Is EdTech Failing?
The problem isn't what you think.
I’m traveling to the Common Sense Summit this weekend. The focus of the summit is on technology and kids, especially AI.
What’s profound in both the focus and timing of this summit is that I’ve been inundated with anti-tech messages lately, and they draw on many of the core ideas this summit will encourage participants to wrestle with.
Those messages have several key points of idea development.
Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows (2010) argues that the internet’s structure is changing not only how we read but also how we think. It is weakening our ability to engage in deep, focused, and reflective thinking.
Jeff Orlowski’s Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (2020) exposes that social media platforms are intentionally designed to maximize engagement through behavioral manipulation, leading to addictive use, increased corporate profits, harmful impacts on mental health, and broader social disruption.
Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation (2024) claims that smartphones, social media, and changes in parenting have led to a shift from play-based to phone-based childhoods. This shift contributes to increased anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems among children.
Jared Cooney Horvath’s book The Digital Delusion (2025) argues that widespread use of digital technology in classrooms is largely ineffective and often actively harms learning, resulting in negative impacts on attention, memory, and deep understanding.
There is strong evidence that unregulated technology use among children is problematic and adversely affects their mental health and cognitive and social development. These critiques are pointing to real and concerning patterns in how children engage with technology today.
But technology often becomes an easy scapegoat.
In many cases, these critiques are surfacing the consequences of systems designed for engagement and profit over learning and well-being. I also wrote previously about the difference between content and delivery in “AI and the Heart of Learning” (Read more in AI Everywhere available on Amazon.) When problematic content is delivered via technology, it’s tempting to blame the technology, but the same technology can deliver vastly different experiences.
For example, online social experiences are largely curated and often fabricated. That is true whether for children or adults. Is having in-person social experiences better than online experiences? Largely yes. But is that an issue with the technology that makes social media platforms possible or the conceptualization of social media? Do we think that because social media causes mental harm that we should no longer engage in online banking?
Different tools and systems are built for different purposes even if they all use technology. This distinction matters when we think about teaching and learning.
It’s easy for people to see alarming statistics and immediately draw the conclusion that technology for children is a problem. That’s when these anti-tech ideas turn into a movement:
States pass cell phone bans in classrooms. Read the latest update as of December 2025.
Parent advocates create programs to reduce screentime. Learn more about 1000 Hours Outside.
Schools systems start to turn away from digital tools. There has been a call for paper-based curriculum as a way to “future-proof” curriculum.
These calls-to-action have had some positive results. Book check-outs from libraries have exploded. Children report feeling less anxious and overall happier.
But the failure of technology in many of these contexts is not evidence that it is net negative. It’s evidence that we don’t yet understand how to integrate it well into the systems we’re trying to build, especially in education.
So I want to step back and look at this from a more nuanced, structural perspective.
I left the classroom in 2008. MySpace was still a thing. A LOT has changed since then.
My perspective as a teacher on technology was that it was something extra that I needed to layer onto what I was already doing. There was a technology specialist in my district, and there were standards for digital literacy. That was all add-ons. And that is largely how technology has been viewed in education. I viewed myself as an expert in teaching and learning, not tech.
Now that I work in technology, I’ve largely shifted my thinking: Technology is a core pillar in the work to design and develop teaching and learning systems.
Technology is understandable even if you don’t plan to become a software engineer or IT specialist. Technology uses a specific set of vocabulary that can sometimes be daunting to try to learn, but the concepts which drive technology development are largely the same concepts which drive all product development and systems design.
For example, in technology, there is the concept of “backend” and “frontend.” “Backend” refers to the systems and processes which happen behind the scenes and out of the view of the person using the technology. “Frontend” refers to what the person using the technology sees and interacts with.
As a teacher, when I used a digital gradebook, that was for backend efficiency in my teaching and learning system. I also used word processing technology to develop a curriculum and handouts. Students interacted with the products of that work.
On the frontend, there were few edtech apps when I was in the classroom. Students mostly engaged with technology via word processing, slide creation, and some video creation. Now the number of edtech apps is hard to fathom. Some estimates put it at half a million, and these apps vary widely from teacher-facing backend efficiency apps and student-facing self-directed teaching apps to general purpose tools like word processing and special purpose tools that support writing skill development. There are toy-based apps like drawing and coloring apps and game-based apps like that focus children on achieving a goal to gain some kind of reward or access. There are apps focused on learning and apps focused on engagement.
With so many edtech products, how can you ever adjust your teaching and learning systems to fit them all? And what’s worse and highly likely is that they may overlap in function and contradict in their approach. What happens when two different apps teach the same concept differently?
And this is where things start to go wrong for edtech: Companies are very motivated to sell these half-a-million products to educators. In doing so, they approach districts and schools and name a common problem (e.g., When students don’t get an idea, teachers don’t have time to provide 1-on-1 instruction). They then describe how their product provides the solution. What is typically not discussed is how districts and schools will have to adjust their existing teaching and learning systems to use that solution.
Even before the proliferation of learning apps, my district would adopt products and then come tell me that I had to use them. Very often, using those products meant that I had to sacrifice something in my existing teaching and learning systems to make it work. If I was willing to make that sacrifice I did, but more often than not, I hid the product in a closet in my classroom and brought it out on days when I was being observed so it appeared that I was using it.
