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.
The word of 2027 seems destined to be “techlash.”
Given my role at HMH, you might expect me to be a champion of education technology. There’s certainly a lot of promise in what it can do for students and teachers, but I’m not going to defend all of it.
We, as an industry, bear some responsibility for how we got here. For too long, we’ve allowed the promise of innovation to get ahead of the evidence that our products are truly helping more students read, write, and do math. Schools have accumulated a dizzying array of apps, platforms, and digital tools, some of which have thwarted student success by fragmenting instruction or serving as little more than digital babysitters. Guidance from policymakers has been slow to come, so teachers are having to make up the rules classroom by classroom without much help.
Almost everyone I talk to is in violent agreement on the need to place some limitations on technology in classrooms. There is also widespread concern that, in a rush to regulate, policymakers will resort to blanket bans and arbitrary (and impossible to implement) screen-time limits.
But in all of this conversation, we are overlooking another important risk. We’ve spent the last decade moving away from disconnected and poor instructional materials toward more coherent, high-quality curricula. Now, with new digital tools entering classrooms faster than ever, we need to make sure they support coherent, high-quality instruction too.
Keeping the bad technology out is the easy part.
Social media platforms designed to keep users scrolling have no place competing for students’ attention during instruction. Neither do addictive algorithms, digital games masquerading as educational activities, or AI chatbots that encourage students to outsource their thinking.
The far more pressing challenge, in my view, isn’t distinguishing TikTok from an AI-powered math tutor. It’s distinguishing between educational tools that both appear well-designed and effective.
Districts use hundreds, sometimes thousands, of digital products, many with legitimate instructional purposes and credible evidence behind them. Yet even a well-designed tool can undermine instruction if it doesn’t align with the core curriculum or the district’s instructional vision.
We’ve learned this lesson through the high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) movement, and now we need to apply it to technology.
We can’t afford to recreate the curriculum problem we just spent a decade fixing.
Not long ago, curriculum was something of a free-for-all in most places. Teachers were largely left to piece together their own lessons, spending hours searching sites like Teachers Pay Teachers and pulling resources from dozens of different places. What students learned often depended on what their teacher could find, with little assurance that those lessons built on one another, aligned with grade-level expectations, or prepared students for what came next.
Over the past decade, states and districts have worked hard to change that. The HQIM movement has helped establish clearer expectations for curriculum quality, supported independent reviews, and made it easier for schools to adopt coherent, evidence-based materials.
However, just as we’ve made great strides toward getting coherent, high-quality instruction into more classrooms, AI threatens to reintroduce the very fragmentation we’ve spent years trying to eliminate.
We can already see how this might play out. Teacher A uses an AI tool connected to the district’s curriculum to reinforce the concepts and strategies students are learning. Teacher B uses a standalone chatbot to generate lessons and activities that introduce different instructional approaches or content students aren’t yet ready for.
You could end up with two teachers working right next door to each other delivering very different instruction, even though they’re technically using the same curriculum. Just like that, years of hard work and significant investments in high-quality materials and coherent instruction could go out the window.
I believe technology has an important place in classrooms. I also believe the same high standards we’ve established for curriculum should apply to digital tools.
It’s time to bring some coherence to edtech
The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch; we’ve already learned a great deal about what it takes to bring quality and coherence to classroom instruction. Now we need to apply those lessons to this new era of digital tools.
Schools need to take a holistic look at the technology in their classrooms. School leaders should take stock of the tools they’re already using and ask whether they’re improving instruction, both individually and together. Are they reinforcing the core curriculum? Are they serving distinct instructional purposes, or are teachers juggling multiple platforms that do essentially the same thing? Just as importantly, are those tools being used as intended?
Districts need to establish a clear vision for quality and hold their technology investments accountable to it. District leaders should set high expectations for student outcomes, including what students learn, the pace and sequence of instruction, and how digital tools complement the core curriculum. Those expectations should guide which tools districts invest in and how they measure their impact on student learning. Procurement models like outcomes-based contracting can reinforce accountability by tying a portion of provider payment to measurable student learning goals.
States should use their policy levers to curate a higher-quality, more coherent marketplace. We’ve seen through the HQIM movement how states can influence what gets adopted in classrooms. They can do the same for edtech, using evidence standards, independent reviews, procurement guidance, and funding policies to help districts identify and adopt higher-quality tools. States don’t need to dictate which tools every district uses, but they can make it easier for districts to choose wisely.
Education companies need to build products that are grounded in learning science, coherent with high-quality instructional materials, and capable of delivering student progress. Providers should be clear about what their products are designed to do, how they support core instruction, and the conditions necessary for them to improve student learning. And we should expect—demand even—to be held accountable for results when the tools are used as designed.
The current backlash against classroom technology should be a wake-up call for our industry to do better on all these fronts. I can only speak for HMH, but we’re taking these concerns seriously. We’re working to be more transparent about our products, more intentional about when and how students use screens, and more accountable for ensuring that the time students spend with our technology serves a clear instructional purpose. We won’t always get everything right, but we’re committed to listening, learning, and improving.
Figuring out tech in schools is a team sport.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the push for high-quality instructional materials, it’s that meaningful improvements in classrooms don’t happen in isolation.
Whether you’re developing educational products, leading a school district, or setting state policy, we each have a role to play in making sure technology strengthens instruction instead of fragmenting it.
We’ve spent a decade moving away from disconnected lessons and piecemeal instruction; we shouldn’t let the next generation of technology take us right back where we started.
