Working for a next-generation Ed Tech company and opening a blog titled “Is Ed Tech destroying the classroom?” may be a questionable career move. But if we can’t interrogate our own industry, we don’t deserve to lead it.
The scale of investment and the reach of Ed Tech into daily classroom life demand scrutiny. This isn’t abstract for me. As the parent of a current college student and a recent university graduate, I sat at the epicenter of classroom digitization while my daughters were in middle and high school. Any reasonable parent, watching a world rapidly sculpted by digital everything, AI’s logarithmic growth, and the steady offloading of executive function, has to ask hard questions about critical thinking, reasoning, and attention. If we don’t, we’re abdicating responsibility.
And the data isn’t comforting.
The evidence is mounting from more than a decade of research on classroom device use and increased screen time, which surged on the K-12 scene in 2012, and it’s alarmingly negative. According to The Economist, in an article titled “Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless,” overreliance on Ed Tech is a poor investment. Citing data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute, the article highlights a stark trend: as classroom device use proliferated, assessment scores across more than 21 national measures have declined since 2014 in math, science, and literacy, after decades of steady improvement beginning in the 1990s.
This is a wake-up call.
Based on the Economist article, Sean Ryan, President of the K-12 Division at McGraw Hill, shot back in a letter to the editor, “It is right to question the return on investment, but blaming the technology for poor outcomes is like blaming running shoes that are still in the box after a New Year’s resolution.” It’s a fair point. It’s incumbent on school districts to implement best practices around technology use, identify clear goals, and enforce educational rigor and accountability.
But here’s the uncomfortable question: if we’ve had more than a decade to implement devices well and performance has trended downward, at what point do we examine the thesis, not just the execution?
Should we return to paper-and-pencil? That sounds atavistic in a digital economy. But the more honest framing may be this: have we confused digital access with educational progress?
We’ve barely completed rigorous, long-term studies on device saturation in classrooms, and yet AI is already being sold as the next cure-all and panacea for improved learning.
That escalation should give us pause. AI is evolving at stratospheric speed and is being rapidly inserted into the Ed Tech stack, often without guardrails or consensus about its role in cognitive development.
Emily Cherkin, The Screentime Consultant, addresses this succinctly in her introductory video, stating that all school screen use should be “Tech Intentional,” prioritizing relationships over screens and serving relationships rather than displacing them. That framing is critical. If technology begins to replace the human dynamics at the heart of learning, struggle, dialogue, mentorship, and feedback, it ceases to be a tool and becomes a substitute.
And students understand the temptation better than any policy paper. Enter the assignment prompt into ChatGPT, and voila, you have an articulate, fully formed essay in minutes. Then you can return to infinite scrolling on TikTok and its small, addictive dopamine hits. In that tradeoff, expediency replaces effort and comprehension. I would be surprised if the student remembers the prompt a few days later, because no durable learning occurred.
My daughter once shared a story about a high school teacher who had reached his limit with AI-generated essays. One day he told his class, “Put away your phones. Pull out a sheet of paper and a pencil. You’re going to write an essay based on the prompt from a week ago. If the quality of your work is substantially different from your prior essay, I’m going to replace your grade with your handwritten response.” Kudos to that teacher.
That moment wasn’t anti-technology. It was pro-learning. It was a demand for intellectual authenticity.
So, what gives?
I am not a Luddite. Classroom device use is here to stay. Nor should we romanticize a pre-digital era that had its own inequities and inefficiencies. But the inevitable march of technology does not supplant responsibility. Its permanence does not absolve Ed Tech companies—including Apollo—from acknowledging its downsides and establishing guardrails against unrestrained use. Nor does it absolve educators of the disciplined work of defining when technology magnifies learning and when it dilutes it.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth for our industry: Ed Tech has often been optimized for scale, engagement metrics, and profits, rather than cognition. At Apollo, we focus on a more grounded mission: helping schools track and manage student information. We believe there is a responsible and powerful role for classroom Ed Tech and AI—one that strengthens, rather than substitutes for, human judgment.
AI can comb through longitudinal data to identify at-risk students. It can monitor attendance patterns to help schools reduce chronic absenteeism. It can process applications and paperwork so administrators and teachers can spend more time teaching and less time on mind-numbing repetitive tasks. That is augmentation and not replacement.
Ed Tech becomes dangerous when it promises immediate results with minimal effort, whether from the student or the educator. Productive struggle, delayed gratification, and wrestling with a blank page, facilitated by an impassioned teacher committed to educational attainment, are the hallmarks of long-term learning success. If Ed Tech is destroying the classroom, it is not because technology is evil. It is because we have allowed technology convenience to supplant critical thinking, attention, teaching, and student accountability.
Ed Tech need not be a Faustian bargain. But it requires industry stewardship, transparent accountability for classroom Ed Tech and AI use, pragmatic legislation that distinguishes innovation from intrusion, and school-level leadership willing to say “not here” or “not yet” when tools undermine pedagogy.
The future of education will be digital. The question is whether it will also remain human. If we get that balance wrong, the damage will not show up in quarterly earnings. It will show up in a generation that struggles to focus, think critically, and act independently.
