Is technology making high school a joke?

Published 6:00 am Sunday, September 27, 2026

I want to issue a challenge to my fellow educators who work in high schools: ask your students about their screen time during the school day and take their answers seriously.

A new research study by the Fordham Institute surveyed 2,000 current high school students or recent high school graduates about their use of technology during the school day. The results are unsurprising but deeply concerning, and there’s no reason to assume that Kentucky students would answer much differently. But educators need to take these student perspectives seriously and reconsider the way technology fits into the learning environment of schools.

The study, “High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction,” found that so many high schools across the country have “one-to-one” initiatives (in some schools, students don’t even have lockers or textbooks anymore), 62% of students report they spend more than half their class time every day on a school-issued device.

One third of students said they spend more than 75% of their school day on screens. Besides this school-sanctioned screen time, huge numbers of students also admit to using electronic devices for various prohibited purposes. The Fordham report found that 75% of students reported spending some portion of their school day using prohibited cell phones or school computers to use social media (50%), watch YouTube videos (33%), or shop online (17%).

Technology has all kinds of legitimate educational purposes. But research also shows that excessive screen time for teenagers aggravates attention and focus problems, anxiety, depression, and relationship building.

Moreover, the students in the Fordham study admitted that they were using tech to avoid doing the real work of learning. Forty-eight percent of students said they had used artificial intelligence to solve math problems for them, while 36% avoid reading requirement books or texts by having AI summarize for them. Additionally, 29% of students admitted to letting AI write drafts of essays or reports. Of greatest concern, more than one-quarter of students admitted to using AI to cheat during tests and quizzes.

If that’s not alarming enough, another finding of the Fordham study was that students who reported the highest use of technology during the school day were also far more likely to report that missing school would not affect their grades, suggesting that technology is aggravating the already big problem of chronic student absenteeism.

Their assumption is backed up by other survey results showing that 58% of students said AI has made homework meaningless and 57% said they could get good grades without doing any real work.

My takeaway is that for far too many students, technology has made high school a bit of a joke. Not only are students using it to avoid meaningful work, but they are also spending valuable instruction time playing games, doomscrolling, and even gambling online.

Of course, teenagers have always tried to avoid the rigors of learning and responsibility. There’s nothing new about that. But what is new is the vast amount of technology we’ve deliberately stuck in front of them to enable and accelerate the problem.

Educators should take these findings seriously. We should consider rolling back the sheer amount of screen time students are experiencing in class. Put away the laptops for a while and give students textbooks and paper notebooks once again. Ask them to complete performance tasks demonstrating their knowledge and skill without the benefit of a computer. Schools should also enforce meaningful bans on cell phone use during the school day.

“Illicit” technology use should be made difficult or impossible. Educators should insist on exposing students to a rich, complex curriculum that gives them the background knowledge to critically evaluate AI outputs.

Above all, educators must invite students to use AI to enhance and extend their learning rather than replace it. And I completely realize that’s easier said than done, as I daily struggle with how to help my adult doctoral students use AI ethically and effectively.

But this is perhaps the greatest challenge we’ve faced as educators, and whether we rise to the challenge or not will determine if high school becomes a more meaningful transition to adulthood or if it descends into a silly, tech-soaked waste of time for more students.

Students are telling us explicitly what they need when it comes to a richer high school experience. Let’s give it to them.

— Gary Houchens, PhD, is professor and director of the Educational Leadership doctoral program at Western Kentucky University.