The Edtech Backlash Has Joined the Chat

A few months ago, the Los Angeles school board did something that would have been unthinkable five years ago: it voted to start pulling devices out of classrooms. The resolution eliminates screens through second grade, sets daily and weekly screen-time limits for older students, blocks YouTube on district devices, and — the part that should make every school pay attetion — orders an audit of the district’s edtech contracts, which the teachers union pegs at roughly $1.6 billion.

LA is not an outlier. It’s the loud edge of a national mood shift. After years of parents lobbying to get phones out of schools — and winning, with 35 states and D.C. now carrying some cellphone policy and three-quarters of American adults backing classroom bans — the campaign has found a new target: the school-issued device itself. By this past spring, at least fourteen states had floated laws to limit screen time in schools. The optimism of the “a device in every hand” era has curdled into a defensive crouch.

Here’s what worries me about the moment we’re in. We bought thoughtlessly, and now we are at risk of cutting just as thoughtlessly. So many schools I visit and work with have no idea how much they spend on EdTech. What’s more, many of the leaders don’t understand the tools and have no data points on daily usage. The purchasing spree had no process. The purge doesn’t either. Both are reactions, and a reaction is not a strategy.

Look at what the research actually says about how we got here. In the 2023–24 school year, the average U.S. district touched 2,739 distinct edtech tools — a number that has climbed almost every year. And most of it goes nowhere: UNESCO’s 2023 global report on technology in education found that roughly two-thirds of education software licenses in the United States went unused. The same report cited the EdTech Genome Project’s finding that 85% of some 7,000 pedagogical tools — about $13 billion worth — were “either a poor fit or implemented incorrectly.” We were not choosing. We were accumulating.

And we were doing it almost entirely on faith. Fewer than one in five of the hundred most-used edtech tools met the evidence bar set by the Every Student Succeeds Act. In a survey across seventeen states, only 11% of educators and administrators asked for peer-reviewed evidence before adopting a tool. The most-downloaded “Top 40” engagement rankings come with a quiet disclaimer that they measure clicks, not effectiveness. We built an enormous apparatus on vibes and vendor demos, and now that the bill is visible, the instinct is to swing the other way and rip it out. Ripping it out without a process is the same mistake wearing a different costume.

The fix is fundamental, which is probably why so few districts do it: a standing edtech committee that reviews the entire stack on an annual cycle. Not a one-time task force convened in a budget panic. A permanent body, with a calendar, that treats edtech the way a school treats curriculum adoption — as a recurring decision, not a settled one.

Who sits on it matters. A real committee is not three people from IT. It’s a teacher from each level, an instructional coach, someone who owns the budget, a special education and accessibility voice, a data-privacy lead — and, as I’ll argue below, a caregiver. The job of the committee is to move every tool through four phases, every year:

1. Evaluate. Run each existing and proposed tool through a consistent lens. (I use the five questions of the Forward Lens: Intention — why this tool, here, now? Investigation — what information skills does it build? Implementation — how is it actually being used in practice, not in the pitch deck? Integrity — how does it handle verification, attribution, and student data? Impact — what did it cost, and what did it add?) The lens is less important than the discipline of applying the same one to everything.

2. Procure. Stop buying on demos. Borrow the practice districts are finally adopting: rapid-cycle evaluation — short, formative pilots that ask “what does success look like?” before a dollar is spent, and match the rigor of the pilot to the risk of the purchase. A free classroom-response tool needs a light touch. A six-figure platform needs evidence. Start your reviews with the highest-cost tools, because those should be carrying the most weight for students and the budget alike.

3. Train. This is the phase everyone skips and then blames the tool for. UNESCO’s blunt summary: when teachers aren’t prepared, the technology simply sits unused. A platform nobody was taught to use isn’t a failed platform — it’s a failed rollout. Budget the professional learning before the license, not after.

4. Refresh. Edtech products change roughly every three years on average, which means a stack you set and forget is obsolete almost on contract. The committee’s standing question each spring is not “what should we add?” but “what do we renew, what do we retire, and what do we replace?” Subtraction is a feature of the process, not a failure of it.

None of this is exotic. It’s the difference between a district that manages its edtech and one that merely owns a lot of it.

Here’s where I want to push the field. The backlash didn’t come from school boards. It came from parents and caregivers — the same people we have historically handed a one-way acceptable-use form at registration and never spoken to again about technology. We treat families as the recipients of edtech policy. They are, in fact, the constituency now driving education-technology policy at the state level. Ignoring them is how a district ends up surprised by a school-board resolution that audits $1.6 billion in contracts.

So the committee’s work cannot end at the conference-room door. Two concrete moves:

Transparency is what converts backlash into trust. A purge buys you a quiet year. A process — visible, annual, and shared with families — buys you a program people believe in.

This is the throughline of everything I’ve been writing this past year. Recalibrating your 1:1 program, recalibrating your stack — it was never about landing on the right number of tools. Fewer screens is not a strategy any more than more screens was.

The recalibration is a repeatable decision: a committee, a lens, a calendar, and a door open to the families on the other end of every device. Build that, and you stop lurching between the buying spree and the purge. You start actually choosing.That’s the work worth doing this summer. Everything else is just reacting to the last headline.