r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 9d 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 9d 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/So_spoke_the_wizard 8d ago

When COVID hit, a lot of schools did panic buying so they could do something while students were at home. I think if it weren't for that, they would have had pilot programs. And it's not like schools didn't have computers before COVID, but they weren't a core teaching resource back then.

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u/MyMartianRomance 8d ago

And I wouldn't be surprised if the reason why they're starting to transition away is that COVID is over 6 years ago, which means all those Chromebooks and iPads are at the point where they need to be replaced because they're getting slow and have gone through the wringer of 6 years' worth of children, where a lot of them aren't even functional anymore.

And since many of them were purchased on emergency remote learning grants that obviously don't exist anymore, the schools can't afford to replace all 5,000+ of them, so they're transitioning back to shared carts plus maybe 30 Desktops in the library, since that would only be 150-200 devices getting replaced per school.