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  "path": "/story/26/02/24/1751207/the-us-spent-30-billion-on-classroom-laptops-and-got-the-first-generation-less-capable-than-its-parents?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-24T18:33:24.607Z",
  "site": "https://news.slashdot.org",
  "tags": [
    "education",
    "Read more of this story"
  ],
  "textContent": "More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 â\" neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it. The U.S. spent more than $30 billion in 2024 alone putting laptops and tablets in classrooms, and Horvath cited PISA data from 15-year-olds worldwide showing a stark correlation between time on school computers and worse scores. A 2014 study of 3,000 university students found they were off-task on their machines nearly two-thirds of the time. Fortune reported back in 2017 that Maine's own test scores hadn't budged in the 15 years since the program launched, and then-governor Paul LePage called it a \"massive failure.\" Horvath framed the generation's eroding capabilities not as a personal failure but a policy one, calling them victims of a failed pedagogical experiment.\n\n \n\nRead more of this story at Slashdot.",
  "title": "The US Spent $30 Billion on Classroom Laptops and Got the First Generation Less Capable Than Its Parents",
  "updatedAt": "2026-02-24T18:01:00.000Z"
}