I pulled two paragraphs from Daniel Buck’s recent historical analysis of the digitizing of U.S. public schools that I believe need highlighting in Americans’ continuing love affair with technology in general, and specifically, the widespread use of laptops, tablets, and cell phones in the nation’s classrooms (see here).

Buck believes that U.S. educators should be leery, even skeptical, of using computer devices in lessons, and that teachers and school districts should demand evidence from vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google that their devices and software are “improving academic outcomes.”

Here’s one paragraph from his analysis:

Most importantly, school boards and state policymakers need to hold tech vendors to a far higher standard. If signing another software contract or purchasing another gadget for every student, the school should (my emphasis) consider the return on investment. Vendors should provide, and schools should demand, clear evidence of the efficacy of their products from outside analysts. Even if the products are effective elsewhere, policymakers should consider whether the investment will prove fruitful for their specific school or district. If the vendors’ products are not improving academic outcomes, the solution is simple: Terminate the contracts.

Note the four “shoulds” in the above paragraph. Yet, the fact of the matter is that the folks who sell computers and software seldom offer proof of effectiveness for the simple reason that they lack “clear evidence of efficacy of their products….”

None. Nada. Zip.

Actually, why would these behemoth corporations offer evidence of their effectiveness, that is, improving student’s academic performance in 2025? These devices have become accepted much like public utilities such as electricity, water, and gas that consumers use daily and pay for monthly. They have become the warp-and-woof of daily life. They have become necessities.

No district administrator, teacher, or parent needs research evidence to justify buying a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone for their schools, classroom, or children just as no research evidence is needed to prove that one must eat to survive. That train has left the station.

For those administrators and teachers who might consider relying less on devices in classrooms, Mr. Buck offers up another meager solution:

Another remedy would be a move away from one-to-one computing. If teachers had to reserve computer labs or Chromebook carts again, it would incentivize a more judicious approach to technology use. Teachers would have to ask: Why do I need computers? How will they actually enhance this learning activity? Or are they more trouble than they’re worth?

Sure, veteran teachers in their 40s and 50s remember computer labs and carts in schools but those labs and carts were then signs of scarcity. No scarcity now. There is abundance of machines; every teacher, every student has access to a device at home or at school.

So, the questions that Buck recommends teachers should ask are, well, trifling. Those questions (and “remedies”) that Buck offers are relics from an earlier age. Even in those earlier decades, Apple, Microsoft, and Google seldom offered evidence of their devices’ effectiveness in “improving academic outcomes.” Their representatives took it for granted even then that these devices would raise test scores.

Today, using laptops and tablets in classroom lessons is as normal as saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the third grade and smelling Lysol in the school’s bathrooms.

Whether they accelerate, confound, or impede student learning, much less academic achievement, is largely unknown, remaining an unanswered question for 2026.*

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*Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, offers school administrators, teachers, and parents advice in managing devices in school. See “Beware the Laptop That Ate the Classroom,” in The New York Times, November 16, 2025.