The United States spent $30 billion on K-12 education technology in 2024. According to Education Week, that amount is projected to nearly double by 2033. It is important to ask: what “have been the results of all of these investments”? Has teaching and learning improved in our schools? Has the 1-to-1 computing mania for students improved their academic performance? Has it helped our young people better understand what it means to be an American? Has it empowered our young people to understand their roles and responsibilities as citizens?

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath has studied this issue more closely than almost anyone else in the world. His primary takeaway is deeply worrying. Horvath argues, “Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” Horvath presents compelling evidence that Ed Tech has largely failed to deliver on its promises to improve education and learning because it goes against the grain of the brain.

Horvath writes, “Digital tools clash with the way human beings are built to learn…To hold attention, digital tools must move fast: flashing visuals, short videos, infinite scrolling, constant rewards. But real learning requires the opposite: stillness, stability, and sustained thought. The very features that keep students clued to their screens are the same ones that make deep thinking impossible.”

Horvath goes further, making a compelling case that Ed Tech has not only failed to improve learning, but has actually made our students dumber. This is not just an American phenomenon, but an issue affecting wealthy countries more broadly. Horvath notes, “An OECD international review of EdTech concluded, ‘Students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes…A separate series of analyses shows: ‘investing in air conditioning has a more beneficial impact on learning than investing in a laptop for every student.”

Horvath’s argument is that real learning, deep learning, transformational learning requires human interaction. Learning requires empathy, and this occurs in schools through effective teaching. According to Horvath, “Empathy is different. It requires two biological systems, locked in mutual awareness, exchanging physiological signals in real time…This helps to explain why the dropout rate for online learning hovers around 85%, why virtual schools typically underperform even the most underfunded brick-and-mortar ones; and why so many students tuned out during COVID-era remote learning.” Schools and teachers matter. Maybe more now than ever.

A serious tension in what Horvath writes is that, for far too many students over the last several decades, traditional brick-and-mortar schools have failed them. The Hoover Institution’s Eric Hanushek argues that “tech and screens have had an impact, but is not the cause of all the decline.” He and others note that American schools have been struggling to deliver results for students since at least the late 1970s. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform came out in 1983. It stated, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Hanushek would agree that schools and teachers matter greatly, even more so now in the era of rampant AI and Ed Tech. He observes that, “We do have ways of improving the schools, but they generally require making changes in the way we operate them, ways that do not rely on finding the key to using AI in the classroom.” Hanushek goes on to note: “We have been rather complacent about the falling performance of schools even as the pandemic highlighted the learning crisis. The complacency follows from considerable inertia in the schools where fundamental change is strongly resisted.”

Too many failing schools, over too many years, have opened the door to the wishful thinking that machines and technology will do what our teachers and schools have failed to do.

To learn more about all of this, please attend a conversation with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath entitled “Technology, AI, and Learning – a Dangerous Triumvirate,” set for October 27, 2026, from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. at the Lincoln Auditorium in the Idaho State Capitol. To register click here: bit.ly/horvathidaho