A recent Fortune magazine article made waves with a grim admission: After more than $30 billion spent flooding classrooms with laptops and tablets, standardized scores keep sliding. Worse, neuroscientists now link more classroom screen time to lower performance. The device meant to modernize learning may be helping to unmake it.

Schools rushed into a technological revolution without asking the most basic question: What does this do to a child’s mind? Many teachers saw the answer firsthand and in real time. Administrators and “experts” ignored them because the fad sounded like “progress.”

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

I taught history and civics in Florida public schools as the laptop trend took hold. Computers had sat in classrooms since my own childhood, but they played a supporting role. A few desktops in the back helped with research. A computer lab handled bigger projects. Most learning still happened on paper with books, notes, and conversation.

Then the Chromebook arrived: cheap, durable, limited, and perfect for one thing — living inside a web browser. Suddenly a district could put a machine not just in every room but in the hands of every student.

Buzzwords beat judgment

Public-school administrators love buzzwords. “Technological literacy” sounds noble, as if every ninth grader is training for Silicon Valley while working on their grammar assignment. Google did not just sell discounted laptops. It supplied a full ecosystem: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Classroom. The whole apparatus of schooling migrated into Alphabet’s software suite. Few people in the system asked why a private company wanted to become the operating system of childhood.

The laptop push also fit the religion of metrics. District offices love anything that produces dashboards, timestamps, and “engagement” graphs. A worksheet completed on paper frustrates the spreadsheet priesthood. A worksheet completed on a Chromebook generates data. The device did not just enter the classroom; it entered the managerial imagination, where metrics matter more than minds.

Once laptops became ubiquitous, the problems announced themselves. The deeper the integration, the harder it became to control.

Cheating became routine. Students searched answers in seconds. The larger problem went beyond quizzes. Googling replaced thinking. Kids refused to read because they assumed a quick search and a copy-paste counted as “learning.” Wikipedia became the default authority. Students stopped vetting anything because they treated the first search result as truth. Even writing shifted. Instead of building an argument, students stitched together paragraphs from the internet and hoped the teacher felt too tired to fight.

RELATED: The world changed, and now we homeschool

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The distraction machine

Schools tried parental controls. Teenagers treated those controls as a challenge. When thousands of bored adolescents share a building, they collaborate. A new filter went up; within days, kids found a workaround. Soon the screens again showed games, movies, even pornography — during class, in plain view, behind a pretense of “work.”

Students used shared Google docs as a covert messaging system. They gossiped, bullied, and planned actual crimes while keeping a document open to look studious. My school eventually held assemblies to remind students that everything typed into a document leaves a record and that bragging about criminal activity or sexual escapades can end up as evidence.

All of that raised another issue: privacy and capture. Google did not subsidize devices and software out of corporate charity. By making Google search and Google apps the center of a child’s information life, the system trained dependency. Google finds the truth. Google organizes the truth. Google presents the truth. A student’s education happens inside a Google ghetto. Pretend the company is not collecting that data if you want, but the incentives cut the other way.

Screens also fed the attention crisis. Administrators told teachers to stop showing videos longer than three minutes without pausing to explain because students could not stay focused. The device that was supposed to expand horizons kept shrinking attention spans. Teachers began competing with the entire internet for a child’s attention, and no lesson plan can win that contest for long.

Locked into the system

The system made escape difficult. Florida went all-in on Chromebooks and tied them to everything. Standardized tests moved entirely onto laptops. “Test prep” software got woven into daily coursework. Students with accommodations or limited English got pushed toward the device as a universal crutch. Denying a Chromebook got treated as denying an education. Teachers who resisted risked discipline.

I reached a point where my students mattered more than compliance. I rebuilt my classroom around paper, books, and discussion. Students used Chromebooks only for mandated testing and accommodations we could not meet otherwise.

The shift showed results fast. Students engaged more. Distraction dropped. Discipline improved. More assignments got finished. Grades rose.

Then COVID-19 struck.

RELATED: America’s new lost generation is looking for home — and finding the wrong ones

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Remote learning turned the screen into the classroom itself. Even Florida, which resisted lockdown hysteria, shifted much of schooling online. Learning fell off a cliff. The lockdowns devastated achievement, but the damage did not end when students returned in person. After COVID, it became nearly impossible to pry students, parents, and administrators away from screen-based schooling. Digital integration became mandatory. No exceptions.

Now the corporate press arrives to play cleanup. Reporters discover the failure well after the money has been spent, the infrastructure has hardened, and a generation has been trained to treat a browser as a brain.

