There is a question that more and more educators are asking: When did teaching start to feel like this?
Not the hard parts. Teachers have always navigated hard parts: the student who shuts down, the lesson that doesn’t land, the essays that need feedback. Those kinds of difficulties are inevitable in this profession.
What feels different now is something harder to name. A sense that the classroom has become more crowded and fragmented… not with students, but with systems. That the decisions a teacher used to make instinctively are now made somewhere else, by something else. That teaching, somewhere along the way, became something closer to administration: managing platforms and devices and disconnected curricular resources.
This blog is about one part of that story: what happened when schools bet heavily on screen-based, platform-driven instruction — particularly for literacy — and what the research now tells us about the cost of that bet. It is also about what it looks like to make a different choice.
The Promise Was Student-Growth and Personalization. The Result Was Something Else.
Over the last decade, schools invested heavily in education technology with an earnest and energizing goal: to meet students where they are, differentiate instruction at scale, and free teachers from the logistical burden of managing wildly different learning needs in a single room.
The idea was compelling. Adaptive platforms could assess each student’s level, generate personalized lessons, and produce data dashboards that helped teachers understand who was struggling and where. Platform-delivered instruction became standard practice across millions of classrooms, costing K-12 districts across the country a total of $30 billion annually.
The results have been more complicated.
A meta-analysis of 21,000 studies found that educational technology has an effect size of +0.29 standard deviations on student outcomes. While this sounds promising, research also shows that for interventions to produce meaningful improvements in student learning outcomes, there should be an effect size of +40 to +50.
To put it plainly: the impact of this massive investment has been underwhelming [1].
Increasingly, teachers, too, are skeptical about the education industry’s over-reliance on educational technologies. In a recent survey of teachers across the country, over half indicated limits on screen time would improve student behavior and support classroom management [2]. Educators also point out that the proliferation of screens in classrooms has come at the cost of collaborative, hands-on learning, making some educators feel more like “glorified babysitters” than teachers [3].
Districts across the country, including the second-largest district in the country, Los Angeles Unified School District, are catching on to these inadequate results and negative perceptions and imposing bans and/or limits on screen time in schools [4].
What was once framed as an equity solution — personalized, adaptive, scalable — is now being reexamined as a source of a different kind of inequity: the gradual erosion of the human relationship at the center of teaching.
Screen-Based Reading Is Not the Same as Reading
There is a deeper design problem here, especially among English Language Arts and literacy educators, and it shows up clearly in the research on how students develop reading skills and stamina. In a recent study, researchers used eye-tracking technology to monitor how eighth-grade students processed texts on screens versus paper [5].
The findings were clear.
Reading comprehension was significantly lower when students read on screens. The number of “transitions” — moments where students had to go back and re-read text before answering questions — more than doubled on screens, and in some cases tripled. Students in the digital condition tended to read faster and do more skimming, a pattern that held even among students who had grown up in digital learning environments and might be expected to be most comfortable on screens.
Researcher Blikstad-Balas, who has spent much of her career studying digital technologies in classrooms, noted that this finding refutes one of the most common defenses of screen-based reading: that students simply need to get used to it. “If anybody should be better at reading on screens,” she observed of the study’s digital-native participants, “these kids should. And they’re not.”
The implications extend beyond comprehension scores. Ladislao Salmerón, a professor at the University of Valencia who studies how digitization changes the reading experience, has argued that reading ability is cumulative; it develops over a lifetime, shaped by every reading encounter a person has. When students spend years in environments that train them to skim, to scan, to decide what not to read, those habits accrue.
Here’s the truth: The reading stamina and analytical depth that complex texts require cannot be developed through shallow, screen-mediated engagement, no matter how personalized the lesson.
And here is where the stakes become most clear. The instinct in many classrooms has been to respond to declining reading stamina by accommodating it: shorter texts, excerpts instead of novels, summaries instead of sources. That response is understandable. It is also, in the long run, exactly the wrong direction. Students do not develop the ability to grapple with complexity by avoiding it. They develop it by doing it, repeatedly, with support, in an environment designed to make that struggle productive and engaging rather than defeating and tedious.
