James Welsch teaches American politics at a high school in Maine. His classroom runs almost entirely on screens — students write blog posts, trade articles, pull up videos mid-discussion. A few years ago, he noticed something wrong with the writing. Essays submitted digitally had grown choppy. Whole passages looked copied. The fluency he expected wasn’t there. So he changed the routine. In some courses, Welsch now requires students to write first drafts by hand.

He is not alone in noticing. He is just one of the first to admit it out loud.

American schools spent roughly $30 billion on education technology in 2024 — ten times what they spent on textbooks the same year. The goal was to modernize instruction, close equity gaps, and prepare students for a digital future. What happened instead is now making its way through Congressional testimony, international research, and the quiet policy reversals of school districts from Kansas to North Carolina that would rather not talk about how much they spent on devices that are sitting in carts at the back of classrooms.

In January 2025, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath sat before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and said what the ed-tech industry had spent years hoping no one would say under oath: Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower than their parents on numeracy, literacy, and creativity. He had the data — Program for International Student Assessment scores showing a direct correlation between classroom screen time and cognitive decline. IQ scores in Western nations rose for over a century. They reversed right around when the devices arrived.

International research backs him up. Studies consistently find that students comprehend text more deeply on paper than on a screen, make more connections, and score significantly higher on reading comprehension tests when they read in print. An OECD analysis found that the more time students spend on computers during the school day, the lower their test scores — and that students using devices more than six hours a day scored two full letter grades lower than those who used no computers at all.

Other countries figured this out before we did and are already reversing course. Sweden — one of the first nations to replace textbooks with screens, back in 2009 — is now investing to put paper textbooks back in the hands of every student, after concluding that attention spans shortened and learning did not improve. France, Italy, the Netherlands, and China have introduced nationwide restrictions on devices in schools. South Korea passed a law in 2025 banning phones and smart devices during class hours entirely.

The research driving these reversals is not coming from one corner of the world. Ongoing studies led by Norwegian researchers, involving academics in 30 countries, have found that the shift to screen-based reading replaces deep comprehension with shallow skimming — readers scan for keywords and believe they are absorbing the material when in fact they are not. The researchers warn that crucial skills, including the ability to empathize and critically analyze texts, may be compromised by a wholesale move to tablets. Their conclusion is pointed: it is vital that teachers be allowed to decide which blend of learning suits their students, rather than schools making a blanket, top-down decision to go fully digital across every subject and every grade.

Here in the United States, schools are starting to follow — quietly, and without much appetite for examining how it happened. McPherson Middle School in Kansas pulled Chromebooks from daily use in December 2025, moving to laptops only for specific teacher-directed activities. North Carolina’s largest school district announced it needed to move away from its one-to-one laptop policy. Maine — which was among the first states to adopt a laptop-for-every-student program in 2002 — saw no improvement in test scores after fifteen years of the initiative.

“This technology can be a tool,” said McPherson’s principal, Inge Esping — who won Kansas’s middle school Principal of the Year award for 2025. “It is not the answer to education.”

That sentence should have been the starting point of this conversation, not the reluctant conclusion of it. We spent $30 billion to find out what a teacher with a stack of textbooks and a whiteboard could have told us for free: reading on paper works, writing by hand works, and replacing those things with screens did not make our children smarter. It made them the first generation in recorded history to be less cognitively capable than the one before them — and the bill for the devices that caused it is still being paid off in school districts across the country.