There’s a familiar, frustrating tension between practice and policy. When it comes to grading, devices, equity, choice, student behavior, and much else, there are yawning gaps between the views from inside and outside the schoolhouse. Worse, educators and policy types often wind up talking past one another. I think we can do better. To delve into this disconnect, I reached out to Alex Baron, the director of academic strategy at a District of Columbia charter school, an Oxford Ph.D., and a former early-childhood and high school math teacher. Together, we’ll try to bridge a bit of the practice-policy chasm.

—Rick

Alex: Policymakers across the country have recently won many phone-banning battles. But my money’s still on students to win the tech war. That’s because we can ban phones but still have a digital deluge, just on different devices. How? Well, kids have more clandestine sensibilities than most undercover agents. For example, in class, kids may appear to be assiduously taking computerized notes, but they turn out to be messaging on Google chat or iMessage; the boys who are ostensibly working on the group project have somehow skirted the school’s content blockers to play a video game; and, alas, TikTok works on Apple Watches.

Yet, policymakers cry, “Why are you silly practitioners allowing kids on computers in class?” Rick, I think part of the answer connects to your electrifying (dad joke intended) National Review article. The subtitle of that piece, “the problem with teaching to the tech,” plays off the familiar idea of “teaching to the test.” I want to suggest here that teaching to the tech and teaching to the test have become intertwined.

As a practitioner, if there’s one immutable truth in education, it’s the distortionary gravity of standardized tests. Since the shift to computerized testing in the 2010s, the cascading implications for tech-based classroom instruction have been enormous.

Rick: You’ve captured something important: how the culture around devices can overwhelm school norms or classroom routines. I’m reminded of that hoary bit of consultant-speak about how culture eats strategy for breakfast.

In theory, there’s good reason to get excited about the possibilities of technology in schooling. Heck, I wrote a whole book about them. That promise is why funders, vendors, and policy types get so amped about stuff like one-to-one computing, smartboards, or having a “tutor in your pocket.” But these things rarely work in classrooms the way they do in theory. Distractions, glitches, and tech hassles rear their ugly head, even if there’s a coherent curriculum and competent support for educators.

This has been an issue for every technology, going back a century or more, but the challenges are upped with today’s personal, interactive devices. I mean, there was only so much distraction a typewriter or classroom television could create. These were controlled by the teacher and offered meager entertainment value. Today, though, students are swimming in personal devices that are connected, social, interactive, and designed to grab our attention.

So, I find it wholly reasonable to argue that all our well-meaning enthusiasm for devices, tech-infused schooling, and “blended learning” has wound up making it tougher to keep students academically engaged. But that seems to be true without apparent regard to assessment. That said, I’m open to being persuaded otherwise.

Alex: OK, let me try to persuade you. For example, consider reading tests. I took the SAT 20 years ago on paper; Rick, you likely took it before the Common Era on a cuneiform tablet. Today’s computerized testing, plus heightened teacher accountability, impacts instruction in two ways.

First, as recently reported in the Atlantic, many students arrive in college having “never been required to read an entire book.” While the shift away from full books isn’t singularly—or even predominantly—caused by online assessment, computerized testing supercharges this trend: Educators are incentivized to assign shorter readings on computers instead of full paper books, since the test is on a screen. Thus, in class, kids read more on computers, where games, messaging apps, and other websites are just a click away. Distraction reigns supreme, which means that kids miss the immersive experience of reading; in other words, they no longer know what it’s like to get lost in a book. Instead, reading’s delightful dissociative function is often replaced by an icky, tech-mediated dissociation, as kids easily slip into the online abyss.

Second, because tests are administered online, educators spend real instructional time teaching kids to use wonky testing tools. For example, in class, we teach kids to underline and write annotations in the page margins; but to prep for tests, teachers have to show kids how to use rickety digital highlighters and notes. And now assessments across subjects have “tech-enhanced” question types, such as drag-and-drop, equation builders, “hot text,” etc. (Curious readers can try a digital test here.) Anecdotally, kids seem to perform worse on such items. This makes assessment data harder to parse—it’s easy to make a technological error that manifests as a content error. As a result, it can be hard to know whether kids got tripped up by the technology or the actual content.

In sum, preparing for tests pushes educators to teach to the tech more than we may otherwise. What do you make of that, Rick?

Rick: You make terrific points. I buy the argument that there are real, underappreciated costs to how technology has changed English/language arts instruction and the culture of reading. But I’m still not sold on the notion that testing necessarily plays a significant role here.

Take your first example. There’s a huge issue with emphasizing shorter reading assignments and selected passages rather than books. You’re obviously right that digital culture steers us away from long-form reading toward shorter stuff—due to screen size, the need to compete with video, and the ubiquitous distraction of the click (as well as the bizarre and destructive push by the National Council of Teachers of English to “decenter” book reading).

Your second point is also compelling. Dog-earing a favorite page, jotting notes in the margins, sitting with a book in your lap, or spotting a colorful jacket on the shelf creates a wholly different relationship with reading than does reading on a tablet (much less a phone) while wrestling with all those tech-enhanced tools.

That’s why I think we ought to attach far more import to having students engage with a raft of printed books and novels, especially for students who are still in the early stages of their relationship to reading. It’s why I do the lion’s share of my long-form reading with a printed book in hand and why my kids have been raised to do the same.

I’m with you on all of this. And I certainly see how assessment can aggravate or accentuate some of the issues. But I’m not convinced that kids’ relationship with technology in schools would look all that different if testing were to go away tomorrow. Indeed, I tend to suspect that schools that have spent a lot of money on tech, brag about their tech savviness, and want to be seen as cutting-edge would still have kids reading digitally—and leave us in pretty much the same place.

That’s where I think I wind up. But I’ll give you the last word here, my friend.

Alex: I’m with you, pal. Technology’s impact on learning is about way more than assessment—I just so enjoyed your “teaching to the tech” subtitle that I wanted to capture how computerized testing does influence teachers to use tech even more than they might otherwise. But I don’t mean to overstate the case or provide a simple cause for a complex issue, as we have here with tech.

In closing, I’ll return to our first post’s key idea: Our view on education topics is filtered through our lens about schools’ purpose. If we think schools’ purpose is to prepare kids for the future economy, then we’ll want students on laptops using ChatGPT, Zoom, and Google suite. If we want schools to produce lifelong bibliophiles who read paperbacks on planes, then we’ll favor tech-lite classrooms.

For what it’s worth, I err on the side of low-tech Luddism for schools, which have seen declines in student learning and mental health alongside rising tech use. A recent report by Tim Daly showed that national test scores started dropping abruptly in 2013 after 25 years of growth with no clear cause. At the risk of oversimplifying the case again, Instagram came out in 2010, Snapchat came out in 2011, and Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012. With that in mind, the test-score tumble starting in 2013 seems less abrupt.

I don’t mean to equate social media with ed-tech apps; however, as an educator, it feels like a moral imperative to unburden kids’ tech-addled minds during school and, instead, demonstrate the benefits of a truly focused mind. Despite the existence of some ed-tech apps I appreciate, overall, I’d say the juice typically isn’t worth the squeeze.