The polls are now open: Vote for this year’s wisest wonk!
All 20 entries are now posted and linked below, and the polls are open via our online survey. Cast your vote before 1:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, November 18. We’ll then tally everything up and announce our first-, second-, and third-place winners in the November 19 Education Gadfly Weekly.
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For decades, school technology generally moved in one direction: more devices, more software, more assignments online, and more of the school day spent on screens. Then came the pandemic, and all of this accelerated.
But now the backlash has arrived. It started with cellphones, as states and districts moved to keep students off personal devices at school. But the conversation has quickly expanded to the technology that schools themselves provide, encourage, and sometimes require: Chromebooks, tablets, instructional apps, streamed videos, online curricula, and most recently, AI tools.
Should there be a limit on school-based devices? Los Angeles Unified School District is pushing hard in that direction. Its new screen-time guidelines tightly limit younger students’ time spent on one-to-one devices; restrict student access to services like social media, streaming services, and gaming platforms; and call for more paper-and-pencil, hands-on, and other off-screen work.
Much of this has obvious public appeal. Cellphone bans are quite popular, and few parents or teachers want kindergartners spending hours on Chromebooks, students drifting into YouTube rabbit holes, or schools misusing AI.
But translating these preferences into policy presents myriad challenges. And there can be downsides. Fordham’s recent High Tech, Low Standards report documented just how pervasive tech-enabled distraction has become in high schools. But not all technology use is created equal.
A blunt limit on screen time may treat a student mindlessly watching videos the same as one writing an essay, conducting research, or receiving targeted instruction. A ban on YouTube may eliminate plenty of distraction while also blocking useful educational content that can’t be found elsewhere. One-to-one devices are often overused, but replacing them with computer labs and shared laptop carts has its own logistical problems. And there are many special cases, such as students with disabilities, who need and should have access to extra technology.
There is also the question of who should decide these limits. States? Districts? Principals? Individual teachers? Push authority too far upward, and out-of-touch policymakers may hamstring good teachers and impede sound instruction. Leave everything to individual educators, and little may change, certainly not in an equitable way.
These are the challenges for this year’s Wonkathon, which asks participants to respond to this prompt: What rules should govern the uses of digital technology in schools—and who should set them?
We are looking for concrete answers. Among the questions contributors might consider:
- How much student screen time is appropriate for different ages or subject areas, and should schools reconsider one-to-one computing, especially in the elementary grades?
- Which uses of technology should schools limit or prohibit, if any? Should rules distinguish between active and passive uses (“sit and get” vs. “engage and produce,” for example, and watching a video vs. creating a presentation), or between purpose-built instructional tools and platforms such as YouTube and social media?
- When should schools favor printed materials, handwriting, face-to-face discussion, hands-on work, and other non-digital approaches? How can they encourage analog instruction?
- How much discretion should teachers and school leaders retain, and what exceptions should exist for technology-focused courses, students with disabilities, English learners, and other instructional contexts requiring technology? What role should families have in setting or enforcing school technology rules?
- What evidence should districts use to decide whether a digital tool is worth the instructional time and cost it consumes?
- How should districts or schools curate or streamline their tech purchases? How can they avoid simply buying the shiny new thing? What are best practices?
- What is the role of states, districts, or schools in supporting educators with effective tech use?
- Under what circumstances should schools send devices home with students, if at all?
- Which decisions belong at the state, district, school, and classroom levels—and how should any limits be monitored and enforced?
We are not asking whether technology is good or bad. Nor are we looking to dive too deeply into the broader debate over whether and how schools should embrace AI. The much harder question about technology, especially as it continues to change and advance, is what thoughtful classroom use looks like in practice: How schools can curb distraction and disengagement without discarding today’s and tomorrow’s digital tools that can actually make teaching and learning better.
What’s a Wonkathon?
For 12 years now, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have hosted an annual Wonkathon on our Flypaper blog to generate substantive conversation around key issues in education reform. Last year’s forum focused on how to make science of reading laws succeed.
As in years past, we’ll encourage our audience to vote for the “wisest wonk,” an honor previously conferred on such luminaries as Edmund W. Gordon and Eric Tucker, Kelly James, Brad Bernatek, Alex Spurrier, Amy Chen Kulesa, Keri Ingraham, Angela Jerabek, Abby Javurek, Jessica Shopoff, Chase Eskelsen, McKenzie Snow, Claire Voorhees, Adam Peshek, Patricia Levesque, Christy Wolfe, Seth Rau, and Joe Siedlecki.
This year’s submissions (in alphabetical order by the surname of the first author)
- State chiefs, you can’t sit this one out, by Jessica Baghian and Kunjan Narechania
- Assuming a frictionless surface: We need a revolution in how we approach “evidence” for ed tech, by Thomas Briggs
- Every digital tool in schools should have to earn its place, by Jean-Claude Brizard
- Every school already has a technology policy. Student learning should guide it, by Bailey Cato Czupryk
- Parent dialogue and radical transparency: A school-by-school, responsive approach to digital technology use, by Bridget K. Cherry
- In service of learning: Expanding opportunity safely and with intentionality, by Lisa Coons
- Free readers, free people: What schools should protect, by Ila Deshmukh Towery
- We raised the bar for curriculum. Let’s not let technology undo that progress, by Lindsay Dworkin
- Evaluate the product team, not just the product, by Emily Freitag
- Tending the ed tech ecosystem, by Pamela J. Hobart
- We solved for access. Now communities must define the boundaries, by Cliff Jones and Lee James
- Is the technology in your classroom advancing or diminishing student capabilities?, by Caitlin Lucas
- The right contract makes ed tech prove itself, by Brittany Miller
- Three pillars for digital technology in schools, and everything else left to communities, by Alice Mueller
- Subsidiarity as a guiding ed-tech principle, by Josiah Padley
- Apply premises liability principles to ed tech, by Jordan Posamentier
- Let’s actually educate today’s learners, not deskill them, by Patrick Riccards
- The education technology debate is missing students with disabilities, by Saashya Rodrigo and Nicole Fuller
- Rule for tech in education, by Selim Tlili
- Artificial intelligence should help us become more human, by Rochelle Van Dijk
