The numbers come first. Test scores in math and reading fell after schools swapped textbooks for screens, according to education researchers cited by Fortune. The decline has fueled a broader debate over what classroom devices cost children beyond the basics.
University of Pennsylvania professor Sarah Schneider Kavanagh and University of Portland professor Katie A. Danielson wrote in a Washington Post op-ed this month that elementary school has always taught more than reading and math — it taught children to wait for another's idea before sharing their own, to negotiate disagreements, and to explain their thinking. Those skills, they argued, develop through person-to-person interaction, not through screens.
When students click through math lessons alone rather than solving problems with classmates, the professors wrote, they lose exposure to different ways of thinking — a loss they say matters more, not less, as AI makes distinctly human skills like judgment, empathy and collaboration more valuable. 'They need a place designed for other aims, such as conversation instead of consumption and collaboration instead of personalization,' Kavanagh and Danielson wrote. 'That isn't resisting the future; it's preparing children to be fully human in it.'
The backlash has moved from op-eds to statehouses. Lawmakers in at least 17 states had introduced or debated legislation on classroom devices or screens as of July, according to a tally cited by Fortune. Los Angeles Unified, the nation's second-largest school district, banned in-school screen use for students from preschool through first grade this year and curbed screen time for older students.
The cognitive case against the devices has reached Washington. Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in written testimony that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the generation before it, despite unprecedented access to technology. Horvath cited a stark correlation between test scores and time spent on computers in school, and said cognitive capability has declined over roughly the last decade. 'We're facing challenges more complex and far-reaching than any in human history,' he told Fortune. 'Now, more than ever, we need a generation able to grapple with nuance, hold multiple truths in tension, and creatively tackle problems that are stumping the greatest adult minds of today.'
Computers and online learning expanded steadily in classrooms for decades, became essential during COVID-19 lockdowns, and then never receded — school systems kept the devices even after the pandemic emergency passed.
This is a story about accountability catching up with a mandate nobody voted on. District administrators and ed-tech vendors sold a promise of individualized instruction; taxpayers footed the bill; and the return, by the districts' own scores, has been children who read and calculate worse than before. Los Angeles Unified's reversal and the activity in 17 statehouses are not nostalgia for chalkboards — they are parents and elected lawmakers reclaiming a decision that bureaucracies made for them without evidence to back it. Free markets punish products that don't deliver; school boards, insulated from that discipline, kept buying tablets anyway. The correction now underway is what accountability looks like when it finally arrives.
