Technology Has to Earn Its Place
Five questions district leaders can ask before buying or renewing K-12 edtech, as screen-time laws, budget cuts, and data breaches raise the bar for proof.
Five questions district leaders can ask before buying or renewing K-12 edtech, as screen-time laws, budget cuts, and data breaches raise the bar for proof.
The new leadership standard for K-12 EdTech decisions
By Luis R. Valentino, Ed.D.
For over twenty years, educational leaders faced a simple technology question: how much access can we provide? More devices, more platforms, more log-ins for more students, on the theory that access itself would lead to greater equity and, eventually, better outcomes. That focus was not naive.
For most of that stretch, access was the real constraint. Home connectivity and device ownership were genuinely unequal, and districts took on the job of closing that gap themselves. The technology in students' hands evolved as the responsibility grew: computer labs first, then computers pushed into individual classrooms, then a shift to laptops and notebooks assigned to each student. Each iteration answered the same question the era demanded.
Then the pandemic turned access from a strategic goal into a survival requirement overnight. Buying first and asking questions later was the right call in an emergency, because the alternative was no instruction at all.
Over time, though, that question has become the wrong one. Devices and connectivity are largely solved problems in most districts today, and the pandemic dollars that let districts buy first and evaluate later are gone. The right question now is harder, and more useful: has this technology earned its place in the classroom?
Over my 35-year career, I learned to ask one baseline question at every edtech demo: "What is the evidence this serves students?" But today, a newer risk sits on top of all this. We are no longer just vetting software; we are fighting to protect the irreplaceable judgment of the teacher.
That question has stayed with me, because it cuts past the feature list and lands on the thing that matters. A tool either changes what happens between a teacher and a student, or it doesn't. Everything else, the dashboard, the analytics suite, the integration with your existing single sign-on, is less relevant.
The research pushing districts toward phone-free policies gets misread the moment it gets applied to every screen in a building. In PISA 2022, students who spent up to an hour a day on digital devices for leisure scored 49 points higher in mathematics than students who spent five to seven hours, after accounting for the socioeconomic profile of students and schools (OECD, 2023). Nearly one in three students across OECD countries reports being distracted by digital devices in class (OECD, 2024).
Economists David Figlio and Umut Özek studied cellphone bans using detailed student-level data from Florida and found test scores rose significantly in the second year, with fewer unexcused absences explaining a large share of the gain (Figlio & Özek, 2025). The first year told a more complicated story. Suspensions climbed once enforcement began, especially among Black students, before easing after that first year. The effects concentrated in middle and high schools, where smartphone ownership is most common (Figlio & Özek, 2025). District leaders considering a similar policy need both halves of that finding, the academic gain and the discipline cost, to implement it well.
The same PISA data show something districts rarely quote alongside the distraction numbers: moderate use of digital devices for learning is associated with higher performance, if the technology supports learning instead of distracting from it (OECD, 2023). A student scrolling social media on a personal phone during a lecture and a student working through adaptive math practice on a district-managed device are not doing the same thing, even though both involve a screen.
The difference is its intended purpose. Undirected browsing and entertainment compete with instruction for a student's attention. Even an instructional video earns its place through what students learn and do with it, not simply because it appears on a screen. Targeted use looks different. A student working through adaptive practice gets immediate, individualized feedback a teacher cannot deliver in real time to thirty students at once. A student with a reading disability gets text-to-speech support that makes grade-level content accessible without singling them out. An emergent bilingual student gets a language production tool that lets them demonstrate understanding before their English proficiency catches up to their content knowledge. None of that is the phone-in-the-pocket problem the legislative wave was written to address.
By March 2026, 33 states barred student phone use in class or across the entire school day by statute, and 41 had passed some law addressing phones in schools (Ballotpedia News, 2026). Those laws target personal phones. Whether they reduce distraction without creating new costs depends on how schools put them into practice. Confusing that category with a purpose-built, district-managed platform delivering targeted instructional support is how a district ends up stripping out tools that were earning their place, in the name of a policy aimed at something else entirely.
In August, the U.S. Department of Education drew the same line. A Dear Colleague letter from Assistant Secretary Kirsten Baesler argued that the debate should not be framed as a choice between technology and no technology, and urged states and districts to judge tools by educational value rather than screen exposure alone (Klein, 2026; Merod, 2026c). Teachers draw it too. In a national Gallup survey of 2,101 public school teachers, 61 percent said students should spend less time on learning devices, and nearly three in four supported a daily cap. Only about a third strongly backed that cap, though, while majorities strongly supported more print and hands-on materials and stronger filtering and monitoring (Senseman, 2026). Parents land in a similar place. In a National Parents Union survey of 1,527 public school parents, three-quarters wanted schools to set daily screen time limits, yet the same share said their school's current use of computers and tablets was already about right. Only 1 percent wanted no screen time at all (Prothero, 2026).
