Should Laptops Really Go the Way of Cellphones?

Last fall, the social scientist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation and a central figure in the recent push to ban cellphones in schools, turned his attention to a new target in K-12 classrooms: laptops. 

“Get laptops and tablets out of classrooms now,” he wrote sweepingly on X, linking to an op-ed by psychologist Jean Twenge—another longtime critic of cell phones—in which she argued that the 1:1 device programs once hailed as a breakthrough have proven to be “a failure.” Twenge called for parents to be allowed to opt out of device use, and for some districts to “eliminate school electronic devices entirely.” A host of other public intellectuals, like UPenn organizational psychologist Adam Grant, have issued similar calls.

Many of the most vocal critics of laptops cite the work of Jared Horvath, a neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne, whose influential 2025 book The Digital Delusion argues that the rapid expansion of classroom technology—everything from 1:1 laptops, tablets, and adaptive learning programs—has done more harm than good. “Everyone went heavy tech, like a bandaid during the pandemic,” Horvath told Edutopia in a recent interview. “But COVID stopped and no one ripped the bandaid off.” Schools, in his view, have defaulted to screens without enough thought, and are long overdue to return to a more “limited and purposeful” use of devices. 

The discourse is already shaping public policy. The Los Angeles Unified School District recently moved to limit screen exposure in early grades, keeping students off all devices until second grade, limiting device use to one hour a day for students in third through fifth grade, restricting access to YouTube, and encouraging more “paper and pen” assignments and physical texts. At least a dozen states have either proposed or adopted similar limits on screen time, according to a recent Washington Post report. 

But as the tech backlash spreads from phones to laptops, many teachers say a fundamental insight is being lost: not all devices—and not all uses of those devices—are the same. After a broad consensus formed against cellphones, high school English teacher Marcus Luther says it seems many educators and thought leaders have “sort of said, okay, let’s just keep going and go for the computer screens, too.”

That blurring, teachers worry, is already shaping how policy is being discussed—and how fast it’s moving. Calls to rein in laptop use in early grades, or restrict specific platforms have expanded into broader arguments to eliminate laptops in K-12 classrooms altogether. But those arguments, teachers told Edutopia, often fail to distinguish between passive, unmonitored screen time and activities like engaging in an hour of guided web research, using digital tools to support reading fluency or to graph complex mathematical functions, or collecting peer feedback on a creative writing assignment.

Luther, who describes his own approach to laptop use in class as minimalist and intentional, said he feels like classroom teachers are increasingly caught between two poles—one pushing for the full embrace of new technologies like AI, and the other for sweeping bans that would return classrooms to the days of hand-written essays, paper-based research, and a version of school that no longer reflects how students work—or will work—outside of it. 

Even teachers who support scaling back classroom technology are worried that the growing backlash is becoming too expansive—and increasingly driven by voices who don’t teach in K-12 classrooms. Dylan Kane, a middle school math teacher who recently wrote a thoughtful article about his month-long experiment without Chromebooks, said broad mandates to eliminate or sharply restrict laptops trouble him. “I believe teachers do their best work when they’re trusted as professionals,” Kane said. “I get very nervous about mandates and things that can feel very blunt and erode teacher judgement.” 

The Case Against Laptops 

The thrust of Horvath's argument against screens—including laptops—begins with a recognition he says many teachers already share: things have tipped too far. “There is this broad sense of, yes, there is too much tech,” he said.

Indeed, in a 2025 New York Times survey of nearly 400 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers, 80 percent said students have a device assigned to them in school—up from about a third before the pandemic—and 70 percent said those devices distract students from schoolwork “a little” or “a lot.”

The question, Horvath said, is what to do: "Do you go cold turkey and get it out of schools, or do you moderate its use?" To argue that severely curbing device use—or eliminating it entirely—is the better path, he points to a bevy of national and international data over the past two decades, data that, critics of Horvath say, often aggregates different devices and uses under a single category.

Like Haidt, Horvath leans on patterns in data provided by PISA, the international assessment of 15-year-olds administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 mostly high-income democracies. 

The 2022 results, for example, show a decline in academic performance at the heaviest end of device use: Students who spent five to seven hours a day on devices for learning scored 10 points lower on their assessment than those who spent three to five hours, data that tends to support a “more is less” conclusion. Roughly 30 percent of PISA students also reported that they were distracted by their own digital devices during math lessons, while roughly a quarter said the same about misuse of technology by their peers. 

Horvath says these findings line up with a broader—and controversial—evidentiary case he makes in his book.

Synthesizing nearly 400 meta-analyses which cover, in turn, more than 20,000 individual studies, he calculates that classroom technology produces an average effect size that is positive but below the threshold researchers typically consider meaningful. He pairs that with what he sees as a more striking pattern in state-level data: aligning NAEP scores with what he identifies as each state’s “digital inflection point,” he argues that achievement tends to plateau and then decline soon after widespread device adoption. 

