How the Laptop Revolution Destroyed Public Education ｜ 2⧸26⧸26
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
151.26695
Summary
A recent Fortune Magazine article has made waves with a grim admission: After more than $30 billion spent flooding classrooms with laptops and tablets, standardized test scores keep sliding. Worse, neuroscientists now link more classroom screen time to lower performance. The very device meant to modernize learning may be helping to unmake it.
Transcript
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So, whatever you think is going to happen in the future,
00:00:30.740
A recent Fortune Magazine article has made waves with a grim admission.
00:00:35.360
After more than $30 billion spent flooding classrooms with laptops and tablets,
00:00:43.560
Worse, neuroscientists now link more classroom screen time to lower performance.
00:00:49.060
The very device meant to modernize learning may be helping to unmake it.
00:00:53.920
Schools rushed into a technological revolution without asking the most basic question.
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Many teachers saw the answer firsthand and in real time.
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Administrators and experts ignored them because the fad sounded like progress.
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I taught history and civics in Florida public schools as the laptop trend took hold.
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Computers had sat in classrooms since my childhood, but they played a supporting role.
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A few desktops in the back helped with research.
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A computer lab handled bigger projects, but most learning still happened on paper with books,
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It was cheap, durable, limited, and perfect for one thing.
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Suddenly, a district could put a machine not just in every room, but in the hands of every single student.
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Technological literacy sounds noble as if every ninth grader is training for Silicon Valley
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The whole apparatus of schooling migrated into Alphabet's software suite.
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Few people in the system asked why a private company wanted to become the operating system of childhood.
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The laptop push also fit the religion of metrics.
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District officials love anything that produces dashboards, timestamps, and engagement graphs.
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A worksheet completed on paper frustrates the spreadsheet priesthood.
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A worksheet completed on a Chromebook generates data.
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The device didn't just enter the classroom, it entered the managerial imagination,
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Once laptops become ubiquitous, the problems announced themselves.
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The deeper the integration, the harder it became to control.
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The larger problem went beyond quizzes, though.
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Kids refused to read because they assumed that a quick search and copy-pasting counted as learning.
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Students stopped vetting anything because they treated the first search result as the truth.
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Instead of building an argument, students stitched together paragraphs from the internet
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and hoped the teachers were too tired to fight it.
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Schools tried parental controls, but their efforts were laughable.
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When thousands of bored adolescents share a building, they collaborate.
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A new filter went up, but within days, kids found a workaround.
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Soon, the screens were again showing games, videos, and even pornography.
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During class, in plain view, behind a pretense of work.
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Students used shared Google Docs as a covert messaging system.
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They gossiped, bullied, and planned actual crimes while keeping a document open to look studious.
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My school eventually had to hold an assembly to remind students that everything they type into a document
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leaves a record and that bragging about criminal activity or sexual escapades can end up as evidence.
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Google didn't subsidize these devices and software out of corporate charity.
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By making Google Search and Google Apps the center of a child's informational life,
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A student's education happens inside the Google ghetto.
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You can pretend that the company isn't collecting the data if you want,
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Administrators told teachers to stop showing videos longer than three minutes
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without pausing to explain because students couldn't stay focused.
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The device that was supposed to expand horizons kept shrinking attention spans.
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Teachers began competing with the entire internet for a child's attention,
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and no lesson plan can win that contest for long.
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Some say the bubbles in an Aero truffle piece can take 34 seconds to melt in your mouth.
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Sometimes the very amount you're stuck at the same red light.
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Florida went all in on Chromebooks and tied them to everything.
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Standardized tests moved entirely onto laptops.
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Test prep software got woven into daily coursework.
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Students with accommodations or limited English got pushed towards the device as a universal crutch.
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Denying a Chromebook got treated the same as denying an education.
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Personally, I reached a point where my students just mattered more than compliance.
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I saw what these screens were doing to learning, and there was just no way that I was going to be able to teach in this environment.
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I rebuilt my classroom around paper, books, and discussion.
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As much as possible, we shoved the computers in the corner.
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Students could use the Chromebook only for the mandated testing and accommodations that we couldn't meet any other way.
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Students engaged more, distractions dropped, discipline improved a lot.
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More assignments got finished, and grades rose.
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Remote learning turned the screen into the classroom itself.
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Even Florida, which resisted most of the lockdown hysteria, shifted much of schooling online.
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The lockdowns devastated achievement, but the damage didn't end when students returned in person.
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After COVID, it became nearly impossible to pry students and parents and administrators away from screen-based schooling.
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And like always, the corporate press arrives just in time to play cleanup.
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Reporters discovered the failure after the money was spent, the infrastructure was hardened,
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and a generation has been trained to treat the browser as a brain.
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Teachers like me were out there warning them the whole time we had a front-row seat to what was happening.
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Public education is stuffed with managerial drones who chase consensus and trends while ignoring what actually helps students.
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Bureaucracy will keep this program alive through sheer inertia, even as evidence piles up.
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And tests that reward reading and writing instead of clicking.
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Districts should stop outsourcing childhood to big tech.
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Stop laundering ideology through digital citizenship.
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And start treating attention as a scarce resource worth defending.
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A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now.
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