Across the Bay Area and beyond, a growing movement of parents is demanding schools put down the Chromebooks and pick up, well, actual books. And honestly? It's hard to argue with them.

Let's be clear about what happened. During COVID, tech companies saw an enormous opportunity — and school districts, flush with emergency federal funding and desperate for solutions, bought in hard. Chromebooks became the default learning tool almost overnight. Google, Apple, and others didn't just offer products; they embedded themselves into the educational infrastructure. Districts signed contracts, teachers rebuilt curricula around apps, and kids got hooked on screens during the most critical developmental years of their lives.

Now the bill is coming due — and we're not just talking about the literal billions spent on devices and software licenses. We're talking about plummeting reading scores, attention spans that make goldfish look disciplined, and a generation of students who can navigate YouTube but struggle with a paragraph of uninterrupted text.

The parent pushback is, at its core, a fiscal accountability story. Public schools spent jaw-dropping sums on technology that hasn't delivered better outcomes. Where's the ROI? If a private company blew this kind of money on a strategy that made its core product worse, shareholders would revolt. Parents are the shareholders of public education, and they're finally demanding answers.

What makes this especially rich is that the tech executives pushing these tools on public schools famously send their own kids to low-tech private schools. They know something the rest of us are just figuring out.

You don't need a peer-reviewed study to understand that a nine-year-old with a Chromebook and an internet connection isn't going to voluntarily practice long division. But we got those studies anyway, and they confirm what common sense already told us.

Parents aren't anti-technology. They're anti-waste, anti-distraction, and pro-accountability. That's a platform we can get behind.