A way back

Public education is stuffed with managerial drones who chase consensus and trends while ignoring what helps students. The bureaucracy will keep this program alive through sheer inertia even as evidence piles up. Parents and lawmakers need to force a reset: paper-based instruction as the default, screens as a tightly limited accommodation, and tests that reward reading and writing instead of clicking. Districts should stop outsourcing childhood to Big Tech, stop laundering ideology through “digital citizenship,” and start treating attention as a scarce resource worth defending.

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Start with elementary grades. Bring back books. Bring back handwriting. Bring back sustained attention. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

Kids learn slower, but they learn for real.

​Opinion & analysis, Public schools, Education, Technology, Laptop, Computers, Distraction, Tech literacy, Test scores, Learning loss, Covid-19, Tyranny, Compulsory miseducation, Administrative state, Google, Chromebooks, Taxpayer dollars, Control 

Two Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are being lauded as heroes after they saved the life of a 4-year-old boy who almost drowned in a Minnesota hotel pool.

The officers were off duty and eating their lunch on Friday when a panicked mother asked them to save her son, according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security.

‘If our agents had not been there and stepped up, this would have been a tragic outcome.’

The two immediately provided CPR to the boy before Plymouth Police officers arrived and took over the emergency revival of the boy. After 10 minutes of additional CPR, the boy began breathing on his own. He was reported to be awake and alert after being transported to a local medical center.

The DHS included a letter from police that said the ICE officers had likely saved the child’s life by attending to him immediately.

“In a situation like this, the first few minutes of emergency aid and quality CPR are critical. Without the quick response and professional actions [of the ICE officers], the outcome of this event would have likely been tragic,” read the statement from the police.

They said that one of the ICE officers “tried to downplay” their heroic actions.

“On behalf of the Plymouth Police Department, I want to extend our thanks and gratitude for the efforts [of the officers] in saving the life of a 4-year-old boy,” the department continued. “Much more than being in the right place at the right time, the ability to work effectively and efficiently in a chaotic and emotional scene is admirable. Truly excellent work.”

RELATED: ‘This is where ICE has come to die’: Antifa member arrested for threats against feds, says DOJ

Police said the boy went into the pool to retrieve a toy and was under water for about five minutes before he was rescued.

“I want to take a moment to commend the heroism and swift action taken by these agents to save the life of a sweet, innocent child,” read a statement from Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis. “If our agents had not been there and stepped up, this would have been a tragic outcome.”

Plymouth is a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Texas Republicans are escalating their efforts to take on illegal immigration, and Rep. Brandon Gill is leading the charge. While BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is thrilled with his efforts, she’s well aware that her state is not even close to being out of the woods.

“Texas is kind of under siege right now,” Gonzales says to Gill.

“It is, and at this point, I believe we have 42 members of Congress in the Sharia-Free America Caucus. So it’s growing rapidly. We’re adding new members every single day,” Gill explains.

“This is a big issue. It’s not going away any time soon. And it’s our job as elected representatives to address it — and address it in a candid and straightforward way, which is to say that there are cultural incompatibilities here that we need to be aware of,” he tells Gonzales.

“I think our immigration system needs to reflect these, and I think we need to be determining who comes into our country. And we need to protect our culture,” he continues, pointing out that immigration is also one of the issues that touches everything else.

“It touches the quality of schools, the quality of health care, the cost of living, the cost of housing. I mean everything,” he adds.

Gill was also recently behind the Somalia Immigration Moratorium Act, which imposes a 25-year moratorium on immigration from Somalia into the United States.

And while much of the left is outraged by Gill’s moratorium, one member of Congress may have a little more disdain for him than the rest.

“Does Ilhan Omar give you the stink eye whenever she sees you?” Gonzales asks.

“Usually it’s much worse than that. I was giving a speech on the House floor about this bill in particular. And she was in the audience, and she was screaming. I could barely hear what she was saying, but she was … calling me names and all kinds of stuff,” he tells Gonzales.

“So she’s not a big fan of me, I will say,” he adds.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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President Donald Trump announced in May that he was nominating Dr. Casey Means to become surgeon general.

Trump said that Means, a tech entrepreneur and Stanford-educated doctor who has long criticized the exploitative nature of the health care system, has “impeccable ‘MAHA’ credentials” and would help Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “reverse the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and ensure Great Health, in the future, for ALL Americans.”

It became painfully clear over the course of Means’ nomination hearing on Wednesday that some lawmakers are anxious about her MAHA views on vaccines and other profitable pharmaceuticals.

‘Devil’s in the details.’

Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-La.) — whom Open Secrets indicated has raised over $1.3 million from the health professional industry and $712,000 from the pharmaceutical/health product industry in campaign contributions since 2019 — noted that “some [parents] have been scared to vaccinate their children because they’ve been told incorrectly that vaccines cause autism.”

Cassidy asked Means whether she believes “vaccines, whether individually or collectively, contribute to autism.”

Means, who told lawmakers that she thinks vaccines “save lives,” responded, “The reality is that we have an autism crisis that’s increasing, and this is devastating to many families, and we do not know as a medical community what causes autism.”

Means noted that the Trump administration is investigating the matter and suggested that “until we have a clear understanding of why kids are developing this at higher rates, I think we should not leave any stones unturned.”

Cassidy rushed to suggest “there’s been a lot of evidence showing they’re not implicated.”

While Means accepted such alleged evidence exists, she emphasized that “science is never settled.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who ranks in Open Secrets’ “Top 20 Member Recipients of Money from Pharmaceuticals / Health Products, 1990-2024” — similarly pressed the issue, trying unsuccessfully to get Means to refute Kennedy’s July 2023 assertion “that autism comes from vaccines.”

RELATED: One for the ladies: Educate yourself about the risks of hormonal birth control

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In her questioning, Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) focused on one vaccine in particular: the hepatitis B shot, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under previous administrations recommended for all American children but as of this year recommends only on an individual basis.

Means has suggested in years past that “hepatitis B vaccine at birth is a crime.”

When Blunt Rochester generalized her concern and asked whether Means thought it was “unethical and dangerous” to hypothetically withhold life-saving vaccines from children, Means noted, “I don’t believe that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya or the HHS would be interested in withholding” them and stressed that the “devil’s in the details.”

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who has received over $600,000 from the health professional industry since 2019, grilled Means over her past criticism of hormonal birth control and its overuse — which has been linked to increased risk of breast and cervical cancers and other medical issues.

After Murray concern-mongered over Means’ suggestions that hormonal birth control is consumed “like candy” and poses “horrifying health risks” to women, Means said, “I’m curious if you’re aware of what the side effects of hormonal contraception are.”

Means suggested further that while such medication should be “accessible to all women,” women should be having thorough conversations with their doctors to ascertain “whether they are higher risk for side effects when prescribed the medication.”

Kennedy noted at the time of Means’ nomination that she “will help me ensure American children will be less medicated and better fed — and significantly healthier — during the next four years. She will be the best Surgeon General in American history.”

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A suspect who reportedly identifies as nonbinary opened fire on a Border Patrol agent during a traffic stop in New Hampshire on Saturday. This latest incident occurred roughly one year after members of a radical trans cult allegedly shot and killed an agent in Vermont.

A criminal complaint reviewed by Blaze News revealed charges filed Tuesday against Blu Zeke Daly, also known as Cullan Zeke Daly, stemming from an incident that occurred on Feb. 21.

‘This individual did have a previous Massachusetts driver’s license that was denominated to be male and now has a New Hampshire driver’s license, which is denominated to be female.’

An on-duty Border Patrol agent patrolling the border between the U.S. and Canada in Stewartstown, New Hampshire, encountered a 2012 Honda Civic at roughly 11:30 p.m., according to the affidavit of an FBI special agent.

Daly, the driver and sole occupant of the vehicle, provided the agent with a New Hampshire driver’s license, according to the court document. After the officer asked whether Daly used any other names, Daly allegedly “immediately drove away,” prompting the officer to follow at a distance.

The affidavit explained that Daly drove to the Pittsburg Port of Entry and stopped at a closed gate. When the officer exited his vehicle, Daly attempted to drive away.

While trying to turn the vehicle around, Daly allegedly fired a handgun at the officer.

The Border Patrol agent returned fire, shooting Daly and causing the suspect to lose control of the vehicle and hit a snowbank.

RELATED: The Zizians’ violent spiral: A trans group tied to killings across America

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A Smith & Wesson SD9 2.0 handgun and ammunition were reportedly recovered from Daly’s vehicle.

The affidavit argued that there is probable cause to believe Daly committed the offenses of attempted murder of a federal officer and assaulting a federal officer with a dangerous weapon.

WMUR reported that investigators have been unable to speak with Daly after the suspect was severely injured in the shooting.

The Department of Justice stated that Daly is currently receiving medical treatment at a New Hampshire hospital and is under guard.

U.S. Attorney Erin Creegan told WMUR that investigators have spoken with “people associated with the defendant.”

Creegan called it “a miracle” that the Border Patrol agent was not injured.