“If you adopted tech in 2009, your scores started going down in 2009,” he said. “If you adopted tech in 2017, your scores go down in 2017.” 

Despite the attention his work has drawn—he made his case to the U.S. Senate earlier this year—Horvath, unlike Haidt and Twenge, isn’t arguing for laptops to disappear entirely. What he wants, he says, is “friction”: a return to an older model of shared laptop carts, for example, or dedicated computer labs in which devices are checked out for a purpose rather than open on every desk. 

Taking Aim At The Evidence

Not everyone reads the data the way Horvath does. 

Adam Sparks, a former middle- and high-school teacher who now runs Short Answer, an ed-tech company that helps schools embed more writing across the curriculum, took aim at  Horvath’s arguments in a widely read newsletter. He noted that the real picture of the effect of laptop and ed tech use in classrooms grows more complicated on closer inspection of the data—and that tidy narratives about tech’s effect on learning tend to overlook other possible culprits like teacher shortages, rising economic inequality, chronic absenteeism, and pandemic learning loss. 

Take the 2022 OECD report, for example. What Horvath presents as evidence against classroom devices, Sparks points out, is built on a category—"devices”—that lumps laptops and cellphones together. While it is true that a large share of students are distracted by their own device use or that of their peers, Sparks notes the report doesn’t distinguish between whether “devices” refers to purposeful, academic laptop use or a student scrolling Instagram under the table. 

Where the report does draw clear distinctions is between devices used for learning and those used for leisure. There, Sparks says, the picture is harder to flatten into a neat conclusion. While academic performance does decline at the highest levels of screen exposure when used for “leisure,”—consistent with Horvath’s claims—at more moderate and purposeful levels of use, the report notes, the pattern reverses sharply. In fact, PISA students who use devices for up to an hour a day for “learning activities” scored 25 points higher in math than students who don’t use them at all. 

To Sparks, the same flattening of key distinctions between devices and use cases is also a problem in the meta-analysis at the heart of Horvath's book. In addition to being highly correlative, Sparks said it collapses fundamentally different interventions—1:1 laptops, adaptive software, specialized learning tools, and games—under a single heading: ed tech. 

“We're referring to ed tech as if it is this one big umbrella term,” he said. “But it's not. It's thousands of digital applications and curricula and different devices.” 

Kane, the middle school math teacher in Colorado, notes that even though Horvath’s book inspired him to ditch laptops in class for a month, he isn’t entirely convinced by all of the data presented by critics like Haidt or Horvath, nor does he think they support some of their more sweeping conclusions. Even before encountering Horvath’s book, Kane said he’d already begun scaling back on tech tools he'd relied on—daily DeltaMath practice, weekly Desmos activities, and nearly all quizzes and tests administered online—because he was frustrated by the “logistical headaches” of keeping students on task once laptops came out. 

The results of his experiment impressed him. Students were more engaged in discussion, more willing to wrestle with problems on paper, and more open to revisiting mistakes, he said. But there were tradeoffs. Planning and grading took longer, and tools like DeltaMath—which efficiently mix old and new skills for practice—proved hard to replace. Kane also missed how quickly laptops allowed him to analyze results across a class. “It’s just so fast and easy to see, ‘Hey, a lot of students got this wrong. I need to reteach that,” he said. 

Months after the experiment, Kane now describes himself as “paper-first,” but not anti-technology. He’s aware of what he’s lost by reducing his laptop use: the ease of assigning and tracking homework online, and the immediacy of feedback, for example. He also hasn’t sworn laptops off for good; he expects to use them in more targeted ways, for occasional activities that work better with digital tools, and ahead of state testing, which occurs on computers. “Students like variety,” he said. “I’m not someone who is saying no technology ever again.”

What Laptops Make Possible

For all the messy public debate about classroom technology playing out on media spaces like X, in the pages of the New York Times, and, increasingly, in state houses across the country, voices like Kane’s—real classroom teachers grounded in the day-to-day realities of schools—have largely been absent from the discourse.

Talk to teachers, and a more nuanced picture comes into focus. Most, like Luther and Kane, aren't defending the status quo, and many share Horvath's concerns about overuse of screens. But they also describe a set of everyday practices—real-time feedback, recorded lessons for absent students, digital research tools, quick formative checks, and faster grading cycles—that they say meaningfully augment what they can do in a classroom. The shift they say they find themselves making lately is not away from the technology as a whole, but toward a more deliberate use of it. 

Luther, for example, frames his approach as a question of discernment. Before deciding whether to use laptops, he asks himself: What does good learning look like? "Once you have a really clear vision of that, then you can ask: does tech play a part in this today?" he said. 