Print Is Not Nostalgia. It Is a Design Decision.
There is an important distinction to make, because the conversation around screens in schools often falls into a binary that does not serve anyone.
Arguing for print-first literacy instruction is not the same as arguing against technology. It is making a specific claim about what the research on reading tells us, and designing curriculum accordingly.
What the research tells us is this: students read differently on screens than they do on paper, and not equally well. A student reading on paper is more likely to read slowly and carefully, to annotate, to return to a passage that needs rethinking. A student reading on a screen is more likely to skim, to scan, to move on before something has fully landed. These are not character differences between students; they are behavioral responses to different media, consistent enough across thousands of study participants to warrant curricular design consideration.
For literacy instruction specifically, this matters tremendously. Reading stamina is not a trait students either have or don’t. It is a skill built through practice, over time, in conditions that make critical reading possible. A print-first curriculum creates those conditions deliberately: a physical text that stays where you left it, margins wide enough to think in, a shared book that anchors a classroom community in the same intellectual experience.
This is also, importantly, not a retreat from the demands of a digital world. The critical reading and thinking skills that students develop through sustained engagement with complex print texts are exactly the skills they need to navigate information online: to evaluate sources, recognize argument structures, identify what is being left unsaid. Print-based reading does not preclude students from developing digital literacy; on the contrary, it builds the foundation that makes digital literacy meaningful.
The challenge for ELA curriculum design is to take this research seriously — not as a reason to resist technology altogether, but as a reason to be intentional about when and how print-based reading sits at the center of instruction. An industry that moved quickly toward screen-based delivery without fully reckoning with what that shift would mean for literacy development now has enough evidence to ask harder, head-on questions.
The science of reading has always pointed toward the importance of volume, complexity, and sustained engagement. Print-first design is how that commitment can come to life.
Not Anti-Technology, Pro-Classroom
At Inquiry by Design, print-first is not a positioning choice. It is a curriculum design decision grounded in what we know about how reading comprehension, language development, and critical thinking actually develop.
Our grades 6–12 English Language Arts curriculum and Secondary Spanish Language Arts program are built around real, long-form texts — novels, poems, long-form investigative journalism, graphic novels, scientific articles — that students read closely, annotate by hand, and discuss in the room. Every student has a physical Student Reader. Every lesson is designed so the teacher’s attention stays on the students, not on a dashboard.
We call this approach Connected by Design. Reading, writing, discussion, and language development are integrated into every lesson, not as separate activities managed across multiple platforms, but as one coherent experience that happens between people, in a classroom, with a shared text at the center.
Committing to a print-first literacy curriculum is a deliberate decision grounded in what we know: that the conditions for real reading, real thinking, and real learning are human conditions. Teachers leading. Students responding to each other. Ideas building across the room.
The classroom has always been the point. Designing curriculum to honor that is how we take it back.
This is the first post in The Connected Learning Project, a blog series from Inquiry by Design. Connected learning isn’t just a framework we write about — it’s the design principle behind everything we build. Inquiry by Design is a print-first English Language Arts (ELA) and Spanish Language Arts (SLA) curriculum provider for grades 6–12, serving 40+ districts and nearly 500,000 students nationwide.
1: https://www.educationnext.org/latter-day-luddite-pulls-the-plug-on-edtech-book-review-digital-delusion-jared-cooney-horvath/
2: https://marketbrief.edweek.org/meeting-district-needs/limiting-students-access-to-tech-is-most-popular-among-teachers-in-these-states/2026/03
3: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/iready-school-software-faces-parent-teacher-student-fury-rcna342850
4: https://edsource.org/updates/los-angeles-unified-approves-screen-time-policy-for-next-school-year
5: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131524001210?via%3Dihub