. Before deciding whether to use laptops, he asks himself: What does good learning look like? “Once you have a really clear vision of that, then you can ask: does tech play a part in this today?” he said. In his own classroom, the answer is often no. Frequently he begins lessons with analog tools—students writing in notebooks, sharing their writing, and discussing ideas—before introducing a device.
When laptops do come out, it’s usually to do something that would be difficult to replicate at the speed and efficiency of new technologies. Shared Google documents, for example, let him respond to student writing in real time, creating an ongoing dialogue as they draft. “I can be a part of their journey and their writing process in a way that would otherwise be impossible—especially in a classroom of 30 or 35 students.” In a unit on King Lear, Luther’s students generated questions in their notebooks about the play, then collected them into a shared digital document that became a running resource for their upcoming essays. “That took ten minutes, and now it is an ongoing resource for students,” he said.
For Sparks, the flexibility that laptops enabled in his classrooms was not a luxury but a necessity. Teaching in a school where students frequently missed class, he relied on recorded lessons and self-paced structures to help them keep up. “Using tech like that was really the only way for me to differentiate instruction,” he said—both for absent students and for those working at very different reading levels. “The kid that needs to move a little slower can slow down, and the kid who’s flying through can move faster.”
Related: White House Dinner suspect worked as California teacher CNN reports
In Samantha DiCicco’s fifth grade classroom, a simple audio tool improves reading fluency. Her students use laptops to record themselves reading a passage aloud, then listen and reflect on their fluency before receiving targeted feedback. The routine gives students a way to see and hear their own progress over time—and DiCicco says it solves a key differentiation problem, allowing her to “gauge how individual students are doing with their fluency progress.”
Like many of the teachers interviewed, Luther is uneasy about the idea of kids spending most of their school day in front of screens—”three to five hours a day is not something anyone feels good about”—but he resists the notion that this reflects most classrooms. He said laptops in his own classroom are used in short 10-to 15-minute bursts and often not at all. High school English teacher Brett Vogelsinger estimates laptops are used in his classroom about 30 percent of the time. “That number goes way up when we are in the middle of a research project,” he said. “But that’s not most days.”
Distraction is real, but so is context
If the argument against laptops lands anywhere with teachers, it is on the question of attention. Laptops, even in well-managed classrooms, introduce a level of distraction that is difficult to ignore. Luther’s school has invested heavily in keeping students on task, using monitoring software like GoGuardian, which allows him to see every student’s screen in real time. “If I see a kid flip over to a game or social media, it’s easy to close that out and go talk to them,” he said. Still, he notes, the mere presence of a laptop can pull at a student’s attention. “It’s hard to be present. And that’s not just a kid thing—adults struggle with this too.”
As the debate over classroom technology intensifies, Sparks worries that policy responses such as proposals to cap or limit device use across classrooms, regardless of need or context, are moving faster than the realities they are meant to address. “Nobody knows that teacher’s context better than that teacher,” he said. “What are we doing stepping in as outsiders and telling them what they can and can’t do?”
Luther, meanwhile, is concerned that the conversation about what to do is often shaped by the extremes. “People like to point to the worst-case scenario on either side,” he said. “And none of it benefits that messy middle ground that most teachers are living in.” What he wishes would get more attention is not the technology itself, but how it is used, and whether teachers are equipped to use it well. In classrooms where devices have become a substitute for instruction or community, removing them is unlikely to produce a sudden transformation. “I don’t think it magically turns schools into a utopia.”
For many teachers these questions are not theoretical; they would completely restructure the way learning works in their classroom, and many are not convinced it would be for the better. “I think we’re sometimes imagining this nostalgic classroom where students were always engaged before computers were around,” Vogelsinger said. “But I don’t think that past actually exists.”
Other educators detect a heavy dose of irony in the new mandates. Andrew Marcinek, a longtime K–12 technology administrator and former English teacher, notes that many districts originally required the use of technology in classrooms, and provided little training or support for teachers. The current backlash risks repeating that pattern. “The response unfolding right now is making the same mistake—just in reverse,” Marcinek recently wrote.
A more realistic path, educators say, lies somewhere in the middle ground: clearer limits on when and how tech is used—particularly for young students—but flexibility to adapt those decisions to the needs of particular classrooms. Whatever direction schools choose, the implications will not be abstract. Students will carry them into a world where digital tools are everywhere, and in the meantime teachers—not the public intellectuals driving much of the debate—will live with the day-to-day consequences of those decisions in their classrooms.
Leave a Reply