I’ve wanted to talk with The 74’s Greg Toppo ever since the backlash against education technology started a few months ago. A veteran reporter and book author (as well as a longtime friend), Toppo has written frequently about new technology being used in schools — and he’s the author of an important 2015 book about games and learning. And in this new interview, Toppo doesn’t disappoint, sharing his views on where the backlash has come from (parents’ desire for a sense of control) and how the conversation surrounding tech sometimes makes him nervous. “When the coverage makes me nervous it’s the reporter not asking the kinds of questions that I would want to ask,” says Toppo. “Like I thought that Wall Street Journal piece about YouTube was amazing…[But] what else is happening that creates an opening? What is the thing that happened to make that happen?” Reflecting on media coverage, Toppo’s view is that journalists have — finally — become adequately skeptical of edtech hype. “I think we as an industry have absorbed Audrey Watters’ lessons,” he says. “I would in large part put myself in the group of people who didn’t really absorb that message very well. But I think I think now people have.” Watch the interview or read the transcript above (or on YouTube). Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple. You can follow Greg at @gtoppo, read his stories here, and find his book here. Key quotes: “It feels like we are experiencing a kind of a culmination of the past at the least six years at most, maybe 10 or 15 years of parent anxiety about technology.” “I think obviously the pandemic had a lot to do with it, putting devices in kids’ hands and that didn’t go very well. So there’s I think there’s a sense that a lot of parents have that you know they’re now kind of returning to schools and seeing, ‘Wait a minute, the devices are still here. I thought they were gonna disappear after 2022.’ I think there’s that shock of realization that kids are spending a lot of time on devices.” “The Jon Haidt ‘cellphones out of schools’ campaign showed the way, right? It showed that if you get enough parents very mad about a very specific, very kind of clear thing, that they can really make some headway. And so I think a lot of parents saw what was possible with that.” “I think that word ‘control’ is a big deal that we don’t talk about. Parents want control and I think they feel like they don’t have it — and they want to get it back.” “My sense is that every place is different, and I think we are just hearing from the worst. We’re hearing from the places where it’s where the tech is just, you know, to the roof. When you read these parents’ testimony and their interviews and their pleas, I mean, they really sound quite like grounded and reasonable and in a lot of ways, you know, they’re really like desperate pleas for people to do something different. I don’t think we can argue at that.” “Every story I’ve ever read about this problem over the past year has the same anecdote, right? A parent realizes their kid watched something in school and is just blown away by the fact that, you know, Tuesday afternoon from one to three, they were watching some movie instead of attending to their schoolwork.” “To me the the bigger question though is like what is happening in that school to that kid so that that kid has uninterrupted time to watch an entire movie with no ramifications? Where’s all this free time coming from?” “I spent a lot of time like thinking about tech like more broadly and thinking about kind of how we as adults, like every generation, has this kind of weird relationship to tech — not just educational technology, but just tech in general.” “I think a lot of the stuff that’s in kids’ schools is not gamification. It’s just a word people are hearing. There’s a difference between gamification and game based learning. And I think probably there’s some gamification, I’m gonna guess, but a lot of it is not gamification. A lot of it is actually game-based learning that’s sometimes really good, really effective.” “When you get the internet, you get it all. Right? It’s a package deal. So you get, you know, you you get either get i-Ready, you get curriculum, but you also get Netflix and YouTube. You can’t separate these things out. I think that’s a really important thing in terms of the anxiety that parents are feeling to put that to put that context — that there’s a lot of nervousness about just the all-you-can-eat buffet of it.” “I feel like sometimes the the fact that it’s all consolidated into this concern about tech and this campaign to to lower the level of tech, to me that feels like maybe it’s a little misplaced.” “When the coverage makes me nervous it’s the reporter not asking the kinds of questions that I would want to ask. Like I thought that Wall Street Journal piece about YouTube was amazing. I thought the data on that was just like just jaw-dropping. But I also wanna go to a different place with it, which is like kind of the question I had before, which is like, ‘What else is happening that creates an opening?’ Like we we get the results. ‘What is the thing that happened to make that happen?’” “I think there’s a lot of cool stuff out there,” says Toppo. “One of the things that was so fascinating to me about writing about that world was that there were a lot of people who cared a ton who were trying to do something different and weird and and really succeeded in my estimation and continue to succeed.” “If you ask the people who make the cool creative stuff, they would say they don’t have the marketing or the lobbying power that the big guys do. They can’t go to state capitals during the legislative session and lobby the lawmakers to make their tool the only one that kids can use or the or get it onto the state list of approved curriculums.” “The hype cycle is fast these days. I feel like people write about something like for instance, like Alpha School. To me, almost as soon as we got gleaming stories about how amazing this was, we got stories of what a hellscape it was. And they were sometimes happening like the same week.” “I think we as an industry have absorbed Audrey Watters’ lessons. You know, years and years ago she was just kind of screaming from the rooftops ‘This s**t isn’t as all it’s said to be. These companies are not looking out for your kids’ best interests. There’s a dark side to all this.’” “I would in large part put myself in the group of people who didn’t really absorb that message very well. But I think I think now people have for for a number of reasons, number one being her just absolute persistence and kind of amazing ability to bring all these strings together. But also I think Silicon Valley’s kind of reached its Sell By date for a lot of people.” “I think if I wrote [my book] in 2026, I think it would be a slightly different book. I think we know more about how kids learn. I think I know more about a little bit of everything, and I’m a little more skeptical. I mean, I was skeptical going into it, but the way my skepticism expressed itself was I almost entirely wrote about tiny little efforts, like small studios.” “I think it’s gonna change in some places. I don’t think it’s gonna change more broadly. I don’t think we’re gonna see like lots and lots of school districts, you know, with memos in the fall saying, ‘No more Chromebooks. No more iPads.’ I think there’s still gonna be a lot of that.” “I’m gonna predict that people are on the ground are gonna be more focused on the money being spent. How is the money being spent? If anything, this has been an exercise in kind of opening opening up the process to a lot of people, opening up the books. ‘How much are we spending on iReady? How much are we spending on iPads?’ I think once that sort of revelation passes, I think maybe it’ll be a little more like data centric.” Previously from The Grade Immunizing schools from bad edtech (with Amplify’s Dan Meyer) Covering Edtech Like Big Pharma (with the NYT’s Natasha Singer) The case for i-Ready (with Curriculum Associates’ Ty Holmes) Why so many parents hate AI right now (with NYT opinion writer Jessica Grose) How one reporter latched onto the edtech backlash (with NBC’s Tyler Kingkade) In defense of education technology (with former EdSurge editor Tony Wan) Why are schools awash in YouTube? (with the WSJ’s Shalini Ramachandran) Education, technology, & the media (roundup of previous coverage) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexanderrusso.substack.com/subscribe
