Why the continued warm feelings towards “educational” tech, even as polls evince a broader turn against Big Tech? I suspect two things are going on. One is the eternal allure of “future-ready” schools. Parents don’t want their kids to be left behind. Since schools are struggling and the world is changing, they hope a classroom full of cool tech means their kids will be up to speed. There’s also a deep-seated impulse to trust that educators know what they’re doing—that the devices and software are being put to sensible use.
But parents may yet awaken to the harm that a device-driven culture of corner-cutting and distraction is visiting upon their kids. If they do, I suspect efforts like the Fordham Institute’s new report, High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction, will have helped.
The report, authored by Fordham’s Brian Fitzpatrick, shares the findings from a national survey of 1,000 high schoolers and another 1,000 recent high school grads. The results are sobering, if unsurprising. Three-quarters of respondents reported using some kind of “illicit” technology daily during school hours—50 percent of respondents said they use social media (like TikTok or Instagram) at least once a day in school, 33 percent said the same about watching YouTube videos, and 17 percent about shopping online.
The distraction problem isn’t just about sneaking and peeking, though. Sixty-two percent of respondents said they spend more than half their class time on school-issued devices. Nearly one-in-three students said they spend more than three-quarters of class time on screens. In short: Most students are spending most of the school day on screens before we ever factor in the time they illicitly spend on their personal devices.
Moreover, for all the suggestions that AI tutoring will bolster instruction, students are clear that they mostly use it to evade the rigors of learning. Forty-eight percent of students reported using AI to solve their math problems for them, 36 percent to summarize books or texts to avoid reading them, and 29 percent to pen the first drafts of their essays or reports. Twenty-six percent reported using AI for help during quizzes and tests. (That’s what us Gen X types used to call “cheating.”)
When asked to respond to statements about the effects of AI on school, 58 percent of students agreed that it’s made homework meaningless and 57 percent that it lets students get good grades without doing any real work. Technology is fostering a classroom culture where students give the impression of learning while the school day becomes a shrinking circle of videos, memes, and chatbot-supplied shortcuts.
