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It’s a tough time to be an education technology enthusiast.
Ed-tech was once widely touted as key to improving learning, but these days many state officials, school leaders, teachers, and parents want to get students off screens in class.
Richard Culatta, the CEO of ISTE, a nonprofit that convenes and trains educators on using tech, has watched this furor grow with a combination of sympathy and alarm. In his telling, the tech backlash is understandable, but the solutions — blanket restrictions in some cases — are not. Echoing many advocates and companies, Culatta insists that schools not throw the ed-tech baby out with the bathwater. Yet he readily concedes there’s a lot of bathwater.
Incidentally, ISTE recently rebranded from the International Society for Technology in Education to the International Society for Transforming Education. Culatta, who’s led the organization for nearly a decade, says the name shift has been in the works for some time and is not a response to ed-tech’s brand crisis.
I’ve heard a lot recently from skeptics of ed-tech, which is why I wanted to talk to Culatta, who has emerged as a leading defender of the value of tech in schools. I was interested in Culatta’s take on why this backlash happened, how to tell good ed-tech from bad, and what role screens should play in early grades.
Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you think there has been such an intense backlash to ed-tech in recent months?
You know, in some ways I’m surprised it’s taken this long. I was watching how we were managing technology in the wake of COVID, and we were not doing it very thoughtfully. When you start handing out devices very quickly without preparing teachers, without carefully selecting the tools, without monitoring them for quality, stuff starts to go off the rails.
The implication is that there has been a lot of bad ed-tech use, right? What does that look like?
People very quickly want to focus on the tools, on the screens, and it just doesn’t line up with what we see. It’s almost entirely about how the technology is used. In some cases, we have kids just clicking next through PowerPoint, and that’s terrible learning. That’s just the equivalent of a worksheet on a screen.
So I think we just need to have a moment where we go back and say ‘we did things wrong.’ Unfortunately, what we’re hearing are far less effective strategies. I mean, our friends in L.A. are doing the worst possible approach to trying to course correct.
[The Los Angeles school board recently approved limits on screen time, set by grade level. For instance, in fourth and fifth grades, students will be limited to 30 minutes per day. Before second grade, devices will generally not be used. School board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin recently explained the rationale behind this shift to me.]
What do you object to about what Los Angeles is doing?
If you have a technology that is not supporting learning, zero minutes should be used. And if you have cases where technology is being used in thoughtful ways, it should have more flexibility. It’s going to mean that all of the energy is spent on clocking and timing as opposed to actually training teachers.
Do you think first graders and kindergartners should be spending any amount of time on screens?
It depends. All technology use should be aligned to student needs and learning goals. The use cases where that makes sense for young students are fewer and far between. Banning rarely is a good strategy.
I saw, ironically, in L.A. a number of years ago, a great example of kindergartners practicing reading. Instead of doing these traditional book reports — that were just painful and boring — they were making videos explaining the words they were using. So lots of vocabulary repetition, lots of good use of words in context. Should it have been done for a very long time? No, but in this case it wasn’t.
I’m old enough to remember when there was incredible hype about the possibility of ed-tech driving substantial learning gains. Was ed-tech oversold?
I don’t think it was oversold. It was oversimplified, and so this idea that you could just put some software in front of a kid with no need for a teacher anymore — I mean, we’d hear stuff like that. What happens is when there are big sweeping statements like ‘oh technology will solve everything’ and then it doesn’t — of course it doesn’t — then people think technology is garbage, and we should ban it.
My colleague did a story recently about the sheer number of sales pitches from tech companies that a school district leader gets. And I’m sure every sales pitch came with, ‘oh we’re curriculum-aligned, we’re evidence-based.’
Why would we ever trust the company selling you the thing to tell you that?
Well, right, but then who do you trust? How do you know?
That is the job of education leaders. That is the job of teachers to know when it’s effective. In fairness, we do need to make it easier for schools to make those decisions. We have something that we’re piloting right now, which is called the EdTech Index. It is a database where we are collecting trusted third-party validations of tools and apps.
Do you think the growth of technology in schools over, say, the last decade has had a net positive effect on students?
In the cases where it’s been used in appropriate ways, the answer is yes. The challenge is that for every two schools that are doing this thoughtfully, there are two schools that are doing it in all the wrong ways. What you end up getting is results that are like, eh, doesn’t really make much of a difference. If you aren’t using it in a way that makes a significant difference, you’re guaranteed that it’s going to be distracting and limiting effective learning.
We have well-intentioned schools and educators, and if your theory is true, so many of them are using tech for ill rather than good — that’s a profound challenge.
Totally. I mean, you’re spot on. A follow-up question that you might ask is, well, even if it does make a difference in some places, just to avoid the risk, let’s just not use technology. And that would be reasonable if we didn’t care about our kids being able to get a job in the global economy.
But is it necessary to introduce those tools in, say, elementary school to prepare kids for a global economy?
100%. It’s not about the tools; it’s about behaviors. The behaviors need to happen over a long time. Being a healthy, contributing member of a digital world — that is a complex skill, just like learning to read and write, play an instrument, or play sports.
Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.
Matt Barnum 2026-08-06 14:20:59
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