During the pandemic, while Americans were grappling with kitchen table issues such as job security, basic freedoms, the well-being of their loved ones and, importantly, the education of their children, Big Tech silently wrote their ticket to further subsidize their already trillion-dollar industry.
And it wasn’t through broadband grants or shadowy back-door-deals tasking Meta or Google with policing Covid “misinformation”(although they’ve done that to decent effect). It was through the pandemic-induced frenzy that ballooned the EdTech cartel.
EdTech is loosely defined as the study and practice of improving learning and performance with technological tools and processes. In the last two decades, this has advanced from computer labs to online curriculums to hybrid and fully online learning environments, to learning environments almost solely conducted on tablets. As a country, we’ve gone from technology augmenting a teacher’s ability to provide engaging, authentic learning experiences, to teachers proctoring a technology-first education by just standing by to help students with IT issues.
In the most extreme cases, there are schools exclusively leveraging technology and AI to teach students, with some offering AI learning environments where children can do school behind a screen in just two hours per day. And this isn’t just a shiny object in esoteric environments; EdTech in all its forms is taking the nation by storm.
Nationwide, more than 86% of K-12 students are provided with a digital learning device in the classroom. In Texas, school districts offer everything from Chromebooks to tablets to laptops, costing taxpayers more than $1 billion for the 2023 – 2024 school year alone.
The amount of time students are spending glued to taxpayer-subsidized screens in the classroom is hard to determine, but one estimate puts it at more than 20% of instructional time—a number that is only growing post-pandemic. To put it into perspective, when I was in middle school nearly 20 years ago, and I was averaging 15 minutes per day on a screen during instructional time. Now, middle schoolers on average spend 150 minutes per day on their school-issued screens.
The catalysts for this shift vary, but they are important. In the early days of EdTech (1990s to 2010s), pilot programs were introduced with the hope that technology would promote personalized learning, guarantee students equitable access to technology, and prepare students for an increasingly digitalized workforce. With little to no efficacy determined in the early days of these programs, the rollout was gradual, with pre-2020 device use peaking with 40% of elementary students and far fewer minutes of instructional time spent on device across all of K-12. Until Covid-19 hit, that is.
Covid-19 transformed K-12 education from the way we remember as kids to a screen-induced frenzy overnight, and permanently.
School districts across Texas gladly took gobs of federal funds, working overtime to ensure all students had a laptop, tablet, or Chromebook to serve as their sole educational portal during school closures. One blessing of all this, of course, was the wave of school choice laws passed throughout the country because of parents’ exposure to the garbage their children were being taught. But amidst all this, Big Tech stayed out of the crosshairs, silently amassing control over classrooms at the expense of the safety and learning outcomes of students.
And their control is only accelerating.
A decade ago, the market for EdTech was around $10 billion. Post-pandemic, that number is 20 times larger, with the 2025 EdTech market value surpassing $200 billion. Companies like Google and Microsoft moved fast and broke things, siphoning off troves of private student data, incorporating indoctrination tools in their software, and creating lifelong users in their walled garden as they happily took government funds to implant their technocracy in schools.
In fact, EdTech and the Big Tech cartel are so entrenched in the education complex that states (including Texas) have passed laws requiring that standardized tests be taken online, further “justifying” technology’s omnipresence in the classroom.
But now that the Covid-19 dust has settled, we have the data, and it overwhelmingly shows that school-issued devices are worsening student outcomes—and it’s not even close. And to little surprise, the lowest performing students are seeing the worst declines in outcomes, so bad that one of the earliest adopters of EdTech (Sweden) is reversing course and going back to pen and paper.
The EdTech cartel is just another tactic in Big Tech’s playbook to capitalize on an increasingly young audience, create lifelong customers, and find new vectors to obtain personal data they can commodify. All while taxpayers across the nation subsidize their regime. And just as the now infamous Facebook files revealed that Big Tech was not only harming our children indelibly, but did extensive research on how to make the very components inducing harm more maximally addictive for children, an army of parents stepping up and pushing back on the EdTech cartel at the local level will pull back yet another curtain of profits over the well-being of our children.