Leaders who make that distinction clearly, in policy language and in procurement decisions, protect the tools worth keeping while closing the door on the ones that were never doing real instructional work in the first place.
Districts are not making this distinction in a vacuum. Four separate pressures, internal and external, are converging on the same decision at the same time, and a leader who only sees one of them is working with an incomplete picture.
The first is fiscal. Congress allocated nearly $190 billion to K-12 schools through pandemic relief funding (Craven, 2024), and that money is now gone for every district (EdTech Magazine, 2026). Researchers at Georgetown's Edunomics Lab warned that losing it meant a single-year spending reduction of more than $1,000 per student on average, with high-poverty districts hit hardest (Roza & Silberstein, 2023). That reckoning now lives in operating budgets. Philadelphia adopted its 2026-27 budget against a $300 million structural deficit, and $36 million of the savings came from cutting contracts and programs with a low return on investment (Sharber, 2026). Technology bought quickly without a plan to sustain it is especially exposed (EdTech Magazine, 2023). Shadowing these complex decisions is a volatile new layer of technological risk. In August, the Federal Communications Commission opened public comment on the future of E-rate, the program that subsidizes school internet access, and cited the school screen time debate as it weighs sweeping changes or even elimination (Merod, 2026b). The connectivity districts treat as settled may not stay that way.
The second is evidentiary, the screen-time research covered above, now reinforced by a May 2026 surgeon general's advisory that flagged harmful screen use by children and teens as a public health concern and urged schools to assign work on paper whenever possible (Merod, 2026a).
The third is legislative. Since Florida moved first in 2023, statehouses have changed school phone policy at a pace rarely seen in K-12 (Ballotpedia News, 2026). California's Phone-Free Schools Act required every district, charter school, and county office of education to adopt a policy limiting or prohibiting phone use by July 1, 2026, which makes this the first school year those policies are in force statewide (Chavolla, 2024). The movement has already widened from phones to classroom devices: at least six states adopted classroom screen time limits or bans in 2026 (Merod, 2026c). It has also reached federal court, where seven families sued Pennsylvania's Lower Merion School District after it repealed a policy letting them opt their children out of required school technology (Walsh, 2026). Public opinion keeps moving in the same direction. In 2026, 77 percent of American adults supported in-class phone bans for middle and high school students, and for the first time more supported than opposed all-day bans (Pew Research Center, 2026).
The fourth is trust. Attackers broke into Canvas twice this spring, on April 29 and again on May 7, through Instructure's Free for Teachers platform. They took usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information, and messages (Merod, 2026a). The second intrusion put a message from the hacking group in front of users and pushed Canvas offline while students at more than 8,000 institutions were in the middle of final exams (Swensen, 2026). The group claimed data on more than 275 million students and teachers. Instructure announced an agreement with the attackers to return and destroy the data, and a former FBI cyber official told the Associated Press the deal suggested a ransom was likely paid (Swensen, 2026). The chair of the House Homeland Security Committee demanded a briefing, and more than half a dozen proposed class actions were filed within a week (Melton, 2026; Swensen, 2026). A school cybersecurity expert told K-12 Dive the breach endangered families' trust in a way beyond what he had seen before (Merod, 2026a). Canvas was not an isolated case. In December 2025, the Federal Trade Commission announced a consent order against Illuminate Education over a 2021 breach that exposed data on more than 10 million students (Melton, 2026).
Those incidents land inside a policy framework already under strain. FERPA contains no explicit security requirements for student data, which leaves districts to set and enforce safeguards through procurement and contracts (Arciniega et al., 2025). Fewer than 25 percent of agreements between schools and vendors specify the purpose of the data disclosures they authorize (Sathyamurthy, 2025). After the Canvas breach, privacy expert Amelia Vance made the practical point: without contract terms that carry real consequences, most breach lawsuits will not succeed (Merod, 2026a).
Taken together, these four pressures mean a district leader is not choosing between technology and no technology. They are choosing between technology that can prove its worth on all four fronts, instructional value, cost, legal compliance, and legislative fit, and technology asking to be trusted on reputation alone.
Districts running structured reviews have already built the alternative. Dr. Alex Marrero, Superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, spent two years putting every digital tool through review by its education technology, information systems, legal, content, and data privacy teams. The district cut its catalog from more than 1,000 tools to 346, saved about $1 million, and committed to reviewing every app every two years (Langreo, 2025). Its ed tech manager described the old approach bluntly: running a thousand things meant doing a thousand things poorly. Some states are going further, exploring contracts that pay vendors partly on performance measures instead of adoption or usage counts (EdSurge Staff, 2026; Klein, 2026). Strip those reviews down to what a superintendent or cabinet needs before a signature, and they come down to five questions worth asking of every product under consideration, new or already installed.
What problem does this solve? Not what the platform does in general, but the specific instructional gap it is meant to close.
What can a teacher or student do better because of it, specifically? Vague answers here, "improves engagement," "supports differentiation," are the sign a vendor has not thought past the sales deck.
