The Viral Video That's Getting EdTech Wrong — Again

A neuroscientist’s Senate testimony has been viewed over two million times. Parents are showing up to school board meetings with copies of his book. Sixteen states have introduced legislation to restrict devices in schools. And districts from Kansas to Michigan to Los Angeles are pulling Chromebooks and iPads from classrooms, some literally overnight.

As a parent who keeps screens largely out of my own home — by choice, not ideology — I’m sympathetic to the anxiety driving this moment. And as someone who has spent years working with school districts on how they approach technology, I can tell you: the frustration behind this backlash is earned. Schools deployed devices without purpose. They handed teachers hardware with no training. They never communicated to families why a screen was in front of their child. The reckoning was inevitable. But here’s what concerns me: the response unfolding right now is making the exact same mistake — just in reverse.

Jared Cooney Horvath is a neuroscientist, author of The Digital Delusion, and the person at the center of this moment. His Senate testimony earlier this year went viral, and his argument has three parts:

• First, there’s a correlation. On international assessments like PISA and TIMSS, students who spend more time on school computers tend to score lower. U.S. and global scores also began declining around the same time schools started handing out laptops.

• Second, he summarizes over 20,000 studies on edtech tools and concludes that most of them perform below the effectiveness of ordinary classroom instruction.

• Third, he argues that screens are fundamentally incompatible with how the brain learns — they disrupt attention, prevent the kind of empathy that comes from human relationships, and make learning too frictionless to stick.

Taken together, his message is clean and compelling: when tech enters education, learning goes down. Pull the plug. It’s a great headline. But the evidence underneath it is messier than the viral clips suggest.

Let’s start with the correlation. Horvath is upfront that it’s correlational — he acknowledges it doesn’t prove causation. But that caveat tends to disappear in the Instagram clips and school board presentations. Declining test scores have coincided with a lot of things: a global pandemic, the rise of social media outside of school, widening inequality, chronic absenteeism. Pointing at devices and declaring them the cause is the kind of clean story our brains love and the data doesn’t support.

There’s also a detail worth noting. The OECD analysis Horvath cites — the one showing students who spend more time on devices score lower — was specifically measuring time on devices for leisure at school. That qualifier matters. A lot. It’s the difference between a student scrolling TikTok and a student using a well-designed tool with a teacher guiding the experience.

Then there’s the research summary. This is the part that sounds most damning in the viral clips, but it’s also the most misleading. The overall effect of edtech across those 20,000-plus studies? It’s actually positive. As Education Next’s review noted, the aggregate effect size is +0.29 standard deviations — modest, below the +0.40 to +0.50 range that typically signals meaningful impact, but not negative. Not harmful. Underwhelming, which is a very different thing.

Horvath reframes it as negative by arguing that the effect is smaller than what regular classroom instruction produces — and that gap, in his telling, makes tech a net loss. It’s a creative framing, but it obscures what the data actually says: that most edtech tools don’t move the needle much, not that they’re actively damaging kids. And that distinction matters enormously for what we do next.

Here’s what is well-supported: Reading comprehension is consistently worse on screens than on paper. Handwritten notes produce better learning outcomes than typed ones. Handwriting builds fine motor skills linked to reading development. These are real, replicated findings that schools should take seriously.

But the research also shows that not all screen time is equal. Intelligent tutoring systems — where technology adapts to what a student knows and doesn’t know — show strong positive effects (+0.52). Interventions designed for students with learning differences show even stronger ones (+0.61). The harmful effects appear concentrated in passive, low-purpose applications: gamified apps designed to maximize time on platform, devices handed out as digital babysitters, screens deployed without any teacher involvement.

A 2024 study published in ScienceDirect analyzing data from nearly 10,000 youth found that mentally passive screen time showed predominantly negative associations across social and cognitive domains — reduced curiosity, memory difficulties, lower resilience. But actively engaged screen use told a different story. Research published in JAMA Pediatrics found no significant negative association between screen media use and academic outcomes when the use was purposeful and educationally oriented.

In other words, the research doesn’t say technology is the problem. It says purposeless technology is the problem. And it says how a tool is used, by whom, and toward what end matters far more than whether it’s a screen or a sheet of paper.

There’s another piece of this that irks me. The data shows that disadvantaged students — the kids who most need high-quality instruction — receive the highest doses of edtech. And the effect sizes for technology interventions among those students are among the weakest in the research (+0.18). We are running the biggest experiment on the children who can least afford to be experimented on.

