Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

Using laptops to replace books and writing is not a tech first approach in the first place. It’s just that you replace a book with a computer, that’s not tech education. The letters and words are still the same, except now you have a distracting screen in front of a kid on a machine that can do other things to satisfy the impulses of a bored kid. There is nothing wrong with laptops in class just use it to teach the kids to use the tech for things those machines were build for. And not as a book and a teaching assistant substitute. Teach kids how to operate a real OS, teach them basic cyber security and cyber hygiene, let them install a printer and wifi. Anything that is useful for when they will use a PC as adults.