Truth in Education | by Barbara Bush | April 7, 2026
In education, as in other areas of life, what may be presented as a promising solution often causes more problems. That has been the case with the increased use of education technology (EdTech) in schools, including artificial intelligence (AI).
EdTech markets itself as a resource for safety, convenience, efficiency, lesson content and delivery, health and wellbeing, and increasing student proficiency in behaviors for classroom success, and those needed in the workforce.
EdTech Marketing for K-12 and Higher Education: The differences, similarities, and how to do it. There are immense differences between marketing to K-12 and Higher Education. People don’t live on the same online places, they don’t respond to the same type of advertising, and campaigns must follow these differences.
A significant component of ‘wellbeing’ behaviors includes emotional regulation. Emotional regulation has two different ways of being understood and applied within psychology; one is to provide an individual the ability to recognize their present or developing emotions, choose if this matches their perceived character, and use some personally created steps to change or maintain the emotions, and then choose their expression. A Biblical Worldview describes this in 2 Corinthians 10:5 and Psalm 119:105. Psychology calls this a cognitive-developmental approach, emphasizing internal mechanisms that govern emotional responses and are not tied to externally targeted behaviors.
Educational classroom methods employing social-emotional learning (SEL) take a different approach to emotional regulation. It sets preferred behaviors as the goal and uses psychological manipulation techniques to achieve them, often through digital mindfulness programs. EdTech surveillance continuously reports the child’s emotional state, based on biometric changes recorded and interpreted by AI.
A Critical Review of Digital Technology in Education that should give Policy Makers and Educators Pause for Thought “Digital Technology is hardly the benign, neutral presence in education that we are often assured it to be” Selwyn (2015, p. 247)
Predictive policing and classroom technology both leverage data analytics, machine learning, and AI to anticipate and interpret behaviors. While their domains differ, they share applications of social psychology in how human behavior is modeled, predicted, and influenced through algorithmic systems.
As the predictive policing projects have shown after years of federal research funding, the outlooks of the AI algorithm programmers mixed with the specifics of the sample cohort of persons used create the algorithm’s results in programmer biases and subtle cohort biases being present. This often skews the conclusions or diagnoses. Human flaws are in the programs, even if AI programs another AI – the original human programming comes through at least unpredictably and intermittently.
Commercial AI search engines recommend that users check their sources, including those related to educational, emotional, or mental health concerns. Some sources may be accurate occasionally and unpredictably. Life-altering decisions and actions are many times taken due to the classroom AI behavioral health ‘findings.’
The range of data gathered by electronic technology in schools is vast and constant. It is not solely one directional. It is giving out data through social psychologically informed algorithms as it collects it. It is easy to assume the constant collection of individual data means the data relative to a student is current and accurate. This may not be the case. Algorithms are preset in the program before a classroom child engages. Program algorithms are based on historical data of a collection of other children in different contexts.
EdTech programs in education and public health are crafted to nudge user behavior through subtle, real-time data input, formed by algorithms. Nudges are designed to be stealth. They often exceed the user’s cognitive load, cognitive bandwidth, which can hinder or counter learning, and create student stress. SEL/mindfulness exercises, which are theoretically designed to relieve stress and prepare students for learning, often add to their stress and obstruct learning due to the nudges. Students and teachers seldom verbalize this overload due to classroom behavior scorekeeping, ranking, and social pressure.
The behavior control for safety includes conformity and submission. It employs B.F. Skinner-based training over education for pedagogy. Education , as defined by Merriam-Webster, is the process of gaining knowledge, skills, and development from study, which may include training. Training, defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary, is the process of learning the specific skills needed to do a job or activity.
Acquiring a set of skills without learning what makes them functional or applicable limits creativity and takes invention out of the hands of current and future students. What makes this attractive? Control beyond the classroom.
Policymakers for education are part of a larger system. EdTech reveals these interlinkages through its creation by companies with contractual ties to law enforcement and the military, both domestic and foreign.
The College Board report shows that the share of high school students using GenAI tools for schoolwork grew from 79% to 84% between January and May 2025. It was used to brainstorm ideas, edit or revise essays, and conduct research; 69% of high school students reported using ChatGPT to help with daily school assignments and homework.
Authoring essays sharpens thinking. Solving math problems builds logic. Researching a topic teaches discernment, the evaluation of evidence, and the formation of one’s own conclusions. When an algorithm performs those functions for a student, we may be producing a generation with credentials without subject content or informed judgment that credentials are supposed to represent.
School decision-makers seldom include parental input in these classroom digital learning decisions. Parents’ input is now often consigned to inputting comments in the school’s computer-based training system. Homeschoolers are able to avoid some of this as long as they don’t use EdTech as their chief source of teaching and learning. It is time to revisit the outsourcing to EdTech taking place in education, and the larger question of how this outsourcing reinforces dependency on an external source with built-in undisclosed biases.
If your school is not honoring your written requests, opt-out notice(s), withholding student information required by law, or violating your parental rights, we want to help you. Truth In Education (TIE) helps parents document violations of laws and understand their legal and Biblical rights. Reach out to TIE: info@truthineducation.org.
Barbara Bush is a Research Analyst for Truth In Education (TIE), a Christian, Atlanta-based nonprofit organization that exposes harmful ideologies and Marxist globalist agendas in America’s schools and advocates for parental rights.