The same is true with edtech apps. This idea of “bolting on” technology rather than integrating technology results in the school system adjusting around that bolt, creating something that kind of works but is rather clunky. For example, if the app requires that you mark students absent, you end up using it for attendance rather than using the system you set up that worked for your context. If the app teaches a concept in a particular way, you end up adopting that approach even as it doesn’t fully work with your existing lessons.
This clunkiness combined with poorly designed content inside the edtech products is largely what results in the ineffective use of technology, as Jared Cooney Horvath describes in The Digital Delusion.
We no longer have the luxury of outsourcing our strategy around technology for teaching and learning. This is not a problem of the IT person on staff or the technology supervisor. Instead of adjusting our systems to fit around an edtech product, to build effective teaching and learning systems, we have to integrate technology thoughtfully and strategically.
We must identify the places in our teaching and learning systems where technology enhances learning. In other words, technology can enable aspects of teaching and/or learning that are not possible without it. For example: running a simulation to model a concept that otherwise cannot be modeled with everyday materials or creating a video to transform written text into a live action recreation.
I also believe that technology can support and scale teaching (not displace a teacher). The relationship students have with a teacher is of the utmost importance. But there are times when students need additional help. If we required teachers to create 30 individual lesson plans, one for each student, that amount of work would be exorbitant. With AI tools, though, there is a future where this is possible. It doesn’t remove the need for a teacher, rather, it enhances what she can do.
If we remove the technology in these examples, the systems would no longer work. That’s integration.
To have more effective technology integration, we must start by understanding how the thing happens without technology, whether that thing is taking attendance, keeping track of student progress, or teaching an idea to a single student.
A mistake often made is that technology will miraculously and magically figure out how to make something work that we have yet to figure out without it. All technology is designed in some way and that design can be walked back to human decisions. Even AI can be walked back to human decisions, but the scale of decisions is so massive that it appears to be creating things without human input.
Once we can clearly describe how the thing happens, we then can begin to design a system where a tech product can be integrated to make that thing happen more quickly, more often, or at scale across different users and contexts.
Instead of seeking solutions to solve a problem which may not need to be solved with technology and buying someone else’s solution, we need to own our teaching and learning systems. What do you need to work more efficiently or reliably or at scale? What requirements do you have for a tool that might do that job and work inside your existing systems?
Whereas before we would typically outsource technology to someone else perceived as more knowledgeable, now we must understand our teaching and learning systems and how technology works inside those systems.
Figuring this out is valuable and worth investing in. As the famous quotation goes: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
At Learning Tapestry, we work in this space of figuring things out. We help solve hard problems in education. Technology is part of that, but it is not always the solution. Our question is never “What technology should we use?” Instead we ask, “What are you trying to do, and where is it breaking down?”
We even try to talk potential clients out of building or buying technology because it won’t help solve their problem. What often looks like a technology problem is often a human or systems problem. Either the people doing the job do not all agree on what “done” looks like or what “quality” means or the systems are poorly designed so that the outcomes are different from what is desired. While it’s easy to blame technology because it is often seen as this hard to understand and magical thing, at Learning Tapestry, we help define what you want, diagnose the problem, and then plan for a solution that aligns with your vision. If there is a need to build a technology product or solution, we can do that too, but we don’t default to building.
As a client of Learning Tapestry’s, I saw firsthand how this works. I was creating the ELA Guidebooks at the Louisiana Department of Education. We were using Google Slides and Google documents to author thousands of documents. Every time I needed to change a color, I had to go change in all of those documents. It was unwieldy at best. I thought my only option was to adopt a commercial content management system, but that meant that I would then have to adapt the design for the curriculum to fit the product. That would include aligning each lesson to standards and displaying that alignment, which I was adamant against doing. I needed a solution that would create the efficiencies I needed without me having to sacrifice what was important in how I designed my system. When I was introduced to Steve and Elise at Learning Tapestry, they asked me to describe what I was trying to do and where was I hitting roadblocks. They then shared how they might integrate technology thoughtfully so that I could build the curriculum with the design that I envisioned.
Sometimes people are so unclear about what they want that they can benefit from pre-baked solutions. Often those provide clarity about what will work and not work for them. In other words, building it based on someone else’s ideas and trying it out can reveal what does and does not need to happen. Other times, people are super clear about what they need and what doesn’t work, and so their technology integration may take a more “custom build” kind of path.
Of course, none of this makes up for poorly designed or intentionally manipulative content. There are plenty of apps couched as “learning apps” that employ dark patterns and/or don’t safeguard against bad actors getting access to children. The presence of these apps in the market certainly shines a negative light on technology for learning, but if we’re being thoughtful about how we integrate technology, I believe these apps won’t end up being used with children.
As I head into the Common Sense Summit, I am interested in asking better questions:
Where does technology genuinely enhance teaching and learning?
Where does it distort it?
Where are we using technology because it works and where are we using it because we were sold on it?
The answers to those questions matter more than establishing a position for or against tech. While there are real data to support concerns about technology, technology problems are often really systems problems, content problems, or design problems. If we collapse all of that into “technology is bad,” we are misdiagnosing the issue to fix.
We need to be more thoughtful and strategic about where and how technology belongs in our teaching and learning systems. Once we stop bolting it onto our systems and technology is integrated well, it can enhance teaching and learning.