In his own classroom, the answer is often no. Frequently he begins lessons with analog tools—students writing in notebooks, sharing their writing, and discussing ideas—before introducing a device. When laptops do come out, it’s usually to do something that would be difficult to replicate at the speed and efficiency of new technologies. 

Shared Google documents, for example, let him respond to student writing in real time, creating an ongoing dialogue as they draft. “I can be a part of their journey and their writing process in a way that would otherwise be impossible—especially in a classroom of 30 or 35 students.” Shared documents also become valuable tools. In a unit on King Lear, Luther’s students generated questions in their notebooks about the play, then collected them into a shared digital document that became a running resource for their upcoming essays. “That took ten minutes, and now it is an ongoing resource for students,” he said.  

For Sparks, the flexibility that laptops enabled in his classrooms was not a luxury but a necessity. Teaching in a school where students frequently missed class, he relied on recorded lessons and self-paced structures to help them keep up. “Using tech like that was really the only way for me to differentiate instruction,” he said—both for absent students and for those working at very different reading levels. “The kid that needs to move a little slower can slow down, and the kid who's flying through can move faster.”

In Samantha DiCicco’s fifth grade classroom, meanwhile, a simple audio tool improves reading fluency. DiCicco’s students use laptops to record themselves reading a passage aloud, then listen and reflect on their fluency before receiving targeted feedback. The routine gives students a way to see and hear their own progress over time—and DiCicco says it solves a crucial differentiation problem, allowing her to “gauge how individual students are doing with their fluency progress.” 

Like many of the teachers I spoke to, Luther is uneasy about the idea of kids spending most of their school day in front of screens—“three to five hours a day is not something anyone feels good about”—but he resists the notion that this reflects most classrooms. He said laptops in his own classroom are used in short 10-to 15-minute bursts and often not at all.

Other teachers described similarly limited use. High school English teacher Brett Vogelsinger, for example, estimates laptops are used in his classroom about 30 percent of the time. "That number goes way up when we are in the middle of a research project," he said. "But that’s not most days."

Who Pays the Price?

If the argument against laptops lands anywhere with teachers, it is on the question of attention. Laptops, even in well-managed classrooms, introduce a level of distraction that is difficult to ignore, they say. 

Luther's school has invested heavily in keeping students on task, using monitoring software like GoGuardian, which allows him to see every student's screen in real time. “If I see a kid flip over to a game or social media, it's easy to close that out and go talk to them,” he said. Still, he notes, the mere presence of a laptop can pull at a student's attention. “It's hard to be present. And that's not just a kid thing—adults struggle with this too.”

As the debate over classroom technology intensifies, Sparks worries that policy responses such as proposals to cap or limit device use across classrooms, regardless of need or context, are moving faster than the realities they are meant to address. “Nobody knows that teacher's context better than that teacher,” he said. “What are we doing stepping in as outsiders and telling them what they can and can't do?”

Luther, meanwhile, is concerned that the conversation about what to do is often shaped by the extremes. “People like to point to the worst-case scenario on either side,” he said. “And none of it benefits that messy middle ground that most teachers are living in.” What he wishes would get more attention is not the technology itself, but how it is used, and whether teachers are equipped to use it well. In classrooms where devices have become a substitute for instruction or community, removing them is unlikely to produce a sudden transformation,” he said. “I don't think it magically turns schools into a utopia.” 

When you zoom out beyond these classrooms, the stakes of the debate only increase. Many of the tools in the center of this backlash—word processors, shared documents, digital databases—are era-defining inventions that have completely reshaped the way people access, create, and revise knowledge. Prohibiting them in schools would not only change classroom planning and management, but deprive kids of devices they’ll soon need in college and careers, where word processing, design, coding, and collaboration software are both ubiquitous and essential to productivity. 

For many teachers these questions are not theoretical; they would completely restructure the way learning works in their classroom, and many are not convinced it would be for the better. “I think we’re sometimes imagining this nostalgic classroom where students were always engaged before computers were around,” Vogelsinger said. “But I don't think that past actually exists.”

Other educators detect a heavy dose of irony in the new mandates. Andrew Marcinek, a longtime K-12 technology administrator and former English teacher who writes frequently about tech integration in schools, notes that many districts originally required the use of technology in classrooms, and provided little training or support for teachers. The current backlash—and the prospect of stripping teachers of both tools and autonomy—risks repeating that pattern, he argues.

"The response unfolding right now is making the same mistake—just in reverse," Marcinek recently wrote.

A more realistic path, educators say, lies somewhere in the middle ground: clearer limits on when and how tech is used—particularly for young students—but flexibility to adapt those decisions to the needs of particular classrooms. Whatever direction schools choose, the implications, they warn, will not be abstract.

Students will carry them into a world where digital tools are everywhere, and in the meantime teachers—not the public intellectuals driving much of the debate—will live with the day-to-day consequences of those decisions in their classrooms.