For years, giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft have fiercely competed to capture the classroom and train schoolchildren on their tech products in the hopes of hooking students as lifelong customers. For more than a decade, tech companies have urged schools to buy one laptop per child, arguing that the devices would democratize education and bolster learning. Now Google and Microsoft, along with newcomers like OpenAI, are vying to spread their artificial intelligence chatbots in schools.

But after tens of billions of dollars of school spending on Chromebooks, iPads and learning apps, studies have found that digital tools have generally not improved students’ academic results or graduation rates. Some researchers and organizations like UNESCO even warn that overreliance on technology can distract students and impede learning.

Schools in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Michigan that once bought devices for each student are now re-evaluating heavy classroom technology use. And Chromebooks, the laptops most popular with U.S. schools, have emerged as a focal point. School leaders, educators and parents described the laptop curbs as an effort to refocus schooling on skills like student collaboration and conversation.

“We’re not going back to stone tablets,” said Shiloh Vincent, the superintendent of McPherson Public Schools. “This is intentional tech use.”

The classroom device pullback is the latest sign of a growing global reckoning over how tech giants and their products have upended childhood, adolescence and education.

In a landmark verdict last week, a jury found the social media company Meta and the Google-owned YouTube liable for hooking and harming a minor. More than 30 states have limited or banned student cellphone use at school. Last year, Australia began requiring social media companies to disable the accounts of children under 16, a move that other countries are considering.

Now children’s groups and educators concerned about screen time are turning their attention to school-issued laptops and learning apps. Parents are flocking to support efforts, like Schools Beyond Screens and the Distraction-Free Schools Policy Project, to vet and limit school tech.

At least 10 states, including Kansas, Vermont and Virginia, have recently introduced bills to restrict students’ screen time, require proof of safety and efficacy for school tech tools or allow parents to opt their child out of using digital devices for learning.

"Is Public Education Over?" Jennifer Berkshire asked in her newsletter this week, detailing a number of efforts across a number of states to push vouchers and private schools – that's the long-standing tactic of the "free market" folks – and to double-down on standardized testing and close "failing schools" – and that is the utterly dismal response of the Democrats' school reformers. "If you, like me, have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of school privatization," she writes, "it’s impossible to ignore the sense that the future we've been warning about has arrived." Indeed, and when it comes to the alarms I've been sounding, I'd add that the ed-tech crowd has always believed it could profit off of crisis, no matter which side here was triumphant: selling software, selling testing technology, selling "intelligent tutoring systems," selling "teacher-less" schools, extracting student data, selling student data, privatizing infrastructure, funding charter school networks and now hyping some microschool bullshit.

(In the latest back-to-school edition of Wired, Julia Black explores "How Microschools Became the Latest Tech Mogul Obsession." There's no mention of charter schools like Rocketship. There's no mention of AltSchool. So I do want to us to recognize, despite the latest! craze! framework that Wired loves to invoke: this new tech mogul obsession is an old tech mogul obsession. They just want to convince consumers (parents, politicians, journalists) that this is new and interesting, that this is different, that this time this time, their product will work magic.)