Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2026 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “What rules should govern the uses of digital technology in schools—and who should set them?” Learn more.
I have come here to bury tech bans, not to praise them.
For too long, when we have talked about technology in the classroom, we have started the conversation with an adversarial construction. In doing so, we fail to recognize that every student today, from kindergarten through 12th grade, is a digital native. They have grown up with technology at their fingertips, whether it be watching their favorite educational programs on a tablet, playing a learning game on a parent’s phone, or doing a classroom lesson on a computer. The era of No. 2 pencils and papers with chunks of wood floating in it is over, no matter how much luddites may want to bring it back.
So when we call for cell phone bans, internet firewalls, removal of Chromebooks or tablets, or any other such all-or-nothing technological demands, we are ultimately seeking to unplug and deskill our students. We are taking away their primary information and learning tool because the adults in the room do not understand how to make the most of it in today’s learning environment.
Ultimately, the question is not what should or should not be allowed in a K–12 classroom in 2026. The question should be how we best use all of the learning tools we have at our disposal to improve teaching and learning, particularly in low-resourced classrooms or with those students who are struggling to achieve proficiency. We aren’t talking about replacing teachers with a computer or a robot. We are talking about equipping educators with everything we have so they can better connect with those digital native learners in their classrooms.
Yet we continue to see states, districts, and schools speak of technology from a deficiency mindset, as we shift from banning cell phones in classrooms to now blocking those same learners from understanding how to apply AI in the instructional practice. Why? We seek to reject that which we do not understand. And, unfortunately, most states, districts, and even those ed schools preparing all of those teachers for our public school districts, just do not understand that technology is just a tool to improve teaching—it isn’t the act of teaching itself.
So we must ask, instead of simply issuing a blanket NO every time the latest proven technology begins to make its way into the classroom, what exactly is the role of states, districts, and schools in supporting educators with effective tech use?
To answer that question, we need to recognize that SEAs, LEAs, and schools each have an important but different role in the process. The goal should not be to train educators to use technology, or to prevent them from using it entirely. It should be to help them use the right technology, for the right purpose, at the right time.
States should establish the broad conditions for effective practice. They can provide evidence-based technology standards, procurement guidance, student-data-privacy requirements, accessibility expectations, and high-quality professional-learning resources. States can also help their school districts avoid having to independently evaluate hundreds of competing products, just as they have with statewide adoptions in subjects like reading. We already know that state guidance can establish principles and guardrails that can empower LEAs to make their own decisions, rather than prescribe legislative bans or force a single technology model for every classroom to adhere to.
School districts should translate those principles into coherent instructional strategy. They should develop a limited, vetted technology ecosystem rather than allowing every classroom to become a collection of disconnected apps (since we’ve already seen how ineffective a collection of disconnected curriculum decisions is for student proficiency in subjects like reading, math, and science). LEAs should provide sustained professional learning—not one-time workshops—along with coaching, peer collaboration, model lessons, technical support, and time for teachers to experiment and reflect. Technology adoption should also be evaluated based on student outcomes (determined by quantifiable data), teacher experience, accessibility, cost, privacy, and whether it actually improves instruction.
Schools and school leaders are closest to the classroom and therefore have a particularly important role. Principals and instructional leaders should help teachers ask, “What learning problem are we trying to solve?” before asking, “What technology should we use?” They should create opportunities for teachers to share successful practices, observe one another, and discuss what is and isn’t working. They also need to protect teachers from the expectation that every new technological innovation must immediately become part of classroom practice.
Finally, teachers should remain the instructional decision makers. Effective technology integration requires professional judgment. A state can approve a platform, and a district can purchase it, but neither can determine whether it is the right tool for a particular lesson, student, or learning objective. Of course, this requires schools of education that have properly prepared novice teachers to make such determinations, lessons that the vast majority of ed schools simply are not teaching today.
The larger principle is that professional development should focus less on the mechanics of technology and more on pedagogy: how technology can deepen inquiry, personalize learning, strengthen feedback, increase student creation and collaboration, and develop critical thinking. Technology training should ultimately make teachers better teachers—not simply make them more proficient users of technology. If this pedagogy sounds familiar, it should. These are the same principles schools, LEAs, and states tried to instill in pursuit of both STEM skill and 21st century skill movements.
For too many years, whether on the state or district level, those making policy on education technology have largely focused on “screen time” and the dangers of technology and virtues of ol’-fashioned learning. Instead, the more meaningful distinction for policy discussions should be between technology that deepens thinking and technology that displaces thinking. A cell phone in the classroom is not the problem. A cell phone being used for research or being used to examine digital copies of artifacts of the American Revolution is an effective use of technology. A cell phone being used to scroll TikTok during science class is not. It isn’t the tech. It’s how it is used and how the teacher applies the technology to the lessons of the day.
No matter at what level the policy is being considered, we need to stop asking the question, “Should we allow students to use this technology in our classrooms?” Instead, from the governor’s office down to the classroom teacher, we need to be asking, “Does this technology help students learn something more deeply, efficiently, creatively, collaboratively, or accessibly than they could otherwise?”
If the answer to that question is yes, it doesn’t matter if the lesson is coming from ancient parchment or a TikTok. If it is connecting with the learner and making the lesson stick, we should allow it to be in the teacher’s toolbox to use when she feels it is needed.
