EdTech in Education

EdTech Isn’t the Problem. The Missing Blueprint Is.

There’s a headline making the rounds that’s worth pausing on, not because it’s entirely true, but because of what it gets people arguing about. Fortune recently reported that the U.S. has spent over $30 billion putting laptops and tablets into classrooms and that the result – according to one neuroscientist’s Senate testimony – is the first generation in modern history less cognitively capable than the one before it.

We should take that causal claim with a healthy pinch of salt, I think. It rests on one expert’s interpretation of falling test scores, tangled together with social media use and generative AI – three very different phenomena wearing the same headline. But the $30 billion figure is real, and the discomfort behind the headline is worth sitting with rather than dismissing.

Leisa Grace Wilson picked up this thread recently on LinkedIn and her Substack, and her framing is the right starting point: EdTech companies are partly to blame for moments like this and partly, they’re not. I want to take her argument further, because sixteen years of building a school network taught me that both halves of her claim are true, and both stop one layer short of where the real problem lives.

Where the blame actually sits

Wilson is right that most EdTech products were built by people with little grounding in pedagogy: no classroom experience, no educator on the board, revenue-first thinking dressed up as innovation. But I’d push this further. The deeper issue isn’t that educators were absent from product design. It’s that when they were present, they were usually brought in to consult on interface, not to interrogate the learning theory underneath it. I’ve sat through enough vendor pitches to recognize the pattern immediately: a former teacher on staff to make the product feel credible, not to ask whether the pedagogy holds up under real classroom conditions. Those two things look identical in a sales deck. They are completely different eighteen months into implementation.

And Wilson is equally right that schools don’t get a pass. Having run decisions for a network approaching 1,800 students, I’ll defend this hard: most schools buy technology the way they buy furniture – a line item to check off, not a pedagogical commitment to defend. A polished demo, a persuasive sales cycle, a signature on a multi-year contract, and the one question that actually matters, what specific gap does this close, and how will we know if it doesn’t, never gets asked out loud. That’s not a technology failure. That’s a leadership failure.

The layer both arguments miss

Here’s where I think the conversation needs to go deeper than „ask if the technology helps.” That question assumes schools already have a clear, specific model of what good learning looks like – something to measure the technology against. Most don’t. And without that reference point, „does this help” is not an answerable question.

If a school can’t describe, step by step, what mastery of a specific concept actually looks like without reaching for a vendor’s dashboard to define it for them – no amount of procurement discipline will save the outcome. The technology isn’t the disease, and it isn’t the cure. It’s a mirror that reflects whatever pedagogical clarity, or lack of it, was already in the room before the first device arrived.

Sweden is the experiment already running

If you want to see this play out at national scale, look at Sweden. It was a genuine frontrunner in classroom digitalization for over a decade – and in 2023, it reversed course. Minister for Schools Lotta Edholm rolled back the mandate requiring digital devices in preschools, citing declining reading comprehension. The government backed this with serious money: hundreds of millions of kronor redirected annually toward ensuring every student has a physical textbook per subject, alongside a national push toward mobile-free schools. The Karolinska Institute, one of the most credible research bodies in the world, stated plainly that there is clear scientific evidence digital tools were impairing rather than enhancing learning.

That’s a sharper data point than the Fortune headline – a government reversing policy with public money.

But the nuance matters, and it actually strengthens the argument rather than simplifying it into „tech bad, books good.” Sweden’s own researchers describe this as recalibration, not reversal. The Swedish Ministry of Education has been explicit that digitalization remains fundamentally valuable – the failure was in how it was deployed, not in the tool itself.

Sweden isn’t proof that classroom technology is inherently harmful. It’s proof of exactly the gap I’ve described above: a country can roll out expensive, well-intentioned digital infrastructure for fifteen years without ever rigorously asking whether it was working – and only find out once a generation has already gone through it.

That’s the more useful story. Not „Sweden banned tech and fixed everything,” but „Sweden is the rare government honest enough to admit it skipped the foundational question, and is now spending real money to go back and answer it properly.”

What I’d actually recommend

If you’re a school leader, a parent, or a founder building in this space, here’s where I’d start and I wish someone had handed me the advice before every technology decision I made over sixteen years:

• Write the learning model down before you evaluate any tool. If you can’t describe, in plain language, what mastery of a specific skill looks like at each stage, you are not ready to evaluate a vendor. You’re ready to be sold to.
• Make the vendor fit your pedagogy – not the other way around. The moment a platform starts shaping how your teachers plan lessons or how you define success, you’ve lost the ability to evaluate it honestly. Decide the model first. Let procurement follow it, not lead it.
• Ask for evidence, not testimonials. „Teachers love it” and „engagement is up” are not learning outcomes. Ask what specific gap closed, for which students, compared to what baseline. If a vendor can’t answer that cleanly, that’s the answer.
• Build in a review point before you build in a renewal. Most contracts fail quietly because nobody revisits the original question after the first excitement fades. Put a date on the calendar, before signing, to honestly ask whether the tool did what it promised – and be willing to say no.
• Treat „system over talent” as the real test. This is the question I ask of every tool I bring near my organization: does this make a good outcome dependent on an exceptional teacher pulling it off, or does it make a good outcome reliable regardless of who’s in the room? If it’s the former, it’s not a system. Oh, and – even better – does the teacher, using the tool, has become a better teacher?!  That one is gold.

EdTech isn’t the villain in this story, and it isn’t the hero either.

It’s a tool that amplifies whatever clarity – or confusion – already exists about what learning is supposed to look like.

Sweden spent fifteen years and hundreds of millions of dollars finding that out the hard way. The rest of us still have the chance to ask the question first.