Technology flooded schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many public school districts—particularly in states with stricter social distancing rules—there seemed to be no other realistic, affordable, and legal option to get kids back to class. But once we opened that floodgate, our children were swept away.
I live in deep-red West Texas, where pandemic strictures were relatively few and brief; we were among the first to get our kids back to in-person school, a decision that put us on the cutting edge of putting children first during those hard years. Yet we have not escaped the misadventures in education technology that have become common across America in the pandemic’s aftermath.
In 2023, our school district, like others across the country, made the move to become a one-to-one technology district, giving a device to each of its 28,000 students.
I don’t recall anyone pausing to ask if this was a good idea. I know I didn’t. It just was: the future, inevitable, expected. Like the grown-ups who installed a computer lab in my childhood school, we wanted to prepare our children for the future.
Looking back, the move was worth discussing from a finance perspective alone. I asked the district what this initial investment cost, but I received no response by the time of our publication deadline. However, the district website lists the replacement cost for a Google Chromebook at $312—almost $8.8 million if we were buying 28,000 of them in one go (without a bulk discount) today.
That’s a lot of money—yet $312 doesn’t buy a particularly reliable machine. The Chromebooks my kids and their friends must use are banged-up and almost universally glitchy and slow, a constant source of low-grade tech frustration. The F key keeps popping off. The program never syncs. The whole thing crashes mid-upload. You know this kind of frustration, the sort that can make even adults with fully formed brains want to smash something.
It’s not all the machine’s fault: The kids aren’t easy on them either, knocking them off desks and dropping them out of backpacks. My niece in New Mexico said her planned school service project at the end of the year is to gather up all the broken bits and pieces of technology she finds around campus to collect for recycling.
Of course, we don’t buy a complete new set of laptops every year. But even staying the course costs money. Devices must be replaced, subscriptions renewed. Staying ahead of the technological curve means a constant flow of tax dollars to tech companies. Educational technology, or edtech, is a $163 billion industry (though some estimates place it much higher) that has enjoyed rapid growth over the last five years, mostly with dubious results.
Our district has 71 different approved devices, apps, and platforms available for campus use. Nearly half the subscriptions are paid at the district level, and the rest are covered by individual schools. It’s hard to nail down total costs, as the platforms’ websites rarely publish prices, instead requiring districts to request a quote. (Our district doesn’t release itemized expenditures, nor did it respond to my question about costs for all things technology-related in time for publication. The topline budget information that is made public, however, suggests an annual edtech budget in the seven or eight figures, likely spread across a number of budget categories.)
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In my observation, even textbooks are increasingly going digital. Sure, online “books” can’t be lost or destroyed the way paper ones can, and they can be accessed from anywhere. But they’re often maddening to use.
A few weeks ago, for example, my eldest managed to check out one of the last remaining hard copies of the AP Human Geography textbook that her teacher had available. It’s been a saving grace on the days when the online textbook wouldn’t load for some reason or another—but assignments are still due. “Why can’t they just buy us regular textbooks?” she’s asked me more than once this year.
And it’s not just public schools like ours that have gone all-in on technology. Unless a private school has a stated goal to be low-tech—and, naturally, the sort of exclusive private schools many Silicon Valley executives choose for their own children have exactly that—it will likely follow the one-to-one device pattern of its public peers. There may be a few more time and age constraints and fancier, more functional devices, but the overall effect is similar.
Even many homeschool curricula have moved online. I once walked into a room to find a young friend homeschooling with his phone propped up beside the computer. While the muted history video droned on and the schooling platform tracked his “engagement” time for a parent to check later, he watched YouTube on his phone. He’d figured out a way to game the assessment at the end of the lecture to achieve a passing grade, but I suspect he never did learn much history.
This is another problem with tech-based education: Cheating and short-cuts are rampant. Of course, it’s tempting to judge the adults involved: Where are the parents and teachers? Why aren’t they watching him closely? Why haven’t they taught her about integrity and honesty? It’s not the tech; it’s how you use it.
Sure, but judgments like those are oblivious to or in denial about reality. All of us struggle to manage our screen time and choose the more arduous path, including adults with greater capacity for self-regulation and deferred gratification than 7-year-olds.
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Moreover, even attentive adults aren’t omniscient, and many students understand these devices better than their parents and teachers. They know every workaround—like sharing documents in Google Classroom on the school network to maintain their school-day group chats after cellphones were banned on campus.
Seriously, ask any parent: With teens and technology, we’re always playing catch-up. In one school classroom with 25 kids, 25 devices (or 50 devices, if you’re in a district where phones aren’t yet banned), and one adult, monitoring is impossible. Students will find loopholes to avoid learning programs that they are not wrong to find dull.
But never to fear: There’s an app for that! And tax dollars to pay for it, naturally. Trying to stay one step ahead of the kids, districts like ours pay for programs like GoGuardian, the leading internet safety monitoring software that’s used by half the schools in America at an estimated cost of $4 to 6 dollars per device per year.
Although Midland’s school district didn’t respond to a request for comment on exactly what this costs, based on known estimates, it probably works out to around $140,000 to license just this one of the 71 approved programs, for one year, for all student devices in Midland.
Among other more controversial features, GoGuardian blocks “entertainment” sites, which sounds prudent. Of course, it’s not so straightforward in practice. According to some older students I know, coolmathgames.com easily sneaks past the program though it’s more arcade than algebra.
Meanwhile, these students tell me, GoGuardian blocks TED Talks they’ve been assigned to watch for English class (flagged: possible entertainment) and articles their health teacher assigned them to read (flagged: sensitive content). As one student told me, and demonstrated with a screen recording, “They can’t seem to block slime videos, but they block videos about trade relations with China.”
Because teachers’ devices often have different GoGuardian settings, they’re unlikely to realize they’ve assigned blocked resources until students begin to complain, and the process to override blocks is convoluted and annoying. In many cases, the students say, the teacher just gives up and rescinds the assignment—or the students give up and resort to Google, which isn’t blocked and now offers up an AI-generated answer to the assignment’s questions at the top of the search results.
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One student told me, and demonstrated with a video, that the dual-credit nursing program she’s doing through our local community college requires the use of Office 365, the online version of programs like Outlook and Microsoft Word. But her district-issued Chromebook, which she’s also required to use, limits the functions of Office 365 through safety programs like GoGuardian.
“I have plenty of crash-outs in class!” she said. It’s vicious cycle of tech frustrations, death by a thousand error messages.
Although much of edtech is sold as teacher-oriented solutions to save time and increase efficiency, it doesn’t play out that way for many teachers. Chronic tech problems can become the dull background noise of education, functionally adding the role of IT helpdesk to a teacher’s already crowded plate of job responsibilities. Sensing teacher frustrations, some students stay silent.
With less than three weeks before the semester’s end, the nursing student finally talked to her teacher about her ongoing frustrations. The teacher was able to override the setting, resolving the conflict on her device. But the default setting remains, which means that other students in the class who haven’t sought help likely still have the same problem.
“In the end,” said another student, a sophomore doing honors-level work, “the entertainment restrictions are pretty much just hurting those of us who are serious students because we can’t get to research. They don’t affect the students spending their days on games or watching movies because there are so many ways around it.”
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
