The Wake County school board held a panel Tuesday night on whether students have too much screen time, and it invited the students who’d been showing up to meetings to say so. “Technology is turning school into a daycare,” fourth grader Raj Murthy told the board, according to WUNC’s Liz Schlemmer. Principals pushed back with specifics: state tests are given on computers, textbook publishers have mostly stopped printing, and reading software can enlarge text or read it aloud in Spanish. Superintendent Robert Taylor landed where I suspect most readers of this newsletter do. “I don’t want you to come into an elementary school and we have no technology,” he said. “I don’t want you to come into an elementary school and technology dominates everything.”

The hard part is everything between those two sentences, and that is what SETDA’s fifth State EdTech Trends Report, out today, documents across 45 states. My Whiteboard Advisors colleagues Evo Popoff and David Walker wrote it from 73 survey responses. Sixty-seven percent of state leaders said their state has a lot of edtech but doesn’t always use it effectively. Fifty-two percent collect no data on whether tools are used or whether they work. Sixty-eight percent said it’s hard to independently verify what vendors claim about AI products. SETDA board chair Dorann Avey calls that “a capacity challenge, not a technology challenge,” and the numbers back her up: 76 percent of state edtech offices have five or fewer staff, and 74 percent say they lack a dedicated, sufficient budget.

The research base won’t settle it for them. Hechinger’s Jill Barshay reports on a forensic audit of the 39 published meta-analyses on AI in education, all of which found benefits. The 14 examined so far had serious statistical flaws, and one has been retracted. Beth Tipton of Northwestern called education research a “no-man’s land” where “anybody can sort of say that they have evidence for anything.” The careful studies are rarer and messier. The 74’s Greg Toppo covers a 1,179-student trial released today in which an AI math tutor matched expert human tutors in the moment, and neither moved scores on a standardized test ten weeks later.

Policy is moving regardless. Twenty-three percent of states now require AI guidance by law, up from 4 percent in 2024. Ohio requires every district to adopt an AI policy. North Carolina will by June 2027. Tennessee will require AI training for middle and high school teachers by 2028. In The 74, Bree Dusseault and Dana Harrison report that of 39 states they studied, only 11 percent had moved past guidance into pilots, procurement help, and evaluation. Their example of how to get there is Tennessee’s SCORE, a nonprofit that ran an 18-month working group feeding the state’s AI plan.

What the states that are getting it right have in common is that they start with the lesson, not the device. Richard Culatta of ISTE+ASCD, on the Trending in Education podcast this week, argues the post-COVID wave of devices got ahead of how well teachers were prepared, that “a digital worksheet is still a worksheet,” and that blanket bans carry their own cost for the graduating class that misses out. Lisa Coons, in Fordham’s Wonkathon, compares a classroom to a well-designed playground: fences and inspections are what make it safe to climb. Before students log in, she writes, a teacher should be able to answer three questions: What will students learn? Is this tool approved? How will the device improve the lesson? Her test for every screen is whether it is “in service of learning.”

Stephen Dackin, who runs Ohio’s education department, wrote the report’s preface and asks the same question of everything the state buys. His example has nothing to do with software. Ohio found only about a quarter of K-3 students who failed a vision screening got a follow-up exam, so the state started paying for exams and glasses in 15 high-need counties. Dackin describes an assembly last winter where students put on their new glasses for the first time. One boy looked out the window and said he could see snow.

— Thomas

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