What evidence supports that claim, and whose evidence is it? A case study a vendor commissioned is not the same as an independent evaluation, and districts increasingly know the difference.
What does the teacher still own, and what should this tool never be allowed to replace? Tech adoption without accountability is a trap. When a platform quietly shifts instructional judgment away from the teacher, that procurement decision has failed this test, regardless of what its usage numbers show.
What is the risk, in cost, in data exposure, in dependency, if this goes wrong? Total cost of ownership includes professional learning time, teacher hours, and the staff who administer the tool, not just the license fee.
Federal guidance now points in the same direction. The Department of Education says every education technology product should be able to answer what learning problem it solves, when it should be used, for whom, for how long, and what evidence shows it improves student learning (U.S. Department of Education, 2026). The federal framework shares deep common ground with my own checklist, and it helps to have it on federal letterhead when a vendor pushes back. Notice what it leaves out. It does not ask what the teacher still owns, and it does not ask what happens to student data when a vendor is breached. After the spring we just had, I would not sign a contract without both answers in writing.
Independent help with the evidence question is taking shape. CoSN, ISTE, Digital Promise, CAST, and other partners in the Edtech Quality Collaborative are building shared indicators for safety, evidence, inclusivity, interoperability, and usability (Ullman, 2026).
A vendor who can answer all five questions with real data is offering something increasingly rare in the education market. A vendor who answers with a case study built for marketing is offering the old model, one that districts can no longer afford to buy on faith. Platforms like ClassLink and Clever now show districts which tools students and teachers open and how often (Ullman, 2026). Treat that as an early signal, not proof. LAUSD board vice president Rocío Rivas warned that schools could end up counting minutes and auditing classrooms instead of evaluating learning outcomes (Dale & Yu, 2026a). Districts that pair usage data with the five questions above are not slowing down procurement. They are making sure the money spent produces something they can defend at the board table.
Evidence from another district should earn a product a serious look, not an automatic renewal. Before a pilot begins, leaders should name the learning outcome they expect, the teacher practice the tool should improve, the students it must serve well, and the time and cost required to implement it. At renewal, they should examine who benefited, who did not, whether the promised gains actually reached students, and whether the results justify the full cost of continued investment. Overall usage can hide a great deal, especially for multilingual learners and students with disabilities.
Los Angeles Unified is living this shift in public, and the timeline shows how fast a large urban district can move once these pressures converge. Board Member Nick Melvoin introduced a resolution on student screen time in March 2026, and the board approved it in April (Los Angeles Unified School District, 2026a, 2026b). After hearing from nearly 19,000 community members, the board adopted a final policy on June 23 (Dale & Yu, 2026a). The policy ends district device use from preschool through first grade starting in August, adds daily limits for grades two through five in November, and brings middle and high school limits by January 2027. It also blocks YouTube and streaming platforms without teacher approval (Dale & Yu, 2026b). More than 400,000 students returned this fall with the first phase already in effect.
Reaction has not been uniform, and a fair account holds both halves of it. A parent coalition, Schools Beyond Screens, pushed for the change from the ground up. District officials, meanwhile, cautioned that the policy could set back efforts to close the digital divide for the highest-need students, and the staff analysis flagged a risk of slowing students' access to technology (Dale & Yu, 2026a, 2026b). The Consortium for School Networking has since advised districts against blanket time limits, urging them to cut low-value screen use and tie devices to clear instructional purposes instead (Merod, 2026c).
Enforcement carries its own price: up to $4 million in one-time costs for classroom laptop carts and $1 million a year for software that tracks screen time and blocks content (Dale & Yu, 2026a). That monitoring layer deserves the same scrutiny as any instructional tool. Nationally, 17 percent of teachers reported that their school had shared student information with immigration enforcement in the prior school year (Center for Democracy & Technology, 2025). The lesson is not that monitoring tools are illegitimate. It is that the accountability standard applied to instructional software has to apply equally to the software a district buys to enforce the policy governing it.
One provision in the LAUSD policy deserves to be copied everywhere: the board must review the screen time rules in a public meeting at least once a year (Dale & Yu, 2026b). That is a renewal decision written into policy. Every technology contract should carry the same discipline.
None of this argues against technology in the classroom. It argues against buying it, or keeping it, on habit instead of proof.
Before your next purchase or renewal comes up, your cabinet should be able to answer the five questions without reaching for a vendor's talking points. Can you name the specific problem this tool solves? Can you point to what has changed for students and teachers because of it, and did those gains reach the students it was bought to serve? Is the evidence behind that claim independent of the vendor selling it? Do you know what the teacher still owns, and what this tool has been kept from replacing? And do you understand the full risk, in cost and in data exposure, if this decision goes wrong?
If you can answer all five, the tool has earned its place, and the pressures documented here are not a reason to walk away from it. If you can't, you already have your answer, whatever the demo looked like.
Technology was never the debate. Whether it earns its place, every time, is.
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