New Policy Brief Details How to Win Back Control of the Classroom from Big Tech

Policymakers must take action to prevent for-profit tech companies from further damaging education, argues a new paper from American Compass. In Teaching to the Tech, Brad Littlejohn writes that the widespread adoption of technology in the classroom has worsened outcomes for students, and the growing presence of AI as a learning tool threatens to repeat old mistakes and magnify harms. 

Since the first-generation iPad’s release in 2010, screens have increasingly found a school-sanctioned foothold in the American educational system. Unlike previous technology learning models where devices might live only in a computer lab, tech companies successfully sold personal technology as a learning tool rather than an object of study. By 2022, there were 50 million Chromebooks in American classrooms. 

At the same time, educational outcomes have worsened. Reading and math scores are at their lowest levels in decades, and young people are suffering from increased mental health and social challenges like diminished attention spans, isolation, and exposure to pornography via school-issued devices. 

The growing presence and sophistication of AI in education represents a new risk—and a chance to get on the right path. Littlejohn writes that the Trump administration’s April 2025 executive order on AI in education risks bringing technology into the classroom without giving it the time to meet necessary quality controls. He recommends the administration should: 

• Issue a supplementary executive order highlighting principles to guide AI educational policy, organized under Goals, Governance, Pedagogy, and Design; 
• Extend the timetables for the Artificial Education Task Force, and; 
• Convene a Working Group on Technology in the Classroom to bring together researchers, frontline educators, parents’ advocates, technologists, and child development experts to build out these principles into robust guidelines that can serve as the basis for a federal EdTech certification program.

Click here to read the full paper.