But removing devices from those same classrooms without a plan doesn’t fix this. It just replaces one form of thoughtlessness with another. Those students don’t need fewer tools — they need better-prepared teachers, clearer pedagogical purpose, and adults who have done the work of deciding why a screen is in the room before it gets there.

Here’s what frustrates me most about this moment. Horvath is right about the core failure — edtech has been deployed without purpose, without teacher preparation, and without honest communication to families. His data, even where it’s overinterpreted, points to a real problem.

But his prescription — pull the plug — skips the hardest and most important step.

This is something I’ve been writing about for a long time. In Teaching Digital Kindness, I argued that technology decisions in schools have to start with relationships — between teachers and students, between schools and families, between the adults making decisions and the children living with them. The device is never the intervention. The human holding it is.

That argument has only gotten more urgent. My upcoming book, set to release later this year, goes further — examining how schools and families can build shared structures around intentional technology use, and why the adults in the room need to reckon with their own screen habits before they can credibly guide children through theirs. Because the pattern we keep repeating — adopt without thinking, panic, remove without thinking — isn’t a technology cycle. It’s a leadership failure. And it will happen again with AI if we don’t break it now.

It’s the same pattern we saw with social media. We gave kids powerful platforms with no guidance, no adult modeling, no shared language for navigating them. And when things went wrong, the response was bans and filters — not the harder work of teaching kids (and ourselves) how to think about these tools. We’re watching the same script play out with devices in schools, and if we’re not careful, we’ll run it again with AI.

I don’t think the answer is defending the status quo. The status quo is broken. Too many classrooms use technology as filler. Too many schools bought devices because a vendor said they should. Too many teachers were handed hardware and told to figure it out.

But the answer isn’t ripping it all out and calling it reform, either.

This is why I developed the Intentional Technology and Screen Framework (ITSF) — a research-grounded framework built around four pillars, each with a guiding question that school leaders, teachers, and families can use to make better decisions about every device, every app, and every minute of screen time in a child’s day.

Pillar One: Purpose Before Platform. What is the specific learning goal this technology is serving — and could that goal be achieved without it?

Most edtech procurement decisions are made at the district level, filtered through a budget cycle, and land in classrooms without teachers having been part of the conversation. UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report is explicit: regulations and purchasing decisions made outside the education sector will not necessarily serve education’s needs. In practice, this means every lesson that uses a device should have a one-sentence rationale connecting the tool to the learning objective. If that sentence can’t be written, the device shouldn’t be open.

Pillar Two: Active Over Passive, Always. Are students doing something with this technology, or is something being done to them by it?

The active/passive distinction is the single most consistent finding in the screen time research. Passive consumption — watching videos, clicking through gamified apps, scrolling — correlates with negative outcomes across nearly every study. Active creation — writing, coding, producing, collaborating — tells a different story entirely. This should be non-negotiable in any school’s technology policy.

Pillar Three: Teacher First, Technology Second. Has every teacher using this tool received sustained, meaningful preparation — not a one-day workshop, but real support?

This is the pillar that makes everything else work. Research from PMC is clear: insufficient teacher preparation is one of the most significant barriers to effective technology integration. When training and sustained support are provided, student outcomes improve. When they aren’t, you get Chromebooks used as digital hall passes. A systematic review of teacher professional development programs confirmed that the programs producing real instructional change are the ones that are sustained, contextually relevant, and collaborative — not August workshops and PDF guides.

Pillar Four: Communicate the Why to Families. Can we explain our technology decisions clearly and honestly to the families we serve — and do they have a way to respond?

When families don’t understand why a device is in their child’s hands, they fill that gap with their own theory. Right now, a lot of families are filling it with fear and distrust — not because they’re anti-technology, but because no one has told them the plan. The CoSN 2025 Blaschke Report identified family communication as one of the most critical and most underserved areas in the screen time conversation, publishing an entire toolkit because most districts haven’t had these conversations at all. The solution isn’t a better FAQ on the district website. It’s genuine, recurring dialogue about what screens are used for, what the learning goals are, and how families can reinforce these principles at home.

These four questions won’t generate a viral moment. They don’t fit in a Senate clip or an Instagram reel. But they’re the questions that actually serve kids — and they’re the ones that keep getting skipped in a debate that swings between “give every kid a laptop” and “take them all away” without stopping to ask why in either direction. The pendulum is swinging. I just hope we have the courage to stop it somewhere in the middle — where the work is harder, the answers are messier, and the results actually last.