I’m not convinced laptops were as big an issue as intentionally sabotaging the US educational system with things like No Child Left Behind and Common Core.

Are Gen-Z folks overseas as screwed as Americans, and is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?

Common core was a thing when my kids were in school, so I “did my research.” A number of states had published their CC standards online, so it was easy to figure out.

The standards looked quite similar to what I learned as a kid, give or take a couple of topics. It’s actually quite puzzling to me what the controversy is. It may be a bunch of political hoopla with no underlying substance.

On the other hand, I think that K-12 math teaching has been a failure all along. Very few adults can make effective use of math beyond basic arithmetic and spreadsheets. I even encounter engineers who admit that they’re weak at math, and that they got through school with the expectation that they would never use their math after graduating.

Every generation declares a “crisis,” looks back at an imaginary glorious past, and blames parents, unions and other standard bogeymen. Parents and leaders who complain about math education don’t even known what math is. I’ve complained about some things like the proliferation of standardized testing, but on the other hand, my generation didn’t learn math very well.

Disclosure: College math major.

> is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?

Yes, here is Dr. Horvath's (the neuroscientist mentioned in the article) written testimony which cites some studies.

The table in Section 3 is particularly damning. It shows how a classroom intervention worsened or improved outcomes relative to the baseline. Note that the worst intervention is the "1-to-1 laptops row".

Unclear if they mixed interventions, I'd have to read the mentioned studies. If the interventions were done in isolation then that's basically a longitudinal study which is a pretty clear smoking gun.

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/A19DF2E8-3C69...

Trend is pretty clear pretty much across all western countries. Even among ones that have supposedly highest quality public education like Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc...

People are getting too stuck on US specific issues and missing that this is a pretty global problem.

What specifically is wrong with Common Core math? I've seen a lot of vague complaints about it but the materials my children brought home seem fine. It's different from the way I learned but I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's worse.

Those are bad but they do not penalize the more competent half of students. Use of laptops as an educational tool penalize everyone equally.

People are graduating from high school functionally illiterate so yeah definitely not just the US.

Budget issues exist all over the world and American culture is Western culture.