Can evidence compete with a story people want to believe?

Folks are beginning to pushback on the anti-edtech narrative. Will anyone care?

Teachers, school leaders, parents, and researchers are pushing back against the anti-educational technology movement led by Jared Cooney Horvath:

• A 4th-grade teacher in LAUSD recently wrote about how his district’s proposed screen-time bans won’t serve teachers and students.

• A family in California was featured by NPR over a fear of losing some of the positive affordances of technology in education: Voice-to-text and text-to-speech.

• School leaders in Massachusetts measured how often screens are actually being used and for what purposes. Kindergartners were found to be on devices for about 20 minutes a day, almost 99% of that time being instructional. High schoolers averaged a little over an hour a day during a 6½-hour school day, with about 66% of that being instructional. Rather than a ban, school leaders recommended no devices at lunch and recess and no use of screens as a reward. The Superintendent concluded that reform “requires a scalpel more so than a chainsaw.”

• Securly, a web filtering and security service used by schools, analyzed YouTube use across 380 districts and 600,000 students. The average elementary student spent just 5 minutes per day on YouTube. Less than 1% of students used YouTube in the ways espoused by the anti-edtech movement and in click-bait anecdotes.

• Dr. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, reviewed Jared Cooney Horvath’s book and found significant timeline mismatches in the evidence provided, manipulative data visualizations, an overstating of declines in test scores, and (as I wrote about recently) contradictions by recent meta-analyses demonstrating educational technology generally improves learning.

• Dr. Natalie Wexler, a literacy expert and author of The Writing Revolution (we led a great webinar with this team!), wrote about how the arguments made by Horvath are papering over issues that existed long before technology became ubiquitous.

• Dr. Peter Bergman of the University of Texas criticized Horvath for his unscientific presentation of effect sizes in his Senate testimony. This is in line with a private conversation I had recently with a researcher who described the testimony as “appalling.”

• Dr. Matthew Kraft, an influential education researcher at Brown University, pushed back on sweeping negative statements about educational technology.

• Dr. Justin Reich, a media professor at MIT and world leading expert on educational technology, spoke to a parent group that advocates for the removal of screens from schools. Reich was equivocal about technology, but when asked if screens caused declining test scores, he said: “It’s very unlikely that it is the school adoption of technology that is related to decreasing scores.” Asked if he felt the immediate removal of screens would improve outcomes: “Almost assuredly no.”

This is heartening.

I fear none of it will matter.

This has never been about evidence and reason, but rather emotion and confirmation bias. Horvath knows this. He tacitly acknowledged it in an interview with NBC News:

“There’s no way in hell my book has this big of an impact… my thought is it (“it” referring to anti-edtech sentiment) was there, it was fomenting, it was always about to happen. It’s just people needed the arguments, and I think that’s probably where the book kind of slid in and just said, ‘Here’s the word you’ve been looking for.’”

To translate what I think Dr. Horvath actually said there: “Parents were already primed to be anxious about technology, so I presented research in a way that validated their anxieties. And because I have a background in neuroscience and “Dr.” in front of my name, it reads as authoritative, so it took off.”

A parent quoted in the story reinforces this interpretation:

“As parents, we feel a lot of imposter syndrome sometimes when we’re talking about this…so having a book written by someone with a background in education as well as neuroscience added a lot of credibility to what parents were experiencing.”

Parents are genuinely exhausted and anxious about the digital world their kids are navigating. I empathize with this. What I can’t abide is a credentialed expert coming along and essentially saying, “Your anxiety is 100% correct, and here is a singular villain to blame.” As is becoming clearer by the day, existing educational research contradicts this narrative. We’ve seen this before:

The Haidt Precedent

Two years ago, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation exploded in popularity despite a lack of alignment with mental health research.

In a review for Nature when the book was released, Dr. Candice Odgers, Associate Dean for Research & Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Irvine, found that Haidt’s conclusions were “not supported by science.” That conclusion is supported by research from Dr. Amy Orben, Dr. Andrew Przybylski, Dr. Matti Vuorre, Dr. Patti Valkenburg, Dr. Sonia Livingstone, and (the aforementioned) Dr. Christopher Ferguson. Their work was recently compiled by Dr. Sara Grimes, a children’s media researcher at McGill University, who published an explainer in an effort to help push back against Haidt’s work.

What strikes me is that Dr. Odgers’ critique maps almost perfectly onto Horvath’s anti-edtech crusade:

Giving credence to this corollary is Horvath himself. He said he was inspired to write his book because of the success of The Anxious Generation: “The next apple up the tree was always going to be ed tech,” he said in the recent NBC news story, “because once parents realize, ‘Wait a second, we can push back against cellphone use in schools, then that means we can push back against Chromebook use in schools too.’”

As I’ve said before, using cellphones and social media is completely different from using school managed devices under the guidance of a licensed educator. That hasn’t stopped folks like Horvath from equating them, validating parental anxiety in the process.

Validation-by-Virality

Will the truth win out with edtech, or will virality?

Recent precedent set by Haidt makes me pessimistic.

After being rejected by most researchers, his book went to #1, spent 52 weeks straight on the bestseller list, sold two million copies, and became the basis for major legislation around the world. As a result, major media outlets continue to lift up his work as authoritative. Worse, policy-makers continue to listen. Randi Weingarten, leader of the largest teachers’ union in the country, recently cited both Haidt and Horvath to justify her pivot towards supporting sweeping “screen-time” regulations in schools.

Evidence proved to be no match for viral opinion validation.

Meanwhile, a recent Stanford-led study of the cell phone bans in schools championed by Haidt showed almost no positive impact on test scores, attendance, attention in class, or cyberbullying. Little impact has been seen for social media bans.

This isn’t surprising. Many of these findings are in line with previous research. We just ignored it.

The evidence-based pushback against Horvath gives me hope that we can avoid making this mistake again. Hopefully it can gain enough traction before viral narrative once again hardens into misguided policy.

Hopefully.