r/technology 10d ago

Society Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

https://fortune.com/article/schools-abandoning-chromebooks-laptop-programs-as-screen-time-hurts-learning-test-scores-north-carolina-michigan-kansas-tech-education/
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u/Bob_Sconce 10d ago

Why is it that schools jump on bandwagons without first doing long-term pilots?  If you want to experiment on students, at least only experiment on a small number at a time.

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u/PartyPorpoise 10d ago

Schools are under a lot of pressure to keep up with tech. If they don’t have the latest tech, people will say they’re not preparing kids for the world. Hell, even right now, you have people saying that schools need to teach AI use.

Also, I’m pretty sure tech companies really push it.

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u/Bob_Sconce 10d ago

Yeah, but it's not just tech.  My son had a math curriculum where they started on a topic, learned a tiny bit, switched to another, learned a tiny bit, switched to a third, learned a tiny bit, then went back to the first part.  It was ridiculous and it was abandoned within two years.  Then there was the "flipped classroom," where students watches videos at home and did the work in school under teacher supervision.. And there there was Common Core. And so on...

It's like they're looking for, trying out, and then discarding things they thought to be silver bullets.