Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

When McPherson Middle School in central Kansas banned cell phones in school four years ago, they didn’t reconsider their school-issued Google Chromebooks that were actively being used in the classroom and at home. It wasn’t until December of last year that it asked its 480 students to give up the laptops as well.

Administrators found that without their phones, students were using school laptops for distracting activities like watching YouTube or playing games, rather than learning. Some were even using their school Gmail accounts to tease other students, the New York Times reported.

Now, the school has transitioned to using laptops only for specific teacher-assigned activities. Meanwhile, the unused laptops sit in carts in the back of classrooms, and children take notes the old-fashioned way: on pen and paper.

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

Students who want to use the laptops for extra work at home can also borrow a Chromebook from the school library, the Times reported.

Increasingly, schools like McPherson in other states such as North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Michigan are rethinking their policies of buying and assigning a laptop to every student and the millions of dollars they spent on them, as studies show........

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