RELATED: Vermont Border Patrol agent’s fatal shooting tied to radical trans murder cult

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“We’re still investigating everything about this individual, including potential motivation and what could have prompted them to be in the border area at that time of night, and what would have caused them to fire at a Border Patrol agent executing routine duties,” Creegan stated.

WMUR obtained court paperwork indicating that Daly was granted a name change in 2024, claiming to identify as nonbinary.

“This individual did have a previous Massachusetts driver’s license that was denominated to be male and now has a New Hampshire driver’s license, which is denominated to be female. So it’s a reasonable assumption that the person has decided to transition their gender,” Creegan added.

In January 2025, a Vermont Border Patrol agent was shot and killed while performing a traffic stop on Interstate 91. The suspects included two individuals tied to a group known as the Zizians, whose members mostly identify as transgender or nonbinary.

There are currently no confirmed connections between Daly and the Zizians.

“When you have something happen which targets a Border Patrol agent in that area, it would be a reasonable line of investigative inquiry to determine whether there is any connection to a broader network or group, because that does appear to exist — the allegations that did exist in the murder investigation involving the Border Patrol agent,” Creegan told WMUR.

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President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise of revitalizing American jobs, and Michigan Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer acknowledged his role in recent economic developments during her 2026 State of the State address.

Whitmer publicly thanked Trump while speaking in the Michigan House of Representatives chamber at the state Capitol in Lansing on Wednesday.

Trump praised Whitmer, saying she had done an ‘excellent job’ and calling her ‘a great person.’

“Michigan is open for business. New factories making batteries, cars, chips are opening in Marshall, Lake Orion, Holland, Bay City, Calumet, Hemlock, Ann Arbor, and Delta Township. A new fighter mission is coming to Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Macomb County,” Whitmer said.

RELATED: ‘This is disgraceful’: Mamdani raked over the coals for attack on NYPD

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She added, “Probably not on the bingo card, but I want to thank President Trump for his work on this.”

Her remarks were met with applause from the chamber.

The public show of appreciation follows multiple reported meetings between Whitmer and Trump at the White House, where the two have discussed manufacturing investment, tariffs, and the Selfridge Air National Guard Base mission. During one Oval Office appearance, Trump praised Whitmer, saying she had done an “excellent job” and calling her “a great person.”

RELATED: ‘Sham businesses’: Vance announces the halt of Medicaid funds to Minnesota over alleged fraud

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One earlier White House visit drew national attention after Whitmer was photographed shielding her face from cameras. Her latest remarks in Lansing, however, marked a visible shift, as she openly credited the president during a high-profile statewide address.

The recent industrial expansion across Michigan, along with the Selfridge announcement, shows strong collaboration between the Democrat governor and the Republican president on key economic priorities.

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Outrage has erupted as people have learned that a child sex offender has launched a bid to land a seat on a city council in California.

Rene Campos, who recently launched a bid to represent District 7 in Fresno, California, is facing some pushback over a highly concerning conviction not too long ago.

‘I was raised in Fresno by a mother who taught me to protect the vulnerable, tell the truth even when it costs you, and never tolerate abuse of power.’

Campos was arrested in 2018 and later pled no contest to a misdemeanor charge of possession of child sex abuse material, according to court records. In October, he pled no contest to failure to register, records indicate.

However, the New York Post reported that he is perfectly eligible to run for office under California law.

RELATED: ‘Sadistic’ PA man sexually assaulted and cut 13-year-old girl at California motel after grooming her on Discord, feds say

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This fact has sparked outrage at the prospect of a convicted child sex offender holding a seat of power. Others pointed out other obvious absurdities in the potential arrangement.

Nav Gurm, a small business owner and attorney who is opposing Campos for the District 7 seat, noted: “If someone is a registered sex offender, they can’t be on campus at a school site; how are you going to be able to fulfill the duties of the job?”

Campos told ABC 30: “I believe Fresno deserves leaders who are honest from the very beginning, not the end. Going into this, I am putting my life out there.”

Campos gave some information on his campaign website about his upbringing and the “values” he brings to the table, including “protecting the vulnerable”: “I was raised in Fresno by a mother who taught me to protect the vulnerable, tell the truth even when it costs you, and never tolerate abuse of power. Those values didn’t come from politics — they came from life.”

While Campos claimed in the interview that he will not be running from his past, a review of his campaign website yielded no direct mention of his criminal past. Instead, there is one brief mention of a “legal situation that has been fully resolved” in the frequently asked questions section of the site.

Campos seemingly first announced his candidacy in late January, according to his Facebook page.

The primary election is scheduled for June 2.

Campos’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

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