“I have pretty much gone back to the way I was teaching when I first started,” said one Brooklyn teacher who’s been in the profession for 25 years.
By Melissa Manno, NY Focus, photos by Jill Anderson
When in-person schooling resumed after the Covid pandemic, Ned Campbell went “all in” on educational technology. He had his high schoolers use their Chromebooks every day to fill out interactive worksheets, visit informational websites, and watch videos about history and politics. He thought the screens would help them learn more and stay engaged.
But Campbell, who teaches US history at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, quickly grew suspicious of how his students were using their devices. They’d look up the answers to assignments, charge their phones, and email friends, he noticed. They would submit essays a few minutes apart that were nearly identical. The day after online homework quizzes, Campbell asked students to answer the same questions on paper, and watched as As turned into Fs.
Campbell began spending more time monitoring the use of technology than he spent teaching, he said. When he asked one student how they had gotten every question right the night before but failed the next day, he said the teenager responded, “ChatGPT.”
“I just had to admit that it wasn’t working,” Campbell said. “The kids didn’t learn. They didn’t retain anything.”
Last school year, Campbell eliminated technology from his classroom. The Chromebook cart remains untouched during class time. Instead, students pick up a hard copy of a worksheet and a dictionary, and spend the first 15 minutes reading, writing, or completing a vocabulary activity. Homework is completed by hand and turned in the following day.
“I have pretty much gone back to the way I was teaching when I first started,” said Campbell, who has been a teacher for 25 years.
In recent years, the use of ed tech has exploded. About nine in 10 public schools nationwide had a 1-1 device program providing every student with a laptop or tablet during the 2024–25 school year, according to federal data. But as schools pour millions into ed tech and artificial learning programs, parents are increasingly questioning whether those investments improve learning — and a growing number of teachers are ditching tech for traditional analog instruction.
Policymakers are beginning to respond, too. On Wednesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI and caps on screen time through middle school. A new state bill would go further: the FOCUS Act, introduced by state Senator Andrew Gounardes last month, aims to sharply limit reliance on screens and to “create a right to analog learning.”
If the bill passes, it would be the most comprehensive restriction on ed tech in the country.
Some of the teachers who’ve already implemented those changes say they’re seeing promising results. It took some time for Campbell’s students to embrace the changes, and they didn’t do too well on their first exam without access to technology — but improved by 20 points on the second. After students spent more time in his class learning vocabulary, Campbell heard from other teachers that their English grades also went up. He noticed a boost in student confidence, as they received better grades on work they completed independently.
His classroom became noisier, but in a good way: Students came to him with questions and talked over classwork with each other, rather than staring at their Chromebooks.
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