A history of technological hype 

Ask any parent, teacher, or school administrator: This is the most difficult school year they have ever faced. No one wanted schools to shut down for months on end. No one wanted to resort to a patchwork of online education, anxious in-person meetings, and cram sessions about “learning management systems.” Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced educators to pin their hopes on digital tools and platforms. 

The suddenness of the shift to remote instruction may be unprecedented, but this is hardly the first time our schools have placed massive bets on new technology. Historian Larry Cuban (1986) has described how efficiency-minded administrators foisted media technologies ranging from radios to computers on teachers in efforts to reform education. Many such pedagogical “innovations” have been introduced over the past two centuries, often with sobering results. As our own research shows, in times of crisis, educational leaders often turn, with unfounded confidence, to technological solutions for the problems they face, leaping before they look.  

At the beginning of the 1800s, for instance, reformers in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, alarmed by the limited educational opportunities available to low-income children, turned to the work of Joseph Lancaster, a young teacher in London who had developed a system of education that took place in vast open rooms. A century and a half later, another generation of reformers, also horrified by the state of American schools, looked to the new technology of television as a means of providing high-quality education at scale.